The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Maps of Meaning 10, 11, 12, & 13

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:58.480 This episode is an amalgamation of episodes 10 to 13 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVO.

00:01:06.520 You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

00:01:12.540 which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon, or by finding a link in the description.

00:01:18.220 Dr. Peterson's self-development program's self-authoring can be found at self-authoring.com.

00:01:25.940 As I've mentioned to you before, each of the three aspects of experience,

00:01:33.780 so the things you know, the things you don't know, and the fact of yourself,

00:01:40.480 have a very ambivalent underlying structure, both positive and negative,

00:01:44.060 so that the things you don't know are interesting and compelling in the sources of new information,

00:01:49.120 but also the source of the things that undermine you both physically and mentally.

00:01:54.720 And the things you know, of course, your culture disciplines you and shapes you into a full person,

00:02:04.400 but also at exactly the same time molds you and crushes you in a particular direction

00:02:10.980 rather than any of the other directions you might have gone in.

00:02:13.420 And then finally, with regards to the individual, we spent a substantial amount of time discussing

00:02:19.920 the individual's capability, capacity to make order out of chaos,

00:02:25.800 and sometimes to make chaos out of order in the service of a higher order,

00:02:30.700 and that's all to the good.

00:02:32.280 But just like culture and nature have their negative aspects, so do the individual.

00:02:36.560 And I think, personally, this is where Christian mythology, in particular, comes into its own.

00:02:44.760 I think of all the major religions, Christianity has the most thoroughly developed,

00:02:52.000 what you might describe as formal model of evil.

00:02:55.640 And that model isn't part of the canonical writings of Christianity, say, encapsulated in the Bible,

00:03:01.480 but part of the cloud of sort of natural mythology and storytelling that surrounds the canonical writings.

00:03:08.120 So you could say that although Christianity and Buddhism have spent a substantial amount of time

00:03:14.600 developing up a representation of the hero,

00:03:19.140 Christianity, in particular, has also spent a substantial amount of time

00:03:23.560 developing a formal portrait of the figure that stands in opposition to the hero.

00:03:28.720 And I think the most appropriate term for that figure

00:03:31.500 who takes multiple forms in mythology is the adversary,

00:03:35.680 because the adversarial spirit is a spirit that stands in opposition to everything.

00:03:44.220 Stands in opposition to nature, stands in opposition to culture,

00:03:48.620 and most specifically, stands in opposition to that aspect of the human being

00:03:53.040 that's both exploratory and creative.

00:03:55.280 Now, the last time we talked, I had a chance to describe to you

00:04:01.000 how the figures of the adversarial brothers emerged naturally at the end of Genesis

00:04:08.040 as a coda to the story, right?

00:04:10.480 Adam and Eve developed self-consciousness,

00:04:12.620 they developed knowledge of their own mortality and death,

00:04:15.280 and as the primordial parents of humanity,

00:04:18.620 their first children take the form of the hostile brothers,

00:04:23.040 which is to say that if you're the child of nature and the child of culture,

00:04:26.720 the sort of ultimate parents,

00:04:29.840 then as an individual, you take two forms,

00:04:32.980 a positive form and a negative form,

00:04:34.680 and the negative form is characterized in many ways

00:04:37.400 by a kind of absolute hatred of the good,

00:04:40.980 hatred of the positive form.

00:04:43.160 And I think that you can't understand the full human propensity for evil

00:04:49.320 without considering more than the territoriality,

00:04:54.640 more than the innate territoriality of human beings.

00:04:56.980 So if you look at animals, well, animals are territorial,

00:04:59.560 and they fight to preserve their territory,

00:05:01.840 and it's a rational struggle.

00:05:04.580 They're fighting for resources and for a place

00:05:06.760 that they can operate and live in and reproduce in efficiently.

00:05:11.460 But human beings are substantively different from that

00:05:14.800 in that their agonistic conflict, their aggression,

00:05:18.980 often seems to be motivated

00:05:20.480 by something more akin to the pure desire for destruction

00:05:23.780 rather than for any rational end whatsoever.

00:05:26.600 And so from that perspective, I would say,

00:05:30.700 as an example,

00:05:33.280 the fact that Hitler ended up committing suicide in a bunker

00:05:36.540 beneath Germany's capital at the end of the Second World War

00:05:39.800 when Berlin was in flames, when all of Germany was in flames,

00:05:42.620 and when his country was completely defeated

00:05:44.220 after tens of millions of people had died in the conflict,

00:05:47.460 including, of course, the seven million or so people

00:05:50.100 that were killed in the Holocaust,

00:05:51.200 the normal mode of interpretation of that would be

00:05:55.320 what a terrible defeat for Hitler,

00:05:57.580 but an equally valid, and I think,

00:06:00.420 an equally valid prima facie argument,

00:06:02.960 and one I think that's actually more valid,

00:06:04.700 is that it wasn't a defeat for Hitler at all.

00:06:07.380 It was precisely what he was aiming at right from the beginning

00:06:10.200 because his mode of being was intensely adversarial.

00:06:15.160 And I would also say that it's certainly possible

00:06:17.200 that the full nature of his motivations

00:06:19.580 weren't even necessarily clear to him

00:06:22.120 as they unfolded across time during the Second World War,

00:06:26.200 no more than the full motivations of any human being

00:06:28.620 are necessarily accessible to them

00:06:30.880 as they act out whatever it is that they act out.

00:06:33.200 So Carl Jung says, for example,

00:06:34.740 that we act out great mythological stories.

00:06:38.540 That doesn't necessarily mean you know the story,

00:06:41.020 it just means you act it out.

00:06:42.880 So, for example,

00:06:43.620 you see people whose lives are repetitive bouts of tragedy,

00:06:47.520 and what they're acting out is a tragic story,

00:06:50.200 and they know it insofar as they're actually acting it out,

00:06:53.500 but they don't necessarily have an explicit model

00:06:56.600 of the relationship between their patterns of behavior

00:06:58.880 and the constantly tragic outcomes they produce.

00:07:01.920 Well, that doesn't even necessarily mean

00:07:03.420 that what they're doing isn't voluntary,

00:07:04.780 because things can be voluntary

00:07:06.780 even if you don't understand them fully.

00:07:10.160 There's an aspect to the human psyche

00:07:12.060 that's a nest of vipers, so to speak,

00:07:14.240 because you can't necessarily trust what you see,

00:07:17.560 and that means not only when you're looking at someone else,

00:07:19.760 but even when you're looking in the mirror.

00:07:21.320 You can't be sure that what you say you're doing

00:07:23.420 is exactly what you're doing.

00:07:25.400 Your motivations aren't transparent,

00:07:27.080 and they may not even be clear.

00:07:28.240 So I suppose the idea that lurks behind this formalization

00:07:36.880 is that freedom of choice is such a good

00:07:40.520 that one of its subsidiary necessities,

00:07:44.180 which is that there has to be a polar distinction

00:07:47.480 between good and evil, is worth having.

00:07:50.440 Freedom is so important that it justifies

00:07:52.460 the distinction between good and evil.

00:07:54.860 And I think that's a reasonable way

00:07:57.640 to presume

00:07:58.480 it's reasonable to presume

00:08:03.320 that that's the manner in which experience

00:08:05.060 is actually structured.

00:08:06.360 And there's complex reasons for that.

00:08:08.100 One would be that

00:08:08.920 under the most optimal circumstances,

00:08:11.820 which is something we'll talk about

00:08:13.080 as this proceeds to a close,

00:08:15.280 that means in a sense

00:08:16.220 you can have your cake and eat it too,

00:08:18.280 which means

00:08:18.840 the potential existence of good and evil

00:08:21.660 allows for freedom of choice.

00:08:23.720 And then if the choice is always towards the good,

00:08:26.020 then you have the benefits of freedom of choice

00:08:28.620 plus the benefits of the good.

00:08:30.240 The only price you have to pay

00:08:31.360 is the constant possibility of evil.

00:08:33.820 It's very much like the structure of Christianity.

00:08:36.040 So you have the highest God

00:08:38.060 whose highest son is Christ,

00:08:41.980 but you have the figure of Satan

00:08:43.620 lurking in the background

00:08:44.520 who's also got a filial relationship

00:08:46.380 with the highest God.

00:08:47.540 It makes for a confusing kind of theology

00:08:50.360 because in many situations,

00:08:52.100 of course,

00:08:52.560 Christ is identified

00:08:53.540 specifically with God the Father,

00:08:56.600 but Satan always lurks in the background

00:08:58.320 and his existential status

00:09:00.860 is indeterminate

00:09:02.220 because since God is everything,

00:09:03.900 then it's very difficult

00:09:04.680 to make the case

00:09:05.460 that the evil spirit

00:09:06.760 isn't a derivative of God.

00:09:08.220 It's not an easy thing

00:09:08.940 to get straightened out rationally.

00:09:11.220 And I think Milton in Paradise Lost

00:09:13.840 does a very good attempt,

00:09:15.100 makes a very good attempt

00:09:16.200 to explain exactly what this might mean,

00:09:19.200 how there could be

00:09:19.820 an overarching transcendent power

00:09:21.640 and there could be

00:09:22.500 two subordinate elements to that,

00:09:24.540 one evil and one good,

00:09:26.980 without destroying the idea

00:09:28.380 that God as such is good

00:09:30.140 and without eradicating

00:09:32.380 the reality of evil.

00:09:33.880 A very, very complex argument to make.

00:09:35.860 Now, the notion of evil

00:09:38.860 is also a very, very complex idea.

00:09:41.200 So if you look at arguments

00:09:42.300 that support atheism,

00:09:44.660 and I've mentioned some of these

00:09:45.780 like Ivan's argument

00:09:46.880 in the Brothers Karamazov

00:09:47.980 where Ivan says,

00:09:49.180 well, the world as such,

00:09:51.120 experience as such,

00:09:52.000 must be evil

00:09:52.920 because it's predicated

00:09:54.660 on the blood of innocence,

00:09:55.860 the suffering of children,

00:09:56.960 the fact that there's vast injustices

00:09:59.100 in the world

00:09:59.580 is indicative that there's no such thing

00:10:01.420 as a good God

00:10:02.260 or to speak in less personified terms

00:10:04.860 is evidence that the structure

00:10:06.520 of experience as such

00:10:07.700 is untenable morally.

00:10:09.940 It shouldn't be

00:10:10.860 because it's predicated on suffering.

00:10:14.320 Geoffrey Burton Russell,

00:10:15.660 who's written a whole series of books

00:10:17.000 on the nature of evil,

00:10:18.260 makes a very clear distinction

00:10:19.580 between different categories

00:10:21.900 of terrible events

00:10:23.020 that I think help bring this into clarity.

00:10:25.560 So imagine this.

00:10:26.500 Imagine first that

00:10:27.260 it's useful to make a distinction

00:10:29.040 between tragedy and evil.

00:10:31.240 Okay, now tragedy is

00:10:32.480 when the bad befalls the good.

00:10:35.400 An earthquake is tragic,

00:10:36.600 so a disease is tragic.

00:10:38.560 Now it's easy to regard a disease

00:10:40.000 or an earthquake as evil as well,

00:10:41.520 but the problem with that

00:10:42.280 is there doesn't seem to be

00:10:43.020 any motivation to it.

00:10:44.520 And so it's more likely,

00:10:45.860 it's more reasonable

00:10:46.540 to think something like,

00:10:47.600 well, people are vulnerable.

00:10:50.420 They have to be vulnerable

00:10:51.680 in order to give existence

00:10:53.000 a viewpoint.

00:10:54.480 One of the consequences

00:10:55.400 of their vulnerability

00:10:56.260 is that they're susceptible

00:10:59.140 to tragedy, okay?

00:11:02.520 If their vulnerability

00:11:04.060 is a precondition for being,

00:11:05.700 then the fact that

00:11:06.420 they're susceptible to tragedy

00:11:07.620 isn't necessarily an evil,

00:11:08.900 it's just a consequence

00:11:10.080 of their limitation.

00:11:13.660 Then you say,

00:11:14.440 well, what constitutes evil

00:11:15.640 if you can't put earthquakes

00:11:16.680 and diseases and so forth

00:11:18.160 into that category?

00:11:19.560 Well, then it seems to be

00:11:20.380 something more dependent

00:11:21.440 on choice,

00:11:23.060 which is the argument

00:11:23.820 that Iliad is making.

00:11:25.100 say the world does all sorts

00:11:28.100 of terrible things to people,

00:11:29.340 but there are frequent,

00:11:32.000 it's frequently the case

00:11:33.260 that people act in such a way

00:11:34.580 to make things worse

00:11:35.500 rather than better, right?

00:11:36.920 So if you look at the consequences

00:11:39.920 of the rise to power

00:11:41.620 of the Nazis, for example,

00:11:43.040 it doesn't seem reasonable

00:11:43.800 to put the Nazi concentration camp

00:11:45.620 in the same category

00:11:46.960 from an ethical perspective

00:11:48.160 as the earthquake, right?

00:11:50.980 Because the earthquake

00:11:52.220 is an emergent consequence

00:11:55.060 of the rules

00:11:56.320 that govern physical existence,

00:11:58.460 whereas the Nazi death camp

00:11:59.780 is something that was planned.

00:12:01.500 It didn't have to be.

00:12:02.900 It seems to be an aspect of choice.

00:12:05.660 And this seems to be

00:12:06.540 the idea that's lurking

00:12:08.340 underneath both this mythology

00:12:10.020 and Iliad's comment on it.

00:12:11.440 It's the mere fact

00:12:13.520 that the world is terrible

00:12:14.560 does not mean that it's evil,

00:12:16.120 but then when you look

00:12:16.940 at specifically human actions,

00:12:18.340 there's this aspect

00:12:19.060 of twisted choice

00:12:20.260 that Fry also makes much of.

00:12:21.860 He says if you look

00:12:22.920 at the structure

00:12:23.480 of human history

00:12:24.300 and you try to explain

00:12:27.300 why it has such a bloody

00:12:28.740 and terrible course,

00:12:30.160 it doesn't seem sufficient

00:12:31.760 just to attribute it, say,

00:12:33.540 to the conditions of existence

00:12:34.720 or to ignorance.

00:12:35.720 It seems more like

00:12:36.800 there's a force behind it,

00:12:39.840 so to speak,

00:12:40.480 manifest, say,

00:12:41.200 in every individual

00:12:41.960 that's actually aiming

00:12:43.360 at the suffering

00:12:44.400 instead of just allowing

00:12:46.200 it to happen

00:12:46.760 or instead of not stepping

00:12:48.040 in to stop it,

00:12:48.900 but actually aiming at it.

00:12:51.860 So let's take a look

00:12:56.340 at the story

00:12:56.840 and let's take a look

00:12:58.980 at the leading figures.

00:12:59.960 So we know, for example,

00:13:01.020 that the figure of Satan

00:13:02.600 in Christianity

00:13:03.320 is associated

00:13:04.060 with a number

00:13:04.580 of strange forms, right?

00:13:06.040 The first association

00:13:07.320 we know of

00:13:07.980 is that he's associated

00:13:09.820 with the dragon

00:13:12.580 in the Garden of Eden, right?

00:13:14.540 And so there's a profound

00:13:17.060 ambivalence in Christianity

00:13:18.260 about the meaning

00:13:19.100 of the opening act

00:13:20.320 of Genesis.

00:13:21.000 Because on the one hand,

00:13:21.780 you have,

00:13:22.540 when Adam and Eve

00:13:23.120 are still profoundly unconscious,

00:13:24.800 they don't suffer.

00:13:26.540 But they're profoundly unconscious,

00:13:28.780 right?

00:13:28.960 They're not self-conscious.

00:13:29.960 They're not aware

00:13:30.480 of themselves.

00:13:31.000 So in many ways,

00:13:31.660 they're still animals.

00:13:32.500 So there's a Gnostic

00:13:34.440 line of speculation.

00:13:36.100 The Gnostics

00:13:36.580 were a Christian sect

00:13:38.120 that believed

00:13:38.720 that redemption

00:13:40.580 could at least partly

00:13:41.700 be attained by understanding

00:13:43.400 rather than just faith.

00:13:44.980 The Gnostics believed

00:13:45.920 that the serpent

00:13:47.420 that tempted Adam and Eve

00:13:49.060 towards self-consciousness

00:13:50.480 was a more developed

00:13:52.060 aspect of God

00:13:53.440 than the God

00:13:54.400 that had created Adam and Eve

00:13:55.600 to begin with.

00:13:56.260 Because the unconsciousness

00:13:57.500 that characterized Adam and Eve

00:13:58.840 was too underdeveloped

00:14:00.780 to be perfect.

00:14:01.500 And so they had to be

00:14:02.840 tempted forward

00:14:03.700 into a more fully developed

00:14:05.120 consciousness.

00:14:05.940 And so although

00:14:06.500 classical Christianity

00:14:07.740 associated the serpent

00:14:09.520 in the tree

00:14:10.060 with Lucifer,

00:14:10.940 who's the bringer of light,

00:14:11.960 who's Satan,

00:14:13.260 the Gnostic thread

00:14:15.120 of reasoning said,

00:14:15.960 well, wait a minute.

00:14:16.580 It's not that simple

00:14:17.400 because, yeah,

00:14:18.100 self-consciousness

00:14:18.940 makes you aware of death

00:14:20.060 and vulnerability

00:14:20.660 and knocks you out

00:14:22.500 into the profane world.

00:14:23.620 But there's an aspect of it

00:14:24.880 that kind of looks

00:14:25.540 like enlightenment.

00:14:26.540 And you know this already

00:14:27.720 in your own lives

00:14:28.440 because often

00:14:29.140 when you believe something

00:14:30.640 and you're unconsciously

00:14:32.200 convinced of the adequacy

00:14:33.580 of that model

00:14:34.340 and then you find

00:14:35.340 that it's not sufficient,

00:14:36.840 right?

00:14:37.260 And so you crumble

00:14:38.280 in disappointment.

00:14:39.720 You put your trust

00:14:40.360 in someone

00:14:40.740 and you find out,

00:14:41.500 say, they're not

00:14:42.080 worthy of that trust

00:14:43.420 and that the evidence

00:14:46.140 that enlightens you

00:14:47.360 breaks that frame of reference

00:14:48.880 and makes you collapse.

00:14:50.180 You think,

00:14:50.840 that's a terrible thing.

00:14:52.060 You can't help

00:14:52.640 but feel that

00:14:53.540 as a real betrayal

00:14:54.520 and as an act

00:14:55.360 even of evil

00:14:56.060 but then a year later

00:14:57.400 or two years later

00:14:58.120 you might look back

00:14:58.840 and think,

00:14:59.200 God, you know,

00:14:59.920 I really needed that.

00:15:01.260 I really needed that lesson

00:15:02.600 because as a consequence

00:15:04.100 of learning that

00:15:05.180 I'm much more mature

00:15:06.240 and much more likely

00:15:07.140 to establish

00:15:07.760 stable relationships.

00:15:09.000 And so,

00:15:09.980 it's easy to see

00:15:10.780 that from one perspective

00:15:12.540 something can be terrible

00:15:13.680 and then from another

00:15:14.660 it might not be terrible

00:15:15.980 at all.

00:15:16.640 And even in classic Christianity

00:15:18.060 you get this strange

00:15:19.200 ambivalence

00:15:19.840 about the events

00:15:20.580 in Genesis

00:15:21.100 that runs something

00:15:22.320 like this.

00:15:23.000 well, yes,

00:15:24.620 it was an act

00:15:25.300 of the most evil spirit,

00:15:28.100 the spirit of enlightenment,

00:15:29.360 the spirit of rationality

00:15:30.520 or the bringer of light,

00:15:31.540 Lucifer,

00:15:32.440 to knock Adam and Eve

00:15:33.600 out of their

00:15:34.260 transcendental unconsciousness

00:15:36.420 and to start history.

00:15:37.660 It was an evil act.

00:15:38.880 But,

00:15:39.540 on the other hand,

00:15:40.960 it was also the precondition

00:15:42.660 for the later emergence

00:15:44.020 of Christ

00:15:44.700 and as far as

00:15:45.420 the Christians are concerned

00:15:46.380 that's the greatest event

00:15:47.580 in history.

00:15:48.220 So,

00:15:48.640 without this initial opening act,

00:15:50.660 right,

00:15:50.820 this tragic opening act,

00:15:52.280 there'd be no

00:15:52.980 reason for the whole

00:15:54.220 redemptive story

00:15:55.360 and therefore considered

00:15:56.760 from the perspective

00:15:58.060 of the total story,

00:15:59.620 the opening tragedy

00:16:00.900 cannot purely be

00:16:02.340 considered evil.

00:16:04.260 Very, very complicated

00:16:05.800 line of reasoning.

00:16:08.260 Now,

00:16:08.660 the other thing you see here,

00:16:10.040 and I think this relates

00:16:11.080 back to our initial map,

00:16:13.940 is,

00:16:14.260 and this also helps you

00:16:15.520 understand the way

00:16:16.360 people think.

00:16:17.100 Now,

00:16:17.220 I said already

00:16:17.860 that it's real easy

00:16:19.020 to confuse tragedy

00:16:21.500 and evil,

00:16:22.440 right?

00:16:22.860 Okay,

00:16:23.220 so what that means

00:16:24.020 is that it's real easy

00:16:25.200 to confuse the negative

00:16:26.300 aspect of the unknown

00:16:27.660 with evil,

00:16:28.460 and likewise,

00:16:29.260 it's very easy

00:16:29.860 to confuse the negative

00:16:30.820 aspect of culture

00:16:31.820 with evil,

00:16:32.500 your own culture,

00:16:33.640 the tyrannical aspect

00:16:34.740 of it,

00:16:35.380 or the culture

00:16:36.100 of other people.

00:16:37.220 So it's very easy,

00:16:38.140 for example,

00:16:39.160 for us to demonize

00:16:40.160 the foreigner,

00:16:40.740 and that's basically

00:16:41.840 because there's a part

00:16:43.600 of our mind

00:16:44.120 that presumes

00:16:44.800 that all things

00:16:45.800 that strike us negatively,

00:16:47.660 all things that produce

00:16:48.580 negative emotion

00:16:49.480 on our part,

00:16:50.260 like fear,

00:16:51.240 are the same thing.

00:16:53.100 So there's a blurry

00:16:54.660 category of evil

00:16:56.320 that's all terrible

00:16:57.520 natural things,

00:16:58.520 all terrible social things,

00:17:00.020 and then whatever

00:17:01.160 nastiness the individual

00:17:02.460 can generate

00:17:03.200 among themselves.

00:17:05.780 It's much more useful

00:17:07.480 to draw a clear

00:17:09.420 distinction between

00:17:10.440 these different categories

00:17:11.720 because that

00:17:13.500 clarity of thought

00:17:14.560 can help you

00:17:15.600 focus in most

00:17:18.320 specifically

00:17:19.040 on those things

00:17:20.180 that the individual

00:17:20.980 is responsible for

00:17:22.400 in terms of

00:17:23.400 turning the world

00:17:24.120 to waste.

00:17:25.560 So Milton says

00:17:26.540 this figure of Satan,

00:17:29.180 Lucifer,

00:17:29.820 the light bringer,

00:17:31.380 always associated

00:17:32.260 with rationality.

00:17:33.680 Milton presents him

00:17:34.500 as a remarkable creature,

00:17:35.980 right?

00:17:36.180 He's the highest angel

00:17:37.680 in God's heavenly hierarchy.

00:17:40.100 He's Christ's elder brother

00:17:41.380 in a similar

00:17:43.060 mythological vein.

00:17:44.740 He's the most powerful angel

00:17:46.020 that ever lived.

00:17:47.020 So at least in the opening stages

00:17:48.800 of this act,

00:17:50.000 Satan is presented

00:17:50.820 as something absolutely remarkable.

00:17:53.040 Now, the problem is here

00:17:54.620 his very remarkableness

00:17:56.200 starts to work against him.

00:17:58.320 And what happens is

00:17:59.280 that as he grows in power

00:18:01.880 and strength

00:18:02.680 in this heavenly hierarchy,

00:18:03.980 he starts to become convinced

00:18:05.560 that the omniscient himself,

00:18:09.780 whatever that transcendent figure is,

00:18:12.300 is unnecessary.

00:18:13.740 So the idea is that

00:18:14.740 whatever Satan represents

00:18:16.880 decides,

00:18:18.680 because of his own pride,

00:18:20.980 his own belief

00:18:21.700 in his own sufficiency,

00:18:23.200 that the transcendent

00:18:25.000 can be eradicated

00:18:26.860 from consideration.

00:18:27.580 And the way Milton presents that

00:18:29.420 is as a revolution

00:18:31.040 in heaven,

00:18:31.840 fundamentally.

00:18:32.820 So imagine

00:18:33.980 that the story

00:18:35.340 is something like this.

00:18:37.380 Well,

00:18:38.640 George Kelly,

00:18:39.520 way back in like 1955,

00:18:41.560 noted that

00:18:42.040 what human beings like

00:18:43.660 more than anything else,

00:18:44.920 really,

00:18:45.380 when you get right down to it,

00:18:46.620 is to be right.

00:18:48.540 Why?

00:18:49.560 Well,

00:18:50.160 it's a pain to be wrong,

00:18:51.520 right?

00:18:51.720 Because if you're wrong,

00:18:53.000 then the little structure

00:18:53.920 that you're using

00:18:54.580 to conjure up the world

00:18:56.880 has to dissolve,

00:18:58.400 and then you have to do

00:18:59.340 a lot of really aggravating work,

00:19:01.720 exploratory work

00:19:02.580 and creative work,

00:19:03.340 to put it back together.

00:19:04.920 And during the time

00:19:06.100 before you put it back together,

00:19:07.800 then you're flooded

00:19:08.920 with negative motivational states,

00:19:10.860 right?

00:19:11.000 You don't know which way is up,

00:19:12.800 metaphorically speaking.

00:19:14.040 So we don't like to be,

00:19:16.060 we don't like not to be right.

00:19:17.720 And so what does that mean?

00:19:19.160 Well,

00:19:19.320 psychologists know

00:19:20.060 that people have

00:19:20.700 a very strong confirmatory bias,

00:19:23.220 which basically means

00:19:24.120 that if you bring

00:19:25.020 a frame of reference

00:19:25.920 to bear on the world,

00:19:27.560 the probability is very high

00:19:29.060 that you will look

00:19:29.900 for confirming evidence,

00:19:32.500 and you will discount

00:19:33.660 disconfirming evidence.

00:19:36.060 Now,

00:19:36.380 the other thing

00:19:36.880 that is characteristic

00:19:38.220 of great figures

00:19:39.180 of evil like Satan

00:19:40.140 is their tendency to lie,

00:19:41.920 right?

00:19:42.100 So Satan is prince of the lie.

00:19:43.800 Now,

00:19:43.960 what does that mean exactly?

00:19:45.000 So T.S. Eliot

00:19:52.720 wrote this poem

00:19:54.540 called The Cocktail Hour.

00:19:55.580 He talks about this woman

00:19:56.320 who goes in

00:19:56.720 for psychiatric treatment,

00:19:57.800 and the woman says

00:19:58.300 to the psychiatrist,

00:19:59.360 I'm telling you,

00:20:00.580 I really, really hope

00:20:01.680 there's something wrong

00:20:02.460 with me,

00:20:03.260 because I'm having

00:20:03.900 a miserable time of it.

00:20:05.340 And as far as I can tell,

00:20:06.460 there's only two options here.

00:20:08.140 Either I'm okay,

00:20:09.220 and I'm having a miserable time

00:20:10.700 because the world is terrible,

00:20:11.980 in which case

00:20:12.820 there's nothing I can do about it.

00:20:14.960 Or there's something wrong

00:20:16.280 with me

00:20:16.860 at some level of analysis

00:20:18.220 that I don't really comprehend.

00:20:20.280 And although that's

00:20:21.440 a painful option,

00:20:22.860 I'm really hoping it's true

00:20:24.260 because if there's something

00:20:25.120 wrong with me,

00:20:25.740 possibly I can fix it.

00:20:27.240 And if there's something wrong

00:20:28.380 with the structure of the world,

00:20:29.500 well,

00:20:29.800 what's there to do about that?

00:20:35.120 Often what you see

00:20:36.100 in psychotherapy

00:20:36.780 is a battle

00:20:37.420 between those two perspectives

00:20:38.620 going on in the minds

00:20:39.620 of the client.

00:20:40.880 The client is,

00:20:41.820 in a situation

00:20:42.400 where they're repetitively

00:20:45.600 facing tragedy.

00:20:46.840 They have a specific viewpoint

00:20:48.500 about the world,

00:20:49.300 like their viewpoint might be,

00:20:50.560 well,

00:20:50.940 when it comes right down to it,

00:20:52.060 you really can't trust

00:20:52.920 other people.

00:20:53.740 And they have all sorts

00:20:54.580 of reasons for believing that.

00:20:55.860 Maybe they were abused

00:20:56.560 as children,

00:20:57.140 or they've had a bad

00:20:57.800 developmental history,

00:20:58.880 a number of relationships

00:20:59.940 that haven't gone well.

00:21:01.300 They have all the facts

00:21:02.540 at their disposal

00:21:03.300 to justify that particular

00:21:04.580 perspective,

00:21:05.300 but the truth of the matter

00:21:06.180 is that as long as they

00:21:07.720 hold on to that belief

00:21:09.040 and won't let it go,

00:21:10.520 and no wonder they won't,

00:21:12.540 they're going to continue

00:21:13.240 to suffer.

00:21:14.260 And part of what you're

00:21:15.080 always doing to someone

00:21:15.820 in therapy is saying,

00:21:16.580 you know,

00:21:17.040 yeah,

00:21:17.360 you've got a pretty coherent

00:21:18.440 view of the world

00:21:19.320 and all that,

00:21:20.180 and I can understand

00:21:21.280 why you'd like to cram

00:21:22.280 the whole world

00:21:22.960 into that coherent

00:21:23.900 perspective,

00:21:24.860 but the truth of the matter

00:21:25.880 is as long as you hold

00:21:26.880 on to that

00:21:27.400 and won't sacrifice it,

00:21:28.660 right,

00:21:29.040 won't go through

00:21:29.700 this terrible period

00:21:30.660 of dissolution,

00:21:31.360 it's always going to

00:21:32.700 produce the same

00:21:34.140 tragic consequences.

00:21:35.940 So as long as you

00:21:36.700 hold on to your belief

00:21:37.720 rigidly,

00:21:38.720 everything around you

00:21:39.860 is going to go

00:21:40.280 from bad to worse.

00:21:43.120 Fry says,

00:21:44.040 with regards to states,

00:21:45.260 he says,

00:21:45.660 a demonic fall,

00:21:47.060 as Milton presents it,

00:21:48.660 involves defiance of

00:21:49.760 and rivalry with God

00:21:51.040 rather than simple

00:21:52.180 disobedience,

00:21:53.280 and hence the demonic

00:21:54.160 society is a sustained

00:21:55.460 and systematic parody

00:21:56.640 of the divine one,

00:21:58.040 associated with devils

00:21:59.120 or fallen angels

00:21:59.880 because it seems

00:22:00.540 far beyond normal

00:22:01.540 human capacity

00:22:03.200 and its powers.

00:22:04.940 We read of ascending

00:22:06.220 and descending angels

00:22:07.300 on Jacob's

00:22:08.040 and Plato's ladders,

00:22:09.180 and similarly,

00:22:10.180 there seem to be

00:22:10.840 demonic reinforcements

00:22:12.260 in heathen life

00:22:13.180 that account for

00:22:13.980 the almost superhuman

00:22:15.120 grandeur of heathen empires,

00:22:17.260 especially just

00:22:17.900 before they fall.

00:22:20.160 Two particular

00:22:20.900 notable passages

00:22:21.820 in the Old Testament

00:22:22.680 prophets linked

00:22:23.500 to this theme

00:22:24.040 are the denunciation

00:22:24.860 of Babylon

00:22:25.660 in Isaiah 14

00:22:26.740 and of Tyre

00:22:27.840 in Ezekiel 28.

00:22:29.920 Babylon is associated

00:22:31.060 with Lucifer,

00:22:32.000 the morning star,

00:22:33.360 who said to himself,

00:22:34.480 I will be like

00:22:35.260 the most high.

00:22:36.620 Okay, so let's

00:22:37.260 translate that

00:22:38.100 into modern language

00:22:39.020 and forget about Babylon.

00:22:40.440 Let's take the Soviet Union

00:22:41.780 for example instead

00:22:43.080 and let's say

00:22:43.920 something like this.

00:22:45.600 I will be like

00:22:46.960 the most high.

00:22:47.780 Well, first of all,

00:22:48.340 it's not difficult

00:22:49.000 to read Stalin

00:22:49.940 into that

00:22:50.680 from a personal perspective,

00:22:51.960 but then it's more

00:22:52.860 complicated than that

00:22:53.840 because you can't blame

00:22:55.000 the Soviet Union

00:22:55.800 on Stalin.

00:22:56.920 When the wall fell down,

00:22:58.600 we know that

00:22:59.180 one-third of East Germans

00:23:00.240 were KGB informers.

00:23:01.660 You can't blame that

00:23:02.460 on Stalin.

00:23:03.460 You have to blame that

00:23:04.360 on the one-third

00:23:05.020 of the East Germans

00:23:05.760 who were KGB informers,

00:23:07.680 right?

00:23:07.940 It's this totalitarian

00:23:09.720 presupposition,

00:23:10.960 presumption,

00:23:11.520 is distributed

00:23:12.140 through the whole society.

00:23:13.300 There's a leader

00:23:14.120 in a hierarchy

00:23:14.880 and all that,

00:23:15.500 but they're not

00:23:16.500 the people

00:23:17.440 to be identified

00:23:18.560 with the fact

00:23:19.620 of the totalitarian state.

00:23:21.140 It's distributed

00:23:21.860 through the whole society

00:23:22.840 and it's precisely this.

00:23:24.480 It's what I don't know

00:23:26.900 I don't need.

00:23:28.060 I don't need

00:23:28.840 what I don't know.

00:23:34.460 One of the things

00:23:35.280 I really like

00:23:35.860 about this sort of

00:23:37.120 Christian metaphysical

00:23:38.060 take on the problem

00:23:38.960 of evil

00:23:39.300 is that it adopts

00:23:42.300 strange first principles.

00:23:43.900 Like, if you're

00:23:44.640 an empirical scientist,

00:23:46.720 it's very difficult

00:23:47.560 to come to terms

00:23:48.280 with the notion

00:23:48.760 of free choice,

00:23:50.000 because we don't have

00:23:50.640 deterministic models

00:23:51.640 of free choice.

00:23:52.280 We don't know

00:23:52.800 how that might occur,

00:23:53.720 although it seems

00:23:55.300 to be a reasonable

00:23:56.040 phenomenological observation

00:23:57.440 that if there's

00:23:58.380 anything true

00:23:59.140 about existence,

00:24:00.240 about the facts

00:24:00.940 of existence

00:24:01.460 as it's subjectively

00:24:02.760 construed,

00:24:03.820 the fact that you

00:24:04.540 seem to have

00:24:05.300 the faculty of choice

00:24:06.280 seems paramount

00:24:07.400 or primary.

00:24:08.100 Now, one might say,

00:24:09.860 well, that's just

00:24:10.480 a delusion

00:24:11.060 and we know that

00:24:11.700 because our

00:24:12.240 deterministic models

00:24:13.880 have been so powerful.

00:24:15.700 Or one might say,

00:24:16.700 well, alternatively,

00:24:18.100 we're going to presume

00:24:18.820 the subjective experience

00:24:20.000 to be true

00:24:20.720 and say, well,

00:24:21.580 our deterministic models

00:24:22.620 just aren't sophisticated

00:24:23.460 enough and there's

00:24:24.400 no real reason

00:24:25.080 to choose between

00:24:25.920 either of those

00:24:26.540 on an a priori basis,

00:24:27.800 right?

00:24:27.980 They're perhaps

00:24:28.700 equally plausible.

00:24:30.220 And we also might note

00:24:31.280 from the deterministic

00:24:32.280 perspective, of course,

00:24:33.360 that if you go down

00:24:34.300 far enough in your

00:24:35.540 analysis of physical

00:24:36.880 structures down

00:24:37.960 to the quantum level,

00:24:38.940 say, then deterministic

00:24:40.100 models don't hold at all.

00:24:41.640 So determinism has

00:24:42.760 its limits at the lower end

00:24:44.160 or high resolution

00:24:45.000 end of physical inquiry.

00:24:46.360 I have no idea

00:24:47.040 what that might mean

00:24:47.800 for free choice.

00:24:49.060 It just means

00:24:49.720 that there are

00:24:50.260 levels of analysis

00:24:51.180 that deterministic models

00:24:52.600 do not describe.

00:24:54.580 Christianity takes

00:24:55.640 the stance

00:24:57.860 that the subjective

00:24:58.980 sense of freedom

00:25:03.280 is accurate

00:25:03.980 and then tries

00:25:05.140 to build the world

00:25:05.960 from that point.

00:25:07.500 It presumes

00:25:08.380 that's an axiomatic

00:25:09.380 principle.

00:25:10.020 And so you have

00:25:10.560 God in Milton's

00:25:12.120 Paradise Lost

00:25:12.820 saying,

00:25:13.220 with regards

00:25:13.740 both to Lucifer

00:25:14.640 and to human beings

00:25:16.200 who are fallen.

00:25:16.900 He says,

00:25:18.340 so will fall

00:25:19.420 he and his

00:25:20.240 faithless progeny,

00:25:21.540 speaking of human beings,

00:25:22.860 whose fault,

00:25:24.160 whose but his own,

00:25:25.200 ingrate.

00:25:26.000 He had of me

00:25:27.000 all he could have.

00:25:28.460 I made him just

00:25:29.260 and right,

00:25:30.000 sufficient to have stood,

00:25:31.920 though free to fall.

00:25:34.000 And I like that.

00:25:34.800 I think that makes

00:25:35.500 a fair bit of sense

00:25:36.340 to me.

00:25:37.240 I started to understand

00:25:38.760 this most particularly

00:25:39.740 as a consequence

00:25:40.520 of reading Carl Jung

00:25:41.540 because Jung has

00:25:42.220 this really interesting

00:25:43.200 notion,

00:25:44.180 and I think it's tied

00:25:45.200 to the idea in Genesis

00:25:46.340 that as soon as Adam

00:25:47.660 becomes self-conscious

00:25:48.600 he hides from God.

00:25:50.360 So what if it was this?

00:25:51.540 And we can take

00:25:52.200 an evolutionary tack

00:25:53.200 on this too.

00:25:54.100 What if it was this?

00:25:55.220 What if it was the case

00:25:56.360 that if you never

00:25:58.380 turned away

00:25:59.320 from any

00:26:00.320 phenomenological evidence,

00:26:02.820 then you build

00:26:03.680 a personality

00:26:04.180 that would be strong

00:26:04.900 enough to withstand

00:26:05.560 tragedy?

00:26:06.220 What if that was the case?

00:26:07.600 So the idea here being,

00:26:09.420 let's say you are

00:26:10.120 the person who notes

00:26:11.100 that his or her friends

00:26:12.300 don't exactly

00:26:13.180 trust him.

00:26:15.860 What do you do?

00:26:17.140 Well, to hide away

00:26:18.140 you just walk away

00:26:19.060 and then, of course,

00:26:19.820 you never learn anything.

00:26:21.020 But let's say,

00:26:21.600 by contrast,

00:26:22.300 you say,

00:26:22.600 well, no, no.

00:26:23.280 The first time

00:26:24.200 you get any evidence

00:26:24.940 that you're not

00:26:25.460 100% trusted,

00:26:26.520 you say,

00:26:26.780 look,

00:26:27.180 I got this pang

00:26:28.440 in my heart

00:26:29.120 saying the communication

00:26:31.240 between you and I

00:26:32.040 is not exactly straight.

00:26:33.700 Now,

00:26:34.400 something's going on here.

00:26:35.580 Either you haven't got

00:26:36.840 your frame of reference

00:26:38.200 with regards to me right,

00:26:39.660 or there's something wrong

00:26:40.680 with the way I'm looking

00:26:41.420 at the world.

00:26:42.180 Those are the options.

00:26:43.260 So let's have it out.

00:26:44.620 You've got this attitude

00:26:45.640 and it's doing,

00:26:47.000 it's hurting me.

00:26:48.220 Tell me what you have to say

00:26:49.580 and I'll tell you

00:26:50.180 what I have to say

00:26:51.140 and we'll exchange

00:26:52.240 this patterned information.

00:26:53.620 And as a consequence,

00:26:54.940 we're both going to walk away

00:26:56.180 a little bit more

00:26:56.860 well put together.

00:26:58.200 So God says,

00:26:59.260 yeah, yeah,

00:26:59.860 you know,

00:27:00.560 people get distorted

00:27:02.260 and twisted

00:27:02.840 and bent and warped,

00:27:04.040 but that's their own problem

00:27:05.980 fundamentally

00:27:06.500 because they have this capacity

00:27:07.720 just to turn away.

00:27:08.960 And as they turn away,

00:27:09.840 they get weaker

00:27:10.460 and as they get weaker,

00:27:12.760 the world gets worse

00:27:13.860 around them

00:27:14.440 because they can't deal with it

00:27:15.420 and they keep making mistakes

00:27:16.540 and well,

00:27:17.140 that's a terrible consequence

00:27:18.460 and all that,

00:27:19.040 but if they just wouldn't

00:27:20.480 turn away to begin with,

00:27:22.260 then there'd be no problem.

00:27:23.400 And there wouldn't be

00:27:24.520 no problem

00:27:25.540 because the world

00:27:26.400 would stop being tragic

00:27:27.580 because the world's tragic,

00:27:29.260 right?

00:27:29.460 I mean,

00:27:29.940 there you are

00:27:30.500 little and vulnerable

00:27:31.460 and, you know,

00:27:32.060 things can roll right over you.

00:27:33.740 The world would never

00:27:35.460 lose its tragedy,

00:27:36.460 but the idea would be

00:27:37.340 instead that you could

00:27:39.200 handle it

00:27:39.760 without becoming corrupted

00:27:40.860 and that would be sufficient.

00:27:42.320 So the idea would be

00:27:43.980 it's a tough situation,

00:27:48.420 all things considered,

00:27:49.260 but it's also an interesting

00:27:50.340 and compelling

00:27:51.080 and beautiful one

00:27:52.420 and it may be

00:27:53.300 that if you didn't

00:27:54.440 turn away,

00:27:55.040 the interesting

00:27:55.800 and beautiful

00:27:56.400 and compelling aspect

00:27:57.720 would overwhelm

00:27:58.880 the tragic aspect

00:27:59.760 and that would be fine.

00:28:00.920 It's a big deal.

00:28:05.060 Thank you.

00:28:35.060 Thank you.

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00:31:36.360 You're welcome.

00:31:38.860 Nietzsche.

00:31:40.000 Talking about the European state of mind at the end of the 19th century.

00:31:44.380 So Nietzsche says, well, we're in this terrible situation, right?

00:31:47.320 God is dead.

00:31:48.580 We've killed him.

00:31:49.700 What does that mean?

00:31:50.560 Well, we've taken our evolved metaphysics, which structures our moral viewpoint,

00:31:55.060 and undermined it by rational criticism, a peculiar move philosophically,

00:31:59.760 because it was never established on rational grounds anyways.

00:32:02.420 We've undermined it rationally and replaced it with, well, nothing.

00:32:06.240 Nothing.

00:32:07.580 What's the consequence of that?

00:32:09.360 Well, he outlines that here.

00:32:11.140 Of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness.

00:32:17.020 And you can think about this as a prophecy on the events of World War I and World War II

00:32:22.340 and the Gulag Archipelago and the 60 million people dead in the Soviet Union

00:32:26.480 and the whole unfolding of 20th century history

00:32:31.000 and the great ideological battles that characterize that unfolding.

00:32:34.980 So this is something Nietzsche sees coming and knows why.

00:32:37.820 He says, of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness.

00:32:42.400 With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence.

00:32:46.980 What I relate is the history of the next two centuries.

00:32:49.640 I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently.

00:32:53.840 The advent of nihilism, right?

00:32:55.720 The belief in nothing.

00:32:57.520 Our whole European culture is moving for some time now

00:33:00.340 with a tortured tension that's growing from decade to decade

00:33:03.220 as towards a catastrophe, restlessly, violently,

00:33:06.880 headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end

00:33:10.140 that no longer reflects, it's afraid to reflect.

00:33:14.400 He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect

00:33:18.820 as a philosopher in solitary by instinct

00:33:21.200 who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside.

00:33:24.620 Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary?

00:33:29.000 Because the values we've had hitherto thus draw their final consequence.

00:33:34.640 Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals.

00:33:39.380 Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had.

00:33:45.440 We require at some time new values.

00:33:47.900 Nihilism stands at the door.

00:33:51.160 Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?

00:33:55.440 Nihilism, right?

00:33:57.860 Your beliefs are undermined once?

00:34:00.540 What's the consequence of that?

00:34:02.260 Well, one consequence is the belief is undermined.

00:34:05.340 The other consequence is more metaphysical, which is

00:34:07.880 fooled once, you no longer have the belief.

00:34:12.180 But maybe it's even worse than that, because human beings can generalize.

00:34:15.500 Fooled once, you never have any, you no longer have any belief in beliefs.

00:34:19.620 Which mean you say something like this.

00:34:21.440 I don't care what you think.

00:34:23.100 It doesn't matter what you think.

00:34:24.520 The world is such a terrible place that

00:34:26.560 no interpretation whatsoever can possibly suffice.

00:34:30.220 That's nihilism.

00:34:31.480 No meaning system whatsoever can possibly suffice.

00:34:35.560 Well, what's the flaw?

00:34:37.200 Well, the flaw is, well, of course no system of coherent belief can suffice.

00:34:41.120 Because most of the world's transcendent.

00:34:44.160 You can't encapsulate everything that is in your sphere of belief.

00:34:48.500 And what you might say then is that if you ever believe that what you believe is what should

00:34:52.660 support you, the facts you know say, or the interpretation you place in the world,

00:34:57.380 then your faith is badly misplaced.

00:34:59.840 You don't believe in what you believe.

00:35:02.000 You believe in something that's deeper than that.

00:35:04.560 And so then you see what's wrong with Tolstoy, right?

00:35:07.700 And Tolstoy's story, and Tolstoy says, accounting for his collapse in the stability of Christian

00:35:17.920 belief, he said,

00:35:18.780 And this all happened, this collapse of my belief, when I was not yet 50 years old.

00:35:24.320 I should have been considered a completely happy man.

00:35:26.940 I had a good, loving, and beloved wife, fine children, and a large estate, growing and

00:35:31.100 expanding without any effort on my part.

00:35:33.420 I was respected by friends and acquaintances, praised by strangers, and could claim a certain

00:35:38.080 renown.

00:35:38.680 I was not physically nor mentally unhealthy.

00:35:42.140 On the contrary, I enjoyed a physical and mental vigor I had rarely encountered among

00:35:46.080 others my age.

00:35:47.280 I could keep up with the peasants working in the fields and work eight and ten hours at

00:35:51.000 a stretch without suffering any after effects from the strain.

00:35:54.700 And in such a state of affairs, I came to a point where I could not live.

00:35:58.800 And even though I feared death, I had to employ ruses against myself to keep from committing

00:36:03.220 suicide.

00:36:03.720 It was as though I had lived a little, wandered a little, until I came to a precipice, and

00:36:10.040 I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin, and there was no stopping or turning

00:36:14.460 back, no closing my eyes so that I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the

00:36:18.680 deception of life and of happiness, and of the reality of suffering and death, of complete

00:36:23.520 annihilation.

00:36:24.880 I grew sick of life.

00:36:26.620 Some irresistible force was leading me to somehow get rid of it.

00:36:29.440 This thought was such a temptation that I had to use cunning against myself in order

00:36:35.000 not to go through with it.

00:36:36.460 And there I was, a fortunate man, carrying a rope from my room where I was alone every

00:36:41.800 night as I undressed so that I would not hang myself from the beam between the closets.

00:36:45.920 And I quit going hunting with a gun so that I would not be too easily tempted to rid myself

00:36:49.940 of life.

00:36:50.440 I myself did not know what I wanted.

00:36:53.660 I was afraid of life.

00:36:54.840 I struggled to get rid of it.

00:36:56.040 Yet I hoped for something from it.

00:36:58.260 My position was terrible.

00:37:00.200 I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life.

00:37:04.520 And in faith, I could find nothing except a denial of reason.

00:37:07.880 And for me, this was even more impossible than a denial of life.

00:37:11.800 I myself, according to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil.

00:37:16.220 And people know it.

00:37:16.960 I described my spiritual condition of myself in this way.

00:37:22.100 My life is some kind of stupid and evil practical joke that someone is playing on me.

00:37:27.100 In spite of the fact that I did not acknowledge the existence of any someone who might have

00:37:30.580 created me, the notion that someone brought me into the world as a stupid and evil joke

00:37:35.360 seemed to be the most natural way to describe my condition.

00:37:39.900 I could not be deceived.

00:37:41.760 All is vanity.

00:37:43.560 Happy is he who has never been born.

00:37:45.540 Death is better than life.

00:37:46.960 We must rid ourselves of life.

00:37:49.500 Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us, and seeing that

00:37:53.240 the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living, and that it's better

00:37:56.480 not to exist, the strong act and put an end to this stupid joke, and they use any means

00:38:01.280 of doing it.

00:38:02.280 A rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, or a train.

00:38:06.580 Now, the interesting thing about this, I think, is, first of all, a Russian wrote it, and second

00:38:11.580 of all, it was written in the late 1900s.

00:38:13.840 And even more particularly is that you note that when the strong act, using a rope around

00:38:18.300 the neck, water, a knife in the heart, and a train, well, Tolstoy's talking about suicide.

00:38:23.260 But there's no necessary reason to presume that this should only be violence engendered

00:38:27.480 against the self, right?

00:38:28.600 If life is a stupid and evil joke, then what's stopping you from benevolently putting an end

00:38:35.580 to the suffering of others, right?

00:38:38.240 Benevolently.

00:38:38.720 Benevolently.

00:38:39.720 In theory, at least.

00:38:46.220 Well, you know, that's one perspective, right?

00:38:48.180 But then there's always the perspective of the lady who went to see the psychiatrist in

00:38:52.840 T.S. Eliot's poem, which is, well, if, when your eyes are open, life appears as nothing

00:38:58.680 but suffering and pain to you, it could be that that is how life is.

00:39:03.420 But it could also be that there's something wrong with the way that you're looking at the

00:39:06.880 world, and in some ways, that's a much more humble perspective, right?

00:39:10.340 Because the alternative is, well, I know what's going on, and I just look out there, and there's

00:39:14.700 the world, and I pretty much got it.

00:39:16.400 Like, I know what it means, and what it means is pointless suffering and pain, and that's

00:39:20.780 my model, and I don't see any reason to question it.

00:39:23.560 But then the alternative is, well, wait a second.

00:39:26.340 There's always the possibility that I don't know absolutely everything, and this final and

00:39:31.300 horrible judgment that I'm placing on the conditions of existence could conceivably

00:39:35.980 be misplaced, given the sort of presumptuousness of the claim, right?

00:39:41.820 I'm in a position to render final judgment on the moral value of existence as such.

00:39:47.700 It seems to me reasonable to presume that that's not the kind of statement that you should easily

00:39:54.960 make.

00:39:57.000 And I remember when George Bush launched his most recent war, the initial terminology, I think

00:40:02.980 this was for the Afghanistan battle, was Operation Infinite Justice, but he retracted that phrase

00:40:09.960 after a number of religious leaders objected to its kind of presumptuousness, which I thought

00:40:15.680 was quite reasonable, because infinite justice is something that most people should probably

00:40:20.360 not hope for, right?

00:40:22.020 Because you never know precisely what infinite justice means, because it might just mean that

00:40:26.440 every bloody mistake you've ever made, you're going to pay for.

00:40:30.580 And I suppose that would be just as applicable to George W. Bush as it would to anybody else.

00:40:36.080 And then Milton again describes the development of this adversarial spirit.

00:40:41.400 He says, first, pride.

00:40:43.160 Pride and worse ambition threw me down.

00:40:45.760 That's Satan's lament when he's in hell.

00:40:47.580 And Milton's description of hell is extremely interesting.

00:40:50.660 He said, the reason that hell is characterized by its structure is not so much because of

00:40:55.180 its nature precisely.

00:40:56.900 It's because of its distance from the good.

00:40:59.600 So the farther you are away, say, from what constitutes the good, the more suffering is

00:41:04.420 endemic to that state.

00:41:07.340 So it's the distance away from something that constitutes the suffering.

00:41:10.780 And then Milton says, it's very interesting to do an analysis of Satan's character and the

00:41:15.400 notion of hell per se, because how in the world can you reconcile the idea of a good God with

00:41:20.600 the notion of this continual suffering?

00:41:23.060 And so Milton says, well, Satan can step out of hell in one moment.

00:41:26.340 All he has to do is admit that he was wrong.

00:41:28.380 And that's the one thing that he will not do under any circumstances whatsoever.

00:41:32.440 So then we put one more twist on the story and we say something like this.

00:41:37.820 Okay, we already know that part of the reason that people have belief systems is so that

00:41:42.460 they can structure their interactions with the world.

00:41:45.060 It's a toolbox, say.

00:41:47.380 We're playing a game.

00:41:48.460 We share the rules.

00:41:49.300 That's fine.

00:41:49.820 We can cooperate with one another.

00:41:51.080 It could be other than it is, but it's the way it is and it works for us.

00:41:54.860 That's fine.

00:41:55.580 There's nothing absolute about it except that a structure like that's necessary.

00:41:58.940 Now, whenever there's a threat to that shared view of the world, well, then we're afraid

00:42:05.100 and for good reason.

00:42:06.320 And it's not surprising under those circumstances that we fight to defend what we've made ours.

00:42:12.180 But then you say, say you adopt this perspective, right?

00:42:15.260 And it's this vengeful desire to wreak havoc that extends beyond other individuals and beyond

00:42:22.540 society even to the structure of experience as such.

00:42:26.160 And then you think, well, what's the best mask for that?

00:42:29.020 And how do these two processes sort of interact?

00:42:31.180 And you think, well, the most efficient way to do terrible things is to mask them with

00:42:38.800 the highest order morality.

00:42:41.440 And that's precisely what the totalitarian does.

00:42:43.640 So that way he gets to have his cake and eat it too.

00:42:45.880 He's perfectly well protected from apprehension of the world because his belief system is complete.

00:42:50.840 Plus his underground motivations, which is this constant desire for revenge, confine their

00:42:56.920 expression within the totalitarian structure and remain invisible even to himself.

00:43:01.600 So he can say to himself, well, the reason I threw all those farmers out of their house

00:43:07.400 in 1920 and stole their soup and their food and their grandmother's blankets and everything

00:43:13.360 they'd worked to own was because I was building the socialist paradise, right?

00:43:18.020 And it was a good thing for me to go into that house and not a bad thing.

00:43:21.400 And as long as he believes that or acts as if he believes that, then he can look in the mirror

00:43:25.980 without screaming.

00:43:27.300 And there's no recognition whatsoever of precisely the sort of game that he's involved in.

00:43:31.780 So he has it both ways, right?

00:43:34.080 He can do everything terrible that he always dreams of doing and consider himself not only

00:43:38.900 good, but good even at a higher level than the people that he was actually afflicting.

00:43:45.420 And of course, that's just standard description of what happened in the Soviet Union.

00:43:54.000 Nietzsche says, I love this, definition of morality.

00:43:58.340 This is the most cynical thing Nietzsche ever said, I think.

00:44:01.780 The idiosyncrasy of decadence with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life successfully.

00:44:10.260 I attach value to this definition.

00:44:12.460 I said, well, why be an ideologue?

00:44:14.160 Well, it's a good way to simplify the world, right?

00:44:17.420 It's a procrastinate bed.

00:44:18.680 You just chop off everything that doesn't fit.

00:44:20.740 Then you don't have to think, right?

00:44:22.800 So that's good because thinking is difficult and it's troublesome and it takes courage and

00:44:26.320 so forth to transform chaos into order is no trivial matter.

00:44:29.900 And if it's all ordered for you, well, then there's really nothing left for you to do.

00:44:33.840 But then Nietzsche goes even below that.

00:44:35.780 He says, yeah, well, there's more to the story than that, isn't there?

00:44:37.960 It's like once you got this little procrustean bed all arranged for your enemies, then you

00:44:42.240 can allow your most base vengeful instincts full flow by just continually chopping people

00:44:50.720 so they fit and you do it all the while by, well, saying, well, it's obviously the best

00:44:58.620 thing that could possibly be done.

00:44:59.940 And so then you look at Stalin, say, because not everybody who's adopted a vengeful tack

00:45:13.080 on existence is sort of like the archetype of vengefulness or adversarial spirit.

00:45:18.040 But you get now and then the people like Stalin who are good counterexample say to the people

00:45:22.720 like Gandhi.

00:45:23.380 And so Stalin's very instructive.

00:45:25.500 And so we could start by looking at what he did in the Ukraine.

00:45:28.540 So at the end of 1929, the Kremlin decreed that millions of peasants from individually owned

00:45:34.280 farms would be forced into agricultural collectives or kolkhozes, seen in the eyes of the Politburo

00:45:39.580 as pliant providers of Soviet agricultural needs.

00:45:43.320 In defiance of the facts, Soviet ideologists hammered out an appropriate Marxist terminology

00:45:48.800 to explain what was going on throughout grain producing areas.

00:45:52.500 It was said resistance to this scientific scheme was being organized by so-called rich peasants

00:45:59.120 or kolaks.

00:46:00.860 With his customary brutality, therefore, Stalin decreed the liquidation of the kolaks as a

00:46:05.540 class.

00:46:06.180 Stalin liked this idea of like group guilt.

00:46:09.100 That was a major theme for Stalin.

00:46:11.180 That meant I really didn't have to ever pay attention to you as an individual.

00:46:14.080 I could just decide if you were a doctor or engineer or a kulak or a German or whatever

00:46:20.000 ethnic, racial, or educational division happened to characterize my particular target at the

00:46:24.980 time.

00:46:25.300 And it didn't matter if you were guilty as an individual.

00:46:28.460 That whole notion never even obtained.

00:46:30.260 It was class guilt that mattered.

00:46:31.580 And if you were in one of those classes, well, we were better without you.

00:46:34.640 And of course, the nature of the class just changed constantly.

00:46:37.500 But it was a perfectly logical thing to think if you believed in like historical determinism.

00:46:41.700 If your parents were rich, bourgeois, what was the probability that you were going to be

00:46:46.000 a useful part of the workers' collective?

00:46:48.560 Be easier just to get rid of you ahead of time so you didn't cause too much trouble.

00:46:52.780 So then you think about these kulaks, rich peasants.

00:46:55.700 Well, who were these people?

00:46:57.020 Like when we get down to the individual level.

00:46:59.720 So you go on a village.

00:47:02.600 Village was full of serfs like not 40 years before.

00:47:05.220 So these are people just struggling out of the feudal society, right?

00:47:08.020 And you got some people in there who managed to be successful enough as farmers, which

00:47:12.440 is no easy thing, to like have a house and maybe hire one person.

00:47:16.380 And you know, maybe have a little extra food in the larder and a few kind of material possessions.

00:47:22.300 So these are successful people.

00:47:24.040 And so you could say, well, they're the ones that actually knew how to farm.

00:47:27.140 It's one theory.

00:47:27.860 Or you could say the reason they had all this stuff was because they stole it from all the

00:47:31.360 other people, right?

00:47:32.180 And then you think, okay, so I march into town.

00:47:34.440 I'm a Soviet revolutionary.

00:47:36.160 And I say, hey, guys, you know those rich people?

00:47:39.720 They stole everything they have from you.

00:47:41.980 And then you think, okay, which of you guys is going to listen to that?

00:47:45.380 Well, it's not going to be the sort of struggling people just underneath them who are really trying

00:47:49.500 to get ahead, right?

00:47:50.280 Because that's where they're hoping to get.

00:47:52.000 It's going to be the resentful and revengeful few who think, well, the world's fundamentally

00:47:56.900 unfair.

00:47:57.420 And it's obvious that those sons of bitches got what they want by stealing it from me.

00:48:01.640 And here it turns out that if I just go down the street and steal it back, well, not only

00:48:06.180 am I allowed to do that, but according to this new and emergent ideology, man, that's the

00:48:12.680 best thing I could possibly do.

00:48:14.760 So then multiply that story by several million participants, and you have like the first five

00:48:19.880 years of the Soviet empire.

00:48:21.640 And so what do we have there?

00:48:22.940 The result was a catastrophic onslaught on millions of peasant households.

00:48:27.560 At first, party activists and local officials, read bullies, right, brutalized peasants, forcing

00:48:34.180 them to surrender their homesteads and their possessions.

00:48:36.700 Deportations, arrests, and killings soon followed as terror generalized.

00:48:40.880 The violence mounted to full-scale rebellion in various places, with regular troops engaged

00:48:46.120 for months.

00:48:47.100 For example, suppressing peasant uprisings.

00:48:49.760 Resistance took various forms, usually reflecting the hopeless, desperate anguish of a doomed

00:48:55.580 population.

00:48:56.660 In the Ukraine, there were even women's rebellions.

00:48:59.300 Spontaneous uprisings of peasant women who attacked the local kolkhozes to demand the

00:49:04.100 return of confiscated farm products.

00:49:06.760 With a colossal impact on the Soviet economy, peasants slaughtered their animals by the millions

00:49:13.580 rather than see them seized.

00:49:15.800 For two years, the fighting raged.

00:49:18.340 As the dreadful process of de-kulakization continued, Stalin ordered a further assault on the recalcitrant

00:49:24.200 peasantry.

00:49:25.240 What conquest calls the terror famine of 1932.

00:49:29.000 Moscow writes conquest.

00:49:30.960 It's from a book called The Harvest of Sorrow.

00:49:33.820 Knowingly decreed grain procurements from the Ukraine and elsewhere, exceeding by far what

00:49:40.080 the local population could produce, which meant that everyone who lived there was forced

00:49:44.900 and ordered to deliver more grain than they had ever grown.

00:49:48.720 Communist brigades roamed the countryside, forcing agriculturalists to disgorge the little

00:49:53.200 they had been able to produce under conditions of severe dislocation.

00:49:56.940 Grain sat unused in state reserves while the local population starved.

00:50:01.020 This is from wisdom, apocryphal, biblical writings.

00:50:11.780 For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,

00:50:15.640 Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and

00:50:20.180 no one has been known to return from Hades.

00:50:22.840 Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been.

00:50:27.240 Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason a spark kindled by the beating

00:50:31.840 of our hearts.

00:50:33.060 When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like

00:50:36.680 empty air.

00:50:37.920 Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works.

00:50:42.540 Our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is

00:50:46.660 chased by the rays of the sun, and overcome by its heat.

00:50:49.440 For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death,

00:50:54.840 because it is sealed up, and no one turns back.

00:50:57.700 So, a piece of writing thousands of years old.

00:51:01.460 And so Nietzsche says at the end of the 1900s, well, rationality undermines our faith in religion.

00:51:05.720 But you have a piece of writing from more than 2,000 years ago that says, look, what is

00:51:11.320 it about being alive?

00:51:12.280 It's short, and there's nothing to it, right?

00:51:14.980 Our thoughts are biologically produced, and when we die, there's nothing left.

00:51:19.060 Well, that's a very modern thought, yet it was expressed thousands of years ago.

00:51:23.240 So you know, I think, merely from observing that, that the crisis of faith that characterizes

00:51:28.760 modern society is a reflection of the permanent crisis of faith that characterizes human beings.

00:51:35.060 What's happening with the totalitarian?

00:51:37.020 Well, the totalitarian is afraid of the unknown, for good reason, I mean.

00:51:43.080 And he's very interested in sustaining his own belief structure.

00:51:48.160 And the combination of those two things, it can start off trivially, is that the more you're

00:51:53.440 convinced that you have to maintain the stability of your current belief structure, the more

00:51:58.020 afraid you are of anything that's unknown.

00:52:01.860 And the more afraid you are of anything that's unknown, the less likely you are to go out

00:52:06.240 and explore it.

00:52:07.040 And then the less likely you are to go out and explore it, the weaker you get, because

00:52:10.260 you stopped gathering information.

00:52:11.960 And then the weaker you get, the more necessary it is that you have to have this frame of reference

00:52:16.300 and it has to remain intact.

00:52:17.820 And this sort of thing starts to cycle and cycle.

00:52:21.000 So you undermine your own sense of your own autonomy and ability, and you make yourself

00:52:25.500 more and more a rigid tool of the propagandistic system.

00:52:29.600 And you're more and more, adopt the stance of enmity towards anything you don't understand.

00:52:34.480 And that's a spiral that goes rapidly downhill, right?

00:52:37.600 Rapidly into a state that's characterized by complete internal chaos.

00:52:41.860 And I think that's a good definition of what is meant in metaphysical language by hell,

00:52:47.980 right?

00:52:48.200 Hell is a bottomless pit.

00:52:49.760 Why?

00:52:50.820 Well, I don't care how bad things are for you or around you.

00:52:54.220 There's always some bloody thing you can do to make it worse, right?

00:52:56.920 There's always some suffering you can extend to others.

00:52:59.200 There's always some bit of stubbornness or rejection that you can pull off that'll make

00:53:02.940 your already terrible situation worse, right?

00:53:05.220 So there's no bottom.

00:53:06.780 And that seems to me to be right.

00:53:08.140 If you do just a cursory historical analysis, no matter what terrible account you can come

00:53:13.900 across with regards to, say, concentration camp brutality, in some other book, there's

00:53:18.720 some worse story, right?

00:53:20.380 Limited only by the absolute ends of the most brutal form of imagination.

00:53:26.880 All a consequence, I think, of this process, right?

00:53:29.320 And you can't really say what causes it, because on the one hand, there's cowardice and lack

00:53:34.880 of faith, right?

00:53:35.720 Anything I don't understand, cowardice pride in lack of faith.

00:53:40.240 Anything I don't understand doesn't exist.

00:53:42.260 Plus, I'm not the person to confront it anyways, right?

00:53:45.100 That's the lack of faith.

00:53:47.180 Each of those things feeds into the other.

00:53:49.880 And it's very difficult to say where it starts.

00:53:51.780 The thing that's kind of interesting about these self-referential processes is that they don't

00:54:02.460 have to start dramatically.

00:54:04.580 Like, the loop can start very, very small.

00:54:06.940 And it picks up speed very, very rapidly.

00:54:09.720 So you imagine you're speaking into a tape recorder, and the speaker's on.

00:54:14.500 You get too close to the speaker with the microphone, and you get some feedback.

00:54:18.140 And if you bring the microphone a little closer, the feedback develops more and more intensely.

00:54:21.640 It can blow up the whole system.

00:54:23.360 It doesn't have to start dramatically to move forward very, very rapidly.

00:54:28.240 And what that means, at least in principle, is that even small mistakes anywhere along

00:54:33.480 this circle can start the development of precisely this kind of spiral.

00:54:38.700 And so you say, well, people, do people need to be abused to become totalitarian?

00:54:43.540 Well, and the answer to that is no, because everyone's been abused sufficiently by some

00:54:48.560 occurrences in their life to justify taking a negative tack on the nature of experience.

00:54:53.600 You say, well, how cowardly do you have to be in order to run away from things?

00:54:57.320 And you think, well, not that cowardly, because under most circumstances, your life is characterized

00:55:02.340 by sins of omission, right?

00:55:03.940 It's, there are things you left undone.

00:55:06.820 And like, just exactly how rigid do you want your belief systems to be?

00:55:11.460 And you say, well, I like them to be stable, because without that stability, then I'm terrified.

00:55:16.860 And then you can say, well, fair enough.

00:55:19.220 But that's all a sign of a kind of existential weakness.

00:55:21.980 And then if social circumstances come around and give your life a good tweak, say, like they

00:55:26.600 did with the Germans prior to World War II, you just never know what side you're going

00:55:30.320 to end up on.

00:55:31.540 And so all these little tiny mistakes, you know, mistakes that I think are marked by

00:55:35.820 your own conscience are precisely that leads you down this terrible path.

00:55:39.760 And if you think, well, no, that can't be right.

00:55:42.120 Well, then you have to remember that in these processes, say, of de-Kulakization and that

00:55:46.680 immense wave of deaths that characterized the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, most people were

00:55:52.280 involved, and if they weren't involved in direct acts of commission, they were absolutely involved

00:55:59.260 in direct acts of omission, right?

00:56:01.160 They knew, but they didn't say anything.

00:56:04.540 Well, classically, sins of commission are regarded as much more evil, say, than sins of

00:56:09.420 omission.

00:56:09.920 But I actually think that's backwards.

00:56:12.040 The sins of omission are worse.

00:56:13.560 Because every time you walk away, I mean, what do you do when you walk away from a Nazi?

00:56:18.680 What are you walking away from?

00:56:20.540 Well, we know what you're walking away from, right?

00:56:23.080 You're walking away from a domain that's likely to expand into something that's completely

00:56:29.420 undifferentiable from hell.

00:56:34.100 And it's no wonder you walk away from that.

00:56:36.780 But the fact that you walk away from it makes it much more likely that it's going to happen.

00:56:42.000 So then I think, to end this, something like this.

00:56:44.980 We look for economic reasons to explain great, terrible acts, right?

00:56:52.220 We look for social reasons.

00:56:53.480 We look for political reasons.

00:56:55.820 But we have Nietzsche's observation, which is something like this.

00:56:58.720 I don't care whether or not your life's being characterized by suffering and deprivation.

00:57:03.400 The mere fact of suffering and deprivation does not allow you to draw a particular conclusion.

00:57:07.940 You can't say that there's a causal path between economic deprivation, say, and the rise of

00:57:12.660 a totalitarian state.

00:57:13.980 Because any event's susceptible to multiple interpretations.

00:57:17.280 Well, how do these states come about?

00:57:19.440 Well, I think, well, we look for political and economic and social reasons because that's

00:57:24.180 the easiest place to look, right?

00:57:26.120 If you ratchet up the level of description to social forces that are beyond your control,

00:57:30.900 then you never have to worry about what it is that you're doing or not doing that's

00:57:34.080 actually causing this sort of thing.

00:57:35.540 But I think if you look at the historical record, especially if you look at it from

00:57:40.040 a mythological perspective, the story's basically clear.

00:57:43.540 And it goes something like this.

00:57:45.140 Every time you make a mistake that you know is a mistake and you don't fix it, the world

00:57:51.140 moves more towards that.

00:57:52.780 And it might be trivial, maybe, but it might not be.

00:57:56.560 So you look at Adolf Eichmann, for example, who is the little bureaucrat who planned the

00:58:00.340 final solution, and you find out he's just your little ratty guy, right?

00:58:04.540 You see him in a bar, you don't even notice him.

00:58:07.200 He's a negligible nobody.

00:58:09.260 But he's the guy who planned the final solution.

00:58:12.800 He was a normal person.

00:58:14.300 I mean, maybe even slightly less than normal, right?

00:58:17.460 He was no monster.

00:58:18.880 He wasn't the sort of person you'd remark on if you saw him.

00:58:21.820 Precisely the opposite.

00:58:23.340 Invisible, quiet, unassuming.

00:58:25.600 Presuming, no doubt, that at least until he was arrested, that he was just doing what

00:58:31.260 he was told.

00:58:32.420 And that was just fine.

00:58:33.880 There's thisнитеenseangermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanermanerman icy自由 masih

00:59:03.880 piece from Search for the Holy Grail. And the Holy Grail is a myth that was constructed in England,

00:59:09.880 and the myth goes something like this. There's a cup, the grail, used to hold Christ's blood,

00:59:16.020 and that cup has redemptive significance, and it's been lost. And the knights, King Arthur's

00:59:22.900 knights, who go off to look for the Holy Grail are after this cup. So it's a redemption story,

00:59:26.840 right? It means the world's damned, unredeemed. There's some object that can serve as the source

00:59:34.800 of redemption, the source of nourishment, say, thinking about it from a symbolic perspective.

00:59:39.740 And it's worthwhile to go on a quest of that sort. And the King Arthur story is set up in an

00:59:44.840 interesting way, because there's a king, Arthur, but he has all these knights, these nobles, and they

00:59:49.280 all sit at a round table. And they're at a round table because they're equals. So although it's a

00:59:54.240 hierarchical story, there's a motif in it that transcends the hierarchy. It says, well,

01:00:00.760 yeah, under normal circumstances, everyone's arranged in a hierarchy, but when you're out to

01:00:06.360 seek whatever you need, then everyone's an equal. And so, fine. So they sit at the round table, and

01:00:11.140 then they go off to search for the Holy Grail. And the story opens with a very interesting motif,

01:00:15.980 which is the knights look at the forest, and then they try to find the part that looks the darkest

01:00:20.880 to them. And then they go that way. That's the marker for their mission, right? To go to the

01:00:27.220 darkest place. And of course, each knight goes off in a different direction, because the world looks

01:00:31.400 slightly different to each knight. So, objectively speaking, they're going to a different place,

01:00:37.620 but psychologically speaking, they're going to the same place, right? And that place, I suppose,

01:00:41.760 has been represented in mythology and literature as the heart of darkness. And if you're ever curious

01:00:47.020 about why people aren't enlightened, since it seems to be a possibility, you can always

01:00:52.720 think about the story of King Arthur and the knights of the Holy Grail, and think, well,

01:00:57.640 do you really want to enter the forest at the darkest place? And the answer to that is, of course,

01:01:01.740 no. Because the darkest place means precisely that place you least want to go. And it's the

01:01:07.640 same for everyone. So then I have this little nephew, although he's almost 15 now. He had this dream

01:01:17.560 when he was four years old. And the background to the dream is this. He was waking up in the middle

01:01:22.840 of the night for months, screaming. He had night terrors. And this went on for like six months.

01:01:30.600 And what was happening in his life was twofold. There was some instability in his family,

01:01:34.400 because his parents got divorced about a year after that. And also, he was at the transition

01:01:39.280 point from staying at home to going to kindergarten. So, you know, not only was he making the big move

01:01:44.000 out there into the terrible world, but the stable point from which he might like to have moved was

01:01:49.800 shaky. So, you know, he wasn't having that great a time. So anyways, he's screaming away at night.

01:01:55.960 And this is pretty unsettling, right? Because night terrors are no joke. And so he's upset about it.

01:01:59.940 His mom's upset about it. And so I'm watching him. And he's running around the house. He's only about

01:02:03.860 this high. Very verbal kid. And he's got this night hat on and this sword and this shield. And he's

01:02:09.260 running around the house being a knight. And at night, he takes his night hat and his shield and his

01:02:13.840 sword to bed. I think, oh, that's pretty cool. And you can see how that makes sense, right? And you can

01:02:18.680 see how it's an enacted reality. Because children enact or act out their reality before they can

01:02:24.460 explicitly understand it, just like we do. And so I'm staying there. One night he wakes up and has, you know,

01:02:32.740 one of these fits. And then the next morning he comes to breakfast. And I said, hey, did you have

01:02:36.960 any dreams last night? And he goes, yeah, I had a dream. I said, well, tell us the dream. And

01:02:42.180 there's six adults sitting around the table. And then he says, okay, I was out in this field and

01:02:49.060 I was surrounded by beaked dwarves. And they came up to my knees. And so these dwarves, they had no arms.

01:02:55.680 They just had shoulders and powerful legs. And they're all covered with hair. And they had a cross

01:03:00.300 shaved on the top of their head. And they're all covered with grease. And everywhere I went,

01:03:03.940 these dwarves would jump up with their beaks and bite me. And we're looking at them like,

01:03:09.920 that accounts for the night terrors, right? And so then he says, yeah, and there's more to it, too.

01:03:15.620 If you looked in the background behind all the dwarves, there was a dragon way in the background.

01:03:20.860 And it was puffing out fire and smoke. And every time it puffed out fire and smoke, a whole bunch

01:03:25.740 more of these dwarves would get made. And you think, that's pretty cool. That's a hydra story,

01:03:30.860 right? Remember the story of the hydra? Cut off one head, two more grows. It's one of Hercules'

01:03:37.280 trials. And that's an observation about the world, which is you solve one problem and like

01:03:42.240 two more problems pop up. And then you solve those. And anyways, he says, okay, well, I've

01:03:46.260 got this dragon back there. And so this is his problem, right? He's being eaten by beaked dwarves.

01:03:51.180 And that's not good. And there's not much sense fighting them off because there's just

01:03:54.800 more of them made every time this thing lurking in the background breathes. So I said, what

01:03:59.520 could you do about that? It's like his brain was working all these ideas around. And he

01:04:03.980 heard lots of Disney stories and had lots of books read to him and had abstracted out

01:04:08.400 a lot of information. But he hadn't quite got it right. And it was all seething around

01:04:12.300 in his head. And I just said, well, what could you do? Tap. And he went, oh, I know what I

01:04:17.240 could do. I could take my sword and I'd get my dad, which is a good notion, right?

01:04:22.180 Because he's small. And then I'd jump up on the dragon and I'd pop out both of its eyes

01:04:25.980 with the sword so it couldn't see me. And then I'd go down its throat to the box where

01:04:30.800 the fire came out. And then I'd carve a piece out of the box and I'd use that as a shield.

01:04:35.840 And I thought, great, you really got the story. And the story is something like this, right?

01:04:40.700 If you're being plagued by midget dwarves and you wipe them out and they keep multiplying,

01:04:46.240 well, you're obviously aiming at the wrong target, right? You should be going to their

01:04:49.500 source. So he went after the dragon. But not only after the dragon, he went right down the

01:04:54.120 throat of the dragon, which is, you know, a fairly brave thing to do. And then right to

01:04:58.040 the place where the fire, the transforming element was being produced. And he took a piece

01:05:02.960 of the device that made the transforming element and he used it as a shield. Okay. Well, that's

01:05:09.300 really cool. And the story's better than that, I think. And it's true even. So it's not

01:05:13.020 one of those fake, he was dreaming and then woke up sort of stories. This actually happened.

01:05:17.480 He didn't have any more nightmares. So when I checked with his mother repeatedly after

01:05:21.540 that, because I thought, well, this is too good to be true, right? He's got this terrible

01:05:25.020 night terror thing. He does one little mythological dream thing and bang, he's better. But that's

01:05:30.800 the case. He didn't have any more nightmares after that. And I think that's because he'd

01:05:34.500 almost already got it, right? He's running around like a knight. He knew, almost. Just had

01:05:41.120 to be made a little more explicit. And not even that explicit because it was still a

01:05:44.580 story. He didn't know you should go to the source of your anxieties, right, to the thing

01:05:50.400 that plagues you the most and you should explore that in detail until you find the information

01:05:55.500 that it contains that will protect you against it. He couldn't say that, but he could tell

01:05:59.660 the story. And he could act it out and that looked like it was good enough. So that's pretty

01:06:05.320 cool. So he basically, you know, he managed this. Essentially, he fought the dragon of

01:06:12.420 chaos and popped back up. As what? As he who can obtain victory over the dragon of chaos.

01:06:19.640 And that's a pretty good story because it says, well, if your frame of reference gets blown

01:06:26.100 away by something you don't understand, some new challenge, and you face the challenge, at

01:06:32.220 least courageously and humil- and humbly, which means, you know, you're not going to run away

01:06:36.320 and you still have something to learn, then you can extract something out of the battle

01:06:40.240 that will enable you to withstand it.

01:06:47.060 And you think, well, why should I believe that, right? And the answer to that would be, well,

01:06:51.900 don't knock it till you try it. And the second answer would be, that's exactly what we do in

01:06:56.400 clinical psychotherapy all the time. And there's endless amounts, I think, of empirical evidence

01:07:00.540 saying that you bring someone in, they've got an anxiety disorder, maybe they're even

01:07:04.620 depressed, whatever, they're running away. You say, you actually don't have to run away.

01:07:09.560 Here's what you have to do. You have to break the problem down into little pieces, digestible

01:07:13.800 pieces, and then you have to hit it one by one. And what you'll discover is not that you

01:07:18.660 habituate to the anxiety, because that's a silly theory. Instead, what you discover is that

01:07:23.920 you thought you were the person who had to run away, but it turns out you're not the person

01:07:27.880 who has to run away. You're the person that can stand there while you're anxious and learn

01:07:32.040 something. And what you most particularly learn is that you're the person who can stand there

01:07:37.080 when they're anxious and learn. And if you've learned that, you don't have to be anxious

01:07:42.460 anymore. Or even more importantly, if you're anxious, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean

01:07:46.880 your life's over. It just means that there you are on the threshold, right, between what

01:07:50.900 you know and what you don't know, and you have something to learn. And you can learn it.

01:07:54.640 And I think that's what the empirical evidence suggests, too, because you've got Edna Foa's

01:07:58.540 work with post-traumatic stress disorder victims, primarily women who were violently raped. And

01:08:03.520 Foa says, well, I know you don't like to think about the event, and it's no bloody wonder.

01:08:08.860 Look what it did to you and how terrible it was. But if you relive it over and over and

01:08:12.600 over again in your imagination in as much detail as possible, including all the motivational

01:08:17.740 and emotional details, which she measures psychophysiologically, you will get better faster and you'll stay better

01:08:23.360 longer. And her work's well documented. And then there's endless cases of exposure in

01:08:27.740 psychotherapy. You can certainly eliminate simple phobias within an hour. And even complex

01:08:33.840 phobias like agoraphobia, which is more like fear of everything, is not an intractable disorder.

01:08:40.800 Imagine that throughout your whole life, you never turned away from a mistake. Not even once.

01:08:47.360 Never. So that whenever you made a mistake that you could rectify, you did rectify it.

01:08:52.740 Then the question would be, well, what exactly would you be like? Would you be suffering from

01:08:57.380 all your existential trouble? Would you be vulnerable to anxiety? What would you be like? And then

01:09:02.480 I think, well, I know a couple of stories like that. And the one that I've told you is the

01:09:06.320 story of Solzhenitsyn. Because Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist, was sitting in the concentration

01:09:12.060 camps in the Gulag Archipelago, thinking, starving, this isn't so good. How in the world did I

01:09:19.900 get here? And the simple story is, well, Stalin put you there and he was bad, right? End of

01:09:24.640 story. It's not your problem, Stalin's problem. But Solzhenitsyn said, well, that doesn't

01:09:31.180 really leave me anything to do, right? To construe myself as a simple victim of fate. And I do

01:09:35.900 have a lot of time on my hands since I'm not really doing anything that requires a tremendous

01:09:41.300 amount of intellectual effort. Let's try a game. Let's do this. Let's pretend that the

01:09:46.860 reason that things happen to me that I don't like, even terrible things, say, or that I

01:09:51.660 can't tolerate is not because I'm a victim of fate, evil, cruel fate, but because there's

01:09:58.260 something I didn't do. And so Solzhenitsyn said, well, I'm going to go back over my whole

01:10:03.300 life, right? Step by step, detail by detail. And I'm going to try to remember every time I let

01:10:10.000 something go. Or I didn't do something I was supposed to. Not because of some adherence

01:10:14.800 to some, you know, arbitrary moral code, because we don't believe in those anyways, right?

01:10:19.320 But just because I noted that, I can tell when I owe a debt to existence. So then you look

01:10:26.260 at Solzhenitsyn and he says, okay, well, so I spent 15 years trying to untie all the knots

01:10:30.700 that I tied up in my brain. And the consequence was, of that was, first, I started to notice

01:10:36.340 there were some people out there I really admired, man. They were so tough, it was unbelievable.

01:10:40.120 You put them in the worst circumstances and they didn't bend an inch. They were tough.

01:10:44.080 And even the nastiest prison guards and administrators, well, they could kill them, that's for sure,

01:10:48.660 but they couldn't bend them and they couldn't break them. And I really learned something from

01:10:51.980 that, right? And it's a good story because he's in the worst possible circumstance, so there's

01:10:56.300 kind of no bottom past that. You don't get much worse than the Gulag prison camp, right?

01:11:00.640 That's, it's cold, you don't get anything to eat, and you're being worked to death,

01:11:04.100 right? For something pointless and to serve Stalin. That's, that's the bottom. And he

01:11:09.840 said, even under those circumstances, there are still people who could, who could thrive,

01:11:14.380 who could manifest admirable qualities. He said, once I figured out I was wrong, I could

01:11:19.080 actually find them and learn from them. Then he wrote this book, which you know about,

01:11:23.000 the Gulag Archipelago, which was released in the West and then circulated all through the

01:11:27.400 Soviet Union and was undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to the demise of the

01:11:34.860 Soviet Union. And so then you think, well, that's pretty interesting, isn't it? You got this

01:11:38.220 one wacko Zek, right? Russian prisoner, starving to death, tattooed. He says, maybe I had something

01:11:46.680 to do with this, but he didn't mean it in some casual sort of, maybe I had something to do

01:11:50.360 with this way. He meant, geez, this is really awful. It doesn't get much worse. Maybe it's my

01:11:55.400 fault. You know, I don't know how it could be, but after all, I'm the one that's suffering,

01:11:59.740 so maybe it was me. Maybe I could fix it. What would happen if I did? And so his conclusion

01:12:04.820 was at the end, and it's not a conclusion that he reached alone, was one person who stops

01:12:10.600 lying can bring down a tyranny. And you think that's a metaphorical statement, right? Because

01:12:15.440 you're the victim of your own tyrannies, just as you are the victim of someone else's tyrannies.

01:12:19.880 And maybe if you stopped lying, construed in this manner of sin of omission, right? Don't

01:12:26.140 avoid anomalies anymore, but confront them head on. Maybe if you quit lying, well, then

01:12:32.080 you wouldn't be victim of tyranny. Maybe no one else would be either.

01:12:35.580 The GRE, say, the bad exam. That's a bad thing. But it's not the worst thing. The worst thing

01:12:47.980 is the sort of thing that knocks existentialists for a loop, right? The worst thing is more

01:12:51.960 like Ivan Karamazov's suffering of innocent children, right? The fact that children are

01:12:58.060 tortured. Or the worst thing is the fact that perfectly good people get sick and die, and

01:13:03.060 sometimes painfully. Or the worst thing is there are tyrants all over the world, and

01:13:06.820 they torture people for no cause, or maybe even just because they like torturing people.

01:13:11.400 And that's an anomaly of a different order, right? It's not just that you're going from

01:13:15.420 point A to B and something you don't like happens. It's more like there are some aspects of existence

01:13:20.340 that look so terrible in and of themselves, associated with our vulnerability, that just apprehending

01:13:26.260 them might be enough to knock the bottom out of your faith in any frame of reference.

01:13:32.020 And that's a kind of Nietzschean theme. Nietzsche says, look, when you're going from point

01:13:36.520 A to B, and something bad happens, something you don't expect, you don't get to where you

01:13:40.580 wanted to go. That's bad. But what's even worse is, you can't have any faith in the

01:13:45.260 frame of reference that you were using, because it's been invalidated. But what's even worse

01:13:49.640 is, you plow your way through two or three frames of reference, and then you start to develop

01:13:54.720 some skepticism about frames of reference in general, right? So, I was a socialist, say,

01:14:00.400 and then I was a Catholic, and, you know, then I developed some new age philosophy, and

01:14:05.320 none of those really worked. And what that made me think was, well, you can't trust socialism,

01:14:10.700 you can't trust Christianity, and those new age people are certainly out to lunch. Maybe

01:14:15.420 you can't trust any frames of reference. And that's a really devastating discovery. And Nietzsche

01:14:21.360 associated that with the death of God, right? It's like, no frames of reference work. And

01:14:26.240 then you have the problem that, well, without a frame of reference, life is chaos, and chaos

01:14:30.440 is intolerable, and therefore, logically, life is intolerable. And I tried to make a case for

01:14:36.760 you then, kind of a side case, which was, people protect their ideologies, because they

01:14:41.420 don't want to lose their frames of reference. They don't want to fall into chaos. But then,

01:14:47.640 there's this additional problem, which is that you can develop a kind of deep cynicism

01:14:52.560 about life in a secondary manner, which is like constant loss of faith. Maybe what you

01:15:00.340 conclude under those conditions, like the aggressive child concludes, is that fundamentally, I'm not

01:15:07.800 to be trusted, you're not to be trusted, society's not to be trusted, and maybe the structure of

01:15:13.640 the world as a whole isn't to be trusted, and therefore, logically, you're more or less

01:15:21.280 obligated to work against it. And so then you have a nice sub-story for the propagation

01:15:28.700 of evil, which is, well, we like to have our ideological frames of reference retained, and

01:15:34.480 that gives us ample reason to squash anyone that's different. But then there's this additional

01:15:38.820 reason, which is, when you get right down to it, things are pretty bloody awful, and maybe

01:15:43.900 the sensible thing to do is to just work for the annihilation of things. And I think we've

01:15:48.620 had endless examples of people who did precisely that in the 20th century, and almost got away

01:15:53.080 with it, in case you're tempted not to take this sufficiently seriously, right? We know that

01:16:00.080 Stalin, in all likelihood, who I think you could make a case for being, if not the most evil

01:16:06.880 man that ever lived, certainly the most evil man that lived this century. And that's really

01:16:10.740 a high honor, right? Because he was up against some really top contenders. We know, as a consequence

01:16:16.200 of recently released KGB documents, that he was probably gearing up to start the Third World

01:16:21.460 War, not one of these little half-rate, you know, little local Third World Wars. We're

01:16:26.020 talking about the whole H-bomb exchange thing designed to eradicate, you know, the US for sure,

01:16:32.100 but also the Soviet Union, and, well, mere territoriality isn't enough to account for that. But then maybe

01:16:38.260 you can see Stalin's point, right? Like Tolstoy can see it, you know, if life is really so awful

01:16:43.420 at bottom, which there are perspectives from which that certainly seems to be the case, then

01:16:48.640 why bother having it around at all? Well, you know, that's a pretty dismal perspective.

01:16:59.580 So that's a real anomaly, right? That's not one of these little second-rate, you'll get

01:17:06.620 over it in a month or two anomalies. This is the sort of anomaly that's laid out in Genesis,

01:17:10.360 where Adam and Eve discover that they're mortal, vulnerable, they're going to die. That really

01:17:15.580 takes the shine off existence, out of paradise they go. They wander around the planet for the

01:17:20.600 rest of history, you know, working themselves to death and being miserable and killing each

01:17:24.880 other. And that's basically the story that's laid out in the Old Testament. And viewed from

01:17:28.640 that perspective, well, it's not precisely an empirical description of the Big Bang, say,

01:17:34.140 but it's not a bad description of the nature of human existence. And it's pretty dismal.

01:17:43.700 There's an essential symbolic relationship between the ingestion of food and its transformative

01:17:49.280 capacities and the ingestion of ideas and their transformative capacity. And what happens

01:17:56.440 when Adam and Eve eat this fruit, which they're not supposed to eat, is that they learn that

01:18:00.200 they're going to die. And that screws up paradise. And in case you just think I'm making this

01:18:07.180 up, which would be, you know, kind of annoying, then you want to look at this picture, which

01:18:12.680 is from the 14th century. And it's really a remarkable picture. So what you've got in the

01:18:17.440 middle here is the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And you've got Eve

01:18:22.620 over here. And you've got the church here. Now what you see happening, you've got to look

01:18:27.960 really carefully at this tree. Because the first thing you see is it's got the snake wrapped

01:18:31.660 around it, this agent of transformation, right, who's associated with Satan. And then up in

01:18:37.620 the branches you have apples and you have skulls. And then if you look at Eve here, she's got

01:18:45.460 grapes here and a skull in her hand. And what this artist is trying to indicate is that there's

01:18:52.120 this tight relationship between Eve tempting Adam towards higher knowledge and delivering

01:18:58.700 him death. So that's a pretty dismal story. And all the people over here on the left side,

01:19:05.120 all these unhappy people, are the people who are living in chaos and misery as a consequence

01:19:10.340 of having their vulnerability revealed to them. And that's the negative side of the story. But then

01:19:16.860 there's the positive side of the story over here. And it's just as complicated. And that's partly

01:19:21.380 why it's expressed in imagistic form. So you've got the church here, symbolized at least in part as

01:19:27.640 Mary. And she's handing out something too. And if you look at those, they're little round circles

01:19:33.240 with crosses on them. And what those are, are hosts. Hosts. They're the symbols of transformation,

01:19:41.420 particularly in Catholicism. Now that's a very complicated idea. And this is the idea.

01:19:45.700 It's something like this. At Christ's last supper, before he was crucified, he told his disciples

01:19:52.400 that they were going to have to ingest him. Right? So they, he gave them wine and bread. And the wine

01:19:58.500 was blood and the bread was flesh. And what's the idea? What does it mean to incorporate someone?

01:20:05.180 It means to embody them. That's what it means. And this, this imagistic, ritualistic process is the

01:20:10.920 notion that in order to attain redemption, it's necessary to embody the hero. And that's kind of

01:20:18.180 what this picture is trying to portray. It says, okay, well, you've got this death apple over on the

01:20:23.620 left-hand side. And that's not so good. And you need an antidote to it. And the antidote is whatever

01:20:28.200 this represents. Whatever this represents. And you see up in the tree here, there's all these hosts

01:20:33.620 hanging. Now the hosts are representative of Christ. And for complicated reasons. They're made out of

01:20:38.680 wheat, say. And partly the reason they're made out of wheat is because if you look at hero gods prior to

01:20:44.880 Christianity, you see that wheat was often conceptualized as a dying and redeemed god. Right?

01:20:51.660 Because it would die in the winter and then be reborn in the spring, just like all plants are. And the

01:20:57.120 notion of the dying and redeeming, the dying and resurrecting hero was kind of, what would you say, layered

01:21:04.000 on top of that older agrarian idea and all mixed together and sort of popped out in this idea of the host.

01:21:10.240 And so the idea here is that whatever ails human beings, which is their knowledge of vulnerability and death,

01:21:17.660 can be rectified by their incorporation of whatever this symbol represents.

01:21:24.500 And so then you might ask, what exactly does that symbol represent? And of course there's standard

01:21:29.440 Christian answers to that. And the extended Christian answers are, well, it represents your

01:21:34.680 faith in Christ, say. But that's not a very useful answer, all things considered. So let's look at it

01:21:41.460 in a little bit more complicated way. It's not a useful answer, I think, because it's too sectarian,

01:21:48.060 right? It excludes many, many people, this notion. And there's a whole formalism that you have to buy

01:21:54.020 into to even get access to what that story means. And it's an unfortunate formalism because, first of

01:22:00.320 all, I think it's more appropriate to an earlier time and place. And second of all, because I think

01:22:05.360 we're actually sophisticated enough now, intellectually, psychologically, to actually

01:22:11.260 start to understand what some of these stories mean. And since we have reasonably well-developed

01:22:15.440 brains, and we might as well use them, it would be better if they were on our side, so to speak,

01:22:20.460 than constantly conspiring to undermine our faith.

01:22:23.080 Let's look at what a person is like. And a person is sort of just as complicated as an object,

01:22:35.420 which is not that surprising because there's an aspect of us that is object-like, right?

01:22:40.300 Our objective being. And we know people are unbelievably complicated. They have nervous systems

01:22:48.420 that have more connections in them than there are subatomic particles in the universe, just for

01:22:52.620 starters. And so that means that when you're looking at another person, you're looking at

01:22:57.220 something that's more complicated than anything else that exists anywhere, including the sum

01:23:02.040 total of everything that exists everywhere, except other people. More complex than everything.

01:23:08.280 And then you have to understand, too, that just because you don't think of yourself that

01:23:11.800 way doesn't mean you're not that way. It just means that your conscious mind, your rational mind,

01:23:17.980 say, isn't sophisticated enough to actually completely model who or what you are. And that's

01:23:25.660 obvious because that's why we study ourselves. We don't know who we are. We're trying to figure

01:23:29.400 it out. We've been trying to figure it out ever since we woke up some thousands of years

01:23:34.340 ago. We don't know when. And you think, well, if you look at people, well, you know, there's

01:23:39.320 the kind of obvious level you see people at, the self level, which is the privileged level

01:23:44.380 of analysis for the West. But you're a member of a family. And if I said, well, are you more

01:23:49.420 yourself or your family? You might say, well, most of the time I think I'm more myself, but

01:23:54.580 I might be willing to sacrifice my life for my child. In which case I would say, well, then

01:23:59.940 you're just as much your child as you are you. Or maybe you're even more your child.

01:24:03.680 And what about your family? Well, that's a tough question too. And then what about your

01:24:08.440 cultural group? Well, you say, no, it's me, not my cultural group. But then I'd say, well,

01:24:13.380 what if there's a war? Is it you or your cultural group? And then you'll say, well, it's my cultural

01:24:18.080 group. And then you see as well, well, at this level of analysis, are you your biological group?

01:24:26.440 Is that what you identify with? The biosphere, say? You say, well, no, not generally, but there's

01:24:31.500 a lot of environmentalists out there. And they say, well, what we should primarily be

01:24:36.740 concerned with is the global health of the planet. Because our survival depends on that.

01:24:41.600 We're as much that as we are the self. And you might not agree with that. And I suspect

01:24:45.780 that most of the time there's screwy reasons for proposing such a thing. But on the other

01:24:50.740 hand, a case can be made. I mean, we know that you can undermine your ecosystems. It happened

01:24:56.560 in Spain. They let, 400 years ago, they let sheep eat everything. And so Spain turned into

01:25:01.340 a desert. Doesn't seem like a particularly wise move. And then you think, well, below the

01:25:06.980 phenomenological level, there's all these sub-elements of you, your physiological structure, your cellular

01:25:12.220 structure, your atomic structure, amenable to infinite investigation, absolutely complex.

01:25:19.940 You'll never exhaust it if you investigate it. And it's perfectly reasonable to presuppose

01:25:24.100 that you're all these things. How does it change the world if you stop thinking about

01:25:28.740 it as made of objects, but instead made of your own experience? And how does it change

01:25:34.540 the world if you think you have an ethical relationship to that experience that's a primary

01:25:39.260 fact, not some secondary derivative? So primary a fact that you can't even look at the world

01:25:44.700 except through an ethical lens, primary fact. What is, how does that change the way you conceptualize

01:25:50.500 yourself in relationship to the world? I don't know.

01:26:14.700 You really can't tell the meaning of someone's life till the very end. It's for the same reason,

01:26:31.820 right? Is that how all the pieces fit together in the story or in the life is not necessarily

01:26:38.140 determined until the final moment. And I think that's part of the reason too why among Catholics,

01:26:43.220 for example, and Christians in general, there's an idea that salvation can always be attained,

01:26:48.980 right? Right up to the last moment, no matter what your life was like. And you think, well,

01:26:52.200 that's a pretty cheap trick, you know, because you can run around doing terrible things your whole

01:26:56.180 life, but as long as you get it together the last second, then you're scot-free. But if you think

01:27:00.240 about it in terms of a story, then you can understand how that could conceivably be the case.

01:27:06.020 And it's for this reason, of course, that this lecture in particular makes me nervous more than any of

01:27:10.980 the other ones I do, because I've been telling you a story that's basically 40 hours long, right,

01:27:15.620 in its spoken form, and then who knows how long in its written form. And it's complicated to pull it

01:27:23.540 together properly. And that's partly because as far as I've been concerned, we've been talking about

01:27:29.060 issues in psychology that are more difficult than any other. First of all, conceptually, even from a

01:27:34.180 neuropsychological perspective, because I've been offering you a model of the way the brain processes the

01:27:39.380 environment that I think is really novel, and I think it reflects the current state of neuroscience.

01:27:46.420 But more than that, there's the problem that we've been dealing with issues all the way along,

01:27:50.260 of life and death, and of war and destruction, and of the possibility for clear-headed optimism,

01:27:56.820 right, a possibility which, as we've discussed, more or less escaped Tolstoy, say, for most of his

01:28:03.380 life, right, because when Tolstoy woke up from his delusions, he looked at the world and he said,

01:28:08.580 well, clearly, it's such a terrible place that as if you're not looking at it through the veils of

01:28:15.540 illusion, there's no way that you can do anything but stand in opposition to it once you understand

01:28:21.140 its basic structure, right, suffering, and innocent suffering, and complete vulnerability,

01:28:26.900 and the whole existential mess that makes up life. Now, it turns out that Tolstoy overcame his

01:28:36.740 rationally-induced cynicism in a kind of mystical way. He had a dream that he was suspended from

01:28:45.060 some transcendent space by a belt around the middle of his waist which hung him over a

01:28:50.100 pit of chaos, and in that image he found comfort, and fair enough, it's a powerful image, but it's not

01:28:56.500 well delineated, right, and it worked well for Tolstoy, and you can see that the image has power,

01:29:02.020 but you can't grab it with your rational mind, you can't take it into pieces and analyze it as an

01:29:07.780 argument, and that's what we do if we're intellectuals, right, we try to understand the

01:29:13.540 detailed structure of something, and I think the detailed structure of what Tolstoy apprehended as

01:29:20.180 optimistic is actually comprehensible, and we've been working towards that and circling around it

01:29:27.620 the entire course of this lecture series, but I found with this material that with each circling

01:29:35.220 around the target, it gets clearer and clearer. It's a funny thing, it's like you're looking at

01:29:39.860 something that's too complicated to see all at once, so you have to look at it from multiple different

01:29:45.460 perspectives, and again and again, and each time you look at it, it becomes clearer and clearer,

01:29:49.780 and that's still the case for me when I go through this material, every time I go through it, I think,

01:29:53.620 oh yeah, that piece fits there, and that piece fits there, and that's how that makes sense, and oh,

01:29:58.820 that's a lot more remarkable than I thought it was to begin with, and so on, and it seems fundamentally

01:30:02.980 inexhaustible, and of course that's what you'd expect from deep, deep stories, right, stories that have

01:30:07.940 been around for thousands and thousands of years, wouldn't have been around for thousands and thousands of

01:30:12.340 years unless they were in some sense inexhaustible, and we've talked about some of the processes that

01:30:17.860 might contribute to that inexhaustibility. So at the beginning of the lecture series, I told you

01:30:25.140 to consider the assumption that there was more than one way of looking at the world, right, there was the

01:30:30.660 standard materialist sort of scientific viewpoint, which was that the world was made up of objects

01:30:36.260 independently existent, us among them, the objects have no intrinsic value, one way or another

01:30:42.820 and the issue of meaning per se wasn't included in that account, and then I said, well, wait,

01:30:49.860 there's another way of looking at the world that we spent just as much time developing

01:30:53.620 that we utilize even more, and that's the narrative, that's the narrative way of looking at the world,

01:30:59.540 to consider the nature of experience rather than the nature of objects as real, to consider your

01:31:06.260 experience as real, even though it includes things that can't be easily and tangibly identified,

01:31:11.380 things like emotions, which of course you find compelling sometimes even beyond your will,

01:31:16.820 things like motivational states, fantasies, ideals, all the things that compel your behavior

01:31:23.780 and give you some sense that there's a direction to life, and people who study emotion and perception

01:31:29.780 have come to understand that the act of transforming the world into something simply made out of

01:31:35.940 objects is incredibly difficult. It's so difficult that we haven't been able to design machines that

01:31:40.420 can do it at all. It turns out also that when we look at the world, we're not just looking at it with

01:31:45.220 our visual systems, but we're looking at it with our motor output systems and our emotions, so that

01:31:50.020 when you look at something like a chair, which just stands there for you like an object, it turns out

01:31:55.780 that the mechanical systems, the motor systems that you would use to use the chair to sit on it are

01:32:02.500 activated during the act of perception. It also turns out sometimes that when you look at something,

01:32:06.980 especially if it's something you don't understand and that it scares you, you actually react to it,

01:32:14.500 conceptualize it with your body and with your emotions before you have any idea what it is from

01:32:19.380 the perspective of an object. When you look at the world and when you think about the world,

01:32:27.940 you have to do it from a motivation, a motivated perspective and an emotionally ridden perspective.

01:32:33.700 You can't even see the world without being gripped by your motivation and emotional states. And so the

01:32:39.060 idea that rationality or perception is somehow separate from or superordinate to

01:32:45.940 perception and emotion is just wrong. We understand now that you can't even think without being

01:32:53.860 motivated. You can't see the world without being motivated. And that means you always look at the

01:32:57.860 world through a kind of lens. And the lens is a narrowing lens. And it has to be, because the world

01:33:02.820 is so complicated, you can't see it all at once. You're only seeing tiny slices of it in time and tiny

01:33:08.340 slices of it in space. And even then you have to narrow it to only those things that are relevant to

01:33:13.940 you at that moment. And we don't know exactly how you do that. We know that it takes years and

01:33:19.060 years of perceptual work in infancy, say, so that you manage to build up an object conception of the

01:33:26.500 world. That's probably all you're doing in the first two or three years of life. And you're doing

01:33:31.140 it constantly. And it's just as complicated as learning language, say, or even more complicated.

01:33:36.020 Most of it's invisible. And we don't know how children do that. And by the time they can talk,

01:33:40.660 they've already done it, so they can't even tell us what they're doing. It takes a long time to build

01:33:45.780 up an object world. And when you look at the world, when you go from point A to point B,

01:33:50.740 even when you're doing something as simple as looking for food in the kitchen, you ignore

01:33:55.860 everything about the world that isn't relevant to making yourself a peanut butter sandwich.

01:34:00.500 And you focus in on those few things that are the refrigerator, the food, the knives,

01:34:04.980 the cutlery, and so on. And everything else is screened out. And you can't help but look at the

01:34:10.500 world through that kind of lens. And the lenses change, and you can be in different motivational

01:34:16.420 states, and they can change because of internal transformations. You're not hungry, you're thirsty,

01:34:20.900 or you're not thirsty, you're interested in someone. Or somebody's telling you a story,

01:34:24.980 and then you adopt their motivational framework, and you can see the world through their eyes.

01:34:29.540 And now we know the neural machinery for that, and we already talked about that.

01:34:33.460 So we can toss back and forth these motivational frames of reference, and that gives us insight

01:34:38.580 into someone else's world. You can look at the world endless numbers of ways. And what you're

01:34:44.100 trying to do is, out of its infinite richness, so to speak, is to pull out parts of it that are useful

01:34:51.460 for you while you're moving from point A to point B. And this can be a chair if you want to sit down,

01:34:56.340 but if you want to take the light bulb out of the ceiling, then it's a stool or a table. And

01:35:00.740 whether or not it's a chair or a stool or a table depends just as much on what you're doing as it

01:35:07.140 does on what it is. And I think that's part of the reason why human beings can be so infinitely

01:35:12.820 creative, right? For us, the world isn't fixed. We never know what it's going to bring forth. So,

01:35:17.540 a hundred years ago, if someone would have said, well, you could build a machine on a wafer,

01:35:23.940 a centimeter square, out of sand, and if you have enough of those machines, then everyone in the

01:35:30.660 world can be connected, and everyone in the world can have an infinite library of verbal material,

01:35:35.380 right? That's impossible, but it's not impossible. It turns out that silica has those properties,

01:35:42.340 and we can build unbelievably powerful machines out of nothing. And so then that kind of makes you think

01:35:48.900 about just what this nothing that we're building things out of is, right? Because it seems to be

01:35:53.700 able to reveal a constant array of properties, properties that are essentially unlimited. And

01:36:00.900 its capacity to reveal those properties seems to depend as much on our ability to interact with it,

01:36:06.420 whatever that is, as it does on whatever the stuff is.

01:36:11.060 And we know, even from a strict object perception of the world, that the stuff that things are made

01:36:19.700 of is a lot more complicated than we had originally presumed even as materialists, because materialists,

01:36:26.020 realists, their philosophy only holds down to about the subatomic level of analysis, a deterministic

01:36:34.180 worldview. Below the subatomic level of analysis, there's nothing deterministic at all, and the stuff

01:36:39.460 that things are made of is so mysterious that we can't even, we can't grasp it, we can't comprehend

01:36:43.860 it. So it turns out that rather than the story world being dependent on the object world, it might

01:36:51.700 be the other way around. The object world is dependent on the story world, and that implies at least to

01:36:56.420 some degree that the story world is actually more real, whatever that means. And then I told you that,

01:37:02.820 well, the real problem of life isn't so much what do you do when you're around things that you

01:37:08.500 understand. The real problem of life is, what do you do when you encounter something you can't

01:37:14.660 conceptualize? And I think a good recent example of that was the bombing of the World Trade Towers,

01:37:19.860 which people were compelled to watch over and over and over and over. And if you ask someone,

01:37:25.780 well, what is it that you're watching? They would say, well, I'm watching the World Trade Towers fall

01:37:30.660 down. But then you might say, well, why are you watching it over and over? And they would say something

01:37:34.660 like, well, I can't believe it. I can't believe it's happening. And what does that mean? It means

01:37:40.180 something like, whatever it is that's happening here, whatever's being blown apart, exceeds my

01:37:46.580 ability to model. And as a consequence, I have to expose myself to it again and again and again

01:37:50.980 and again to try to understand what's falling. What's falling exactly? Is it just the towers? Is it

01:37:57.540 20,000 people? Is it the financial system of the US? Is it the stability of the Western world? Is it the

01:38:02.900 beginning of World War III or as the former CIA director just mentioned in the US, the beginning

01:38:08.900 of World War IV? What is it exactly that you're looking at when something happens that you don't

01:38:13.380 understand? And then you say, well, how do you react to that? And it turns out that you react mostly

01:38:24.020 with your body, not with your mind, not with your perceptual systems, not with your thoughts,

01:38:28.100 but with your emotions and your body. And that means you sweat and you panic and you feel depressed

01:38:33.940 and you feel hurt and you feel ashamed and you're prepared for a catastrophe, which is stress. And all

01:38:40.020 that's basically non-cognitive. And what that kind of means is that when you encounter something you

01:38:45.060 don't understand, the first manner in which you conceive of it is embodied, emotional, physical,

01:38:52.500 way before you develop up an object representation or cognitive representation, you may not ever get

01:38:57.700 it. Like an event like that, or a worse event, can throw someone into a tailspin that's so extreme

01:39:04.020 that they never get out of it. So you see, for example, sometimes, and this is more true among

01:39:08.260 elderly people, if their spouse dies, the probability that they'll die in the next year, say from a heart

01:39:13.380 attack or something like that, increases substantially. Why is that? It's because their conceptual frame was so

01:39:22.340 dependent on the existence of their spouse, say someone they've lived with for 25 years, that the

01:39:28.500 anxiety and uncertainty caused by their anomalous disappearance, their death, is so extreme that it

01:39:35.540 sends their body into a physiological state that's basically unbearable and that does them in. And when

01:39:40.580 you start to understand what having your preconceptions rattled really means, then you also start to

01:39:46.740 understand why people are so motivated to protect their ideological territory, right? Because ideological

01:39:54.020 territory, that's how you see the world, that's your story. And you can't have your

01:39:59.220 fundaments rattled all the time because it throws everything into chaos and that puts you in this

01:40:04.260 terrible, panicky, cortisol-ridden, stressful state that's really hard on you physically. So we know,

01:40:10.980 for example, that if you're in a state where you're chronically exposed to threat or punishment,

01:40:15.700 which is the case in depression, say, you produce a lot of cortisol, which is a stress hormone and

01:40:20.820 cortisol is toxic. So the more of it you produce, the more you kill off your hippocampal cells and

01:40:25.940 you really need them because they're key to memory. You do in your immunological system, there's all

01:40:31.780 sorts of negative side effects of cortisol poisoning, increased incidence of cardiovascular disease,

01:40:36.660 heightened rate of cancer, plus it's just no fun, right? It's the worst thing that can possibly happen

01:40:41.540 to you, essentially. If something unknown happens to you and blows your frame of reference, right,

01:40:46.580 knocks you for a loop, sends you to the underworld, however you want to construe it,

01:40:50.980 that's really going to upset your bandwagon and throw you into a state that you do virtually anything

01:40:56.900 to avoid. But by the same token, there is a possibility that inside that chaotic mess,

01:41:02.740 there's something you really need. And what's the logic there? Well, the logic is something like this.

01:41:08.580 When you look at the world, you only see a fragment of it. And that's good because it's

01:41:12.420 pretty overwhelming and a fragment's generally more than enough. But all the information that

01:41:17.460 you've ever gathered in your entire life to build yourself out of and to make your life stable has

01:41:23.220 come as a consequence of your ability to explore what you don't understand. And that's an unlimited

01:41:29.620 capacity, right? No matter how much you explore and how much information you gather, there's always

01:41:34.740 the possibility that there's way more information out there. And that means if you have a problem

01:41:39.300 and you see that it's a problem, even though that's frightening, it's also a gateway into a domain

01:41:45.300 of possibility. And the possibility is this richly informative background that could, in principle,

01:41:51.220 provide you with any answer you need. And then you can think one more thing. The old gods,

01:41:57.620 the gods, Mars, say, the god of war, Venus, the god of love, they're all internalized for us, right?

01:42:05.940 We know that anger is a psychological state and that love is a psychological state. But if we look at

01:42:11.780 our great religious traditions, Christianity, say, or Buddhism, just to take two as an example,

01:42:18.500 we still have this notion that what these figures represent is something external.

01:42:23.860 Well, you might say, how primitive, right? Just as primitive as the idea that the god of war is

01:42:31.780 something external is the idea that this sort of figure is supposed to be something external.

01:42:36.420 It's supposed to be something embodied, right? It's a story about the nature of individual moral

01:42:42.980 responsibility. So the idea is something like this. Well, reality itself, the existence of things,

01:42:51.780 seems to depend on the existence of a finite observer so that we can see things from a perspective.

01:42:58.020 If you don't see things from a perspective, everything is the same. There's nothing delineated.

01:43:03.460 But if there's going to be delineated things, small things, insufficient things, and they're going

01:43:08.100 to be aware, they're going to be vulnerable as a part of their limitation. And so you say, well,

01:43:14.180 limitation is a precondition for being, and that means suffering is part and parcel of being.

01:43:25.300 Dostoevsky said clearly, look, I'll give you all the cake you want. You've got a big house,

01:43:30.820 you've got nothing to do but watch TV, right? And propagate the species. Are you happy? And Dostoevsky

01:43:37.380 Dostoevsky says, well, no. Why? Well, because human beings are really fundamentally ungrateful and

01:43:43.220 insane. So if you give them some little comfortable niche to occupy themselves with, so they don't

01:43:48.020 have anything to worry about, the first thing they're going to do, just like Adam and Eve,

01:43:51.380 basically, or just like Gautama Buddha, they're going to run around looking for the apple, looking

01:43:56.980 for the snake, looking for the trouble to smash the frame into bits, no matter how comfortable it is,

01:44:02.500 just so they can get access to a little chaos and have some fun. And so then you think, well,

01:44:07.140 maybe it's more like the purpose of life isn't to avoid chaos, because we like chaos. It's entertaining,

01:44:12.340 right? It keeps us alert and awake, and it gives us something to do that really has no end. And so

01:44:17.380 maybe the answer is something more like, well, forget the frame of reference. Forget the chaos,

01:44:22.740 but hit the balance, right? Between the two, right? So that you've got one foot where it's reasonably

01:44:28.340 comfortable, and you've got one foot out there where it's kind of exciting and dangerous,

01:44:31.860 and that's perfect. And then you think, the state you want to attain that makes you resistant to

01:44:37.220 even the greatest anomalies, anomalies of death, say, or vulnerability or mortality,

01:44:42.020 is exactly that position, right? Balanced right between the forces of chaos and the forces of

01:44:48.500 order, or between yin and yang. And how do you know you're there? Because that's what it really

01:44:54.580 boils down to. How do you know that you're there? And then you think, okay, it's pretty simple.

01:44:58.660 You watch with your eyes open, just like Solzhenitsyn watched. You think, I don't know

01:45:05.940 everything, so let's see what I do know. No preconceptions. I'm not going to shield myself

01:45:11.460 from the truth with some second-rate frame of reference. We don't believe in those anyways,

01:45:16.020 because they're always fragmentable. I'm just going to watch. So when am I not miserable? And then you

01:45:21.940 think, well, I'm not miserable when I'm interested in things, something. I get interested in something.

01:45:26.020 I don't exactly know why I get interested in it. It catches me.

01:45:34.340 What's the phenomenology of being caught? I'm not self-conscious when I'm engaged in something.

01:45:40.420 I'm more like a child, which is why children have intimations of immortality. I'm engaged in this

01:45:46.820 process. I don't think about myself, so I'm not self-conscious. I lose my sense of temporality,

01:45:52.820 because it seems like I can do whatever it is that I'm doing, thing that I enjoy for hours,

01:45:57.620 and the time flies by. And I'm not even really aware of the surrounding world. And none of my

01:46:02.100 existential concerns are paramount at that time. Every need is suppressed by my engagement in the

01:46:08.980 activity. And then you say to yourself, well, yeah, fine. That only happens like, you know,

01:46:13.300 10 minutes every three days or something when I'm being particularly miserable. But you might say,

01:46:17.860 well, the fact that it happens at all is probably worth paying attention to. I mean, if you believe

01:46:22.100 that your experience is real, like real, the fact that you can get into a state like that at all is

01:46:27.540 worth paying attention to. And so then you might say, well, that's where your sense of ethics really

01:46:32.020 starts to arise, is what makes you interested? Well, it might be just as cracked and peculiar as

01:46:38.420 something you could possibly imagine, right? Your parents are against it. Your friends are against it.

01:46:42.980 Even you're against it when you're thinking clearly. But there's still this reality that

01:46:48.020 something compels you. And then you think, well, can you trust it? And I think, well,

01:46:53.140 that's a tough question. Because I read a long time, for a long time, I read accounts of serial

01:46:58.740 killers. Because I was really interested in what motivated them, right? And they're an interesting

01:47:04.020 breed in many ways, which is why there's such a popular fascination with them. And so then you think

01:47:08.900 about a story like that, and you think, geez, maybe you can't trust your interest, right?

01:47:13.860 Maybe it'll take you somewhere you don't want to go, like seriously, where you don't want to go.

01:47:17.780 How do you know that if you really let yourself be who you could be, that you'd end up somewhere good?

01:47:23.940 And so then you come to the second part of the story, which is something like this.

01:47:28.420 Let's say that you're a very, very, very finely tuned biological machine, right?

01:47:33.940 Look into a computer. And then you say, okay, you take a computer and you feed it

01:47:40.820 false information. What do you get out? False information, right? Well, you've stuck with this

01:47:47.940 computer. It's very complicated. You kind of reside in it in some manner you don't understand. And yet,

01:47:55.140 you're prone, upon occasions, either to deny it information altogether when you walk away from

01:48:01.140 something you know you shouldn't walk away from, or to feed it bad information. And so then what if

01:48:05.940 it, what if this was the case? What if it was the case that the systems that orient you with regards

01:48:10.980 to your interest can become pathologized by any relationship you have with yourself that's predicated

01:48:16.980 on bad faith? And so then you think, well, that's why there's an ethical aspect to this redemptive

01:48:23.940 process, like a real strenuous and strict ethical aspect that goes something like this.

01:48:28.580 There are things that you can do. Find yourself engaged with the world at such a level that your

01:48:34.420 existential concerns could disappear. And we can even understand that biochemically to some degree,

01:48:39.300 because if you're really interested in something, you get a dopamine release, an exploratory dopamine

01:48:44.580 release. That's great. I mean, that's associated with positive affect, with confidence, with increased

01:48:49.860 immunological functioning, with better memory functioning, with learning, everything you want.

01:48:54.820 It's also potently anti-anxiolytic and analgesic, which means that if you're really pursuing something

01:49:03.620 that's compelling to you, you're much more resistant biochemically to punishment, disappointment,

01:49:08.340 depression, pain, threat, etc. And it's not because you're blind. It's not because you're blind. It's

01:49:14.660 because your nervous system is optimally tuned to make you maximally resistant. And so then you might think,

01:49:19.300 think, if you were optimally tuned, how resistant would you be? You don't know. Right? Because it's a

01:49:26.740 spiral that never stops moving uphill. We don't know what the upper end is. I mean,

01:49:33.940 we have exemplars that might indicate what that upper end could be, but we don't actually know.

01:49:39.140 So then you think, okay, well, here's the rule, say, it's something like this. If you look at the

01:49:46.900 world from this perspective, which is something you have to decide if you're, you know, you find

01:49:51.620 compelling and reasonable, the rule is this. You're always going to run into anomaly, right?

01:50:02.180 And anomaly is always going to look to you like, like this. And it's no bloody wonder you want to

01:50:09.140 run away from that. I mean, in some ways, your whole body is telling you, watch out, and for good

01:50:13.860 reason, because it's no joke. But then there's more to the story, because the anomalous thing, that's

01:50:19.380 everything you don't know. And you might say, well, you're going out with someone, you want to have a

01:50:24.260 long-term relationship, they betray you. How could there be any good in that? Because that's certainly

01:50:29.460 what you're going to ask when you first encounter the unexpected information. But then you might

01:50:34.580 think, could be that I'm a little too naive for my own good, right? People pull me in a little more

01:50:40.820 than they should, or I'm not sufficiently careful when I enter into intimate relationships with people,

01:50:46.100 or I don't treat people right, or I don't have a good conceptualization of myself, or I'm chasing after

01:50:51.540 the wrong person. Well, that's all going to be very annoying to learn. But if you don't learn it,

01:50:56.340 you're going to be in big trouble. So maybe the best thing to do when an anomaly of that sort hits

01:51:00.660 you is to think, okay, yeah, it's a dragon, no doubt it will eat me. But if I don't let it eat me,

01:51:06.740 then there'll just be another one waiting around the corner, and it'll probably be a little bit

01:51:10.020 bigger. And if I get eaten by enough of them, I'm not really going to want to be around much. And maybe

01:51:14.580 I'm not going to be willing to help other people be around much either. Doesn't seem like a very good

01:51:18.980 alternative to me. Back in 1957, some new Gnostic writings were discovered in a cave.

01:51:32.340 They were discovered by these two Arab guys who went out to kill the man who killed their father.

01:51:38.100 They took him out into this cave, and they killed him. And when they were burying him,

01:51:41.300 they found these amphora full of papers and papyrus. And they took them home,

01:51:46.020 and their mother used a bunch of them to light cooking fires with. And one day,

01:51:49.860 one of their friends who was an antiquities dealer showed up, and he said, you know,

01:51:53.940 you shouldn't be burning those. Those are about 1500 years old, and they look like

01:51:59.060 very early Gnostic Gospels. And the Gnostics were this branch of Christianity that was pretty

01:52:03.540 violently suppressed by the emergence of Orthodox Christianity. And the Gnostics believed that

01:52:09.300 faith was a good thing, but knowledge was all right too. And they wrote gospel accounts,

01:52:15.220 say, of Christ's life, that were knowledge predicated as much as revelation predicated,

01:52:21.540 say. And this is one of the quotes from one of those gospels, the Gospel of Thomas,

01:52:25.060 which is actually one that, the only one that got out. Carl Jung got a hold of him,

01:52:30.180 interestingly enough. And this is one of the quotes. And I really like this.

01:52:35.220 This is a non-canonical saying of Christ. And the saying is,

01:52:38.580 if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth

01:52:46.740 what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I think that's a pretty good

01:52:54.580 good line to close off the class. So, thank you for attending.

01:53:01.220 Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

01:53:15.380 This was an amalgamation of episodes 10 to 13 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVO.

01:53:26.260 To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

01:53:30.580 the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

01:53:35.860 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com.

01:53:41.140 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 26, 2017

Maps of Meaning 10, 11, 12, & 13

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