The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 19, 2017


The Psychology of the Flood


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 42 minutes

Words per Minute

178.83362

Word Count

28,972

Sentence Count

186

Misogynist Sentences

16

Hate Speech Sentences

71


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson discusses the story of Noah and the Ark and the Tower of Babel. Dr. Peterson uses the story to argue that we have a built-in understanding of the world that is not only embedded within us, but also embedded within our bodies and minds. This episode is the sixth installment in the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories Lecture Series, and is entitled The Psychology of the Flood. Dr. B.P. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. Tickets can be found at jordanbpeterson.ca/thepsychologicalsignificance or by finding the link in the description. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. P. Peterson's P.I.S.T. Project, which is a non-profit organization that helps people with depression and anxiety find relief from their conditions. With decades of experience helping patients with similar conditions, Dr Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. J.B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety, where you can be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Let s take a step towards feeling better, let s feel better. - Let s make a step toward the brighter, better you deserve it. (Dailywireplus.org/thebiblehyphen) is a podcast series that could be a lifeline for those struggling with Depression and Anxiousness and anxiety, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be a little bit better than they may be feeling better by reaching out to them. This is a moment of hope and help them find a place where they can feel like they re not alone, and they can help you feel better, and a place of support and support you can help them in the process of recovery. The Daily Wire Plus podcast is a place they can get a chance to help you get some of their best chance to feel their best access to information and support in the next episode of The Bible of the Bible Hyphen Series. Subscribe to the Bible hyphen Series: Noah and The Ark: The Story of the Ark.


Transcript

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:50.980 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:00:59.420 You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.
00:01:06.820 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.
00:01:12.020 This is episode 24.
00:01:17.020 This podcast episode is the sixth installment of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories Lecture Series.
00:01:25.560 This episode focuses on Noah and the Ark and is entitled The Psychology of the Flood.
00:01:31.000 Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto.
00:01:35.320 Tickets can be found at jordanbpeterson.com slash bible hyphen series or by finding the link in the description.
00:01:56.260 So I'm going to launch right into it.
00:01:58.020 I like this story as well.
00:02:00.680 This is the story of Noah and the flood and then the Tower of Babel.
00:02:05.320 Which I think are juxtaposed very interestingly.
00:02:09.160 The Tower of Babel is one of those stories like Cain and Abel that's only a few lines long.
00:02:13.800 It's like a fragment in some sense.
00:02:15.500 Although the story of Noah is quite a well-developed narrative.
00:02:19.860 But like the other stories that we've covered, it is relevant at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.
00:02:27.640 And so what I'm going to do to begin with is to start with some background information.
00:02:35.460 So some psychological background information so that the story makes sense.
00:02:40.580 And the first thing that I'd like to make a case for is that you bring to bear on the world an a priori perceptual structure.
00:02:53.100 And that's really an embodied structure.
00:02:54.980 And it's a consequence of the three and a half billion years that you've spent putting your body together.
00:03:00.880 Which is a tremendous amount of time.
00:03:03.100 And not only your body but your mind of course.
00:03:06.040 Because your mind is part of your body and very much embedded within it.
00:03:10.080 You know, you tend to think that you have your brain in your head.
00:03:13.020 And it's sort of floating separate from the rest of your body.
00:03:15.720 But it's not really true.
00:03:17.100 You have a tremendous, massive system of neurons running through your entire body.
00:03:24.580 Autonomic, there's more neurons in the autonomic nervous system than there are in the central nervous system.
00:03:30.020 So that's a lot of neurons.
00:03:31.140 And then your central nervous system of course enables you to exercise voluntary control over your musculature.
00:03:37.480 And also to receive information from it.
00:03:39.880 Your brain is really distributed through your body.
00:03:42.500 One of the things you may not know is that people who are paraplegic can walk.
00:03:47.200 If you suspend them above a treadmill, their legs will walk by themselves with no voluntary control.
00:03:52.020 So your spine is capable of quite complex activity.
00:03:55.620 In fact, when you walk mostly it's a controlled fall.
00:03:58.440 And mostly your spine is doing it.
00:04:00.160 And so, anyways, the point of all that is that you don't have a blank slate consciousness
00:04:08.480 that's interpreting a world that manifests itself as segregated objects.
00:04:14.040 In some straightforward sense, you have a built-in interpretive system
00:04:19.140 that's extraordinarily deeply embedded and invisible.
00:04:23.120 Because you might think about it as the implicit structure of your unconscious.
00:04:27.260 It's what gives rise to your conscious experience.
00:04:30.540 And it presents you with the world.
00:04:33.360 That's one way of thinking about it.
00:04:34.860 And it's a good way of thinking about it.
00:04:36.160 It's the psychoanalytic way of thinking about it.
00:04:38.060 As well as the neuroscientific way of thinking about it.
00:04:42.080 Because one of the things that's pretty interesting about modern neuroscientists,
00:04:45.100 especially the top-rate ones, and those are usually the ones that are working on emotions,
00:04:48.500 as far as I've been able to tell,
00:04:50.420 are often quite enamored of the psychoanalysts.
00:04:54.900 Yach Panksepp was a good example of that.
00:04:56.840 Because they came to understand that the psychoanalysts' insistence on underlying unconscious personified motivations
00:05:06.020 was actually an accurate reflection of how the brain worked.
00:05:09.180 So to think of yourself as a loose collection of autonomous spirits
00:05:13.660 that's governed by some overarching identity is a reasonable way of thinking about it.
00:05:19.080 But the question is, or a question that arises from that is,
00:05:24.360 what is the nature of this a priori structure that you use to interpret the world?
00:05:31.740 And I think the clearest answer to that is that it's a story.
00:05:35.920 That you live inside a story.
00:05:38.080 And that's very, very interesting to me.
00:05:39.920 Because I believe, and I have a couple of videos that lay this out,
00:05:46.020 I believe that Darwinian presuppositions
00:05:50.540 are at least as fundamental as Newtonian presuppositions.
00:05:55.680 I actually think they're more fundamental.
00:05:57.340 And that the fact that we've evolved story-like structures through which to interpret the world
00:06:04.340 indicates to me that there's something deeply true about story-like structures.
00:06:09.760 They're true at least insofar as the fact that we've developed them
00:06:14.060 means that here we are living
00:06:16.040 and that it's taken three and a half billion years to develop them.
00:06:19.480 They're highly functional.
00:06:22.020 And so we don't have much better definition of truth than highly functional.
00:06:26.060 You know, that's about as good as it gets.
00:06:28.180 Partly because we're limited creatures
00:06:30.280 and we don't have omniscient knowledge.
00:06:32.800 And so the best we can do with our knowledge, generally speaking,
00:06:35.780 is to note its functionality
00:06:37.720 and improve it when it fails to work properly.
00:06:41.120 I think the scientific method actually does that.
00:06:44.060 And so the fact that we've evolved a story-like structure
00:06:47.780 through which to interpret the world,
00:06:49.640 that's pretty damn interesting.
00:06:51.000 It says something fundamental about stories.
00:06:52.740 And it's strange in the same way
00:06:54.900 that the fact that we have hemispheric specialization
00:06:58.460 for the known and the unknown
00:06:59.780 or for chaos and order,
00:07:02.000 order and chaos, sorry,
00:07:03.560 respectively,
00:07:04.340 also says something fundamental about the nature of the world
00:07:07.180 if you assume that, you know,
00:07:08.580 we've evolved to reflect the structure of the world,
00:07:11.760 broadly speaking.
00:07:12.860 And that's obviously not just the physical structure,
00:07:16.440 the atoms and the molecules,
00:07:17.800 but all of the patterned manifestations
00:07:19.900 of the physical molecules
00:07:21.900 as they build structures of increasing complexity across time.
00:07:25.880 That would include human interactions
00:07:27.580 and political interactions,
00:07:29.520 economic interactions,
00:07:30.940 familial interactions,
00:07:32.280 all of those things that are
00:07:33.540 a very important part of our reality,
00:07:36.540 but perhaps in some sense not as fundamental
00:07:38.380 as the physical attributes
00:07:40.900 that the physicists concentrate on.
00:07:42.960 So we live in stories.
00:07:46.000 And so I want to talk to you
00:07:47.760 a little bit about stories
00:07:48.920 and about their structure.
00:07:50.460 Because when you understand
00:07:51.900 a little bit about the structure of stories,
00:07:54.540 then a whole array of things about mythology
00:07:57.400 all of a sudden make overwhelming sense.
00:08:00.040 And it's so useful
00:08:01.000 because what you see is that
00:08:03.040 many of the things that are
00:08:05.300 standard occurrences in your life
00:08:08.060 everyone's life
00:08:09.440 are portrayed universally in mythology.
00:08:14.420 And it's very helpful
00:08:15.660 because first of all,
00:08:17.260 it de-isolates you.
00:08:19.380 One of the things you learn
00:08:20.460 as a clinical psychologist
00:08:22.260 contra the anti-psychiatrists,
00:08:25.460 let's say,
00:08:26.360 is that diagnosis is often a relief to people.
00:08:29.880 You know, there's a problem with being diagnosed
00:08:32.140 because then you might be labeled
00:08:33.400 and then the label can follow you
00:08:34.660 for the rest of your life.
00:08:35.620 And once you're labeled as something,
00:08:38.360 then strange things happen around you
00:08:40.280 that often reinforce that label.
00:08:42.940 Maybe you start acting it out more
00:08:44.480 or you adopt it as an identity.
00:08:45.840 But there's a flip side of that,
00:08:47.420 which is that the last thing
00:08:49.200 that you ever want to hear
00:08:50.340 when you go see a physician
00:08:52.080 or a psychologist is,
00:08:54.040 you know,
00:08:54.340 I've never seen a case like yours before.
00:08:58.180 Right.
00:08:58.740 That is not a relief, man.
00:09:00.160 Because if the message is
00:09:02.840 I've never heard anything like
00:09:05.040 what you're telling me,
00:09:06.640 the outcome is either going to be
00:09:07.940 not so good for you
00:09:09.000 or you're not going to get listened to at all, right?
00:09:11.220 Because you're such an anomaly
00:09:12.340 that your existence is annoying
00:09:15.860 to the integrated knowledge structure
00:09:17.620 of the medical professional
00:09:18.680 that you're attempting to receive advice from.
00:09:20.940 Well, it's definitely the case
00:09:22.420 because, you know,
00:09:24.360 if you can be put in a box,
00:09:25.980 then the box tells the doctor
00:09:28.240 what to do with you.
00:09:29.660 And that's actually a relief to the doctor.
00:09:31.680 But also a relief to you, right?
00:09:33.420 Because you want to know.
00:09:34.520 So you come and you say,
00:09:35.600 look, I can't go out of my house much anymore.
00:09:38.160 I'm afraid on elevators.
00:09:40.480 I have heart palpitations
00:09:42.120 and I sometimes end up in the emergency room.
00:09:44.720 Increasingly, my interactions in the world
00:09:48.080 are restricted.
00:09:48.780 I find myself staying at home.
00:09:50.080 I'm afraid I'm going to die of a heart attack.
00:09:52.300 And the psychologist says,
00:09:54.140 well, you have agoraphobia.
00:09:55.820 It's like lots of people have that.
00:09:57.560 And here's usually how it develops
00:09:59.400 and here's the treatment course.
00:10:00.820 And, you know,
00:10:01.360 we can probably do something about that.
00:10:02.980 And it's like,
00:10:04.540 well, you're not going to die of a heart attack now,
00:10:07.040 probably.
00:10:07.640 That's a real relief.
00:10:08.780 You're not crazy in a completely unique way.
00:10:11.820 And you're crazy in a way
00:10:13.280 that might be treatable, you know.
00:10:15.920 And so it's such a relief
00:10:16.900 because people come in there
00:10:17.980 with a pile of snakes
00:10:19.140 of indeterminate magnitude
00:10:21.360 and they walk out
00:10:22.080 with one manageable snake.
00:10:23.640 And it's still a snake,
00:10:24.720 but, you know,
00:10:25.720 one manageable snake
00:10:27.000 beats a hydra, right?
00:10:29.020 So, all right.
00:10:31.540 So, back to stories.
00:10:34.220 So,
00:10:35.440 the stories that we tell
00:10:47.600 and that we live in
00:10:49.440 are fundamentally
00:10:51.120 ways that we deal
00:10:53.100 with the complexity of the world.
00:10:54.560 And the fundamental problem
00:10:56.820 with the world,
00:10:58.440 as far as I can tell,
00:10:59.820 is that not only is it
00:11:00.920 complex beyond your comprehension,
00:11:03.840 but the complexity shifts
00:11:05.400 in unpredictable ways.
00:11:07.800 So,
00:11:08.900 that's the Darwinian conundrum, actually.
00:11:11.720 That's why Darwinism
00:11:12.960 seems to be a practical necessity
00:11:15.160 with regards to the continuation of life
00:11:17.600 because
00:11:18.000 because the complexity changes
00:11:20.400 unpredictably,
00:11:21.780 you can't necessarily tell
00:11:23.620 what's going to work
00:11:24.380 in the future.
00:11:25.540 And so,
00:11:26.260 the Darwinian process
00:11:27.160 solves that
00:11:27.820 by generating
00:11:28.520 quasi-random
00:11:29.620 variations
00:11:31.700 and
00:11:32.180 letting whichever one
00:11:34.040 by happenstance
00:11:34.960 happens to work
00:11:35.860 in that environment
00:11:36.520 survive.
00:11:37.700 Now,
00:11:37.940 it's not random
00:11:39.300 precisely
00:11:40.560 because
00:11:41.020 the underlying structure
00:11:43.420 is conserved.
00:11:44.280 It's very rare
00:11:44.880 that a child
00:11:45.620 would be born
00:11:46.160 with an extra arm
00:11:47.140 or something like that.
00:11:48.260 Like the skeletal structure
00:11:49.840 that you inhabit
00:11:50.680 is shared by
00:11:52.240 animals going
00:11:53.700 way, way back
00:11:54.920 in evolutionary history.
00:11:56.020 There's a lot of conservation
00:11:57.080 in the evolutionary process.
00:11:59.480 So,
00:12:00.120 there's variation
00:12:00.760 within conservation.
00:12:02.200 Like music.
00:12:03.240 It's a good way
00:12:04.320 of thinking about it.
00:12:06.320 So,
00:12:08.580 the
00:12:08.960 stories that we tell
00:12:12.000 have exactly
00:12:12.640 the same structure.
00:12:13.520 they have this
00:12:15.560 core element
00:12:18.440 with variations.
00:12:19.600 And so,
00:12:19.860 all right,
00:12:20.220 I'll turn to the stories.
00:12:21.620 And so,
00:12:22.600 the first problem,
00:12:24.080 as I mentioned,
00:12:24.800 is a complexity problem.
00:12:27.780 Things are just
00:12:28.520 too complicated
00:12:29.360 to get a handle on.
00:12:30.760 And that actually
00:12:31.480 has serious consequences
00:12:32.960 because
00:12:33.380 what happens
00:12:34.340 to everyone eventually
00:12:35.260 is that their lives
00:12:36.140 become so complicated
00:12:37.080 that they die.
00:12:39.300 So,
00:12:39.980 and that,
00:12:40.340 and many terrible things
00:12:41.960 can happen to you
00:12:42.480 on the way to dying
00:12:43.340 as well
00:12:43.800 that are complex,
00:12:45.100 complexity-related,
00:12:47.160 right?
00:12:47.420 You can develop
00:12:47.920 a serious illness
00:12:48.560 that you can't get
00:12:49.220 a handle on.
00:12:50.140 You can hit a,
00:12:51.120 what would you call,
00:12:52.900 an impasse
00:12:53.440 in your relationship
00:12:54.280 that you cannot get past
00:12:56.020 and see no way out of.
00:12:57.840 That happens to people
00:12:58.820 quite frequently.
00:12:59.740 People who are suicidal,
00:13:01.020 for example,
00:13:01.580 they often feel like
00:13:02.460 they've been backed
00:13:03.100 into a corner.
00:13:04.540 That they have no options.
00:13:06.500 They have no good options.
00:13:07.520 No matter which way
00:13:08.260 they turn,
00:13:09.140 there's something terrible
00:13:09.920 to face
00:13:10.400 and they can't see
00:13:11.480 any way out of it.
00:13:12.880 And sometimes
00:13:13.660 that's more true
00:13:15.020 than you'd like to think
00:13:16.180 because we also tend
00:13:17.900 to like to think
00:13:19.140 that people's problems
00:13:20.000 are primarily psychological,
00:13:21.500 but they're not.
00:13:22.580 That's one thing
00:13:23.220 you learn quite rapidly
00:13:24.300 as a clinician
00:13:25.060 is that most of the time
00:13:26.880 people don't come to you
00:13:27.800 because they have
00:13:28.300 mental illness.
00:13:28.980 They come to you
00:13:29.500 because they have
00:13:30.000 a complexity management problem.
00:13:31.920 Their lives have got
00:13:32.880 out of hand on them
00:13:34.360 and they don't know
00:13:35.540 how to get them
00:13:36.060 back under control.
00:13:37.960 And so,
00:13:38.540 all sorts of things
00:13:39.340 can do that.
00:13:39.900 And then, of course,
00:13:40.460 that can make you anxious
00:13:41.260 or depressed.
00:13:42.080 It can trigger
00:13:42.500 all sorts of illnesses.
00:13:43.620 But the fundamental problem
00:13:44.920 is still that
00:13:45.520 things have got
00:13:46.860 beyond you.
00:13:48.340 And that actually
00:13:49.300 has a psychophysiological cost
00:13:51.080 that isn't merely
00:13:51.900 psychological.
00:13:52.960 You have a limited
00:13:53.940 amount of capacity
00:13:55.380 from a resource perspective
00:13:58.380 to deal with
00:13:59.400 emergent complexity.
00:14:01.380 It's just not enough
00:14:02.560 of you.
00:14:02.860 You'll exhaust
00:14:05.360 your psychophysiological
00:14:06.700 resources
00:14:08.040 if you get into
00:14:09.100 a situation
00:14:09.700 that's too complex.
00:14:11.340 Well, that's what
00:14:11.940 the idea of chaos represents.
00:14:15.820 It represents
00:14:16.320 that underlying complexity
00:14:17.500 that can manifest itself
00:14:18.780 at any time.
00:14:19.860 And it can manifest itself,
00:14:21.060 for example,
00:14:21.640 if you wake up
00:14:24.400 in the morning
00:14:24.760 and you feel an ache
00:14:26.100 of some sort
00:14:26.740 and perhaps it's nothing
00:14:28.080 and you ignore it
00:14:29.480 but it gets worse
00:14:30.220 and you end up
00:14:30.980 going to the hospital
00:14:31.820 and you find out
00:14:32.580 perhaps, for example,
00:14:34.820 that you have
00:14:35.180 pancreatic cancer
00:14:36.120 and you're going to live
00:14:37.100 for six months
00:14:37.740 and that's the end
00:14:38.420 of that.
00:14:39.420 And so it's
00:14:40.840 at that moment
00:14:42.500 that you break
00:14:43.240 through the thin ice
00:14:44.260 that everyone walks on
00:14:45.420 and you see
00:14:46.320 what's underneath
00:14:47.000 and what's underneath
00:14:47.880 is the ineradicable
00:14:49.280 complexity of life
00:14:50.780 and that's chaos.
00:14:52.720 And that's now
00:14:54.280 it's taken people
00:14:55.840 a long, long time
00:14:56.980 to get a grip
00:14:58.900 on this conceptual
00:15:00.880 what would you call it?
00:15:03.180 Conceptual schema.
00:15:04.120 And human beings
00:15:07.780 have done it
00:15:08.440 mostly with image
00:15:09.340 and story
00:15:09.940 before they've been able
00:15:10.780 to do it
00:15:11.160 in any articulated manner.
00:15:13.560 And so there are
00:15:14.480 a set of images
00:15:15.220 that represent
00:15:16.080 this underlying chaos
00:15:17.560 and one of them
00:15:18.720 is the dragon
00:15:19.400 of chaos
00:15:20.080 that,
00:15:20.780 precisely that.
00:15:22.160 And that's the dragon
00:15:23.100 that the hero
00:15:23.600 goes out to confront.
00:15:24.620 That's the symbol
00:15:25.300 of the unknown.
00:15:26.040 It's the thing
00:15:26.520 that lurks underneath.
00:15:27.700 It's the thing
00:15:28.240 that also guards treasure
00:15:29.580 because in the unknown
00:15:30.600 there's a possibility.
00:15:32.380 Also the water
00:15:34.140 that was there
00:15:35.520 that we talked about
00:15:36.220 in the Mesopotamian
00:15:37.040 creation myth
00:15:37.800 the water that's there
00:15:39.260 at the beginning
00:15:39.880 both the salt
00:15:41.800 and the fresh water
00:15:43.000 is often a symbol
00:15:44.060 of pre-cosmogonic chaos.
00:15:46.940 Often people have dreams
00:15:48.180 for example
00:15:48.800 some of you
00:15:49.420 have had this dream
00:15:50.060 I suspect you'll dream
00:15:51.060 that you're in a house
00:15:52.360 that you know well
00:15:53.240 and all of a sudden
00:15:54.340 you discover a new room
00:15:55.520 or a set of new rooms
00:15:56.480 or maybe a set of rooms
00:15:57.860 in the basement
00:15:58.440 and often the rooms
00:15:59.360 are not well organized
00:16:01.400 and they're full of water.
00:16:02.940 Those are very common things
00:16:04.100 and what that means
00:16:04.860 is that you've
00:16:05.620 broken through
00:16:07.220 the constraints
00:16:08.180 of your conscious
00:16:09.860 self-understanding
00:16:11.360 to a new domain
00:16:13.080 of possibility
00:16:15.500 but a new domain
00:16:16.840 that needs a tremendous
00:16:17.700 amount of work.
00:16:18.540 It says
00:16:18.820 well here's a new part of you
00:16:20.000 but it's not well developed.
00:16:22.520 It's flooded.
00:16:23.660 It's flooded with chaos
00:16:24.800 essentially.
00:16:26.160 And it's water
00:16:26.900 I think partly
00:16:27.580 because chaos
00:16:28.540 is not only
00:16:29.340 what you fall into
00:16:30.760 when you're
00:16:31.260 not expecting it
00:16:32.760 but it's also
00:16:33.400 the unknown
00:16:34.280 that you confront
00:16:35.080 forthrightly
00:16:35.840 and generate new things
00:16:36.880 out of
00:16:37.240 and water is a symbol
00:16:38.340 of life
00:16:38.700 especially in the desert
00:16:39.720 and of course
00:16:40.400 water
00:16:40.760 life is dependent
00:16:41.880 on water
00:16:42.440 and so
00:16:42.840 water is a natural
00:16:44.460 symbol
00:16:45.380 to utilize
00:16:47.600 to utilize
00:16:47.780 when you're talking
00:16:48.600 about something
00:16:49.240 that's life-giving
00:16:50.080 but also potentially deadly
00:16:51.540 because a little bit
00:16:52.540 of water
00:16:52.920 well that's a drink
00:16:53.920 but a lot of water
00:16:54.740 that's a shipwreck
00:16:55.640 right
00:16:56.360 and so
00:16:56.860 and those are the
00:16:58.140 those are the extremes
00:16:59.260 now
00:17:00.100 there are accounts
00:17:02.480 that are sort of
00:17:04.100 subtexts
00:17:04.980 in Genesis
00:17:05.740 and elsewhere
00:17:06.720 in the Old Testament
00:17:07.520 of God
00:17:09.100 conquering a
00:17:11.380 great monster
00:17:13.440 Leviathan
00:17:14.200 or
00:17:14.580 or
00:17:15.580 Behemoth
00:17:16.520 that has
00:17:17.000 these sort of
00:17:18.220 serpentile
00:17:18.980 elements
00:17:20.320 and
00:17:21.120 making the world
00:17:22.340 as a consequence
00:17:23.240 of that conflict
00:17:24.100 so there's this idea
00:17:25.440 that
00:17:25.760 the world creating
00:17:27.360 force
00:17:27.920 which we've talked about
00:17:28.940 as the logos
00:17:29.520 is the thing
00:17:30.540 that continually
00:17:31.140 confronts
00:17:31.860 chaos
00:17:32.780 and that
00:17:33.880 one way of thinking
00:17:35.140 about chaos
00:17:35.800 is as a predatory
00:17:37.080 reptilian monster
00:17:38.380 and often one
00:17:39.680 that lives in the depths
00:17:40.400 or perhaps underwater
00:17:41.520 and part of that
00:17:42.960 I think is because
00:17:43.700 we actually use
00:17:44.620 our predator detection
00:17:45.620 circuit to do this
00:17:46.620 sort of precognitive
00:17:47.540 processing
00:17:48.120 and so the notion
00:17:49.680 fundamentally is
00:17:50.600 anything that threatens
00:17:51.820 you instantaneously
00:17:52.740 is something that
00:17:54.180 your predator detection
00:17:55.100 circuit should be
00:17:55.820 working with
00:17:56.400 it's fast
00:17:57.880 it's fast
00:17:59.500 it's low resolution
00:18:00.540 it doesn't have
00:18:01.440 a lot of ideas
00:18:02.420 but it's really
00:18:03.880 really fast
00:18:04.640 and that also
00:18:05.500 accounts for
00:18:06.160 our capability
00:18:07.460 and tendency
00:18:08.280 to very rapidly
00:18:09.200 treat people
00:18:10.680 who upset
00:18:11.360 our conceptual
00:18:13.460 structures
00:18:14.820 as enemies
00:18:16.960 of the predatory
00:18:17.740 variety
00:18:18.260 we can fall
00:18:19.440 into that
00:18:19.880 in no time
00:18:21.240 flat
00:18:21.620 because it's
00:18:22.640 the archetype
00:18:24.260 if something comes
00:18:25.020 along to knock
00:18:26.280 you for a loop
00:18:26.980 it's a shark
00:18:28.240 it's something
00:18:28.740 that lurks
00:18:29.180 under the water
00:18:29.740 it's something
00:18:30.100 that will pull you
00:18:30.700 down
00:18:30.960 it's an enemy
00:18:31.600 and you should
00:18:34.240 get prepared
00:18:34.800 and that's a
00:18:35.820 reasonable defensive
00:18:36.580 strategy
00:18:37.080 even though
00:18:37.580 it also has
00:18:38.520 its dangers
00:18:39.080 and can sometimes
00:18:40.400 be wrong
00:18:40.960 so
00:18:42.260 the landscape
00:18:43.820 within which
00:18:44.640 we have to
00:18:47.860 erect our stories
00:18:48.780 is fundamentally
00:18:50.460 one of
00:18:51.060 an overarching
00:18:52.540 chaos
00:18:53.040 a chaos
00:18:53.500 that exceeds
00:18:54.060 our capacity
00:18:54.700 to comprehend
00:18:55.340 in any sense
00:18:57.200 individually
00:18:58.240 familial
00:18:58.980 socially
00:18:59.460 economically
00:19:00.100 we're always
00:19:01.220 threatened
00:19:02.580 by the collapse
00:19:03.340 of the structures
00:19:03.960 that we inhabit
00:19:04.680 constantly
00:19:05.620 we have to work
00:19:06.520 well it's like
00:19:07.620 you own a house
00:19:08.260 you know
00:19:08.640 how much time
00:19:09.720 do you spend
00:19:10.100 maintaining a house
00:19:11.140 well a lot
00:19:13.100 and why is that
00:19:13.940 it's because
00:19:14.360 the house falls apart
00:19:15.940 because you're stupid
00:19:16.780 and the house falls apart
00:19:18.420 well because you do
00:19:19.160 repairs wrong
00:19:19.920 or you ignore things
00:19:20.880 right
00:19:21.120 and I'm saying this
00:19:22.660 actually for technical reasons
00:19:23.980 the house falls apart
00:19:25.100 because you're incompetent
00:19:26.260 but even if you're competent
00:19:27.780 the house falls apart
00:19:28.700 right
00:19:29.140 it's just entropy
00:19:30.020 and so things have a proclivity
00:19:31.480 to fall apart
00:19:32.180 on their own
00:19:32.760 so you just have to run
00:19:33.740 like mad
00:19:34.280 just to keep them doing
00:19:35.940 what they're supposed
00:19:36.700 to be doing
00:19:37.380 and then of course
00:19:38.460 that is complicated
00:19:39.220 by your own
00:19:40.060 willful blindness
00:19:41.240 and inadequacy
00:19:42.120 as a repair person
00:19:43.140 and refusal to attend
00:19:44.340 and all those other things
00:19:45.260 so
00:19:45.460 and that's a very classic
00:19:47.580 idea
00:19:48.180 which we'll return to
00:19:49.160 one of the ideas
00:19:50.460 that Mircea Eliade
00:19:51.820 famous history of religions
00:19:55.320 extracted from
00:19:57.660 a very large corpus
00:19:59.820 of flood myths
00:20:00.920 was the idea
00:20:02.280 that the earth
00:20:03.600 is periodically flooded
00:20:04.820 for two reasons
00:20:05.740 one is
00:20:06.460 things fall apart
00:20:08.040 just entropy
00:20:09.140 it's straight entropy
00:20:09.980 it's
00:20:10.300 I don't remember
00:20:10.980 which law of thermodynamics
00:20:12.240 that is
00:20:12.820 but
00:20:13.060 it's one of the big laws
00:20:14.520 of thermodynamics
00:20:15.340 it's one of the top three
00:20:17.320 man
00:20:17.660 things fall apart
00:20:18.520 of their own accord
00:20:19.500 and that's one of the things
00:20:20.960 that we
00:20:21.340 have to contend with
00:20:22.520 and then
00:20:23.220 the rate at which
00:20:24.580 things fall apart
00:20:25.560 is sped
00:20:26.420 by the sins of men
00:20:27.960 that's the other idea
00:20:29.440 and
00:20:29.680 you know that
00:20:30.640 everyone knows that
00:20:31.740 because you know
00:20:32.540 you know
00:20:33.320 your car breaks down
00:20:34.720 in the highway
00:20:35.200 and you think
00:20:35.780 God that's so inconvenient
00:20:36.840 and then you
00:20:37.380 you know
00:20:37.640 you shake your fist
00:20:38.380 at the sky
00:20:38.900 and then there's part of you
00:20:39.900 in the back of your mind
00:20:41.140 that goes
00:20:42.020 God you know
00:20:42.660 I knew that rattle
00:20:44.600 that I wasn't paying attention to
00:20:46.020 actually signified something
00:20:48.020 you know
00:20:48.860 and I knew
00:20:49.900 I should have paid attention to it
00:20:51.440 and I didn't
00:20:52.520 and now I'm in the situation
00:20:53.860 that I'm in now
00:20:54.560 and you know
00:20:54.900 I know
00:20:55.500 I bet you this happens to people
00:20:57.800 two or three times a week
00:20:58.900 is
00:20:59.080 they do something stupid
00:21:00.600 that they know
00:21:01.140 they shouldn't have done
00:21:01.880 that they told themselves
00:21:03.000 not to do
00:21:03.600 mere seconds before
00:21:05.200 and they know
00:21:06.140 the voice says
00:21:07.500 don't do that
00:21:08.280 yeah yeah
00:21:08.860 you do it
00:21:09.800 you get nailed for it
00:21:11.120 exactly the way
00:21:11.880 that you knew
00:21:12.400 you would get nailed for it
00:21:13.540 and then you're hurt
00:21:14.400 doubly
00:21:15.420 because
00:21:15.800 not only did it fall apart
00:21:17.340 but you're the idiot
00:21:18.520 that made it fall apart
00:21:19.700 knowing full well
00:21:20.620 that it was going to fall apart
00:21:21.740 and ignoring it
00:21:22.680 and so
00:21:22.940 that's the idea
00:21:23.980 behind the notion
00:21:25.280 that
00:21:25.640 there are two reasons
00:21:26.960 that things fall apart
00:21:28.040 thermodynamic entropy
00:21:30.200 and
00:21:30.680 the proclivity of people
00:21:32.360 not to attend to things
00:21:33.860 they know
00:21:34.320 they should attend to
00:21:35.340 and partly
00:21:36.320 we do that
00:21:36.880 because
00:21:37.200 if a problem emerges
00:21:39.380 it always announces itself
00:21:40.840 unless it's a really
00:21:41.960 really tiny problem
00:21:42.960 and you're approaching it
00:21:43.860 voluntarily
00:21:44.240 it always announces itself
00:21:46.940 with negative emotion
00:21:48.100 and that's part of the
00:21:49.720 predator detection circuit
00:21:50.800 it announces itself
00:21:52.280 in frustration
00:21:53.000 or disappointment
00:21:53.780 or emotional pain
00:21:54.960 or grief
00:21:56.020 or the paramount one
00:21:57.700 anxiety
00:21:58.520 and no wonder
00:22:00.600 because it's a problem
00:22:01.540 right
00:22:01.800 and one of the logical
00:22:03.500 responses
00:22:03.960 is to sort of
00:22:04.680 freeze in the face
00:22:05.520 of the problem
00:22:06.140 but of course
00:22:07.100 if it's a problem
00:22:08.060 that has to be addressed
00:22:08.860 and solved
00:22:09.560 freezing it
00:22:10.420 and turning away from it
00:22:11.580 is not a good solution
00:22:12.860 because
00:22:13.280 since things tend to fall apart
00:22:15.180 on their own accord
00:22:16.060 if you just leave the thing alone
00:22:18.420 that's problematic
00:22:19.440 it's just going to get worse
00:22:21.140 not better
00:22:21.660 which is one of the things
00:22:22.580 that's very annoying about life
00:22:23.980 so for example
00:22:25.180 you know
00:22:25.640 if you get a warning message
00:22:27.320 from the tax department
00:22:28.820 the probability that
00:22:30.560 ignoring that
00:22:31.660 will make it go away
00:22:33.960 is zero
00:22:34.740 right
00:22:35.180 what will happen instead
00:22:36.140 is that the more you ignore it
00:22:37.500 the larger it will grow
00:22:38.640 and if you ignore it long enough
00:22:39.900 then it will turn into something
00:22:41.300 large enough to eat you
00:22:42.860 and that will be the end of you
00:22:44.580 and I read in Harper's Magazine
00:22:46.660 at one point
00:22:47.380 that people would rather be mugged
00:22:49.720 than audited
00:22:50.360 and so
00:22:51.260 I believe that
00:22:52.420 because the mugging man
00:22:53.340 that's over
00:22:53.960 right
00:22:54.160 it's like
00:22:54.520 a couple of minutes
00:22:56.160 a sheer terror
00:22:57.060 loss of your wallet
00:22:58.740 the way you walk
00:22:59.660 the audit
00:23:01.220 that's like
00:23:01.960 that's like a semi-fatal disease
00:23:04.660 so
00:23:05.600 so that's chaos
00:23:08.720 now it's the idea here too
00:23:11.160 is that that's the chaos
00:23:12.320 that's
00:23:13.420 the psychological idea
00:23:14.820 is that that's also the chaos
00:23:16.160 that
00:23:16.460 whatever is being represented
00:23:18.140 in Genesis
00:23:18.680 as the spirit of God
00:23:20.020 extracts order out of
00:23:21.840 at the beginning of time
00:23:22.940 and it's also
00:23:23.820 that which
00:23:24.880 we're constantly contending with
00:23:26.520 as we struggle
00:23:27.800 in the same manner
00:23:28.860 to construct and maintain
00:23:30.220 habitable worlds
00:23:31.280 so
00:23:32.360 it's brilliant
00:23:33.460 it's brilliant
00:23:34.240 you know
00:23:34.580 when I first
00:23:35.140 put together the relationship
00:23:37.000 between
00:23:37.540 what Iliadi called
00:23:39.520 the pre-cosmogonic chaos
00:23:40.800 and
00:23:41.220 the predatory landscape
00:23:43.360 that surrounded our ancestors
00:23:44.720 and
00:23:45.040 the manner in which
00:23:46.440 we're structured neurologically
00:23:47.940 to respond to all of that
00:23:49.420 I thought
00:23:49.800 it was
00:23:50.380 it was like
00:23:51.120 an amazing epiphany
00:23:52.960 because
00:23:53.320 it's self-evidently the case
00:23:55.360 that the world is too complicated
00:23:57.100 for us to deal with
00:23:58.100 and that's one of the problems
00:23:59.060 that we face
00:23:59.620 on an ongoing basis
00:24:01.260 and then
00:24:01.820 the question is
00:24:02.780 well what do you do about that
00:24:03.860 and
00:24:04.020 if you ignore it
00:24:05.480 it gets worse
00:24:06.060 so ignoring it doesn't work
00:24:07.360 and so
00:24:07.700 we know what doesn't work
00:24:09.280 and so if ignoring it doesn't work
00:24:10.760 then
00:24:10.980 attending to it might work
00:24:13.020 and then I found out
00:24:14.320 with the Egyptians
00:24:15.000 for example
00:24:15.700 that
00:24:16.020 Horus was the god of attention
00:24:18.260 and the same thing happened
00:24:19.420 among the Mesopotamians
00:24:20.560 with Marduk
00:24:21.200 and his
00:24:21.540 ring of eyes
00:24:22.540 it's like
00:24:23.040 what's the way to
00:24:24.360 forestall
00:24:25.360 the catastrophe of things
00:24:27.540 falling apart
00:24:28.360 and the answer to that
00:24:29.180 is by attending to them
00:24:30.280 voluntarily attending to them
00:24:31.920 and that slots very nicely
00:24:33.100 into the hero mythology
00:24:34.260 that promotes the idea
00:24:36.340 that if there's a dragon
00:24:37.960 in the whereabouts
00:24:39.860 in the near
00:24:41.500 in the neighborhood
00:24:43.420 let's say
00:24:44.020 that hiding in the basement
00:24:46.280 just makes it grow larger
00:24:47.700 it's time to go out
00:24:48.880 and confront the damn thing
00:24:50.700 and the general stories are
00:24:52.660 well you might get killed
00:24:54.080 because it's a dragon
00:24:55.080 but
00:24:55.340 it's only might
00:24:57.600 as opposed to
00:24:58.380 definitely will get killed
00:25:00.000 if it happens to attack you
00:25:01.420 at three in the morning
00:25:02.240 at home
00:25:03.180 when you're hung over
00:25:04.040 and it's been a bad day
00:25:05.220 and you don't have
00:25:06.320 your
00:25:06.600 you know
00:25:07.100 your sword
00:25:08.180 and your shield
00:25:08.740 at the ready
00:25:09.340 which is generally
00:25:10.360 what happens
00:25:11.100 to people who
00:25:11.980 avoid things
00:25:12.960 so it's not something
00:25:14.340 that should be recommended
00:25:15.580 you're screwed both ways
00:25:17.140 that's one of the things
00:25:18.240 that's so nice about
00:25:19.240 being deeply pessimistic
00:25:21.560 it's so freeing
00:25:22.760 because
00:25:23.040 one of the things
00:25:24.160 well
00:25:25.560 it's very frequent
00:25:26.600 it's such a relief
00:25:27.600 and it's really
00:25:28.700 a useful habit
00:25:29.620 to develop
00:25:30.700 is
00:25:30.980 sometimes
00:25:32.020 no matter what you do
00:25:33.480 you're in trouble
00:25:34.280 and that's a relief
00:25:35.660 because then you can stop
00:25:36.700 scrabbling around
00:25:37.660 for the way out
00:25:38.480 there's no way out
00:25:39.360 man
00:25:39.640 it's like
00:25:40.460 you can pick
00:25:41.260 murder
00:25:42.160 you know
00:25:42.860 wretched death A
00:25:44.280 or slightly less
00:25:45.440 wretched death B
00:25:46.560 something like that
00:25:47.500 and I know
00:25:48.880 that's a terrible way
00:25:50.220 of looking at things
00:25:50.960 but it is
00:25:52.000 extraordinarily useful
00:25:53.560 to understand
00:25:54.220 that many times
00:25:55.360 you get
00:25:55.680 your choice
00:25:56.740 boils down to
00:25:58.340 picking the least
00:25:59.160 bad option
00:26:00.100 and if that's all
00:26:01.560 you can do
00:26:02.100 if that's how
00:26:03.020 life is revealing
00:26:04.140 itself to you
00:26:04.820 it's like
00:26:05.080 well more power to you
00:26:06.180 the least bad option
00:26:07.240 that's the best
00:26:07.900 you can do
00:26:08.540 and it's good enough
00:26:10.820 especially compared
00:26:11.780 to the alternative
00:26:12.340 which is the most
00:26:13.280 bad option
00:26:14.060 so
00:26:14.940 all right
00:26:17.100 now
00:26:17.340 so the fundamental
00:26:20.560 reality of things
00:26:21.700 is complexity
00:26:22.560 beyond comprehension
00:26:23.780 and then
00:26:24.360 the question is
00:26:25.760 well how is it
00:26:26.660 that you manage that
00:26:27.540 and partly you manage that
00:26:28.700 and this is
00:26:29.200 where the
00:26:29.940 image of the patriarchal order
00:26:32.280 comes in
00:26:32.860 in the positive manner
00:26:34.540 I might point out
00:26:35.740 because in the absence
00:26:37.120 of patriarchal structure
00:26:38.800 for lack of a better
00:26:40.120 lexicon
00:26:40.760 there's nothing
00:26:41.560 but chaos
00:26:42.300 and I wouldn't
00:26:42.960 recommend chaos
00:26:44.400 because it's
00:26:45.220 there's a lot of it
00:26:47.800 and there isn't
00:26:48.300 that much of you
00:26:49.220 and if you think
00:26:50.360 you can handle it
00:26:51.160 without an a priori structure
00:26:52.460 and without a sociological
00:26:53.720 structure surrounding you
00:26:54.900 then you don't know
00:26:55.760 anything at all
00:26:56.600 about human beings
00:26:57.540 because one of the
00:26:58.660 things I've noticed
00:26:59.320 for example
00:26:59.920 is that
00:27:00.340 it's unbelievable
00:27:03.780 the degree
00:27:04.440 to which our sanity
00:27:05.500 depends on a
00:27:06.720 functioning sociological
00:27:07.920 structure
00:27:08.480 and here's why
00:27:09.740 well first of all
00:27:11.200 you kind of need to know
00:27:12.840 what to do every day
00:27:14.060 you have to have a routine
00:27:15.100 because you're an animal
00:27:15.980 you know
00:27:16.340 and you know
00:27:16.940 if you have a dog or a cat
00:27:18.160 dogs are a really good example
00:27:19.920 of this
00:27:20.140 dogs like routine
00:27:21.140 they like to be walked
00:27:22.440 the number of times a day
00:27:23.600 that they're supposed to be walked
00:27:24.780 and they get quite sick
00:27:25.980 very rapidly
00:27:26.680 if you don't
00:27:27.660 if you don't
00:27:28.400 routinize their
00:27:30.100 their days
00:27:30.860 children are exactly
00:27:31.960 the same way
00:27:32.620 now you can overdo it
00:27:33.980 right
00:27:34.220 but still
00:27:35.180 you know
00:27:35.480 you need to know
00:27:36.260 approximately when you should get up
00:27:37.920 it should be approximately the same
00:27:39.600 every day
00:27:40.100 you need to know approximately
00:27:41.480 when you're going to eat
00:27:42.960 you need to know
00:27:43.560 what you're going to eat
00:27:44.420 you need to know
00:27:44.980 who you're going to eat with
00:27:46.100 you need to know
00:27:46.660 where to buy your food
00:27:47.560 it's like
00:27:47.920 80% of your life
00:27:49.820 70% of your life
00:27:51.280 something like that
00:27:52.100 consists of those things
00:27:54.120 that you do
00:27:54.960 every single day
00:27:55.880 that you repeat
00:27:56.600 and those are often
00:27:58.260 the things that people
00:27:59.180 think about as the trivial
00:28:00.480 elements of their life
00:28:01.460 but one of the things
00:28:02.320 I would like to
00:28:03.040 point out to you
00:28:04.180 if you do the mathematics
00:28:05.200 I did this with a client of mine
00:28:08.080 who was having a hard time
00:28:09.160 putting his child to bed
00:28:11.280 they were having a fight
00:28:12.360 every night
00:28:12.860 and I knew
00:28:14.100 by that time
00:28:15.120 the studies indicate
00:28:15.960 that most parents
00:28:17.260 only spend 20 minutes
00:28:18.740 per day of one-on-one time
00:28:20.380 with their child
00:28:21.140 now
00:28:22.340 the reason for that
00:28:23.520 is that people are busy
00:28:24.540 and it's actually not that easy
00:28:25.860 to parse out 20 minutes
00:28:27.320 of one-on-one time
00:28:28.240 it's a lot bloody more time
00:28:29.760 than you think
00:28:30.520 but that's all there is
00:28:32.360 20 minutes
00:28:33.240 he's spending like 40 minutes a day
00:28:35.500 fighting with this kid
00:28:36.380 trying to get
00:28:37.020 the kid to go to bed
00:28:38.300 and that's not very
00:28:39.600 entertaining
00:28:40.820 you know
00:28:41.220 you think
00:28:41.600 well I was just having a scrap
00:28:43.000 with the kid about going to bed
00:28:44.400 but it's no no no
00:28:45.220 no no
00:28:45.620 if it happens every day
00:28:47.260 it's a catastrophe
00:28:48.320 so you do the math
00:28:49.780 so we'll say
00:28:51.080 five hours a week
00:28:52.020 for the sake of argument
00:28:52.980 just to keep it simple
00:28:53.980 it's 20 hours a month
00:28:56.080 it's 240 hours a year
00:28:58.800 that's six 40 hour work weeks
00:29:00.960 that guy was basically spending a month and a half of work weeks
00:29:04.360 doing absolutely nothing but having a wretched time
00:29:07.480 fighting with his son trying to get him to go to bed
00:29:10.880 horrible
00:29:12.060 right
00:29:12.700 that's just way too much time to spend doing something like that
00:29:16.080 if you want to actually have a positive relationship with someone
00:29:19.100 because it's just too
00:29:20.260 it's just too punishing
00:29:21.940 and so
00:29:23.240 well
00:29:24.420 so you need structure
00:29:25.440 you need predictability
00:29:26.500 and you need more of it than you think
00:29:28.360 just to keep you sane
00:29:29.860 now
00:29:30.480 if you're lucky
00:29:31.580 and maybe a bit odd
00:29:33.560 you can deviate
00:29:34.840 5% from the norm
00:29:37.000 or 10% from the norm
00:29:38.400 or something like that
00:29:39.280 carefully and cautiously
00:29:41.240 as long as the rest of you
00:29:42.860 is all well ordered
00:29:43.740 in a normative manner
00:29:44.740 you might be able to get away with that
00:29:46.460 and you might be able to sustain it across time
00:29:48.340 and people might be able to tolerate you
00:29:50.400 if you do it
00:29:51.000 or maybe you'll get really lucky
00:29:52.460 and you happen to be creative
00:29:53.780 but reasonably well put together
00:29:55.300 and people will actually be happy
00:29:56.880 that there's something idiosyncratic and unique about you
00:30:00.000 but even under those circumstances
00:30:01.880 mostly what you want is to
00:30:03.340 have a routine
00:30:05.180 that's disciplined
00:30:06.160 that's predictable
00:30:07.140 and bloody well stick to it
00:30:08.800 you're going to be way
00:30:09.900 healthier
00:30:10.920 and happier
00:30:11.720 and saner
00:30:12.480 if you do that
00:30:13.180 and then the other thing that you need
00:30:14.500 because
00:30:15.180 this is one of the things the psychoanalysts got wrong
00:30:18.260 I think
00:30:18.680 is that
00:30:19.000 they overestimated the degree to which
00:30:21.340 sanity was a consequence
00:30:22.920 of internal
00:30:23.880 of being properly structured internally
00:30:26.540 you know
00:30:27.100 because from the psychoanalytic point of view
00:30:29.640 you're sort of an ego
00:30:30.480 and that ego is inside you
00:30:32.080 and of course it rests on an unconscious structure
00:30:34.420 but
00:30:34.680 the purpose of psychoanalysis
00:30:36.680 is to sort out that unconscious structure
00:30:39.020 and the ego on top of it
00:30:40.540 and to make you a
00:30:41.460 fully functioning and autonomous individual
00:30:43.840 but there's a problem with that
00:30:45.640 because
00:30:45.960 the reason that you're sane
00:30:50.020 as a fully functional
00:30:51.320 and autonomous human being
00:30:52.860 isn't because
00:30:53.720 you've organized your psyche
00:30:55.480 even though that's important
00:30:56.680 the reason that you're sane
00:30:58.600 if you're
00:30:59.140 if you have a well organized unconscious
00:31:01.980 and ego
00:31:02.540 is because other people
00:31:03.580 can tolerate having you around
00:31:05.360 for reasonably extensive periods of time
00:31:07.940 and will cuff you across the back of the head
00:31:10.200 every time you do something so stupid
00:31:12.060 that people will dislike you permanently
00:31:14.160 if you continue
00:31:15.200 and so what people are doing to each other
00:31:17.720 all the time
00:31:18.560 just non-stop
00:31:20.120 is broadcasting sanity signals
00:31:22.880 back and forth
00:31:23.840 right
00:31:24.140 it's like
00:31:24.580 you smile at people
00:31:26.020 if they're
00:31:26.580 well if they're not
00:31:27.640 not only behaving properly
00:31:29.040 but behaving in a way
00:31:30.020 that you would like
00:31:30.700 to see them continue to behave
00:31:32.580 you frown at them if they're not
00:31:34.200 you ignore them if they're not
00:31:35.380 you shun them
00:31:36.140 you
00:31:36.320 you roll your eyes at them
00:31:37.900 you manifest a disgust face
00:31:39.520 you don't listen to them
00:31:40.460 you interrupt them
00:31:41.300 you won't cooperate with them
00:31:42.840 you won't compete with them
00:31:43.900 it's like
00:31:44.280 you're blasting signals
00:31:45.860 at other people
00:31:46.500 about how to regulate their behavior
00:31:48.020 so frequently
00:31:50.040 well it just makes up
00:31:51.260 all of your social interaction
00:31:52.540 that's why we face each other
00:31:54.260 and we have emotional displays
00:31:55.760 on our face
00:31:56.480 and we're looking at each other's eyes
00:31:57.860 and we know exactly
00:31:59.040 we know as much as we can
00:32:00.760 about what's going on
00:32:01.720 with each other
00:32:02.360 given that we don't have
00:32:03.540 immediate access
00:32:04.240 to the contents of their consciousness
00:32:05.840 and so
00:32:06.360 partly what you're doing
00:32:07.860 with your routine
00:32:09.040 is establishing yourself
00:32:10.500 as a credible
00:32:11.740 reliable
00:32:12.600 trustworthy
00:32:13.600 potentially interesting
00:32:15.080 human being
00:32:15.780 who isn't going to do anything
00:32:17.280 too erratic at any moment
00:32:18.660 and everyone else is around there
00:32:20.420 tapping you into shape
00:32:21.820 making sure that that's exactly
00:32:23.180 what you are
00:32:23.820 and that's how you stay sane
00:32:25.720 and so what happens to people too
00:32:27.160 if they don't have a routine
00:32:28.360 and they get isolated
00:32:29.820 is they start to drift
00:32:31.060 and they drift badly
00:32:32.580 because the world is too complicated
00:32:35.000 for you to keep it organized
00:32:36.800 all by yourself
00:32:38.040 you just cannot do it
00:32:39.900 so a lot of our
00:32:41.060 so we outsource the problem of sanity
00:32:43.740 and it's very intelligent
00:32:45.860 that we outsource the problem of sanity
00:32:47.520 because sanity is an impossibly complex problem
00:32:51.720 and so the way that we manage the incredibly complex problem
00:32:55.720 is we have a very large number of brains
00:32:58.800 working simultaneously on the problem
00:33:00.860 all the time
00:33:01.720 it's like a stock market for sanity
00:33:04.040 and it's partly
00:33:05.260 and I use that
00:33:06.540 I use that definition
00:33:07.840 with purpose
00:33:09.060 because the stock market does the same kind of impossible thing
00:33:12.520 right
00:33:12.720 because it tries to price things
00:33:14.080 which is impossible
00:33:15.160 there's
00:33:15.820 how many things are there
00:33:17.360 like a billion
00:33:18.400 how in the world do you decide what the price is
00:33:21.060 you can't decide what the price is
00:33:22.960 that's why you have a stock market
00:33:24.720 well in a free market
00:33:26.500 I mean for consumer goods
00:33:27.940 is everyone's voting on what the price of everything is all the time
00:33:30.820 and that's the way we figure it out
00:33:32.240 because it's actually
00:33:33.000 it's technically impossible
00:33:34.620 that's partly why the stock market explodes now and then
00:33:37.280 and there's bubbles
00:33:37.960 and all that sort of thing
00:33:38.960 but anyways
00:33:39.760 the point is
00:33:40.960 things are chaotic
00:33:44.460 in Alice in Wonderland
00:33:46.420 when Alice goes down the rabbit hole
00:33:48.260 that's the underworld
00:33:50.060 right
00:33:50.460 so now she's gone
00:33:52.240 into the substructure of being
00:33:54.200 and she meets the Red Queen
00:33:56.540 and the Red Queen is Mother Nature
00:33:58.500 and Mother Nature is running around
00:34:00.980 yelling
00:34:02.060 off with her heads
00:34:02.920 off with her heads
00:34:03.840 which is of course
00:34:05.500 what Mother Nature does
00:34:06.640 and she tells Alice
00:34:08.240 in my kingdom
00:34:09.720 you have to run as fast as you can
00:34:11.380 just to stay in the same place
00:34:12.980 and that's exactly right
00:34:14.860 and that's a description of
00:34:16.060 in fact evolutionary biologists
00:34:19.060 psychologists have picked up
00:34:20.400 on that phrase
00:34:21.080 they call it the Red Queen problem
00:34:22.480 and the Red Queen problem is
00:34:24.200 everything's after you all the time
00:34:27.340 and you're not smart enough
00:34:28.200 to do anything about it
00:34:29.280 or enough about it
00:34:30.480 and so that's a permanent existential problem
00:34:33.100 so how do you deal with that
00:34:34.200 you've got a biological structure
00:34:35.840 so your embodiment is part of
00:34:38.440 the solution to the problem
00:34:39.780 and then you're enculturated
00:34:41.400 and because you're enculturated
00:34:43.800 you're taught a lot of things
00:34:45.720 that you need to know
00:34:46.500 but mostly what you're taught
00:34:47.620 is how to communicate with other people
00:34:49.440 in an acceptable manner
00:34:50.540 and then once you can communicate
00:34:53.000 with people in an acceptable manner
00:34:54.960 then you can outsource your problems
00:34:56.520 constantly
00:34:57.120 which you're doing constantly
00:34:58.380 and so we're in this
00:34:59.200 continual dynamic exchange
00:35:01.700 of problem solving
00:35:02.640 so if you're a socialized person
00:35:04.200 that's what you get access to
00:35:05.680 and that's something to know
00:35:06.880 if you're going to have kids
00:35:07.920 and I mentioned this
00:35:08.840 I think in a previous lecture
00:35:09.940 the purpose of being a parent
00:35:13.080 for very young children
00:35:14.320 is to make your children
00:35:15.720 exceptionally socially desirable
00:35:18.620 by the age of four
00:35:20.280 because if you can do that
00:35:22.140 they're set
00:35:23.380 because everyone wants them around
00:35:26.140 and as soon as everybody wants them around
00:35:28.080 they want to play with them
00:35:28.940 they want to cooperate with them
00:35:29.980 they want to compete with them
00:35:31.100 it's like the door is open
00:35:32.520 the door is open
00:35:33.320 and they stay sane
00:35:34.260 because they've got all sorts of people
00:35:35.540 who actually like them
00:35:36.560 that are helping them out
00:35:37.820 and so that's your goal
00:35:39.260 is to make them
00:35:40.220 as socially acceptable
00:35:41.880 as you possibly can
00:35:43.020 as socially desirable
00:35:43.940 as you possibly can
00:35:44.980 and that doesn't mean
00:35:46.280 you render them
00:35:48.200 obedient without spirit
00:35:50.260 right
00:35:50.660 that's a tyrant's mode
00:35:52.380 of enforcing social acceptability
00:35:55.280 it's like never do anything wrong
00:35:57.000 well that's not any way to
00:35:59.140 I mean that's a good
00:36:00.100 piece of advice
00:36:01.220 you know
00:36:01.540 like
00:36:01.780 but
00:36:02.520 it's missing the other half
00:36:04.660 which is do a bunch of things
00:36:05.880 that are right
00:36:06.460 so that
00:36:06.940 so that
00:36:07.640 people are
00:36:08.600 thrilled to have you around
00:36:10.200 and encourage that
00:36:11.760 that's what you want to do
00:36:12.600 as a parent
00:36:13.220 as well as
00:36:14.120 inculcating the order
00:36:15.460 and so
00:36:16.020 you know
00:36:16.680 in this little diagram
00:36:18.320 I indicated that
00:36:19.260 there's God the father
00:36:20.620 with the son behind him
00:36:21.700 and he's
00:36:22.000 ruling over this walled city
00:36:23.680 so he's like
00:36:24.680 the meta spirit
00:36:25.640 of the walled city
00:36:26.700 it's very very nice
00:36:28.860 very nice image
00:36:30.580 brilliant image
00:36:31.540 so it's
00:36:32.420 is the collective spirit
00:36:34.460 of the city
00:36:35.140 that's another way of thinking about it
00:36:36.460 or the collective spirit
00:36:37.240 of the city
00:36:37.760 across time
00:36:38.840 or the collective spirit
00:36:40.040 of the force
00:36:41.360 that built
00:36:42.080 and maintained the city
00:36:43.540 across time
00:36:44.300 even better
00:36:45.140 and that's associated
00:36:46.540 with the sun
00:36:47.400 because it's a
00:36:48.460 it's associated
00:36:50.160 with enlightenment
00:36:50.840 and illumination
00:36:51.880 and all of those things
00:36:53.220 that we associate
00:36:53.800 with higher consciousness
00:36:54.780 and vision
00:36:55.420 it's a brilliant image
00:36:56.740 and then
00:36:57.540 I overlaid this
00:36:59.000 you know
00:36:59.260 now of course
00:37:00.100 the patriarchal aspect of existence
00:37:04.480 can become tyrannical
00:37:05.880 it does that quite regularly
00:37:07.840 it's one of the existential dangers
00:37:09.740 of human civilization
00:37:11.120 is that
00:37:11.720 civilization is a medication for chaos
00:37:14.580 but it can spin out of control
00:37:16.700 in and of itself
00:37:17.980 and become its own
00:37:18.980 sort of problem
00:37:19.960 which is like a hyper order problem
00:37:21.740 generally
00:37:22.140 which then produces a chaos problem
00:37:24.320 so
00:37:24.940 every solution
00:37:26.040 carries within it
00:37:27.180 certain problems
00:37:28.960 right
00:37:29.320 because no solution is perfect
00:37:30.680 and so you have to keep things in balance
00:37:32.360 but
00:37:32.640 it's one of the reasons
00:37:33.740 that I'm really
00:37:34.440 let's call it irritated
00:37:37.540 about the postmodernists
00:37:39.440 because they keep
00:37:40.360 yammering about the patriarchy
00:37:42.460 and it's very very annoying
00:37:44.380 because
00:37:44.880 because
00:37:46.020 it's self-evident
00:37:47.640 that social structures
00:37:49.020 are tyrannical
00:37:50.020 it's like
00:37:50.760 that's not news folks
00:37:52.540 that's obvious
00:37:54.000 but that's not all they are
00:37:56.520 and
00:37:56.980 it's
00:37:57.440 it's the reduction
00:37:59.180 of the entire
00:38:00.220 complex
00:38:01.880 solution
00:38:03.280 let's say
00:38:03.860 to a unidimensional problem
00:38:06.020 it's just
00:38:06.860 tyranny
00:38:07.660 it's like
00:38:08.100 no actually
00:38:09.160 it's not just tyranny
00:38:10.160 if you spent six months
00:38:11.800 somewhere that was just
00:38:12.860 tyranny
00:38:13.440 you'd know the difference
00:38:14.860 very very rapidly
00:38:15.820 and that doesn't mean
00:38:16.840 that everyone
00:38:17.840 doesn't give up
00:38:19.460 a pound or two
00:38:20.460 or ten
00:38:21.100 or twenty
00:38:21.700 of flesh
00:38:22.440 to participate
00:38:23.900 even in a society
00:38:25.380 that's as free
00:38:26.020 as a western society is
00:38:27.400 we all get crushed
00:38:28.520 and molded
00:38:29.180 by the tyrannical force
00:38:30.820 of social convention
00:38:31.960 but
00:38:33.160 at least in principle
00:38:34.500 the benefit
00:38:35.920 is worth the cost
00:38:37.220 and then it's also
00:38:38.400 up to you
00:38:38.920 to make sure
00:38:39.360 that you don't sacrifice
00:38:40.320 more to the group
00:38:41.380 than you should
00:38:42.820 and you can start
00:38:44.300 to tell
00:38:44.760 if you're sacrificing
00:38:45.800 more to the group
00:38:46.480 than you should
00:38:47.060 because you start
00:38:47.760 to become resentful
00:38:48.660 of other people
00:38:49.300 that's part of that
00:38:50.440 that's part of the
00:38:51.160 psychological mechanism
00:38:52.160 that's informing you
00:38:53.120 of that
00:38:53.440 so it's up to you
00:38:54.500 to fight
00:38:55.000 against
00:38:56.040 the overarching
00:38:57.720 pressure for conformity
00:38:59.360 to retain your
00:39:00.540 individual logos
00:39:01.920 let's say
00:39:02.560 but that's sort of
00:39:03.640 your problem
00:39:04.260 it's like
00:39:04.780 the group
00:39:05.820 wants you to behave
00:39:07.420 now if you could behave
00:39:09.200 and be
00:39:09.820 creatively productive
00:39:11.480 so much the better
00:39:12.340 but that's pretty damn rare
00:39:13.540 so
00:39:13.820 the group generally
00:39:15.280 tends to settle
00:39:16.240 just for behave
00:39:17.560 and there's a
00:39:18.580 tyrannical element
00:39:19.460 of that
00:39:19.860 but what the hell
00:39:20.900 is the alternative
00:39:21.560 it's you know
00:39:23.040 our society
00:39:23.820 is based on
00:39:24.720 consensus
00:39:25.440 and the consensus
00:39:26.460 is based on
00:39:27.340 the sacrifice
00:39:28.080 of a certain
00:39:29.200 sacrifice
00:39:29.780 of individuality
00:39:30.680 even though
00:39:31.220 individuality
00:39:31.880 is absolutely
00:39:32.520 necessary
00:39:33.100 as a revitalizing
00:39:34.680 force for the society
00:39:35.860 it's a very
00:39:36.640 tough thing
00:39:38.140 to manage properly
00:39:38.980 so anyways
00:39:39.500 you have
00:39:41.080 your physiological
00:39:43.460 structure
00:39:44.120 as your first
00:39:44.900 line of ordering
00:39:45.800 in relationship
00:39:46.540 to chaos
00:39:47.220 because your body
00:39:48.420 presents you
00:39:49.480 with the world
00:39:50.040 in a certain way
00:39:51.040 and then the second
00:39:52.160 line of defense
00:39:52.840 is something like
00:39:53.580 the sociological
00:39:54.340 structure that you
00:39:55.120 inhabit
00:39:55.440 we could call those
00:39:56.220 the competency
00:39:56.960 hierarchies
00:39:57.760 or something like that
00:39:58.700 and thank God
00:39:59.820 for them
00:40:00.200 because you know
00:40:01.260 maybe you're going
00:40:02.160 to be able to
00:40:02.540 specialize in one
00:40:03.380 or two things
00:40:04.000 in your life
00:40:04.520 or five things
00:40:05.280 but there's 300
00:40:06.040 things you need
00:40:06.800 to know
00:40:07.260 and if it's just
00:40:08.360 you
00:40:08.740 you know
00:40:09.260 you'll be doing
00:40:09.800 your genius level
00:40:10.560 mathematics
00:40:11.160 while your bathtub
00:40:12.400 is leaking
00:40:12.960 all over your
00:40:13.680 bathroom floor
00:40:15.620 and that's not so
00:40:16.340 good
00:40:16.540 so you can call
00:40:17.200 a plumber
00:40:17.640 and hooray for that
00:40:18.600 so you know
00:40:19.660 we tend to cooperate
00:40:20.700 to keep chaos
00:40:21.560 under control
00:40:22.300 and we tend to
00:40:23.520 cooperate to keep
00:40:24.340 order under control
00:40:25.360 and that's the
00:40:26.560 political dialogue
00:40:28.360 right
00:40:28.840 we maintain the
00:40:30.500 culture to keep
00:40:31.140 chaos under control
00:40:32.260 and we
00:40:33.500 balance the culture
00:40:35.340 out properly
00:40:35.980 to keep the
00:40:36.740 culture under control
00:40:38.040 and that way
00:40:39.180 we get to live
00:40:40.120 reasonably peacefully
00:40:41.740 reasonably productively
00:40:43.400 for a reasonable
00:40:44.400 amount of time
00:40:45.220 and that's the best
00:40:46.100 that we can do
00:40:46.820 and we should have
00:40:47.920 some gratitude
00:40:48.520 when that's working
00:40:49.780 because the default
00:40:51.540 condition
00:40:52.580 of things
00:40:54.540 is that not only
00:40:56.600 do they not work
00:40:57.400 very well
00:40:57.940 they work worse
00:40:58.820 and worse
00:40:59.360 over time
00:40:59.980 all by themselves
00:41:00.920 so anytime anything
00:41:02.120 is working
00:41:02.660 you should just be
00:41:03.460 amazed by it
00:41:06.740 going online
00:41:07.860 without expressvpn
00:41:09.060 is like not paying
00:41:09.920 attention to the
00:41:10.560 safety demonstration
00:41:11.320 on a flight
00:41:11.960 most of the time
00:41:13.100 you'll probably be
00:41:13.960 fine
00:41:14.300 but what if one day
00:41:15.640 that weird yellow
00:41:16.540 mask drops down
00:41:17.420 from overhead
00:41:17.900 and you have no
00:41:19.080 idea what to do
00:41:19.900 in our hyperconnected
00:41:21.220 world
00:41:21.500 your digital privacy
00:41:22.600 isn't just a luxury
00:41:23.600 it's a fundamental
00:41:24.800 right
00:41:25.160 every time you connect
00:41:26.080 to an unsecured network
00:41:27.260 in a cafe
00:41:27.920 hotel or airport
00:41:29.200 you're essentially
00:41:30.120 broadcasting your
00:41:31.020 personal information
00:41:31.820 to anyone with a
00:41:32.940 technical know-how
00:41:33.720 to intercept it
00:41:34.520 and let's be clear
00:41:35.360 it doesn't take
00:41:36.240 a genius hacker
00:41:36.880 to do this
00:41:37.520 with some off-the-shelf
00:41:38.820 hardware
00:41:39.200 even a tech-savvy
00:41:40.320 teenager
00:41:40.800 could potentially
00:41:41.540 access your passwords
00:41:42.740 bank logins
00:41:43.660 and credit card details
00:41:44.920 now you might think
00:41:46.300 what's the big deal
00:41:47.240 who'd want my data
00:41:48.240 anyway
00:41:48.620 well on the dark web
00:41:49.920 your personal information
00:41:51.160 could fetch up to
00:41:51.960 $1,000
00:41:52.760 that's right
00:41:53.980 there's a whole
00:41:54.660 underground economy
00:41:55.580 built on stolen identities
00:41:57.200 enter expressvpn
00:41:59.000 it's like a digital
00:42:00.040 fortress
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00:42:03.600 their encryption is so
00:42:05.160 robust that it would
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00:42:09.300 it but don't let its
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00:43:51.300 all right so what does
00:43:55.060 the frame look like
00:43:56.020 well I think it looks
00:43:56.900 something like this and
00:43:57.840 this is as far as I can
00:43:59.100 tell this is the bare
00:44:00.000 bones this is the bare
00:44:01.520 bones of a variety of
00:44:02.380 things it's a bare
00:44:03.060 bones story it's a bare
00:44:04.620 bone conceptual
00:44:05.520 framework it's a bare
00:44:07.020 bone dasein to speak
00:44:08.960 in Heideggerian terms
00:44:10.300 it's like it's the bare
00:44:11.400 bones world that you
00:44:12.420 live in you're always in
00:44:13.640 one of these worlds
00:44:14.540 there's no getting out
00:44:15.780 of them you can move
00:44:17.340 from one to another but
00:44:18.540 you're always in a world
00:44:19.400 like this and so this is
00:44:20.500 the world that you're in
00:44:21.360 you're somewhere because
00:44:24.500 you have to be somewhere
00:44:25.460 now you might not know
00:44:26.600 where that is which means
00:44:28.420 that somewhere that you
00:44:29.620 are is chaotic in which
00:44:31.480 case you need to go over
00:44:32.760 your past in great detail
00:44:34.360 and figure out where you
00:44:35.940 are it's like you're lost
00:44:37.180 right you're you're lost
00:44:38.600 and the problem with being
00:44:39.460 lost is when you're lost
00:44:40.940 you don't know where to go
00:44:42.100 and the problem with not
00:44:43.040 knowing where to go is
00:44:43.860 there's a million places
00:44:45.120 that you could go and a
00:44:46.620 million places is too many
00:44:47.940 places for you to go
00:44:48.920 without dying so being
00:44:50.600 lost is not good so you
00:44:52.340 need to know where you
00:44:53.200 are one of the things that
00:44:55.160 we built online my
00:44:56.420 partners and I is this
00:44:58.220 program called past
00:44:59.460 authoring that helps
00:45:00.380 people lay out the
00:45:02.060 the narrative of their
00:45:04.040 past to identify to break
00:45:06.600 their life down into six
00:45:07.820 stages epochs we call them
00:45:09.580 and then to identify the
00:45:10.900 emotionally significant
00:45:13.100 moments in each epoch and
00:45:14.620 to write them out what
00:45:15.720 happened negatively what
00:45:16.780 happened positively what the
00:45:18.400 consequences were what you
00:45:20.060 derived from it perhaps what
00:45:21.460 you could have done
00:45:22.060 differently perhaps what you
00:45:23.320 learn from it all of that so
00:45:24.660 that you can narrow in zero
00:45:27.040 in on determining precisely
00:45:29.640 where it is that you are
00:45:31.320 right now and people are
00:45:33.000 often loath to do that
00:45:33.940 because they actually don't
00:45:34.780 want to know because they'd
00:45:35.680 rather be spread out in a
00:45:37.940 sort of half blind manner in
00:45:41.400 the fog hoping that the place
00:45:43.860 that they're at is better than
00:45:45.180 it really is and deluding
00:45:47.060 themselves by remaining vague
00:45:48.880 than to figure out I'm right
00:45:50.600 here right now with these
00:45:51.700 specific problems but it's
00:45:53.480 actually better to do that
00:45:55.560 because if you have a set of
00:45:57.120 specific problems and you've
00:45:58.760 really narrowed them down and
00:46:00.180 really specified them then you
00:46:02.020 can probably start fixing them
00:46:03.340 and you can start fixing them
00:46:05.700 in micro ways bit by bit but
00:46:08.380 there's no way you can do that
00:46:09.400 without knowing where you are
00:46:10.500 it's impossible and you can kind
00:46:12.380 of tell if you don't know where
00:46:13.720 you are it's quite
00:46:15.220 straightforward if you are
00:46:17.720 haunted by reveries of the past
00:46:20.260 for events that are older than
00:46:22.900 approximately 18 months if they
00:46:24.840 continue to come up in your mind
00:46:26.420 over and over in your dreams over
00:46:27.880 and over you haven't extracted the
00:46:32.040 world out from your past
00:46:33.880 experiences the potential is still
00:46:36.040 trapped in the past and to confront
00:46:38.440 the potential means to confront the
00:46:40.140 dragon of the past and of course
00:46:42.120 that's terrifying and it can
00:46:43.760 seriously be terrifying so for
00:46:45.340 example maybe you're vague and ill
00:46:47.740 formed and ill-defined because you
00:46:49.480 were abused very badly when you were
00:46:50.860 a child four years old something
00:46:52.400 like that and maybe you're abused by a
00:46:53.740 family member because that's
00:46:55.060 generally who does the abusing and so
00:46:57.520 that just makes it worse and then what
00:46:59.300 that means is that you've got a
00:47:01.600 implicit you've had an implicit
00:47:04.060 encounter with malevolent evil that
00:47:07.840 know you've had a direct encounter with
00:47:09.580 malevolent evil but you have an
00:47:11.020 implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil
00:47:13.660 that's plaguing you it's still there
00:47:15.640 it's trapped in the memories right
00:47:17.320 it's it's trapped in the
00:47:18.760 representational structure and as an
00:47:20.800 adult you're now faced with the
00:47:22.300 necessity of articulating that fully
00:47:24.340 before you have any chance whatsoever
00:47:25.720 of freeing yourself from it and so
00:47:27.520 that's no joke lots of times people
00:47:29.080 have to go into the past that's what
00:47:30.520 the psychoanalysts do and they and say
00:47:32.740 look here is something came along just
00:47:34.540 bloody well knocked me over and it
00:47:37.240 isn't even that I repressed it which
00:47:39.100 which I think was well we won't talk
00:47:41.560 about Freud's errors because Freud was a
00:47:43.480 genius so we'll just leave him alone
00:47:44.800 but but sometimes it's not repression
00:47:47.320 it's just the terrible things happen to
00:47:49.060 people at such a young age that there
00:47:50.860 isn't a bloody chance in hell that they
00:47:53.080 can figure out why they happened or
00:47:54.820 what to do with them or what they mean
00:47:56.500 and then you can carry that with you and
00:47:58.720 you carry it with you it's like your
00:48:01.660 your your body encounters the world in
00:48:04.280 stages and it happens very rapidly well
00:48:06.640 it can extend over years but the
00:48:08.320 initial stages happen very rapidly so
00:48:10.240 for example if you're walking down the
00:48:12.400 road and you hear a large noise be a
00:48:14.080 loud noise behind you go like this
00:48:16.000 that's a predator defense response by
00:48:18.480 the way you crouch down and that's to
00:48:20.420 stop something from jumping on your
00:48:22.000 back and getting at your neck too easily
00:48:23.920 that's like few mill a few hundred
00:48:26.020 milliseconds it's really fast or even
00:48:27.580 faster than that and it better be
00:48:29.080 because something like a snake but
00:48:31.120 we'll say can nail you just right now so
00:48:33.160 you better be fast but it's low
00:48:34.780 resolution it's like danger snake
00:48:37.180 something like that or danger predatory cat
00:48:39.640 it's that fast and then you can unravel
00:48:43.300 that and categorize it but that takes
00:48:47.260 time you do that with emotion and then
00:48:49.300 you do it with cognition you can do that
00:48:50.880 with long-term thinking you know because
00:48:52.660 maybe you've encountered someone
00:48:54.040 specifically malevolent and predatory at
00:48:56.140 work it happens to people a lot who's
00:48:58.060 operating as a as a destructive bully
00:49:00.940 and who seems to have no positive
00:49:02.880 function whatsoever and is only living
00:49:06.520 that out and then you you know you don't
00:49:08.260 know what to do about it so you're you're
00:49:10.180 in prey mode I don't mean this kind of
00:49:13.180 mode although that would help too but I
00:49:15.220 mean you're acting like a prey animal and
00:49:17.440 then you have this terribly complex thing
00:49:19.280 to decompose which is what the hell's up
00:49:21.280 with this person why are they making my
00:49:23.620 life miserable what is it about me that
00:49:25.660 allows them to make my life miserable
00:49:27.880 that's a nasty little road to walk down
00:49:29.920 and you're stuck with having to you're
00:49:32.020 stuck with having to decompose it maybe
00:49:34.180 you can't maybe formulating an explicit
00:49:37.360 philosophy of good and evil to deal with
00:49:39.760 something malevolent in your environment
00:49:41.920 actually just happens to be beyond you and
00:49:45.400 that could easily be it's certainly the
00:49:47.440 case for people who are young and it's
00:49:49.240 the case for plenty of adults as well it's
00:49:51.040 no simple thing to mad to manage it's
00:49:53.500 something to that often soldiers who
00:49:55.480 have post-traumatic stress disorder have
00:49:57.160 to do because they've encountered
00:49:58.480 terrible things they've either done them
00:50:00.340 or ran into them and they need to
00:50:02.200 update their moral model of the world or
00:50:04.660 if they end up in something close enough
00:50:07.360 closely approximating hell anyway so you
00:50:12.400 need to know where you are that's this
00:50:15.040 what is where are you so you're
00:50:17.500 navigating your navigator you're a
00:50:19.120 sailor on an ocean man that's what that's
00:50:21.100 what you are you're a mobile creature
00:50:22.480 you're going from point A to point B all
00:50:24.760 the time you know it's sitting there
00:50:26.260 glued to a rock like some brainless you
00:50:29.260 know sea creature there's a funny
00:50:31.000 little creature called a hydra very
00:50:33.340 simple little creature in its juvenile
00:50:35.620 stage it has a brain because it swims
00:50:37.600 around but then when it turns into an
00:50:39.700 adult it latches itself to a rock and
00:50:42.220 promptly digests its brain because if
00:50:44.500 you're just sitting on a rock and you're
00:50:45.920 not moving you don't need a brain so but
00:50:47.500 that's not our issue right we're
00:50:48.920 we're zipping around in the world and so
00:50:50.680 we're navigating agents and so to
00:50:52.600 navigate and there's two things you
00:50:55.000 need to know the first is where the
00:50:57.640 hell are you exactly precisely right
00:51:00.160 razor-sharp what's good about you and
00:51:03.340 what's bad about you by your own by your
00:51:05.500 own reckoning you don't have to you can
00:51:07.420 ask other people but this is a game you
00:51:09.100 play yourself it's like as far as I'm
00:51:11.140 concerned I'm taking stock what is it
00:51:14.200 that's okay about me and what needs some
00:51:15.640 work and you got to watch to not be too
00:51:18.280 self-critical when you're doing that too
00:51:19.840 because that can just be another kind of
00:51:21.100 flaw and then the next is okay well
00:51:23.080 where are you going what's your
00:51:24.820 destination well and that's what the
00:51:27.640 frame is now you know you could do that
00:51:29.680 in a very sophisticated way and you do
00:51:31.900 that by thinking consciously about who it
00:51:34.360 is that you are in an articulated manner
00:51:36.100 and where you want to go and why and how
00:51:38.260 you're going to get there and people
00:51:39.580 hardly ever do that that is that's come
00:51:41.620 as such an absolute shock to me as an
00:51:44.500 educator I just because one of the other
00:51:48.100 programs I use this in my classes what
00:51:51.760 are the other programs in this suite of
00:51:53.200 programs is called the future authoring
00:51:54.700 program and I started developing it my
00:51:57.040 maps of meaning class which is where
00:51:58.600 some of this materials from and I got
00:52:00.460 students to write about their past it's
00:52:02.140 like okay we're talking about stories so
00:52:04.900 let's tell your story who are you how
00:52:07.060 do you get here and what are you now that
00:52:10.480 usually helps people put things to rest
00:52:12.100 although it's quite stressful while
00:52:14.340 you're doing it stress goes up when
00:52:17.140 you're doing it and maybe you feel
00:52:18.760 miserable for a couple of weeks and
00:52:20.140 then stress goes down and it stays down
00:52:21.940 so that's and that's also why people
00:52:23.860 don't do it because who the hell wants
00:52:25.420 to have their stress go up but if it's
00:52:27.400 temporary it's a sacrifice so then the
00:52:30.240 next issue is well where are you going
00:52:31.840 and one of the things that and this I
00:52:33.700 just still I cannot understand the
00:52:36.040 students that had been in education
00:52:38.480 system for 15 years 14 years high-end
00:52:41.500 students most of them not once in their
00:52:43.840 whole bloody life did anyone ever get
00:52:46.720 them to sit down for like a day and say
00:52:48.640 alright justify your existence like well
00:52:53.200 seriously it's like here you are in
00:52:54.940 university you're taking a bunch of
00:52:56.200 courses you've got some sort of vague
00:52:58.240 career plan it's like defend the damn
00:53:00.820 thing a bit since you're going to go live
00:53:03.340 it and everything you're staking
00:53:05.680 everything on it it's like what's your
00:53:07.660 damn plan and why are you so convinced
00:53:10.540 that it's not the plan of a babbling
00:53:13.360 fool because if you haven't thought
00:53:15.760 about it then it is and if you really
00:53:17.740 want to go out there and live that out
00:53:19.300 you know one of the things Carl Jung said
00:53:21.700 was that you you're in a story whether
00:53:24.040 you know it or not and and then he made
00:53:27.160 two nice comments about that if it's
00:53:30.280 someone else's story you're probably going
00:53:31.840 to get a bit part and it might not be the
00:53:34.180 one you want and if it's a story that
00:53:36.760 you don't know it might be one with a
00:53:38.200 really bad ending or maybe it's just bad
00:53:40.600 period with a worse ending and if you
00:53:43.060 don't know what the story that you're
00:53:44.140 living out is maybe that's the one you
00:53:47.200 know maybe you got that from your mother
00:53:48.820 you got it from your grandmother you
00:53:50.380 got it from your aunt or God only knows
00:53:52.480 where you picked it up because you pick
00:53:54.160 up things like mad because that's what
00:53:55.540 human beings are like so maybe you're
00:53:57.520 living a malevolent tragedy unconsciously
00:54:00.400 and then one thing you might ask yourself
00:54:02.920 is well how wretched and miserable is
00:54:05.140 your life let's add futile to that how
00:54:07.480 wretched miserable and futile is your life
00:54:09.760 and you might say well yeah seventy
00:54:12.580 percent on each count it's like then
00:54:14.740 you're probably unconsciously living out
00:54:16.960 a malevolent tragedy and maybe that's
00:54:19.960 not for the best
00:54:21.340 well it's either that or the whole
00:54:22.900 universe hates you right or seventy
00:54:25.300 percent hates you you know so so
00:54:28.300 anyways you know we got students to start
00:54:30.280 writing in detail about not what they
00:54:35.140 wanted it's not a career thing because
00:54:38.440 that's the closest people usually get is
00:54:40.260 they have a career plan it's like no no
00:54:41.980 it's not a career plan that's that's
00:54:43.900 peripheral important but peripheral
00:54:45.820 it's like all right you got three
00:54:47.980 years man you're going to live them
00:54:49.580 anyways devote those three years to
00:54:52.960 setting the world up around you so that
00:54:54.520 it's the best it can possibly be for you
00:54:57.880 as if you were taking care of yourself as
00:55:00.520 if you cared for yourself but what would
00:55:03.660 that look like you know let's say just
00:55:05.200 for the sake of argument if you figured
00:55:07.120 out where you were that you could have
00:55:08.800 what would be best for you well what is
00:55:12.280 that I bet you never asked people don't
00:55:17.960 ask and so life comes at them like
00:55:21.340 random snakes and they sort of fend them
00:55:23.740 off and life goes by and things don't
00:55:26.680 work out the way people expected them to
00:55:28.540 but a huge part of that is they didn't
00:55:31.360 know where they were because they
00:55:33.040 wouldn't look or didn't know that they
00:55:34.540 should look
00:55:35.260 ignorance and willful blindness right to
00:55:37.360 great catastrophes and they never figured
00:55:40.560 out where they wanted to go or why now
00:55:43.260 there's a problem with figure out where
00:55:44.580 you want to go and the problem is is
00:55:47.040 that you make your conditions for
00:55:48.480 failure clear to yourself and people
00:55:51.060 don't like that so if you keep yourself
00:55:53.220 in the fog then you can't tell when you
00:55:55.920 screwed up now that isn't so good
00:55:58.020 because you're still screwing up you're
00:55:59.460 just too blind self-blind to notice
00:56:02.160 although in in in the short term that's
00:56:05.340 less painful if you make your criteria
00:56:07.920 for success razor sharp then you know
00:56:09.960 every time you screw up but that's great
00:56:12.360 because then you could fix it you could
00:56:14.020 either repair the the behavioral
00:56:19.140 inadequacy or the conceptual inadequacy that
00:56:21.840 you're using as a tool in that
00:56:23.160 situation or maybe you could adjust your
00:56:25.080 damn plan either way you can fix it and
00:56:28.740 so okay so you're living in one of
00:56:31.080 these bloody things and you might as
00:56:34.500 well it seems to me you might as well
00:56:36.240 make it the best one you could live in
00:56:37.800 because you don't have anything better
00:56:39.540 to do now if you don't do that if you
00:56:43.380 don't do it consciously and and this is
00:56:45.060 what the psychoanalyst pointed out is
00:56:46.560 that you have innumerable quasi
00:56:50.260 autonomous subsystems that make you up
00:56:53.580 that will generate stories impulsively
00:56:56.700 and you'll just act about and you know
00:56:59.100 that because you watch yourself over
00:57:01.080 two weeks and you think Jesus I did a
00:57:02.580 lot of stupid things in the last two
00:57:03.980 weeks and you think why and it's
00:57:06.180 because you're a random your collection
00:57:08.280 of somewhat random quasi autonomous
00:57:11.080 personality units and lacking a leader
00:57:14.100 they're just going to fire off whenever
00:57:16.200 they want you know first you're hungry
00:57:17.700 then you're thirsty then you want to go to
00:57:19.200 bed with your wife you know then you
00:57:20.900 want to sleep in then you want to tell
00:57:22.380 your boss off then you want to curse at
00:57:24.000 the guy that cuts you off in traffic
00:57:25.500 it's like you're kind of like a two
00:57:27.420 year old you know just it's one
00:57:29.700 emotional frame after another vying for
00:57:33.240 dominance there's no overarching
00:57:35.160 hierarchy and there's no king at the top
00:57:37.500 and so you know we already talked about
00:57:40.800 pyramids of competence and what's
00:57:42.900 supposed to be at the top is you want to
00:57:44.640 bring all those things together we
00:57:46.800 understand this neurologically I'll show
00:57:48.600 you some of that in a little bit we
00:57:50.100 understand this neurologically how how
00:57:52.220 how this maps in some sense right on to
00:57:55.440 the neural structure of your being you
00:57:58.260 want to put something in control and the
00:58:01.420 thing that you should put in control is
00:58:02.940 the bloody thing that pays attention and
00:58:04.980 learns right everything else in the
00:58:07.620 hierarchy should be subordinate to the
00:58:09.900 thing that pays attention and learns and
00:58:12.780 you could think well that's that's the
00:58:15.060 message of the idea of logos that's for
00:58:17.160 sure because logos is partly attention
00:58:19.200 and partly communication and you learn
00:58:21.300 a lot by communicating with others okay
00:58:23.460 so you need to know where you are just
00:58:26.580 like your GPS which is about the closest
00:58:28.920 thing we have to an intelligent cybernetic
00:58:31.140 system those GPS is in your cars those
00:58:33.240 bloody things are pretty smart because
00:58:34.620 they can they know where you are they
00:58:36.840 know where you're going and if you go
00:58:38.100 off course they recalculate your route it's
00:58:40.320 like those things are damn near alive
00:58:41.880 that's so close to intelligence it's and
00:58:44.280 and you you can tell that because they
00:58:46.140 act intelligent they solve problems
00:58:47.640 continually so you need and this is a
00:58:50.640 cybernetic model by the way and
00:58:52.080 cybernetic models were the models on
00:58:53.820 which the GPS systems were based so it's
00:58:55.740 not accidental so you need to know where
00:58:57.840 you are and you need to know where you're
00:58:59.340 going and then the next thing you need to
00:59:01.020 know is how it is that you're going to
00:59:03.000 act move your body how you're going to
00:59:05.880 propel yourself through time and space to
00:59:09.060 transform this into that and so okay and
00:59:12.360 then we can we can make that a little bit
00:59:14.160 more complex because it's a bit too
00:59:15.720 simple so we'll do this so it isn't
00:59:18.720 exactly that you live in one of these
00:59:20.240 it's that you live in a nested hierarchy
00:59:22.980 of these and you could think of this as
00:59:25.020 your own internal patriarchy that's a
00:59:27.360 good way of thinking about it and maybe
00:59:29.100 it could be a tyrant or maybe it could be
00:59:31.120 something that gives you security and
00:59:33.840 functional autonomy and hopefully that's
00:59:35.640 the one you go for but it's a battle you
00:59:37.920 know because a little bit of tyranny
00:59:40.320 exists in everyone and so well so at the
00:59:45.600 very highest level of analysis that
00:59:48.480 would be the overarching story maybe you
00:59:51.240 think I'd like to be a good person or a
00:59:53.040 successful person or famous person I
00:59:55.620 think goods probably better because you
00:59:58.020 can come up with the definition of good
00:59:59.680 if you want as long as doesn't annoy other
01:00:01.320 people too badly because they'll just get
01:00:05.220 in your way and that won't be helpful so
01:00:07.860 you have to negotiate it but let's say
01:00:10.140 you're a good person and sort of the
01:00:12.780 story at the top of the hierarchy and
01:00:15.120 then you could decompose that into your
01:00:17.580 primary roles maybe you're a good parent
01:00:19.680 maybe you're a good employer or maybe
01:00:21.780 you're good employee maybe you're a good
01:00:23.760 sibling maybe you're a good child you
01:00:25.560 know those are major roles that you have
01:00:27.120 in your life and so you'd say that what
01:00:29.880 good person is is what's good about you
01:00:33.000 across all those roles so it's a it's a
01:00:35.160 it's a higher order abstraction from
01:00:37.380 something more concrete and then you
01:00:38.760 can take the you know the the role good
01:00:41.880 parent and you can say well what is it
01:00:45.060 that constitutes a good parent and you
01:00:46.980 might say well a good parent this isn't
01:00:48.840 exhaustive obviously a good parent has a
01:00:51.180 good job and and takes care of his or her
01:00:54.240 family and then you might say well what
01:00:56.240 does it mean to take care of your family
01:00:58.680 and then you might say well you know you
01:01:00.720 you can cook the odd meal not too odd
01:01:03.160 hopefully you can cook the odd meal and
01:01:05.640 you can play with play with the baby and
01:01:08.220 then you might say well how do you play
01:01:09.600 with a baby and then you might say well
01:01:11.460 you play peekaboo with the baby or you
01:01:13.860 tickle the baby okay well that what's a
01:01:15.980 cool there's a cool shift there because
01:01:17.580 this is all articulated and conceptual
01:01:20.580 right right down to this level and then
01:01:22.620 all of a sudden it's your body because
01:01:24.400 how do you play peekaboo with a baby you
01:01:26.220 don't like have a chat about how you play
01:01:28.020 peekaboo with a baby right you go like
01:01:30.120 this it's quite fun you can even do it
01:01:32.640 with older people they even smile about
01:01:34.440 it right it's dad's gone and the baby's
01:01:37.560 all shocked to death about that where'd he
01:01:39.660 go oh look he's back you know it's the
01:01:42.360 baby is playing with the reliability of
01:01:44.460 the world so it's real intense game for a
01:01:47.340 baby it's like oh no dad's gone oh look
01:01:51.420 he showed up again oh no he's gone and then
01:01:54.180 dad's smiling to indicate that those
01:01:56.280 brief flashes into non-existence aren't
01:01:59.100 existentially terrifying beyond capacity
01:02:02.400 right and so but the point is is that if
01:02:04.800 you're playing peekaboo with the baby
01:02:06.000 you're not thinking anymore it's not in
01:02:07.920 the realm of articulation or
01:02:09.240 abstraction it's actually something that
01:02:10.920 you're doing with your body and so to
01:02:12.900 me this is a nice multi-stage solution
01:02:15.780 to the mind-body problem because what
01:02:17.760 happens is that the highest the higher
01:02:19.860 order of abstraction it's articulated and
01:02:22.260 conceptual but if you decompose it
01:02:24.720 sufficiently you end up with an actual
01:02:27.240 action and the action involves the
01:02:29.380 movement of musculature it's not
01:02:31.680 something conceptual and one of the
01:02:33.480 things that's really cool about this
01:02:35.100 hierarchy is that it has educational
01:02:38.460 lessons so one of the things you want to
01:02:40.480 do if you're trying to teach someone
01:02:41.940 something even yourself is you want to
01:02:44.220 you want to specify the thing that
01:02:46.680 needs to be doing at the highest
01:02:48.600 resolution possible level so I'll give you
01:02:51.900 just a brief example so let's say I may
01:02:54.600 have may be repeating this but it
01:02:56.100 doesn't matter say you've got a three
01:02:57.780 year old kid and they're in their room
01:02:59.520 is chaos right there's monsters are
01:03:01.560 going to be coming out under the bed in
01:03:02.940 no time flat unless that thing room
01:03:04.980 gets some order in it and so you you
01:03:07.500 tell the kid clean up the room you know
01:03:09.360 it's a mess and you leave and you come
01:03:10.920 back and the kids like throwing legos
01:03:12.540 everywhere it's they're not cleaning up
01:03:14.580 and then you think that's a bad kid
01:03:16.560 that's a bad theory a because you're
01:03:19.080 going right from here to here if you
01:03:22.320 want to have a good fight with someone
01:03:23.820 and destroy them then that's what you
01:03:25.320 do you don't bother with the subtleties
01:03:27.360 down here you just go right from the
01:03:28.800 right for the jugular it's like you're a
01:03:30.900 bad stupid kid you've always been that
01:03:33.300 way you're hopeless there's not a chance
01:03:35.280 of teaching you anything right and we
01:03:37.500 can that way you can nail the past the
01:03:39.540 present and the future all of the same
01:03:41.100 insult you've always been a terrible
01:03:43.500 person you there's no teaching you and
01:03:45.660 your future is going to be exactly the
01:03:47.100 same way then the only thing the person
01:03:49.200 can do if you do that to them is hit
01:03:51.060 you because that's that's it there's no
01:03:53.340 there's no coming back from that you
01:03:55.680 box them completely and so if you want
01:03:57.420 to have a really unproductive argument
01:03:59.060 you go right for this past present and
01:04:02.220 future you're not a good person
01:04:03.780 demolish their entire conceptual structure
01:04:05.940 and expose them completely naked to chaos
01:04:09.180 it's like great you won the argument it's
01:04:11.900 not a good thing to do to your long-term
01:04:14.280 partner let's say unless you want them
01:04:16.400 terrified out of their skull and
01:04:18.560 characterized and their attitude
01:04:22.020 towards you characterized by non-stop
01:04:24.240 extreme resentment it's probably not
01:04:26.580 going to do your love life a hell of a
01:04:28.140 lot of good for example so with the
01:04:30.660 three-year-old maybe what you do is you
01:04:32.280 say you you pick the level of analysis
01:04:34.980 at which they're actually functioning and
01:04:36.840 you say and this is something you can do
01:04:38.460 if you pay attention to a kid and lots
01:04:40.500 people won't pay attention to children
01:04:42.040 because they're terrified of them they're
01:04:43.720 terrified that they'll do something wrong
01:04:45.220 with them and or that that the kid won't
01:04:47.740 like them or some damn thing it's like
01:04:49.480 all you have to do to get a kid to like
01:04:51.580 you is pay attention to the kid for like
01:04:53.440 two seconds and the kid will instantly like
01:04:55.780 you because attention is so it's such a it's
01:04:59.980 it's the ultimate currency for children
01:05:02.740 right they they need adult attention
01:05:04.780 because adults know way more than kids and
01:05:06.940 so they love attention all you have to do is
01:05:08.620 pay attention to them they will like you
01:05:10.180 instantly so you tell the kid you see
01:05:14.200 that teddy bear kid goes yes then you've
01:05:17.440 established that the child has mastered
01:05:19.600 the art of perceiving a teddy bear
01:05:22.180 because they can say yes it's this
01:05:24.160 complicated thing man it's like a six
01:05:26.440 month old isn't going to do that three
01:05:28.280 month old has got the whole teddy bear
01:05:29.800 identification subroutine automatized so
01:05:32.920 teddy bear yes can you pick it up yes
01:05:36.340 pat pat pat good work do you see the
01:05:40.360 hole on that shelf yes can you put the
01:05:43.240 teddy bear in that hole yes go over do
01:05:46.960 that pat pat pat great okay now we'll do
01:05:50.440 thing number two thing number three so
01:05:53.280 you're building up the micro routines of
01:05:55.240 cleaning up the room from the bottom up
01:05:57.040 right here you're building it into their
01:05:59.100 body because you're starting with the
01:06:00.640 things they've already automatized and
01:06:02.260 building upwards towards abstraction and
01:06:04.820 so once the kid has all the micro
01:06:06.320 routines down and maybe there's a I don't
01:06:08.360 know how many micro routines are there to
01:06:10.100 clean up your room 200 like a lot but
01:06:13.760 not an infinite number so you teach them
01:06:15.740 all the micro routines and then you can
01:06:17.240 say run set of micro routines which means
01:06:21.080 clean up room and then they can do it they
01:06:23.420 know what it means so but you do the
01:06:25.800 building from the bottom up and lots of
01:06:27.320 times when you're arguing with someone
01:06:29.600 that you live with and hypothetically love
01:06:31.580 although those two things are hard to get
01:06:33.500 together in the same relationship what
01:06:37.040 you want to do is assume is assume
01:06:39.500 stupidity before you assume total in
01:06:42.440 total malevolence that's that's that's
01:06:44.600 a good rule of thumb for establishing
01:06:46.460 peace so maybe if your partner won't do
01:06:49.280 something well maybe it's there's
01:06:51.320 something going on up here but you might
01:06:53.240 want to assume to begin with they
01:06:54.560 actually just don't know how to do it and
01:06:56.480 you need to decompose it so maybe there's a
01:06:58.640 way you want to be greeted when you come
01:07:00.260 home because you're going to come home
01:07:01.820 every day probably and maybe that's a
01:07:03.860 five-minute interaction or a 10-minute
01:07:05.660 interaction so that's an hour a week or
01:07:07.580 four hours a month or 50 hours a year or
01:07:09.680 one solid work week of coming home
01:07:12.980 interactions right all you have to do is
01:07:15.380 get 50 interactions like that right and
01:07:18.260 you've got your relationship sorted out
01:07:20.360 that's something that's really worth
01:07:22.460 thinking about because that's it there's
01:07:23.840 you just don't have that much time
01:07:25.400 right get the meals sorted out that's
01:07:27.680 about five hours a day get your sleeping
01:07:30.080 time arrangements sorted out get the
01:07:32.780 fundamental interactions that you
01:07:34.460 repeat with your partner worked out
01:07:36.920 voluntarily and negotiate it you're
01:07:39.320 going to cover 80% of your life that
01:07:41.060 way and then it can just run as a
01:07:42.320 routine and that's really helpful and
01:07:44.480 if you don't do that consciously especially
01:07:46.640 because our roles have fragmented and
01:07:48.540 most of the traditional roles have
01:07:49.860 disappeared and so nobody knows who the
01:07:51.440 hell is supposed to do what in the
01:07:53.040 kitchen for example so nobody does
01:07:55.320 anything except bitch and fight make
01:07:57.300 wretched meals or buy or buy fast food or
01:08:01.200 some something like that so you know the
01:08:03.600 the alternative to that catastrophic
01:08:06.640 failure or continual resentment and
01:08:09.040 fighting is to rebuild the structures
01:08:11.100 from the bottom up using consensus and
01:08:13.380 negotiation and and you can do that so
01:08:15.700 that's you can think of that as the
01:08:17.580 patriarchal structure that's a good one
01:08:19.980 and I mean it's partly psychological
01:08:21.480 because these are things you do as a
01:08:23.820 person but it's also partly political
01:08:25.620 and economic and sociological because
01:08:27.900 while you're doing each of these things
01:08:30.060 you're also doing them in a way that
01:08:32.260 socially hopefully not just socially
01:08:34.500 acceptable but actually socially
01:08:36.120 desirable and so that's that's the
01:08:39.820 decomposition and the reason that this
01:08:41.700 keeps chaos at bay is because it isn't
01:08:44.940 because your belief systems keep chaos at
01:08:47.040 bay it's not that abstract it's that if
01:08:49.680 you do things right do these things
01:08:51.300 right then terrible things happen to
01:08:53.100 you with less frequency and that's not
01:08:55.200 like it's partly psychological because
01:08:57.480 maybe you don't fight as much maybe
01:08:58.860 you're not anxious as much maybe you're
01:09:00.340 not as depressed but a lot of it's just
01:09:02.040 practical if you just if you you know if
01:09:04.660 your kid doesn't leave his skateboard on
01:09:06.780 the stairs then you don't break your neck as
01:09:09.960 often and that's not just psychological
01:09:12.200 that's actually a good thing not to
01:09:13.720 break your neck so often and so this
01:09:15.780 this structure isn't merely something
01:09:18.180 that keeps things at bay psychologically
01:09:20.700 okay so here's a here's another look at a
01:09:27.960 hierarchy of narrative the structure that
01:09:32.140 keeps chaos at bay and this is maybe the
01:09:35.340 hierarchy that I engage in when I'm
01:09:36.960 writing and I'm doing all these things at
01:09:38.580 the same time that's that's what's cool
01:09:40.500 you know like when I ask a student what
01:09:42.780 are you doing when you write an essay
01:09:44.160 it's like well that's a hard question
01:09:46.800 right it's like well you're fast and
01:09:50.520 important question that's the first thing
01:09:52.680 you should do if you're writing an essay
01:09:53.700 then you're paying attention to the words
01:09:55.560 and the phrases in the sentences and the
01:09:57.960 sentence relationship between the
01:10:00.000 sentences within the paragraphs and the
01:10:01.500 paragraph relationships to one another
01:10:03.240 within the essay and then the essays
01:10:05.220 relevance to the class and the classes
01:10:08.160 relevance to your life and like the
01:10:10.680 essay bleeds out across your entire life
01:10:13.440 and so if I'm writing something well
01:10:16.800 obviously at the most highest resolution
01:10:20.760 level of analysis I'm actually moving my
01:10:22.440 fingers on the keyboard and moving my
01:10:24.600 eyes back and forth on the screen that's
01:10:26.880 where the mind meets the body but then I'm
01:10:29.580 trying to formulate a sentence and so I
01:10:31.920 try to think up a good sentence that's
01:10:33.480 that's nailing what I am trying to
01:10:36.060 formulate and then I try to pick it apart
01:10:37.680 and I do that a bunch of ways I take the
01:10:40.320 sentence and I put it on another page and
01:10:42.060 then I write like 10 different variants
01:10:43.680 of the sentence and see if I can get a
01:10:45.120 better variant and then I try to think
01:10:47.160 of ways that it's a stupid sentence to
01:10:48.940 see if I can you know put a pry bar
01:10:51.240 underneath it and loosen it up and if I
01:10:54.000 can't do anything if I can't manage that
01:10:56.160 then I keep the sentence that I've got and
01:10:57.840 then I do that with 10 sentences in a
01:10:59.940 paragraph and I make sure the sentences
01:11:01.560 are all arranged properly in the paragraph the
01:11:03.480 same way by rewriting a bunch of different
01:11:05.760 variants of it and trying to get the
01:11:07.500 word right and the phrase right and the
01:11:09.060 sentence right and the sentence order
01:11:10.740 right and the paragraph order right and
01:11:13.500 I can tell when it's right enough because I
01:11:16.080 can't make it any better that doesn't
01:11:17.820 mean it's right it just means I can't
01:11:20.040 improve it and so I get to the point
01:11:21.720 where if I'm writing a paragraph and I
01:11:23.880 write a variant and I can't tell if the
01:11:25.800 variant is any better and it might be
01:11:27.240 worse then I'm done I've hit the limit of
01:11:29.700 my intellectual capacity and it's time to
01:11:31.860 move on but then but you know that it
01:11:34.500 isn't like the essay that that I'm
01:11:36.600 writing let's say has a boundary that's
01:11:39.060 tightly drawn around the essay because
01:11:40.980 there's a reason I'm writing the damn
01:11:42.240 essay and that would be well I'm trying
01:11:44.280 to I'm trying to write a whole
01:11:45.780 manuscript hopefully I'm trying to
01:11:47.280 address an important problem because why
01:11:48.840 would I be doing it otherwise I mean
01:11:51.240 that would be kind of pointless and
01:11:52.620 maybe that's part of my role as a
01:11:54.600 scientist and that's a subset of my
01:11:56.880 role as a professor and then that's a
01:11:58.560 subset of my role as a productive citizen
01:12:01.260 and then that's a subset of my role of
01:12:04.320 someone who confronts the unknown see
01:12:07.200 and that's why the logos is the thing
01:12:11.160 that's at the top of the hierarchy
01:12:12.600 that's how the hierarchy should be
01:12:14.220 structured is that everything else should
01:12:16.620 be sick you see because you have a
01:12:18.180 structure and you think well what should
01:12:19.560 the structure be subordinate to and then
01:12:21.600 the answer should be something like the
01:12:23.820 structure should be subordinate to the
01:12:25.260 process that generates the structure or
01:12:28.080 the structure should be subordinate to the
01:12:29.760 process that generates and maintains the
01:12:31.800 structure well obviously how could it
01:12:34.500 be any other way unless the structures
01:12:36.360 perfect within which case you dispense
01:12:38.880 with the thing that generates it and
01:12:40.500 improves it but then you're a
01:12:41.880 totalitarian it's like hey we got the
01:12:43.680 answer it's like no you don't people are
01:12:46.380 still suffering and they're still dying
01:12:48.360 you don't have the damn answer and so
01:12:51.480 maybe you have an answer that means that
01:12:53.400 there isn't quite as much suffering and
01:12:54.880 dying as there could be but there's
01:12:56.820 plenty of road to be traveled yet and so
01:13:00.240 it don't makes perfect sense that all of
01:13:03.420 this should be should be nested within
01:13:06.540 this highest this I think of it sort of
01:13:09.000 as the highest order of moral striving and
01:13:12.060 then that also gives you a moral hierarchy
01:13:13.740 that's the most important thing you do
01:13:16.860 that with honest speech you do that with
01:13:18.960 attention and honest speech that's how
01:13:20.700 you do that and you don't sacrifice that
01:13:24.120 to any of this because if you do then
01:13:27.000 then you're hurting your soul it's
01:13:29.760 there's the this idea in the New
01:13:31.080 Testament that the sin against the Holy
01:13:33.180 Ghost is the one sin that can't be
01:13:34.740 forgiven no one knows what the hell that
01:13:36.360 means maybe it doesn't mean anything but
01:13:38.460 I think this is what it means is that
01:13:40.260 because this process generates all this
01:13:44.640 if you violate that process then there's
01:13:49.080 no hope for you because that's the
01:13:51.540 process by which you improve yourself
01:13:53.460 and everyone else to everything else so
01:13:56.280 if you decide you're not going to engage
01:13:57.540 in that it's like well there's no fixing
01:13:59.940 that because you've blown apart your
01:14:02.080 relationship with the thing that does the
01:14:04.300 fixing and so okay and so that's how you
01:14:09.300 keep chaos at bay and so part of that is
01:14:11.520 structural right because you know how to
01:14:13.200 do these things more or less it's part of
01:14:16.080 your skill set if you happen to be a
01:14:17.880 writer you could build one of these for a
01:14:19.380 plumber it doesn't doesn't make any
01:14:20.820 difference really although the outside
01:14:22.860 thing should be the same which is I think
01:14:25.200 partly why in in the Judeo-Christian
01:14:27.960 tradition there's the assumption that
01:14:31.080 people are fundamentally equal before God and
01:14:34.380 what that means is that well they should be
01:14:37.260 nested everyone regardless of their
01:14:40.860 particularities particularities as
01:14:43.080 individuals their highest order function
01:14:45.340 is that they do it in whatever manner
01:14:48.280 they can manage and that's an
01:14:49.840 extraordinarily valuable or maybe the
01:14:52.120 most extraordinarily valuable
01:14:53.740 sociological political and economic
01:14:55.600 function and so that's why people are
01:14:58.540 valuable it's like we have this faculty to
01:15:01.120 continually generate improvements to the
01:15:03.880 structure that we jointly inhabit great
01:15:08.200 that gives us it's so cool because that
01:15:10.660 gives us a fundamental unity with at the
01:15:13.160 highest order of analysis with with the
01:15:17.140 room for as much diversity as you can
01:15:19.400 possibly manage right because it actually
01:15:21.040 turns out that the more the
01:15:23.380 substructures differ the better because
01:15:25.180 then you know you can be doing something
01:15:26.680 different than me and that would be good
01:15:28.480 because if we were doing the same thing
01:15:29.740 then it's just duplication of labor if we
01:15:31.720 could agree on the higher order
01:15:33.580 principle and then specialize at the lower
01:15:35.620 order levels it's like that's you get to
01:15:38.420 have your cake and eat it too and that
01:15:40.520 doesn't happen very often so so and so
01:15:45.620 then another rule of thumb is if you're
01:15:47.660 trying to solve a problem solve it at
01:15:49.180 this level highest resolution level
01:15:51.860 possible before you dare move up dare
01:15:54.800 move up the hierarchy because they as you
01:15:57.980 move up the abstraction hierarchy the
01:15:59.540 probability that you'll make a
01:16:00.680 catastrophic error while attempting to
01:16:03.020 fix the problem radically increases because
01:16:05.660 abstraction is very very powerful and
01:16:08.240 so you want to be very careful when we
01:16:09.800 saw that when you know when this when
01:16:12.260 when the mortgage market crashed the
01:16:14.600 reason it crashed was because of
01:16:15.980 strange use of derivatives and
01:16:17.740 derivatives are like higher order
01:16:19.280 abstractions in the financial world and
01:16:21.080 derivatives give you tremendous
01:16:23.420 financial leverage and power with huge
01:16:26.540 risk and so the upside is massive
01:16:29.600 absolutely massive because you can
01:16:31.060 multiply your earnings but the
01:16:32.720 downside is complete bloody catastrophe and
01:16:35.600 so part of what i would say an
01:16:37.920 intelligent conservative ethos is is
01:16:41.480 solve the problem at the highest level
01:16:44.180 of resolution highest level low most
01:16:46.400 local level of resolution it's safer and
01:16:49.880 it's more likely to actually produce a
01:16:51.280 solution
01:16:52.280 ok now so now you're in your plan now we
01:16:57.680 simplified it again just to one little
01:16:59.360 map right but all those other things are
01:17:00.880 nested in there and so what happens to
01:17:03.680 you as you stroll merrily on your way
01:17:06.200 through life well what happens is that
01:17:08.420 as you're moving from point a to point
01:17:10.160 b you encounter things and people think
01:17:13.760 that what they encounter are objects but
01:17:16.160 that's not the case first of all most of
01:17:18.500 the things that you encounter many of
01:17:20.000 the things are actually other people and
01:17:21.560 they're not objects are too damn complex
01:17:23.000 and even apart from the social world the
01:17:27.200 things that you encounter aren't objects
01:17:29.120 they seem to be something more like
01:17:30.860 tools or obstacles and i don't mean that
01:17:33.320 we see objects and turn them into tools or
01:17:35.300 obstacles i mean that we see tools and
01:17:37.460 obstacles because what happens is that
01:17:39.080 when you array yourself towards a goal
01:17:42.860 then the world transforms itself into
01:17:46.340 things that get in the way of that goal
01:17:47.720 and things that three things things
01:17:49.580 that get in the way of the goal things
01:17:51.440 those are things you don't like things
01:17:53.120 that facilitate your movement towards
01:17:55.160 the goal those are things that you like
01:17:56.960 and irrelevant things and mostly you
01:17:59.660 want irrelevant things because there's
01:18:01.280 just too damn many things so the
01:18:03.320 category of irrelevant is when you really
01:18:05.300 like so most of things most of
01:18:07.820 everything is irrelevant if you have a
01:18:09.140 good plan a few things are good because
01:18:11.380 they move you forward and some other
01:18:12.580 things are not so good you want to go
01:18:14.680 around the not so good things if you
01:18:16.180 can manage them unless you like to run
01:18:17.800 head forth into like brick walls which
01:18:19.900 is not particularly so learning
01:18:21.880 experience but i wouldn't repeat it too
01:18:23.500 many times you want you want the world
01:18:26.440 to array itself as a set of we could say
01:18:29.800 tools now what happens is that you have
01:18:32.140 this perceptual system that's mediated by
01:18:34.180 dopamine it's the same system that
01:18:35.800 cocaine activates or methamphetamine are
01:18:38.560 the drugs that people really like to take
01:18:40.060 and it's the dopaminergic system that
01:18:42.940 responds with positive emotion to
01:18:44.920 indications that you've encountered
01:18:46.420 something that will facilitate your
01:18:47.740 movement towards a goal and that's
01:18:50.140 really important to know because people
01:18:52.600 tend to think that they're happy because
01:18:54.220 they achieve goals and that's not true
01:18:56.020 what's true it because as soon as you
01:18:58.240 achieve a goal then you have a problem
01:18:59.680 which is what's the next goal and that's
01:19:01.480 actually a big problem you encounter that
01:19:03.340 as soon as you graduate from university for
01:19:05.020 example that's right I made this joke
01:19:06.820 before day graduation day years like king
01:19:10.300 of the university hierarchy
01:19:11.680 undergraduate hierarchy day after your
01:19:14.620 unemployed potential starbucks employee
01:19:17.020 right so it's like so obviously the the
01:19:20.700 the accomplishment per se as a source of
01:19:23.800 reward is is problematic because when you
01:19:27.040 accomplish you run the frame to its end and
01:19:30.160 then you have the problem of needing a new
01:19:31.780 frame so that's a problem but if what
01:19:34.480 you're encountering instead are things
01:19:36.220 that will move you along your way it's
01:19:38.300 like hey that's great and that's where
01:19:39.920 you get your positive motivation and so
01:19:41.980 that's really thinking that's so much
01:19:43.960 worth thinking about you can think about
01:19:45.580 that for a year and that wouldn't even
01:19:47.200 be enough to think about it because
01:19:48.340 here's what it means it means in some
01:19:50.620 sense that the Buddhists are right with
01:19:52.240 their claim about Maya
01:19:53.560 M-A-Y-A which means that people live in an
01:19:56.080 illusion and what they mean by that is
01:19:57.940 well you have goal whatever your goal is
01:20:00.880 and that goal gives relevance to the
01:20:03.700 world and you could change the
01:20:05.620 relevance of the world in a snap just by
01:20:07.880 changing your goal you can do that and
01:20:10.720 so then you think well it's sort of an
01:20:12.120 illusion because you can just change it
01:20:13.840 now you don't want to push that line of
01:20:15.760 argumentation too far because even if
01:20:18.640 the specific point can be changed the
01:20:22.720 fact that you're in one of these frames
01:20:24.100 cannot be changed and so you have to be
01:20:26.980 in a frame although you get to pick the
01:20:28.420 frame so there's still an absolute there
01:20:30.160 which is that you have to be in a frame
01:20:31.480 and that is not a trivial absolute it's
01:20:33.820 a very it's a very major absolute so
01:20:36.220 then you think okay all of your
01:20:37.900 positive emotion is going to be
01:20:39.460 experienced in relationship to the goal
01:20:41.500 well then we think well you could use
01:20:44.020 some positive emotion it's a good thing
01:20:46.120 positive emotion inhibits anxiety and
01:20:50.140 disappointment and frustration and pain it
01:20:54.160 does all that technically it does that
01:20:56.560 that's why a football player with a broken
01:20:58.300 thumb who wants to score a touchdown can
01:21:00.280 go out there and you know play the
01:21:02.140 football game even though it's a kind of
01:21:04.360 an arbitrary goal right it's like really
01:21:06.280 you're going to go out there and like
01:21:07.300 risk your hand to fire a pigskin through
01:21:11.920 some some poles it's like well you can say
01:21:16.620 the same sort of cynical thing about most of
01:21:18.640 the things that people do but you can't
01:21:20.500 say the cynical thing about the fact that
01:21:22.360 they have to do things so you have a you
01:21:25.660 have a point you have your aim you have
01:21:27.820 your ambition and then that's what turns
01:21:30.280 the world into a potentially positive
01:21:31.840 place and here's the kicker this is so
01:21:34.540 cool the higher the aim the more the
01:21:37.720 positive emotion so that's that's you
01:21:41.260 think well why should I bother you know
01:21:43.180 why should I bother doing something
01:21:44.500 lofty and difficult it's like because it's
01:21:48.160 worth it that's why because the
01:21:52.720 alternative is stupid suffering because
01:21:55.660 really really because what happens is
01:21:57.520 like you don't need a framework in order
01:22:01.540 to suffer you can just lay there day
01:22:05.020 after day and suffer right that's easy
01:22:08.980 that's the default condition if you don't
01:22:11.860 have a lofty ambition then you suffer
01:22:14.920 miserably and the reason for that is
01:22:16.960 life is really complex short finite
01:22:19.840 full of suffering and beyond you and so
01:22:23.080 you can just lay there and think about
01:22:24.340 that and it's horrible and so that's not
01:22:26.680 helpful it's just not useful and so you
01:22:29.080 know people often say life is
01:22:30.940 meaningless it's like no it's not that's
01:22:33.280 wrong because it was meaningless that'd be
01:22:35.380 easy you could just sit there and do
01:22:36.520 nothing and it would matter right it'd be
01:22:38.140 like you look like you're like a lot
01:22:39.820 lobotomized sheep it's just irrelevant but
01:22:43.400 that isn't what happens when people say
01:22:45.520 that life has no meaning that isn't
01:22:47.620 what they mean what they mean is I'm
01:22:49.780 suffering stupidly and intensely and I
01:22:52.640 don't know what to do about it well the
01:22:54.700 suffering is meaningful it's just not the
01:22:57.100 kind of meaning you want so how do you get
01:22:59.140 out of that you adopt you you note the
01:23:04.840 baseline of suffering which is very very
01:23:07.900 very very high and then you say to
01:23:10.300 yourself okay I need to do something
01:23:11.680 that justifies that and that's not so
01:23:14.800 easy because it's the baseline for
01:23:16.780 suffering is high if you're going to make
01:23:18.520 something of yourself let's say so that
01:23:20.980 it's worthwhile to exist in the world
01:23:23.680 then you have to do you have to aim at
01:23:26.080 something that's so well structured that
01:23:29.780 you can say yeah earthquakes cancer
01:23:32.800 death of my family dissolution of my
01:23:35.860 goals ultimate futility of life and the
01:23:38.320 heat death of the universe hey it
01:23:41.200 doesn't matter it's worth it
01:23:43.180 all right so now here's an here's an
01:23:49.900 another complicating factor so I said well
01:23:53.740 there's three things that you can run
01:23:55.180 into when you're going about your your
01:23:58.720 goal and I would say if you're going to
01:24:02.140 form a goal if you're going to form a
01:24:03.760 plan look about three to five years out
01:24:06.100 in the future because beyond that you
01:24:08.740 get something called combinatorial
01:24:12.400 explosion and it means that there's so
01:24:14.680 many variables you just can't predict so
01:24:16.600 there's not that much point looking out
01:24:17.980 20 years because like what the hell do
01:24:20.020 you know what's going to happen in 20
01:24:21.520 years nothing three years maybe you've
01:24:24.460 got maybe you can chart a course to
01:24:26.900 three years five years something like
01:24:28.480 that so that's not a bad segment of time to
01:24:31.360 to consider and then consider what your
01:24:35.980 life would have to be like in order for
01:24:37.360 it to be worthwhile for you knowing
01:24:39.640 also what you're going to be like if it
01:24:41.980 isn't worthwhile for you and what you're
01:24:44.200 going to be like if it isn't worthwhile
01:24:45.640 for you is Cain that's what you're like
01:24:49.300 because that's what that story is about
01:24:50.680 because Abel's the guy who has a goal and
01:24:53.260 is making the proper sacrifices and Cain is
01:24:55.780 the person for whom by his own faults at
01:24:58.600 least in part things aren't working out
01:25:00.760 for and so the default for not doing
01:25:04.120 this is something like building
01:25:05.980 resentment bitterness with an underlying
01:25:08.200 what would you call it flavor enhancer of
01:25:11.800 murderous resentment something like that
01:25:14.020 which you will act out in the world which
01:25:16.120 people act out in the world all the time
01:25:17.680 and it's no wonder because without this
01:25:20.800 without something lofty pulling you
01:25:24.460 along then the baseline is stupid
01:25:26.920 suffering and you know if you take an
01:25:28.660 Anna dog and you just chain it in the
01:25:30.340 backyard you know and you put a collar on
01:25:32.260 it that's too tight so it chafes all the
01:25:34.420 time and it can't even bark and you know
01:25:36.580 there's just dirt around it and it's too
01:25:38.320 goddamn hot out in the Sun and maybe you
01:25:40.300 don't give it enough water you know it's
01:25:42.220 not going to be very happy dog its basic
01:25:45.220 condition is misery well the same applies
01:25:48.700 to people so alright so you're on your
01:25:52.540 way to see you remember the you've all
01:25:56.080 probably watched Pinocchio or know about
01:25:58.480 it one of the things that happens that's
01:26:00.040 really cool in Pinocchio is that when
01:26:02.100 Geppetto decides that he wants his puppet
01:26:04.480 to be a genuine autonomous being he
01:26:10.060 wishes upon a star it's a very strange
01:26:12.160 thing but everybody just swallows it
01:26:13.700 because we don't notice when we're
01:26:14.960 swallowing things that are that are
01:26:17.060 completely preposterous you know it's
01:26:19.220 this animated puppeteer wishes on a
01:26:23.420 star that his puppet is going to become
01:26:25.400 real and everybody nods their head and
01:26:26.840 goes oh yeah that makes sense it's like
01:26:28.520 no it doesn't it doesn't make any sense at
01:26:30.860 all but it doesn't matter it doesn't make
01:26:32.780 the sort of sense that we normally
01:26:34.040 associate with sense it makes a kind of
01:26:35.980 meta sense and everybody understands it so
01:26:38.320 this is what Geppetto is doing is he's
01:26:40.460 elevating his eyes above the horizon so
01:26:43.220 out of the realm of the worldly let's
01:26:45.980 say to the transcendent and the
01:26:48.260 transcendent will say for all intents and
01:26:50.300 purposes you can see the transcendent
01:26:52.160 spread above you in in in in the heaven
01:26:55.220 that arches over us it's it's close
01:26:57.800 enough for our purposes and there's a
01:27:00.200 star there and a star is something that's
01:27:01.820 eternal that shines in the darkness and
01:27:03.920 so Geppetto makes an agreement with the
01:27:05.960 transcendent he says look I'm willing to
01:27:07.820 do whatever it takes that my creation
01:27:10.160 becomes autonomous well that's exactly
01:27:12.980 this situation that you want to set up
01:27:14.360 for yourself is like okay you got to
01:27:15.980 figure out what star you're going to
01:27:18.440 orient yourself by and you have to ask
01:27:21.200 yourself like no one's ever asked you
01:27:23.060 okay if you had the choice to make your
01:27:26.380 life worth living what's your price what
01:27:30.860 do you need just find out first of all
01:27:33.740 you just ask you'll tell yourself like
01:27:35.960 you'll be afraid because you thought I'll
01:27:37.580 never get that it's like well lower your
01:27:39.320 sights a little bit then you know don't
01:27:41.200 ask for a 80-foot super yacht in like
01:27:43.760 six months that just means you're stupid
01:27:45.980 you know it doesn't mean you're not you
01:27:48.260 know first of all it's not going to make
01:27:49.400 you happy anyways you know it's just not
01:27:51.300 it's not it's not wise you're asking
01:27:54.800 you're supposed to be asking yourself
01:27:56.300 this question like you're someone you
01:27:57.560 care about so you imagine you're talking
01:27:59.900 to some 12 year old kid that you kind of
01:28:01.760 like think I wouldn't be so bad if this
01:28:03.920 12 year old kid had a decent life so you
01:28:07.460 too it's like it wouldn't be so bad the
01:28:09.140 universe wouldn't mind if you had a
01:28:10.400 decent life if there was little less
01:28:11.960 suffering on your part especially if
01:28:13.880 you didn't you know foist it off on
01:28:16.040 other people if there's a little less
01:28:17.660 suffering on your part and you made
01:28:19.520 things a little better everywhere you
01:28:20.920 went it's like the universe would
01:28:22.220 probably be okay with that so you could
01:28:24.200 I think you could get away with it if
01:28:25.760 you're sort of quiet about it and so ask
01:28:29.300 yourself okay so then once you've
01:28:31.820 established your your target and you
01:28:33.860 know where you are then you know what's
01:28:35.360 good for you because that moves you
01:28:37.640 along and that happens at a perceptual
01:28:39.560 level you don't have to think about it
01:28:40.820 anymore and the experimental literature
01:28:43.100 and that's already quite clear so for
01:28:44.600 example if I specify that podium as the
01:28:48.500 target for my action you know then I'm
01:28:51.380 happy when I'm walking towards it
01:28:52.700 because there it is and everything
01:28:53.900 cooperating really nicely but if I
01:28:56.120 specify going to the exit sign that you
01:28:59.420 guys can't see that that that this is an
01:29:02.660 obstacle in the front of then as soon
01:29:05.000 as I specify that then that's an
01:29:06.500 annoying obstacle and that's
01:29:08.680 precognitive it's happens immediately it
01:29:11.180 happens instantaneously and so it
01:29:13.580 really is the case that you you your
01:29:16.340 your being manifests itself inside these
01:29:19.700 frames and so what's so cool about that
01:29:21.860 is you can change the frame it doesn't
01:29:23.780 mean you can like juggle planets or
01:29:25.700 anything like that but it does give you
01:29:27.500 quite a scope of of of of what untrammeled
01:29:32.660 action within the world and if the
01:29:34.260 frame isn't working out then you can
01:29:35.600 tweak it or sometimes you have to make a
01:29:37.100 major adjustment in it whatever you
01:29:39.020 don't have to stick to the damn thing
01:29:40.500 like it's the ideology that you're going
01:29:42.380 to die for it's a tentative plan it's a
01:29:44.880 work in progress and it's nuts with the
01:29:47.300 future authoring program one of the
01:29:48.740 things I recommend for people is that
01:29:50.540 they should do it badly because you're
01:29:52.880 not going to get it right anyways but a
01:29:54.860 reasonable plan is way better than no
01:29:58.400 plan plus a reasonable plan is a plan
01:30:00.020 is a plan that has built into it the
01:30:02.720 processes that will enable the plan to
01:30:05.180 get better as you implement it so you
01:30:06.980 just start with a reasonable plan so you
01:30:09.260 don't have to worry about whether it's
01:30:10.580 correct it's not correct it doesn't
01:30:13.580 matter it's better than nothing that's
01:30:15.260 the issue so ok so you've got the world
01:30:17.180 parsed up into things that making making
01:30:20.780 you happy when you look at them things
01:30:23.660 that get in the way that produce negative
01:30:25.460 emotion and then a whole host of
01:30:27.380 irrelevant things because almost
01:30:29.420 everything's irrelevant and that's
01:30:31.580 where all the chaos is hiding the chaos
01:30:33.920 is hiding in what's irrelevant and so
01:30:36.920 and that's very interesting
01:30:38.480 observation because since the chaos is
01:30:40.400 virtually infinite it's a real questions
01:30:42.560 where the hell do you put it well you
01:30:44.360 put it in what you ignore and you can
01:30:46.520 ignore it as long as it isn't actively
01:30:48.200 interfering with your movement forward you
01:30:50.120 can assume that it's that it doesn't
01:30:52.820 matter that it isn't matter that it
01:30:55.280 doesn't matter same thing all right so
01:30:59.660 here's the kicker there's one more
01:31:01.040 class of things that you can run into
01:31:03.740 along the way and this is where the
01:31:06.500 chaos breaks through so let's say you're
01:31:15.320 moving from point A to point B and
01:31:16.820 and something that you don't expect
01:31:20.120 occurs and it gets in the way so let's
01:31:25.460 say that you're living with someone and
01:31:27.560 maybe you kind of like them you're not
01:31:29.120 married so you don't like them that much
01:31:30.980 because otherwise you'd ask them to
01:31:32.300 marry you but anyways and so how a
01:31:36.920 quarter of you is looking for something
01:31:38.780 better and three-quarters of you is
01:31:40.280 half satisfied something like that and
01:31:42.200 and then a person because we're
01:31:45.200 ambivalent about such things and then
01:31:46.880 the person you discover or the person
01:31:49.160 announces that they've been having an
01:31:50.540 affair okay so then how are you
01:31:53.420 supposed to respond emotionally to that
01:31:55.100 well the part of you that wasn't all
01:31:57.080 that committed to the relationship is
01:31:58.520 kind of exhilarated by that and then the
01:32:00.620 three-quarters of you that's half
01:32:02.000 satisfied is hurt and and you're going
01:32:04.220 to exploit that part for sure in the
01:32:06.020 ensuing discussions and not mention the
01:32:08.120 oh that's kind of exciting that you you
01:32:10.080 know betrayed me that way so so but the
01:32:15.000 point is is that you that's a hole now
01:32:17.580 what's happened is a hole has you have
01:32:20.220 this structure that you're walking on
01:32:22.260 like ice like the thin ice that you're
01:32:24.120 skating on and now there's a hole in it
01:32:26.080 and the hole we don't even know how deep
01:32:28.860 the hole is but you know there's a hole
01:32:30.240 there and so now you're anxious about it
01:32:32.340 oh they'll maybe also a little bit
01:32:33.660 excited because God only knows what's
01:32:35.160 down there but but you don't know
01:32:38.160 what to do with that hole because it
01:32:40.320 could spread very badly on you it
01:32:42.120 could be that you know the whole
01:32:43.920 relationship was a facade and that all
01:32:47.400 your relationships have been facade
01:32:48.840 facades and that the reason that is is
01:32:51.120 because you're so damn shallow that it's
01:32:52.620 impossible for you to have a
01:32:53.700 relationship that isn't just a facade and
01:32:56.040 that's partly because you don't pay any
01:32:57.900 attention to other people and it's also
01:32:59.220 partly because you're malevolent and
01:33:00.600 selfish so that's a nasty thing to
01:33:02.760 discover or maybe that's the sort of
01:33:04.740 person that you're attracting which
01:33:06.600 would make sense actually if that's the
01:33:08.220 sort of person that you are and so so
01:33:11.040 there are certain things that you can
01:33:12.900 encounter that basically unglu you and
01:33:15.540 what happens is that those moments of
01:33:17.820 being unglued travel up that entire
01:33:19.800 hierarchy of presuppositions it's like
01:33:22.360 because the one of the logical
01:33:24.780 conclusions to being betrayed in a
01:33:26.200 relationship is that you are that you're
01:33:28.200 truly a bad person now another equally
01:33:33.000 logical conclusion is that the person that
01:33:35.360 you're with is really a bad person and
01:33:37.040 another logical conclusion is all people
01:33:39.800 are truly bad people you know i mean
01:33:42.320 in in macro ways and in micro ways you
01:33:46.340 can't trust anyone you can't trust
01:33:47.720 women you can't trust men you can't
01:33:49.180 trust human beings you can't trust
01:33:50.540 yourself the whole place is a
01:33:52.520 catastrophe it's a nightmare well then
01:33:55.280 you can fall through into chaos now the
01:33:58.100 way your body responds to that when
01:34:00.240 something or maybe you know you're
01:34:01.460 supposed to be getting a promotion at
01:34:02.780 work that's good you're all chipper
01:34:04.580 about the promotion at work and you you
01:34:07.040 walk into your boss's office because he
01:34:08.900 or she wants to see you and they say
01:34:11.060 well you know we've reviewed your
01:34:13.400 performance over the last few years and
01:34:16.040 your performance has been somewhere
01:34:21.320 between mediocre and decent and we're
01:34:23.460 downsizing and see you later that's not a
01:34:28.640 raise or a promotion that's for sure
01:34:30.320 that's a hole that you fall into and the
01:34:34.160 question is well what do you make of
01:34:35.480 that right how do you frame that how do
01:34:38.600 you take that emergent chaos and make
01:34:41.120 habitable order out of you don't know is
01:34:43.220 the whole capitalist system rotten to the
01:34:45.620 core i mean that's a convenient
01:34:47.480 explanation under those circumstances
01:34:49.160 that's for sure
01:34:50.480 were you working for a psychopathic son
01:34:52.400 of a bitch did you make the wrong choice in
01:34:55.340 university and was that your father's
01:34:57.020 fault because you never did what you want
01:34:58.580 or was it your fault for not standing
01:35:00.380 up to them or is it a dying industry or
01:35:03.320 is maybe this a wake-up call that you
01:35:04.880 should go do something else that you've
01:35:06.140 been waiting to do you know that you've
01:35:08.180 actually wanted to do your whole life and
01:35:09.800 that's why you're doing such a miserable
01:35:11.840 job at your current occupation because
01:35:13.520 you're bitter and resentful about the
01:35:14.900 fact that you never did what you want
01:35:16.400 you don't know it's all of those things
01:35:18.740 at once and that's very stressful because
01:35:21.260 all of those things at once is too many
01:35:23.360 things and that's the re-emergence of
01:35:25.820 chaos that's the flood that's the return
01:35:29.780 to the beginning of the cosmos that's
01:35:31.640 another way that it's been represented
01:35:33.140 mythologically it's that you voyage all
01:35:35.420 the way back to the beginning of the
01:35:36.620 cosmos when there's nothing but
01:35:38.300 undifferentiated chaos and that's what
01:35:41.300 you're confronting and maybe it's too
01:35:43.160 much for you and often it is i mean that
01:35:45.500 that can really that can be traumatizing
01:35:48.740 it can hurt your brain you know it's just
01:35:51.380 too much for you to bear but it doesn't
01:35:53.420 matter you're stuck with it and so how
01:35:55.400 do you respond to that well some of it
01:35:57.020 is catastrophic negative emotion you
01:36:00.260 freeze and that's protective and maybe
01:36:02.180 you don't even want to move you don't
01:36:03.200 want to bloody well get out of bed for a
01:36:05.180 week and that's because your body is
01:36:06.980 reacting as if the bedroom floor is
01:36:09.260 covered with snakes and the best thing
01:36:10.640 for you to do is just not move just
01:36:12.620 freeze not a pleasant situation to be in
01:36:15.200 because it's your hyper aroused very very
01:36:18.560 physiologically demanding and there's zero
01:36:20.780 about it that's productive except maybe the
01:36:22.940 snakes won't see you but they've
01:36:24.380 already seen you so that isn't helping
01:36:26.120 very well so you've got all this
01:36:27.740 undifferentiated native negative emotion
01:36:29.780 anxiety fear hurt anger guilt shame
01:36:32.900 emotional pain the whole plethora of
01:36:35.120 catastrophes and then maybe on the other
01:36:37.700 side lurking down there is thank god i'm
01:36:40.700 done with that job i just bloody well
01:36:42.380 hated i dragged myself off to work every
01:36:45.080 day and there's a little part of my soul
01:36:47.420 that's so goddamn happy i finally got
01:36:49.280 fired that i can hardly stand it you know
01:36:51.920 maybe you don't even admit that to
01:36:53.420 yourself because well that would mean
01:36:55.100 that all that time you spent at the job
01:36:56.540 was just sunk cost you're deluding
01:36:58.700 yourself the whole time it isn't an
01:37:01.580 interesting thing to consider those
01:37:03.020 sometimes if you're in the unpleasant
01:37:04.640 circumstance of having to fire someone
01:37:07.240 you know sometimes firing someone is the
01:37:10.100 best thing that can happen to them which
01:37:11.660 doesn't mean that you should go out and
01:37:13.400 like enjoy it although i have met very
01:37:17.180 disagreeable people who actually enjoyed
01:37:19.180 firing people i'll tell you a story about
01:37:21.520 that at some point because it's quite
01:37:22.960 interesting but you know sometimes if
01:37:25.180 someone's just limping along in their job
01:37:27.400 and doing it as miserably and wretchedly as
01:37:30.460 they possibly can imagine the best thing
01:37:32.680 you can do to them for them is to say you
01:37:34.900 know you're failing at this and and that
01:37:39.520 doesn't necessarily mean that you would
01:37:40.900 have to be failing at absolutely
01:37:42.460 everything else in the entire world so
01:37:44.500 maybe you should just accept the damn
01:37:46.060 failure and go off and try something new
01:37:48.520 and i mean that's terrifying for people
01:37:50.920 and i know they hate it and all that but
01:37:52.600 but but sometimes it's better than the
01:37:56.980 alternative which is just slow
01:37:58.420 torturous death so here's a funny way of
01:38:05.200 looking at it so let's say you fall right
01:38:07.960 into that hole that's underneath any
01:38:10.660 everything and you've hit an anomaly that
01:38:12.880 you don't understand you say what's that
01:38:14.560 anomaly made out of exactly i know that's
01:38:17.560 a strange way of thinking about it you
01:38:19.060 know because it's not what you could say
01:38:21.520 we'll just go along with that it's a
01:38:24.100 metaphor what's that anomaly made out of
01:38:26.380 well here's a way of thinking about it's
01:38:27.700 made out of spirited matter and here's
01:38:30.280 why
01:38:31.020 this is something i learned in part from
01:38:32.980 piaget said what's made out of matter
01:38:36.520 because of course that's the world matter
01:38:39.040 and the world is also what matters and so
01:38:41.380 that's kind of a nice duality there but
01:38:44.380 it's made out of spirit because when you
01:38:46.960 encounter something anomalous and go
01:38:48.580 down the rabbit hole when you go into
01:38:49.960 the underworld that's underneath
01:38:51.040 everything that you've relied on you
01:38:53.620 learn things down there so what's down
01:38:55.480 there is information and that's now it's
01:38:57.880 maybe way more information than you want
01:39:00.280 but it is information it's information and
01:39:03.340 what can you what can you do with the
01:39:04.960 information you can inform yourself with
01:39:07.780 the information right you can put
01:39:09.940 yourself information with the
01:39:12.760 information that's helpful too and so
01:39:15.880 and you think well you you're a psyche
01:39:18.340 maybe you're not a spirit it depends on
01:39:20.140 you know whether you're a materialist or
01:39:21.820 not but at least we can say that you're
01:39:23.380 a psyche the question is what's your
01:39:25.020 psyche made out well it's obviously got a
01:39:27.220 material substrate but the matter happens
01:39:30.160 to be arrayed in a particular order and
01:39:33.040 that's an information order and so when
01:39:35.920 you fall into the underworld that's
01:39:37.480 underneath everything and you encounter
01:39:39.040 that latent information then what you
01:39:41.080 can do is enhance your psyche you can
01:39:43.100 grow your spirit because what you do is
01:39:44.980 you take the new information and you
01:39:47.620 incorporate it that's like eating the
01:39:49.840 apple that Adam and Eve ate you
01:39:51.580 incorporate that and that makes more of
01:39:53.560 you and that's not a metaphorical or
01:39:55.660 metaphysical proposition it's not it's to
01:39:57.940 say nothing other than well that's what
01:39:59.620 happens when children learn you think of
01:40:01.400 what happens child's three has a pretty
01:40:03.880 low-resolution representation of the
01:40:06.580 world and is a fairly low-resolution
01:40:09.280 human being got all the constituent
01:40:11.860 elements there but isn't
01:40:12.880 differentiated in any tremendous manner
01:40:15.220 that's all still to come in the future
01:40:16.660 and so what does the child do explore
01:40:19.360 what do they explore things they don't
01:40:22.120 understand that's where the
01:40:23.320 information is because you already
01:40:25.360 understand what you understand there's
01:40:26.860 no information there you go where
01:40:28.540 they're where you don't understand
01:40:30.100 that's where the information is and out of
01:40:32.020 that information you generate a higher
01:40:33.760 resolution world and you generate a
01:40:35.860 higher resolution self and so out of
01:40:38.320 the combat with the underlying dragon
01:40:41.280 of chaos you generate spirit and matter
01:40:43.600 and that's what you do when you go down
01:40:45.400 into the underworld so if it doesn't
01:40:47.860 kill you or if it doesn't make you wish
01:40:50.500 you were dead which it probably will but
01:40:52.780 there's a bunch of you that has to die
01:40:54.100 down there anyway so maybe that's not
01:40:55.780 such a bad thing because if you had this
01:40:57.880 relationship that ended in betrayal then
01:41:00.160 there's something that's just not
01:41:01.300 exactly right right there's something
01:41:03.700 that went and the reason I'm saying
01:41:05.200 that think well that's kind of
01:41:06.700 moralistic it's like actually I don't
01:41:08.440 mind being moralistic in case you
01:41:09.960 haven't noticed but but that's not it's
01:41:13.180 not a fair comment because you're
01:41:14.740 playing the stupid game it's like you
01:41:17.260 live with someone infidelity that's the
01:41:20.680 game right you've decided the rules with
01:41:23.320 the game comes a morality the morality are
01:41:25.840 the rules of the game well then the
01:41:28.120 thing collapses into infidelity it's
01:41:30.760 like well you played the game wrong or
01:41:32.800 it was the wrong game one of those two
01:41:34.420 you it's one of those two you pick the
01:41:37.620 damn game and having picked the game
01:41:39.880 you can't all of a sudden say well no
01:41:41.500 those aren't the rules it's like yeah
01:41:43.300 yeah if you pick the game you pick the
01:41:45.860 rules and if you fail at complying with
01:41:48.940 the rules then you fail now you could say
01:41:51.160 well I can pick a different game it's
01:41:52.480 like I don't care how you solve the
01:41:53.800 problem you're still stuck with the
01:41:55.720 problem it's a moral problem
01:41:57.640 fundamentally and it might take some
01:42:01.540 major league retooling to to fix it so
01:42:08.020 you're at point A trying to get to point
01:42:10.480 B that's not working out you hit an
01:42:13.120 anomaly you're not getting to point B
01:42:15.760 that's for sure your medical school
01:42:19.360 student you write your MCATs which is a
01:42:22.060 test you have to write to go to medical
01:42:23.680 school you get 25th percentile I don't
01:42:26.680 know who you are but you're not a
01:42:27.760 pre-med student and maybe you never
01:42:29.980 were right and that's the rub man and
01:42:32.560 so who the hell are you you don't know
01:42:35.320 collapse down here into this
01:42:37.720 motivational conflict this place of
01:42:40.120 motivation and emotional uncertainty and
01:42:42.160 tremendous information right it's a
01:42:44.580 place of transformation it's the Phoenix
01:42:46.780 that burns it's the burning part of the
01:42:48.880 Phoenix that burns it's it's the
01:42:50.780 journey to the underworld it's the
01:42:52.200 journey to hell it can really be a
01:42:54.060 journey to hell because you may find
01:42:55.860 out that the reason that your partner
01:42:58.380 betrayed you or that you didn't get your
01:42:59.820 damn promotion is because there's
01:43:01.680 seriously something wrong with you and
01:43:03.780 you know it and I don't just mean that
01:43:05.220 you don't know what you're doing I mean
01:43:06.840 that there's 25 percent of you that is
01:43:08.880 seriously aiming at things not being
01:43:11.280 good and so you fall into the
01:43:13.080 underworld and you find out that oh God I
01:43:17.200 just got exactly what I was aiming for or
01:43:19.200 or I got exactly what the worst part of
01:43:22.020 me was aiming for and that worst part
01:43:24.240 that's something to clean up and that's
01:43:25.920 not going to be easy because it's got
01:43:27.300 its hooks in me like something
01:43:28.860 something ferocious something seriously
01:43:31.740 ferocious and I've been toying with it
01:43:33.960 for a very long time and maybe I can't
01:43:36.540 even detach it anymore and so that's not
01:43:39.600 so fun and you see people like that in
01:43:41.340 psychotherapy very frequently or you see
01:43:43.140 them wandering around on the streets like
01:43:45.940 absolute catastrophic former shells of
01:43:49.540 themselves you know because they've hit
01:43:51.820 the underworld and they ended up in hell
01:43:53.500 and there's no getting out of it and so
01:43:55.300 those are the people you tend to give a
01:43:56.920 wide berth to when you walk down the
01:43:58.720 street so there you are down in the
01:44:00.520 underworld right back where the latent
01:44:03.320 information exists and just too much of
01:44:06.400 it and that's this it's the same thing
01:44:09.520 it's the same thing and that's why the
01:44:12.100 Adam and Eve story is archetypal right
01:44:14.680 because we're always ingesting something
01:44:18.280 new that knocks us into a new state of
01:44:21.340 self-consciousness and it's always a
01:44:23.680 catastrophic demolition of our current of
01:44:27.820 our previous paradise insufficient as that
01:44:30.220 paradise was something comes along to
01:44:32.380 destroy it and knocks the slats out of
01:44:34.720 our life and that's a voyage to the
01:44:36.480 underworld out of the walled garden into
01:44:41.780 chaos and so what is all of that well
01:44:52.220 there's lots of ways of construing it
01:44:54.020 it's a it's a frame transformation
01:44:57.080 there's a walled city it's got a hole in
01:45:00.260 it because all walled cities have holes in
01:45:02.120 them right because everything's imperfect
01:45:03.740 and that's where the chaos comes up and
01:45:05.540 then maybe you go out there like a hero to
01:45:08.000 fight the chaos and to re-establish the
01:45:10.760 frame that's what you're supposed to do
01:45:12.200 and maybe you free some information
01:45:14.480 while you're doing that or maybe you
01:45:18.500 establish a relationship and so that's
01:45:21.560 the journey frame damage chaos voluntary
01:45:27.020 confrontation reconstitution of the world
01:45:29.760 and that's that's human existence and
01:45:33.420 hopefully it's not just linear it's
01:45:36.720 it's stepwise right is that the you that
01:45:42.600 emerges as a consequence of your latest
01:45:44.520 catastrophe is everything that you were
01:45:46.980 before plus something more and that
01:45:50.100 actually constitutes what you might
01:45:51.900 describe as measurable progress right and
01:45:54.880 that's another argument against moral
01:45:56.340 relativism because if you can do
01:45:59.640 everything that you could do before and
01:46:01.140 you can do some more things we could
01:46:03.000 just define that as better it's not a
01:46:05.100 bad definition and then we have enough
01:46:06.960 it's like what you're trying to do is to
01:46:08.500 differentiate the world and differentiate
01:46:13.920 yourself and every time you undergo one
01:46:16.160 of these revolutions then hopefully both
01:46:18.120 of those things happen and then there's a
01:46:19.740 moral to that story too which is do it
01:46:23.340 voluntarily and maybe do it don't wait
01:46:28.140 for it to happen catastrophically keep
01:46:31.320 your eyes open and when something goes a
01:46:33.660 little bit wrong that you could fix fix
01:46:36.840 it don't say no that doesn't matter maybe
01:46:40.800 it does matter maybe it is matter maybe
01:46:43.140 it's exactly the matter out of which you
01:46:44.760 should be built maybe it's the matter out
01:46:46.740 of which the world should be built and if
01:46:48.900 part of you is telling you it matters
01:46:51.480 what it means is that that part is
01:46:54.420 telling you that there's something
01:46:55.920 there that you need to engage with
01:46:59.100 that's what it means for something to
01:47:00.900 matter I really get out of the kick a
01:47:02.880 kick out of the word matter because it's
01:47:04.440 got these two weird meanings right there's
01:47:06.360 the matter that everything is made out of
01:47:08.100 that materialists think everything is
01:47:10.800 made out of and that's just dead matter
01:47:12.420 and then there's the matter that life is
01:47:14.340 made out of which is what matters and
01:47:16.980 now and then you're moving through life
01:47:18.540 and something matters it's calling to
01:47:20.580 you and that's the unrevealed world
01:47:22.680 trying to reveal itself to you and all
01:47:25.080 you have to do is allow it to reveal
01:47:27.540 itself to you and then maybe what
01:47:29.460 happens is that a minor shift in shape
01:47:33.000 is all that has to happen to you don't
01:47:34.980 have to burn right down to the bloody egg
01:47:37.320 and and hatch out you know as a newborn
01:47:40.200 maybe you can just repair a little bit of
01:47:42.840 something that's gone wrong with you and
01:47:44.340 so you can undergo a sequence of
01:47:46.140 continual micro deaths instead of
01:47:48.060 waiting for the bloody catastrophe that
01:47:50.460 might send you so far down that you'll
01:47:51.960 never recover and all you have to do is
01:47:54.180 attend to what matters and your whole
01:47:56.280 nervous system is it's doing this for
01:47:58.320 you you've got a goal something happens
01:48:01.020 it matters so what are you supposed to do
01:48:03.060 with that you're supposed to you're
01:48:04.560 supposed to fix it you're supposed to
01:48:06.060 engage with it that's why it's calling
01:48:08.400 out to you as if it matters it's saying
01:48:10.680 there's an indeterminate part of the
01:48:12.960 world here that wants to manifest itself
01:48:15.000 into fully articulated being and it's
01:48:17.880 calling to you to do that and if you
01:48:20.520 ignore it then it accumulates and it
01:48:22.800 accumulates it turns into the dragon of
01:48:24.960 chaos and then it waits until you're not
01:48:27.480 at your best and then it eats you and
01:48:30.180 and that's the alternative so that seems like a
01:48:33.000 bad plan unless you like being lunch meat
01:48:35.700 so so that's a long introduction to Noah
01:48:44.220 but you need it you know because you can't
01:48:55.740 understand the story otherwise and so
01:48:57.660 because that's what the story is about
01:49:00.900 and and now we can go through the story
01:49:03.300 relatively rapidly although it doesn't
01:49:05.100 look like we'll go through all of it
01:49:06.300 tonight
01:49:07.460 ok so we'll start with the next section of
01:49:10.140 Genesis and this is immediately after
01:49:12.780 Cain and Abel and there's a short story to
01:49:14.640 begin with just a fragment I called it
01:49:17.460 giants of the earth and it came to pass
01:49:21.000 when men began to multiply on the face of
01:49:23.160 the earth so this is after Cain and Abel
01:49:24.780 that and daughters were born unto them
01:49:27.600 that the sons of God saw the daughters
01:49:31.260 of men that they were fair and took them
01:49:33.180 wives of all which they chose and the
01:49:38.400 Lord said my spirit shall not always
01:49:40.560 strive with man for that he is also
01:49:42.720 flesh yet his days will be a hundred and
01:49:45.660 twenty years there were giants in the
01:49:49.200 earth in those days and also after that
01:49:51.000 when the sons of God came in unto the
01:49:53.100 daughters of men and they bear children
01:49:54.780 to them the same became mighty men
01:49:56.760 which were of old men of renown now
01:50:00.000 there's been all sorts of attempts to
01:50:01.380 interpret those few rather jumbled lines
01:50:04.080 but I see it as a reflection of a
01:50:08.580 classic development of hero mythology
01:50:10.800 which is that and this is sort of
01:50:12.480 nostalgia for the past one of the
01:50:14.220 things Marcia Eliade pointed out was
01:50:17.040 that what happens to human memory in
01:50:21.900 pre-literate cultures because nothing is
01:50:23.640 written down is that what needs to be
01:50:26.160 preserved gets amalgamated and so
01:50:28.560 imagine that you have a culture that's
01:50:30.060 based on fishing let's say so you have to
01:50:32.400 be a good fisherman you know and and our
01:50:35.220 human beings who use simple tools to fish
01:50:38.040 are unbelievably good fishermen they know
01:50:40.020 every bloody thing you can possibly
01:50:41.220 imagine about fish because otherwise they
01:50:43.500 die so it's really important that they
01:50:45.180 learn everything about fish and maybe
01:50:46.860 they've been fishing for like 13,000
01:50:48.840 years or something like that so there's a
01:50:50.580 lot of accumulated knowledge and so
01:50:52.620 then the question is well who taught
01:50:54.420 mankind how to fish and the answer is
01:50:57.960 fragments of individuals across history
01:51:01.020 but that's you know you're not going to
01:51:02.640 remember the damn fragments you put them
01:51:04.380 all together into the amalgam of the
01:51:06.960 heroic fisherman you know the guy who
01:51:08.820 established the pattern for proper
01:51:10.980 fishing whatever that pattern happens to
01:51:12.900 be one of the patterns might be don't take
01:51:14.820 all the damn fish because there won't be
01:51:16.680 any for the next year or something like
01:51:18.300 that but all those fragments of
01:51:20.280 discovery get amalgamated into heroes of
01:51:23.220 the past and then what you do if you're
01:51:25.620 a fisherman is you act out the heroic
01:51:27.540 fishermen of the past and so the idea
01:51:29.460 that there were men of renown or heroes in
01:51:32.000 the past is just a fragmentary what would
01:51:36.420 you call it's just a fragment of that
01:51:38.820 sequence of ideas that back in the past
01:51:41.040 there were mighty human beings who
01:51:44.040 established the proper patterns of being
01:51:47.160 and they were the sons of God who took
01:51:49.260 the daughters of men to life now and it's
01:51:53.340 interesting too because we do know that
01:51:55.260 the more competent men are
01:51:58.620 disproportionately likely to leave offspring
01:52:02.460 so it's a perfectly reasonable way of
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01:53:22.300 on to the flood this is from murcia
01:53:30.420 Eliade who who wrote a book called a
01:53:32.420 history of religious ideas which i would
01:53:33.920 strongly recommend it's a three-volume set
01:53:36.420 it's quite readable and it's brilliant
01:53:38.160 it's brilliant i i really like it and
01:53:41.560 this is what
01:53:42.560 mitchell Eliade's had to say about flood
01:53:45.540 myths as has been well known since the
01:53:47.800 compilations made by our Andre H usner and
01:53:50.760 JG Fraser who wrote the golden bow the
01:53:53.340 deluge myth the flood myth is almost
01:53:55.500 universally disseminated it is documented on
01:53:58.140 all the continents although very rarely
01:54:00.360 in Africa particularly in the desert
01:54:02.520 for unsurprisingly although and on
01:54:06.780 various cultural levels a certain number
01:54:08.700 of variants seem to be the result of
01:54:10.400 dissemination rather than spontaneous
01:54:12.900 regeneration let's say first from
01:54:14.880 Mesopotamia and then from India it is
01:54:17.280 equally possible that one or several
01:54:19.440 diluvial catastrophes gave rise to
01:54:21.720 fabulous narratives but would be risky to
01:54:23.880 explain so widespread a myth by
01:54:25.900 phenomena of which no geological traces
01:54:28.180 has been found well Eliade wrote this
01:54:30.580 quite a while ago i think he wrote that
01:54:32.020 book perhaps in the 80s maybe in the
01:54:34.000 70s but since then there actually has
01:54:35.860 been quite a bit of evidence advanced in
01:54:38.860 various circles for the existence of
01:54:40.960 catastrophic floods that occurred within
01:54:43.420 the relative memory of human relative
01:54:46.640 human civilization memory let's say so
01:54:48.700 the west coast Indians for example i
01:54:50.860 suppose that's the wrong word the west
01:54:52.900 coast i don't know what to say either i
01:54:55.900 know
01:54:56.900 a kwakwaka
01:54:59.020 carver who told me a flood story and
01:55:01.900 they have a story that's almost
01:55:03.580 identical to the story of noah except of
01:55:05.980 course it involves giant canoes but
01:55:07.720 it's it's the same story they release if i
01:55:11.400 remember correctly a raven but noah
01:55:13.740 releases a raven first and then a dove
01:55:15.740 once once the flood comes to an end and
01:55:17.560 and it has a tower of babel issue to the
01:55:20.360 same story so the canoes are all put
01:55:22.520 together it's not one giant canoe it's
01:55:23.900 a bunch of canoes all together they
01:55:25.400 write out the flood and then the canoes
01:55:27.860 separated and go all over the world and
01:55:29.840 that's why there are people all over the
01:55:31.280 world so anyways the story is very widely
01:55:33.620 disseminated but you know there were
01:55:35.900 floods in North America not that long
01:55:38.780 ago so there are floods you can look up
01:55:41.060 the Missoula floods 15,000 to 13,000
01:55:44.300 years ago and the kwakwaka people have
01:55:46.460 probably been on the west coast for
01:55:47.600 something like 13 to 14,000 years so and
01:55:50.660 you know you can you can maintain an
01:55:52.260 oral tradition for a very very long time
01:55:54.200 you think no but traditional societies
01:55:57.200 don't change that's why they're
01:55:58.760 traditional and so they have the same
01:56:00.140 stories over generations they remember
01:56:02.540 the same stories so when the Missoula
01:56:05.420 floods which were a consequence of
01:56:07.760 melting glacial ice discharged up to
01:56:11.360 they figure there were 55,000 55 of them
01:56:13.940 between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago
01:56:16.220 discharged volumes up to 15 times the
01:56:18.840 volume of the Amazon River so these are
01:56:20.660 major league floods and then Sears et al
01:56:24.440 published a paper in 2008 called
01:56:26.600 climate change and post glacial human
01:56:28.580 dispersers in Southeast Asia claiming
01:56:30.980 that there were multiple floods
01:56:32.280 particularly affecting Southeast Asia
01:56:34.580 between 15,000 and 7,000 years ago so
01:56:37.760 there might Iliad it might be a bit wrong
01:56:40.100 about the notion that there were no
01:56:41.900 geological traces of such such
01:56:44.500 catastrophic flooding but anyways it
01:56:46.360 doesn't matter because we're still
01:56:47.500 looking at this from a psychological
01:56:48.760 perspective and that's fine the
01:56:51.380 majority of the flood myths seem in
01:56:53.020 some sense to form part of the cosmic
01:56:54.940 rhythm the old world people by a
01:56:58.000 fallen humanity is submerged under the
01:57:01.180 waters and sometime later a new world
01:57:03.640 emerges from the aquatic chaos in large
01:57:06.260 number of variants the flood is the
01:57:07.900 result of the sins or ritual faults of
01:57:10.540 human beings sometimes it results simply
01:57:13.180 from the wish of a divine being to put
01:57:15.160 an end to mankind the chief causes lie
01:57:17.620 at once in the sins of men and the
01:57:19.660 decrepitude of the world it's a
01:57:22.000 brilliant analysis partly because it
01:57:25.180 puts it it it draws this lovely parallel
01:57:28.600 between which I mentioned a bit earlier
01:57:31.000 between the fact that things go wrong
01:57:32.980 all by themselves but that you can speed
01:57:36.040 that along by not paying any attention
01:57:37.660 you know so if you're in a
01:57:39.100 relationship you know relationship takes
01:57:41.200 an awful lot of maintenance and you
01:57:43.120 know what it means needs to be
01:57:44.440 maintained because you start
01:57:45.640 developing some distance from the
01:57:47.320 person that you have the
01:57:48.220 relationship with and then that
01:57:49.720 starts to become tinged with a little
01:57:51.700 bit of dislike and hopefully not
01:57:53.320 contempt but a little bit of dislike and
01:57:55.120 maybe some some some emotional distance
01:57:58.300 and you feel that and you think well
01:58:00.400 it's hard to tell what you think but you
01:58:02.680 feel that anyways you know that that's
01:58:04.360 emerged and so then you have a chance at
01:58:06.800 at that point to repair whatever's gone
01:58:11.440 wrong and that would require some
01:58:13.460 retooling on both of your parts maybe
01:58:15.440 one more one person more than the other
01:58:17.340 but whatever we would require a serious
01:58:19.080 discussion like look I've noticed that
01:58:21.680 this has been happening and maybe it's
01:58:24.700 you and maybe it's me and we should
01:58:26.180 probably figure it out because if it was
01:58:27.840 you that'd be convenient and everything
01:58:29.520 but if it was me then I'd like to fix it
01:58:31.780 because then it would be fixed and so
01:58:33.860 that's why you listen to your partner
01:58:35.280 because they might tell you that
01:58:36.540 there's something stupid about you
01:58:37.760 that you don't know and then if you
01:58:39.440 could fix that then you wouldn't have
01:58:40.580 to be stupid in that way anymore and
01:58:42.440 it's actually one of the real useful
01:58:44.140 it's one of the genuinely useful
01:58:46.860 features of having a partner because
01:58:48.500 do you really want to be stupid and
01:58:50.080 then continue to repeat your mistakes
01:58:51.700 ad nauseum for the rest of your life I
01:58:54.000 know it's more convenient to do that
01:58:55.460 than to have a you know knock down
01:58:57.580 drag them out argument about just
01:58:59.200 exactly why you're stupid and how you
01:59:01.640 could fix it but still it's better to
01:59:04.040 have the argument so that chief causes
01:59:08.520 lie at once in the sins of men and the
01:59:10.420 decrepitude of the world and the sins
01:59:11.960 there are generally either acts of
01:59:15.180 commission where people do things that
01:59:17.780 they know to be wrong or they fail to do
01:59:20.700 things that they know would be right
01:59:22.240 doesn't really matter sins of commission
01:59:24.820 are usually judged more harshly say
01:59:26.960 within the judeo-christian tradition
01:59:28.740 but I think there might be a bit of an
01:59:30.340 error in that because sins of omission
01:59:31.980 can be a real catastrophe and so here's
01:59:34.560 a flood idea you tell me what you
01:59:36.260 think about this so you know so there's
01:59:38.260 this idea that a judgmental being will
01:59:40.620 flood you out if you continue on your
01:59:42.880 wayward ways and that seems like a
01:59:45.160 little bit of you know it's one of the
01:59:46.720 examples of of jehovah being a little
01:59:48.960 on the harsh side in the old testament
01:59:50.820 not something that modern people really
01:59:53.080 approve of so much because we like our
01:59:55.600 gods sort of domesticated let's put it
01:59:58.480 that way and unfortunately that isn't
02:00:01.640 how it tends to work but I've often
02:00:03.280 thought about the reaction in North
02:00:05.860 America to the hurricane in in New
02:00:12.820 Orleans because there's two ways of
02:00:15.060 reading that right one is mother nature
02:00:17.260 has a little fit and sends a hurricane
02:00:21.040 into New Orleans and wipes everyone out
02:00:23.600 and isn't that a catastrophe and isn't
02:00:25.820 that an example of isn't that example
02:00:29.420 of our fragility in the force in the
02:00:31.760 face of of natural power but there's
02:00:36.260 another way of reading it maybe this is
02:00:37.680 unfair but it'll do for the purpose of
02:00:39.440 illustration it's like you know the
02:00:41.180 Dutch build dykes right to keep the
02:00:42.860 ocean back and they're actually pretty
02:00:44.760 effective at that because their country is
02:00:46.760 mostly underwater and it turns out that if
02:00:48.920 you go to Holland it's actually not
02:00:50.180 underwater and so their dykes are
02:00:52.940 working and so that the Dutch were very
02:00:55.100 organized people and they better be
02:00:57.260 because their country is supposed to be
02:00:58.700 underwater right so you better be
02:01:00.140 organized if your country is supposed to
02:01:01.820 be underwater and so they are very
02:01:03.980 organized and they have a rule for their
02:01:05.600 dykes which is they try to estimate the
02:01:08.300 worst possible oceanic storm that will
02:01:11.180 come in 10,000 years and make sure that
02:01:14.840 the dykes will withstand that well from my
02:01:19.400 reading the Army Corps of Engineers in New
02:01:22.280 Orleans built the dykes for a storm every
02:01:24.620 hundred years and that's not so good
02:01:27.440 because we live about 80 years let's say so
02:01:31.520 that means the probability that one of
02:01:33.140 those storms is going to come whipping by in a
02:01:35.240 lifespan is pretty damn high and then so
02:01:38.100 that perhaps wasn't the wisest of
02:01:41.400 planning especially because some of New
02:01:43.200 Orleans is actually supposed to be
02:01:44.840 underwater and then worse you know
02:01:46.980 Mississippi is a state that's quite well
02:01:48.900 known for its corruption and so you
02:01:50.940 might also say that tremendous amount of
02:01:52.980 the money and time and resources that
02:01:55.020 could have and should have and was
02:01:56.760 planned to go towards fixing the problem
02:02:00.360 didn't and so the hurricane came along and
02:02:03.780 oh my god wasn't it a natural disaster and
02:02:06.360 the question is what bloody well makes you
02:02:09.660 so sure that it was a natural disaster
02:02:11.360 right because if the infrastructure would
02:02:14.640 have been maintained and built to the
02:02:16.740 specifications that were certainly
02:02:18.420 technically possible and would have
02:02:20.220 actually been less expensive in the long
02:02:22.320 run to build and everyone knew it and
02:02:25.020 the hurricane came along and wiped out the
02:02:27.300 city why do you think that's a natural
02:02:28.560 disaster to me that's an that's a natural
02:02:32.640 example if you think about it from a
02:02:35.940 metaphorical perspective of a judgmental God
02:02:38.640 deciding to use a flood to teach a moral
02:02:44.220 lesson and you might say well that's
02:02:46.380 pretty harsh what about all those flood
02:02:48.000 survivors it's like yeah well the whole
02:02:50.220 flood thing was kind of harsh and so
02:02:52.500 pointing out that there were steps that
02:02:54.060 could have been taken and and also that I
02:02:57.360 doubt in the aftermath have been taken
02:03:00.000 even though everyone knows now exactly what
02:03:02.640 what had happened is you might consider
02:03:07.440 the diagnosis but it's irrelevant
02:03:08.940 because what I'm what I'm really trying
02:03:10.800 to tell you is how the mythological
02:03:12.720 stories would line up on this because
02:03:14.460 you can tell a story about mother
02:03:15.960 nature manifesting her catastrophe and
02:03:20.220 potential for tragedy or you can tell
02:03:22.380 another story of an absolute failure of the
02:03:24.660 human social structure and the human
02:03:28.740 individual level because of the
02:03:31.140 corruption to address a problem that
02:03:33.300 everyone knew was there and so that's a
02:03:36.480 good example of how things how the flood
02:03:39.780 comes when you're not behaving properly
02:03:41.700 you know and one of the things that's
02:03:43.680 quite interesting about the Old
02:03:44.820 Testament and the people who wrote it is
02:03:46.500 that they always assume that if the
02:03:48.600 flood comes that meant you weren't
02:03:50.040 prepared if that's the rule right that
02:03:52.740 that's it's like the a priori axiom I
02:03:55.080 think you got flooded out hey you weren't
02:03:57.240 prepared enough how can you tell what you
02:03:59.680 got flooded out right that's the
02:04:01.780 evidence and you might say well that's
02:04:03.100 not very fair it's like fair isn't the
02:04:05.620 point the point is do you want to get
02:04:07.840 flooded out again or not because fair
02:04:10.660 would be well you better figure out why
02:04:12.160 you got flooded out and fix it so it
02:04:14.380 doesn't happen again and that's the
02:04:16.060 moral thing to do when you're thinking
02:04:18.340 about morality as walking the path it's
02:04:21.460 most appropriate to get to the
02:04:22.840 destination that you think would be the
02:04:24.820 best possible destination by the mere
02:04:29.680 fact that it exists that is it lives
02:04:33.400 and produces the cosmos gradually
02:04:35.140 deteriorates and ends by falling into
02:04:37.000 decay that is the reason why it has to
02:04:39.820 be recreated in other words the flood
02:04:41.860 realizes on the macrocosmic scale what
02:04:44.300 is symbolically affected during the new
02:04:46.180 year festival the end of the world and
02:04:48.520 the end of a sinful humanity in order to
02:04:50.900 make a new creation possible well that's
02:04:53.720 interesting there's a lot of
02:04:54.860 information packed into those few lines
02:04:56.840 the deliata wrote because he also at
02:04:59.780 the in the in the Mesopotamian rituals
02:05:03.800 the Mesopotamians would act out the
02:05:10.340 collapse of the kingdom into chaos
02:05:12.260 essentially at the New Year's
02:05:13.880 festival it's kind of what you do when
02:05:15.860 you make resolutions because like it's a
02:05:19.160 degenerate what you'd say is our
02:05:20.780 proclivity to make New Year's
02:05:21.920 resolution sort of a degenerate
02:05:23.580 ritual and I don't mean that it's bad I
02:05:25.560 mean that it's the remnants of
02:05:28.200 something much grander so the idea was
02:05:31.380 well the Mesopotamians would take their
02:05:33.720 emperor outside the city the walled city
02:05:35.640 and once a year and they would make him
02:05:38.520 kneel and they take off all his king
02:05:40.620 clothes and then they'd whack him with a
02:05:42.540 glove if I remember correctly the
02:05:44.040 priest would do that and then they'd
02:05:45.180 make him recount all the ways that he
02:05:46.980 wasn't being a good emperor that year he
02:05:49.620 wasn't being a good Marduk because that
02:05:51.480 was who he was supposed to be on earth
02:05:53.040 and that's the guy with eyes all the way
02:05:54.480 around his head speaks magic words and
02:05:56.660 transforms chaos into order that's what
02:05:59.160 the emperor is supposed to do and so the
02:06:01.140 question would be okay your emperor it's
02:06:03.100 like have a little humility here because
02:06:05.820 you're not God incarnate you probably made
02:06:07.980 some mistakes can you think of any ways in
02:06:10.100 the last year that you didn't take
02:06:11.960 every advantage of every opportunity you
02:06:14.720 possibly could have to take some spare
02:06:17.120 chaos and transform it into a bit of
02:06:19.100 habitable order that's a good thing to
02:06:21.140 think about well that's what you're
02:06:22.160 thinking about when you make a new
02:06:23.480 year's resolution even though you don't
02:06:24.860 know it it's like well could you be a
02:06:26.900 better person in the upcoming year well
02:06:30.260 you can imagine the flood and then you
02:06:39.860 can set yourself straight and then you
02:06:43.100 can prepare for it and that means maybe
02:06:45.140 you can stave it off but it also means
02:06:47.480 that maybe even if you don't stave it off
02:06:49.400 you could ride it out and that's
02:06:52.040 actually the story of Noah because what
02:06:54.440 happens with Noah is that he can see
02:06:56.780 that things are not good and that
02:07:00.140 there's a flood coming and God is maybe
02:07:03.380 letting him know and it says in the
02:07:05.540 story that Noah walked with God
02:07:07.040 remember that's what Adam did before he
02:07:08.720 got all self-conscious about the whole
02:07:10.220 thing he walked with God we'll talk
02:07:11.900 about that more next time but what that
02:07:13.700 would mean maybe is because Noah was
02:07:15.860 straight and he put himself together and
02:07:18.860 his familial relationships were good
02:07:20.900 because it also says that that his
02:07:22.740 antenna were working and he could see a
02:07:25.700 little farther into the future than
02:07:27.380 someone whose vision was completely
02:07:28.940 obscured by by fog and chaos and he
02:07:32.240 could tell that things were not going to
02:07:35.840 go well and so he prepared for it and
02:07:39.380 because he prepared for it well then
02:07:42.680 things actually went pretty well for
02:07:44.060 Noah even though the flood came and so
02:07:46.680 that's an interesting thing because
02:07:48.020 that's an that's an indeterminate issue
02:07:51.260 in human existence how big a hurricane
02:07:54.500 would it take to wipe out New Orleans if
02:07:56.180 everyone was prepared well that you're
02:07:59.000 not going to wipe out the Dutch I mean
02:08:00.440 that's going to be a tough one man you're
02:08:01.940 going to have to conjure up a pretty damn
02:08:03.440 big storm to take out their dykes well
02:08:06.560 how thoroughly defended could New Orleans
02:08:10.040 be if nobody in the municipal municipal and
02:08:14.000 state governments was corrupt well end of the
02:08:18.140 hurricane problem because that's something
02:08:19.580 that we could clearly deal with we know how to do it and
02:08:21.740 and the same applies in your own life is
02:08:24.020 that there are floods coming you can
02:08:26.240 bloody well be sure of that that's
02:08:27.740 absolutely 100% certain some of them are
02:08:30.920 going to be personal some of them are
02:08:32.300 going to be familial some of they're
02:08:33.980 going to be social and political and
02:08:35.480 economic it's like are they going to be
02:08:38.360 catastrophes for you are you going to ride
02:08:40.940 them out are you going to prepare well the
02:08:43.460 first issue might be well do you have your
02:08:45.080 act together well enough to see them
02:08:46.640 coming with enough advance warning so that
02:08:49.640 you can take proper measures maybe just
02:08:51.540 to sidestep it maybe just don't go where
02:08:53.840 the flood is going to be that's a simple
02:08:55.640 thing but maybe you don't have that
02:08:57.380 luxury right and so it is going to be a
02:09:00.440 catastrophe maybe someone in your family is
02:09:02.900 going to get really really sick right and
02:09:05.960 maybe maybe there's just a tiny pathway
02:09:09.020 through that that everything doesn't fall
02:09:11.240 apart it doesn't end in divorce it doesn't
02:09:13.940 end in death it doesn't end in sorrow it
02:09:16.040 doesn't end in catastrophe but the margin of
02:09:18.140 error is like slim down to virtually zero
02:09:20.540 and every imperfection that you bring to
02:09:23.480 that situation is going to increase the
02:09:25.100 probability that that tragedy is going
02:09:27.080 to turn into something indistinguishable
02:09:28.640 from hell and that's coming it's coming
02:09:31.700 your way absolutely certainly and so then
02:09:35.240 you might think well since it's coming
02:09:36.740 your way maybe the best thing to do is to
02:09:38.840 put yourself together so that when it
02:09:41.000 comes it can be the least amount of awful
02:09:43.460 possible so I'll close with the story
02:09:46.040 this was a very affecting story for me my
02:09:51.380 mother-in-law had frontotemporal
02:09:54.980 dementia she developed it quite young she's
02:09:57.980 about 55 something like that and her
02:10:01.100 husband who was very extroverted man
02:10:03.440 about town guy I grew up in a small town
02:10:06.200 everybody knew him he was charismatic drank
02:10:09.980 too much charismatic good businessman quite a
02:10:14.980 remarkable person a real character but not
02:10:18.320 exactly a family man even though he he he
02:10:21.320 provided for his family very well but
02:10:24.380 when his wife got sick he really took care of
02:10:26.620 her man it was something to see because
02:10:29.240 that's no joke dealing with someone who has
02:10:31.520 Alzheimer's for all intents and purposes
02:10:33.920 because they get taken away from you piece
02:10:36.260 by piece and that is not pretty and then
02:10:38.840 it's also hard right not only is it
02:10:41.880 catastrophic but it's hard and Jesus he
02:10:44.420 just stepped into that like perfectly and
02:10:47.660 it was way less awful than it could have been
02:10:51.980 way less it was just a tragedy it wasn't
02:10:55.760 hell and then I was there when she died
02:10:59.900 and my wife's family are actually pretty
02:11:04.720 good at dealing with death as it turns
02:11:06.460 out my wife's sister is a palliative care
02:11:09.440 nurse and you have to be pretty tough
02:11:11.100 cookie to be a palliative care nurse but
02:11:12.880 you can do it which is pretty interesting
02:11:14.560 because that means that you can go make
02:11:16.480 relationships with people at the last
02:11:18.780 stages of their life that are genuine
02:11:20.320 relationships and people just die on you
02:11:22.800 non-stop and yet you know she's a
02:11:26.940 competent alive alert fun person it's
02:11:33.660 like two thumbs up for her man that's
02:11:36.280 someone you can rely on in a tragedy and
02:11:38.560 her other sister is a pharmacist and my
02:11:42.320 wife has volunteered in palliative care
02:11:44.980 awards and is also very good at taking
02:11:46.580 care of people who are genuinely not in
02:11:49.480 good health and so we were there when
02:11:52.780 my mother-in-law died and of course you
02:11:57.220 can imagine here's a here's a deathbed
02:11:59.820 situation for you your mother-in-law is
02:12:02.800 dying and everyone's at each other's
02:12:04.600 throats it's like you think that's
02:12:06.140 uncommon then your eyes aren't open
02:12:08.080 because it's plenty bloody common and
02:12:10.220 then it's not just a tragedy it's hell and
02:12:12.960 like maybe you can stand the tragedy but
02:12:14.920 you can't stand the hell and in this
02:12:17.680 situation that isn't what happened is
02:12:19.640 everybody pulled together and what
02:12:21.560 happened was well she died but what was
02:12:25.040 so interesting was the family actually
02:12:26.680 came together more tightly as a
02:12:29.060 consequence and so although there was
02:12:31.100 something taken away on the one hand
02:12:32.660 there was something gained on the other
02:12:34.580 that wasn't trivial and I'm not trying to
02:12:36.500 be all optimistic and you know isn't the
02:12:39.380 universe a wonderful place about all this
02:12:41.120 like someone died and in an ugly way and
02:12:44.120 it was harsh but God it was a hell of a
02:12:47.840 lot better than it could have been and
02:12:49.160 maybe it was good enough that's the
02:12:50.780 thing you know is that this is something
02:12:52.520 that I constantly wonder is that if
02:12:54.500 people did what they could to speak the
02:12:59.300 truth and pay attention then maybe the
02:13:03.260 tragedy that's part of life wouldn't have
02:13:05.720 to deteriorate into the unbearable hell
02:13:08.660 that doesn't have to be part of life
02:13:10.880 and maybe we could actually tolerate the
02:13:13.160 tragedy or maybe we could even rise
02:13:14.600 above it or maybe we could even
02:13:15.680 mitigate it you know because we can we
02:13:18.080 do that sort of thing all the time and
02:13:19.700 so it's always an open question and
02:13:22.700 Eliade put it very well are the floods
02:13:26.780 the consequence of the fact that things
02:13:28.700 fall apart or are the floods a
02:13:30.920 consequence of the fact that people make
02:13:35.300 mistakes that they know they shouldn't make
02:13:37.580 and make anyways they sin right and
02:13:40.460 that's to miss the mark right because
02:13:42.080 that's an archery term to sin and that
02:13:43.760 means maybe they don't even specify the
02:13:45.680 damn target which is really you're not
02:13:48.320 going to hit it unless you specify it or
02:13:50.060 having specified it they just say oh to
02:13:54.380 hell with it it's not that important
02:13:56.480 it's like you got to be careful when you
02:13:58.340 say something like to hell with it it's
02:14:00.500 not that important because one of the
02:14:02.300 things that might happen to you if you
02:14:04.160 say to hell with it it's not that
02:14:06.260 important is that you might actually end
02:14:08.120 up in hell for a pretty prolonged
02:14:10.460 period of time or maybe for the
02:14:12.440 remainder of your miserable existence
02:14:15.560 because it's certainly the case that
02:14:17.060 people do exist there and I've seen them
02:14:19.460 exist there and once you're there it's
02:14:21.640 no trick it's no simple matter to get
02:14:23.760 the hell out and so it might matter that
02:14:26.900 the things that matter get addressed it
02:14:29.660 might matter that you do what you can to
02:14:31.700 walk with God like I said we'll talk
02:14:34.140 more about that next time and it might
02:14:36.480 be that that is how you build an ark and
02:14:39.600 are protected from the flood even if the
02:14:41.760 damn thing comes and the thing is it
02:14:45.120 will and this is a funny thing too that
02:14:47.640 I've noticed about our education system
02:14:50.480 and the way we teach students and their
02:14:53.340 trigger warnings and all of that absolute
02:14:55.900 rubbish thinking most of my lectures I'd
02:14:58.500 have to have a trigger warning every 15
02:15:00.360 seconds so as I tell my students when
02:15:04.860 they're young it's like look don't fool
02:15:06.540 yourself you know you're going to develop
02:15:10.260 a serious illness at least one maybe two
02:15:13.560 or three and one of them is likely to be
02:15:15.540 chronic and if it isn't you it's going to
02:15:17.580 be someone you love it's going to be your
02:15:19.120 husband it's going to be your parent it's
02:15:20.760 going to be your kids that's coming and
02:15:23.220 so is a lot of death and and pain and so
02:15:26.700 like just exactly what sort of person
02:15:29.520 are you going to be when that shows up
02:15:30.900 and that's the right question it isn't
02:15:33.660 how are you going to be happy in your
02:15:35.760 life it's like good luck with that it's
02:15:37.980 a stupid ambition anyways as far as I'm
02:15:39.840 concerned because it's too shallow you
02:15:41.940 know happiness you're lucky that comes
02:15:43.620 it comes and goes like the Sun coming
02:15:45.840 out from behind the cloud if you're happy
02:15:47.880 man more power to you enjoy it enjoy it
02:15:51.240 it's a it's a gift from the cosmos to be
02:15:53.700 happy but a pursuit no no the pursuit is
02:15:57.480 when the damn flood comes you want to be
02:16:01.200 the person who built ark and that's what
02:16:04.020 the story of Noah is about and the thing
02:16:06.240 is the flood is always coming that's
02:16:08.580 another thing that's worth commenting on
02:16:10.740 with regards to this story is you know
02:16:12.900 there's an apocalyptic element to the
02:16:15.120 Judeo-Christian tradition there's an
02:16:19.020 idea that the end of the world is
02:16:22.020 always at hand and that you should
02:16:24.360 prepare to be judged and the thing
02:16:26.700 about that is it's true and the reason
02:16:28.800 it's true is because the end of your
02:16:31.680 world is at hand and it will certainly
02:16:34.800 come and when it comes you will be judged
02:16:38.400 because it will be up to you to figure
02:16:40.860 out what to do with the fact that your
02:16:42.300 world just collapsed and that'll be a
02:16:44.400 moral problem of ultimate severity
02:16:47.520 because it'll push you right to your
02:16:49.260 limits and you'll find out exactly where
02:16:51.600 your unaddressed weaknesses lie because
02:16:55.020 that's what happens in a crisis and so
02:16:57.780 the reason that that's an archetypal
02:16:59.220 reality and it lurks underneath the
02:17:01.200 entire Judeo-Christian structure the
02:17:03.220 apocalypse the impending apocalypse is
02:17:05.140 because we always live in apocalyptic
02:17:07.680 times and your world is always in small
02:17:10.800 ways and large ways coming to an end and
02:17:13.680 so what do you do you prepare for it you
02:17:16.600 prepare for your world to come to an end
02:17:19.880 and then maybe when the end comes you
02:17:22.100 get another world that'd be a good deal
02:17:24.280 so we're ready for this next week
02:17:30.440 my question was regarding the online
02:17:44.720 university you plan to create and the
02:17:46.760 plans you have for that man we spoke
02:17:48.780 briefly last week and I want to ask you
02:17:50.060 how can a student such as myself get
02:17:51.620 involved with this process yeah well an
02:17:58.120 online university that's a great perhaps a
02:18:01.300 grandiose ambition right but one of the
02:18:04.420 things that so here's my here's my
02:18:06.880 rationale you know lots of things have
02:18:10.780 dramatically transformed in the last 20
02:18:13.540 years and whole swaths of enterprise has
02:18:18.400 been wiped out and that's happening at a
02:18:20.020 more and more rapid rate as our
02:18:21.760 technology progresses right now
02:18:23.800 newspapers are in the process of dying
02:18:25.720 actually think they're in the process of
02:18:27.580 committing suicide but they're in the
02:18:29.920 process of dying and that's going to
02:18:33.400 happen very rapidly I think the globe and
02:18:35.020 mail lost 10% of its readership in the
02:18:36.940 last three months something like that and
02:18:38.800 so what happens is that new technologies
02:18:44.020 come along to supplant the old
02:18:45.340 technologies and I've watched a number of
02:18:47.860 businesses fail some large businesses I
02:18:50.320 knew some people who worked at digital
02:18:52.900 equipment corporation when it was failing
02:18:54.640 and I've had some inside track into
02:18:56.500 failing businesses and I see when they
02:18:58.780 start to fail they tend to the failure
02:19:00.700 process tends to tip and then accelerate
02:19:02.740 can happen unbelievably quickly and this is
02:19:05.140 what it looks to me this is how it looks to
02:19:07.780 me in relationship to the universities
02:19:09.520 especially in the US although not only
02:19:12.460 especially in the humanities although not
02:19:15.040 only so number one so I've recorded three
02:19:25.120 years of my personality lecture say so
02:19:27.700 let's have three years of lectures on
02:19:29.860 Freud now what I should do with those I
02:19:33.520 think is edit them into one really good
02:19:36.100 lecture on Freud and then stop giving
02:19:38.260 that lecture because why would I give
02:19:39.640 that lecture again because I've already
02:19:40.960 given it and it's edited and it's in good
02:19:42.600 shape and if it's a really good lecture
02:19:44.680 then why does someone else have to give
02:19:46.300 the lecture why does 300 other people
02:19:48.160 have to give a lecture on Freud you
02:19:50.080 know what I mean what's going to happen
02:19:51.460 is there's going to be some really good
02:19:52.840 lectures on subjects and that's all that
02:19:55.840 people are going to need or want because
02:19:58.360 the internet tends to move things towards
02:20:00.760 winner-take-all very very rapidly and so
02:20:03.940 it seems to me that we're already at a
02:20:06.640 point technologically where we could
02:20:08.260 identify a hundred things that people
02:20:11.440 really need to know and do a sequence of
02:20:14.260 lectures on those things that were
02:20:15.700 outstanding and then they could be
02:20:18.280 updated and added to but then it's
02:20:20.080 like it's a done game and it's free so I
02:20:23.680 know I started thinking about this last
02:20:25.240 year when I noticed that my psychology
02:20:27.700 lectures had a million views and that was
02:20:29.680 last April and I thought that's amazing a
02:20:31.660 million views it's like what the hell
02:20:33.280 that's I don't know what to make of that
02:20:35.200 that's that's a best that's the kind of
02:20:37.500 best-selling book that you never write
02:20:39.040 because no one ever writes a best-selling
02:20:40.880 book so a million views that's something
02:20:43.400 to pay attention to and now it's way
02:20:44.720 more than that but there's videos and
02:20:47.600 podcasts and that means that people can
02:20:49.220 listen when they're doing other things
02:20:50.360 too and so that's really cool and maybe
02:20:52.340 people can listen better than they can
02:20:53.960 read that's a real possibility because
02:20:56.240 we've only been reading silently for
02:20:57.880 about well most of like most of humanity
02:21:00.920 for less than a hundred years and
02:21:02.360 virtually no one could read silently 500
02:21:05.120 years ago it's a really new skill and so
02:21:07.400 maybe we're better at listening and so all of a
02:21:10.160 sudden there's the possibility of
02:21:11.900 disseminating high-quality educational
02:21:14.120 material highly produced highly vetted
02:21:17.960 to millions of people for nothing
02:21:21.800 well how are you going to compete with
02:21:24.080 that then then it's worse because the
02:21:28.140 humanities which have become completely
02:21:30.560 degenerated almost completely degenerate
02:21:32.840 in my estimation have abandoned their
02:21:35.240 valuable intellectual property which is
02:21:37.700 the collective wisdom at least for the
02:21:39.740 West of Western civilization it's just
02:21:42.020 sitting there someone might as well
02:21:43.700 steal it back and then there's the
02:21:47.180 student loan debacle in the United
02:21:48.860 States that's pronounced properly debacle
02:21:51.560 debacle okay obviously I've read that
02:21:55.820 word more than said it and so you know
02:21:58.580 and so you know I had a guy write me today
02:22:01.160 and he asked if he should go to a private
02:22:02.900 college for twenty two thousand dollars a
02:22:04.640 year to Purdue produce to pursue an
02:22:06.740 undergraduate in psychology so that he
02:22:09.680 could get into clinical graduate school
02:22:11.240 or go to another university the state
02:22:13.520 university for far less I told him to go to
02:22:15.620 the state university because it's the
02:22:17.300 wise economic decision but you know it
02:22:19.400 doesn't seem to me that it's reasonable at
02:22:21.080 all to load people up when they're 22 with a
02:22:23.180 hundred thousand dollars in student debt
02:22:24.680 that they cannot declare bankruptcy for it's
02:22:28.220 indentured servitude and the and to load up
02:22:31.560 people when they're 22 or 23 with debt of
02:22:34.140 that magnitude it's like how the hell
02:22:36.260 are they going to be entrepreneurs
02:22:37.380 how are you going to take a risk with a
02:22:38.940 hundred thousand dollar debt load and
02:22:40.640 who's going to marry you well really
02:22:43.160 Jesus you know because another story I
02:22:45.260 heard recently was well I just got
02:22:47.100 married to my partner she brought into
02:22:49.140 the marriage a hundred and twenty
02:22:50.060 thousand dollars in student debt it's
02:22:51.620 like oh my god it's like that's
02:22:53.640 crippling man like once you're once
02:22:56.180 you're making a substantial amount of
02:22:58.420 money if you're fortunate maybe you're in
02:23:00.020 your 40s you could handle a debt load
02:23:01.700 like that but in your 20s it's just
02:23:03.340 crippling so you know the tuition fees
02:23:07.180 have ratcheted up like mad in the last
02:23:09.940 30 years the colleges and universities
02:23:12.000 have become unbelievably
02:23:13.220 administratively top-heavy they're
02:23:15.600 regulated to death by the by the
02:23:18.020 legislative system so there's ethics
02:23:19.920 committees which are so
02:23:21.020 counterproductive that it's just
02:23:22.360 unbelievable there's this entire whole
02:23:24.720 new monstrous hyper accommodation
02:23:27.600 movement that that's that borders on I
02:23:30.920 don't need all I'll make a video about
02:23:32.760 that soon enough that's absolutely
02:23:34.260 pathological and there's this whole
02:23:36.240 post-modern neo-marxist idiocy that's
02:23:38.760 going on in the universities and so like
02:23:40.720 well how many mistakes does an
02:23:42.240 institute plus students aren't being
02:23:44.700 taught how to speak they're not being
02:23:46.380 taught how to debate they're not being
02:23:48.180 taught how to write and they don't read
02:23:50.220 difficult things they read French
02:23:52.560 intellectual post-modernists right and
02:23:54.960 they probably don't read those either
02:23:56.220 they read secondarily derived pit they
02:23:59.280 skim secondarily derived papers about
02:24:02.700 French intellectual post-marxist for
02:24:05.460 post-modernists from the 1970s and the
02:24:08.400 standards have been lowered because
02:24:09.900 there's too many people pursuing higher
02:24:11.580 education and so I think okay there's
02:24:15.720 eight dimensions of success and on every
02:24:19.800 single dimension there's failure the
02:24:22.280 systems done the and so the vision
02:24:25.460 would be why not provide everybody in
02:24:28.100 the world with high quality education in
02:24:30.620 the humanities for like 150th the cost
02:24:33.860 you can charge for accreditation that's a
02:24:36.920 whole separate issue right accreditation
02:24:38.720 but the but the resources it's like why
02:24:41.600 not make them available to everyone so
02:24:44.420 that's the plan I mean I don't know if I
02:24:46.280 can do it or not but it's partly what I'm
02:24:48.320 doing with this biblical lecture series
02:24:49.880 it's sort of putting my toe in the water
02:24:51.800 but I have a plan and I have some good
02:24:55.400 programmers who are willing to help and
02:24:56.840 there's lots of people out there that
02:24:58.100 would help God I'm being flooded with
02:24:59.660 offers of help I'd love to take people
02:25:02.180 up on the offers but it's not that easy
02:25:04.040 to get someone to help you do something
02:25:05.660 you know what it so that'd be the plan
02:25:09.380 it's like so what would the plan be give
02:25:11.660 people a high-quality education in the
02:25:13.620 classic humanities teach them how to speak
02:25:15.560 and write a credit them for one-tenth the
02:25:18.980 current cost and do it with millions of
02:25:21.320 people instead of tens of thousands I'm
02:25:24.500 asking what plans do you have for the
02:25:25.700 accreditation side where people can show
02:25:27.500 something for what the time they spend
02:25:28.940 watching well one of the things that I
02:25:30.320 would do for example is imagine that you
02:25:32.540 were in a course and so you have taken
02:25:35.960 exam let's say it's a multiple choice
02:25:37.520 exam just for the sake of argument
02:25:39.560 because they're simpler the writing issue
02:25:41.900 is a separate problem well so one of the
02:25:46.160 things that you would do if you enrolled
02:25:47.780 in the course is generate multiple
02:25:49.400 choice questions that'd be one of your
02:25:50.780 assignments here's a lecture generate
02:25:53.060 ten multiple choice questions now you
02:25:54.980 got a thousand people generating ten
02:25:56.580 multiple choice questions well then you
02:25:58.500 can do their statistical procedures that
02:26:00.620 help you figure out what valid multiple
02:26:03.560 choice questions are you could have
02:26:06.140 people vote on them for that matter if
02:26:07.760 you put them on a website assignment
02:26:09.320 number two here's a hundred multiple
02:26:10.940 choice questions pick the ten that you
02:26:12.920 think are most representative of the
02:26:15.800 knowledge that you've acquired get a
02:26:17.540 hundred people to do that so you get
02:26:19.100 crowdsource the test construction and
02:26:21.440 then you could keep making the test
02:26:22.760 better and better as well because you
02:26:24.380 could build that I'd like to build the
02:26:25.640 system so that it was self-improving with a
02:26:27.980 minimum of administrative interference and
02:26:30.500 so then what would happen is that as you
02:26:33.980 got accredited so you start writing exams
02:26:36.320 and maybe you write more and more of them
02:26:37.880 then you'd start to buy voting power with
02:26:40.100 regards to the content of the courses and
02:26:42.080 maybe even the right to produce courses
02:26:43.820 to put them up online so it's something
02:26:46.400 like that but our strategy would be to
02:26:48.440 build we want to build a system that's
02:26:50.720 basically autonomous and self-improving
02:26:53.120 right from the beginning so minimum of
02:26:56.240 administrative overhead extremely low
02:26:58.400 cost widespread availability crowdsourced in
02:27:02.960 its structure and autonomously self-improving I think we can do that I don't know if I can do it
02:27:09.140 but I think we have the technology to do
02:27:13.040 that and then you think well so here's the
02:27:15.980 plan you know because you're I'm always
02:27:17.360 thinking of the point point B what what's a
02:27:19.460 good thing to do with life well the good
02:27:21.320 good thing to do with your life is the
02:27:22.540 most difficult goddamn thing you can think
02:27:24.620 of that would do the most possible good
02:27:26.600 that'll get you up in the morning and so
02:27:29.180 because you think why should I get up in
02:27:31.040 the morning it's like well you know I've got
02:27:33.320 50 million people to educate hey that'll do it
02:27:36.220 really you know that that's that'll that'll
02:27:40.160 overcome a lot of angst that sort of
02:27:42.140 thinking so well so it seems to me that it
02:27:47.300 seems to me that it's inevitable now
02:27:49.820 whether or not I can do it that's a whole
02:27:53.180 different story but I can certainly start it
02:27:55.640 and I'm going to start it my partner my
02:27:57.740 business partner the guy who helped me
02:27:59.120 develop the self-authoring program which
02:28:02.220 thousands of people are using that now
02:28:04.220 and we've helped thousands tens of
02:28:06.580 thousands of students now stay in
02:28:08.120 universities so that's really cool well
02:28:10.260 maybe not given the state of universities
02:28:12.020 I'm contributing to the problem but you
02:28:16.160 know but they're but they're sticking out
02:28:18.900 their plans that's the point they're
02:28:20.400 actually making plans and sticking them
02:28:21.940 out so so I think that we can and we
02:28:25.840 know how to start small with because
02:28:27.840 the way to build a big system is to
02:28:29.280 build a small system that works and then
02:28:30.880 scale it and so that's I've been
02:28:34.440 talking with my partner his name is
02:28:36.040 Daniel Higgins I have another partner
02:28:37.900 Bob Peel who used to be my graduate
02:28:39.580 supervisor at McGill and we've been
02:28:41.660 working on this sort of thing for about
02:28:42.940 25 years and our goal has been right
02:28:44.680 from the beginning to build low-cost
02:28:47.780 high-quality psychoeducational
02:28:49.580 interventions and bring them to as wide
02:28:51.240 a market as possible so and my and
02:28:55.040 Daniel in particular has devoted most of
02:28:56.700 his life to doing that it's been about 20
02:28:58.140 years now so so well that's a sketch of
02:29:03.300 it all outline more of it on on the web at
02:29:05.160 some point but that's kind of what what
02:29:06.660 we've been deciding what we've been
02:29:08.160 planning to do
02:29:09.240 all right thank you very much yeah
02:29:10.140 hello when you were on the Rubin report
02:29:17.800 not too long ago in that discussion you
02:29:20.860 mentioned how use of psilocybin
02:29:23.660 straightens people out and can produce
02:29:27.120 these transcendent experiences which is
02:29:29.460 jarring for a person who may have
02:29:30.960 I should have never mentioned that on the
02:29:33.160 Rubin report obviously for someone who
02:29:35.660 became a Christian as a result of their
02:29:37.320 only time doing magic mushrooms that's a
02:29:39.620 jarring piece of information I was just
02:29:41.000 wondering if you could expand on what you
02:29:42.280 find intriguing about religious experience
02:29:44.520 and what we can know about the
02:29:45.960 transcendent from them if if anything
02:29:47.740 that's a tough one man
02:29:54.560 the relationship between in theogenic use
02:30:03.960 let's say which is sometimes what those
02:30:06.240 chemicals are described and religious
02:30:10.320 experience is unspecified but it looks
02:30:13.260 like it's profound there is a man named
02:30:15.660 Gordon was all who wrote a book if I
02:30:18.540 remember correctly called Soma he was
02:30:22.020 investigating the potential use of
02:30:23.940 Amanita muscaria mushrooms among the
02:30:27.060 people who wrote the Hindu holy
02:30:28.980 scriptures thousands of years ago and he
02:30:32.140 felt that he identified the chemical
02:30:34.720 that they were using the sacred drink
02:30:37.180 the use of ayahuasca and psilocybin
02:30:42.820 mushrooms and so forth is well
02:30:44.500 documented particularly in North America
02:30:46.060 and the evidence the empirical evidence
02:30:48.820 that under certain conditions those
02:30:50.980 chemicals can produce religious
02:30:52.640 experiences is absolutely overwhelming
02:30:54.700 there's been good research done
02:30:56.440 recently at Johns Hopkins looking at
02:30:59.500 psilocybin the first research that's
02:31:01.480 been done on hallucinogens really in 30
02:31:04.960 years because people were so terrified
02:31:07.240 of them in the 60s and for good reason
02:31:09.060 indicated that the people that they
02:31:13.540 dosed with psilocybin about 75 percent of
02:31:16.060 them had a mystical experience which they
02:31:17.740 regarded as one of the five three to five
02:31:20.920 most important experiences of their life
02:31:22.420 and a year later were characterized by
02:31:26.440 permanent personality transformation which
02:31:28.480 was an increase in trait openness of one
02:31:30.580 standard deviation which is a lot by the
02:31:32.920 way it moves you from 50th percentile to
02:31:34.840 85th percentile for example it's a it's a
02:31:37.420 huge move and that look permanent now
02:31:39.940 whether or not that's a good thing that's a
02:31:41.620 whole different issue but they're very
02:31:43.420 very powerful and they also did some
02:31:45.400 recent research showing that psilocybin
02:31:48.640 mushrooms were an unbelievably effective
02:31:50.140 smoking cessation intervention so if I
02:31:54.280 remember correctly and I may have this
02:31:55.700 wrong because it's been a while since I
02:31:56.960 read it they had an 80 percent success
02:31:59.300 rate in in stopping people from using
02:32:02.240 tobacco with one psilocybin experience and
02:32:06.080 so well so those things are very all of
02:32:09.860 that's very interesting to me and I don't
02:32:11.480 exactly know what to make of it I don't
02:32:13.400 know what to make of it at all not even a
02:32:15.200 little bit but but the evidence for the
02:32:20.960 relationship between met mystical
02:32:23.900 experiences and hallucinogen use of
02:32:26.780 certain types is incontrovertible and I
02:32:29.120 don't and I don't think anybody else
02:32:31.100 knows what to derive from that I mean one
02:32:33.860 conclusion is something like religious
02:32:40.160 experiences are a common concomitant of
02:32:43.100 going temporarily insane and that it's not
02:32:46.280 a bad hypothesis because you see for
02:32:48.260 example in the prodroma of illnesses
02:32:50.780 like schizophrenia and sometimes manic
02:32:53.060 depressive disorder too on the manic end
02:32:54.860 you do see the emergence often of
02:32:57.920 religious type delusions it's not that
02:33:00.140 common but it's not uncommon so it's
02:33:01.940 definitely the case that if your brain
02:33:05.360 function has been detrimentally affected
02:33:09.080 one of the consequences can be
02:33:11.120 experiences that are subjectively
02:33:13.460 experienced as indistinguishable from the
02:33:15.440 religious you also see the same thing in
02:33:18.080 cases of epilepsy especially in the
02:33:20.540 prodroma so if you have an epileptic
02:33:22.380 condition sometimes you know that
02:33:24.500 you're going to have a seizure you can
02:33:26.100 feel it mounting and often or at least
02:33:29.960 occasionally those experiences are
02:33:32.780 associated with an elevation of
02:33:35.600 religious sensation deepening meaning
02:33:38.780 that increases in its depth and
02:33:41.900 complexity until it's overwhelming and
02:33:45.080 that's what subjectively brings on the
02:33:47.900 seizure now God only knows how to
02:33:50.540 disentangle causality in a
02:33:52.160 circumstance like that Dostoevsky had
02:33:54.440 seizures like that by the way so so that
02:33:57.740 the the pessimistic viewpoint is religious
02:34:02.520 phenomenology is a consequence of brain
02:34:04.520 disorder the positive side more
02:34:09.140 positive side is no religious
02:34:12.860 experience is a category of
02:34:15.680 experience that's within the realm of
02:34:18.020 human possibility and there are
02:34:20.180 different modes of eliciting it and we
02:34:22.860 know that there are many modes of
02:34:23.960 eliciting it fasting can elicit it
02:34:26.020 that's the dancing under some
02:34:31.700 circumstances music can elicit it music
02:34:33.980 elicits it regularly I mean basically as
02:34:35.960 far as I'm concerned rock concerts are
02:34:37.640 indistinguishable from religious
02:34:39.560 rituals their rituals not like they
02:34:42.500 don't come with dogmatic overlay let's
02:34:45.380 say but the ritualistic structure is
02:34:47.060 there and maybe it's there just
02:34:48.620 listening to music what that means for
02:34:52.580 the investigation of hallucinogens I have
02:34:55.280 no idea and I would also certainly use the
02:34:59.540 caution that Carl Jung developed when he
02:35:01.700 was talking about hallucinogens and he did
02:35:03.500 that I think only a very brief number of
02:35:05.900 times and I think in relationship to
02:35:07.820 eldest Huxley's original work on
02:35:09.560 mescaline experiences he said beware of
02:35:13.820 wisdom that you didn't earn and that's
02:35:17.360 very very smart so I would say there's
02:35:21.320 something to be learned about there's
02:35:23.420 something there's a lot to be learned
02:35:25.700 about hallucinogens there may be
02:35:27.200 something to be learned from them but
02:35:29.300 having said that if you play with fire
02:35:32.780 you end up burnt generally speaking so all
02:35:38.480 due caution is in effect so one more
02:35:43.160 I know you're an Aldous Huxley fan so I
02:35:46.820 thought I'd ask you this question
02:35:48.080 after reading his book Doors of
02:35:50.980 Perception in which he gives an account of
02:35:53.820 his experience taking the psychedelic drug
02:35:56.420 mescaline he stated that in the final
02:36:00.360 stages of egolessness there is an obscene
02:36:02.880 knowledge that all isn't all that all is
02:36:06.120 actually each he then went on to say
02:36:08.460 that this is as near I take it as a
02:36:11.160 finite mind can ever get to perceiving
02:36:13.240 everything that is happening in the
02:36:15.360 universe I was wondering if maybe you
02:36:17.800 could explain what that means because
02:36:19.260 I've been trying to understand it for a
02:36:21.420 month there is a neuroscientist a while
02:36:31.180 back whose name I don't remember who had a
02:36:33.360 stroke and she being a neuroscientist was
02:36:37.680 analyzing the neurological consequences of
02:36:41.520 the stroke as it occurred if I remember
02:36:43.980 correctly the stroke either temporarily or
02:36:47.940 more permanently took out the function of
02:36:50.460 large portions of her left hemisphere and
02:36:52.860 she had exactly that experience it was an
02:36:56.760 experience of ego dissolution something
02:36:59.400 like that that the the felt sense of of
02:37:05.340 identity shifting from that sort of narrow
02:37:07.560 boundary maybe that you would define by
02:37:10.440 the boundary of your physical being into
02:37:13.320 something that was much broader and much it
02:37:16.820 gets it gets it gets hard to describe this
02:37:19.700 without you know degenerating into hippie
02:37:22.640 poetry from 1967 very very rapidly but
02:37:25.640 it's something like a sense a sense of of the
02:37:32.060 underlying unity of consciousness that
02:37:33.920 might be one way of thinking about we
02:37:35.140 don't know much about consciousness in
02:37:37.220 fact I don't think we know anything about
02:37:38.360 consciousness and obviously consciousness
02:37:40.820 is something that we all share but it's
02:37:42.980 also something that we seem to also
02:37:45.440 experience individually but maybe our
02:37:48.320 individual consciousnesses are something
02:37:50.260 like the manifestations of something
02:37:52.160 that's a more unified consciousness
02:37:54.260 underneath I mean that's hardly an
02:37:56.120 original idea but it does seem to be the
02:37:58.760 case that under some circumstances there
02:38:01.200 are neurological transformations that make
02:38:03.320 that link more apparent assuming that the link exists now you could say well no
02:38:09.380 they're just producing a delusion but the funny thing about you know the funny thing about
02:38:15.260 delusions is that you got to think well how do you know something's a
02:38:18.140 delusion and the answer that has to be like something like well hardly anyone
02:38:22.700 else thinks it that would be criteria number one but criteria number two would be if you act on the
02:38:28.700 delusion do does your ship sink because if your ship sinks then it was a delusion it's something like that but if you act on your delusion and things get better
02:38:39.080 well then maybe it wasn't a delusion and there's no evidence from the
02:38:44.240 psilocybin studies that have been conducted at Johns Hopkins that there was
02:38:47.900 detrimental effects for the participants and the participants certainly don't
02:38:51.140 think that the effects were detrimental so and I've been hesitant to talk
02:38:55.460 about any of this for obvious reasons haha I'll tell you something really funny I
02:38:59.660 think it's funny anyways I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard so you know and so
02:39:06.860 Leary's a good object lesson and being very careful about this sort of thing
02:39:10.220 because it certainly it isn't obvious that his net effect was good and I say
02:39:20.420 that with some caution because Leary was a very smart person and he was very
02:39:23.300 creative but he got tangled up in that hallucinogenic madhouse you know that
02:39:28.520 characterized the say the period from 1965 to about 1970 and it didn't seem to me
02:39:35.000 that that was altogether a good thing thing is we have these chemicals now in
02:39:39.260 our culture and people are experimenting with them like mad and making them
02:39:44.480 illegal doesn't seem to be working in large part because there I think there were
02:39:49.280 seven known seven to twenty known psychoactive substances that were illegal in
02:39:56.300 the year 2000 there's something like 400 now because labs all over the world keep
02:40:01.680 tweaking the molecules right because molecule a is illegal so chemists just
02:40:06.840 shifted a little bit then they have a new hallucinogen and which might be fine and
02:40:12.280 might not be because now and then you can produce a chemical that's unbelievably
02:40:15.840 dangerous fentanyl sort of like that there was a drug a while back that I can't
02:40:20.520 name I can't remember the name it was an acronym it was a fun drug if you took it
02:40:25.700 once it gave you permanent irreversible total Parkinson's disease so people would
02:40:30.980 take it and they were frozen and that was it so mptp I think it was called so it
02:40:37.580 because it destroyed the same area of the brain that that Parkinson's destroys
02:40:41.900 except they did it right away so you know designer drugs right a little caution is in
02:40:49.860 order how we might approach the issue of hallucinogen use in a mature manner well
02:40:56.640 that's a topic for an entirely other discussion I'm not even necessarily sure that it can be
02:41:01.740 approached that way although I would say at minimum determining what it is that you're up
02:41:09.380 to if you're going to experiment would be a good thing like what it is it exactly that
02:41:13.560 you're serving they're not party drugs they're not for fun right whatever they are that's not what
02:41:20.940 they're for and so maybe they could be used by people who are carefully orienting themselves
02:41:27.300 towards the good although I wouldn't say that that should be read as a recommendation thank you
02:41:35.220 thank you for listening to the jordan b peterson podcast that was episode 24 the psychology of the
02:41:47.420 flood you can support these podcasts by donating to dr peterson's patreon the link to which can be
02:41:52.720 found in the description dr peterson's self-development programs self-authoring can be found at self-authoring
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