Struggle Between Chaos and Order

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 37 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

[2] Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture, recorded in Zurich on January 19, 2019.

[3] I've named it The Struggle Between Chaos and Order.

[4] This lecture was recorded when I had my ankle replacement re -replaced.

[5] Dad came with me to Zurich to basically help cook.

[6] This only meat diet doesn't make it.

[7] it particularly easy to stay in hospitals.

[8] So he brought me steak and did work while I was morphed up in bed.

[9] It wasn't that bad of a time, actually, and the surgeon has managed to fix my ankle as much as a replaced ankle can be fixed.

[10] Hope you enjoy the lecture.

[11] Exciting news, Dad is launching his first e -course December 17th.

[12] It's available for presale currently for Cyber Monday.

[13] A lot of people have been asking us for a more structured and condensed resource where they can learn about personality without needing to spend 30 -plus hours watching videos, reading resources, etc. So earlier this year, we recorded a new video series that will be packaged as an online course with eight videos, supplementary materials, including lecture notes, additional reading materials and resources, transcripts, a free license to the Understand Myself Personality Assessment and an exclusive discussion group, all designed to give you an in -depth look at your personality.

[14] This is my favorite topic in psychology, so far anyway.

[15] It's worth checking out if you've been intending to learn about personality and want to do it in a concise and structured format.

[16] Go to Jordan B .Peterson .com slash personality.

[17] If you're listening to this while our Cyber Monday promotion is going on, we're currently offering a presale of a 35 % discount on the course until Friday, December 6th.

[18] If you're interested, this is a great opportunity to get it at a lower price.

[19] Hopefully you find it interesting.

[20] I did.

[21] I sat in all the lectures and fun fact, I've given every person I've dated, Dad's personality test.

[22] We'd out the fools early, right?

[23] Check out the course at jordanb peterson .com slash personality.

[24] The struggle between chaos and order, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[25] Thank you.

[26] It's good to see that you outnumber the protesters.

[27] It's very nice to be here in Zurich.

[28] I'm here for a couple of reasons.

[29] One reason, obviously, is to have the opportunity to speak to all of you.

[30] But I'm also here, I was here because my daughter had surgery in Switzerland this week, and she had an ankle replacement when she was 16, and it didn't work perfectly, although the mechanical joint that was put in worked very well, but her bone structure couldn't handle it exactly right.

[31] And so she hasn't been as mobile as might be optimal over the last 10 years.

[32] and in a fair bit of pain.

[33] And so she tracked down the gentleman, the physician, who made the joint, and he's Swiss, and works just outside of Basel.

[34] Basel?

[35] Basel, yes.

[36] How embarrassing.

[37] And anyways, she had this joint replaced and fixed this week, and that seemed to have gone very well.

[38] So we're quite happy about the quality of Swiss engineering at the moment.

[39] So, yeah, no kidding.

[40] So since I was coming here, I thought I would also take the opportunity to deliver this lecture and see how that went.

[41] And today, I talked to a couple of journalists, one from Die Welt, got that approximately right.

[42] Yoken Wagner was the journalist.

[43] And he asked me this annoying question.

[44] And I didn't give a very good answer.

[45] That's why it was annoying.

[46] It was a good question.

[47] But it was annoying because I didn't give a very good answer.

[48] It's a really hard question.

[49] And he said, and so I thought I would talk about that tonight because it's dead relevant to the substructure of the book 12 Rules for Life.

[50] And it's a crucially important issue.

[51] And it's very complicated.

[52] It's not like I understand it very well.

[53] That's the thing.

[54] It's so hard to, it's hard to grapple with.

[55] And he said, in your book, you identify women as chaos and men as order.

[56] And why do you do that?

[57] And as I said, it was a difficult question.

[58] It kind of took me a back because it takes a long time to explain that and I've wrestled with it for a long time.

[59] So I'm going to try to answer that question more intelligently.

[60] That's what I'm going to try to do that for like 70 minutes and see if I can come to some more.

[61] concise conceptualization of that so the first thing is that I don't think that that's my idea like I think that that's my observation that that's how stories work now I could be wrong it's highly probable but but I have my reasons for thinking this way and so I don't want to convince you of them because I'm actually not that interested in I'm not that interested in convincing people I'm interested in figuring things And if that people find the way that I figure things out convincing, well, that's all well and good.

[62] But if they don't, well, that's fine too, because there's always the possibility.

[63] In fact, the probability that my thinking has errors in it.

[64] And I'm always trying to find out what those errors are.

[65] You know, if you have a map, your thought structure is like a map.

[66] And you want your map of the world to be accurate, because otherwise when you use your map, you wander into a pit.

[67] And unless you're, you know, inclined to wander into a pit, then it'd be better if your map was as accurate as possible.

[68] And so you should be trying to find out constantly where you're not so accurate in your mapping.

[69] And that's a lot better than trying to convince people or trying to convince yourself that you're right.

[70] You know, you can convince yourself that you're right and walk right off the edge of the world.

[71] And that's not that helpful.

[72] So I'm trying to make my map better, you know.

[73] And a tremendous amount of our cognitive structure is something approximating a map.

[74] And the reason for that is we have to make our way in the world, right?

[75] This is part of the tension between the religious viewpoint, let's say, and the scientific viewpoint, because the religious viewpoint, part of the dramatic viewpoint, part of the narrative viewpoint, part of the literary viewpoint, it's all associated with stories.

[76] It has to do with how you map out the world and how you make your way in the world.

[77] And the scientific domain has to do with the nature of the objective world.

[78] And there's truth in both of those approaches, and it is obvious.

[79] how they interrelate.

[80] It's also not obvious which truth is the more fundamental.

[81] It's certainly the case that you have to contend with the objective world, but it's also certainly the case that you have to make your way as a living creature through the world, and that you need guidelines to do that.

[82] And so I'm interested in the structure of maps.

[83] I'm interested in the structure of stories.

[84] I think a story and a map are the same thing, that a story is a kind of map.

[85] And a story presents you with a compelling way of perceiving the world and acting in it.

[86] Okay, and now, so that doesn't seem to be too contentious, that idea.

[87] Why else?

[88] You wouldn't listen to a story if it wasn't compelling.

[89] You wouldn't remember if it wasn't compelling.

[90] We wouldn't tell each other's stories if we weren't compelled by them.

[91] We wouldn't be compelled by stories if they weren't useful.

[92] Stories present heroes and adversaries in conflict.

[93] We obviously imitate people in stories.

[94] We tell stories about heroes and anti -heroes.

[95] They're targets for emulation and imitation.

[96] So they're guides to existence.

[97] That's what a story is.

[98] The story has a moral, which is the point of the story for your perception and action.

[99] So that seems, I think that's solid, that set of ideas.

[100] And a story isn't the same as a scientific description.

[101] That's obvious.

[102] If you go watch something like Sleeping Beauty, the Disney movie, you don't think that's a scientific treatise, you think it's something else.

[103] You don't even think it's true necessarily, but you go watch it, and there must be some truth to it, must have some purchase on the world, because, well, unless you just think it's mindless entertainment, but the question then is, well, why are you entertained in that mindless way?

[104] Like, why does that mode of presentation of information grip you?

[105] It doesn't really help solve the problem.

[106] It's entertaining.

[107] I would say the reason that it's entertaining to go see something like a movie is because Movies are, the story, is so deep and so important that you're actually biologically prepared to enjoy it.

[108] It's actually an indication of its depth, the fact that it's entertaining, that it's gripping.

[109] And I would say that the most gripping and memorable stories are the ones that get retold and remembered.

[110] And our ancient stories are like that.

[111] They've been around forever.

[112] Well, why?

[113] Well, they grip us in some manner.

[114] And so we need to understand them.

[115] well perhaps we don't need to but it seems useful that we might make the effort to understand them and so I spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of stories because I think stories are at the bottom of the way we think they're at the bottom of the way we act we're nested inside stories you know even when you talk to someone about your life you tend to turn it into a story and so stories are at the bottom or they're close to the bottom And so what is it like down there at the bottom?

[116] It's not, the story world isn't the same as the objective world.

[117] It has its own characteristic structure.

[118] It relies on metaphor, for example.

[119] And science doesn't.

[120] Science maybe does when you're generating hypotheses, but you're trying to get away from metaphor.

[121] You're trying to get to something that's clearer and more objective, whatever that means.

[122] Story relies on metaphor.

[123] What metaphors?

[124] Well, it have to be metaphors you understand, because otherwise they're not good for anything.

[125] So, what are the fundamental metaphors?

[126] All right, so I think the fundamental metaphors are something like chaos and order, and the force that mediates between them.

[127] That's the fundamental narrative structure.

[128] And so we might take that apart a little bit.

[129] The world's made out of chaos and order.

[130] And so what does that mean?

[131] It means the way you experience the world.

[132] right each of us it's not really a description of the objective world it's a description of universal human experience and so order how do you define order how do you know when you're in order it's easy it's not actually it's very hard to figure this out but once you figure it out it's easy order is where you are when what you want is happening okay and that's a really precise definition I labored over that definition and it's for really for decades even though it's so short because order isn't what you expect for example, which is psychologists like to think that we predict the world and that we, that we're, that we're trying to make what we expect happen because that keeps us stable and calm.

[133] You don't want unexpected to emerge too dramatically.

[134] It's like fair enough.

[135] But it isn't that you're running around trying to make the world turn out the way you expect.

[136] It's that you're running around trying to make the world turn out the way you want it to turn out.

[137] And that's a crucial difference because the fact that you want something pulls motivation into the story, right?

[138] It makes you more than just a cold cognitive calculator.

[139] It says, well, you're a living thing.

[140] There's things you desire and value, and you're trying to make them manifest themselves in the world.

[141] And so how do you know when you're in order?

[142] It's like you act and what you want happens.

[143] That doesn't mean you're right.

[144] Who knows if you're right?

[145] That's a whole different issue.

[146] But it means that you're in the domain of order.

[147] And how do you know that?

[148] Well, here's one way.

[149] You're not terrified.

[150] Right?

[151] You're not anxious.

[152] And why not?

[153] Well, it's because apparently things are under control.

[154] The fact that you're getting what you want indicates that it's the definition of being under control.

[155] You know, like if you're talking to someone, you're having a conversation with them, the conversation's going in an engaging manner, it's flowing.

[156] It's like, you're not anxious and terrified about that because it's working.

[157] If you're at a party and you tell a joke and it falls flat, you know, and everyone's embarrassed, it's like, well, then you'll, if you're not completely psychopathic, You'll be embarrassed as well, and you'll feel I made some mistake.

[158] I don't know where I am.

[159] My map is wrong.

[160] And then anxiety moves up to grip you and freeze you, because you're not where you thought you were.

[161] You're not in order.

[162] Well, where are you when you're not in order?

[163] Well, you're in chaos.

[164] It's whatever is antithetical to order.

[165] And that's where all hell breaks loose.

[166] That's chaos, you know?

[167] And those are real domains, and it's really useful to know about them, because you need to know whether you're in order or whether you're in chaos.

[168] You need to know, for example, that being in chaos is, like, that's a, what would you call it?

[169] That's a canonical human experience to be in chaos.

[170] When you don't get the promotion at work that you've been working on, and you're disappointed and frustrated and things fall apart on you, that's chaos, you know?

[171] When someone you loves betrays you, that's chaos.

[172] When you betray yourself, that's chaos.

[173] You know, if there's an earth, or a flood, or a revolution, or a riot.

[174] That's all chaos.

[175] That's an existential place.

[176] And we move between order and chaos constantly in our lives.

[177] Hopefully, not catastrophically.

[178] And so chaos is where you are when what you want is not happening.

[179] And then that can happen at different levels, you know.

[180] It's like you can go home in the evening and you don't get a warm welcome from your wife.

[181] Maybe we were hoping for that.

[182] Well, that's a little chaos.

[183] It makes you a little anxious.

[184] But that's a whole different than a divorce announcement.

[185] Or to come home and find your partner making love with someone else, that's a real catastrophic and cataclysmic descent, assuming that you wanted the relationship to be maintained.

[186] You know, maybe there's a certain amount of, what would you call it, self -satisfaction at discovering that if you didn't like the relationship to begin with.

[187] but, you know, well, people are complicated, you know.

[188] So, and you never know, you might have driven her to it, or she might have driven you to it.

[189] Who knows?

[190] Because we're certainly capable of doing those sorts of things, just for the joy of having the martyrdom.

[191] You know, so the great stories talk about chaos and order.

[192] You know, they talk about the movement between those two, even more importantly.

[193] So the story of Exodus, for example, Moses, the story of Moses and Exodus, everyone, virtually everyone knows that story.

[194] Order is Egypt, initially, that's a tyranny, because order can be tyrannical.

[195] There can be too much of it.

[196] And so the Israelites escape from Egypt, they escape from the tyranny.

[197] And then what happens?

[198] It's like, well, you escape from tyranny and everything's good.

[199] It's like, no, that isn't how it works at all.

[200] You escape from tyranny.

[201] That could be the tyranny of your own thoughts, right?

[202] That could be the tyranny of your marriage.

[203] It could be the tyranny of your previous job.

[204] You escape from it.

[205] You think, well, now my problem solved.

[206] It's like, no, it's not.

[207] It's like 40 years in the damn desert for you.

[208] Because you escape from pathological order at your peril.

[209] Bang, chaos.

[210] And everything falls apart in chaos.

[211] That's why the Israelites worship false idols in the desert.

[212] They're trying to orient themselves again.

[213] They're chasing after new values.

[214] They don't know what to do.

[215] And then something emerges to recreate order and a new order emerges.

[216] And that's the story.

[217] That's the human story.

[218] Order, collapse, chaos, the underworld, reconstitution, new order.

[219] And you might say, well, is the world order, or is it chaos, and say, well, it's both, but it's one other thing, too.

[220] It's the ability to make the movement between those states.

[221] And that's the third thing.

[222] And that's so important to know, because you might be tempted to think that your order and to identify with that.

[223] You know, like the radical nationalists do that, the identity politics type of.

[224] do that.

[225] It's like, here's my identity.

[226] Here's my order.

[227] That's me. It's like, well, no, it's not.

[228] It's not you, because you're chaos too, or at least your experience is.

[229] But then you're not just chaos either.

[230] And that's a good thing, because that's intolerable, right?

[231] You can't live on a non -stop diet of the unexpected and unpredictable, especially if it's involuntary.

[232] It just, it's deadly.

[233] It just burns you to a frazzle.

[234] You can't manage it physiologically.

[235] You might feel that your chaos and everything else is too, but that's no good.

[236] That's nihilism and despair and hopelessness and frustration and disappointment, resentment, and hatred and anger.

[237] And it's like, that's a mess, man. And so you don't want to be that either.

[238] But you can be the thing that moves between those states and that transcends them, you know.

[239] And part of the idea, the symbolic idea, for example, that's embedded in the idea of the death and resurrection is exactly that, is that you're the thing that can dissolve and reconstitute.

[240] And that's the crucial thing you need to know, that you can ride out those movements between those different states.

[241] I don't know if there's anything more important you can know than that, except maybe this, is that that's also, that participating in that movement, especially voluntarily, that's associated with the intrinsic sense of meaning.

[242] That's what meaning, that's what meaning guides you to.

[243] If it's functioning, if you're functioning honestly, and the instinct for meaning is working, it puts you there.

[244] It makes you that thing that can make that transition.

[245] And hopefully it's a, it's a journey like this, but it's upward, you know?

[246] Order, catastrophe, reconstitution, but at a higher level of order, right?

[247] You learned from your mistake.

[248] And so when you put yourself back together, you're more together than you were.

[249] It's not inevitable that it'll happen.

[250] You can make a mistake and never recover.

[251] You're just done because the chaos is real and it can be deadly.

[252] It's no joke.

[253] It's nothing to embark on lightly.

[254] But you know, your life is punctuated by painful bouts of learning.

[255] Let's put it that way.

[256] You can be almost certain that you've been learned something worthwhile if it destroyed and reconstituted part of you.

[257] It's partly why people are resistant to learning because who wants to go through?

[258] that.

[259] But storing up the catastrophes for the future as an alternative, refusing to change when anything happens.

[260] Well, that just means that one day things will collapse and you will not recover.

[261] Better to keep yourself up to date with the little deaths and rebirths that you need on a constant basis.

[262] Chaos and order.

[263] Well, how do you represent those?

[264] You can't just tell a story about chaos and order.

[265] I mean, it's hard even to just explain it.

[266] It's not a You need to represent it somehow.

[267] And the thing is, we needed to represent this.

[268] I mean, us as human beings, we need to represent this in some sense, long before we figured it out.

[269] Like what I just told you was an articulated representation.

[270] It took me a very long time to develop that representation.

[271] And then it took, and I've been building on the ideas of many, many other people.

[272] And these ideas have been developing for thousands of years.

[273] And so it's not like this is an easy thing to articulate.

[274] It's very difficult.

[275] And there are a prodroma, dramatic or artistic prodroma, to this set of ideas.

[276] It's partly what artists do, but it's what storytellers and dramatists do.

[277] They dramatize the world, and they abstract out the crucial elements, and they present them in the form of personalities.

[278] That would be a good way of thinking about it.

[279] And it's because we tend to experience reality as if it's characterized by personalities.

[280] And I think that's because we're social primates for crying out loud.

[281] Most of what we have interacted with throughout our evolutionary history are other social primates.

[282] Like the primary reality for human beings is actually personalities, at least to the degree that our primary reality is ourselves and other people.

[283] It's shaped our cognitive architecture.

[284] We tend to look at the world as if it's personalities.

[285] And so chaos and order manifest themselves to us.

[286] in personified form.

[287] It's not like they're interpreted that way.

[288] It's not like we know what chaos and order are and we attribute personalities to them.

[289] It's that they reveal us, they reveal themselves to us through the metaphor of personality.

[290] Okay, so let me give you some examples.

[291] I've spent a lot of time unpacking three fundamental stories, more than that, but these are the three that.

[292] I think I've delved most deeply into.

[293] One of them is creation myth from ancient Egypt.

[294] One of them is a creation myth from ancient Mesopotamia.

[295] These are foundational stories, right?

[296] They oriented cultures for thousands of years.

[297] Unbelievably powerful stories.

[298] And they've had a determining effect on the fundamental narratives that guide us.

[299] So they're not trivial stories.

[300] At least they're no more trivial, let's say, than our culture.

[301] And then the story in Genesis as well.

[302] which is a variant of the Mesopotamian story in particular.

[303] Or a variance good enough idea.

[304] So in Mesopotamia, for example, in ancient Mesopotamia, there were two fundamental forces at work at the beginning of time.

[305] One was characterized as Tiamat and one was characterized as Apsu.

[306] And Tiamat was the goddess of salt water, tears and chaos.

[307] And she was often represented as something approximating a predatory reptile.

[308] So, now, why, why that?

[309] Well, you're in order and things are going well, right?

[310] Let's say you're out for a stroll in a park, and it's a sunny day, and everything is working out for you just nicely.

[311] Maybe you're holding hands with someone you love, and you think, oh, isn't life wonderful?

[312] And this doesn't necessarily happen in Switzerland, but it happens sometimes in Canada.

[313] How about a grizzly bear appears?

[314] And, you know, you have bears here.

[315] But they're little cuddly bears 600 pounds, you know 700 pounds.

[316] A grizzly bear is like 2 ,000 pounds And it is the most powerful predator So like if you put a grizzly bear In a cage with tigers Which they did in the late 1800s In North America, the grizzly bear just kills the tigers, that's that, and it kills lions It's like you don't No other predator can withstand a grizzly bear And so if a grizzly bear appears in your path You are not in order and your map, right, you all think that's funny.

[317] It's like, yeah, because you know, that's definitely evidence of error.

[318] You thought you were one place, and you're somewhere completely different, especially if the grizzly bear is there, and her cubs are there.

[319] That's really not a good situation.

[320] So what's the worst error you can make?

[321] How about accidental encounter with a carnivorous predator?

[322] How would that be?

[323] How about that as a symbolic representation of being off the path?

[324] You imagine our archaic ancestors huddled around the fire.

[325] Here's the story.

[326] You know, there was this predatory cat that was discovered a while back.

[327] It's been extinct for a very long period of time.

[328] And it had two very large teeth on the top and one very large teeth, tooth on the bottom.

[329] And it turned out that it's jaw size.

[330] was exactly the size of an ancestral human skull.

[331] Right, so it would put two teeth here and one here.

[332] Right, and like we've been preyed upon by terrible things forever.

[333] Millions of years, you know, long enough so that the image of the predator, especially the reptilian predator, is burned deep into our psyche.

[334] You know, human beings are prepared to be afraid of snakes.

[335] for example.

[336] You can teach fear to people, teach fear of snakes to people very rapidly.

[337] That was the initial hypothesis, but the newer data indicates it's not that you're prepared to be afraid of snakes.

[338] You're just afraid of snakes.

[339] And some people, you can get over it, but it's there.

[340] It's instinctual.

[341] And it's also the same with chimpanzees, by the way.

[342] If a chimpanzee's never seen a snake, if you have a little cage full of chimps, big cage full of chimpanzees, and you bring in a snake, they hit the ceiling.

[343] And then they look at the snake, but they're not happy.

[344] They're enthralled, but they're not happy.

[345] And they even have a specific snake cry.

[346] So if chimps encounter a snake in the wild, they'll make the cry.

[347] And other chimps will come and look at the snake, assuming, you know, it's an impressive sort of snake, they'll sit there and look at it, gaze at it, they're transfixed by it.

[348] It's like, well, so why would chaos be represented by a predator?

[349] Well, it's because if you encounter a predator, you are definitely in chaos.

[350] That's the symbolic representation.

[351] Now, this goddess, Tiamat, the goddess of chaos.

[352] Another question.

[353] Where does order come from?

[354] Well, it comes from chaos.

[355] So what does that mean?

[356] Well, you have to learn things, right?

[357] When you don't know anything, you aren't getting what you want, because you don't know what to do.

[358] If you're very socially awkward and you go to a party and you don't know what to do, you don't get what you want.

[359] It's a chaotic situation.

[360] And so what do you have to do?

[361] To fix that, you have to face the chaos, and you have to turn it into order.

[362] You have to learn how to manage the chaos so that you now get what you want.

[363] So what that means is that order emerges out of chaos.

[364] Okay, so that's the idea.

[365] And it's a universal truth that order emerges out of chaos.

[366] And it's a universal truth that you partake in that process.

[367] That's what you do.

[368] It's your fundamental mode of being in the world is to act such that you make new order emerge from chaos.

[369] Sometimes you do the river, sometimes you tear down old order so new chaos can emerge and be rebuilt.

[370] But we'll leave that aside for a moment.

[371] That's another variant of the fundamental story.

[372] Order comes from chaos.

[373] Tyamat is the fundamental goddess.

[374] She has a husband, Ap Sue.

[375] He's the goddess of Fresh.

[376] He's the God of Freshwater.

[377] And the idea is that the intermingling of the two constitutes the original act of creation.

[378] All right.

[379] So, why is that the case?

[380] You encounter chaos and you make order.

[381] And all that means is that you learn new things by encountering what's new.

[382] And then maybe it means that you learn new things best by voluntarily encountering what's new.

[383] And then maybe it means that you learn new deep things by voluntarily encountering what's truly chaotic and new, right?

[384] So there's a relationship between how much chaos you're willing to contend with and how much new order you can conceivably produce.

[385] But it's a risky game, because you're dealing with things that are truly unknown, you're dealing with things that are genuinely outside of your ken. And if you make a mistake, well, then you end up somewhere dangerous.

[386] The Mesopotamians posited that the original act of creation was a consequence of the intermingling of Absu and Tiamat, the intermingling of chaos and order.

[387] Okay, so, when you learn something new, you're not a blank slate when you encounter it, right?

[388] Like, when you meet someone new, and maybe you're trying to make a relationship with them, you use all the information that you have about previous relationships.

[389] Right, you take the order that you've already established, and you use it to structure the new situation that you're encountering.

[390] And so, and then maybe something new can come out of that.

[391] You know, like, you're reading a book, and you're learning new things, but you're using all the knowledge that you have as a literary creature, as a literate creature to do that.

[392] And so, in the encounter with chaos, there's always order at work.

[393] There's always order at work.

[394] And so that's that Mesopotamian idea, is that new things emerge because of the interplay between order and chaos.

[395] All right.

[396] And the chaos, as I said, is represented by this dragon, this feminine dragon, and we haven't got to the feminine part yet, because it's hard to get there.

[397] And this orderly structure, Apsu.

[398] Okay.

[399] So that's one example.

[400] So that's one example of the metaphor, feminine, masculine used as representation of chaos and order.

[401] Here's another one.

[402] There's an Egyptian story.

[403] I'll run through it quickly.

[404] It's the story of Osiris and Set and Isis and Horus.

[405] It's a great story.

[406] And so here's the story in brief form.

[407] Osiris is a god, but he's also the pharaoh at the same time.

[408] So you can think about him as the spirit of the pharaoh in some sense.

[409] You could even think about him as the concept of king or emperor.

[410] You know, you can have many kings in succession, but they're all the king.

[411] And so the king is an abstraction of what's common across the set of kings.

[412] And Osiris is an abstraction of what's common across the set of pharaohs, let's say.

[413] And it's part of the Egyptian's attempt, the ancient Egyptians attempt, our attempt, to understand what constituted genuine sovereignty, genuine authority, not power, but authority, competence, authority, and the foundation of the state.

[414] How should the state be founded?

[415] Osiris is the answer to that.

[416] Now, Osiris was a great king slash god.

[417] when he was young.

[418] And he established the Egyptian state.

[419] He rested it from chaos, let's say.

[420] Now he's old.

[421] So the story goes.

[422] And he's got all the problems that something old has.

[423] He's kind of out of date.

[424] He's kind of anachronistic.

[425] But even more importantly, he's willfully blind.

[426] He refuses to see.

[427] And that's worse than just being old.

[428] And so what's the idea?

[429] The idea there is that structures of order, represented by Osiris, have two fundamental flaws.

[430] One is they age.

[431] What you know is always slightly out of date.

[432] Your culture is always a construction of the past.

[433] So it's not, what do they say about the military?

[434] 100 % prepared to fight the last war.

[435] Right, and that's sort of the situation that we're always in.

[436] But the willfully blind part, that's even worse.

[437] It's like you could know, but you refuse to engage.

[438] And that's a deadly sin.

[439] It's a worldwide trope of mythology that the proclivity to turn a blind eye brings down the reign of destruction that's why for example in the story of Noah when everything is flooded that's the return of chaos it's because of the sins of men it's their inability to aim and hit the target its willful blindness brings things down around us so does entropy so does age but it's sped along by that anyhow Osiris has a brother set And set, that's the setting sun.

[440] It's the force that devours consciousness at night.

[441] It's everything dark and corrupt.

[442] And set, the name set, becomes Satan through the Egyptian, the Coptic Christians.

[443] So our modern conception of the, what would you call it, transcendent personality of evil is emerged at least in part from this underlying Egyptian mythology.

[444] Osiris has a brother set.

[445] What does it mean?

[446] Well, it means that the kingdom is always threatened by some malevolent force, always.

[447] And I think that's so useful to know that, right?

[448] To know that existentially is that, well, you have a structure, whatever it is, it has an evil twin, and you have to keep an eye on that thing, because the evil twin can always dominate.

[449] You know, this fear that's emerged of the patriarchy, let's say, the oppressive patriarchy, He's a recasting of the same story, except there's no Osiris.

[450] There's just set.

[451] There's just evil and tyranny.

[452] And people can relate to that because structures are tyrannical.

[453] And that's the pathology of order, is the tyranny of structure.

[454] That's the pathology of order.

[455] Anyways, Osiris isn't willing to comprehend the depth of his brother's malevolence.

[456] And he ignores him.

[457] And so one day, Osset, Chops Osiris up and distributes his pieces all around Egypt.

[458] You can't kill him because he's a god, but you can make it damn difficult for him to get his act together.

[459] And that's exactly what...

[460] It's interesting.

[461] I use that metaphor on purpose to get your act together, you know?

[462] Because it draws on the same metaphorical idea.

[463] To get your act together means that you're scattered into your constituent parts, and maybe it's because you've been laid low by chaos and malevolence.

[464] You no longer have your act together.

[465] You have to gather up your pieces.

[466] You have to put yourself back.

[467] together.

[468] Well, that's the condition of Osiris, scattered throughout the kingdom, set the rules.

[469] Many of you have seen the Disney movie, The Lion King.

[470] It's the same story.

[471] You know, you have the king, Mufasa.

[472] He has an evil brother.

[473] He doesn't pay enough attention to him.

[474] And his evil brother kills him.

[475] And everyone understands that story.

[476] It makes perfect sense.

[477] And so I'm telling you that just to show you how these ideas echo across time, you know, and that they're part of the way that we look at the world.

[478] Osiris falls apart.

[479] Seth rules.

[480] That's not good.

[481] That's not good.

[482] It means the tyrant has control.

[483] What happens?

[484] Third character appears.

[485] Isis.

[486] Female.

[487] Queen of the underworld.

[488] Chaos.

[489] Why chaos?

[490] Well, because chaos emerges when things fall apart.

[491] By definition.

[492] It's personified in the Egyptian story by ISIS.

[493] Queen of the underworld.

[494] She's also the spirit of renewal, right?

[495] And that's part of the hint about why chaos is feminine, because new things emerge out of chaos.

[496] Well, what's the fundamental criteria of femininity is that new things emerge from the feminine?

[497] Right?

[498] It's the definition of the feminine that new forms emerge from it.

[499] You know, when people were critiquing 12 rules for life, said, well, you associate women with chaos and men with order.

[500] It's like, no, it's femininity with chaos.

[501] masculinity with order, that's not the same thing.

[502] And chaos isn't all bad.

[503] It's the antidote to tyranny, for example.

[504] And order isn't all good because it can degenerate into tyranny.

[505] So there's nothing pejorative about the metaphorical identification.

[506] It's just a matter of, it's a matter of understanding the structure of the world.

[507] Osiris falls apart.

[508] ISIS appears.

[509] Why is that?

[510] Well, it's because the queen of the underworld always appears when things fall apart.

[511] That's where you are when things fall apart.

[512] This is so useful to know.

[513] Things fell apart.

[514] Well, where am I?

[515] You're in the underworld.

[516] That's the mythological idea.

[517] What do you do in the underworld?

[518] You actually need to know that because you're going to be in the underworld.

[519] It's like, things are going to fall apart on you.

[520] It's like, okay, what do you just die when that happens?

[521] You're done?

[522] It's like, no, you better know how to orient yourself there.

[523] ISIS appears on the scene.

[524] She searches all over Egypt for Osiris's missing parts and she finds his phallus and she makes herself pregnant with it.

[525] What does it mean?

[526] Well, you know what it means.

[527] You know what it means.

[528] Your life is going on along and something knocks you for a loop and maybe it's malevolence right.

[529] Maybe you're betrayed by someone because that's harsh.

[530] You know, it could be maybe you get cancer or maybe you get some other illness or your career falls apart.

[531] That's all brutal And, you know, or maybe it's a natural disaster.

[532] But to be betrayed, that's really brutal.

[533] And that's an encounter with malevolence.

[534] And that can break you into pieces.

[535] It's like, well, maybe you recover from that, right?

[536] Maybe you don't.

[537] But maybe you recover from it.

[538] And you look back and you think, you know, I'm a hell of a lot wiser and more put together than I was when that happened.

[539] I was a little too naive for my own good.

[540] And it was a hell of a descent down into that chaotic underworld, propelled by the evil that I didn't understand or wouldn't look at.

[541] But now that I've reconstituted myself, and I'm wiser, I can see that that was the birth of something new, the new you, let's say.

[542] Well, that's the alternative.

[543] You either give birth to a new you in the underworld, or you're done, because the old you, it's fragmented.

[544] And maybe you can pull your pieces back together, and maybe not, but it's good to at least know that that's the root out and that's the possibility.

[545] Is there something new that could be born if you let go of what was the past?

[546] There better be, because that's your life.

[547] Anyways, ISIS makes herself pregnant.

[548] And she gives birth to Horace.

[549] And Horace is the hero.

[550] He's a visionary hero.

[551] Horace is a falcon.

[552] He can see.

[553] Falcons can see better than any other creatures.

[554] Human beings are very good vision, but we don't see as well as birds of prey.

[555] And so the bird of prey, the falcon, is a symbol of vision.

[556] Now, you remember that Osiris was willfully blind.

[557] Well, Horace is the opposite.

[558] Horace looks at things.

[559] Right?

[560] And so that's the idea.

[561] There's an idea for you.

[562] Things fall apart on you.

[563] Well, maybe you were willfully blind.

[564] Well, so what should you do about it?

[565] You should open your eyes.

[566] Right?

[567] You should adopt identification with Horace, let's say.

[568] You should see what's right in front of you.

[569] Well, what's right in front of you?

[570] That which you do not wish to look at.

[571] That's the horror of it.

[572] Horace grows up outside the state.

[573] because it's ruled by his evil uncle.

[574] What does that mean?

[575] Well, we all do that to the degree that the state is ruled by our evil uncle.

[576] You know, we're all alienated to some degree from the social structure.

[577] That's why the idea of the oppressive patriarchy, for example, carries with it some compelling weight.

[578] You know, the social being extracts its pound of flesh, and it's not structured perfectly.

[579] And so to the degree that there's a mismatch between what our society is and what it should be, it's easy for us to feel alienated from it to grow up in something approximating the underworld but hopefully we do that with our eyes open it's your moral duty to do that why moral duty because the consequence of keeping your eyes closed when you're in the underworld are fatal or worse you think well what's worse than fatal that's easy a lot of suffering followed by fatal is a lot worse yeah really like if you think death is the worst thing there is you are not using your imagination because it is not the worst thing there is.

[580] It's no picnic, you know.

[581] But that's not the point, is that there's plenty of hell to traverse before death if you're in cautious.

[582] And if you want to walk that route, keeping your eyes closed when they should be open, that's a good way to find that path.

[583] Horace emerges, and he's the visionary, he sees, and he's willing to look at malevolence.

[584] Okay, so there's another thing.

[585] There's another thing.

[586] Man, I've talked to my clients.

[587] You know, I had this client once who'd been brilliant female lawyer, terrified of her own intelligence.

[588] It was quite interesting because she was a very nice person, a very agreeable person, and a naive person.

[589] And her niceness and her agreeableness and her naivety was part of a package that also enabled her to make close personal contact with her clients.

[590] And so it was a positive element to it, but there was a negative element too because it laid her wide open for exploitation by people who were malevolent.

[591] And one of them tried to take her out.

[592] They basically took her body of work.

[593] They stole it from her after she, with a series of underhanded maneuvers.

[594] And then basically, when she got upset about it, generated the story that she was mentally unstable.

[595] And it was real trouble because the person who did this had the upper hand.

[596] And so it took us like two years to sort that out.

[597] It was really troublesome.

[598] And her intelligence, you know, it would give her hints about the misbehavior of people in her corporate office.

[599] But she didn't like it because it was like, well, no nice person would ever think those thoughts.

[600] It's like, yeah, fair enough.

[601] Or more maybe more accurately, no naive person who's laid themselves open to exploitation by malevolence would ever think those thoughts.

[602] It's like, yeah, but you want to stay that way?

[603] You want to stay naive so you can be exploited in that manner?

[604] Or do you want to wake up?

[605] You wake up, you look at things you don't want to look at.

[606] And so she learned to allow her intelligent intuitions that were shining a light on the dark corners of the world to manifest itself more fully.

[607] And so she became harder and tougher, but better.

[608] So, Horace, he wakes up.

[609] He's awake.

[610] He can see.

[611] He's the famous Egyptian eye.

[612] He's the falcon.

[613] He can see set.

[614] He goes back and has a fight with him.

[615] is it's the deity of evil and that's no joke and horace is a god and so is set horace fights horace fights with set and during the fight seth tears out one of his eyes what does that mean it means even if you're awake you emerge out of the underworld even if you're awake even if you're paying attention if you look at things that are dark you risk damaging your consciousness right it's a warning it's like you have to look but beware because what you're looking at is enough to, it's enough to undermine your consciousness.

[616] Horace emerges successful.

[617] He gets the eye back and he banishes set to the nether regions of the kingdom.

[618] No killing him.

[619] There's no getting rid of the proclivity for malevolence.

[620] The best you can do is keep it under control for some period of time.

[621] He takes his eye back.

[622] You'd think, well, he'd put the eye back in his head and then he'd be king, but that isn't what he does.

[623] He goes down into the underworld and he finds Osiris, his father, who, who's existing down there as a sort of semi -dead shade.

[624] And he gives Osiris his eye.

[625] And then Osiris wakes up, because he can see again, and then the two of them go back, and they rule jointly.

[626] And it's so incomprehensibly brilliant that story.

[627] The idea is, well, in the underworld, you wake up and you see, and you encounter the spirit of malevolence.

[628] You see what's made your love.

[629] life go wrong.

[630] You know, your own inadequacies, let's say your own moral inadequacies, your own foolishness, your own blindness, and maybe the malevolence of others.

[631] Now, there's other reasons to fall apart.

[632] Sometimes you just start, let's say, an innocent bystander in a series of catastrophes.

[633] I'm not talking about that.

[634] That happens to people.

[635] But this is a deeper and darker variant of the pathway to failure.

[636] You're in the underworld.

[637] You have to figure out how the hell you got there and one of the first things you're going to have to do if you're going to wake up and you're going to see is you're going to have to contend with the fact of malevolence.

[638] Yours, societies, the social structure, other people, all of that.

[639] And that's a traumatizing experience, even if you're prepared for it.

[640] What's the consequence if you manage it?

[641] You revivify your culture and you develop the capacity.

[642] to be sovereign.

[643] That's the Egyptian story.

[644] It's an amazing story.

[645] In the Egyptian story, Osiris is male, masculine, and ISIS chaos is female.

[646] Now, ISIS obviously emerges in this story as a revivifying force.

[647] Well, chaos is the source of new things.

[648] That's part of the reason that it's feminine.

[649] It's the source of new things.

[650] Okay.

[651] Why is order masculine?

[652] I think it's because human hierarchies are fundamentally masculine.

[653] If you look at our relationship to chimpanzees, for example, our closest biological relative, chimpanzee social structures are fundamentally masculine.

[654] So the basic social structure is stratified males.

[655] Now, the females fit in there, but the most dominant individuals are male.

[656] Is that the case with human beings?

[657] Well, it certainly was the case for human beings up until the very recent present.

[658] And I think the fundamental reason for that was that, well, how could women compete?

[659] They were so overwhelmed by their reproductive, by their involuntary reproductive responsibilities that the hierarchical structuring had to be left essentially to the men.

[660] Think, well, is that a contentious proposition?

[661] Well, it's what the radicals claim that our society is fundamentally patriarchal.

[662] Now, their claim is that it's fundamentally oppressive in patriarchal, which is a completely different claim, but they're inclined, and this would include the people who are criticizing the manner, which I'm using symbolic representation.

[663] They use exactly the same symbolic representational structure.

[664] Men organize themselves into hierarchies.

[665] And the hierarchy, a hierarchy, points in a single direction, and it organizes.

[666] So you have an internal hierarchy that guides you.

[667] You know, so for example, right now, at least in principle, you're focused on one thing.

[668] Hopefully you're focused on the content of the lecture and maybe on whatever thoughts it might be generating, but you're focused on one thing.

[669] It means that all of the other things that you could be focused on or inhibited, they're, they're, and you've, you've pulled one thing out to be ruler above all else in this situation.

[670] You cannot perceive the world without using an internal hierarchy.

[671] It's inevitable.

[672] And then that hierarchy, think about this.

[673] All of you are here at the same time, at the moment, and you're all doing the same thing.

[674] And so that hierarchy, of perception that's guiding the way that you look at the world is also organizing the behavior of everyone in this room and so there's a concordance between the social hierarchy and the internal hierarchy and that concordance is in fact order look when you came in here the chairs weren't randomly positioned right they're all facing the stage the room has a story embedded in it the story is that we all come in here and sit down and face the stage because that's where the action is if there's going to be any action.

[675] And we're all agreed that we're going to make this the focal point.

[676] And that agreement is a hierarchical arrangement of value.

[677] We've decided that this is the most valuable thing at the moment.

[678] Nothing else competes to the degree that you're quiet and listening then you're participating in that.

[679] And it's part of social order.

[680] And so we structure ourselves into hierarchies to produce order.

[681] And the hierarchy, the hierarchy has a fundamentally masculine symbolic nature.

[682] And I think it's because the complex, that complex human hierarchies, they're manifestations of masculinity.

[683] It doesn't mean women don't contribute.

[684] I don't mean that, partly because it isn't the case that men are only masculine and women are only feminine.

[685] men have a feminine side and women have a masculine side and so that additionally complicates the issue and I'm not going to address that at the moment because I want to stick closer to the main point all right the hierarchy of value is fundamentally masculine because complex hierarchies are fundamentally the consequence of masculine activity for better for worse you might debate that and you probably could but it's a reasonable proposition back to feminine.

[686] Why is feminine chaos?

[687] Okay, so we said, well, the first symbolic analog is that chaos and the feminine are the same because new forms emerge from both.

[688] That's a fundamental symbolic equivalence.

[689] It's what makes the metaphor work.

[690] When you encounter something chaotic, something new can emerge, and it's the feminine out of which new things emerge.

[691] All right, why else?

[692] Why else is the feminine?

[693] Characterized as chaotic.

[694] Now I can't tell if this is a human universal or if this is something that's mostly characteristic of the experience of men.

[695] But I think it's a universal.

[696] You have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.

[697] All right, so what that means is that on average, men are half as successful reproductively as women.

[698] Okay, you might think, well, how can you have twice as many female ancestors as male?

[699] That doesn't make any sense.

[700] It's like, yes, it does.

[701] Here's how it would make sense.

[702] Imagine that on average, every woman had one child throughout the entire history of humanity.

[703] Then imagine that half of the men had zero and the other half had two.

[704] Well, that's basically what happened.

[705] Like if you strip it down and you look at it mathematically, that's what happened.

[706] And so men, to be male, is to be much more susceptible to radical failure at reproduction.

[707] Why?

[708] Women are sexually selective.

[709] And this turns out to be a big deal.

[710] So look, there's two forces that drive evolutionary selection, speaking biologically.

[711] There's natural selection.

[712] Don't get eaten by a grizzly bear.

[713] Because then you're dead.

[714] And if you're dead, you don't reproduce.

[715] But to not be selected as a mate is also reproductive death.

[716] And so Darwin identified this very early when he was laying out the theory of evolution, natural selection, and sexual selection.

[717] And Darwin actually believed that sexual selection was at least as powerful a force as natural selection.

[718] Can you find a mate and reproduce?

[719] Well, let's contrast for a minute.

[720] Chimpanzees and human beings once again.

[721] The evidence suggests that human beings have diverged more from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.

[722] than chimpanzees have.

[723] Okay, so chimps are more like whatever we were both like seven million years ago than we are.

[724] We've transformed ourselves radically.

[725] You can tell that by looking at a chimp.

[726] They look very different than us.

[727] They're a lot shorter.

[728] They don't stand upright.

[729] They're basically vegetarian because they're not great hunters.

[730] They have tremendous gut area where we have traded that in for brain, which might have not been a great idea, but it's nonetheless what we decided.

[731] We've undergone tremendously rapid cortical development.

[732] Well, and here we are.

[733] We're not in the jungle chewing on leaves eight hours a day.

[734] We're sitting in this lecture all in Zurich instead.

[735] And it took seven million years to get here.

[736] And it was hard going.

[737] So why are we so different?

[738] Well, here's one explanation.

[739] It's because human females are sexually selective.

[740] Now, a chimpanzee female goes into heat.

[741] and when she goes into heat all the males can tell and she will indiscriminately mate with any of them now the dominant males tend to mate more often but that's because they chase the subordinate males away it's not because the females prefer the dominant males but that's not the case for human beings it's not the case for female human beings they're sexually selective they have hidden ovulation and they are definitely more likely to mate across and up hierarchies.

[742] It appears to be a human universal.

[743] Human females are sexually choosy.

[744] What's the consequence of that?

[745] Well, one consequence of that, perhaps, is that we evolved unbelievably rapidly over the last seven million years, driven by sexual selection.

[746] See, what women seem to have done, as far as I can tell, is outsource the problem of mate selection.

[747] In a brilliant quasi -free market, what would you call?

[748] approach.

[749] It's like, well, how do you calculate the value of a man?

[750] Well, how the hell do you know?

[751] You were just like born 18 years ago.

[752] What do you know?

[753] You don't know how to calculate the value of a man?

[754] Who does?

[755] Well, how about other men?

[756] There's a proposition.

[757] How about if you line up all the men and let them compete, whatever they're competing at, and then, like, some guy wins, and so he's the better man. Why not go after him?

[758] Well, that's a hell of a fine solution to the problem of mate selection.

[759] It's like, it's a distributed solution, right?

[760] You can let the intelligence of the entire society rank order masculinity in terms of value, and you can peel from the top.

[761] And that's exactly what women appear to do.

[762] If you look at their biological strategy, and you think, well, why would they do that?

[763] It's like, well, how about because they bear the primary responsibility and burden for reproduction?

[764] How would that be?

[765] It's like, and they know it, unlike chimpanzee females, it's like, well, I'm going to have a baby.

[766] It's like, I should probably find someone halfway's useful to help me with it.

[767] And so that's pure pragmatic reasoning, and I think that's part of what drives it, but I think it's deeper than that as well, is that there's an instinctual component to it that makes men who are successful more sexually attractive to females.

[768] And I think the data for that is overwhelming, and I think it's in perfect concordance with what everyone essentially knows, even though we might not want to know it.

[769] But that's almost always a sign that it's something you should know.

[770] It's like, I don't want to know that.

[771] It's like, oh, for sure, it's true then.

[772] It's like, it's definitely true.

[773] So, all right, so what does that have to do with femininity as chaos?

[774] Well, how about this?

[775] How do you know you're not in order?

[776] If you're a man. That's easy.

[777] All the women reject you.

[778] And if you think that doesn't throw you into chaos, then you're not thinking.

[779] It's the primary thing that will and should throw you into chaos.

[780] Because if all the women reject you, well, that either means all the women are wrong, or that there's something wrong with you.

[781] And the probability that it's all the women who are wrong, and there's not something wrong with you, is basically zero.

[782] So part of the reason that women are represented as chaos, now, and this is, you could think, well, that's a male point of view.

[783] It's like, possibly, possibly.

[784] Maybe it's a uniquely male point of view, but I'm not convinced that it is.

[785] Anyhow, there's no rejection greater than rejection at the level of sexual selection.

[786] Because it's a fundamental rejection, right?

[787] It's like, I've summed you up, your genetic material shouldn't propagate into the next generation.

[788] Okay, so chaos, and so the feminine is all, also nature.

[789] It's nature and chaos.

[790] Well, why?

[791] Well, look, if that's the fundamental process of selection, evolutionary selection among human beings, and I think the evidence for that is pretty strong, then women are nature.

[792] It's not even symbolic.

[793] If nature is what selects, which is how you have to define it, if you're thinking biologically, nature is that which selects in the Darwinian struggle.

[794] It's an axiomatic definition.

[795] Okay, what selects?

[796] Women, then are they nature?

[797] Yes.

[798] And so what's the encounter with a rejecting woman like for a man?

[799] It's an encounter with chaotic nature, and nature says, not you.

[800] Okay, so that's the second reason.

[801] That's the second reason that chaos and femininity seem to be associated.

[802] Okay, here's another.

[803] Women are higher in negative emotion than men, quite a bit higher.

[804] Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some men who experience more negative emotion on average than women, because the curves overlap.

[805] But across cultures, men are more disagreeable and women are higher in negative emotion.

[806] And that seems to kick in at puberty, by the way, because it doesn't seem to be characteristic of boys and girls.

[807] And it doesn't seem to be a consequence of socialization.

[808] It looks like a cultural universal.

[809] Also, the differences in negative emotion between men and women get bigger in more egalitarian countries, not smaller.

[810] So that's also something that's very much worthwhile.

[811] Okay, so why are women more prone to negative emotion than men?

[812] Well, they're smaller, and so that's one possibility, and that really kicks in at puberty.

[813] And so you might say that in a physical altercation, they're more likely to lose.

[814] And so maybe you might say, well, the creature who's more likely to lose a physical altercation should be, on average, somewhat more anxious.

[815] So that's one possibility.

[816] Another possibility is, how about sexual vulnerability?

[817] That's a good one.

[818] That would go along with the fact that the emotional differences kick in at puberty.

[819] So, right, sex is a dangerous business for men and for women, but it's very, very dangerous for women because they might get pregnant.

[820] And, you know, now that's not a catastrophe and unwanted pregnancy for a variety of reasons, but 100 years ago, not even that, it was a complete bloody catastrophe.

[821] It could easily have meant social alienation.

[822] at minimum, and it could easily mean death.

[823] It wasn't good.

[824] And so, women have manifest increased vulnerability with regards to sex.

[825] So that's another thing that should make them more sensitive to negative emotion.

[826] Here's another one.

[827] It's like, well, maybe the female nervous system isn't wired for the woman.

[828] Maybe the female nervous system is wired for the woman infant diad.

[829] Now, you know, women are going to pay a price for being the fundamental caregivers.

[830] What's the price?

[831] Well, you have to be sensitive to the infant, especially the infant.

[832] Less so with older children.

[833] But the infant, you know, an infant is just, it just can't do anything.

[834] All it can do is emit distress and vaguely.

[835] And so you have to respond to the distress.

[836] It has to distress you.

[837] And so if you're not sensitive to negative emotion, That's not going to happen.

[838] You want to be pretty sensitive to your infant's distress, like, maybe not so much that it just puts you into a tailspin from which you never recover, although motherhood has been known to do that to people, but at least sensitive enough so that you're there when there's manifestation of distress.

[839] And so, and maybe you also need to be able to communicate that distress in a compelling manner to your partner, who's less susceptible to the same degree of that.

[840] of distress.

[841] And so that's another way that women are agents of chaos in some sense, is that they're transmitters of distress -related negative emotion.

[842] They transmit that to men.

[843] You say, well, all those bad things are good things.

[844] It's like, it's not the right way of looking at it because they're necessary things.

[845] You know, we have to, we pay a price for propagating ourselves across time.

[846] We pay a price for reproducing successfully.

[847] and the price we pay and we pay a price for our enhanced cognitive ability part of that is the susceptibility of men to sexual rejection and our entanglement in the brutal process of sexual selection across hundreds of thousands of years there's a story in Tom Sawyer it's an interesting story this is a bit of a more positive representation of the idea of chaos the feminine idea of chaos Tom Sawyer comes out of his house one day and he's like 13 or 14 and he sees this girl across the street her name is Becky and he's transfixed by her it's like sexual maturity is dawned on him and he's like attracted by her and so the first thing he does is he hops up on a fence and balances like this right so it's a display and it's like she represents a challenge to him and the way that he responds to that challenge in that narrative is by manifesting something that approximates competence and so what you could say is that the desire to captivate a female that you're attracted to calls out of you at least in principle what might be the best from you maybe that's another reason that women are chaos that feminine is chaos I read this line once I don't know what you think about this but it's never really disappeared from my imagination and maybe it's a terribly sexist idea who knows men test ideas women test men it isn't obvious which of those is the more difficult process by the way by any stretch of the imagination it's not also obvious which of them is more worthwhile.

[848] But I do think another possible reason that femininity is associated with chaos symbolically is because women constantly challenge men.

[849] And they challenge them to be, it's better than they are.

[850] Maybe that's it.

[851] But better.

[852] And why?

[853] Well, it's because women are often put in a position where they have to depend on men.

[854] That's definitely the case when they have small children, right?

[855] So they have to put themselves now, especially voluntarily, in a situation of dependence.

[856] It's like, well, what are you going to do?

[857] Like, if you were guys, if you were a woman, and that was going to happen to you, you're going to make yourself vulnerable because you had to take care of this tiny thing that was completely incapable of taking care of itself.

[858] And you had to pick a partner.

[859] It's like, well, you might hope that they were better because you need them.

[860] And so there's a challenge that women put forward and Men are often, in some sense, not up to it.

[861] I'm not saying that women always do that in the most...

[862] What would you call it?

[863] It's not like they do that error -free.

[864] But there's something driving it, right?

[865] It's something you have to contend with.

[866] It's like, well, a human infant is a very vulnerable creature.

[867] You see that in stories of the birth of the hero.

[868] The hero is always threatened at birth.

[869] You see that in the story of Moses, because the Pharaoh wants to put everybody, every first -born Jew to death.

[870] And then you see the same thing in the birth of Christ.

[871] You see that in Harry Potter, who's threatened at birth.

[872] And so, well, why is that part of the central hero narrative?

[873] It's because everyone's threatened at birth, right?

[874] Each new person is a potential, well, I would say, has an aspect of the potential savior about them.

[875] That's their potential.

[876] They're threatened at birth.

[877] Well, that's a mother's responsibility.

[878] Well, she's going to do what she can to buttress that vulnerability against the world, and she's going to look at the adult male who's beside her and think, look, I've got something that really needs to be taken care of here, and it's not you.

[879] And that's correct, but it's, but it's demanding, you know, it really is demanding for that call to go out to each male who enters a relationship to be responsible, like for 20 years to grow up and carry that weight proper, And that's not, the other thing is, is you're not just going to grow up because someone asks you nicely, you know, you're with your partner and they say, well, you know, how about you grow up?

[880] And you say, yeah, no problem.

[881] And then you go to sleep and then you wake up and you're all grown up.

[882] It's like, that isn't how it works is you're going to have to be tortured three quarters to death before you grow up.

[883] And three, that three quarters that needs to be tortured to death is all the part of you that's not mature and responsible.

[884] And it has to be tortured to death because it has to do.

[885] Why?

[886] Because if it doesn't, then the new you that might be fully fledged, let's say, and responsible to be all that you could be, to use a terrible cliche, it's like it's tension that brings that forward.

[887] And so there's this, there is this tension between men and women.

[888] And it's, and I think we wouldn't, we wouldn't ever be happy if that wasn't the case.

[889] Here's a very funny psychological study.

[890] It's probably not true, because so many of them aren't.

[891] But I'm going to tell it to you anyways, because I love the study.

[892] So imagine that you get couples to relate how satisfied they are with their relationship to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10, eh?

[893] And you take the satisfied people and you take the dissatisfied people and then you get them to track the emotional valence of their interactions.

[894] So you interact with your partner.

[895] Was it positive or negative?

[896] And so then you, you know, you can average how many positive interactions there are compared to how many negative interactions.

[897] You think, well, the couples that really love each other, it's like, it's all positive.

[898] And then the couples that aren't doing bad, it's all, or are doing badly, it's all negative.

[899] It's like, no, that isn't how it works.

[900] If your relationship falls beneath four positive to one negative interactions, then it's done.

[901] That's too much negativity.

[902] But if it goes above 11 to 1 positive to negative, it's also done.

[903] Why?

[904] Why?

[905] Because that isn't, you don't want untrammeled bliss from your partner.

[906] Because that would kind of imply that you are both okay exactly the way you are.

[907] Well, you're not.

[908] You're not anywhere near what you could be.

[909] And you know that, but so does your partner about each other.

[910] And so you've got to poke and prodded each other bits.

[911] Like, fix yourself up for Christ's sake.

[912] It's like, well, you too.

[913] It's like, you fix yourself up.

[914] No, you fix yourself up.

[915] It's like, yeah, we'll both fix ourselves up.

[916] And there's going to be some damn tension around that.

[917] And so that's another part of that dynamic, that struggle between chaos and order, that's necessary to call something approximating the best forward.

[918] All right.

[919] So those are the reasons, as far as I can tell.

[920] Let's recap a little bit.

[921] It's necessary for us to understand, at some deep level, the nature of the world that we live And we do that with stories.

[922] The stories try to lay out, they try to lay out the structure of the world that we have to contend with and walk through.

[923] It's not the same as the objective world.

[924] It's the world of emotion and motivation and dream and literature and struggle.

[925] It's the living biological world.

[926] And that's portrayed in stories.

[927] And the stories tell us, well, there's two fundamental domains of existence.

[928] There's an orderly domain and a chaotic domain.

[929] And then there's a process that media, between those two.

[930] And that's reality.

[931] That's the yin and the yang, by the way.

[932] You know, the Taoists knew this.

[933] The world was made out of chaos and order, and it's masculine.

[934] It's feminine and masculine for them as well.

[935] It's the same, it's the same metaphorical structure.

[936] And the place you're supposed to be is in the middle of those two things, right?

[937] That's where meaning is to be found.

[938] Well, how did we come to realize this to the degree that we have?

[939] Well, these domains, manifested themselves in our imagination in personified form, masculine and feminine.

[940] Why?

[941] Well, because that's how we understood the world.

[942] We understood the world as a place of personalities that were masculine and feminine.

[943] We had to use some pre -existing cognitive structure to come to grips with the way that we represented the world.

[944] Well, that happened naturally in stories.

[945] And the masculine tended to represent order and the feminine tended to represent chaos.

[946] And I explained, I told you some stories about the same thing happens in Genesis, for example, God who's masculine, right?

[947] God the Father encounters chaos at the beginning of time.

[948] It's Tohu Babohu.

[949] And that's a word that's related to the Mesopotamian word Tiamat.

[950] And it's associated with the same set of ideas that some orderly structure encounters something chaotic and generate something new.

[951] And so that's right at the foundational, that idea is right at the foundation of our culture.

[952] And so that's the evidence, for me, that Egyptian story, the Mesopotamian story, the story in Genesis, the analysis of their symbolic structure, is evidence that though, well, as well as the Taoist interpretation, which maps, which uses exactly the same mapping structure, that's the evidence, and that's not all the evidence that these symbolic categories exist.

[953] I don't believe that I'm just pulling them out of thin air.

[954] Maybe I am, you know, it's very difficult to tell if you're projecting or discovering.

[955] But, well, I've laid out my case for discovery and not projection.

[956] How to wrap that up.

[957] Well, I've answered the question as well as I can.

[958] And what I haven't answered, and what I need to answer still, is why it is that you should care about that.

[959] You know, because, well, that's the take -home message right now.

[960] I told you some reasons.

[961] I think you need to know the underlying architecture, the structure of the underlying narrative, architecture of the world because you need to know where you are you in order are you in chaos if you're in chaos what do you do you open your eyes you wake up you face what you don't want to confront and that helps you overcome what put you in chaos and build new order you need to know that it's absolutely crucial you ask yourself like if you're in chaos you ask yourself it's a good prayer what could i see that i'm unwilling to see that would guide me out of this hell that's a good thing to ask you know and you you will see if you want to that's the thing you can see if you want to you won't want to but if you don't you'll stay there and that's not good and so these are these are crucial things to know because you will be in chaos and you need to get out and that's how you get out okay so it's so and the stories that we've created these stories over so many thousands of years in an attempt to formulate what guides us and to transmit the knowledge forward.

[962] It's something like that, to orient ourselves while we're alive, but also to provide that orientation for future generations.

[963] It's a collective work of the human imagination across millennia.

[964] And that's what I was trying to explain, at least in part, in 12 rules.

[965] There was no attempt to, like, pejoratively describe women as chaos and men as order, and to make the case that one was preferable to another, I don't believe that anyways.

[966] It's an attempt to elaborate out the fundamental structures of the narratives that guide us, so that people, including me, can understand them in a more articulate and complete manner.

[967] Because, you know, you need to know, it seems to me that we're at a point in our development, let's say, psychologically and technologically and culturally, all of that, that we have to be more awake than we were.

[968] And we were guided, in some sense, unconsciously and implicitly by these stories for a tremendously long period of time.

[969] And we woke up enough to criticize the stories.

[970] And then we lose them.

[971] It's like we lose the story.

[972] And it's at the bottom of everything.

[973] It's we can't lose the story.

[974] You can't lose the thread.

[975] You can't you lose the orientation.

[976] And you have to understand now instead of just following or instead of just believing.

[977] You have to develop some articulated representation.

[978] It's very difficult, you know.

[979] This idea of order and chaos and the symbolic representation of femininity and masculinity, the overlay of those two, it's tremendously complicated, assuming there's any degree of accuracy in it, tremendously complicated conceptually.

[980] But we no longer seem to be able to blindly follow the deep stories that have guided us for so long.

[981] We no longer believe in them.

[982] It's like, well, we can't believe in them anymore.

[983] We have to understand them.

[984] And so, My claim, I suppose, is that what I was trying to do in 12 Rules for Life wasn't to classify men and women into chaos and order, but to say, look, there's a pattern here that we need to understand if we're going to orient ourselves properly in the world.

[985] And so then you might say, well, why bother orienting yourself properly in the world?

[986] It's like, well, because the alternative is grim.

[987] You know, it's like, well, chaos is terrible if you're overwhelmed by it.

[988] It's not only will it do you in, like physiologically, because you can't tolerate the stress when everything's fallen apart and there's no direction.

[989] And maybe it's your own damn fault because you're blind and malevolent.

[990] You know, or maybe you've been done in by someone who's betrayed you.

[991] It's terrible.

[992] You want to suffer like that.

[993] Endlessly, that's not a good solution.

[994] And it's not just not good for you.

[995] It's like if you're in the underworld for too long, you get vicious.

[996] You know, you start generating fantasies of destruction and revenge, and you'll do anything you can to pursue them.

[997] And so it's not good socially.

[998] You have to pull people out of the underworld in order for things to survive properly.

[999] And, you know, we're in a situation, I think, where the collapse of our belief systems have made us more chaotic and more nihilistic and more hopeless in many ways, and it's not good.

[1000] It's better to understand the stories.

[1001] And so, and if to understand the stories, you have to contend with a way of thinking that grates against your ideological sensibilities, well, so be it, that's life.

[1002] It's not like it's a straightforward, it's not like it's something, it's not like say it's something straightforward to sort out.

[1003] You know, the reason we told stories instead of laying this out in an articulated manner for tens of thousands of years, is because it's so damn complicated that the best we could do was tell stories about it.

[1004] That was it.

[1005] That's where our knowledge ended.

[1006] You know, and we've developed enough psychological knowledge, maybe, in the last 500 years, to start to articulate the underlying narrative structure.

[1007] And I think we need to be able to do that.

[1008] I think part of the reason that my book has been popular, and the lectures that I've been doing like this one have been insanely popular enough to bring all you people out on a Saturday night.

[1009] It's like, what the hell is going on?

[1010] You know, to listen to this.

[1011] It's like, it's not a walk through the park precisely.

[1012] But I do think it's the manifestation of a realization, a collective realization, at least in part, that it's time to be more awake than we have been and to understand what's at the bottom of things.

[1013] And so that's why I laid out the symbolic structure that I laid out in my first book in Maps of Meaning and then in 12 Rules for Life.

[1014] And, you know, it represents my best attempt to make sense of things.

[1015] It's not an attempt to convince people.

[1016] It's like, I don't know for Christ's sake.

[1017] It's like life's a mystery.

[1018] It's difficult to contend with you.

[1019] You delve into the bottom of things if you want to understand them.

[1020] I've always wanted to understand what drove people towards malevolence.

[1021] You know, and the study has laid out this symbolic landscape for me, and it's been so helpful to understand it.

[1022] And so I've been trying to communicate it.

[1023] And part of that communication is the representation of these symbolic patterns, and they happen to manifest themselves in gendered form.

[1024] And that's just how it is.

[1025] And we can deny it, and maybe it's wrong, but I can't see how it's wrong.

[1026] We can deny it, but it's not going to help.

[1027] It's not deniable.

[1028] And I do believe it's the way we think.

[1029] And so I hope that you find that helpful.

[1030] You know, I think it's useful to know that you can be in chaos.

[1031] And it's useful to know that what you do there is you open your eyes.

[1032] And that it's also a place of renewal.

[1033] Not necessarily, because it can be a place of death, but it can be a place of renewal.

[1034] And you are the sort of creature that can be renewed.

[1035] And to understand the symbolic understructure is to understand that consciously.

[1036] And I think we need to understand it consciously.

[1037] And so that's my best crack at the moment at explaining why chaos is feminine and masculine and order is masculine.

[1038] Thank you very much.

[1039] So I have this electronic questioning system set up.

[1040] And you may have been informed about this.

[1041] We did our best to inform everybody.

[1042] But if you have a cell phone and you go to the website sly dot do and you enter the code swiss then you can ask questions and you can see the other questions so there's a bunch of questions here already i'm going to answer some of them and then if you want to add your question to the lot then there's some low probability that it'll get answered so well let's try a hard one what are your thoughts on the latest jillette ad well I hate it so that would be the first that would be the first I don't know if that's a thought it's more like a feeling I'd rather have my corporations greedy than virtuous I think it's more trustworthy like this is a strange thing you know it's a strange thing that I see happening on the left it's like the left has always been skeptical of large corporations and like they have their reasons it's kind of interesting because the left is skeptical of large corporations and the right is skeptical of large governments and they never seem to notice that they're both skeptical about large right and you should be skeptical about large you know that trope from 2008 too big to fail it's like no so big will inevitably fail that's the right trope in any case so the left now is happy about virtue signaling corporations it's like oh I see all of a sudden you trust them that's that's all it took is to produce an ad that criticizes masculinity and all of a sudden corporations are trustworthy?

[1043] I don't think so.

[1044] Now, that doesn't mean I think that corporations are particularly untrustworthy compared to other forms of human organization.

[1045] What else?

[1046] You see, what's happening on the radical end of the left spectrum is, I think it's something like this.

[1047] It's very difficult to pull apart completely but ideologies are parasites in my estimation on this underlying symbolic structure that I was talking to you about.

[1048] There's chaos and there's order, and order fragments into two categories, you could say, negative order and positive order.

[1049] And negative order is tyranny, and positive order is the wise king for all intents and purposes.

[1050] And the left, the radicals on the radical left, say, the patriarchy is a tyranny, and what they say, what they are claiming is that society is nothing but the evil king.

[1051] And that's just simply not true.

[1052] I mean, society is the evil king, because human history is a bloody nightmare.

[1053] And that's true of every culture.

[1054] So if you point to a culture and you say, you have an endless plethora of sins on your conscience, then you're correct.

[1055] But it's half the story.

[1056] It's like, well, you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

[1057] It's like, look, if you're a reader, an intelligent reader of a book, you keep what's useful and discard what isn't.

[1058] And if you're an intelligent critic of your own culture, you don't just say, well, it's all gone to hell in a handbasket, and it's an oppressive tyranny.

[1059] You say, well, here's some things that we did pretty badly, and here's some things worth preserving, and let's, like, get the things worth preserving to grow and see what we can do about constraining the things that.

[1060] aren't so good.

[1061] That takes discrimination, right?

[1062] That takes wisdom to pull that apart.

[1063] You want to pass on what's best and leave what isn't behind.

[1064] You do the same thing in your own personal development.

[1065] But that isn't how it works for the ideologues, because they've already decided, it's their axiomatic assumption.

[1066] The West is an oppressive patriarchy.

[1067] Period.

[1068] And there's no questioning that.

[1069] If you question that, then, well, then look out for you.

[1070] that's for sure and so then Gillette comes along and says well here's men and things men do they're associated with the oppressive patriarchy then they should stop doing them it's like it's not helpful the APA the American Psychological Association just did the same thing with their guidelines for the psychological treatment of boys and men and I was reviewing that today I'm writing an article about it you know they claim that the reason that boys and men have poor mental health, and the reason that boys and men who are antisocial pose a threat to society is because boys are badly socialized by men.

[1071] That's essentially the claim.

[1072] It's like, well, how about no?

[1073] How about that's not even vaguely true?

[1074] And so I was thinking about that today.

[1075] It's not only not true.

[1076] It's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, antithetical to the truth.

[1077] It's the opposite of the truth.

[1078] And how do we know that?

[1079] It's like, well, if you study anti -social behavior, which is more prevalent among men, and then you look at the risk factors for anti -social behavior among men, like, here's one risk factor.

[1080] Alcohol.

[1081] Okay, if you got rid of intoxication, impulsive violent crimes would virtually disappear.

[1082] So that's something that's sort of knowing.

[1083] 50 % of people who are murdered are drunk.

[1084] And 50 % of the people who do the murdering are drunk when they do it.

[1085] And in many altercations, it's a toss -up who's going to be the victim and who's going to be the perpetrator.

[1086] That's certainly the case in fights.

[1087] It's also the case for rape.

[1088] So if we're serious about things like aggression and its control, we'd look at the direct causes, but we're rarely serious about such things.

[1089] Alcohol is a major contributor.

[1090] Here's another one.

[1091] How about fatherlessness?

[1092] So, like, if you're a young man, a boy, raised in a fatherless family, you're way more likely to be antisocial.

[1093] Way more likely.

[1094] Okay, so let's think about that for a minute.

[1095] So what does that mean?

[1096] If the American Psychological Association was accurate, what you would see is that boys who have fathers were more violent.

[1097] But that isn't what you see.

[1098] What you see is that boys without fathers are more violent.

[1099] So how does that equate to the proposition that it's the pathological socialization of boys by men that produces violence?

[1100] It's like, no, that's exactly wrong.

[1101] Well, the Gillette ad, it's playing on the same tropes.

[1102] Well, there's something wrong with men.

[1103] Well, yeah, no kidding.

[1104] It's not like that's news.

[1105] But, well, it's Jesus, it's not news, you know.

[1106] And we could all be better than we are.

[1107] But to attack masculinity as such, it's, well, maybe it's a form of chaotic challenge.

[1108] I mean, I don't really understand it.

[1109] Well, I do.

[1110] I do wonder that, you know, if that's part of a, here's something, I might as well get in trouble for this.

[1111] I've been thinking about this.

[1112] That'll definitely get you in trouble.

[1113] You know, I already said that one of the functions of women is to challenge men, and I mean in the most profound way.

[1114] And that's part of the evolutionary process that's made us what we are.

[1115] It's like, women have never organized themselves politically on mass, right?

[1116] That's never happened before.

[1117] So now that's happening.

[1118] And I looked at this chart the other day, and it was a chart of the degree to which university...

[1119] Yeah, I'm definitely getting in trouble for this.

[1120] The degree to which a university discipline was politically correct.

[1121] rank ordered.

[1122] And then beside it, a list of the probability that that university department was female dominated.

[1123] And they match up very nicely.

[1124] The more dominated they are by women, the more likely they are to be politically correct.

[1125] It's like, hmm, that's interesting.

[1126] I thought, well, I don't know why that is.

[1127] And I don't understand it exactly.

[1128] So I've been generating hypotheses, which is what you do, if you're a scientist, by the way, is you try to think, well, what might account for that?

[1129] You don't think it's true when you think.

[1130] you just think what might account for it.

[1131] I thought, well, maybe that's how women would express themselves politically.

[1132] We don't know.

[1133] Women have never expressed themselves politically.

[1134] So now they organize and they express themselves politically.

[1135] Like, what kind of voice is that going to produce?

[1136] Well, maybe it's a voice that criticizes the patriarchy.

[1137] Maybe it's an extended part of the female challenge to the male.

[1138] It's like, you're not everything you could be.

[1139] Here's my accusations.

[1140] Can you withstand them?

[1141] Is there enough to you to manage it?

[1142] Well, I have no idea.

[1143] It's like, is that what's happening?

[1144] I can't tell.

[1145] You know, I mean, we're seeing this degeneration in the universities into this ideological morass as far as I can figure it.

[1146] And the axiomatic presupposition is that our culture is a tyrannical patriarch.

[1147] It's an accusation.

[1148] Well, what do you do with an accusation like that?

[1149] You just roll over and die?

[1150] or do you respond to it and say look not so fast you know there's some things worth preserving here and a little gratitude is also in order there's plenty of bloodshed and catastrophe and past sins but look at all the good things that you have and have some gratitude and if we're not able to make that case let's say as men or maybe even as standard bearers of our civilization if we're not able to make that case, then maybe we're not everything we should be.

[1151] Look, I talked to this neuroscientist a while back, and he told me something very interesting.

[1152] He wrote this book called The Master and His Emissary, Ian McGilchrist, very smart man. And he was talking about the necessity of opponent processing in the operation of complex and finely tuned systems.

[1153] He said, well, imagine you want to move your right hand very slowly and accurately, so you can do this.

[1154] But if you really want to do it accurately, you do this, you put your left hand up, and you push against your right hand, and then you push a little harder with your right hand than your left, and you can move unbelievably, finely, and accurately.

[1155] Because there's forces in conflict that are regulating the action.

[1156] It's like, I don't know how much force there has to be in conflict to regulate our actions.

[1157] Maybe when women rise up politically, which is what they've done, what will emerge from that is like a challenge to the idea of, the patriarchy.

[1158] Well, the Gillette ad goes along with that.

[1159] And why is it a problem?

[1160] Well, because we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1161] So that's some of my thoughts on the latest Gillette ad.

[1162] Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawkins, and Sam Harris are all warning about AI.

[1163] What are your thoughts about AI?

[1164] We're going to build very powerful systems that reflect who we are and magnify it.

[1165] So, and And that's going to happen very quickly, and so we better set a good example.

[1166] That's my thoughts on AI.

[1167] You know, it's like one of the things I learned from Carl Jung, I like this a lot, was that he believed that, you know, back around the 15th or the 16th century, maybe even earlier than that, sort of at the dawn of the technological revolution, we had two, he laid this out in his studies of alchemy, which was the sort of dreamlike precursor to see.

[1168] science and alchemy was sort of half mythology and half dawning empiricism and out of alchemy emerged chemistry and then and physics and then science exploded and here we are 300 years later and we're way more technologically powerful than we were but part of alchemy was mythology and ethics and it's remained unchanged we haven't expanded ourselves in the same manner and one of his war was that we better because the more technologically powerful we become the more ethical behavior becomes a necessity and so we're going to build these incredibly powerful machines very very soon and it's already happening and they are going to reflect who we are and they're going to if they're going to reflect what we want they're going to reflect the way we want things to be as indicated by our actions and so I've thought about such things for a very long period of time and came to the conclusion that the most effective way of dealing with that is to try to encourage people to be better as individuals and so that's what I would say like that's more or less the answer I have to the set of problems that are going to confront us it's like be more honest have your eyes open more be more responsible pay attention to the meaning in your life right act ethically or else And I think that that's always been true, but in some sense, it's the urgency for that has become amplified.

[1169] And that's another reason that we have to wake up.

[1170] So, you know, when I look at the future, it's so contradictory at the moment.

[1171] And I would say that's because we're in a period, we're strangely enough in this period of chaos.

[1172] You know, we've lost our pathway in the West to some degree.

[1173] we're polarizing and we're confused about who we are and where we're going.

[1174] At the same time, there are processes afooted in the world that are so positive that they're almost unbelievable, right?

[1175] I mean, we've lifted a tremendous proportion of the world's population out of poverty over the last 20 years.

[1176] It's the biggest economic miracle in human history by a huge margin.

[1177] And everyone's being connected to the electrical power grid at an incredible rate.

[1178] And everyone has access to unbelievably powerful, virtually everyone, access, or soon will have access to unbelievably powerful computational technology.

[1179] You know, and most people in the world are now middle class.

[1180] And starvation is essentially a thing of the past, except when it's imposed on one population by another for political reasons.

[1181] You know, and we've declared war in a number of serious illnesses and are well on our way to eradicating them, polio being the first one, but it won't be the last one to go.

[1182] you know the third world has developed immensely in terms of lifespan over the last and standard of living over the last 20 years you know the child mortality rate in africa is now the same as it was in europe in 1952 that's a bloody miracle you know and so there's all these things that are happening that are so incredibly positive and yet you know we're rife with confusion and and there's tremendous tension and and there's the sense that I think everybody shares to some degree that things could go to hell in a handbasket very, very rapidly.

[1183] And I think that we're in a situation where, what would we say, we have to decide what we want?

[1184] And you decide that as an individual.

[1185] It's like, do you want the world to get better and better?

[1186] You want to act in a manner that will increase the probability of that occurring?

[1187] that seems like the right way forward.

[1188] So we wake up and we get our act together and we move forward into a future that's better and better.

[1189] That would be a good thing.

[1190] But it's not going to be a straightforward thing.

[1191] So I think too, and I've tried to say this in my lectures and, you know, we all bear the responsibility for this.

[1192] It's one of the things that I think is so perverse and strange about the structure of reality.

[1193] It's like, I do believe there's something true about the idea that the direction of the world rests on your shoulders, like uniquely, which is weird, because of course, look at all of you, there's seven billion of us, is how can the weight of the world, the future of the world, rest on each of our shoulders?

[1194] Well, reality is a very strange.

[1195] Reality is very incomprehensible.

[1196] That's one thing you can say for certain.

[1197] And it seems to me that it could be structured, that it's your responsibility.

[1198] And I think it's worth taking that seriously.

[1199] So, if you could debate Karl Marx, what would you tell them?

[1200] How about you won't live long enough?

[1201] If you counted a corpse a second, you wouldn't live long enough to count all the course.

[1202] corpses you produced.

[1203] How's that?

[1204] I would tell him that he underestimated the scope of the problem.

[1205] And that this is also something that I believe is true of the leftists who follow Marx.

[1206] One of Marx's propositions was that capital would accrue in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority of people under a capitalist state.

[1207] It's like that's actually true in some ways.

[1208] you know, and we all know this because we all know that I think the world's richest 80 people have more money than the bottom 2 billion, something like that.

[1209] You know, there's a real proclivity for complex systems to tilt into a winner -take -all situation.

[1210] But, and that's true.

[1211] And so you could say, well, Marx was right.

[1212] It's like, no, he wasn't, because he blamed that on capitalism.

[1213] It's like, it's a way worse problem than Marx thought.

[1214] Because it's characteristic of every system that we know of.

[1215] We don't know what to do about it.

[1216] You know, and this is graphed in this function that I've talked about quite frequently called the Pareto distribution, parato distribution.

[1217] Systems tilt towards winner -take -all situations.

[1218] And you see this in all sorts of domains.

[1219] So, hardly any musicians sell all the recordings.

[1220] Right?

[1221] How many musicians are in the world?

[1222] I don't remember.

[1223] There's some untold millions of numbers of songs.

[1224] on the net, right?

[1225] Original songs.

[1226] What fraction of them get listened to?

[1227] Like none.

[1228] A thousandth of a percent.

[1229] And those songs take all the listeners.

[1230] It's like the same thing happens if you sell a book.

[1231] It's like almost no books sell well.

[1232] It's like you shouldn't even write a book because the probability that it won't sell is virtually certain.

[1233] Now now and then a book sells a tremendous number.

[1234] But it's the same thing.

[1235] And I have a friend who's an author, and he's been an author a long time, and he explained at least partly why this happened.

[1236] So imagine you write a book of fiction.

[1237] Okay, you think, well, where do people, it's just an example, where do people buy fiction books?

[1238] Well, how about the airport?

[1239] I think, well, there's thousands of airports.

[1240] It's like, yeah, and each of them has a bookstore, and the bookstore has a kiosk out front, and the same five books occupy the top rung of every single kiosk.

[1241] It's a real estate grab in some sense.

[1242] And if you have the top left -hand corner, you're number one, you sell all the books.

[1243] And the people down in the corner, they hardly sell any books, but at least they're on the damn kiosk.

[1244] And there is this proclivity for the winner to take all in every situation.

[1245] And we don't exactly know what to do about it.

[1246] And so that's another thing that I would tell Marx.

[1247] It's like, you underestimated the problem.

[1248] So he blamed that on capitalism.

[1249] And actually capitalism is pretty good at churning because there is a 1 % that has most of the money, but that 1 % actually changes.

[1250] The fact of the 1 % stays quite constant, but the people who constitute that 1 % churn quite regularly.

[1251] You know, so, for example, a Fortune 500 company only has a lifespan of 30 years, and a family fortune generally has a lifespan of three generations.

[1252] And even in the course of your own life, each of you, I think, has something like a 10 % chance.

[1253] this isn't exactly right but it's approximately correct each of you has at least a 10 % chance of being in the top 1 % at some point in your life and so the structure the unequal distribution is really stable but the composition changes and that's another thing Marx really didn't take into account if you examine Paleolithic grave sites way before the dawn of capitalism you find that a small number of people were buried with all the gold right most graves nothing, small number of people, tremendous riches.

[1254] And you see this, you see this in the size of cities, so a small number of cities have almost all the people.

[1255] A small number of planetary bodies have almost all the mass. The same applies to stars.

[1256] And so there's this deep tendency for the winner to take all.

[1257] It's expressed in the New Testament.

[1258] There's a statement, a statement of Christ, he says, to those who have everything more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

[1259] Which is, well, a rather harsh observation about the structure of the world, and also one that doesn't seem particularly fair.

[1260] But I would say to Marx and to the leftists who follow him is, if you really cared about the poor, you take the problem of an equal distribution a lot more seriously than you do when you blame it on capitalism and the West.

[1261] It's a way deeper problem than that.

[1262] And so I would tell Karl Marx that he was nowhere near pessimistic enough.

[1263] So, all right.

[1264] Ah, Lewis asked, what is music to our psyche?

[1265] Yeah, I really like that question.

[1266] Music has really been an interest of psychological interest of mind because it's, you know, being obsessed by the idea of meaning, trying to understand what it is and whether it's something real.

[1267] And I do believe it's something, I think it's the most real thing, actually.

[1268] I think your instinct for meaning is the best guide that you have, and I think that meaning is the ultimate reality.

[1269] I do believe that.

[1270] I think that we have intimations of meaning in music, and that's why we love music.

[1271] You know, no matter how nihilistic and hopeless you are, I always thought about punk rockers in that way, because, you know, especially when I was writing my first book, because punk rock was pretty popular then.

[1272] It's like this nihilistic, violent sort of music about the pointlessness of things.

[1273] And yet, the punk rockers listened to it, and they were, like, having a fine time listening to it.

[1274] It was so paradoxical.

[1275] It's like, at the same time, the music was blasting forth the message, a message of, say, nihilism and destruction.

[1276] And I know some of that was social criticism, and some of it was irony.

[1277] I'm not criticizing punk rock.

[1278] It was just so perverse to me that the punk rockers who were.

[1279] decrying the structure of reality on nihilistic grounds were fully engaged and immersed in a meaningful experience while listening to the music.

[1280] And they didn't notice the contradiction.

[1281] And they were feeding on the meaning.

[1282] I mean, I don't know if it's possible for people to live without music.

[1283] And I think it's because music provides a direct intimation of meaning.

[1284] It's actually the most representative form of art. And the reason I think that's the case is because I don't think the world is made out of objects.

[1285] I think the world, it's better to conceptualize the world as made out of patterns.

[1286] Objects are patterns, but they're a subset of patterns.

[1287] And you want, it's something like this, is that when the patterns of your life are interacting harmoniously, then the sense of meaning prevails.

[1288] it's part of being in order but it's more than that because order isn't enough you have to be on the edge of order in order for things to be properly balanced harmoniously because you have to be improving the order that you inhabit at the same time that you inhabit it that's where that's where meaning exists it's on that boundary and that's where music puts you you know music shows you the structure of the world in these nested patterns and then the patterns transform and you you bring yourself into harmony with the transformation of those patterns and that gives you a deep intimation of meaning and it illustrates to you how to dance with the world like the world has a musical structure and you're you're if you were if you were dancing properly you would be in alignment with those patterns and music intimates that you know And that's why, well, that's why so much music is sacred.

[1289] You know, it's used in religious ceremony because it provides a direct and incontrovertible demonstration of the meaning of the harmony of patterns.

[1290] It's something like that.

[1291] And so music has always been fascinating to me because it escapes from rational criticism.

[1292] You know, it's, because it's easy for us.

[1293] We're intellectual and we're cynical and we're critical.

[1294] And we can take things we can believe and we can break them apart and have nothing.

[1295] left.

[1296] You know, and it's the fate of many a neurotic intellectual to do precisely that, to take their own belief systems, and to subject them to radical criticism and to leave themselves with nothing but the broken pieces of Osiris.

[1297] Right?

[1298] It's like, well, none of that worked, and now where am I?

[1299] There's nothing but nihilism and hopelessness.

[1300] And then music comes along and it speaks of this harmonious relationship between the patterns of being.

[1301] And what do you, what do you do if you're a critical intellect you say well you can't you can't launch an intellectual attack on the aesthetic experience that music produces it's immune to that you know it's a primary experience and thank god for that because it gives us this link to something that's of transcendent reality that our critical intellect cannot break apart and so well so that's what music is to our psyche as far as I'm concerned.

[1302] And there's more to it than that.

[1303] I mean, that doesn't exhaust what music is, but it's a good start.

[1304] All right.

[1305] Well, that's a good place to end.

[1306] I guess that's a positive place to end.

[1307] So, I'll end.

[1308] Thank you very much.

[1309] It was a pleasure talking with all of you.

[1310] Good night.

[1311] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief.

[1312] or his newer bestseller 12 Rules for Life and antidote to chaos.

[1313] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1314] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1315] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1316] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment or review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1317] Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week.

[1318] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson.

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[1320] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books, can be found on my website, jordanb peterson .com.

[1321] My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[1322] That's self -authoring .com.

[1323] From the Westwood One podcast network.