Maps of Meaning 10, 11, 12, & 13

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] This episode is an amalgamation of episodes 10 to 13 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TBO.

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[3] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found.

[4] found at self -authoring .com.

[5] As I've mentioned to you before, each of the three aspects of experience, so the things you know, the things you don't know, and the fact of yourself have a very ambivalent underlying structure, both positive and negative, so that the things you don't know are interesting and compelling in the sources of new information, but also the source of the things that undermine you both physically and mentally.

[6] And the things you know, of course, your culture disciplines you and shapes you into a full person, but also at exactly the same time, molds you and crushes you in a particular direction rather than any of the other directions you might have gone in.

[7] And then finally, with regards to the individual, we spent a substantial amount of time discussing the individual's capability capacity to make order out of chaos and sometimes to make chaos out of order in the service of a higher order and that's all to the good but just like culture and nature have their negative aspects so do the individual and i think personally this is where christian mythology in particular comes into its own i think of all the major religions, Christianity has the most thoroughly developed what you might describe as formal model of evil.

[8] And that model isn't part of the canonical writings of Christianity, say, encapsulated in the Bible, but part of the cloud of sort of natural mythology and storytelling that surrounds the canonical writings.

[9] So you could say that although Christianity and Buddhism have spent a substantial amount of time developing up a representation of the hero.

[10] Christianity in particular has also spent a substantial amount of time developing a formal portrait of the figure that stands in opposition to the hero.

[11] And I think the most appropriate term for that figure who takes multiple forms in mythology is the adversary, because the adversarial spirit is a spirit that stands in opposition to everything, It stands in opposition to nature, stands in opposition to culture, and most specifically stands in opposition to that aspect of the human being that's both exploratory and creative.

[12] Now the last time we talked, I had a chance to describe to you how the figures of the adversarial brothers emerge naturally at the end of Genesis as a coda to the story, right?

[13] Adam and Eve developed self -consciousness.

[14] they develop knowledge of their own mortality and death, and as the primordial parents of humanity, their first children take the form of the hostile brothers, which is to say that if you're the child of nature and the child of culture, the sort of ultimate parents, then as an individual, you take two forms, a positive form and a negative form.

[15] And the negative form is characterized in many ways by a kind of absolute hatred of the good, hatred of the positive form and I think that you can't understand the full human propensity for evil without considering more than the territoriality more than the innate territoriality of human beings so if you look at animals well animals are territorial and they fight to preserve their territory and it's a rational struggle they're fighting for resources and for a place that they can that they can operate and live in and reproduce in efficiently, but human beings are substantially different from that in that their agonistic conflict, their aggression, often seems to be motivated by something more akin to the pure desire for destruction rather than for any rational end whatsoever.

[16] And so from that perspective, I would say, as an example, the fact that Hitler ended up committing suicide in a bunker beneath Germany's capital at the end of the Second World War, when Berlin was in flames, when all of Germany was in flames and when his country was completely defeated after tens of millions of people had died in the conflict, including, of course, the seven million or so people that were killed in the Holocaust.

[17] The normal mode of interpretation of that would be what a terrible defeat for Hitler, but an equally valid, and I think an equally valid prima facie argument, one I think that's actually more valid is that it wasn't a defeat for Hitler at all.

[18] It was precisely what he was aiming at right from the beginning.

[19] his mode of being was intensely adversarial and I would also say that it's certainly possible that the full nature of his motivations weren't even necessarily clear to him as they unfolded across time during the Second World War no more than the full motivations of any human being are necessarily accessible to them as they act out whatever it is that they act out so Carl Jung says for example that we we act out great mythological stories that doesn't necessarily mean you know the story, it just means you act it out.

[20] So for example, you see people whose lives are repetitive bouts of tragedy and what they're acting out is a tragic story and they know it insofar as they're actually acting it out, but they don't necessarily have an explicit model of the relationship between their patterns of behavior and the constantly tragic outcomes they produce.

[21] Well, that doesn't even necessarily mean that what they're doing isn't voluntary because things can be voluntary even if you don't understand them fully.

[22] There's an aspect to the human psyche that's a nest of vipers, so to speak, because you can't necessarily trust what you see.

[23] And that means not only when you're looking at someone else's say, but even when you're looking in the mirror, you can't be sure that what you say you're doing is exactly what you're doing.

[24] Your motivations aren't transparent, and they may not even be clear.

[25] So I suppose the idea that lurks behind this formalization is that freedom of choice is such a good, that one of its subsidiary necessities, which is that there has to be a polar distinction between good and evil, is worth having.

[26] Freedom is so important that it justifies the distinction between good and evil.

[27] And I think that's a reasonable way to presume, it's reasonable to presume that that's the manner in which experience is actually structured.

[28] And there's complex reasons for that.

[29] One would be that under the most optimal circumstances, which is something we'll talk about, as this proceeds to a close.

[30] That means, in a sense, you can have your cake and eat it too, which means the potential existence of good and evil allows for freedom of choice.

[31] And then if the choice is always towards the good, then you have the benefits of freedom of choice plus the benefits of the good.

[32] The only price you have to pay is the constant possibility of evil.

[33] It's very much like the structure of Christianity.

[34] So you have the highest God whose highest son is Christ, but you have the figure of Satan lurking in the background who's also got a filial relationship with the highest God it makes for a confusing kind of theology because in many situations of course Christ is identified specifically with God the Father but Satan always lurks in the background and his his existential status is indeterminate because since God is everything then it's very difficult to make the case that the evil spirit isn't a derivative of God it's not easy thing to get straightened out rationally.

[35] And I think Milton in Paradise Lost makes a very good attempt to explain exactly what this might mean, how there could be an overarching transcendent power, and there could be two subordinate elements to that, one evil and one good, without destroying the idea that God as such is good and without eradicating the reality of evil.

[36] A very, very complex argument to make.

[37] Now, the notion of evil is also a very, very complex idea.

[38] So if you look at arguments that support atheism, and I mentioned some of these, like Ivan's argument in the brothers Karamazov, where Ivan says, well, the world as such, experience as such, must be evil because it's predicated on the blood of innocence, the suffering of children, the fact that there's vast injustices in the world is indicative that there's no such thing as a good God, or to speak in less personified terms, is evidence that the structure of experience as such is untenable morally.

[39] It's sure.

[40] shouldn't be, because it's predicated on suffering.

[41] Jeffrey Burton Russell, who's written a whole series of books on the nature of evil, makes a very clear distinction between different categories of terrible events that I think help bring this into clarity.

[42] So imagine this, imagine first, that it's useful to make a distinction between tragedy and evil.

[43] Okay, now tragedy is when the bad befalls the good.

[44] An earthquake is tragic, so, or disease is tragic.

[45] Now it's easy to regard a disease or not.

[46] earthquake is evil as well but the problem with that is there doesn't seem to be any motivation to it and so it's more likely it's more reasonable to think something like well people are vulnerable they have to be vulnerable in order to give existence a viewpoint one of the consequences of their vulnerability is that they're susceptible to tragedy okay if their vulnerability is a precondition for being then the fact that they're susceptible to tragedy isn't necessarily an evil it's just a consequence of their limitation.

[47] Then you say, well, what constitutes evil if you can't put earthquakes and diseases and so forth into that category?

[48] Well, then it seems to be something more dependent on choice, which is the argument that Iliad is making.

[49] Say, the world does all sorts of terrible things to people, but there are frequent, it's frequently the case that people act in such a way to make things worse rather than better, right?

[50] So if you look at the consequences of the rise to power of the Nazis, for example, doesn't seem reasonable to put the Nazi concentration camp in the same category from an ethical perspective as the earthquake, right?

[51] Because the earthquake is an emergent consequence of the rules that govern physical existence, whereas the Nazi death camp is something that was planned.

[52] It didn't have to be.

[53] It seems to be an aspect of choice.

[54] And this seems to be the idea that's lurking underneath both this mythology and Eliatti's comment on it.

[55] The mere fact that the world is terrible does not mean that it's evil.

[56] But then when you look at specifically human actions, there's this aspect of twisted choice that Fry also makes much of it.

[57] He says if you look at the structure of human history and you try to explain why it has such a bloody and terrible course, It doesn't seem sufficient just to attribute it, say, to the conditions of existence or to ignorance.

[58] It seems more like there's a force behind it, so to speak, manifest, say, in every individual that's actually aiming at the suffering instead of just allowing it to happen or instead of not stepping in to stop it, but actually aiming at it.

[59] Now, so let's take a look at the story.

[60] And let's take a look at the leading figures.

[61] So we know, for example, that the figure of Satan in Christianity is associated with, with a number of strange forms, right?

[62] The first association we know of is that he's associated with the dragon in the Garden of Eden, right?

[63] So there's a, and so that there's a profound ambivalence in Christianity about the meaning of the opening act of Genesis.

[64] Because on the one hand you have, when Adam and Eve are still profoundly unconscious, they don't suffer.

[65] But they're profoundly unconscious, right?

[66] They're not self -conscious, they're not aware of themselves, so in many ways they're still animals.

[67] So there's a Gnostic line of speculation.

[68] The Gnostics were a Christian sect that believed that redemption could at least partly be attained by understanding rather than just faith.

[69] The Gnostics believed that the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve towards self -consciousness was a more developed aspect of God than the God that had created Adam and Eve to begin with, because the unconsciousness that characterized Adam and Eve was too underdeveloped to be perfect.

[70] And so they had to be tempted forward into a more fully developed consciousness.

[71] And so although classical Christianity associated the serpent in the tree with Lucifer, who's the bringer of light, who's Satan, the Gnostic thread of reasoning said, well, wait a minute, it's not that simple because, yeah, self -consciousness makes you aware of death and vulnerability and knocks you out into the profane world, but there's an aspect of it that kind of looks like enlightenment.

[72] And you know this already in your own lives, because often when you believe something And you're unconsciously convinced of the adequacy of that model.

[73] And then you find that it's not sufficient, right?

[74] And so you crumble in disappointment.

[75] You put your trust in someone and you find out say they're not worthy of that trust.

[76] And the evidence that enlightens you breaks that frame of reference and makes you collapse.

[77] You think that's a terrible thing.

[78] You can't help but feel that as a real betrayal and as an act even of evil.

[79] But then a year later or two years later, you might look back and think, God, you know, I really needed it.

[80] that.

[81] I really needed that lesson because as a consequence of learning that, I'm much more mature and much more likely to establish stable relationships.

[82] And so it's easy to see that from one perspective, something can be terrible.

[83] And then from another, it might not be terrible at all.

[84] And even in classic Christianity, you get this strange ambivalence about the events in Genesis that runs something like this.

[85] Well, yes, it was an act of the most evil spirit, the spirit of enlightenment, the spirit of rationality, or the bringer of light, Lucifer, to knock Adam and Eve out of their transcendental unconsciousness and to start history.

[86] It was an evil act.

[87] But on the other hand, it was also the precondition for the later emergence of Christ.

[88] And as far as the Christians are concerned, that's the greatest event in history.

[89] So without this initial opening act, right, this tragic opening act, there'd be no reason for the whole redemptive story and therefore considered from the perspective of the total story, the opening tragedy cannot purely be considered evil.

[90] Very, very complicated line of reasoning.

[91] Now the other thing you see here, and I think this relates back to our initial map, and this also helps you understand the way people think.

[92] Now I said already that it's real easy to confuse tragedy and evil, right?

[93] Okay.

[94] So what that means is that it's real easy to confuse the negative aspect of the unknown with evil.

[95] Likewise, it's very easy to confuse the negative aspect of culture with evil, your own culture, the tyrannical aspect of it, or the culture of other people.

[96] So it's very easy, for example, for us to demonize the foreigner.

[97] And that's basically because there's a part of our mind that presumes that all things that strike us negatively, all things that produce negative emotion on our part, like fear, are the same thing.

[98] So there's a blurry category of evil that's all terrible natural things, all terrible social things, and then whatever nastiness the individual can generate among themselves.

[99] It's much more useful to draw a clear distinction between these different categories because that clarity of thought can help you focus in most specifically on those things that the individual is responsible for.

[100] in terms of turning the world to waste.

[101] So Milton says this figure of Satan, Lucifer, the light bringer, always associated with rationality.

[102] Milton presents him as a remarkable creature, right?

[103] He's the highest angel in God's heavenly hierarchy.

[104] He's Christ's elder brother in a similar mythological vein.

[105] He's the most powerful angel that ever lived.

[106] So at least in the opening stages of this act, Satan is presented as something absolutely remarkable.

[107] Now, the problem is here his very remarkableness starts to work against him.

[108] And what happens is that as he grows in power and strength in this heavenly hierarchy, he starts to become convinced that the omniscient himself, whatever that transcendent figure is, is unnecessary.

[109] So the idea is that whatever Satan represents decides, because of his own pride, his own belief in his own sufficiency, that the transcendent can be eradicated from consideration.

[110] And the way Milton presents that is as a revolution in heaven fundamentally.

[111] So imagine that the story is something like this.

[112] Well, George Kelly, way back in like 1955, noted that what human beings like more than anything else, really, when you get right down to it, is to be right.

[113] Why?

[114] Why?

[115] Well, it's a pain to be wrong, right?

[116] Because if you're wrong, then the little structure that you're using to conjure up the world has to dissolve, and then you have to do a lot of really aggravating work, exploratory work and creative work, to put it back together.

[117] And during the time before you put it back together, then you're flooded with negative motivational states, right?

[118] You don't know which way is up, metaphorically speaking.

[119] So we don't like to be, we don't like not to be right.

[120] And so what does that mean?

[121] Well, psychologists know that people have a very strong confirmatory bias, which basically means that if you bring a frame of reference to bear on the world, the probability is very high that you will look for confirming evidence, and you will discount disconfirming evidence.

[122] Now, the other thing that is characteristic of great figures of evil like Satan is their tendency to lie, right?

[123] So Satan is Prince of the Lie.

[124] Now, what does that mean exactly?

[125] So, T .S. Eliot wrote this poem called The Cocktail Hour.

[126] He talks about this woman who goes in for psychiatric treatment.

[127] The woman says to the psychiatrist, I'm telling you, I really, really hope there's something wrong with me because I'm having a miserable time of it.

[128] And as far as I can tell, there's only two options here.

[129] Either I'm okay, and I'm having a miserable time because the world is terrible, in which case there's nothing I can do about it.

[130] Or there's something wrong with me at some level.

[131] of analysis that I don't really comprehend and although that's a painful option I'm really hoping it's true because if there's something wrong with me possibly I can fix it and if there's something wrong with the structure of the world well what's there to do about that often what you see in psychotherapy is a battle between those two perspectives going on in the minds of the client that the client is in a situation where they're repetitively facing tragedy they have a specific viewpoint about the world like their viewpoint might be be, well, when it comes right down to it, you really can't trust other people.

[132] And they have all sorts of reasons for believing that.

[133] Maybe they were abused as children, or they've had a bad developmental history, a number of relationships that haven't gone well.

[134] They have all the facts at their disposal to justify that particular perspective.

[135] But the truth of the matter is that as long as they hold on to that belief and won't let it go, and no wonder they won't, they're going to continue to suffer.

[136] And part of what you're always doing to someone in therapy saying, you know, yeah, you got a pretty coherent view of the world and all that.

[137] And I can understand why you'd like to cram the whole world into that coherent perspective.

[138] But the truth of the matter is, as long as you hold on to that and won't sacrifice it, right?

[139] Won't go through this terrible period of dissolution.

[140] It's always going to produce the same tragic consequences.

[141] So as long as you hold on to your belief rigidly, everything around you is going to go from bad to worse.

[142] Fry says with regards to states, he says a demonic fall, as Milton presents it, involves defiance of and rival.

[143] with God rather than simple disobedience and hence the demonic society is a sustained and systematic parity of the divine one Associated with devils or fallen angels because it seems far beyond normal normal human capacity in its powers We read of ascending and descending angels on Jacobs and Plato's ladders and and similarly that there seem to be demonic reinforcements in heathen life that account for the almost superhuman grandeur of heathen empires especially just before they fall Two particular notable passages in the Old Testament prophets linked to this theme are the denunciation of Babylon in Isaiah 14 and of Tyre in Ezekiel 28.

[144] Babylon is associated with Lucifer, the morning star, who said to himself, I will be like the most high.

[145] Okay, so let's translate that into modern language and forget about Babylon.

[146] Let's take the Soviet Union, for example, instead.

[147] And let's say something like this.

[148] I will be like the most high.

[149] Well, first of all, it's not difficult to read.

[150] Stalin into that from a personal perspective, but then it's more complicated than that because you can't blame the Soviet Union on Stalin.

[151] When the wall fell down, we know that one -third of East Germans were KGB informers.

[152] You can't blame that on Stalin.

[153] You have to blame that on the one -third of the East Germans who were KGB informers, right?

[154] It's this totalitarian presupposition, presumption is distributed through the whole society.

[155] There's a leader in a hierarchy and all that, but they're not the people to be identified with the fact of the totalitarian state.

[156] It's distributed through the whole society, and it's precisely this.

[157] It's what I don't know, I don't need.

[158] I don't need what I don't know.

[159] One of the things I really like about this sort of Christian metaphysical take on the problem of evil is that it adopts strange first principles.

[160] Like if you're an empirical scientist, it's very difficult to come to terms with the notion of free choice.

[161] Right?

[162] Because we don't have deterministic models of free choice.

[163] We don't know how that might occur, although it seems to be a reasonable phenomenological observation that if there's anything true about existence, about the facts of existence as it's subjectively construed, the fact that you seem to have the faculty of choice seems paramount or primary.

[164] Now, one might say, well, that's just a delusion, and we know that because our deterministic models have been so powerful.

[165] Or one might say, well, alternatively, we're going to presume the subjective experience to be true and say well our deterministic models just aren't sophisticated enough and there's no real reason to choose between either of those on an a prior basis right there perhaps equally plausible and we also might note from the deterministic perspective of course that if you go down far enough in your analysis of physical structures down to the quantum level say then deterministic models don't hold at all so determinism has its limits at the lower end or high resolution end of physical inquiry I have no idea what that might mean for free choice it just means that there are levels of analysis that deterministic models do not describe.

[166] Christianity takes the stance that the subjective sense of freedom is accurate and then tries to build the world from that point.

[167] It presumes that's the an axiomatic principle and so you have God in Milton's Paradise Lost saying with regards both to Lucifer and to human beings who are fall and he says so will fall he and his faithless progeny speaking of human beings whose fault who's but his own ingrate he had of me all he could have i made him just and right sufficient to have stood though free to fall and i like that i think that makes a fair bit of sense to me i started to understand this most particularly as a consequence of reading karl yung because yung has this really interesting notion and and i think it's tied to the idea in genesis that as soon as Adam becomes self -conscious, he hides from God.

[168] So what if it was this?

[169] And we can take an evolutionary tack on this, too.

[170] What if it was this?

[171] What if it was the case that if you never turned away from any phenomenological evidence, then you build a personality that would be strong enough to withstand tragedy?

[172] What if that was the case?

[173] So the idea here being, let's say you are the person who notes that his or her friends don't exactly trust him.

[174] what do you do well to hide away you just walk away and then of course you never learn anything but let's say by contrast you say well no no the first time you get any evidence that you're not 100 % trusted you say look i got this pang in my heart saying the communication between you and i is not exactly straight now something's going on here either you haven't got your frame of reference with regards to me right or there's something wrong with the way i'm looking at the world those are the options so let's have it out you've got this attitude and it's it's doing it's hurting me tell me what you have to say and i'll tell you what i have to say and we'll exchange this patterned information and as a consequence we're both going to walk away a little bit more well put together so god says yeah yeah you know people get distorted and twisted and bent and warp but that's their own problem fundamentally because they have this capacity just to turn away and as they turn away they get weaker and as they get weaker the world gets worse around them because they can't deal with it and they keep making mistakes and well that's a terrible consequence and all that but if they just wouldn't turn away to begin with then there'd be no problem and there wouldn't be no problem because the world would stop being tragic because the world's tragic right I mean there you are little and vulnerable and you know things can roll right over you the world would never lose its tragedy but the idea would be instead that you could handle it without becoming corrupted and that would be sufficient so the idea would be it's a tough situation all things considered but it's also an interesting and compelling and beautiful one and it may be that if you didn't turn away the interesting and beautiful and compelling aspect would overwhelm the tragic aspect and that would be fine nietzsche talking about the european state of mind at the end of the 19th century.

[175] So Nietzsche says, well, we're in this terrible situation, right?

[176] God is dead, we've killed him.

[177] What does that mean?

[178] Well, we've taken our evolved metaphysics, which structures our moral viewpoint, and undermined it by rational criticism, a peculiar move philosophically because it was never established on rational grounds anyways.

[179] We've undermined it rationally and replaced it with, well, nothing, nothing.

[180] What's the consequence of that?

[181] Well, he outlines that here.

[182] of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness and you can think about this as a prophecy on the events of world war one and world war two and the gulag archipelago and the 60 million people dead in the Soviet Union and the whole unfolding of 20th century history and the great ideological battles that characterize that unfolding so this is something Nietzsche sees coming and knows why he says of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness.

[183] With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence.

[184] What I relate is the history of the next two centuries.

[185] I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently, the advent of nihilism, right, the belief in nothing.

[186] Our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured tension that's growing from decade to decade, as towards a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end that no longer reflects.

[187] It's afraid to reflect.

[188] He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect as a philosopher in solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside.

[189] Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary?

[190] Because the values we've had hitherto, thus draw their final consequence, because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals, because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had we require at some time new values nihilism stands at the door whence comes this uncanniest of all guests nihilism right your beliefs are undermined once what's the consequence of that well one consequence is the belief is undermined the other consequence is more metaphysical which is fooled once you no longer have the belief but maybe it's even worse than that because human beings can generalize fooled once you never have any you no longer have any belief in beliefs which mean you say something like this I don't care what you think doesn't matter what you think the world is such a terrible place that no interpretation whatsoever can possibly suffice that's nihilism no meaning system whatsoever can possibly suffice.

[191] Well, what's the flaw?

[192] Well, the flaw is, well, of course no system of coherent belief can suffice because most of the world's transcendent.

[193] You can't encapsulate everything that is in your sphere of belief.

[194] And what you might say then is that if you ever believe that what you believe is what should support you, the facts you know say, or the interpretation you place in the world, then your faith is badly misplaced.

[195] You don't believe in what you believe.

[196] You believe in something that's deeper than that.

[197] And so then you see what's wrong with Tolstoy, right?

[198] And Tolstoy's story, and Tolstoy says, accounting for his collapse in the stability of Christian belief, he said, this all happened, this collapse of my belief, when I was not yet 50 years old.

[199] I should have been considered a completely happy man. I had a good, loving, and beloved wife, fine children, and a largest state, growing and expanding without any effort on my part.

[200] I was respected by friends and acquaintances, praised by strangers, and could claim a certain renown.

[201] I was not physically nor mentally unhealthy.

[202] On the contrary, I enjoyed a physical and mental vigor I had rarely encountered among others my age.

[203] I could keep up with the peasants working in the fields and work eight and ten hours at a stretch without suffering any after effects from the strain.

[204] And in such a state of affairs I came to a point where I could not live.

[205] and even though I feared death I had to employ ruses against myself to keep from committing suicide it was as though I had lived a little wandered a little until I came to a precipice and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin and there was no stopping or turning back no closing my eyes so that I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and of the reality of suffering and death of complete annihilation I grew sick of life some irresistible force was leading me to somehow get rid of it.

[206] This thought was such a temptation that I had to use cunning against myself in order not to go through with it.

[207] And there I was, a fortunate man carrying a rope from my room where I was alone every night as I undressed so that I would not hang myself from the beam between the closets.

[208] And I quit going hunting with a gun so that I would not be too easily tempted to rid myself of life.

[209] I myself did not know what I wanted.

[210] I was afraid of life.

[211] I struggled to get rid of it.

[212] Yet I hoped for something from it.

[213] My position was terrible.

[214] I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life And in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason and for me this was even more impossible than a denial of life I myself according to rational knowledge it followed that life is evil and people know it I describe my spiritual condition of myself in this way My life is some kind of stupid and evil practical joke that someone is playing on me in spite of the fact that I did not acknowledge the existence of any someone who might have created me. The notion that someone brought me into the world as a stupid and evil joke seemed to be the most natural way to describe my condition.

[215] I could not be deceived.

[216] All is vanity.

[217] Happy is he who has never been born.

[218] Death is better than life.

[219] We must rid ourselves of life.

[220] Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living and that it's better not to exist.

[221] The strong act and put an end to this stupid joke.

[222] And they use any means of doing it.

[223] A rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, or a train.

[224] Now, the interesting thing about this, I think, is first of all, a Russian wrote it.

[225] And second of all, it was written in the late 1900s.

[226] And even more particularly is that you note that when the strong act, using a rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, and a train.

[227] Well, Tolstoy is talking about suicide.

[228] But there's no necessary reason to presume that this should only be violence engendered against the self, right?

[229] If life is a stupid and evil joke, then what's stopping you from benevolently putting an end to the suffering of others, right?

[230] Benevolently, in theory, at least.

[231] Well, you know, that's one perspective, right?

[232] But then there's always the perspective of the lady who went to see the psychiatrist in T .S. Eliot's poem, which is, well, if when your eyes are open, life appears as, as nothing but suffering and pain to you it could be that that is how life is but it could also be that there's something wrong with the way that you're looking at the world and in some ways that's a much more humble perspective right because the alternative is well i know what's going on and i just look out there and there's the world and i pretty much got it like i know what it means and what it means is pointless suffering and pain and that's my model and i don't see any reason to question it but then the alternative is well wait a second there's always the possibility that I don't know absolutely everything in this final and horrible judgment that I'm placing on the conditions of existence could conceivably be misplaced given the sort of presumptuousness of the claim, right?

[233] I'm in a position to render final judgment on the moral value of existence as such.

[234] It seems to me reasonable to presume that that's not the kind of statement that you should easily make.

[235] And I remember when George Bush launched his most recent war, the initial terminology.

[236] I think this was for the Afghanistan battle was Operation Infinite Justice.

[237] But he retracted that phrase after a number of religious leaders objected to its kind of presumptuousness, which I thought was quite reasonable, because infinite justice is something that, most people should probably not hope for right because you never know precisely what infinite justice means because it might just mean that every bloody mistake you've ever made you're gonna pay for and I suppose that would be just as applicable to George W. Bush as it would to anybody else and then Milton again describes the development of this adversarial spirit he says first pride pride and worse ambition threw me down that's Satan's lament when he's in hell and Milton's of hell is extremely interesting.

[238] He said the reason that hell is characterized by its structure is not so much because of its nature precisely.

[239] It's because of its distance from the good.

[240] So the farther you are away, say, from what constitutes the good, the more suffering is endemic to that state.

[241] So it's the distance away from something that constitutes the suffering.

[242] And then Milton says, it's very interesting to do an analysis of Satan's character.

[243] And the notion of hell per se, because how in the world can you reconcile the idea of a good God with the notion of this continual suffering?

[244] And so Milton says, well, Satan can step out of hell in one moment.

[245] All he has to do is admit that he was wrong.

[246] And that's the one thing that he will not do under any circumstances whatsoever.

[247] So then we put one more twist on the story and we say something like this.

[248] Okay, we already know that part of the reason that people have belief systems is so that they can structure their interactions with the world.

[249] It's a toolbox, say, we're playing.

[250] a game we share the rules that's fine we can cooperate with one another it could be other than it is but it's the way it is and it works for us that's fine there's nothing absolute about it except that a structure like that's necessary now whenever there's a threat to that shared view of the world well then we're afraid and for good reason and and it's not surprising under those circumstances that we fight to defend what we've made ours but then you say let's say you adopt this perspective right and it's this vengeful desire to wreak havoc, that extends beyond other individuals and beyond society even to the structure of experience as such.

[251] And then you think, well, what's the best mask for that?

[252] And how do these two processes sort of interact?

[253] And you think, well, the most efficient way to do terrible things is to mask them with the highest order morality.

[254] And that's precisely what the totalitarian does.

[255] So that way he gets to have his cake and eat it too.

[256] He's perfectly well protected from Apprehension of the world because his belief system is complete Plus his underground motivations, which is this Constant desire for revenge Confined their expression within the totalitarian structure and remain invisible even to himself So he can say to himself Well, the reason I threw all those farmers out of their house in 1920 And stole their soup and their food and their grandmother's blankets and everything they'd work to own was because I was building the socialist paradise right and it was a good thing for me to go into that house and not a bad thing and as long as he believes that or acts as if he believes that then he can look in the mirror without screaming and there's no recognition whatsoever of precisely the sort of game that he's involved in so he has it both ways right he can do everything terrible that he always dreams of doing and consider himself not only good but good even at a higher level than the people that he was actually afflicting and of course that's just standard description of what happened in the Soviet Union Nietzsche says I love this definition of morality this is the most cynical thing Nietzsche ever said I think the idiosyncrasy of decadence with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life successfully I attach value to this definition said well why be an ideologue well it's a good way to simplify the world right it's a Crustian bed.

[257] You just chop off everything that doesn't fit.

[258] Then you don't have to think, right?

[259] So that's good because thinking is difficult and it's troublesome and it takes courage and so forth to transform chaos into orders, no trivial matter.

[260] And if it's all ordered for you, well, then there's really nothing left for you to do.

[261] But then Nietzsche goes even below that.

[262] He says, yeah, well, there's more to the story than that, isn't there?

[263] It's like once you got this little Procrustian bed all arranged for your enemies, then you can you can allow your most base vengeful instincts full flow by just continually chopping people so they fit and you do it all the while but well saying well it's obviously the best thing that could possibly be done and so then you look at stella and say because not everybody who's adopted a vengeful tack on existence is sort of like the archetype of vengefulness or adversarial spirit but it'd get now and then the people like Stalin who are good counter examples say to the people like Gandhi and so Stalin's very instructive and so we could start by looking at what he did in the Ukraine so at the end of 1929 the Kremlin decreed that millions of peasants from individually owned farms would be forced into agricultural collectives or Kolkoses seen in the eyes of the Politburo as pliant providers of Soviet agricultural needs in defiance of the facts soviet ideologists hammered out an appropriate Marxist terminology to explain what was going on throughout grain -producing areas it was said resistance to this scientific scheme was being organized by so -called rich peasants or coolax with his customary brutality therefore stalin decreed the liquidation of the coolax as a class stalin liked this idea of like group guilt that was a major theme for stalin that meant I really didn't have to ever pay attention to you as an individual I could just decide if you were a doctor engineer or Kulak or a German or whatever ethnic racial or educational division happened to characterize my particular target at the time and it didn't matter if you were guilty as an individual that whole notion never even obtained it was class guilt that mattered and if you were in one of those classes well we were better without you and of course the nature of the class just changed constantly but it was perfectly logical thing to think if you believed in like historical determinism if your parents were rich bourgeois what was the probability that you were going to be a useful part of the workers collective be easier just to get rid of you ahead of time so you didn't cause too much trouble so then you think about these cool acts rich peasants well who were these people like when we get down to the individual level so you go on a village village was full of serfs like not 40 years before so these are people just struggling out of the feudal society right and you got some people in there who've managed to be successful enough as farmers which is no easy thing to like have a house and maybe hire one person and you know maybe have a little extra food in the larder and a few kind of material possession so these are successful people and so you could say well they're the ones that actually knew how to farm it's one theory or you could say the reason they had all this stuff was because they stole it from all the other people right and then you think okay so I march into town I'm a Soviet revolutionary and I say hey guys you know those rich people they stole everything they have from you and then you think okay Which of you guys is going to listen to that?

[264] Well, it's not going to be the sort of struggling people just underneath them who are really trying to get ahead, right?

[265] Because that's where they're hoping to get.

[266] It's going to be the resentful and revengeful few who think, well, the world's fundamentally unfair.

[267] And it's obvious that those sons of bitches got what they want by stealing it from me. And here it turns out that if I just go down the street and steal it back, well, not only am I allowed to do that, but according to this new and emergent ideology, man, that's the best thing I could possibly do so then multiply that story by several million participants and you have like the first five years of the Soviet empire and so what do we have there the result was a catastrophic onslaught on millions of peasant households at first party activists and local officials read bullies right brutalized peasants forcing them to surrender their homesteads and their possessions deportations arrests and killing soon followed as terror generalized the violence mounted to full -scale rebel rebellion in various places, with regular troops engaged for months.

[268] For example, suppressing peasant uprisings.

[269] Resistance took various forms, usually reflecting the hopeless, desperate anguish of a doomed population.

[270] In the Ukraine, there were even women's rebellions, spontaneous uprisings of peasant women who attack the local cocoses to demand the return of confiscated farm products.

[271] With a colossal impact on the Soviet economy, peasants slaughtered their animals.

[272] by the millions rather than see them seized for two years the fighting raged as the dreadful process of deculacization continued still in order to further assault on the recalcitrant peasantry what conquest calls the terror famine of 1932 moscow writes conquest it's from a book called the harvest of sorrow knowingly decreed grain procurements from the ukraine and elsewhere exceeding by far what the local population could produce right which meant that everyone who lived there was forced in order to deliver more grain than they had ever grown.

[273] Communist brigades roamed the countryside, forcing agriculturalists to disgorge the little they had been able to produce under conditions of severe dislocation.

[274] Grain sat unused in state reserves while the local population starved.

[275] This is from wisdom, pocryful, biblical writings.

[276] For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades.

[277] Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts.

[278] When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.

[279] Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works.

[280] Our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and overcome by its heat For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow and there's no return from our death because it is sealed up and no one turns back So a piece of writing thousands of years old and so Nietzsche says at the end of the 1900s Well, rationality undermines our faith in religion, but you have a piece of writing from more than 2 ,000 years ago that says look, what is it about being alive?

[281] It's short and there's nothing to it, right?

[282] Our thoughts are biologically produced and when we die there's nothing left.

[283] Well, that's a very modern thought, yet it was expressed thousands of years ago.

[284] So you know, I think, merely from observing that, that the crisis of faith that characterizes modern society is a reflection of the permanent crisis of faith that characterizes human beings.

[285] What's happening with the totalitarian.

[286] Well, the totalitarian is afraid of the unknown, for good reason.

[287] And he's very interested in sustaining his own belief structure.

[288] And the combination of those two things, it can start off trivially, is that the more you're convinced that you have to maintain the stability of your current belief structure, the more afraid you are of going to, of anything that's unknown.

[289] And the more afraid you are of anything that's unknown, the less likely you are to go out and explore it and then the less likely you are to go out and explore it the weaker you get because you stop gathering information and then the weaker you get the more necessary it is that you have to have this frame of reference and it has to remain intact and this sort of thing starts to cycle and cycle so you undermine your own sense of your own autonomy and ability and you make yourself more and more a rigid tool of the propagandistic system and you're more and more adopt the stance of enmity towards anything you don't understand and And that's a spiral that goes rapidly downhill, rapidly into a state that's characterized by complete internal chaos.

[290] And I think that's a good definition of what is meant in metaphysical language by hell, right?

[291] Hell is a bottomless pit.

[292] Why?

[293] Well, I don't care how bad things are for you or around you.

[294] There's always some bloody thing you can do to make it worse, right?

[295] There's always some suffering you can extend to others.

[296] There's always some bit of stubbornness or rejection that you can pull off that'll make your already terrible situation worse, right?

[297] So there's no bottom.

[298] And that seems to me to be right.

[299] If you do just a cursory historical analysis, no matter what terrible account you can come across with regards to say concentration camp brutality, in some other book, there's some worse story, right?

[300] Limited only by the absolute ends of the most brutal form of imagination.

[301] All a consequence, I think, of this process, right?

[302] And you can't really say what causes it, because on the one hand, there's cowardice, and lack of faith, right?

[303] Anything I don't understand.

[304] Coward is pride in lack of faith.

[305] Anything I don't understand doesn't exist.

[306] Plus, I'm not the person to confront it anyways, right?

[307] That's the lack of faith.

[308] Each of those things feeds into the other, and it's very difficult to say where it starts.

[309] The thing that's kind of interesting about these self -referential processes is that they don't have to start dramatically.

[310] Like the loop can start very, very small, and it picks up speed very, very.

[311] very rapidly.

[312] So you imagine you're speaking into a tape recorder and the speaker's on you get too close to the speaker with the microphone and you get some feedback and if you bring the microphone a little closer the feedback develops more and more intensely it can blow up the whole system.

[313] It doesn't have to start dramatically to move forward very very rapidly and what that means at least in principle is that even small mistakes anywhere along this circle can start the development of precisely this kind of spiral And so you say, well, people, do people need to be abused to become totalitarian?

[314] Well, and the answer to that is no, because everyone's being abused sufficiently by some occurrences in their life to justify taking a negative tack on the nature of experience.

[315] You say, well, how cowardly do you have to be in order to run away from things?

[316] And you think, well, not that cowardly, because under most circumstances, your life is characterized by sins of omission, right?

[317] it's there are things you left undone and like just exactly how rigid do you want your belief systems to be and you say well I like them to be stable because without that stability then I'm terrified and then you can say well fair enough but that's all sign of a kind of existential weakness and then if social circumstances come around and give your life a good tweak say like they did with the Germans prior to World War II you just never know what side you're gonna end up on and so all these little tiny mistakes you know mistakes that I think are marked by your own conscious are precisely that leads you down this terrible path and if you think well no that can't be right well then you have to remember that in these processes say of decoulicization and that immense wave of deaths that characterized the soviet union in the nazi germany most people were involved and if they weren't involved in direct acts of commission they were absolutely involved in direct acts of omission right they knew but they didn't say anything Well, classically, sins of commission are regarded as much more evil, say, than sins of omission.

[318] But I actually think that's backwards.

[319] The sins of omission are worse.

[320] Because every time you walk away, and what do you do when you walk away from a Nazi?

[321] What are you walking away from?

[322] Well, we know what you're walking away from.

[323] You're walking away from a domain that's likely to expand into something that's completely undifferentiable from hell and it's no wonder you walk away from that but the fact that you walk away from it makes it much more likely that it's going to happen so then i think to end this something like this we look for economic reasons to explain great terrible acts right we look for social reasons we look for political reasons but we have nietz's observation which is something like this i don't care whether or not your life's being characterized by suffering and deprivation.

[324] The mere fact of suffering and deprivation does not allow you to draw a particular conclusion.

[325] You can't say that there's a causal path between economic deprivation, say, and the rise of a totalitarian state, because any event is susceptible to multiple interpretations.

[326] Well, how do these states come about?

[327] Well, I think, well, we look for political and economic and social reasons because that's the easiest place to look, right?

[328] If you ratchet up the level of description to social forces that are beyond your control, then you never have to worry about what it is that you're doing or not doing that's actually causing this sort of thing.

[329] But I think if you look at the historical record, especially if you look at it from a mythological perspective, the story's basically clear.

[330] And it goes something like this.

[331] Every time you make a mistake that you know is a mistake and you don't fix it, the world moves more towards that.

[332] And it might be trivial, maybe, but it might not be.

[333] So you look at Adolf Eichmann, for example, who is the little bureaucrat who planned the final solution, and you find out he's just your little ratty guy, right?

[334] You see him in a bar?

[335] You don't even notice him.

[336] He's a negligible nobody.

[337] But he's the guy who planned the final solution.

[338] He was a normal person.

[339] I mean, maybe even slightly less than normal, right?

[340] He was no monster.

[341] He wasn't the sort of person you'd remark on if you saw him.

[342] precisely the opposite, invisible, quiet, unassuming, presuming no doubt that, at least until he was arrested, that he was just doing what he was told, and that was just fine.

[343] There's this piece from Search for the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is a myth that was constructed in England, and the myth goes something like this.

[344] There is a cup, the Grail, used to hold Christ's blood, and that cup has redemptive significance, and it's been lost, and the knights, King Arthur's knights, who go off to look for the Holy Grail, are after this cup.

[345] So it's a redemption story, right?

[346] It means the world's damned, unredeemed, there's some object that can serve as the source of redemption, the source of nourishment, say, thinking about it from a symbolic perspective, and it's worthwhile to go on a quest of that sort.

[347] And the King Arthur story is set up in an interesting way, because there's a king, Arthur, but he has all these knights, these nobles, all sit at a round table and they're at a round table because they're equals.

[348] So although it's a hierarchical story, there's a motif in it that transcends the hierarchy.

[349] It says, well, yeah, under normal circumstances everyone's arranged in a hierarchy, but when you're out to seek whatever you need then everyone's an equal and so fine.

[350] So they sit at the round table and then they go off to search for the Holy Grail.

[351] And the story opens with a very interesting motif which is the knights look at the forest and then they try to find the part that looks the darkest to them, and then they go that way.

[352] That's the marker for their mission, right, to go to the darkest place.

[353] And of course, each night goes off in a different direction because the world looks slightly different to each night.

[354] So, objectively speaking, they're going to a different place, but psychologically speaking, they're going to the same place, right?

[355] In that place, I suppose, has been represented in mythology and literature as the heart of darkness.

[356] And if you're ever curious about why people aren't enlightened, since it seems to be a possibility, you can always think about the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail and think, well, do you really want to enter the forest at the darkest place?

[357] And the answer to that is, of course, no, because the darkest place means precisely that place you least want to go.

[358] And it's the same for everyone.

[359] So then I have this little nephew, although he's almost 15 now, he had this dream when he was four years old.

[360] The background to the dream is this.

[361] He was waking up in the middle of the night for months, screaming.

[362] He had night terrors.

[363] And this went on for like six months.

[364] And what was happening in his life was twofold.

[365] There was some instability in his family, because his parents got divorced about a year after that.

[366] And also he was at the transition point from staying at home to going to kindergarten.

[367] So, you know, not only was he making the big move out there into the terrible world, but the stable point from which he might like to have moved was shaky.

[368] So, you know, he wasn't having that great a time.

[369] So anyways, he's screaming away at night, and this is pretty unsettling, right?

[370] Because night terrors are no joke, and so he's upset about it, his mom's upset about it.

[371] So I'm watching him, and he's run around the house, he's only about this high, very verbal kid, and he's got this knight hat on and this sword and this shield, and he's running around the house being a knight, and at night he takes his knight hat and his shield and his sword to bed.

[372] I think, oh, that's pretty cool.

[373] And you can see how that makes sense, right?

[374] You can see how it's an enacted reality, because children enact or act out their reality before they can explicitly understand it, just like we do.

[375] And so, I'm staying there, one night he wakes up and has one of these fits, and then the next morning he comes to breakfast, and I said, hey, did you have any dreams last night?

[376] And he goes, yeah, I had a dream.

[377] I said, well, tell us the dream.

[378] And there's six adults sitting around the table.

[379] And then he says, okay, I was out in this field and I was surrounded by beaked dwarves and they came up to my knees.

[380] And so these dwarves, they had no arms, they just had shoulders and powerful legs.

[381] And they're all covered with hair and they had a cross shaved on the top of their head.

[382] They're all covered with grease.

[383] And everywhere I went, these dwarves would jump up with their beaks and bite me. And we're looking at them like, that accounts for the night terrors, right?

[384] And so then he says, yeah, and there's more to it too.

[385] If you looked in the background behind all the dwarves, there was a dragon way in the background and it was puffing out fire and smoke and every time it puffed out fire and smoke, a whole bunch more of these dwarves would get made.

[386] And you think, that's pretty cool, that's a Hydra story, right?

[387] Remember the story of the Hydra, cut off one head, two more grows, it's one of Hercules trials.

[388] And that's an observation about the world, which is you solve one problem.

[389] like two more problems pop up and then you solve those and anyways he says okay well i've got this dragon back there and so this is his problem right he's being eaten by beak dwarves and that's not good and there's not much sense fighting them off because there's just more of them made every time this thing lurking in the background breeze so i said what could you do about that it's like his brain was working all these ideas around and he'd heard lots of disney stories and had lots of books read to him and had abstracted out a lot of information but he hadn't quite got it right and it was all seething around in his head and I just said well what could you do tap and he went oh I know what I could do I could take my sword and I'd get my dad which is a good notion right because he's small and then I jump up on the dragon and I'd pop out both of its eyes with the sword so it couldn't see me and then I'd go down its throat to the box where the fire came out and then I'd carve a piece out of the box and I'd use that as a shield and I thought great you really got the story and the story something like this, right?

[390] If you're being plagued by midget dwarfs and you wipe them out and they keep multiplying while you're obviously aiming at the wrong target, right?

[391] You should be going to their source.

[392] So he went after the dragon.

[393] But not only after the dragon, he went right down the throat of the dragon, which is, you know, a fairly brave thing to do.

[394] And then right to the place where the fire, the transforming element was being produced.

[395] And he took a piece of the device that made the transforming element and he used it as a shield.

[396] Okay.

[397] Well, that's really.

[398] cool and the story's better than that i think and it's true even so it's not one of those fake he was dreaming and then woke up sort of stories this actually happened he didn't have any more nightmares so when i checked with his mother repeatedly after that because i thought well this is too good to be true right it's got this terrible night terror thing he does one little mythological dream thing and bang he's he's better but that's the case he didn't have any more nightmares after that and i think that's because he'd almost already got it right he's running around like a night He knew, almost, just had to be made a little more explicit and not even that explicit because it was still a story.

[399] He didn't know you should go to the source of your anxieties, right, to the thing that plagues you the most and you should explore that in detail until you find the information that it contains that will protect you against it.

[400] He couldn't say that, but he could tell the story and he could act it out and that looked like it was good enough.

[401] So that's pretty cool.

[402] so he basically you know he managed this essentially he fought the dragon of chaos and popped back up as what as he who can obtain victory over the dragon of chaos and that's a pretty good story because it says well if your frame of reference gets blown away by something you don't understand some new challenge and you face the challenge at least courageously and humbly which means you know you you're not going to run away and you still have something to learn then you can extract something out of the battle that will enable you to withstand it and you think well why should I believe that right and the answer that would be well don't knock it till you try it and the second answer would be that's exactly what we do in clinical psychotherapy all the time and there's endless amounts I think of empirical evidence saying that you bring someone in they've got an anxiety disorder maybe they're even depressed whatever they're running away you say you actually don't have to run away Here's what you have to do.

[403] You have to break the problem down into little pieces, digestible pieces, and then you have to hit it one by one.

[404] And what you'll discover is not that you habituate to the anxiety, because that's a silly theory.

[405] Instead, what you discover is that you thought you were the person who had to run away.

[406] But it turns out you're not the person who has to run away.

[407] You're the person that can stand there while you're anxious and learn something.

[408] And what you most particularly learn is that you're the person who can stand there when they're anxious and learn.

[409] And if you've learned that, you don't have to be anxious anymore.

[410] Or even more importantly, if you're anxious, it doesn't matter.

[411] It doesn't mean your life's over.

[412] It just means that there you are on the threshold, right, between what you know and what you don't know, and you have something to learn.

[413] And you can learn it.

[414] And I think that's what the empirical evidence suggests, too, because you've got Edna Foa's work with post -traumatic stress disorder victims, primarily women who were violently raped.

[415] And Foa says, well, I know you don't like to think about the event, and it's no bloody.

[416] wonder look what it did to you and how terrible it was but if you relive it over and over and over again in your imagination in as much detail as possible including all the motivational and emotional details which she measures psychophysiologically you will get better faster and you'll stay better longer and her works well documented and then there's endless cases of exposure in psychotherapy you can certainly eliminate simple phobias within an hour and even complex phobias like agoraphobia which is more like fear of everything is not an interesting intractable disorder.

[417] Imagine that throughout your whole life you never turned away from a mistake, not even once, never.

[418] So that whenever you made a mistake that you could rectify, you did rectify it.

[419] Then the question would be, well, what exactly would you be like?

[420] Would you be suffering from all your existential trouble?

[421] Would you be vulnerable to anxiety?

[422] What would you be like?

[423] And then I think, well, I only know a couple of stories like that, and the one that I've told you is the story of Solzhenitsyn.

[424] Because Solzhen, the Russian novelist sitting in the concentration camps in the Gulag archipelago thinking starving this isn't so good how in the world did I get here and the simple story is well Stalin put you there and he was bad right end of story it's not your problem Stalin's problem but Solzhenitizen said well that doesn't really leave me anything to do right to construe myself as a simple victim of fate and I do have a lot of time on my hands since I'm not really doing anything that requires a tremendous amount of intellectual effort.

[425] Let's try a game.

[426] Let's do this.

[427] Let's pretend that the reason that things happen to me that I don't like, even terrible things, say, or that I can't tolerate, is not because I'm a victim of fate, evil, cruel fate, but because there's something I didn't do.

[428] And so Solzhenitsin said, well, I'm going to go back over my whole life, right, step by step, detail by detail and I'm gonna try to remember every time I let something go or I didn't do something I was supposed to not because of some adherence to some you know arbitrary moral code because we don't believe in those anyways right but just because I noted that I can tell when I owe a debt to existence so then you look at Solzhenitsyn and he says okay well so I spent 15 years trying to untie all the knots that I tied up in my brain and the consequence was of that was first I started to notice there were some people out there I really admired man they were so tough it was unbelievable you put them in the worst circumstances they didn't bend an inch they were tough and even the nastiest prison guards and administrators well they could kill them that's for sure but they couldn't bend them and they couldn't break them and I really learned something from that right and it's a good story because he's in the worst possible circumstance so there's kind of no bottom past that you don't get much worse than the gulag prison camp right that's it's cold you don't get anything to eat and you're being worked to death right for something pointless, and to serve Stalin, that's the bottom.

[429] And he said, even under those circumstances, there are still people who could thrive, who could manifest admirable qualities.

[430] He said, once I figured out I was wrong, I could actually find them and learn from them.

[431] Then he wrote this book, which you know about, the Gulag Archipelago, which was released in the West, and then circulated all through the Soviet Union, and was undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to the demise of the the Soviet Union and so then you think well that's pretty interesting isn't it you got this one wacko Zek right Russian prisoner starving to death tattooed he says maybe I had something to do with this but he didn't mean it in some casual sort of maybe I had something to do with this way he meant geez this is really awful doesn't get much worse maybe it's my fault you know I don't know how it could be but after all I'm the one that's suffering so maybe it was me maybe I could fix it what would happen if I did and so his conclusion was at the end and it's not a conclusion that he reached alone was one person who stops lying can bring down a tyranny and you think that's a metaphorical statement right because you're the victim of your own tyrannies just as you are the victim of someone else's tyrannies and maybe if you stop lying construed in this manner of sin of omission right don't avoid anomalies anymore but confront them head on maybe if you quit lying well then you wouldn't be victim of tyranny maybe no one else would be either the GRE say the bad exam that's bad thing but it's not the worst thing the worst thing is the sort of thing that knocks existentialists for a loop right the worst thing is more like Ivan Karamazov's suffering of innocent children right the fact that children are tortured or the worst thing is the fact that perfectly good people get sick and die and sometimes painfully or the worst thing is there are tyrants all over the world and They torture people for no cause or maybe even just because they like torturing people.

[432] And that's an anomaly of a different order, right?

[433] It's not just that you're going from point A to B and something you don't like happens.

[434] It's more like there are some aspects of existence that look so terrible in and of themselves associated with our vulnerability that just apprehending them might be enough to knock the bottom out of your faith in any frame of reference.

[435] And that's a kind of Nietzschean theme.

[436] Nietzsche says, look, when you're going from point A to B, and something bad happened something you don't expect you don't get to where you wanted to go that's bad but what's even worse is you can't have any faith in the frame of reference that you were using because it's been invalidated but what's even worse is you plow your way through two or three frames of reference and then you start to develop some skepticism about frames of reference in general right so I was a socialist say and then I was a Catholic and you know then I developed some new age philosophy and none of those really worked and what that made me think was, well, you can't trust socialism, you can't trust Christianity, and those new age people are certainly out to lunch.

[437] Maybe you can't trust any frames of reference.

[438] And that's a really devastating discovery, and Nietzsche associated that with the death of God, right?

[439] It's like no frames of reference work.

[440] And then you have the problem that, well, without a frame of reference, life is chaos, and chaos is intolerable, and therefore, logically, life is intolerable.

[441] And I tried to make a case for you then, that's kind of a side case, which was people protect their ideologies because they don't want to lose their frames of reference.

[442] They don't want to fall into chaos.

[443] But then there's this additional problem, which is that you can develop a kind of deep cynicism about life.

[444] In a secondary manner, which is like constant loss of faith, maybe what you conclude under those conditions, like the aggressive child concludes.

[445] is that fundamentally, I'm not to be trusted, you're not to be trusted, society is not to be trusted, and maybe the structure of the world as a whole isn't to be trusted, and therefore logically you're more or less obligated to work against it.

[446] And so then you have a nice sub -story for the propagation of evil, which is, well, we like to have our ideological frames of reference retained, and that's a nice sub -story for the propagation of evil, which is, well, we like to have our ideological frames of reference retained, and that that gives us ample reason to squash anyone that's different but then there's this additional reason which is when you get right down to it things are pretty bloody awful and maybe the sensible thing to do is to just work for the annihilation of things and I think we've had endless examples of people who did precisely that in the 20th century and almost got away with it in case you're tempted not to take this sufficiently seriously right we know that Stalin in all likelihood I who I think you could make a case for being If not the most evil man that ever lived, certainly the most evil man that lived this century.

[447] And that's really a high honor, right, because he was up against some really top contenders.

[448] We know, as a consequence of recently released KGB documents, that he was probably gearing up to start the Third World War.

[449] Not one of these little half -rate, you know, little local third world wars.

[450] We were talking about the whole H -bomb exchange thing designed to eradicate, you know, the US for sure, but also the Soviet Union.

[451] And, well, mere territoriality isn't enough to account for that.

[452] But then maybe you can see Stalin's point, right?

[453] Like Tolstoy can see it, you know, if life is really so awful at bottom, which there are perspectives from which that certainly seems to be the case, then why bother having it around at all?

[454] Well, you know, that's a pretty dismal perspective.

[455] So that's a real anomaly, right?

[456] That's not one of these little second rate you'll get over it in a month or two anomalies.

[457] This is the sort of anomaly that's laid out in Genesis.

[458] where Adam and Eve discover that they're mortal, vulnerable, they're going to die, that really takes the shine off existence, out of paradise they go, they wander around the planet for the rest of history, you know, working themselves to death and being miserable and killing each other.

[459] And that's basically the story that's laid out in the Old Testament.

[460] And viewed from that perspective, well, it's not precisely an empirical description of the Big Bang, say, but it's not a bad description of the nature of human existence.

[461] And it's pretty dismal.

[462] There's an essential symbolic relationship between the ingestion of food and its transformative capacities and the and the ingestion of ideas and their transformative capacity and what happens when Adam and Eve eat this fruit which they're not supposed to eat is that they learn that they're going to die and that screws up paradise and in case you just think I'm making this up which would be you know kind of annoying then you want to look at this picture which is from the 14th century and it's really remarkable picture so what you've got in the middle here is the the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and you've got Eve over here and you've got the church here now what you see happening you got to look really carefully at this tree because the first thing you see is it's got the snake wrapped around it this agent of transformation right who's associated with Satan and then up in the branches you have apples and you have skulls And then if you look at Eve here, she's got grapes here and a skull in her hand.

[463] And what this artist is trying to indicate is that there's this tight relationship between Eve tempting Adam towards higher knowledge and delivering him death.

[464] So that's pretty dismal story, and all the people over her on the left side, all these unhappy people are the people who are living in chaos and misery as a consequence of being, of having their vulnerability.

[465] revealed to them and that's the negative side of the story but then there's the positive side of the story over here and it's it's just as complicated and that's partly why it's expressed in imagistic form so you've got the church here symbolized at least in part as Mary and she's handing out something too and if you look at those there are little round circles with crosses on them and what those are are hosts hosts they're the symbols of transformation particularly in Catholicism now that's a very complicated idea and this is the idea something like this at Christ's last supper before he was crucified he told his disciples that they were going to have to ingest him right so they gave them wine and bread and the wine was blood and the bread was flesh and what's the idea what does it mean to incorporate someone it means to embody them that's what it means and this this imagistic ritualistic process is that notion that in order to attain redemption it's necessary to embody the hero and that's kind of what this picture is trying to portray it says okay well you got this death apple over on the left hand side and that's not so good and you need an antidote to it and the antidote is whatever this represents whatever this represents and you see up in the tree here there's all these hosts hanging now the hosts are representative of Christ and for complicated reasons they're made out of wheat say and partly the reason they're made out of wheat is because if you look at hero gods prior to Christianity, you see that wheat was often conceptualized as a dying and redeemed god, right?

[466] Because it would die in the winter and then be reborn in the spring, just like all plants are.

[467] And the notion of the dying and redeeming, the dying and resurrecting hero was kind of, what would you say, layered on top of that older agrarian idea and all mixed together and sort of popped out in this idea of the host.

[468] And so the idea here is that whatever ails human beings, which is their knowledge of vulnerability and death, can be rectified by their incorporation of whatever this symbol represents.

[469] And so then you might ask, well, what exactly does that symbol represent?

[470] And of course there's standard Christian answers to that, and the extended Christian answers are, well, it represents your faith in Christ, say.

[471] But that's not a very useful answer, all things considered.

[472] So let's look at it in a little bit more complicated way.

[473] It's not a useful answer, I think, because it's too sectarian, right?

[474] It excludes many, many people this notion.

[475] There's a whole formalism that you have to buy into to even get access to what that story means.

[476] And it's an unfortunate formalism because, first of all, I think it's more appropriate to an earlier time and place.

[477] And second of all, because I think we're actually sophisticated enough now, intellectually, psychologically, to actually start to understand what some of these stories mean.

[478] And since we have reasonably well developed brains and we might as well use them, it would be better if they were on our side, so to speak, than constantly conspiring to undermine our faith.

[479] Let's look at what a person is like.

[480] And a person is sort of just as complicated as an object, which is not that surprising because there's an aspect of us that is object -like, right?

[481] our objective being and we know people are unbelievably complicated they have they have nervous systems that have more connections in them than there are subatomic particles in the universe just for starters and so that means that when you're looking at another person you're looking at something that's more complicated than anything else that exists anywhere including the sum total of everything that exists everywhere except other people more complex than everything and then you have to understand too that just because you don't think of yourself that way doesn't mean you're not that way, it just means that your conscious mind, your rational mind say isn't sophisticated enough to actually completely model who or what you are.

[482] And that's obvious because that's why we study ourselves.

[483] We don't know who we are, we're trying to figure it out.

[484] We've been trying to figure it out ever since we woke up some thousands of years ago.

[485] We don't know when.

[486] And you think, well, if you look at people, well, you know, there's the kind of obvious level, you see people at the self level which is the privileged level of analysis for the West but you're a member of a family and if I said well are you more yourself or your family you might say well most of the time I think I'm more myself but I might be willing to sacrifice my life for my child's in which case I would say well then you're just as much your child as you are you or maybe you're even more your child and what about your family well that's a tough question too and then what about your cultural group while you say no it's me not my cultural group but then I'd say well what if there's a war is it you or your cultural group and then you'll say what's my cultural group and then you see as well well at this level of analysis are you your biological group is that what you identify with the biosphere say say well no not generally but there's a lot of environmentalists out there and they say well what we should primarily be concerned with is the global health of the planet because our survival depends on that were as much that as we are the self and you might not agree with that and I suspect that most of the time there's screwy reasons for proposing such a thing but on the other hand a case can be made I mean we know that you can undermine your ecosystems if it happened in Spain they let 400 years ago they let sheep eat everything and so Spain turned into a desert doesn't seem like a particularly wise move and then you think well below the phenomenological level there's all these sub -elements of you your physiological structure, your cellular structure, your atomic structure, amenable to infinite investigation, absolutely complex.

[487] You'll never exhaust it if you investigate it, and it's perfectly reasonable to presuppose that you're all these things.

[488] How does it change the world if you stop thinking about it as made of objects, but instead made of your own experience?

[489] And how does it change the world if you think you have an ethical relationship to that experience that's a primary fact, not some secondary derivative?

[490] So primary of fact that you can't even look at the world except through an ethical lens.

[491] Primary fact.

[492] How does that change the way you conceptualize yourself in relationship to the world?

[493] I don't know.

[494] You really can't tell the meaning of someone's life till the very end.

[495] It's for the same reason, right, is that how all the pieces fit together in the story or in the life is not necessarily determined until the final moment.

[496] And I think that's part of the reason too, why among Catholics, for example, and and Christians in general there's an idea that salvation can always be attained right right up to the last moment no matter what your life was like and you think well that's a pretty cheap trick because you can run around doing terrible things their whole life but as long as you get it together the last second then you're scot -free but if you think about it in terms of a story then you can understand how that could conceivably be the case and it's for this reason of course that this lecture in particular makes me nervous more than any of the other ones I do because I've been telling you a story that's basically 40 hours long, right, in its spoken form and then, who knows how long in its written form.

[497] And it's complicated to pull it together properly.

[498] And that's partly because as far as I've been concerned, we've been talking about issues in psychology that are more difficult than any other, first of all, conceptually, even from a neurological perspective, because I've been offering you a model of the way the brain processes the environment that I think is really novel, and I think it reflects.

[499] the current state of neuroscience and but more than that there's the problem that we've been dealing with issues all the way along of life and death and of war and destruction and of the possibility for all clear -headed optimism right a possibility which as we've discussed more or less escaped Tolstoy say for most of his life right because when Tolstoy woke up from his delusions he looked at the world and he said well clearly it's such a terrible place that If you're not looking at it through the veils of illusion, there's no way that you can do anything, but stand in opposition to it once you understand its basic structure, right?

[500] Suffering and innocent suffering and complete vulnerability and the whole existential mess that makes up life.

[501] Now it turns out that Tolstoy overcame his rationally induced cynicism in a kind of mystical way.

[502] He had a dream that he was suspended from some transcendent space by a belt around the middle of his waist, which hung him over a pit of chaos.

[503] And in that image, he found comfort, and fair enough, it's a powerful image, but it's not well delineated, right?

[504] And it worked well for Tolstoy, and you can see that the image has power, but you can't grab it with your rational mind.

[505] You can't take it into pieces and analyze it as an argument.

[506] And that's what we do if we're intellectuals, right?

[507] We try to understand the detailed structure of something.

[508] And I think the detailed structure of what Tolstoy apprehended as optimistic is actually comprehensible.

[509] And we've been working towards that and circling around it the entire course of this lecture series.

[510] But I found with this material that with each circling around the target, it gets clearer and clearer.

[511] It's a funny thing.

[512] It's like you're looking at something that's too complicated.

[513] to see all at once so you have to look at it from multiple different perspectives and again and again and each time you look at it it becomes clear and clear and that's still the case for me when I go through this material every time I go through it I think oh yeah that piece fits there and that's how that makes sense and oh that's a lot more remarkable than I thought it was to begin with and so on and it seems fundamentally and exhaustible and of course that's what you'd expect from deep deep stories right stories that have been around for thousands and thousands of years wouldn't have been around for thousands and thousands of years, unless they were in some sense inexhaustible.

[514] And we've talked about some of the processes that might contribute to that inexhaustibility.

[515] So at the beginning of the lecture series I told you to consider the assumption that there was more than one way of looking at the world.

[516] Right, there was the standard materialist sort of scientific viewpoint, which was that the world was made up of objects, independently existent, us among them.

[517] the objects had no intrinsic value one way or another and the issue of meaning per se wasn't included in that account and then I said well wait there's another way of looking at the world that we spent just as much time developing that we utilize even more and that's the narrative way of looking at the world to consider the nature of experience rather than the nature of objects as real to consider your experience as real even though it includes things that can't be easily and tangibly identified.

[518] Things like emotions, which of course you find compelling, sometimes even beyond your will.

[519] Things like motivational states, fantasies, ideals, all the things that compel your behavior and give you some sense that there's a direction to life.

[520] And people who study emotion and perception have come to understand that the act of transforming the world into something simply made out of objects is incredibly difficult.

[521] It's so difficult that we haven't been able to design machines that can do it at all.

[522] It turns out also that when we look at the world, we're not just looking at it with our visual systems, but we're looking at it with our motor output systems and our emotion so that when you look at something like a chair, which just stands there for you like an object, it turns out that the mechanical systems, the motor systems that you would use to use the chair to sit on it are activated during the active perception.

[523] It also turns out sometimes that when you look at something especially if it's something you don't understand and that it's and that scares you you actually react to it conceptualize it with your body and with your emotions before you have any idea what it is from the perspective of an object when you look at the world and when you think about the world you have to do it from a motivation a motivated perspective and an emotionally ridden perspective you can't even see the world without being gripped by your motivation and emotional states and so the idea that rational Or, perception is somehow separate from or superordinate to perception and emotion is just wrong.

[524] We understand now that you can't even think without being motivated.

[525] You can't see the world without being motivated.

[526] And that means you always look at the world through a kind of lens.

[527] And the lens is a narrowing lens.

[528] And it has to be because the world is so complicated.

[529] You can't see it all at once.

[530] You're only seeing tiny slices of it in time and tiny slices of it in space.

[531] And even then you have to narrow it to only those things that are relevant to you at that moment.

[532] And we don't know exactly how you do that.

[533] We know that it takes years and years of perceptual work in infancy, say, so that you manage to build up an object conception of the world.

[534] That's probably all you're doing in the first two or three years of life.

[535] And you're doing it constantly, and it's just as complicated as learning language, say, or even more complicated.

[536] Most of it's invisible, and we don't know how children do that.

[537] and by the time they can talk, they've already done it, so they can't even tell us what they're doing.

[538] It takes a long time to build up an object world.

[539] When you look at the world, when you go from point A to point B, even when you're doing something as simple as looking for food in the kitchen, you ignore everything about the world that isn't relevant to making yourself a peanut butter sandwich, and you focus in on those few things that are, the refrigerator, the food, the knives, the cutlery, and so on, and everything else is screened out.

[540] And you can't help but look at the world through that kind of lens.

[541] And the lens has changed and you can be in different motivational states and they can change because of internal transformations.

[542] You're not hungry, you're thirsty, or you're not thirsty, you're interested in someone.

[543] Or somebody's telling you a story and then you adopt their motivational framework and you can see the world through their eyes and now we know the neural machinery for that and we already talked about that.

[544] So we can toss back and forth these motivational frames of reference and that.

[545] gives us insight into someone else's world.

[546] You can look at the world endless numbers of ways.

[547] And what you're trying to do is out of its infinite richness, so to speak, is to pull out parts of it that are useful for you while you're moving from point A to point B. And this can be a chair if you want to sit down, but if you want to take the light ball out of the ceiling, then it's a stool or a table.

[548] And whether or not it's a chair or a stool or a table depends just as much on what you're doing as it does on what it is.

[549] And I think that's part of the reason why human beings can be so infinitely creative, right?

[550] For us, the world isn't fixed.

[551] We never know what it's going to bring forth.

[552] So, a hundred years ago, if someone would have said, well, you could build a machine on a wafer, a centimeter square, out of sand, and if you have enough of those machines, then everyone in the world can be connected, and everyone in the world can have an infinite library of verbal material, right?

[553] That's impossible, but it's not impossible.

[554] It turns out that silica has those properties and we can build unbelievably powerful machines out of nothing.

[555] And so then that kind of makes you think about just what this nothing that we're building things out of is, right?

[556] Because it seems to be able to reveal a constant array of properties, properties that are essentially unlimited and its capacity to reveal those properties seems to depend as much on our ability to interact with it, whatever that is, as it does on whatever the stuff is.

[557] And we know even from a strict object perception of the world that the stuff that things are made of is a lot more complicated than we had originally presumed even as materialists because materialists, realists, their philosophy only holds down to about the subatomic level of analysis, a deterministic worldview.

[558] Below the subatomic level of analysis, there's nothing deterministic at all and the stuff that things are made of is so mysterious that we can't even we can't grasp it we can't comprehend it so it turns out that rather than the story world be being dependent on the object world it might be the other way around the object world is dependent on the story world and that implies at least to some degree that the story world is actually more real whatever that means and then I told you that well the real problem of life isn't so much, what do you do when you're around things that you understand?

[559] The real problem of life is, what do you do when you encounter something you can't conceptualize?

[560] And I think a good recent example of that was the bombing of the world trade towers, which people were compelled to watch over and over and over and over.

[561] And if you ask someone, well, what is it that you're watching?

[562] They would say, well, I'm watching the world trade towers fall down.

[563] But then you might say, well, why are you watching it over and over?

[564] and they would say something like, well, I can't believe it.

[565] I can't believe it's happening.

[566] And what does that mean?

[567] It means something like, whatever it is that's happening here, whatever's being blown apart, exceeds my ability to model.

[568] And as a consequence, I have to expose myself to it again and again and again and again to try to understand what's falling.

[569] What's falling exactly?

[570] Is it just the towers?

[571] Is it 20 ,000 people?

[572] Is it the financial system of the U .S.?

[573] Is it the stability of the Western world?

[574] Is it the beginning of World War III, or as the former CIA director just mentioned in the US, the beginning of World War IV?

[575] What is it exactly that you're looking at when something happens that you don't understand?

[576] And then you say, well, how do you react to that?

[577] And it turns out that you react mostly with your body, not with your mind, not with your perceptual systems, not with your thoughts, but with your emotions and your body.

[578] And that means you sweat and you panic and you feel depressed and you feel hurt and you feel ashamed.

[579] you're prepared for a catastrophe which is stress and all that's basically non -cognitive.

[580] And what that kind of means is that when you encounter something you don't understand the first manner in which you conceive of it is embodied, emotional, physical, way before you develop up an object representation or cognitive representation, you may now never get it.

[581] Like an event like that or a worse event can throw someone into a tailspin that's so extreme that they never get out of it.

[582] So you see, for example, sometimes, and this is more true among elderly people, if their spouse dies, the probability that they'll die in the next year, say, from a heart attack or something like that, increases substantially.

[583] Why is that?

[584] It's because their conceptual frame was so dependent on the existence of their spouse, say, someone they've lived with for 25 years, that the anxiety and uncertainty caused by their anomalous disappearance, their death, is so extreme that it sends their body into a physiological state that's basically unbearable and that does them in.

[585] And when you start to understand what having your preconceptions rattled really means, then you also start to understand why people are so motivated to protect their ideological territory, right?

[586] Because ideological territory, that's how you see the world, that's your story.

[587] And you can't have your fundamentals rattled all the time because it throws everything into chaos and that puts you in this terrible, panicky, cortisol -ridden, stressful state that's really hard on you physically.

[588] So we know, for example, that if you're in a state where you're chronically exposed to threat or punishment, which is the case in depression, say, you produce a lot of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and cortisol is toxic.

[589] So the more of it you produce, the more you kill off your hippocampal cells, and you really need them because they're key to memory.

[590] You do in your immunological system.

[591] there's all sorts of negative side effects of cortisol poisoning, increased incidence of cardiovascular disease, heightened rate of cancer, plus it's just no fun, right?

[592] It's the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, essentially.

[593] If something unknown happens to you and blows your frame of reference, right, knocks you for a loop, sends you to the underworld, however you want to construe it, that's really going to upset your bandwagon and throw you into a state that you do virtually anything to avoid.

[594] But by the same token, there is a possibility that inside that chaotic mess there's something you really need and what's the logic there well the logic is something like this when you look at the world you only see a fragment of it and that's good because it's pretty overwhelming and a fragment's generally more than enough but all the information that you've ever gathered in your entire life to build yourself out of it to make your life stable has come as a consequence of your ability to explore what you don't understand and that's an unlimited capacity right no matter how much much you explore and how much information you gather, there's always the possibility that there's way more information out there, and that means if you have a problem and you see that it's a problem, even though that's frightening, it's also a gateway into a domain of possibility, and the possibility is this richly informative background that could in principle provide you with any answer you need.

[595] And then you can think one more thing.

[596] The old gods, Mars, say the god of war, Venus.

[597] the God of love.

[598] They're all internalized for us, right?

[599] We know that anger is a psychological state and that love is the psychological state.

[600] But if we look at our great religious traditions, Christianity say, or Buddhism, just to take to as an example, we still have this notion that what these figures represent is something external.

[601] Well, you might say how primitive, right?

[602] Just as primitive as the idea that the god of war is something external is the idea that this sort of figure is supposed to be something external it's supposed to be something embodied right it's a story about the nature of individual moral responsibility so the idea is something like this well reality itself the existence of things seems to depend on the existence of a finite observer so that we can see things from a perspective you don't see things from a perspective everything is the same.

[603] There's nothing delineated.

[604] But if there's going to be delineated things, small things, insufficient things, and they're going to be aware, they're going to be vulnerable as a part of their limitation.

[605] And so you say, well, limitation is a precondition for being, and that means suffering is part and parcel of being.

[606] Dostoevsky said clearly, look, I give you all the cake you want.

[607] You got a big house, you got nothing to do but watch TV, right, and propaganda.

[608] the species are you happy and Dostoevsky says well no why well because human beings are really fundamentally ungrateful and insane so if you give them some little comfortable niche to occupy themselves with so they don't have anything to worry about the first thing they're gonna do just like Adam and Eve basically or just like Gatama Buddha they're gonna run around looking for the apple looking for the snake looking for the trouble to smash the frame into bits no matter how comfortable it is just so they can get access to little chaos and have some fun and so then you think well maybe it's more like the purpose of life isn't to avoid chaos because we like chaos it's entertaining right it keeps us alert and awake and it gives us something to do that really has no end and so maybe the answer is something more like well forget the frame of reference forget the chaos but hit the balance right between the two right so that you got one foot where it's reasonably comfortable and you got one foot out there where it's kind of exciting and dangerous and that's perfect and then you think that The state you want to attain that makes you resistant to even the greatest anomalies, anomalies of death, say, or vulnerability or mortality, is exactly that position, right?

[609] Balance straight between the forces of chaos and the forces of order or between yin and yang.

[610] And how do you know you're there?

[611] Because that's what it really boils down to.

[612] How do you know that you're there?

[613] And then you think, okay, it's pretty simple.

[614] You watch with your eyes open.

[615] just like Solzhen watched you think I don't know everything so let's see what I do know no preconceptions I'm not gonna shield myself from the truth with some second -rate frame of reference we don't believe in those anyways because they're always fragmentable I'm just gonna watch so when am I not miserable and then you think well I'm not miserable when I'm interested in things something I get interested in something I don't exactly know why I get interested in it it catches me what are the what's the phenomenology of being caught.

[616] I'm not self -conscious when I'm engaged in something.

[617] I'm more like a child, which is why children have intimations of immortality.

[618] I'm engaged in this process.

[619] I don't think about myself, so I'm not self -conscious.

[620] I lose my sense of temporality because it seems like I can do whatever it is that I'm doing, thing that I enjoy for hours and the time flies by, and I'm not even really aware of the surrounding world.

[621] And none of my existential concerns are paramount at that time.

[622] Every need is suppressed by my engagement in the activity.

[623] And then you say to yourself, well, yeah, fine, that only happens like, you know, 10 minutes every three days or something when I'm being particularly miserable.

[624] But you might say, well, the fact that it happens at all is probably worth paying attention to.

[625] I mean, if you believe that your experience is real, like real, the fact that you can get into a state like that at all is worth paying attention to.

[626] And so then you might say, well, that's where your sense of ethics really starts to arise.

[627] is what makes you interested, well, it might be just as cracked and peculiar as something you could possibly imagine, right?

[628] Your parents are against it, your friends are against it, even you're against it when you're thinking clearly, but there's still this reality that something compels you.

[629] And then you think, well, can you trust it?

[630] And I think, well, that's a tough question because I read a long time, for a long time, I read accounts of serial killers, because I was really interested in what motivated them, right?

[631] And they're an interesting breed in many ways, which is why there's such a popular fascination with them.

[632] And so then you think about a story like that, and you think, geez, maybe you can't trust your interest, right?

[633] Maybe it'll take you somewhere you don't want to go, like seriously where you don't want to go.

[634] How do you know that if you really let yourself be who you could be, that you'd end up somewhere good?

[635] And so then you come to the second part of the story, which is something like this.

[636] Let's say that you're a very, very, very finely tuned biological machine, right?

[637] Look into a computer and then you say, okay, you take a computer and you feed it false information.

[638] What do you get out?

[639] False information, right?

[640] Well, you've stuck with this computer.

[641] It's very complicated.

[642] You kind of reside in it in some manner you don't understand.

[643] And yet you're prone upon occasions.

[644] either to deny it information altogether when you walk away from something you know you shouldn't walk away from or to feed it bad information and so then what if what if this was the case what if it was the case that the systems that orient you with regards to your interest can become pathologized by any relationship you have with yourself that's predicated on bad faith and so then you think well that's why there's an ethical aspect to this redemptive process like a real strenuous and strict ethical aspect it goes something like this there are things that you can do find yourself engaged with the world at such a level that your existential concerns could disappear and we can even understand that biochemically to some degree because if you're really interested in something you get a dopamine release an exploratory dopamine release that's great i mean that's associated with positive affect with confidence with increased immunological functioning with better memory functioning with learning everything you want it's all Potently anti -anxiolytic and analgesic which means that if you're really pursuing something that's compelling to you You're much more resistant biochemically to punishment disappointment depression pain threat etc and it's not because you're blind It's not because your nervous system is optimally tuned to make you maximally resistant and so then you might think if you were optimally tuned How resistant would you be?

[645] You don't know right because it's a spiral that never stops moving uphill.

[646] We don't know what the upper end is.

[647] I mean, we have exemplars that might indicate what that upper end could be, but we don't actually know.

[648] So then you think, okay, well, here's the rule, say, something like this.

[649] If you look at the world from this perspective, which is something you have to decide if you're, you know, you find compelling and reasonable, the rule is this.

[650] You're always going to run into an anomaly, right?

[651] An anomaly is always going to look to you like this and it's no bloody wonder you want to run away from that I mean in some ways your whole body is telling you watch out and for good reason because it's no joke but then there's more to the story because the anomalous thing that's everything you don't know and you might say well you're going out with someone you want to have a long -term relationship they betray you how could there be any good in that because that's certainly what you're going to ask when you first encounter the unexpected information but then you might think could be that I'm a little too naive for my own good right people pull me in a little more than they should or I'm not sufficiently careful when I enter into intimate relationships with people or I don't treat people right or I don't have a good conceptualization of myself or I'm chasing after the wrong person well that's all going to be very annoying to learn but if you don't learn it you're going to be in big trouble so maybe the best thing to do when an anomaly of that sort hits you is to think, okay, yeah, it's a dragon, no doubt it will eat me, but if I don't let it eat me, then there'll just be another one waiting around the corner and it'll probably be a little bit bigger and if I get eaten by enough of them, I'm not really going to want to be around much and maybe I'm not going to be willing to help other people be around much either.

[652] Doesn't seem like a very good alternative to me. Back in 1957, some new Gnostic writings were discovered in a cave.

[653] They were discovered by these two Arab guys who went out to kill the man who killed their father.

[654] They took him out into this cave and they killed him and when they were burying them they found these amphora full of papers and papyrus.

[655] And they took them home and their mother used a bunch of them to like cooking fires with.

[656] And one day one of their friends who was an antiquities dealer showed up and he said, you know you shouldn't be burning those.

[657] Those are about 1 ,500 years old and they look like very early Gnostic Gospels and the Gnostic were this branch of Christianity that was pretty violently suppressed by the emergence of Orthodox Christianity.

[658] And the Gnostics believed that faith was a good thing, but knowledge was all right too.

[659] And they wrote gospel accounts, say, of Christ's life, that were knowledge predicated as much as revelation predicated, say.

[660] And this is one of the quotes from one of those Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, which is actually one that, the only one that got out, Carl Jung got a hold of him, interestingly enough.

[661] and this is one of the quotes.

[662] And I really like this.

[663] This is a non -canonical saying of Christ, and the saying is, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

[664] If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

[665] And I think that's a pretty good line to close off the class.

[666] So thank you for attending.

[667] Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[668] This was an amalgamation of episodes 10 to 13 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVO.

[669] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

[670] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.