Maps of Meaning 4, 5, & 6

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

[1] This podcast is an amalgamation of episodes 4 to 6 from Maps of Meaning, recorded by TV Ontario.

[2] You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon, or by finding the link in the description.

[3] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found at self -authoring Maybe you're 35 years old and you've never had a job and one of the things that's stopping you is that you're so damn nervous that you can't pick up a phone and use it because if anything unexpected happens while you're talking you get scared so badly you have to hang up and so that would be characteristic of somebody with a severe anxiety disorder and so what do you do with that person so you say are they afraid of the phone well no what are they afraid of well they're afraid of anomalies in human interaction They're afraid of something unexpected happening while they're trying to impose a structure.

[4] And the reason they're afraid of that is because they never learned that they were capable of dealing with the emergence of something new on an ongoing basis, which meant that, well, which meant in all likelihood that when they were children, they were so sheltered from any contact with those aspects of being that transcend knowledge, that they never learned that there was something inside of them that would reveal itself if they were allowed the opportunity to be.

[5] to encounter the unknown, to encounter fear, then to master it, then to extract out something of value.

[6] So they can't get a job because they can't use the phone.

[7] And it isn't because they can't use the phone, right?

[8] It's a deeper story than that.

[9] It's because they're terrified of this and they have no idea that they have some resource they could draw on to combat it.

[10] And you could say, well, we can teach them to use the phone, right?

[11] Say well, you know, here's a repertoire of stock line.

[12] that you might use, you know, like small talk at a party, and that would increase what they know and enable them to deal with the unknown.

[13] Or you could say, look, you know, relax a little bit.

[14] When the person says something on the phone that you don't understand, pause a little bit.

[15] Think about what they're saying.

[16] Pay attention to them.

[17] Allow yourself a luxury of formulating a response.

[18] You'll do fine.

[19] And even if you do it badly, the first half a dozen times, well, you'll learn eventually.

[20] The person derives from that, the notion that not only can they cope, on the phone, but that possibly there's more to them that originally met the eye.

[21] We come into the world equipped with an array of possibilities and limitations.

[22] Those possibilities and limitations are expressed most particularly in our physical form, the fact that we have a specific kind of embodied form that allows us to do certain things and that also doesn't allow us to do certain other things.

[23] Lao Tzu has pointed out that it's the space inside a pot that makes the pot worthwhile.

[24] And what he means by that is that those things that limit you give you as much form and possibility as those things that enable you.

[25] What that means more broadly is the fact that you come to a given circumstance with a set of possibilities and a set of limitations.

[26] It's that that allows you to impose form on what you encounter.

[27] So that the whole notion of form is a tenet in some peculiar way that we don't really understand yet on the Necessity of Limitation and I think the best way to understand that or to begin to understand that is to give some consideration to the notion of a game So for example if you're playing chess There's a virtually unlimited number of things you can't do and only a very narrow number of things that you can do Yet when you're playing chess the arbitrary limitations that are imposed on each piece don't seem to to be unfair in any sort of cosmic sense they seem to be part of the structure that enables you to actually play the game without the imposition of those rules which are of course relatively arbitrary in their structure there wouldn't be a game at all now it's clear that for human beings games and fantasy for that matter shade up into reality so that the game structures that we engage in and the fantasy structures that we use to undergird our stories and our pretend play say when we're children shade imperceptibly into real life.

[28] We play games because there's something about games that make them deeply analogous to what we do in day -to -day situations.

[29] And that means the observation that the rules of a game actually make the game possible is an observation that's broadly applicable to consideration of your own limitation.

[30] Some of those limitations and possibilities take the form of emotions and motivations.

[31] And we know, I think, incontrovertibly, regardless of the claims of social scientists who are more relativist in their orientation, that human beings come into the world with a standard set of biological predispositions, emotions and motivations.

[32] And furthermore, I think we know that it's the fact of those shared emotions and motivations that allow us to communicate at all.

[33] And then imagine further that a consequence of that lengthy process of interpersonal negotiation is the emergence of a tremendously complicated game and not one that's arbitrary because the game has to have certain rules in order for it to be played at all.

[34] So for example, we know that even with rats, if rats, they like to engage in rough and tumble play and if you put two rats together juvenile rats, one rat almost always dominates the other.

[35] It only takes about a 10 % gain and weight on the part of one rat for it to be pretty much stably dominant and it's always the subordinate rat that introduces play or or asks for play but it turns out that even among rats if the dominant rat pins or or obtains victory over the subordinate rat more than 70 % of the time the subordinate rat will no longer play so then you can imagine likewise that if you're going to play a game with some other person whether it's a game of fantasy or the actual chance to engage in some cooperative real -world activity unless that person allows you a certain amount of space for the manifest of your own emotional and motivational needs.

[36] You're not going to play the game with them, right?

[37] You're going to look for another game.

[38] And that means that there's a certain set of difficult to describe constraints for all of you on games that you're willing to play before you'll look for another game.

[39] Well, and then you can start to conceive of revolutionary tendencies in that sense, right?

[40] Imagine the human society that's got so unstable that the vast majority of the citizens within that society are subjugated to starvation, and so the society never, no longer provides their basic needs, and constant tyranny.

[41] You could imagine as well that there's going to be an innate tendency among the members of that society to start hypothesizing about what alternatives might be possible, right?

[42] To start dreaming about alternative societies and then also to take action if the situation becomes too extreme.

[43] And I think this is part of the reason why you see stable mythological motifs across different cultures.

[44] It's not so much like Jung said that we have archetypes of what what might constitute social order deeply embedded in our unconscious.

[45] I think this situation is more externalized than that, in that what's biological is what we bring to the situation, our hopes and our desires, and the fact that we have hopes and desires.

[46] Now I think what happens with stories is something like this, is that as human societies increase in complexity and number, so they become bigger and bigger, and more and more people engage in the negotiating process, exchanging emotional and motivational information.

[47] The pattern that the society takes, if it's going to be stable across long periods of time, starts to become encoded in the stories.

[48] So imagine, you've got your emotions and your motivations, you make your case known, 10 ,000 other people do that over a thousand years, and structure starts to emerge that satisfies more or less all of these emotions and motivational states, and is also recognizable as a pattern.

[49] So then you could say, for example, considering a story like Moses and the imposition of the Ten Commandments on the ancient Hebrews prior to his imposition of those Ten Commandments and of course there were actually many more than ten Moses according to the mythological story Moses spent years literally years adjudicating conflict between the people that he was leading 18 hours a day they'd come to him with their various problems saying we have a dispute how should it be settled and he'd settle it well imagine doing that for ten years years, right, becoming an expert at evaluating what constitutes an appropriate solution to an emotional problem between two people.

[50] Imagine as well that as a consequence of doing that for such a long period of time, you start to become able to abstract out lawful regularities in the manner in which people have to interact in order for peace to be maintained.

[51] Imagine further that those could be codified in stories, but even more codified as law eventually when consciousness became capable of of grasping explicitly the nature of the interactions.

[52] So my point is a point very much like Nietzsche's, because Nietzsche said at the end of the 19th century that it's a mistake to presume that most of our philosophies are rational in nature.

[53] And I think that's a mistake that characterizes Western philosophical thinking, at least since the Enlightenment.

[54] It's a mistake to assume that there was a chaotic social state, upon which a rational order was imposed as a consequence of rational action.

[55] It's much more reasonable to presuppose that the order emerged naturally over lengthy periods of time and then was interpreted and codified and given structure in a secondary manner.

[56] And so what I'm trying to outline for you in large part is the processes by which that order comes to be.

[57] So you say first it's behavioral, emotional, motivational, people and even animals communicate in a way that makes their motivational and emotional needs known to one another.

[58] So even among wolves and chimpanzees and any kind of lower order, social animal you have the emergence of dominance hierarchies fundamentally which are stable solutions to the entire set of emotional and motivational problems that besets the group and no one would ever say that the emergence of a chimpanzee dominance hierarchy is a consequence of rational deliberation so then imagine chimpanzees get the power to watch what they're doing and to start to represent it and then imagine furthermore that that representation takes the form of stories and then laws and then you have some idea of about how human social order comes to be.

[59] And this is an exciting possibility for me because it offers the potential solution to one major question, which is, how is it that people should act?

[60] And because we're essentially rationalist in our presuppositions, we believe that there are rationalist solutions to that, but the solutions may be something that are much more akin to biological solutions.

[61] First, I want you to consider the following hypothesis.

[62] Okay, so we're going to make the presupposition, a couple of presuppositions that I don't think are unreasonable.

[63] First is that we are essentially animals that we've evolved in a Darwinian fashion.

[64] And second, that the consequence of that evolution, much of which was precognitive, right?

[65] We were around as creatures before we were capable of thinking in words say.

[66] Much of that evolutionary history has conditioned the manner in which we think.

[67] So we think more like biological entities than we think like computers, or we think more like biological entities than we think like rational machines.

[68] And of course we already know that rational machines cannot think very well except in very bounded environments because they don't have access to an embodied structure or to emotions and motivations.

[69] So then you might say, well, why is it that like in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths, our most fundamental representations of the world tend to take story form and not only do they take story form but they tend to utilize certain kinds of categories.

[70] Now I've showed you this diagram before.

[71] This represents what I think are the three cardinal categories of experience.

[72] So there's the great mother who's holding the world in her hand here and inside her subordinate in a sense is the great father.

[73] This is a Christian representation obviously and then the tragic son of course in the crowd here representing society is adoring the figure of the tragic hero here because they regard his mode of being as necessary to their own salvation so to speak their own proper mode of living okay so then you think well why these characters and I'd offer you this possibility is first of all every human being that's ever lived has lived in an environment characterized by the presence of these three entities right we have mothers we have fathers and we exist as a individuals and then you think well when you're a child and you begin to comprehend the world the outside world everything outside of the family is of course vague and ill -defined right non -existent in a sense and all there is for you to observe is the mother who for you really is the whole world and the father a secondary source of comfort and trouble perhaps and the fact of your own individuality and so you say well that's true from the perspective of individual development but Even if you go way, way back in history, maybe 500 ,000 years when our cognitive capacities were first starting to develop, and we were trying to figure out what the world was really like, what categories would we have at our disposal to start to modify and change in order to represent the outside world, and then you might think, you can only talk about what you don't know in terms that you know.

[74] And since for the child, the mother is the world, it isn't absurd to presume that for the human being the world is the mother first as a projection right as a as a an a priori cognitive schema the hypothesis being the natural world which of course does manifest itself in truth in the mother partakes in many ways of the same properties as the mother it's a working hypothesis just like you might presume if you date a new woman that she has aspects of your sister all things considered aspects of your mother given that they were also female you take what you know to represent what you don't know so we use our fundamental social cognitive categories initially to portray the world and the world's nature is portrayed in personified or metaphorical form and so then the question is what are the primary categories well we have three of them here but they're not the only three because this is all good this category system the benevolent mother, the benevolent father, and the hero.

[75] Well, we know the world is not only benevolent, it's also malevolent.

[76] Or at least we can say that because we're equipped with certain emotional possibilities and certain motivational possibilities, the probability that we will encounter despair and frustration and disappointment and anxiety is just as real as the possibility that we will encounter elation and hope and satisfaction.

[77] So for us, the world is bivalent, it takes with one hand and gives with the other, and that's true for the natural world which produces us and destroys us, as it is for the social world, which fosters our development and crushes our individuality, and as well for the individual who, in many regards, is as admirable a creature as you could hope ever to propose, and at the same time, someone who's capable of unbelievable depths of depravity.

[78] So a world that's not only divided into three fundamental categories, but each category divided into a structure that's essentially ambivalent in its fundamental element.

[79] And of course, that poses the central existential problem for human existence, doesn't it?

[80] I mean, we're faced with the vagaries of the natural world and what we don't understand, the vagaries of the social world, and it's often arbitering unreasonable demands on us, and the fact of our capacity for transcendence tied to our own vulnerability.

[81] And you could say perfectly reasonably that regardless of where you're situated in time and space, those are basically your problems.

[82] And your goal through life, your path through life is going to be characterized by the solutions you either come up with or don't come up with to that set of problems.

[83] Okay, so there's one more categorical element that complicates this picture.

[84] and I think in many ways it's the most difficult thing there is to grasp.

[85] So we'll take a shot at it first.

[86] And I've showed you this representation before.

[87] This is the dragon of chaos.

[88] And you can think of the dragon of chaos as a symbol of totality.

[89] And furthermore, you can think of it in relationship to this structure as the source of this structure or even as the source of all structure.

[90] So you see in the Sumerian creation myth, for example, the character of Tiamat, right?

[91] And I told you that the word Tiamat is associated with the later Hebrew word ta 'am, which means chaos.

[92] And Teom is the chaos that Yawa makes order out of, makes the world out of.

[93] So the idea lurking behind the Sumerian creation myth, and then later lurking behind the entire edifice of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for that matter, is that something that can be best represented by this figure is best.

[94] conceptualized as the ground of everything that exists.

[95] Now what in the world can that mean?

[96] Well it means something like this.

[97] Let's look at the concrete metaphorical representation.

[98] First of all you have a kind of totality here right you have a thing that can live by devouring itself so it has no need of anything outside of it.

[99] In fact there is nothing outside of it.

[100] It's a figure of absolute totality and it's characterized by a strange intermixture of metaphorical representations of matter because a snake is something that crawls on the ground and spirit because a winged serpent is something that can fly and therefore partakes of the metaphorical realm of heaven heaven and earth right totality yin and yang from the Taoist perspective that's the entire world and it's also something that's characterized by the capacity for transformation because a snake can shed its skin and be reborn so it's something that's constantly renewing itself despite It's absolutely archaic age.

[101] And it's also something that presents a terrible danger and tremendous opportunity because a dragon is something that will burn you if you get anywhere near it, but also hoards a treasure that's more valuable than anything else.

[102] Iliad has pointed out that in traditional classic creation myths, the Sumerian myth being one example, when the hero, whoever the hero is, first encounters the great dragon of chaos, he either runs away or is paralyzed by fright.

[103] The world in itself is a complex array of patterns and those patterns manifest themselves in space and they manifest themselves in time.

[104] And I think the best way to get a grip on what those patterns might be like is to think of them in terms of music.

[105] And I think that's what music represents.

[106] Music is this complex, three -dimensional structure full of interwoven patterns of different dimensions and length that expends itself over time.

[107] And if you listen to a piece of music, you can concentrate on one instrument or another, or you can concentrate on a phrase, or you can concentrate on the entire melody or the voice, you can parse out different elements from the complex background.

[108] And that's especially the case with very sophisticated orchestral music, right, which is susceptible to multiple reinterpretations and multiple encounters because of its complexity.

[109] And this is to say only that what you look at is far more complicated than what you see, or to say alternatively that there's more information in anything you perceive than you could ever get complete access to.

[110] And that's partly because, it's partly because your perceptual systems delude you.

[111] So we think you look with your eyes or with your other senses, but that's only true when you're looking at what you already know what to look at, right?

[112] when you've already built perceptual machinery that enables you to detect a particular object.

[113] But when you're looking at what you don't know what to look at, the way you look is by getting nervous, right?

[114] It's not precisely a perceptual function.

[115] It's something much more deeper and primordial than that, and it's more like, oh no, something that I cannot categorize either perceptually or cognitively, something that I do not know how to respond to, has just occurred.

[116] And the first categorization is this, that's it.

[117] There's nothing under that.

[118] It's merely fear plus heightened attention.

[119] And that prepares the ground for constructing a more detailed representation.

[120] But that first encounter, that's the encounter with the dragon of chaos.

[121] So then you take this figure, the source of all things, the Tao in some ways.

[122] and you say well how does it manifest itself and the answer to that is something like this and we see this both in the in the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian myths that I described to you the first division of the great dragon of chaos or the primordial egg is always into two subordinate elements the great father and the great mother why is that Well, it's illustrative of a fundamental, of the fundamental binary nature of existence, I guess.

[123] Partly you could say, if you're a cognizant being, a defined, delimited being, what you perceive always has a binary structure.

[124] There's the aspect of you that's structured enough to allow the perceiving.

[125] That's what you know.

[126] That's the manner in which you're structured so that you can even formulate a perception.

[127] something a child builds up over time from the primordial aspects, say, of his visual system or his auditory system, learns to parse up the world by generating machinery that allows the complex patterns that make up the world to be turned into objects.

[128] So there's the thing, the structure that allows the perceiving, and then there's the thing that's being perceived or the thing behind that.

[129] This is a very complicated distinction.

[130] You'd say, well, what's the difference between the Dragon of Chaos, say, the representation of the cosmos as such and the great mother.

[131] And I would say it's something like this.

[132] The unknown that appears in relationship to a perceiver is different than the unknown as such.

[133] So I would say this for example, there are going to be things that surprise you that wouldn't surprise me and vice versa.

[134] And the things that would surprise you have to be construed in relationship to what you already know.

[135] Because you're only gonna to be surprised by things you don't know.

[136] And likewise for me, I'm only going to be surprised by things I don't know.

[137] But what we know is going to vary somewhat.

[138] So the unknown for you is going to be different than the unknown for me. And the great mother is a representation of the unknown for you or the unknown for me. Different for everyone in some sense because we're all going to be, we're all going to be stymied and stopped by different aspects of being.

[139] But the same as well in that when you encounter things you don't understand and you encounter things, you don't understand in many, many ways, you're going to react to those different things the same way.

[140] And I can give you a narrative illustration of this.

[141] King Arthur's Knights, they sit around the round table, they're all equals.

[142] That's why they sit around a round table, right?

[143] They have a king, the king determines their destinies like Marduk does, but they're still all equal.

[144] They determine they're going to go look for the Holy Grail, which is a symbol of redemption.

[145] So they're off to find the highest value, like Pinocchio wishing on a star, highest value.

[146] And they all enter the forest to begin their quest, but they each enter it at the place that appears darkest to each of them, right?

[147] So that means they all go in different directions, even though they're on the same quest, and theoretically they're inhabiting the same space.

[148] So it's only to say that every person has their demons, so to speak, and that those demons differ from person to person.

[149] And even though there are things you can say about the demons that are common across people.

[150] So we know, for example, from clinical work, from endless clinical work, that if you want to help someone, you identify, okay, what do you want to do?

[151] They need to know that, right?

[152] That's this.

[153] What do you want to do?

[154] Where do you want to go?

[155] What kind of structure do you want to impose on your world?

[156] And then you identify, okay, well, what things are stopping you?

[157] So then you look back at the Sumerian creation myth and you think, well, there's Apsu, right?

[158] God of the known, Tiamat's consort, right, culture, but there's also Marduk, and Marduk is the power, the spirit, the entity, representation of the Sumerian Savior, who goes out to confront this and to make the world.

[159] Well, that's what you teach people in behavior therapy.

[160] You teach them not so much that you don't teach them habituation.

[161] You don't teach them to get used to things that they're afraid of.

[162] You teach them that there's something within them that can respond to the things that they're afraid of.

[163] that's of as great a magnitude as the fears themselves.

[164] When a computer starts up, it has to boot -strap is what that means.

[165] And bootstraps itself by continuing to engage in more and more complex processes as it starts up.

[166] So it starts up with a simple process, and that triggers a more complex process, and that triggers a more complex process, and that way the computer boots itself into existence.

[167] Well, that's exactly what we did, except we did it over like three billion years, right?

[168] We started out as these unbelievably simple organisms that could pretty much do nothing at all except replicate and develop much more and more complex forms over this tremendously long period of evolutionary history.

[169] Right.

[170] So that's how we solved the problem that you can't know anything without knowing something and that you can't have knowledge without generating it.

[171] It's a little knowledge, a little more generation, a little knowledge, a little more generation, a little knowledge.

[172] this huge spiraling process that extends over vast amounts of time.

[173] Information encoded in your body, right, as part of your, as part of the nature of your being, and information encoded in your culture reflected inside you and acted out in the world.

[174] And as scientists, you know, with this 500 -year history of science behind us, we always believe that it's the material substrate of things that's the reality.

[175] But it is more complicated than that because even the material substrate that we consider as scientists isn't merely unformed stuff, right?

[176] It has structure, it's pattern, it's full of information, and there are physicists working now who believe that conceptualization of the ground of being, the material ground of being, as information is a more fruitful metaphor than conceptualization of the ground of being as unformed matter.

[177] It's not unformed, right?

[178] It's patterned and regular, informative, so that if you investigate it, it reveals order.

[179] That's not just a material structure.

[180] So if you go back to Democritus, right, the person who originated the atomic hypothesis, Democritus actually says two things, not one.

[181] He says, everything's made out of atoms, little bits of stuff.

[182] But the other thing he says is atoms array themselves in space, array themselves.

[183] And what that means is that the atomic structure of things is patterned, and that the pattern is just as real as the atoms themselves.

[184] It's the pattern that's the knowledge, right?

[185] It's a pattern that's the information.

[186] So what we encounter as conscious beings is this complexly patterned array, which we then turn into knowledge, usable knowledge.

[187] I said, well, how would this metaphorical representation work?

[188] And so the way I want you to look at this figure is like this.

[189] Imagine this as distant, right, as lurking in the background.

[190] So this is the ground of all being, manifesting itself as one primordial archetype or one standard mode of metaphorical representation.

[191] Why this figure?

[192] Well, this is complicated, I think.

[193] If you show men a picture of a beautiful woman with her eyes averted, while you're doing a brain scan mapping of their nucleus, accumbens.

[194] Nothing happens.

[195] Why is that relevant?

[196] Well, the nucleus accumbens is part of the underlying emotional circuitry that governs approach behavior and pleasure.

[197] And approach behavior and pleasure very tightly intertwined.

[198] If you show the same man a picture of a beautiful woman with her eyes locked on his, his nucleus accumbens will light up.

[199] Why is that?

[200] Well, it's partly because men are innately attuned to female beauty.

[201] Female beauty has a standard form.

[202] It's replicable cross -culturally.

[203] It constitutes the average human female form.

[204] But more than that, the gaze locking is an indication of shared attention.

[205] And it's also the indication of the initial establishment of a shared attentional space.

[206] And it's an invitation, and that invitation activates approach circuitarily, even if it's just a picture.

[207] So, and you can see this if you walk into any drugstore or any drugstore that sells magazines.

[208] What do you see?

[209] Well, in the men's magazines you see an infinite array of beautiful women.

[210] And in the female magazines, the women's magazines, you see an infinite array of beautiful women.

[211] Now, just exactly why is that?

[212] Well, there's something absolutely compelling about female beauty.

[213] And then you have to ask yourself, what the hell does compelling mean?

[214] Okay, so what compelling means is you're busily engaged in a goal -directed task, and something happens in your peripheral vision, so to speak.

[215] that attracts your attention.

[216] Now that attention is attracted by processes that are fundamentally unconscious, which means processes that occur before you can think.

[217] So you can imagine a loose collection of college -aged males having a conversation in a bar when someone beautiful walks by and one or more of them catch her out of the corner of their eyes.

[218] Orientation, right?

[219] Unconscious.

[220] Why?

[221] Because there's some something about that pattern form that grips attentional systems and directs observation towards it.

[222] So then you think, okay, human beings are really, really complicated pattern processes.

[223] And you think, well, partly what we're trying to get a handle on here is the nature of the world.

[224] And partly what we know already is that there are aspects of the world that you can't understand always.

[225] And then you think, well, people are trying to get a grip on the fact that there are parts of the world that you can't understand.

[226] so that there's this transcendent element of being that always escapes encapsulation.

[227] How would you represent it?

[228] Well, it's the transcendent element of things that always attracts your attention, implicitly, beyond your control.

[229] So a loud noise, or a scream, or the cry of a baby, or anything horrific, right, blood, broken bodies.

[230] These are stimuli that are so representative of trouble, that you can't help but attend to them.

[231] And then you can imagine that all the stimuli, so to speak, that you can't help but attend to can be amalgamated into representations of the transcendent aspect of reality.

[232] And that's what you see in this representation right here.

[233] So you see a weird intermingling of female sexuality, plus some very distinct genital symbolism why genital so imagine that that's a volvo opening why before we had any scientific knowledge at all let's go 10 ,000 years ago what the hell's inside a body well we knew that I guess a little bit from hunting right we knew the interior of a body what is it about the interior of a body that allows new forms to be generated how is it that mothers can give birth to children how is it that one form that's complex and attractive and mysterious can give rise to another form.

[234] Why is that useful knowledge from a representational perspective?

[235] Because there's some association between the feminine form from a metaphorical perspective and the capacity for nature to give rise to new forms.

[236] And then you see a representation of a typical monstrous form.

[237] That's Kelly, the Hindu goddess, the devourer.

[238] and in this representation.

[239] So she's like a more developed version of Tiamat.

[240] That's a good way of thinking about her.

[241] She's not so much unspeakable anymore.

[242] You could actually say a few things about Kelly.

[243] You could say, well, she's like a spider because she has eight legs and she weaves a web of fate.

[244] And you could say, well, her web is made out of fire because if you get too near to her, you'll burn up.

[245] And you could say she glares at you with eyes that are unblinking.

[246] and you could say she has a tongue like a tiger and you could say that she carries weapons of destruction and has a headdress of skulls and that her hair is on fire and you could say that she's giving birth to this guy as nature gives birth to human beings and is devouring him at the same time intestines first and then you could say well you can imagine that the first few people that made a representation like that shocked themselves quite badly right because this is a this is a representation of of fear itself in a sense but not exactly it's also a representation of those stimuli that if you're human are going to make you both afraid and compelled just like it's hard to look away from fire even if it's burning something down that you wanted to have around rats if you raise a rat to juvenile status and then waft in cat odor it will completely short circuit why well the rats never seen a cat so exactly what the hell is it responding to you think well you can say well it's not a condition stimulus right because the rats never encountered a cat there's something deep in the brain of that rat that knows something about cat odor it's never encountered a cat so exactly what is it perceiving well in some sense I think the notion that it's perceiving is wrong it isn't perceiving it's it's It's just going like this.

[247] That's the representation.

[248] Well, and with chimpanzees who are more complex, there are other stimuli that evoke exactly that kind of response.

[249] Chimps don't like snakes, dead or alive, plastic, rubber, doesn't matter.

[250] They don't like snakes.

[251] If you put one in their cage, they get as far away from the snake as they can as quickly as possible, and then they look at it.

[252] Because I suppose if you're a chimpanzee, even if you don't like snakes, it's a good idea to know where they are.

[253] Right?

[254] So it's simultaneously repelling.

[255] a snake plus attractive yeah well you better look at it and see where it's going to go chimpanzees don't like unconscious chimpanzees so if you knock a chimpanzee out with anesthetic and you bring the body of the chimpanzee back into the chimpanzee cage the chimps do exactly the same thing away from the body but they look at it they don't like masks made of chimpanzee faces well three -year -old kids don't like masks either there are these underlying perceptual primitives so to speak that likely active they lower limbic mechanisms in our brains that say to us, this is a place, suddenly, where something unexpected that you probably do not like or will not like is very, very likely to happen.

[256] So you can imagine that an environment characterized by unconscious bodies or blood or the presence of spiders or snakes, et cetera, might be a place where a primate such as yourself may encounter things that they don't know how to cope with.

[257] therefore afraid right same with fear of the dark and then you can imagine that the dark is populated with all of these monsters of the unknown and you get some notion of what's happening to children who are afraid of the dark why are they afraid of the dark because in the dark which is the place you don't know lurk things that could hurt a creature like you what things well we can't exactly say but if you give children exposure to books and to adult conversation and to television, soon those limbic structures that are populating the darkness with unnameable fear start to populate it up with skeletons and vampires and monsters and so forth and so on, as the representational structures that the brain is capable of generating say, well, fear -inducing things are like that.

[258] They're bloody, they're dangerous, they look like serpents, they look like insects, they lurk in the dark, they sneak up on you, et cetera, all mangled together into some sort of.

[259] of monstrous form.

[260] Now I want to read you a story.

[261] All right, so let me give you a little background of this story.

[262] This story popped into my head in one chunk like complete which I thought was kind of interesting but it was also a story that emerged in solution to a problem I'd been thinking about for a long time because I was dealing with this guy who didn't want to grow up.

[263] So he's caught in a kind of Peter Pan situation and Peter Pan, Pan means everything, hey, Pan, like pantheistic.

[264] Peter Pan is a child who won't grow up.

[265] Now he's magical.

[266] Well, okay, fine.

[267] Children live in a magical world, right?

[268] They're rife with possibility.

[269] He's magical.

[270] He doesn't want to grow up.

[271] So he lives in Neverland with the lost boys.

[272] Neverland doesn't really exist.

[273] And the lost boys are obviously boys who haven't managed to establish some mode of being.

[274] And he's in constant battle with Captain Hook and Captain Hook's a tyrant right a pirate a negative manifestation of the negative archetype of social order and Captain Hook is always fighting Peter Pan because Peter Pan represents childhood and vulnerability and he doesn't want to be vulnerable so they're locked in this sort of eternal battle and lots of people I think more commonly men but not necessarily get caught in this Peter Pan problem.

[275] So I was dealing with a person who was caught in this situation, didn't want to grow up, wouldn't sacrifice childhood.

[276] And so this story popped into my head.

[277] It's called cockadoodle do.

[278] Once upon a time there was a man who had a long, hard journey ahead of him.

[279] He was trudging along the way over boulders and through brushes when he saw a little shiny gnome with big white teeth in a black toupee sitting by the side of the road.

[280] He was drumming on a log with two white bones and humming oddly to himself.

[281] The little gnome said, John, why work so hard?

[282] Why walk so fast?

[283] Who knows if you'll ever get there anyway?

[284] Come over here.

[285] I have something to show you.

[286] So John walked off the road.

[287] He was sick of walking anyway because people kept throwing sticks and stones at him.

[288] Little gnome said, I have a shiny red jewel that I would like to sell you.

[289] Cheap.

[290] Here it is.

[291] And from beneath his cloak, he pulled the biggest ruby that the man had ever seen it must have weighed a hundred pounds and it's shone like the sun the gnome said do you like it it's an enchanted stone what will you offer me for it and the man said I don't have much much money but I'll give you everything I have the gnome looked displeased so John added I could pay some more monthly so the gnome accepted fair enough by now pay later sounds good for me I'm all for the installment plan so the man gave the gnome all his money and promised to pay the rest later and the gnome walked back into the bush by the road clacking his teeth and giggling and twitching the more the man thought about this ruby and the great deal he got the happier he became he started back on the road with a light heart but soon discovered that he couldn't make much progress because a hundred pounds was a lot to carry he said to himself why continue anyways I have what I want I'll just stand here holding my Ruby and when people walk by they can see how well I've already done so he stopped a little while one of his little while later one of his friends came along saw him standing there his friend said John why do you come along with me I've just opened a new business and I could really use some help come along quick it will be opening soon John thought that sounded good but his friend was in a hurry besides couldn't he see the ruby how could he speed along beside him where would he put his jewel so he said thanks but I have to take care of my jewel maybe I'll see you later his friend looked at him like he was crazy but he was trying to get somewhere quick so he just shrugged a bit and said okay John see you later then he sped on down the road a little while later another friend came by and he said John nice to see you I'm going back to school there are lots of wonderful things to learn great things to do the world is full of unsolved problems I could use some company.

[292] Would you like to come along?

[293] John thought that sounded pretty good, but this friend too looked like he was in a hurry.

[294] Besides standing beside the road holding the jewel was tiring and he needed all the energy he had for that.

[295] So he said to his friend, thanks, but I have to take care of my jewel.

[296] Isn't it beautiful?

[297] Maybe I'll see you later.

[298] His friend looked at him like he was crazy, but he was trying to get somewhere quick.

[299] So he just shrugged and said, hope everything goes all right with you.

[300] See you later.

[301] Many friends came and went and the years went by.

[302] the jewel got heavier and heavier but the man got more and more attached to it the only thing was nobody seemed to notice how beautiful it was people would rush by and talk about their plans and nobody had a ruby as big and nobody seemed likely to get a ruby as big and you'd think that someone might have had said something like at least nice ruby John sure wish I had one like that but it never happened then one day someone knew came down the road he was bent over and he was thin and his hair was gray although he didn't look that old he was carrying a big dirty rock carefully in his arms and he wasn't making much progress the strange figure approached and glanced up at John then he grinned and said why are you standing there so stupidly with a big ugly rock in your tired old hands you look pretty daft I bet you wish you had a big ruby like the one I am carrying and John thought this poor man is deluded he's carrying a rock it is I who have the ruby so he said excuse me sir but you are sadly mistaken and I'm the one with the jewel.

[303] I met a little gnome by the side of the road, and he sold it to me. I'm still paying for it, although not so very much.

[304] You are carrying a rock.

[305] The tired stranger looked annoyed.

[306] He said, I don't know what game you're playing, Mr. You have a rock.

[307] I have a jewel.

[308] The little gnome you described sold it to me, and he said it was the only one.

[309] I've been carrying it for 20 years, and I'll never let it go.

[310] And John said, but I've been carrying mine for 20 years too.

[311] it can't be just a rock rock or jewel on and on they argued suddenly out stepped the little gnome as if he'd never left only this time he wasn't so little he was bigger and redder and menacing and his laugh sounded like the rattling of chains quit arguing you too i've never seen a sight quite so pathetic you're carrying rocks both of you and if you would have ever had the sense to put them down for a second or two you would have seen that oh well at least you were dillow I played a mean trick.

[312] I feel bad.

[313] So I'm gonna give you what you really deserve.

[314] Do you want what you really deserve?

[315] And John and the Thin Stranger nodded eagerly.

[316] Finally they thought you haven't seen anything yet.

[317] Throw down your rocks.

[318] So John and the thin stranger obeyed.

[319] Each rock split down the middle when it hit the ground outflowed a river of ravenous white worms which rushed towards the men and devoured them whole.

[320] while they thrashed about and screamed soon nothing was left except a leg bone from each the little gnome picked them up and walked off the road he sat down by a hollow log and started to drum he drummed and he waited and he hummed an odd little tune a picture of food feeds the whole hungry clan the image of good makes the whole healthy man why walk for miles Why do the work?

[321] Just smile the smile.

[322] Success, after all, is a quirk.

[323] Life isn't real.

[324] That's the message I give.

[325] It's easy that way.

[326] Plus, who wants to live?

[327] So needless to say, the guy that I was telling this story to, you'd never listened to it, and things really didn't go well for him for a long, long time.

[328] And they really didn't go well for him until he was willing to give up some of the things he was carrying along.

[329] so he had acquired for example a number of things that he couldn't afford and the fact that he was carrying them right paying for them month after month meant he couldn't afford to get an education was perfectly willing to sacrifice the possibility of getting an education for the image of success rather than the reverse right and he was completely irritated at the world because he had all these trappings of success which no one he admired also admired and he absolutely wasn't getting getting anywhere.

[330] And he thought that was tremendously unfair.

[331] But the truth of the matter was that had he put down what he was carrying for even a moment, then he would have been able to get to where he wanted to go.

[332] And that's a motif that succinctly and dramatically describes the necessity for sacrifice.

[333] One of the things you see in psychotherapy very, very commonly is that the person who's coming for help does the same damn thing over and over and over and over and every time they do it it has the same consequence bad so they end up with the same kind of they end up in the same kind of relationship right starts out well then the person turns against them and starts to abuse them they get abused repeatedly then it ends then they meet someone else and the cycle continues it doesn't seem to matter who they're out with either they pick a person like this or they turn the person into someone like that they lose jobs the same way or their educational hopes fail the same way why well the person thinks man the structure of the world is so unfair everyone else seems to be getting along just fine but me i get hit in the head over and over exactly the same way and then you think well what is the structure of the world exactly and then you remember well you know there's the things you don't understand and there's the things you do understand and the things you do understand structure you and protect you but you know sometimes the things you do understand aren't the right things right you're valuing something you're carrying something that's an impediment to your further progress and it's frequently the case that it's the kind of impediment that under no conditions do you want to give up because there's something about you that says like john says about the ruby look it's a ruby who the hell cares if it weighs a hundred pounds and i have to stand by the road right I still got the ruby, and all you'd ever have to do is put the damn thing down and wander off, and everything would be just fine, but you won't do it.

[334] Why?

[335] Because you don't want to give up what you know.

[336] Because you don't want to sacrifice anything.

[337] Well, long before people had any psychological acumen or any psychological knowledge, they'd already figured out that if you were going to take on a figure like this and expect to get absolutely anywhere with her, right, the horrors of the world, You bloody well better be willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to keep you going along your path, right?

[338] Unfortunately, the things that you have to sacrifice are often those things that you're most particularly compelled by or gripped by or value the things that you want to give up least, which is why in archaic societies where all this is dramatized, people sacrifice an animal that they value particularly.

[339] or earlier than that even, a child that they value particularly, right, dramatically portraying the idea of sacrifice, you have to give something up if you want to make an inroad on what she represents.

[340] And so then you say the purpose of sacrifice is to turn the terrible aspect of the world into the benevolent aspect of the world, and this is Diana, not a Hindu goddess, but a Greek or Roman goddess, the same idea applies.

[341] In the Hindu case, if you make the appropriate sacrifices, then the terrible aspect of the world turns into the benevolent aspect of the world.

[342] And it is the case that even empirical studies of success indicate that intelligence is a handy thing to have, but hard work and dedication is a handy thing to have too.

[343] And what that means is that you're constantly willing to sacrifice the impulsive pleasure of the present for the hopes of payback in the future.

[344] For example, you sacrifice immediate gratification to obtain an appropriate social role, to take your place in society.

[345] It's definitely a sacrifice, right?

[346] Because you put off pleasures in the moment to obtain long -term stability and productivity to turn the world into this.

[347] And so then you can say, this is how the world falls apart as it's explored, right?

[348] So first of all, there's the thing that you can't.

[349] even name that only fills you with dread, but also with the sense of possibility.

[350] And that manifests itself in your life as something concrete that you don't know, promising and threatening.

[351] And that divides itself up into those aspects of the world that you value and admire and that hold promise for you and those aspects of the world that don't.

[352] And that's a differentiation as a consequence of exploration.

[353] It's not a differentiation of the world into objects, though.

[354] It's a differentiation of the world into categories of emotion, those things that are good for you, those things that are bad for you, and the source that they're derived from.

[355] That's the background of the world.

[356] We'll stop there.

[357] We've had written history for 5 ,000 years, right?

[358] People have been generally literate for less than 500 years.

[359] But we've had culture for 150 ,000 years.

[360] identifiable culture for at least 25 ,000.

[361] So the vast period of our inculturation was pre -literate inculturation before we could write down the rules and transmit them.

[362] How were they transmitted assuming we had culture?

[363] Well, there's a variety of mechanisms.

[364] We have a tendency to see elements of the world in personified form because most of the interrelationships we have with the world are actually social or interpersonal relationships.

[365] So that's basically how our brain is structured and And as we evolved, we developed the capacity to extend our cognitive ability beyond the merely social to take in the world as such.

[366] But the categories that we used to do that were still fundamentally social.

[367] Now the reason the unknown per se is symbolized as feminine is because the critical feature of the feminine, and I don't mean the female individual, I mean the feminine as a category, is its capacity to generate new forms.

[368] and the unknown as such is logically and appropriately symbolized by the feminine because it's the bringer forth of all things, which is to say that the background of existence, the unknowable background of existence is the thing that generates everything.

[369] Paired with that, of course, according to the schema that we've been working with, is the archetype of the great father.

[370] And the archetype of the great father is the archetype of tradition fundamentally, the great weight of the past, because as you incorporate your past, the past of your culture, through the intermediation of your parents, you learn routines and rituals for structuring the unknown.

[371] Now, those routines and rituals are patterns of action that you use in the world as such, and also complex patterns of action that you use to structure your own interpretations and your own motor output and your own conceptualizations when you're dealing with other people.

[372] and so that would be the absorption most fundamentally of your cultural rules and the fact of those cultural rules and their incarnation in you essentially keeps chaos at bay which means if two of you share the same cultural structure assuming you're playing the same game so to speak that means that you can each predict each other's responses which is very very useful because that way you you can be sure that you can trust the other person you can more or less infer their goals because after all their value structure of similar to yours.

[373] And if you can infer their goals, that means you can embody their emotions.

[374] So that's the benevolent aspect of tradition, right?

[375] The part that protects and shelters you and structures the nature of your being in the face of existential terror and doubt, so to speak.

[376] But there's also an aspect of tradition that's terrible, tyrannical.

[377] It's the part that marches young men off to war, say, in defense of the structures that it's protecting, it's the part that says when you're a teenager, wear this and not this.

[378] or you'll be the target of mockery for all your peers.

[379] It's the part of the structure that crushes the creative life out of you because the tyrannical aspect of social order doesn't want your creative life, so to speak.

[380] What it wants is your obedience because your obedience is what makes the machine run smooth.

[381] And so you're always in an ambivalent relationship with regards to security, to authority.

[382] On the one hand, it provides you shelter and what you need and allows you to gain the benefits of literally thousands and thousands of years of cultural evolution.

[383] On the other hand, it's the thing that makes you obey or face the painful consequences thereof, which can range from mere social exclusion and consequent re -exposure to the unknown, to truly oppressive practices designed to make you be exactly like everyone else or else.

[384] And so you could say, most particularly, again, that that's a standard existential problem.

[385] It's a problem that's faced by people in every place and in every culture, balancing the appropriate attitude towards culture.

[386] So the most fundamental representation of culture can be portrayed essentially in this manner, I think.

[387] And what you see here is the Dragon of Chaos, of course, lurking in the background.

[388] and what that means is that all forms come from the formless, and that the Father itself is a primary form.

[389] A representation of God the Father, and God the Father in the Christian Trinity is the representation of the positive and the security -inducing and the tyrannical aspect of social order, right?

[390] God has a set of rules for you.

[391] You bloody well better listen to those rules, if you don't, all hell's going to break loose.

[392] And, you know, that's a pretty reasonable summary of how things work, unfortunately.

[393] So on the one hand God offers security, on the other hand he offers tyranny and in total that basically represents order.

[394] So you can see this representation is quite useful.

[395] It shows God standing over this city which of course is a city committed to him fundamentally.

[396] So it operates under the moral principles that he represents and behind him is a representation of the sun, which is partly a representation of the source of all life, partly a representation of the source of all life, of consciousness and illumination, right, because you're conscious during the day, and partly a halo representing the sort of transcendent nature of the social order that structures existence.

[397] So it's a primary phenomenon and it's only to say that in all human experience there's a cultural aspect and a natural aspect and the funny thing is the cultural aspect in some ways is as natural is the natural aspect, right?

[398] Because we're social beings, we can't exist without society, society structures, our very nature, who are beneficiaries and victims.

[399] And so then, just as the case, just as is the case with the feminine, there's two aspects that can be represented metaphorically with regards to the masculine.

[400] You can say, well, the secure aspect of social order is the wise king, and you can see a medieval representation of him here, sitting on his throne calmly in a relatively open posture, That means he's ready to listen to supplicants, to people who are coming to talk to him.

[401] He's holding an orb with a cross on top of it, which means essentially that he's in control of the world, and that the world is subordinated to something else that's represented by the cross, a wise and just ruler.

[402] And then his mirror image here is the son devouring king, a very common mythological theme, the father who wants to destroy his son.

[403] And there's shades of the Oedipal conflict in that, of course, if you remember your Freud.

[404] But basically what it means is this, is that despite the fact that every human being is an offspring of culture, by nature, every human being is also in the terrible position of facing the fact that their very individuality is likely to be crushed out of them during the socialization process.

[405] And in a sense, that's really not avoidable.

[406] I mean, if you're subject to really tyrannical socialization, it's obviously a much more cardinal problem, right?

[407] But even if you're subject to socialization under normal circumstances, you are still what you are rather than the manifold things that you could have otherwise been.

[408] And just to give you some sense of how dramatic a process this really is, one of the things you should know is that you actually die into your brain.

[409] So one of the things you might wonder is, why is it the death evolved?

[410] It doesn't really make that much sense from a Darwinian perspective, right?

[411] Because you'd make the presupposition that if you could just stick around and father children, say, for 250 years, you'd be doing a lot better job than the poor sap who only lived to be 30.

[412] So why is it that you only live to be 70 and really your, you know, your period of fertility is over, say, by the time you're 40?

[413] Why would that be?

[414] What's the utility of death?

[415] And then you remember, well, the environment's always changing, right, in this chaotic manner that's represented by the great mother.

[416] Can you change with it?

[417] And the answer to that is yes, but only to a certain point, which is why as people age, they tend to become more and more alienated from the current culture, right?

[418] They've adopted their position of being, say, which is more or less fixed by the time they're 25 or so, once their prefrontal cortex matures, and then after that the world gets away from them.

[419] They don't have enough biological resources left to constantly undergo new revolutionary neurological processes.

[420] And part of the reason is this, you have more neural connections in your brain when you're first born than you do for the rest of your life, any other time in your life.

[421] And as you learn when you're an infant, and as you learn, say, over the first two years, what happens is that there's a plenitude of circuits and they die off, leaving only those circuits that have a function.

[422] And you think about that as kind of a quasi -Darwinian process.

[423] And so what that means is that as you mature and become fixed in your form, you know, to adopt your personality, whatever it becomes, what's happening is that the excess possibility in some sense is being demolished by experience.

[424] So the tyrannical aspect of inculturation is something that's real, because it makes you, in large part, what you are.

[425] And you have to understand as well that that's necessary because it's better to be something.

[426] In the final analysis, it's better to be something than to be nothing.

[427] But, you know, we still have residual dreams like those expressed by Peter Panse, who's the boy that never wants to grow up because he doesn't want to attain any final and fixed form.

[428] And it's interesting because in one respect, as you progress through your life, you're climbing, assuming things are going well, you're climbing to ever new heights.

[429] But on the other hand, the direction that you're going in constantly narrows as you age.

[430] So there's a real trade -off there and I think the existential angst that's caused as a consequence of that trade -off is often real.

[431] And I also think that adolescents and early adults feel this most intently, which is part of the reason why they tend to rebel against social structures in general, you know, whether it's the military -industrial complex or the corporate world or globalization or what have you, is that you have these large structures that represent the tyrannical aspect of social being.

[432] and it's no wonder that the fact of those structures engenders rebellion it should on the other hand it's also no wonder that structures like that exist because if they didn't exist then people would have no way of interrelating their their social being and we would revert back to the sort of hobzian state of war where everybody's arms are around everybody else's throat that doesn't mean the payoff is always good So, for the Freudians, of course, had a real field day with this and were most fundamentally concerned by it.

[433] Now, part of the reason that Freudian psychology has had such an immense impact on Western and world cultures because Freud came along just when classical Judeo -Christian mythological structures were on a serious decline in the West, and Freud stepped in with a secularized mythological version of reality, which said, well, there's nature, and that's the is.

[434] That's the wild and untamed impulses that spring up from the animal mind.

[435] And there's the ego, which is the individual, who's in many ways a pawn of these id -like forces.

[436] And then on top of the ego, crushing it down into the id, so to speak, is the super ego, which is the internal and external embodiment of social order and morality.

[437] So you can see the mythological substructure underlying Freud.

[438] Freud said, well, the ego is always being shaped by the superego, and it's always compulsion.

[439] It's don't, don't, it's always no, it's like Old Testament morality, right, in the incarnation of the Ten Commandments.

[440] Whatever you want to do, if it feels good, the probability is high that it's immoral from the perspective of the social world.

[441] You can really see this with children, you know, it's really remarkable to watch them because my sense is, and I don't think this is just because I'm a particularly tyrannical father, is that children often get in more trouble for having fun than they do for any other reason, because their capacity for unbridled enjoyment is so unbridled that it actually poses a threat to orderly structure.

[442] So, you know, if a child really gets in an active mood and is playing a very active game, I mean, especially if they're somewhere between, say, three and five, they can tear your house to shreds and no time flat and you're always falling them around like, no, no, no, quiet down, don't do that.

[443] And, you know, they're smiling away and they're happier than any adult you're ever going to see in your entire life and you're doing everything you can to push them down so that they can sit.

[444] quietly and read a book or whatever it is you think they should be doing and that's really nasty and horrible but by the same token it's absolutely necessary because if they don't learn to bring their impulses even their impulses their ludic impulses right their impulses to play under control then nobody else can stand them and if they don't get access to the resources that are in the social world man they have one dismal life laid out in front of them so anyway so that's an early description of the genesis of the conflict say between the ego and the superego and I just wanted to point that out because it's not just sex and aggression that gets regulated, right?

[445] I mean, we can understand why that might happen, but it's also playfulness and creativity and spontaneity and all the things that we associated with the joy of being that the terrible, tyrannical social structure puts a clamp on.

[446] So Jack Panksap, for example, has recently demonstrated that children, boys, because it's usually boys, who have attention deficit disorder, which is generally diagnosed in the schoolroom, do much better if they're placed on methyl, methamphetate, which is a kind of amphetamine fundamentally.

[447] But normal kids do better on amphetamines too, by the way.

[448] They can focus more and they can pay attention more.

[449] Mostly what methamphetate does is suppress play.

[450] So Panksep's notion is that, well, what's happening with these ADHD kids, hyperactive kids is they're more playful, more boisterously playful, which tends to be a masculine attribute in the juvenile forms of many mammals, they're boisterously playful, give them little methamphetate that shuts down their play behavior and they can sit down and focus you know and well you can understand how even if you might think that's necessary because apparently many people do you can also still understand that by the same token that probably represents some kind of loss right because we like to see kids play and it's good for them besides so anyways Freud says the ego pops up it's all thrilled to death with the world the super ego comes along and shuts it down and that's a fate that befalls all of us And not only that, because Freud's a pretty wise man, all things consider.

[451] He doesn't say that's all to the bad.

[452] He says that's the price we pay for social being.

[453] And fair enough.

[454] You see this happening in children all the time where part of what they do as they mature is to adopt roles.

[455] So they'll play being a father or being a mother, say.

[456] And what they're doing is pulling in what they see as the worldview that characterizes parenthood, embodying the father, playing out the role and trying to organize their motivation.

[457] structures within the observed framework say that the father provides and that's an interjection of social wisdom if you can imagine that the role of father say as a structure like one structure would be well if you're a father and you're around to model then you have to be taken care of the children or at least you have to be there often enough so that you can be a target of modeling and so you can imagine that the spirit of the father that's modeled at least in the optimal circumstances is one that deals out rules and order but that also provides nurturing care and support and that's a kind of story we know fathers who aren't like that and maybe we know fathers who are too much like that but all things considered on the average you have a father role and children attempt to interject that and that's part of the way that they learn to modulate their own motivational resources so for example if the child observes the father and the mother sharing which means taking each others motivational states into account, then they can act out the game of sharing with a doll, say, representing a child.

[458] And what they're doing is trying to imagine what it's like inside that doll's head, treating it like a person, by embodying the potential motivations and emotional states of that pretend object in their own body, and then by trying to organize a higher order structure, which would be like the tea party where tea is shared, a higher order structure where you have a turn, because you want a turn because you're thirsty like me, and then I have a turn, and we both get what we want, and we can exchange information.

[459] Well, that's a little bit more optimistic representation of the tyranny of social order than pure compulsion, right?

[460] Because what it suggests is there's a way that you can organize the way you are, genuinely, and the way I am, genuinely, so that we both are genuine, yet we get something more than we would get if we were just by ourselves.

[461] and so you think that with kids they like to play by themselves but by the time they're about three and a half or four boy like they have a hunger for other children and they'll do anything in order to go out and play with other kids so you can say to them well if you if you take all the toys off your bed i'll go and let you play with your friend and like the toys are off there in two -tenths of a second and they're out the door because they have this primary need to go out and experiment with the social world and in large way in large part that's how they build the complex higher order more abstract structures that enable them to regulate their motivation states and their emotional states without just no it's a more sophisticated way of doing it right it's better to play a game with someone then to engage in a battle of wills with them because then there's no compulsion there's just mutual participation and and that's critical because one of the things that the notion of the tyranny of the social order brings up as a question is all right all right so you have to take part in society right you have to take your part in the social world yet the social world wants its pound of flesh or it's 60 pounds of flesh depending on where you live on the one so you're damned if you do so to speak and you're damned if you don't what do you do as a consequence of facing that challenge and so you remember with the great mother with chaos and the unknown the way you meet the challenge is to understand that the things you don't understand are dangerous and frightening and that if you encounter them, they can hurt you and that this is real, but you don't run away all the same, right?

[462] If you're trying to get somewhere and things you don't understand happen, you can't shut yourself down, you have to explore cautiously and try to gain new knowledge.

[463] Well, how do you organize your social being?

[464] Well, let's make the presupposition that you've got half a dozen or so fundamental motivational states, right?

[465] So, what they are is your subjugation to a world of a priori deities, right?

[466] You see in children, rage, fear, hunger, anger, affiliation, love, the capacity to play, all value sets which have their own goal -like behavioral patterns, their own worldview, their own way of manifesting themselves.

[467] All those are innate, right?

[468] they're all dependent on pre -wired neural architectural systems they have to unfold in experience but they're there okay and so let's say that's what you come into the world with and that's what you come into the world with and that's what you come into the world with but then the fact that you're in the world poses a more complex problem which is well yeah you've got one motivational state happening you're angry but then you've got another one you have to worry about which is you'd like to be affiliated with someone like your sibling so you got a real conflict with your sibling it's like you really hate them but you really like them too and you want to play with them so what do you do about that well you'd say a behaviorly disregulated child who isn't well socialized say they're impulsive they don't they don't act as if they take the future into account so they heavily future discount they're impulsive what does that mean if you watch a child have a temper tantrum which around two they're really prone to it's like it's a phenomena you know it's like a tornado on a real small scale The child's just flipped out.

[469] If you saw an adult do that, you'd run away screaming, right?

[470] And they're completely dominated by this emotional state.

[471] And my sense, watching that has always been to kind of try to help the kid not have that happen to them because it looks like a terrible catastrophe for their emerging ego, right?

[472] I mean, they're trying to get their world together and something frustrates them and, whomp, up come these like amygdellic projections that are governing anger, hypothalamic even more primitive.

[473] and just like bowl them over and then they're on the floor and they're holding their breath and they're turning blue and they're having a fit and then it takes them like 15 minutes to recover so they have to take themselves into account as total as complete beings and that's the emergence of a higher order morality but it's more complicated than that because not only do they have the problem of themselves which is a bad enough problem but then they have the problem of the other person So what's the proper response of the individual given that he or she is threatened by the natural world and the unknown on the left hand and threatened by the social order and its tyranny on the right hand, but also dependent on the natural world and chaos for all good things and all new information and dependent on the social order for their very mode of being, right?

[474] Caught between four paradoxes all at the same time.

[475] How can that root be properly negotiated?

[476] Well, then you can look at hero mythology and the most common plot, and I would say in some ways, the only plot, although there are variations of this that are endless, romantic variations or adventure story variations or variations of failed heroic endeavor, still the only plot goes something like this.

[477] There's a current state of being.

[478] Now that can be represented by a psychological state.

[479] Your current state.

[480] Your current state.

[481] personality it can be represented by your family it can be represented by your extended social group your city your town your country your ecosystem your your in science fiction frequently the entire global community right a structure is threatened by what well you name it if it's dangerous it can threaten the structure that can be one of various forms of barbarian right any person from another culture, an alien in science fiction, a terrible monster that lives in the deep that had been dominated and oppressed before, but has come back for more, an agent of horror.

[482] That's a common theme in modern horror movies, right?

[483] An object that moves, the ghosts in the basement because the dead were improperly buried, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[484] Anything uncanny, anything fear -inspiring, anything reptilian, anything that smothers or, it's a little bit of entrances or seduces or you name it if it's change or some metaphoric representation of anything that can change then it's this the dragon of chaos and that's the thing that always threatens the stable state in its multiple potential manifest forms and what does that mean it means the apocalypse is always happening right the end of the world is always before us which is why you see apocalyptic imagery for example throughout the New Testament Christ says the world is coming to an end and people are waiting around for it to happen but what they don't precisely understand is that the world is always coming to an end always and that's because what you think now is not good enough for the next second right you have to change because change is coming and what change means is you have to let go of what you know that's the apocalypse and it's always on us the structure is three What do you do about that?

[485] Well, you can run, but you can't hide, right?

[486] That's the theory, and the reason for that is that even if you are unwilling to face the threat that's right in front of you, no matter where you run to, that threat's going to be there.

[487] So you see in the case of an agoraphobic woman who starts to run away from the shopping mall when she has heart palpitations that then she runs away from the subway and then she runs away from taxis and then buses and then other people.

[488] and then finally she's at home and there's nowhere to run but her heart's still palpitating and the fear of death is still on her and there's no place to go so hiding isn't much of a help or you can pretend that the chaotic thing isn't there and refused to change but all that does is make the threat bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger so just like simply put well say you only have a hundred dollars in the bank and you have a hundred and ten dollar telephone bill and you think well I I'd like that hundred dollars I'm not gonna pay that telephone bill.

[489] It's just a little threat, right?

[490] But then you don't pay it.

[491] In the next month it's a $125 telephone bill and then they slap a $50 charge on you and then they cut off your phone.

[492] So then you don't have a phone.

[493] Then you miss a job appointment and that's not so good and then it's $250 to pay your phone bill and another $200 to get it hooked back up.

[494] Then your credit record goes all to hell because you haven't paid any of that.

[495] Then you can't buy a house when you're 25.

[496] And you think, kind of weird, eh?

[497] Little bitty chaos turns into a great big monster and partly that's because everything that looks separate from everything else isn't it just looks that way and when you ignore anything especially if it's impeding your progress you know it's impeding your progress you know you have to deal with it step away from it and see what its true nature really is so you can hide and you can not change or you can pretend that the threat doesn't exist but in the final analysis that just stores up the catastrophe for later.

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

[499] This was an amalgamation of episodes 4 to 6 from Maps of Meaning recorded by TV Ontario.

[500] 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.

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

[502] Thank you.