140. Maps of Meaning 12: Final - The Divinity of the Individual

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[15] I started the beginning of the class three months ago talking to you about what the problem was that I was trying to address.

[16] And the fundamental problem, was the problem of belief systems and the issue is was what precisely constitutes a belief system and then a secondary question was why are people so inclined to even engage in conflict to maintain and expand their belief systems and then maybe a sub -question of that and is there an alternative to conflict with regards to belief systems.

[17] And then the last issue was something like, well, is there a way of judging the relative quality of belief systems?

[18] And so those are all very, very complicated questions.

[19] I mean, the first one is something like, how is it possible to understand the structures by which we orient ourselves in the world?

[20] The second one is something like, what's the psychological significance precisely of those systems what role does it play in psychological health and maybe also in social health the next one is can you make a non -relativistic case when you assess an array of different value systems and then link to that is is it possible to hierarchically organize value systems in a manner that's justifiable so that something can be reasonably considered in a superior or subordinate position.

[21] Now the last question drew my attention because of the implications of the first set and the last question drew my attention because I was trying to sort out the metaphysics in some sense of the Cold War.

[22] The question was, was this just a battleground, between two hypothetically equally appropriate belief systems, which could be a moral relativistic perspective, right?

[23] It's belief systems are arbitrary.

[24] And so combat between them is in some sense inevitable, and even more to the point, there isn't any other way around the discontinuity in some sense other than combat or subordination, because there's no way of adjudicating a victor because there's no such thing as victory if there's no way of ranking value systems.

[25] It's arbitrary.

[26] And it's a frightening prospect because it means that if you have a value system and I have a value system and they're different, I mean, we can talk or you can subordinate yourself or I could do the same, but there's also no reason why we shouldn't just engage in flat -out conflict.

[27] Now, it's complicated in the modern world, obviously by the fact that conflict can become so untrammeled that it risks destroying everything and that doesn't seem necessarily to be in anyone's best interest unless your interest happens to be in destroying everything and certainly there are no shortage of people whose interests tilt in that direction all right so the first question was well what does it mean to have a belief system and that's a very complicated problem and I think it's a subset of the question of being maybe you can break the question of being into two domains which we've done in this class and you could say well you can assess being from the perspective of what exists and then you can assess being from the perspective of how you ought to act so it's like you walk into a room and you can describe the furniture or you can determine how you're going to conduct yourself in the room.

[28] Maybe it's the difference between a play and the stage setting for a play.

[29] Now, the modernist perspective, roughly speaking, is that the fundamental reality is to be found in the description of the furniture, so to speak, in the description of what is.

[30] That's the scientific process.

[31] And the scientific process seems to involve the stripping off of the subjective from perception and to some degree from action, and the extraction of the commonalities across perception as a means of delineating the nature of reality.

[32] Now, obviously, that's a very powerful process, and it has many advantages, but exactly what it is that science is doing is not precisely clear.

[33] One perspective might be is that we are genuinely discovering the nature of objective reality and perhaps even the nature of reality itself.

[34] But there are some problems with that perspective.

[35] One of them being that the scientific process seems to strip the subjective from the phenomena.

[36] It does that technically, right?

[37] I mean, you have a hypothesis about what something is, and you have a hypothesis about what something is, and you have a hypothesis about what something is, and we undertake a number of procedures to assess what the fundamental phenomena is, and then we look across our perceptual sets, and we extract out the commonalities, and we dispense with everything that is superfluous, everything that's merely subjective.

[38] So what you feel about the chair is not relevant to the objective existence of the chair.

[39] And so it eradicates subjectivity, and that's a very useful process, because it does seem to enable us to grasp reality in a fundamental sense more profoundly, but it leaves the subjective behind, and maybe that's a problem.

[40] It should be working.

[41] Okay.

[42] Okay.

[43] Thank you.

[44] I would have.

[45] I just didn't want to.

[46] All right.

[47] Appreciate it.

[48] So then the issue might be, well, is something irretrievably lost if you dispense with this objective and also how deep a hole do you dig when you dispense with this objective?

[49] And I think that that's intrinsically associated with the problem of the relationship between is and ought, because that's an old philosophical conundrum, I think first put forth by David Hume, who made the claim that no matter how much you know about something from an empirical perspective, you cannot use that as an unerring guide to action in relationship to that empirical object or set of empirical objects.

[50] And people, it's a tricky issue, you know, because obviously you can use empirical information to inform your decisions.

[51] But I think, but the problem is, is that there's multiple pathways of action that are implied by any set of data.

[52] That seems to be the fundamental problem.

[53] It's something like that, is that you can't draw one -to -one specification between the empirical description and what you should do about that and like maybe an example is well you can gather a lot of information about AIDS and you can gather a lot of information about cancer and you can gather a lot of information about educational outcomes and economic outcomes and so forth but it isn't obvious how you then use that empirical information for example how to guide policy decisions because you might say well how much money should we spend on education compared to cancer prevention and how much money should be spent on cancer prevention compared to curing AIDS or addressing disease in a third world country.

[54] What happens is that the set of variables that you encounter while trying to make your empirical calculation get to be so massive so rapidly that there doesn't seem to be any logical way of linking them to a behavioral outcome.

[55] That's kind of associated with the postmodern conundrum as well, which is, well, if you have a set of data, and it could be a literary work for that better, there's a very large number of interpretations that you can derive from that set of data.

[56] and there's no simple way of deciding which one is going to be canonical.

[57] And so I think the reason that you can't derive an aught from an is is because you run into something like combinatorial explosion.

[58] It's like you have an infinite number of facts at your disposal, roughly speaking, and then another infinite number of ways that you can organize those facts, and that massive array of facts and recategorized facts doesn't tell you what to do in a given situation.

[59] And so maybe the question of what to do in a given situation is a different domain of question.

[60] And I believe that to be the case.

[61] I think it was Stephen Jay Gould, who talked about religion and science as two, I think he called them different magisterium, two different fundamental domains, and that each had their realm of operation.

[62] And one was the description of the objective world, obviously that's on the scientific end, and the other was the realm of ethics.

[63] And so you could put religion, mythology, narrative, the humanities, all of that, history, even for that matter, to some degree, into the ethics category.

[64] And because I don't see a straightforward way of taking a set of facts and then transforming them into a behavioral compulsion, then I do think that these two things are reasonably regarded as overlapping and intrinsically associated but but technically and philosophically separable all right so then then the next question emerges well if they're separable if there has to be a domain of inquiry into the structure of values what might that look like like how is it that you would understand the psychological and sociological phenomena that are associated with a moral stance, and how would you understand the details of that?

[65] And then, even more to the point, is there any way of subjecting different sets of ethical interpretation to testing so that you can judge their comparative validity?

[66] Because that's sort of the way out of moral relativism, roughly speaking.

[67] It's like, first you make the proposition that there are value structures and that they're independent from empirical investigation, and then the next is that you investigate the possibility that you can compare and contrast different structures of ethics and draw some sort of conclusion that's not merely arbitrary.

[68] Now, it might be turtles all the way down.

[69] That's how the old joke goes, right?

[70] But maybe not.

[71] And I was interested in that again because I thought, well, are we fighting the Cold War merely because we're having an argument?

[72] or is there some manner in which one of these systems can be just determined to be wrong?

[73] And of course, there was more weight behind that query, because the Soviet system and the Maoist system and the system that's in place in North Korea were not only predicated on different assumptions than the Western system, but they were also extraordinarily murderous.

[74] And so that seemed to add additional weight to the sequence of questions.

[75] So, I was reading Jung at the time, and Carl Jung, was fundamentally, I would say, a psychologist of narrative, of story.

[76] And he outlined this, he outlined the idea for me that people inhabited stories, roughly speaking.

[77] He said actually they inhabited myths and even more to the people.

[78] point, whether they knew it or not, they inhabited archetypal myths or even that they were possessed by them.

[79] And so, it was the first time I'd really come into contact with the idea, directly put, that there was a direct relationship between the structures that you use to orient yourself in the world and stories.

[80] And so then I started to assess the fundamental elements of stories.

[81] What might a story look like?

[82] And while I was doing that, that was informed by a number of other things that I was reading about, including a set of, I read the neuroscience literature with regards to information processing fairly extensively.

[83] And that introduced me to a whole set of other ideas, including cybernetic ideas, which have been incorporated into what I was describing to you.

[84] And this basic cybernetic system is a system that has a starting point and a system that has an end point.

[85] and a system that has a subsystem that monitors progress or deviation from progress along the pathway to the end point.

[86] And I thought, well, that looks a lot like a story or a map.

[87] That's another way of thinking about it.

[88] And I thought, okay, well, that's where the overlap is.

[89] And the fundamental story is something like, it's very straightforward.

[90] It's also the frame that you inhabit when you conceptualize the world and narrow and simplify the world, which you have to do because it's so complex, because you have this infinite number of facts that are laying around you.

[91] So what are you doing?

[92] Well, you're a mobile creature, a living creature, not a static information processor, and you're targeted.

[93] You're a targeted creature.

[94] And otherwise you wouldn't move, right?

[95] To move is to be a targeted creature because you have to move towards something or away from something.

[96] So the targeting is built right into the fact that you're a mobile creature.

[97] And then you might say, well, what do you target?

[98] And the answer to that is, well, you target, you target, you could say you target what you aim for, But then you could say, well, you aim for what you want.

[99] You target your desires, and then that leads you into a discussion of the underlying neurobiology, essentially.

[100] You bring to the table a set of inbuilt desires, and the targets that you pick have to address the fact that those desires exist, and the desires are actually grounded in necessity.

[101] And this is a sidebar, but this is where I think Piaget's theory is weaker than it should be, because Piaget, and you know I'm a great admirer of Piaget, believed that the human infant came into the world with a fairly primordial set of reflexes, mostly sensory motor reflexes, and then bootstrapped him or herself up on the basis of those reflexes in the sociological, in the social surround.

[102] And so it's a constructivist viewpoint.

[103] The child comes in with a few basic elements that can get it going, elements of exploration and memory, essentially.

[104] And then it builds itself as a consequence of its exploration in the social community.

[105] Now, I think that's true, except that it's too empty because what it fails to take into consideration is the fact that, and I think this is an observation in some sense philosophically that was first made by Emmanuel Kant when he criticized pure reason.

[106] So that you can't come into the world structureless.

[107] You have to come into the world with an inbuilt structure, and then it's the interaction of that structure with the world that provides the information that you can use to build yourself.

[108] But the structure has to be there.

[109] And I would say that's the same mythologically speaking as the idea that the great father is always there.

[110] There's the great mother is always there.

[111] That's chaos itself.

[112] The great father is always there.

[113] That's order.

[114] That's the interpretive structure that you use to interact with the chaos.

[115] And then, of course, the individual is always there at the same time.

[116] Pige, in some sense, re -told that story.

[117] Except he didn't give enough credence to the fact that the infant comes into the world far more fully formed than his theory presumes.

[118] Now, the problem, see, the problem with that is that without that additional underlying set of, let's call them, neurobiological constraints, the interpretation universe gets too large.

[119] You need constraints to narrow the domain of phenomena that you're contending with.

[120] And it's in the analysis of the constraints that the answer to how do you stop drowning in an infinite number of potential interpretations emerges.

[121] The interpretations are subject to constraints.

[122] And that's also the way out of the moral relativist paradox, as far as I can tell.

[123] Now, one of the things I really liked about Piaget was that he described some of the constraints.

[124] One of the constraints was, is, well, if I'm going to exist in a social world, and I'm going to, because I won't exist at all, if I don't exist in a social world, then there are constraints on the way that I have to interact with other people.

[125] And Piaget's essential point was, I have to organize myself to play a joint game with you, but the joint game has constraints, and one of them is you have to want to play, because you have other options, and then there are other constraints.

[126] you and I have to be able to play in a way that other people don't object to, or maybe even that you and I have to play in a way that other people will be, will support.

[127] And then you can imagine another constraint, which is you and I have to play a game in a way that other people would support that will last more than the moment.

[128] So it has to work today and tomorrow and next week.

[129] It has to work across the span of times.

[130] It has to work not only for you and I, but it has to work for our future selves.

[131] And so the damn constraints are starting to pile up.

[132] That's just on the sociocultural side.

[133] That's on the constructionist side only.

[134] But the biological constraints are equally important because not only does the game that you and I have to play have to satisfy those emergent sociological constraints, but the game also has to be organized so that the internal polity that's composed of, let's call them the fundamental motivational and emotional systems that constitute us, they have to, to all find satisfaction, because otherwise the system grounds to a halt.

[135] And so, this seems to me to be the beginnings of an answer to the postmodern conundrum.

[136] It's like, okay, any set of facts is amenable to an infinite number of interpretations.

[137] Fine, got it.

[138] That makes deriving an is from an ought a very difficult endeavor.

[139] Right, no problem.

[140] All right, but that doesn't mean that any old solution will work.

[141] Why?

[142] Well, first of all, it's merely because we interpret.

[143] work into the conversation to begin with.

[144] The interpretation has to be functional, and again, that's what it seems, that's what seems to tie it back to the story.

[145] This is also what got me interested in pragmatism, technically speaking.

[146] And so, because if your conundrum is, here you are, and there you have to be, and how to get there, then one of the constraints on the manner in which you interpret the world is, when you apply your interpretation, do you end up moving from the point you're at to the point you want to be.

[147] And if the answer to that is no, then the solution is insufficient.

[148] Now, you could call the solution untrue, but it's dangerous to introduce the truth, falsity, dilemma, because it isn't, it's functionality more than truth, although I think you could say that in the final analysis, truth is integrally linked to function, but I'm not going to touch that question for the time being.

[149] The point is, is that your interpretation of the world carries within it implicitly a theory about its own validity.

[150] And the theory about its own validity is that if you enacted in the world, it will produce the result that you desire.

[151] And then the consequence of that is that if it doesn't produce the result that you desire, then it isn't good enough theory.

[152] Period.

[153] And that's how you grapple with the fact that, although you don't know everything, you still have to orient yourself in the world.

[154] You lay out partial theories that make partial predictions, and if they do a good enough job, then you don't worry about it anymore, and you go on to the next thing.

[155] Okay, so then you think there's a lot of constraints piling up on your interpretations.

[156] Number one, they have to work for the creature that you are, and so, you know, we can lay sort of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, something like that.

[157] It's not exactly the same, because I don't think that he got the hierarchy right for very complex reasons, but it's reasonably obvious to observe that, well, you're not going to work out very well if you don't have anything to eat.

[158] And, you know, you've got about a week in you if you don't have anything to drink.

[159] And obviously you need shelter and, you know, you need companionship.

[160] And by need, what I mean is that if you don't have these things, then you die.

[161] The whole game comes to a halt.

[162] So we can ground that in self -evident reality without any real problem.

[163] And you might say, well, what's the list of human necessities?

[164] And that's a difficult thing to parameterize because you can argue about the degree to which something is necessary.

[165] but there's some things that we know about.

[166] Well, we covered the basics, temperature regulation, elimination, food intake, shelter, right?

[167] But then there's more subtle things like, well, children, for example, die without touch.

[168] So there's something integral about tactile interaction with other people.

[169] So we could call that love if you want to do that.

[170] It's not optional.

[171] Play is the same thing.

[172] children do not develop properly unless they play.

[173] And I would say that adults also can't maintain their mental health or physical health unless they play too.

[174] And so you can say, well, there's a core set of necessities, and then off of that there's a secondary set of, like, what would you call them?

[175] They're not ultimate necessities, but they're going to be pretty highly valued by people and more or less universally.

[176] Pain avoidance, for example, under most circumstances.

[177] Most people don't really like to be in terror.

[178] Most people really don't like to be disgusted.

[179] You know You can lay out the basic emotions.

[180] You can lay out the basic motivations and you can say, well, the game that you're going to play has to operate within a space that's defined by that set of a priori constraints.

[181] Fine.

[182] Now, things are getting pretty constrained here.

[183] So the game you play has to satisfy that set of biological demands, intrinsic biological demands, and it has to be something that you, you can utilize with other people voluntarily, and it has to be something that will be playable across multiple iterations.

[184] And I would say there's a very limited number of interpretive structures that are going to satisfy all of those preconditions simultaneously.

[185] And to me, that just blows out the two things.

[186] It blows out the claims of moral relativism, and it also demolishes, And this is the same thing in some sense It demolishes its ideas that the manner in which people organize themselves in the world as individuals and in societies Is somehow arbitrary Doesn't look to me to be arbitrary at all And so and I and Piaget's genius.

[187] I think in some part was observing that in children spontaneously in that when children Pass the egocentric phase which means after they're about two years of old They're maybe they're What they're approaches?

[188] three years old they've more or less got their internal mechanisms organized so that they're a unitary being roughly speaking at three they start to develop the ability to use fictional frames of reference so and that's an interesting thing because I would say that the fundamental biological systems come armed with their own frame of reference so if you're hungry poof up comes a frame of reference and within that your perceptions are shaped, the action proclivities are primed, and the world lays itself out around that particular biological necessity, and you can lay those out.

[189] Same if you're thirsty, same if you're too hot, same if you want to play.

[190] All those systems come built in.

[191] But then the problem with that is that they compete, because it isn't obvious which one should take priority, and then it's not that easy to organize them in a social space.

[192] And so what's seems to have happened to human beings is that we've been able to replace the frame that's predicated on motivational necessity with abstracted frames that are more voluntarily constructed, that incorporate multiple motivational systems simultaneously.

[193] And that's, in some sense, that's also what, it's the same thing as we've learned how to think abstractly.

[194] And so the frame that you're going to lay out on the world, if it's a good frame, is one that solves a whole set of problems at the same time.

[195] And so that, and you can slot different frames, you can, you can experiment with different frames, and that's a precondition to being able to play, because one of the things that Piaget pointed out, you can see this when children pretend play, it's like, and even more clearly in games that have rules, but let's say they're in pretend play, and they're going to say, well, we're going to lay out a little fictional schema here, we're going to play house, and you can be the cat and I'll be the dad, and then, you know, a bit to see if those roles are acceptable, and then you run it as a simulation, and that's what kids are doing when they're playing.

[196] And they're experimenting with different superordinate frames of reference that are actable in the world.

[197] And they're learning how to develop those perceptual schemes, and also how to interact in a manner that allows the scheme that they're using to find its social acceptability.

[198] And it's successful, the child assumes that the scheme is successful, if both children have fun while they're doing it.

[199] And so that's the volunteerism.

[200] And so Piaget made a very interesting point about that that I think is absolutely brilliant.

[201] He said that there's a difference between a game that people will play voluntarily and one that has to be enforced.

[202] And so then you can imagine an environment where game A is played voluntarily, it has a certain end, and game B is played by force, but both of them are moving towards the same end.

[203] And Piaget's claim was, the game that's played voluntary, Or even more to the point, the set of all games that are played voluntarily will out -compete the set of all games that are played by force if they're put head -to -head in a competitive environment.

[204] I thought, God, that's such a brilliant observation, because there you have the basis for a pragmatic grounding for the evaluation of ethics.

[205] It's like, you can pick the target.

[206] It doesn't matter, whatever target you pick.

[207] If the game is voluntary and aimed at the target, it will defeat a game.

[208] that's imposed by tyranny.

[209] Now, it's a proposition, but it's a pretty good proposition, and I would say there's a fair bit of evidence for this proposition, and a fair bit of it is actually derived from observation of animal behavior, because I ran you guys through the emerging literature on the stability, say, of chimpanzee hierarchies, and the chimpanzee tyrant hierarchy isn't very stable, and the reason for that is that two subordinate chimps, who are three -quarters as strong as the dominant tyrant, can take him out, and they do.

[210] And so then the question might be, well, how do you have to conduct yourself as a high -dominance chimp if you're not going to be torn apart by those who are hypothetically your subordinates?

[211] And the answer to that is, well, don't be too much of a tyrant.

[212] Formulate some social connections, engage in some reciprocity with regards to your social relationships.

[213] Don't oppress the females.

[214] Don't torment the children, et cetera, because that makes you unpopular.

[215] And then you'll get torn into shreds.

[216] And so there are practical limits on the expression of tyranny that are a consequence both of biological limitations because people are going to object if the system is set up so that their fundamental needs aren't met and they're also going to object if the game that's being played isn't functioning socially.

[217] And so this is a very, very tight set of constraints.

[218] And then the question might be, okay, if you take that set of constraints, what sort of systems can operate, what would you say?

[219] Well, just that.

[220] What set of systems can operate within those sets of constraints?

[221] Then you might say, if you take the set of all systems that might operate within those constraints and you look at what's common across them, then you could extract out what's essentially a universal morality.

[222] It's something like that.

[223] And I don't see how that proposition is precisely questionable.

[224] It seems to me that all of that's built on rock.

[225] There's no doubt that infants bring biological necessity to the table.

[226] I think that's fully established, and it's established physiologically, it's established behaviorally, it's established with regards to evolutionary history because we can take the motivational systems that are part and parcel of our being, and we can trace their development back in some cases half a billion years so so the idea that the the infant is a blank slate when it's born and that's subject to infinite sociological manipulation is a it's a it's dead in the water that's just not the case so okay so fine so we've got that nailed down hard and then the idea that your identity is also shaped sociologically well I don't think anybody disputes that it doesn't matter where they are on the interpretive framework, they might dispute the degree to which that occurs and the mechanisms by which it occurs.

[227] But the fact that it occurs, that's close enough to self -evident so we can just leave it there.

[228] Well, then the question is, what are the consequences of sociological, of socialization?

[229] And once you admit the existence of the realm of the realm of, biological necessity, you instantly put a set of constraints on how societies can structure themselves so that they will not be torn down and overthrown.

[230] Then if you look at how kids are socialized, I think that Piaget's developmental observations are by and by correct.

[231] First two years, it's mostly interactions between the infant and the parents.

[232] It's bidirectional though, because the infant has to come to terms with the mother.

[233] But the mother also has to come to terms with the infant.

[234] So it's not even topped down at the level of infant maternal relationship.

[235] Quite the contrary.

[236] I mean, if you watch a new mother adapt to a baby, you can see that the mother is doing as much adaptation to the baby as the baby is to the mother, because the infant has this inbuilt character already and has to be charmed into a relationship.

[237] That's love does that.

[238] And attention, it's very little different than establishing a relationship with someone who's older.

[239] It's lower resolution, and it's harder to make the observations because, of course, the infant is only capable of behavioral display, can't speak, but nonetheless, the necessity for establishing the individual relationship is there to begin with.

[240] So even in the early stages of the infant's socialization, the process isn't state downward.

[241] It's not great father downward.

[242] It's mutual.

[243] And then, of course, by the time the child is old enough to be launched out into the social world, then all the constraints that are associated with the playground are immediately placed on that child.

[244] And that's a very unforgiving landscape, right?

[245] Because the last thing a child wants, really, the last thing a child wants is not to have any friends, or even perhaps, equally seriously, not to have a best friend.

[246] I read something so idiotic the other day that I couldn't believe it.

[247] So the newest prince, so Queen Elizabeth's, I guess, great -grandchild, is off to daycare in the UK.

[248] And in this daycare, they don't let the kids have best friends because that's unfair.

[249] I thought, you know Something times you see something that's so stupid you can't even believe it it exists and that was one of those examples because It's been known for quite a long time that one of the developmental Milestones that children attain somewhere between say the age of five and ten is they pick a best friend and So they and you know the the hypothesis well that's unfair to all the other children It's like, well, first of all, you can't be the best friend to everyone, because then maybe there's a billion children, so each of them gets one second.

[250] It's like, that's just not a very deep relationship.

[251] So the idea that you can be equally friendly with everyone is a preposterous.

[252] But even worse, the thing that the child's doing is actually becoming, they're stepping out of their egocentricity because their best friends becomes more important than they are.

[253] And that's a precursor for adult relationships where, you know, if you're married, Well, your partner should be at least as important as you are and the relationship should be more important But then when you have children, it's like they're more important than you that that's that It's unless there's something wrong with you You come second and your children come first and they're way first.

[254] They're not just a little I mean You're necessary because without you they're not going to manage so you have to take care of yourself But you're not number one anymore once you have kids unless seriously unless you didn't learn the lessons in the playground And when you have a best friend you're not number one.

[255] They are and so So anyways, there are these constraints that emerge in the social landscape.

[256] You have to have friends, and also you have to single someone out as particularly unique among those friends, and establish a genuinely reciprocal and caring relationship.

[257] I can't remember the psychiatrist who studied this so intently.

[258] Unfortunately, he was the first person to do a detailed analysis of the best friend relationships that children established.

[259] I'd like to give him credit for his ideas, but unfortunately I can't remember his name.

[260] So, okay, so what are the propositions so far?

[261] You inhabit a structure that orientes you in the world.

[262] It has something that's akin to a narrative structure.

[263] I'm here, I'm going there, and this is the way I did it.

[264] It's narrative, if you describe it.

[265] It's based in biological necessity, but it's shaped by socialization.

[266] And the fact of that base, and that shaping means that the set of interpretive schema that you can lay out in the world are bounded Those would be functional hypothetically functional systems and maybe they compete over over the evolutionary time span But there's something in common across that set of functional interpretations and if you extract that out You can get the initial images of what you might describe as an archetypally universal morality.

[267] That's what archetypes are, fundamentally.

[268] So, and to say all that is no more than to say that people can abstract across instances, and we can obviously do that.

[269] So then the question is, can you start to develop an articulated picture of what that archetypal structure of universal morality might be?

[270] And so my answer to that was basically, well, let's look at old stories, as many old stories as we can collect, and if there are stories that have survived, for a very long period of time, so much the better, because that indicates that they're peculiarly memorable and peculiarly functional, because if they weren't memorable, then they'd have been forgotten, and if they weren't functional, they wouldn't have managed to be the foundation stories for cultures that lasted for thousands or even tens of thousands of years.

[271] So, and then we could say, well, let's collect a whole variety of these stories and see if there's patterns across them.

[272] Now, the danger of that is, have you collected an unbiased set of stories?

[273] Danger number one.

[274] How do you know that you're not just reading into the stories?

[275] That's the postmodern problem.

[276] Reasonable, reasonable objections.

[277] And so those objections have been laid against people like, he wrote the Golden Bough.

[278] Fraser, who was the Frazier, who was one of the first anthropologists, to collect stories from all over the world and to start to look for commonalities.

[279] The same objection has been laid at the feet of people like Mercea.

[280] Eliad or Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell it's like how do you know you just how do you know you're not just cherry -picking your damn interpretations perfectly reasonable perfectly reasonable objection and I would say that the reason I don't believe that I'm cherry -picking my interpretations is because I used a method and it's a method that's akin to the multi -trade multi -method method of construct validation that that clinical psychology and other disciplines of psychology rely upon but it's also akin to a process put forward by E .O. Wilson that he called conciliants.

[281] And the process is something like, well, pick your level of analysis.

[282] Does the phenomena manifest itself at that level of analysis?

[283] Yes.

[284] Pick another level of analysis and another level of analysis and another level of analysis and see if the same phenomena manifests itself at every single level, and then assume that the probability that that will happen by chance decreases with each additional level of analysis that fits where there's concordance.

[285] And I thought, okay, that makes sense.

[286] So it isn't only that you can look for patterns and stories because, you know, what if you're a hyperactive pattern detector, which basically means like, and there are people like that, people who tilt towards paranoia, people who tilt towards conspiracy theories.

[287] You can see it manifest itself in new age thinking all the time, because new age thinkers are very high in openness, but not very good at critical thinking.

[288] And so they see phenomena A and B and C and D. they think pattern, then they think universal pattern, but they don't attempt to dis -confirm their pattern prediction.

[289] And so what I tried to do when I was starting to see patterns emerge in the stories, informed by people like Jung and Iliata and so forth, was to see if what they were describing manifested itself at any other levels of analysis that were independent intellectually from that stream of thinking.

[290] And I found it in two places.

[291] I found it in cybernetics, and I found it in neuroscience.

[292] And so, and the neuroscience element, that includes the physiology, but also the behavioral analysis that was done by people most particularly like Jeffrey Gray and the animal experimentals who were brilliant, brilliant scientists and who've done a very good job of laying out the manner in which interpretive frameworks exist within the realm of animal cognition and to describe how they manifest themselves in the world.

[293] So I thought, okay, that's not too bad.

[294] We've got maybe four different levels of evidence all pointing in the same direction.

[295] And so that's why I walked you guys through the neuropsychology.

[296] It's like a story is you're going somewhere, you're somewhere and you're going somewhere, and you're tracking your progress.

[297] Okay, that's the story.

[298] Well, what happens when you look at how people lay out, they're called cognitive maps?

[299] Well, it's the same thing.

[300] You specify a target, an endpoint.

[301] You specify a beginning point, which is just where you are.

[302] And then there's a mechanism.

[303] a comparative mechanism that operates, or multiple comparator mechanisms that operate neurophysiologically, to orient yourself towards that goal.

[304] And the emotions basically emerge as a consequence of that.

[305] Positive emotions indicating that you're moving forward properly.

[306] Negative emotions indicating that you've encountered some kind of obstacle.

[307] It's like, well, that's the basic structure of a narrative.

[308] Okay, fine.

[309] So now we can see how it's instantiated neurophysiologically.

[310] That adds a fair bit of credence to the entire process.

[311] So, now normally when you look at the basic cybernetic work, there's a hypothesis that the system is oriented towards a goal and that it's comparing what is manifesting itself in the world to that desired end state as the system moves.

[312] But it's too simple because people don't precisely have goals.

[313] They have nested hierarchies of goals.

[314] And so the issue of emotional regulation becomes more complex than are you proceeding happily towards your current goal?

[315] Because your goal is composed of microgoals, and it's a constituent element of a set of macro goals.

[316] And so that makes the problem of error far more complex than it would be if you only had one frame of reference, and you are only adjudicating your error within that frame of reference.

[317] The question starts to become, what does it mean when you make a mistake?

[318] And the answer to that, the behavioral answer to that was, well, you encounter a stimuli that's a threat or maybe a punishment or an incentive reward or a consumatory reward, something like that.

[319] It's a unidimensional and oversimplified answer.

[320] I'm not complaining about it.

[321] It has great utility, but there's a problem, And the problem is, it doesn't take into account the nested structure of your goal hierarchy.

[322] And what that means is that it underestimates the difficulty of responding to an error.

[323] Because the problem with an error is that you don't know what the error signifies.

[324] And that's a huge problem.

[325] And that's part of what I want to delve into even in more depth today.

[326] And so this is like Ellis in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole.

[327] It's exactly the same thing.

[328] The rabbit hole is, you made a mistake.

[329] You made a mistake.

[330] You've got your oversimplified representation of the world laid upon it It validates itself in its execution if it executes properly if it executes improperly Then what does that signify and the answer isn't precisely that you've made a mistake The answer is it signifies that there's something in the world that you excluded that shouldn't have been excluded And that's a big problem because when you've laid out a simplified schema on the world you've excluded virtually everything and so what that means is that as soon as you make an error the search space for the error immediately tends towards the infinite and you experience that you it's it's part of it human existential experience and the way you experience that is especially if your mood is shaky is you lay out a small plan like maybe you go out for for coffee with someone that you're romantically interested in and they're there they're not they're not pleasant to you and and so that's an error.

[331] It means, well, what does it mean?

[332] Well, you've construed yourself wrong, you've construed them wrong, you've construed the opposite sex wrong, you've construed human beings wrong, you're a walking catastrophe, and you might as well not even exist.

[333] It's like, well, that's pretty extreme, but it's not that extreme, I'll tell you, like it's, it's not that uncommon for people to have exactly that set of catastrophic responses to even a minor setback.

[334] Now, it's not good for them and I would say, you know, just because you scraped your foot doesn't mean you should dig a grave and jump into it, pull all the dirt on top of you, you know.

[335] So you don't want to start by taking yourself completely apart, but that doesn't mean people won't do it.

[336] They do it all the time.

[337] In fact, to me, it's always a mystery that they don't do it every single time because the logical inference for why didn't you get someone interested in you could easily be because you're a failure as a human being.

[338] And at some level, that's actually true.

[339] Now, it's true in a way that's not that helpful, right, because it's just too catastrophic.

[340] But it isn't obvious at all how people can defend themselves against that cascade of catastrophizing.

[341] I mean, after all, if you were everything you could be, then maybe everyone would be attracted to you.

[342] I mean, perhaps not, but you get the point.

[343] And no easy rationalization is going to let you just brush that away, especially if you actually happen to be interested in the person, because that's even worse.

[344] Because then not only are you rejected, but you're rejected by someone who's upon whom you've projected an ideal, or perhaps from whom you've actually observed an ideal.

[345] So it's worse.

[346] You're rejected by someone that you want to be attracted to you to validate your own miserable existence.

[347] It's not a trivial problem.

[348] So you're in this protected space that I, you know, I made an analogy between that in the Garden of Eden.

[349] or the city that Buddha was raised in, it's all protected and everything inside it is beautiful and functional.

[350] And that's by definition, because if your frame of reference is working properly, then what's within it is things you control that are functional and they're serving your purposes.

[351] So when you're successful, you're in the Garden of Eden.

[352] That's one way of thinking about it.

[353] When the things that you're laying out in the world are delivering what they're supposed to do.

[354] deliver.

[355] That's what you inhabit.

[356] But the problem is, is that there's always a snake inside the garden.

[357] And that's the story that's echoed in the story of Buddha.

[358] In that case, it's Buddha's own curiosity that happens to be the snake.

[359] And you could actually say the same thing about human beings.

[360] Maybe it wasn't the snake.

[361] Maybe it was Eve's curiosity.

[362] They're the same thing in some sense.

[363] And so it's Buddha's curiosity that drives them outside the city to find disease and death and to blow apart his paradisal conceptualization of the world.

[364] And so, when we're looking at, for universality, the first thing we might say is, well, you have a frame of reference that you've laid on the world.

[365] It's a story.

[366] You live inside a story.

[367] And the second thing we could say, and that's universally true.

[368] The content of the story can differ.

[369] That's okay.

[370] I don't care about that.

[371] It's the structural equivalence that I'm interested in.

[372] You live inside a story.

[373] And you have to, because you have to live in something like that, because you are goal directed and you have to be.

[374] and you have to simplify the world because you're just not enough of you to take into account everything at once.

[375] In fact, you can hardly take into account anything at once.

[376] So you have to narrow things unbelievably.

[377] And by narrowing and including only certain things, you exclude virtually everything else.

[378] So you're always in the situation where you have this little bounded universe that you inhabit, but outside of it is chaos itself.

[379] And so that's the existential landscape.

[380] Order surrounded by chaos.

[381] It's like a tree.

[382] It's like the evolutionary home of primates, the tree with the snakes on the ground.

[383] That's our landscape.

[384] Or it's the fire for tribal people and the terrors of the forest that are beyond the light that the fire casts.

[385] It's explored territory versus unexecis.

[386] explored territory and that's that's an archetype as well that that's you can't not be in a situation where that's the case Even if you're among friends, you know You think that's explored territory.

[387] That's not exactly right because what happens if you're among friends is that They carefully reveal new parts of themselves all the time So it's like they're blasting little Elements of unexplored territory you you constantly and if they don't then what happens?

[388] You get bored and you look for new people.

[389] And we know there's empirical data on that with regards to intimate relationships because there was a nice study done a while back showing that looking at the ratio of positive to negative emotional experiences that were most predictive of long -term relationship success.

[390] And the answer was, now obviously it depends on how you would measure an event and how you would measure positive and negative emotion.

[391] But that aside, the finding was something like if you're in a relationship and you only have five positive interactions to one negative interaction, then the relationship will end.

[392] It's two negative.

[393] But if you have more than 11 positive interactions to one negative interaction, then it also ends.

[394] And you think, well, that's pretty bloody peculiar.

[395] Why in the world would that be?

[396] Don't you want like a hundred to one positive to negative interactions?

[397] And the answer to that is, what makes you think that you want a relationship so that you can be happy?

[398] Or at least happy moment to moment.

[399] Why do you think that?

[400] It's not, it's certainly not the case.

[401] You know that too, because I mean, I bet you there's not a person in this room who hasn't rejected someone because they were too nice to them.

[402] Something like that person's no challenge.

[403] It's something like that.

[404] You want someone who, you know, you can get along with them.

[405] But now and then they bite you and you think, oh, that's, that's interesting.

[406] You know, I didn't really expect that.

[407] And then you go and puzzle over it for a while and you torture yourself about it.

[408] And that's one of the things that keeps you.

[409] you really linked into the relationship.

[410] And the reason for that is that part of the reason that you want the relationship isn't so that you're happy right now.

[411] It's so that you can live a high quality life across multiple decades.

[412] And so you're looking for someone that you have to contend with who's going to push you beyond what you already are and who's going to judge you harshly often for your limitations.

[413] Now, that'll make you angry and all of that.

[414] You know, and resentful and maybe you'll take your revenge and and all of that.

[415] But you don't want someone who's thinks you're perfect in your current form, partly because why would you want to go out with someone that deluded?

[416] So, okay, so you've got this interpretive schema laid out on the world, and it excludes the entire world, and because it excludes the world, the world tends to manifest itself inside that protected space in an uncontrollable manner, and that can take you down, and it takes you down the rabbit hole, And down the rabbit hole is where everything is, because when you make an error, what that is is the manifestation of the excluded world.

[417] And the problem with that is that's too much, right?

[418] Because if you step out of the lifeboat into the ocean, then you drown, and that's not any good.

[419] You can't drown every time something manifests itself that you didn't expect.

[420] There has to be a mechanism for orienting you in the face of error.

[421] All right, so what exactly does that imply?

[422] The question is, what do you discover when you go down the rabbit hole?

[423] I was thinking about that a lot today.

[424] I showed you that diagram that I thought was like a map of the phenomenological world.

[425] The lowest resolution category is something like the Dragon of Chaos.

[426] And so you might say, well, what do you discover when you make an error?

[427] And the answer is, first, it's a brief manifestation of the Dragon of Chaos.

[428] And that's no more to say than when you encounter the incursion of unexplored territory into explored territory.

[429] The circuitry you use is the same circuits that we use to respond instantaneously to the presence of predatory forces.

[430] We use that circuit.

[431] And that makes perfect sense because the predator is almost by definition, the thing that lurks beyond the safe confines of the community.

[432] And I told you, I believe, a story about rats, raised in naturalistic environments.

[433] The rats are, they've got their burrows on one end of the little field, their little rat hierarchy, they're doing their little rat social things, they're playing and they're laughing and they're tickling each other, and they're raising their rat families, and that's all working out just fine.

[434] Rats in that situation, by the way, are very difficult to get addicted to cocaine.

[435] If you want to addict a rat to cocaine, you have to put it in a cage and isolate it.

[436] It's not really a rat anymore than you're a person if you're in solitary confinement, right?

[437] I mean, you're mostly just misery.

[438] Anyways, in solitary confinement, you'd be after cocaine non -stop, and maybe under other circumstances.

[439] But like a normal rat, it's not that interested in cocaine.

[440] So that's just a side note.

[441] Anyways, the rats are doing their thing, and then they've learned that they can go out to the other side of the field, and they can get food.

[442] And so, one day, the experimenters, instead of putting food out there, put a cat out there.

[443] And the rat goes out and gets a whiff of the cat, which they do not like.

[444] And then the rat runs home and pokes his beak out of the burrow and screams for like two days, ultrasonically.

[445] And all the other rats are like frozen stiff because of that.

[446] They're not going anywhere.

[447] And so a two -day rat screaming fit is no trivial thing.

[448] I calculated, that would be the equivalent of use screaming for two weeks.

[449] So you have to be pretty upset to scream for two weeks, right?

[450] So this is hard on the rat.

[451] But the reason I'm telling you this is the rat doesn't expect the cat to be there.

[452] The rat goes out and there's a cat.

[453] And what it uses is it's predator detection and alert systems to signify the presence of the cat.

[454] And what we've done with the dragon imagery, roughly speaking, is make an amalgam of predatory monsters and state that's a symbol for what lurks beyond safety.

[455] because you know we're observing our own responses in some sense and and it's not only that we're observing our own responses but that we also have a category categorical set of responses to predator and and we again there's no speculation about this we already know this like if you go study monkeys for example they have distinct sets of vocalization that are associated with predator detection that have distinct circuits we know that there are predator detection circuits.

[456] And it's not unreasonable to also presuppose that they underlie the phenomena, for example, that human beings are very good at learning fear to snakes.

[457] Snake fear might be innate, like that's pushing the argument.

[458] But at minimum, psychologists have already concluded that even if snake fear isn't innate, and it probably is, that it can be learned like that.

[459] So you can condition people to be afraid of pictures of snakes way faster than you can condition them to be afraid of pictures of electrical outlets.

[460] or handguns.

[461] So, and that's well documented.

[462] I don't think anybody disputes that at all.

[463] So, the first assumption is when something unexpected emerges, so we'll call that the snake in the garden, that you're prey and that's a predator and that the monster has come to get you.

[464] It's something like that.

[465] Now, the representation of the dragon is more complex than mere monster because the dragon, the mythological dragon also is the thing that hoards treasure.

[466] And I really like that symbol.

[467] I think that's also why it will never go away.

[468] It's such a great symbol because it says, well, the unknown can take you down.

[469] It can bite you with its fiery breath, like a poisonous snake, and it can burn things like fire, and it's an aerial predator that can take you from the air, and it's a carnivorous predator that can take you from the ground, and it's reptilian.

[470] It's the sort of thing that can pull you down into the water.

[471] And it's easy to see that as an amalgam of the threats that have been laid forth for human beings since the beginning of time.

[472] And Monster is an amalgam of predator.

[473] And you might say, well, there's no such thing as a dragon.

[474] It's like, yes, there is.

[475] It's just a loose category.

[476] What's common across all predators equals dragon.

[477] It's not like it's a not, they're not real.

[478] They're hyper real.

[479] They're more real than the phenomenon of themselves, just like an abstraction can be more real than the phenomenon of themselves.

[480] And then the canonical dragon for human beings isn't just a predator.

[481] We're not rabbits.

[482] You can imagine that the dragon for a rabbit is just a dragon.

[483] There's no damn treasure there at all.

[484] But for human beings, it's ambivalent.

[485] Because the thing that you don't know about is also the thing that holds the greatest gift.

[486] And why is that?

[487] It's because the unrealized world manifests itself when you make an error.

[488] And the unrealized world is something that can take you down, obviously.

[489] But it's also the source of all new information.

[490] It's an infinite source of information, and that's a really useful thing to know.

[491] Error is an infinite source of information, and that's one of the things that can help you recalibrate the way that you interact with the world.

[492] You think, well, we're interacting.

[493] Let's say we're having a conversation, and it's flowing melodically, and all of a sudden I say something, and there's a disjunction, right?

[494] You're offended by it.

[495] There's some negative emotion that comes up, or, you know, maybe I've said something.

[496] to impress you or to be arrogant and you respond badly.

[497] It's like you've got this melodic thing going on.

[498] It's a consensual frame and something pokes itself up to put a disjunction in the conversation.

[499] It's like, well, that's where the information is.

[500] It's like something went wrong.

[501] Something didn't work out.

[502] I'm not looking at the world properly.

[503] Or I don't know you well enough or as well as I thought.

[504] There's something there.

[505] And if I have any sense, I'm going to focus my attention on that.

[506] Like not obsessively or anything like that.

[507] But that's where all the information is.

[508] Because as long as what we're doing is working, then we both know enough already.

[509] As soon as what we're doing together isn't working, then that's instant evidence that there's something about us that needs to be updated.

[510] And you might think, well, that's a terrible thing.

[511] And the answer is, yes, of course it is.

[512] It's a terrible thing.

[513] But it's also the thing.

[514] And this is the next stage of the development of this, let's call it universal morality.

[515] It's like the universal morality might be found in the answer to the, question what should you do when you make a mistake now one answer is catastrophic dissolution that's that's a collapse into chaos well that's no one is going to pick that voluntarily let's put it that way it's unbelievably unpleasant terribly anxiety -provoking shameful and painful all at the same time worse it can mean the absence of Positive emotion because if you really collapse into chaos not only are you overwhelmed by negative emotion But the positive emotion system shut off and that that's what happens to someone who's Extraordinarily depressed and also hyper -anxious at the same time not only are they suffering from an excess of negative emotion But they've got no incentive movement forward whatsoever.

[516] Okay, so that's not an optimal solution because it takes you out The other possible and so I would call that a nihilistic solution or a chaotic solution It's not a solution, it's a dissolution, and you can think about it as a precursor to a potential solution, but it's very easy to get stuck there.

[517] And that's why Jonah could have stayed in the belly of the whale, along with all the other people that were eaten by the whale, and never got back out.

[518] And you see people like that all the time.

[519] Their error has come along, blown out their frames of reference, they've collapsed into the underworld, into the chaotic underworld, and they don't know how to get out.

[520] They have post -traumatic stress disorder, or they're depressed, or they're hyper -anxious, or, Or they're resentful and aggressive and destructive, like there's any number of states of being that can overwhelm you when the bottom has fallen out of your life.

[521] So it isn't something that people are going to, it's not an optimal solution, let's put it that way.

[522] Well, the other, that's a nihilistic solution, a collapse.

[523] The other solution is, we're talking, and I don't get what I want from you.

[524] And so I say you better not do that again.

[525] I don't want to see that from you again.

[526] And that's a tyrannical attitude, right?

[527] What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my universe of order and its predictions, and I'm going to say, you go along with this, or I'm going to punish you.

[528] And that's a, now there is an element in society, like society is made up of threats like that to some degree.

[529] It's an eradicable, ineradicable, part.

[530] of society.

[531] That would be the tyrannical aspect of the Great King, let's say.

[532] We've organized a set of punishments and threats that keep each of us in alignment.

[533] However, generally speaking, in a society that's functional, we've decided to adopt agreement with that set of principles more or less voluntarily.

[534] We say, well, you have rights and responsibilities, and I have rights and responsibilities and I'm willing to pay a price for yours, including the acceptance of punishment if I transgress, but you're going to do the same for me. There are intelligent ways that punishment and threat can be used and bounded.

[535] So, but that can easily degenerate into tyranny.

[536] And one of the methods that I can choose to use if I don't want to encounter error is just to enforce my will on everyone else.

[537] And I think when that happens personally and in the family and in the community and in the state, all at the same time, then you get the emergence of a tyranny.

[538] And so I would consider the...

[539] those two counterproductive reactions to the emergence of the unrealized world.

[540] It's like, you say something I don't like, I collapse completely.

[541] Children don't like other children who do that, by the way, right?

[542] It's something that's very interesting to observe.

[543] So let's say, kids have organized themselves to play a little game of baseball with a plastic bat and a ball, and one child pitches, and the other child hits the ball, and the child catches it and puts the batter out.

[544] and the batter bursts into tears, well, what happens is the other kids, you know, the first time that happens, they'll be sympathetic.

[545] The third time that happens, they won't invite that kid out to play baseball anymore.

[546] So the answer to, we're not getting along, is not you get to burst into tears and manifest extraordinary emotional distress, because if you do that, no one's going to want to play with you.

[547] And that's a lesson that many people could stand learning again.

[548] One of the things I think that's really destabilizing our society right now, maybe, is that I'm not sure that kids have been encouraged or allowed to play enough in the last 25, 30 years and I think a lot of this identity stuff is actually fantasy play.

[549] It's delayed fantasy play because it's sort of what you do when you're seven years old.

[550] It's like, well, I'm going to be this identity.

[551] That's what you're doing when you pretend.

[552] You're going to go along with that because we're going to play this out.

[553] It's like that's fine.

[554] You don't impose that.

[555] though, right?

[556] Not if you're a kid that has a clue.

[557] You invite people to play.

[558] You don't insist on your identity and their compliance with it.

[559] It's not a playable game.

[560] And you don't burst into tears and run off when someone won't play your game because then they won't play with you.

[561] And then you have to turn to force.

[562] And that's fine if that's what you want to do.

[563] But you better look out because you better be ready to use it.

[564] universally.

[565] And what I mean by this is if we can say leaf structure A is better than a structure B from a pragmatic perspective, does it come with the responsibility of making sure that people who are trapped, perhaps a trinical leaf structure somewhere else, do we have a responsibility against them?

[566] Good question.

[567] I mean, that's part of the question that in some sense, motivated, in some sense, motivated the American incursion into Iraq, right?

[568] So what's our responsibility in relationship to tyranny?

[569] That's a good question.

[570] Because one of the criticisms current feminists are getting is for not protesting about the situation of women and, say, Saudi Arabia.

[571] Yeah.

[572] Yeah, well, I think that's, I think that criticism is more emerging because of, because it's apparently, it's apparently paradoxical.

[573] And they've laid out a set of principles to which in principle they adhere.

[574] And one of those principles is to reduce the destructive power of the patriarchy.

[575] It's like, okay, there is some destructive patriarchy for you.

[576] Radio silence.

[577] It's like, hmm, now what am I supposed to do about that?

[578] Am I supposed to question your adherence to those principles, which is exactly what should be done?

[579] So I think it's a criticism of performative contradiction.

[580] You say you're for this, but when it comes to act it out, you don't selectively in this situation.

[581] So there's something wrong, there's something about your game that you're not being straight about.

[582] That's the criticism.

[583] And maybe there's rejoinders to that.

[584] Well, okay, okay, well, responsibility.

[585] Well, you know, then you'd have to look at it different levels of analysis with regards to interactions.

[586] You definitely have a responsibility to your partner and your children.

[587] Okay, so your responsibility to your children, as far as I'm concerned, is don't, it's twofold.

[588] One, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

[589] And there's a corollary to that, which is don't be an idiot.

[590] You know, so that's partly why you need a partner, because your partner has to tell you when your demands on your children are excessive, because you're kind of, you know, you're not 100 % oriented properly.

[591] But still, you're their target adult.

[592] And so it's up to you to help them choose a path that makes you want them to be around.

[593] Right.

[594] And that's your critical responsibility.

[595] And hopefully, you're enough of an analog of the broader community so that if they can figure out how to get along with you, it radically increases the probability that they'll be able to get along with everyone.

[596] So, for example, if you're playing with your children, two years old, You help them, you encourage them to play in a manner that's fun.

[597] And if you get that down, then, you know, when you introduce them to another child, don't know how to play in a manner that's fun.

[598] And so great, you've solved the problem.

[599] The problem is to get your child to enter into the collaborative social world.

[600] And so, yes, you have a primary responsibility for that.

[601] And then with regards to your partner, here's something to think about with regards to role.

[602] So my wife and I have had this discussion many times.

[603] And one of the discussions is, well, how are we to treat each other in public?

[604] And it isn't, her name is Tammy.

[605] The discussion isn't, how should Jordan treat Tammy in public?

[606] Or how should Tammy treat Jordan?

[607] That's not the discussion.

[608] This isn't personal.

[609] It's how should a wife treat her husband?

[610] And how should a husband treat his wife?

[611] It's impersonal.

[612] And it's partly, you don't put your partner down in public.

[613] Why?

[614] Well, it's not because you're hurting that person's feelings.

[615] That's not why.

[616] It's that you're denigrating the relationship that you are involuntarily.

[617] You know, some of the most painful days I've ever spent, one in particular, I spent with a group of men who had been in therapy for their marriage and who bloody well needed it, I can tell you that.

[618] And they spent their whole day complaining about their wives.

[619] Like, it just made me sweat the whole day.

[620] I thought, I can't believe I'm here with you guys.

[621] I can't tell you why I was.

[622] It's just, you know, it was just happenstance more than anything.

[623] And I thought, how can you be so damn dumb?

[624] It's like, it's certainly possible that you married barbarian witches, fine, but you don't have, you're so lacking in sense that you would discuss that in public, not noticing that you picked them.

[625] So basically all you're doing is holding up a sign and waving it constantly that says, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, right?

[626] And so, well, back to responsibility.

[627] You have a responsibility to those whom you love and are obligated to, to ensure that they manifest themselves in a manner that's most beneficial to them over the long run.

[628] Now, you have the same responsibility, I would say, to yourself, but you'll have blind spots.

[629] Other people have to help you with that.

[630] But so the rule is, you don't let, you don't, you help your wife figure out how not to make a fool of herself in public.

[631] And she extends to you the same courtesy, and it's partly maintenance of the sacred nature of the relationship.

[632] It has nothing to do with you or her precisely.

[633] It's broader and wider than that.

[634] Okay, so then that's two levels of responsibility.

[635] Child, partner, next level of responsibility.

[636] You're asked at your workplace to undergo unconscious bias retraining.

[637] And you say yes.

[638] It's like, okay, you've just admitted that you're a...

[639] bigot, right?

[640] Because you're acting it out.

[641] It's like, I'm a racist bigot.

[642] Obviously, I need to be retrained.

[643] And so you might say, well, I'm not going to make a fuss about it, right?

[644] Or I've been told to do it.

[645] Or maybe you agree with it.

[646] Fine.

[647] And if you agree with it, no problem.

[648] You can make a case for it.

[649] I think it's a weak and appalling case personally, but you can make a case for it.

[650] You could say, well, you know, I am interested in my biases and how to rectify them.

[651] And like, fair enough, you know, people are biased.

[652] But if you object to it and you don't say anything, then you're complicit.

[653] And then it's on you.

[654] And you know, like A causes B and C and B and B and causes C and so forth.

[655] The thing doesn't always, but it has this tendency to expand.

[656] And you'll come home angry and upset and you'll go to the training program and you'll think this is ridiculous because that is what you'll think in all likelihood.

[657] And you won't say anything.

[658] but it eats at you, well, you've abrogated your responsibility.

[659] And so, and then you might say, well, so then that's how the community becomes corrupt.

[660] That's how the community starts to be corrupt, is that people turn a blind eye to emergent pathology, when they know it's pathological.

[661] That's exactly what the Egyptian story says.

[662] Osiris is overcome by Seth because he's willfully blind, willfully blind, which means he knows.

[663] but refuses to, he knows, quote, his predator detection systems have gone off.

[664] Monster, well, then you're supposed to look, okay, exactly what sort of monster is this?

[665] Well, it doesn't have wings, it doesn't have a tail, you know?

[666] You cut it down into the, you cut it from the monster that it could be into the monster that it is.

[667] That's the first step, and then you take the appropriate steps.

[668] And then you also notice the other monsters, because here's something to think about.

[669] You're going to pay a price for speaking up, but you're going to pay a price for not speaking up.

[670] So it's like monsters on the right, monsters on the left.

[671] Pick the ones you want to battle with.

[672] If you decide not to make your stand, you weaken yourself.

[673] If you do it a hundred times, then even if the monster was only this big.

[674] Now, you're this big.

[675] It's going to eat you.

[676] You know, when it was this big, you probably could have kicked it across the room.

[677] It's too late for that.

[678] You've capitulated and capitulated.

[679] And so what you've done, and this is a way to think about it, from a Jungian perspective, this is what Jung was trying to get at when he was talking about alchemy.

[680] It's like the thing that pops up to object to you is this incredibly complex entity.

[681] It's the entire world encapsulated in the event.

[682] If you interact with it, you unpack it.

[683] You differentiate your sense of the world.

[684] and you gather new skills.

[685] So, for example, let's say there's something going on at your workplace and you need to object to it because it's driving you crazy and you talk it over with your wife so that you've got your head screwed on straight and say, oh, I've got to say something.

[686] And you go there and you say something and you know, you're stumbling and awkward and all of that.

[687] But you watch the response and maybe you get what you're aiming at and maybe you don't.

[688] But you've learned a bunch.

[689] You've learned, well, I'm not as coherent as I could be.

[690] I'm not as good at putting my arguments together.

[691] My boss is more of a son of a bitch than he thought he was.

[692] This is a worst problem that I knew about.

[693] It's like, differentiated, differentiated.

[694] So now the landscape is higher resolution.

[695] And so are you?

[696] Well, so good.

[697] So maybe you're a little bit better prepared the next time you have to do that.

[698] And so the issue here, to some degree, is don't lose an opportunity to grapple with something that objects to you, especially when the object, objection is rather small.

[699] because that's something you can say well I can put up with it it's like fair enough like you don't want to make everything into a war I usually use a rule of three if we're interacting and you do something that I find disruptive I'll note it it's like potential dragon gone and I leave it be and then if you do it again I think oh yeah that probably wasn't merely situational but I'll leave it be because that's still not enough evidence but if you do it a third time then I'll say hey I just notice this and you'll say no that didn't happen and I'll say yeah not only did it happen but it happened here and it happened here and I'm not making this up so there's something going on here like I'm not ignoring it and we can get to the bottom of it and then they'll come up with a bunch of objections about why that isn't necessary and you push those aside and they'll come up with a few more objections and they'll push those aside and then usually they'll get mad or burst into tears and if you push that aside then you get to have a conversation right and then you can solve the problem but man it's you got to be a monster because first of all you need six arguments about why their objections aren't going to stop you and then you have to not be intimidated by the anger and you have to not be swamped by compassion about the tears and then you can have a conversation and people don't do that they won't do that and so they don't solve the problems and so then the problems accrue right and if they accrue over 15 years of relationship then they end up fat ugly and in divorce court so and that's you know that's not a that's not a great outcome it's a it's divorce court and cancer are similar in their in their seriousness not always but but sufficiently often so when that error emerges it's a it's a glimmering now you know we talked a lot about the hierarchical structure of goals you know And so here's something, here's something to think about.

[700] So the thing that announces itself as error has a two -fold nature.

[701] That's because it's chaos and order at the same time.

[702] Or it's because it's all the archetypal structures at the same time.

[703] It's the dragon of chaos.

[704] It's the great mother positive and negative.

[705] It's the great father positive and negative.

[706] It's the individual, hero and adversary.

[707] All of that manifests itself in the moment of error.

[708] right the archetypes come forward did you make an error because you're a bad person could be now so so one of the things to think about with regards to that is you know in the mesopotamian creation story when when time out comes flooding back it's so interesting that story I think about what she does so she's the archetype of error let's say the error that can take you out that can dissolve you in salt water tears well she's irritated because Zapsu was destroyed, so the structure is gone.

[709] Carelessness has destroyed the structure.

[710] Up comes Tyamat.

[711] She's not happy.

[712] What does she do?

[713] She prepares a phalanx of monstrous.

[714] Monsters.

[715] It's exactly what the story says.

[716] She produces a whole horde of monsters to come at you.

[717] And she puts Kingu at their head, and Kingu is the King of the Monsters.

[718] And later, so he's the ultimate bad guy.

[719] He's Satan for all intents and purposes.

[720] In the Mesopotamian version, it's out of his.

[721] that Marduk makes human beings.

[722] It's out of his blood that Marduk makes human beings.

[723] That's a critical issue, man. The Mesopotamian said, imagine the worst monster you can possibly imagine.

[724] The king of all the monsters.

[725] That's the blood of human beings.

[726] Wow.

[727] So what does that mean?

[728] Well, it means that one of the terrible things that lurks.

[729] Let's say that you've been in a long -term relationship and it collapses.

[730] Let's say, let's say you were you know he had a tendency towards alcoholism you weren't so great with regards to your drug use you know that conscientious and you had like four or five kind of low rent affairs and you know it your marriage collapses bang well who do you first meet when you fall into chaos you meet King of the Monsters and he's you it's like why did my marriage fall apart what did I do wrong bang bang bang bang Bang, bang.

[731] I did all these things wrong.

[732] Why?

[733] Because that thing inhabits me. What is it?

[734] Well, that's the most horrifying question, right?

[735] Well, that's why...

[736] So down there in the archetypal space, all these things lurk, the hero and the adversary.

[737] Well, you've just met the adversary.

[738] Well, maybe you were a tyrant.

[739] That's certainly possible.

[740] Maybe everything around you was chaotic.

[741] So what do you encounter when things fall apart?

[742] You encounter the adversary.

[743] You encounter the tyrant, you encounter the catastrophe of nature, and you encounter the dragon of the chaos, and they're all intermingled.

[744] You have to sort that out.

[745] That's what happens to Ellis when she goes down the rabbit hole, right?

[746] She meets the Red Queen.

[747] The Red Queen is always running around, off with her heads, off with her heads.

[748] And she says, in my kingdom, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

[749] Right, down the rabbit hole, you meet the archetypes.

[750] And so So back to responsibility.

[751] Well, one of the things Solzion Edison detailed, you know, he said, well, how does societies go corrupt?

[752] He said, it's easy.

[753] One little sin at a time.

[754] You go to work, someone's lording it over you, you know that they're tyrannical.

[755] You don't have the wherewithal to stand up.

[756] It's like, okay, you're a slave.

[757] And so if you continue to agree to be a slave, you will continue to generate tyrants, right?

[758] And the only thing that can stop you from doing that, I think, is the right kind of terror.

[759] It's like, be careful what you give up.

[760] Because, and that's this logos.

[761] Okay, so, all right, so that's this logos.

[762] The logos is the thing that enables you to mediate between order and chaos.

[763] And maybe you have to have some faith in that.

[764] It's like, well, what should you do if someone is harassing you?

[765] Well, you should fight back.

[766] Okay, what is that?

[767] What's the most effective way to fight back?

[768] Well, sometimes it's physical, but that's not necessarily for the best.

[769] Maybe it's through articulation, maybe it's through analysis, right?

[770] You want to be sharp, you want to be able to decompose a problem, you want to be able to formulate an argument and a counter -response, and maybe you want to be so good at that that people don't mess with you to begin with.

[771] And then you're a perfectly articulate counter -monster, and you never have to take your sword out.

[772] That's the place that you want to be.

[773] It's like people should know, after three seconds of interacting with you, that harassing you will be a serious.

[774] bad idea.

[775] And then you'll have a perfectly fine time with them.

[776] So, and that's part of, you know, so there's some utility in meeting the devil in the underworld, right?

[777] Because maybe he's got something to teach you.

[778] That's certainly possible.

[779] And that, and one of the things that you can be taught is that your normative morality, which is basically your harmlessness and your naivety, masquerading as virtue, is completely insufficient to protect you in the world, especially against the sorts of things that you're talking.

[780] about which are tyrant tyranny.

[781] Tyrants will push until you push back.

[782] It's in their nature.

[783] They don't have internal controls.

[784] So they just push and push and push and push and push and push.

[785] Even kids do that, like little kids do that all the time.

[786] They'll just push you until they hit a wall.

[787] They're actually quite happy when they hit a wall because the last thing a child wants is a universe without walls.

[788] It terrifies them, right?

[789] They want to see, well, I'm in a swimming pool.

[790] There's an edge.

[791] They don't want to see, oh, oh, oh, oh.

[792] this isn't a swimming pool, this is an ocean, I'm in the middle of an ocean, I'm going to drown.

[793] That's a terrible thing for children, that's why they need discipline and structure, because it's consistency and predictability and routine and all the things that are extraordinarily helpful to them.

[794] Okay, so now, think about that hierarchy that we talked about.

[795] So, you're not in a story, you're in nested stories, and the nested stories ground themselves in action, in actual embodied action, So, if you're going to be a good partner, maybe you help prepare the meals.

[796] And to help prepare the meals means you pick up a plate with your hand and you move it physically through space and you put it on the table.

[797] That's where it stops being an abstraction.

[798] So at the bottom of an ethical hierarchy of value are actions.

[799] Not things, that's the scientific world, but actions.

[800] And then you can label the actions with abstractions as you move up the hierarchy.

[801] So you're good at setting the table.

[802] So that means you're good at making dinner.

[803] So that means that you've got one element of being a good partner in place.

[804] And being a good partner is one element of being a good person.

[805] And so you're not so good at setting the table and you say, well, I'm not a good person.

[806] It's like, well, no, you should go down to the higher resolution levels of the hierarchy and start there.

[807] And that's what you do when you're arguing with people.

[808] But there's another thing that's really useful about conceptualizing the hierarchy in this manner.

[809] So I think what we'll do is we'll stop now for 10 minutes and I'll, because I want to bring up this diagram.

[810] Because what I want to do next is, it's a bleak story at the moment because the story is something like, you're going to lay out oversimplifications in the world and they're going to be prone to catastrophic error.

[811] And then you have to encounter what's terrifying in order to progress.

[812] And so what that means is that progression is always dependent on terror, something like that.

[813] And there's some truth in that, and that's why people don't progress.

[814] But it's not a sufficient truth, and I want to unpack that when we come back.

[815] So let's come back in 10 minutes, and then I can unpack that.

[816] There's this parable in the New Testament that just came to mind.

[817] I'm going to mangle it a bit because it's not one that I have well memorized, and I'm probably going to conflate two or three stories together.

[818] but I think I've got it right.

[819] Christ is walking down the road and someone picks him up and the person is rich and wealthy and He has a talk they have a talk and the wealthy man Basically tells him all the things that are wrong with his life and then he asks him what he should do about it and Christ says to him you have to give up everything you own and follow me and And that's often been read as a criticism of wealth, and that's actually not what the story means.

[820] What the story means is this, this guy has a lot of wealth, but he's still miserable.

[821] And so that means that what he has is the obstacle to what he could be.

[822] And so that's the message of the story, is that if you're miserable with what you have, then you have to let go of what you have so that maybe you could have something else.

[823] And so, and then there's some commentary on that story.

[824] I think other people are listening.

[825] and they say, well, if that's the price to be paid, then no one is ever going to pay it.

[826] And I think that's where the statement, it is easier for a man to go through the eye of a needle, for a camel to go through an eye of the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter paradise.

[827] I believe that's the derivation of that story.

[828] And like I said, that's been read as a critique of wealth, but it isn't.

[829] It's a critique of attachment.

[830] Now, you know, in the Buddhist doctrine, one of the impediments to enlightenment is attachment.

[831] And people read that as saying, well, you shouldn't care for anything in the world.

[832] And there's a nihilism that's associated with that.

[833] And there is a strong nihilistic tendency in Buddhism that has to do with abandonment of the world.

[834] And you see that in Christianity to some degree with people going off to lead ascetic lives.

[835] and to, you know, it's part of multiple religious traditions, that idea of asceticism, and there's some utility in it, if it is your attachment, say, to material things or status or whatever, that's interfering with your psychological progression.

[836] Now, the idea is that you should let go of whatever it is that's interfering with your psychological progression, because no matter how valuable what it is that's interfering is, it's not as valuable as what you're giving up.

[837] Okay.

[838] However, the criticism still still And the criticism was, well, if the task is that difficult, then no one's going to do it.

[839] And so in the brothers Karamazov, there's a famous story called the Grand Inquisitor.

[840] And it's a story told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother, Alyosha.

[841] And Ivan is a very high status, intelligent, attractive.

[842] tough -minded soldier.

[843] And Alyosha is his younger brother, and he's kind of softer and less rational, more spiritual, and also training to be a novitiate at the local monastery.

[844] And Ivan likes to tear strips off him because he's a cynic and an atheist, and in Dostoevsky's normal, brilliant manner, he makes Ivan an incredibly powerful, Articulate and admirable character.

[845] So when Dostoevsky wants to take someone on in his literary Investigations, he doesn't take his enemy and turn him into some sort of weak Puppet.

[846] He takes his enemy and turns him into the strongest possible enemy he can imagine and then goes to battle against that.

[847] It's a hallmark of great literature.

[848] It's what distinguishes Dostoevsky, for example, from Ayn Rand because what Ayn Rand does is she takes her, she's a darling of the I would say libertarian slash right, she takes her enemies, and they're all the same, first of all, every single one of her negative characters is exactly the same as every other one, and they're all bad, you know, there's no redeeming qualities whatsoever in them, and they also, I would say, make, they're weak characters who make weak arguments.

[849] That's not the way to progress.

[850] The way to progress is to take your enemy seriously, and to even inflate them into something beyond their capacity to inflate themselves and then see if you can hammer out a solution to the genuine problem that's being posed.

[851] Anyway, so Dostoevsky does that brilliantly, always, and that's what makes him so absolutely remarkable.

[852] But anyways, Ivan tells Elyosha this story.

[853] He calls it the Grand Inquisitor, and in the story, Christ comes back to Earth in the Spanish Inquisition, and he's out by a fountain, and people sort of notice him, and he starts performing miracles, and a big crowd gathers around, and it's like happy days, you know.

[854] But then the Inquisitor shows up, this old, you know, harsh, tyrannical guy, and he has his guards arrest him and throws him in prison.

[855] And so now Christ is in prison, and the Inquisitor comes down and says to him, well, you're probably wondering why we threw you in prison, you know, especially given that we're the members of the, you know, were the representatives of the church that you hypothetically founded.

[856] And Christ remains silent through this entire episode.

[857] And the Inquisitor basically says, look, you know, you laid down this ethic that's wonderful, but it's superhuman.

[858] No one can do it.

[859] It's asking way too much.

[860] And so the burden you put on people was just far too great.

[861] And so what we've done in the Catholic Church in the centuries since the church was founded is we've lightened the load.

[862] We said, well, we take ordinary people and say, well, they're here.

[863] Here's some things you can do to be a little bit better.

[864] And, you know, we've instituted confession and repentance and all that.

[865] We've kind of toned it down so that the average person has some hope of progress.

[866] And we're making headway.

[867] And the last bloody thing we need around here is you coming back and, like, screwing up all our good efforts.

[868] It's like it was nice to have you around once, but once was plenty, man. We don't need you around anymore.

[869] And so Christ listens to this, doesn't say anything.

[870] And then the Inquisitor turns to leave, and Christ grabs him and kisses him on the lips.

[871] And the Inquisitor turns white and then leaves, and when he leaves the door, he leaves the door open.

[872] And that's the end of the story.

[873] And it's an amazing story.

[874] It's an absolutely remarkable story in every possible way.

[875] And, you know, Dostoevsky was objecting to some degree to the tyranny of the Catholic Church, or even of the Christian church for that matter.

[876] But the thing that he did that was so damn brilliant is that he even made the inquisitor leave the door open.

[877] You know, and as a balanced critique of Catholicism, even during the Inquisition, it's so brilliant.

[878] It's so emblematic of Dostoevsky's take on the world that he criticized the inquisitorial aspect of Christianity.

[879] And, of course, it's the tyrannical aspect of any belief system, but noted that they bloody well left the door open, right?

[880] So it's brilliant, it's brilliant.

[881] It's remarkable.

[882] So anyways, the whole point that I'm making here is that there are terrible impediments to enlightenment and the like the impediments are the necessity of sacrifice and the necessity of necessity of necessity of the voluntary acceptance of suffering I mean you see that in Buddhism you know because one of the canons of one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is that life is suffering and that attachment makes it worse and well it isn't it isn't precisely attachment it's attachment to things such that you cannot release the things when it's time to let them go, right?

[883] So like you're a phoenix, you're a hundred years old, your feathers, they're not working anymore, right?

[884] You're all wrinkly, you're done.

[885] It's time to burst into flames and be reborn, but you don't want to burn off your feathers.

[886] You want to cling to them.

[887] And that's not good because you have to be willing to undergo that transformation process.

[888] And that involves, like, you know, if you take yourself apart because you've made a mistake and you find out what it is about you that's not set up properly and that's why the mistake occurred, that's really going to happen, for example, when an intimate relationship breaks down, then you have to be in a position where you're willing to let the errors that are part of your character that define you, right?

[889] They might even be part of your identity.

[890] You have to let, you have to be willing to let them go.

[891] You have to be willing to let them burn off.

[892] And that's a hell of a thing to ask.

[893] And so then the question might be, well, is there a less radical solution to the problem than crucifixion and resurrection or the total immolation and regeneration, because that's the archetypal, what's that, that's the archetypal end point that if you want to put yourself together, you have to die and be reborn.

[894] I mean, that, and that motif comes up all the time in, in popular, popular stories and in mythology.

[895] And so the, here's, here's how I think that problem can be resolved.

[896] So, let's go back to the, Pinocchio story momentarily.

[897] So what happens, and the Pinocchio story to me is analogous in its structure to the Sermon on the Mount.

[898] And so I'm going to make a parallel between those two things.

[899] So basically what the Sermon on the Mount suggests is that you should conceptualize the highest good that you're capable of conceptualizing and orient yourself towards that.

[900] And that having done that, you should live in the moment.

[901] So it's not like you should live in the moment.

[902] It doesn't say that because that's often.

[903] and Christ the hippie, you know, so the hippies who have adopted that sort of, that element of Christianity say, well, you live for the moment, you know, and in meditation and other practices, some of the attempt is to get you to live in the moment.

[904] But, you know, just to tell people to live in the moment, it's like, what the hell kind of advice is that?

[905] What about the future?

[906] You know, that's not helpful advice.

[907] Somebody comes to you and they're suffering dreadfully because, you know, their mother has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed.

[908] Well, live.

[909] in the moment.

[910] It's like, that's just not helpful.

[911] It's, and because it's even worse than that, it's judgmental.

[912] You say, well, the only reason you're suffering is because you haven't oriented yourself property, live in the moment.

[913] It's like, no, you're suffering because your mother has Alzheimer's and you don't have a job.

[914] It's like it's not because you aren't living in the moment.

[915] So living in the moment isn't the right answer.

[916] The right answer is something more like, orient yourself towards the highest good that you can imagine, and then act in the moment.

[917] That's a different story.

[918] Now that's what happens in the Pinocchio story.

[919] Basically, what happens is that Geppetto sees the star beckoning in the distance, and he orientes himself towards the highest good he can imagine.

[920] He wants to take this creation of his, and so this is manifesting itself conceptually at multiple levels simultaneously, because there's a, there's a story about the destiny of humanity in relationship to God nested in the story.

[921] It's like, take your fallible creation, your puppet, and set up the conditions such that it's capable of taking on full functional independence.

[922] It's something like that.

[923] So that's what you do if you're a good parent with your children.

[924] You don't protect them.

[925] You don't offer them safety.

[926] You don't do any of that, except insofar as it's necessary, to facilitate their development as fully competent and courageous beings.

[927] The purpose of the protection is only to allow that developmental process to, to So you orient, Geppetto orients himself, and so the father orients himself, and then the son undertakes the voyage.

[928] And so, all right, so let's say that that's the case.

[929] You orient yourself first, then you can start to rely on your, then you can start to concentrate more on your orientation to the moment.

[930] Now, I'm going to tell you another story.

[931] So, you know, I was just watching Harry Potter the other day, the first one.

[932] and I was watching the Quidditch game and the Quiddish game is very interesting because there's a game and a meta game going on at the same time.

[933] So the game is just the standard Quiddish game.

[934] It's kind of like basketball played on brooms, right?

[935] You have to throw balls through hoops and if you get enough points you win.

[936] But at the same time, so there's the normal players and then there's two seekers, one from each team.

[937] And the seekers aren't playing the same game.

[938] The game is nested inside the Seeker game, actually, Because if you're a seeker and you perform your task, then everyone wins, right?

[939] You win, but everyone wins.

[940] And so you're not even playing the normal game.

[941] You're playing the seeker game.

[942] And the thing that Harry Potter chases is this thing called the snitch.

[943] And the snitch, this is one of the things that's, I can't, I don't know how the hell, J .K. Rowland figured this out.

[944] I cannot figure it out.

[945] Because that snitch is a winged ball, right?

[946] And there's actually a symbol of that winged ball called the round chaos, which Jung describes in his works on alchemy.

[947] And his works on alchemy are really, really difficult.

[948] It's not easy to figure out what he's talking about at all.

[949] But the round chaos, which is a winged ball, is, it's a manifestation of the spirit mercury, and mercury is an emissary of the god.

[950] So you can think about mercury as the unconscious manifesting itself in your field of experience, something like that.

[951] In any case, the round chaos is the container of the primordial material from which the world is made.

[952] And I think about it like this.

[953] It's this thing.

[954] There.

[955] It's that.

[956] So when you encounter an anomaly, an error, it's a container.

[957] That's a way of conceptualizing it.

[958] And what does it contain?

[959] Well, it contains, in some sense, it contains the whole world.

[960] But here's an example.

[961] Like, look, let's say, God, let's say that you've had repeated fights with your wife about how domestic duties are going to be arranged around mealtime.

[962] And believe me, you're going to have those fights.

[963] And so what's happening is that meal times are unpleasant because there's a war for power going on in the kitchen, right?

[964] And so then you think one day, well, you're going to note that and you're going to do an archaeological investigation and find out just what the hell is going on.

[965] And so you start unpacking the fact that meal times are not pleasant.

[966] And so what's in that little thing that you're unpacking, that package?

[967] Well, the entire power dynamic between men and women in the modern world is inside that dispute.

[968] And, you might find that part of the reason that your wife is upset about the way that meal times are arranged is because her grandmother was beat by her grandfather, and that's playing a role in, it's played a role in determining her unconscious expectations, and that's pathologizing one of the day -to -day rituals in the house.

[969] And if you're going to unpack that, you're going to have to unpack all of that into, you take a little monster and you decompose it, you find out, It's a hydra.

[970] It's got 50 heads.

[971] Then you have to work through every single one of those.

[972] It's really, really difficult.

[973] And so it's a container that contains everything.

[974] But the thing is if you unpack it successfully, let's say, and you deal with it, you negotiate a consensus, then all of a sudden you get peace, say, around your meal times, which is a major accomplishment, man, because you have to eat three times a day, and it's the center of the household and all of that.

[975] So, but the thing is, is that often, when you're, especially in the context of an intimate relationship, things will emerge that produce discontinuities.

[976] And the question is, what should your attitude towards that discontinuity be?

[977] Well, you can punish the person for manifesting the discontinuity.

[978] That's the tyrannical aspect.

[979] Or you can let it take the whole thing apart, and that will happen.

[980] I mean, that's often how relationships end, is that a discontinuity emerges, and people get into it, and things go sideways so badly, that the whole relationship descends into chaos, and people bail out of it.

[981] And so it's no wonder that people want to ignore it, and it's also no wonder that they want to tyrannize it.

[982] It's like, quit bothering me with that.

[983] Well, possibly, but probably not.

[984] And also, if my attitude towards you is quit bothering me with that, you're a lot.

[985] attitude towards me when I have the same sort of problem in reverse is going to be exactly the same.

[986] And so we're not going to get anywhere with it.

[987] All right.

[988] But that still is painful.

[989] Now, let's go back to the Quidditch issue.

[990] Now, here's what happens, is that Harry Potter is picked to be the seeker.

[991] So that means he is the seeker.

[992] Whatever he represents is the seeker.

[993] And he's an interesting character because he's touched by evil and he's a root.

[994] rule -breaker, and he's also kind of a normal kid.

[995] He's not a hyper -intellect or anything like that.

[996] That's Hermione's role, right?

[997] So he's normal but super -normal at the same time, and he gets picked to be the seeker, and then you think about what is it he seeks, and he seeks this thing that glimmers, right?

[998] It flashes in front of him.

[999] It's made out of gold, and it has wings, and if he grabs it, then he wins.

[1000] And so the question is, what does that represent?

[1001] Now, it's interesting that when people watch that movie, they actually find that, you know, they think that that's kind of cool, that it's a cool game.

[1002] And it is a cool game.

[1003] She laid it out very nicely, and the idea is that, well, there's a game, and if you play it normally, you win the game, but in that game is a metagame is a meta -game, and if you play that properly, then not only do you win, but everybody wins.

[1004] So then the next rule is the meta -game supersedes the game, and that's the same idea that I'm chasing here with you today about this metamorality.

[1005] It's the morality that emerges as a consequence of the analysis of a set of moralities, or it's the morality to which all other moralities should be subjugated.

[1006] That's another way of thinking about it.

[1007] And I said, well, that's a terrible thing because it involves painful sacrifice, or maybe it involves confronting the thing you least want to confront.

[1008] That's the Jungian dictum, right?

[1009] If your life isn't all that it should be, then you should find out the thing that you least want to confront that you're avoiding and confront that.

[1010] And that's easy to say.

[1011] But it's a terrible thing because it means you're going to have to turn your gaze to the place where you are weakest and most vulnerable.

[1012] And that is asking a lot of people.

[1013] So then you might say, well, is there an alternative?

[1014] And I think there is an alternative.

[1015] So this is the anomaly, right?

[1016] This is the ball that contains everything.

[1017] I think there is an alternative.

[1018] I think it's associated with this idea.

[1019] So imagine we could have a conflict if we were in a relationship.

[1020] We could have a conflict that would blow the relationship apart.

[1021] All right, so we don't want to have that conflict.

[1022] And then we can have no conflict whatsoever, which means that you would never get to say what you wanted, and I would never get to say what I wanted, because we're either identical, which is just not happening, or we're going to have conflict, because you're going to want some things that I don't want, and vice versa.

[1023] So if there's no conflict, we are not in a relationship.

[1024] All right, so zero conflict is the wrong amount, and conflict that destroys the relationship is the wrong amount.

[1025] And then you might say, well, okay, what's the optimal amount of conflict?

[1026] Well, so then we can think about how people respond emotionally.

[1027] So let's say, if you go after the person that you're arguing with and you say, you're a bad person.

[1028] And you really make that case, you bloody well hammered home, you remember 50 things they've done that were bad and you lay them out.

[1029] It's like, I'm going to stomp you, you're a bad person.

[1030] You really need to change.

[1031] Okay, well, first of all, you're going to meet tremendous resistance.

[1032] that's like you've got the hydrogen, you bring in the hydrogen bomb to the war, right?

[1033] And maybe, unless you want to destroy everything, maybe that's not the most logical solution.

[1034] But then by the same token, everything's all right and we never have any conflict.

[1035] That's not helpful either, and you're going to get bored of that, and you're not going to develop.

[1036] And so then the question is, well, maybe there's some happy medium here.

[1037] Maybe you want to be repairing this structure, you know, the structure that goes from microactions up to higher order conceptualizations.

[1038] Maybe you want to be updating that on a constant basis, and you want to update it in a manner that doesn't drop you into chaos or place you in too much stasis.

[1039] And then the answer is, well, then the question is, how is it that you can calibrate your approach to error so that you get the benefits of doing it without the disadvantage of collapsing into chaos?

[1040] And then the answer to that is something like, it's something like, Once you have decided to adopt responsibility for being, and we'll say that what that means is that you have conceptualized a good that you're willing to devote yourself to, and I think you're perfectly welcome to do that on an individual basis.

[1041] I think you should do it on an individual basis.

[1042] You should consult with your ancestors while you're doing that, because generally speaking, the route to optimal, the route to quality of life and productivity has been laid out by other people.

[1043] We kind of know what the parameters are.

[1044] You need to do something that other people find is useful.

[1045] And you have to regard it as useful as well.

[1046] Or at least you have to be entertaining.

[1047] There has to be something about you of value to other people that you have to pursue with a fair bit of diligence.

[1048] So you have to play a productive social role.

[1049] Probably need friends.

[1050] Probably need an intimate relationship.

[1051] And if it could be medium to long -term intimate relationship, perhaps all the better.

[1052] That's what most societies hold up as ideal.

[1053] You could assume, well, there's probably a reason for that.

[1054] I think one of the reasons is that your life gets fragmented otherwise, badly fragmented.

[1055] You know, Because every time you have a long -term relationship and it fragments, it's like your identity is blown into pieces.

[1056] You get fragmented across time.

[1057] It's not good.

[1058] It breaks you into pieces, and you don't necessarily recover that well.

[1059] It makes everything much more impermanent and unreliable, all of those things.

[1060] So it introduces a tremendous amount of uncertainty into your life, and it also means that you don't have anyone around that you can really trust, and that's bad.

[1061] Because if you have someone around you can really trust, then you have two brains instead of one.

[1062] And like, you probably need two brains to manage your way through life.

[1063] It's pretty complicated.

[1064] So you orient yourself towards some good, the highest good that you can conceptualize.

[1065] And it has to be through a consultation with your ancestors because you need to do the things that people have always done.

[1066] And you need to do them properly.

[1067] And you need to assume that that's the way that you should live unless you have a very good reason to change it dramatically.

[1068] And maybe you do.

[1069] But you've got to start with some axiomatic set of presuppositions because otherwise you have to invent everything on your own and you don't have enough time to do that So you have to use normative guidelines and if you don't then people won't know what to do with you That's another big problem if you live completely outside the norm I mean, you know remarkable artists manage that to some degree But of course they pay for the privilege by being remarkable artists So if there's something truly remarkable about you perhaps you could justify deviating from the normative path, but if there isn't, first of all, there's nothing remarkable enough about you to justify deviating in every way from the normative path, no matter how remarkable you are.

[1070] So that's part of the rescuing of the father from the depths, is to reunite yourself with the traditional structures of your community.

[1071] You can do that in a way that you feel suits your own needs best, but I don't think you cannot do it, because it makes you weak.

[1072] then you'll drown.

[1073] All right, so let's say you have oriented yourself, but not perfectly, because you're full of mistakes and errors.

[1074] So then what do you do?

[1075] Because you have to fix those errors, but you still have to be oriented.

[1076] And this is why I started to get interested in the phenomena of meaning as a phenomenological experience, to experience something as meaningful.

[1077] It's not exactly obvious what that means to experience something as meaningful.

[1078] I think that you can you can approach it obliquely, you know, like if I said, watch yourself for two weeks and notice when you're doing something that you regard as meaningful.

[1079] I could say, well, here's some, here's some markers.

[1080] You lose a sense of time, you lose a sense of vulnerability, you're deeply engaged in it.

[1081] It seems worth the effort, right?

[1082] You forget yourself while you're doing it.

[1083] Maybe you forget your existential concerns while you're doing it.

[1084] You're not ruminating or obsessing about the meaning of your life.

[1085] life, right?

[1086] So there's markers for it.

[1087] It's like the flow states that Chick -Sat -Mahili described.

[1088] And then you can experience it, you experience it under certain sort of ritualistic conditions.

[1089] You might experience it when you go see a great movie.

[1090] You might experience it when you listen to music.

[1091] I think music is a very, very standard pathway for people to have that kind of experience.

[1092] Because virtually everyone gets intimations of meaning from music.

[1093] And I think music, music is hierarchically structured patterns that are representative of being laying itself out properly.

[1094] It's something like that.

[1095] So it's an abstract representation of proper being.

[1096] And so we can grapple with the phenomena of music and we can, we can bach, or phenomena of meaning, we can box it in a little bit and start to conceptualize it.

[1097] We can start to conceptualize it perhaps as the manifestation of a deep instinct.

[1098] And so I would say, well, meaning is what manifests itself when you are when you've oriented yourself properly and when you've optimized the flow of information between you and you between you and chaos that might be the right way of thinking about it because you think about a piece of music is you want it to be predictable but you don't want it to be perfectly predictable you want to be it to be predictable with some interesting variations and predictable with some variations that make sense and maybe you can conceptualize that is something like this.

[1099] It's like, it's predictable at this order of stability, but it's varying down here from time to time.

[1100] And so you've got stable stability there, but variability there.

[1101] And you can handle that.

[1102] So you want an overarching structure of stability with some internal variability.

[1103] And maybe that's the way that you update yourself without falling apart.

[1104] And then I would say, you can find the pathway to the optimal rate of update by relying on your sense of meaning.

[1105] That's what it's for.

[1106] What it tells you is that you're wandering your way through the world between the catastrophes of chaos and the catastrophes of order, and now and then you swing into the proper locale.

[1107] You're where you should be.

[1108] And what happens is you get engaged by that.

[1109] You get meaningfully engaged by that.

[1110] And it's fragile.

[1111] It'll move on you, right?

[1112] Because it's very difficult to exist at that point constantly.

[1113] Your bad habits, all sorts of things, your situation.

[1114] There's all sorts of things that are going to interfere with that.

[1115] But that doesn't mean that that isn't where you should be.

[1116] And so then you might say, well, that's where you should strive to be all the time.

[1117] And then the question might be, well, what would it be like if you were there all the time?

[1118] And I think that's where intimations of paradise come from.

[1119] I mean, when words, I think it was Wordsworth, talked about intimations of immortality and childhood.

[1120] People tend to romanticize their childhood because of the sense of intense engagement that goes along with being a child.

[1121] And it's one of the wonderful things about being around children, actually.

[1122] It's, it's one of, they pay you for their care.

[1123] And the way that children pay you for their care is that they turn normal things into magic again when you're around them.

[1124] Because you've seen it a hundred times before.

[1125] And so when you see it, you don't see it.

[1126] You see what you already know.

[1127] But when a child sees it, they don't, because they don't know.

[1128] They see it.

[1129] And then when you watch them see it, you see it too.

[1130] And so it's just tremendous fun leading a small child around to do things that you've done before because they're so, you know, they're like this.

[1131] They're like all the time.

[1132] And, you know, maybe that's too much.

[1133] And they cry and they get upset and all of that.

[1134] But a good part of the time, it's just wild -eyed wonder.

[1135] And then you can see the world through their eyes and it's payment.

[1136] And so that sense of being engaged like that is something that people love about children, and rightly so.

[1137] But it's also a marker to the proper way of being.

[1138] You know, there's a dictum in the, this is a Jungian idea, that there's no difference between the archetype of the wise old man and the archetype of the child.

[1139] They're the same thing.

[1140] Because the wise old man is the person who found what he had in childhood but lost.

[1141] Right.

[1142] That's a very powerful motif, is that the purpose of maturation is to reach.

[1143] return to the state of childhood as a mature being, not to stay in the state of childhood.

[1144] That's Peter Pan, but to make the sacrifices necessary for maturation and then return.

[1145] You say, well, how do you do that?

[1146] Well, you do that in part by noting what it is that's meaningful for you to engage in.

[1147] I would say it's your nervous system reporting to you.

[1148] Right hemisphere and left hemisphere balanced.

[1149] The balance between chaos and order produces an output that says you are in the right place.

[1150] It's a perception.

[1151] The meaning is a perception of being in the right place.

[1152] It's the genuine thing.

[1153] However, because it can be pathologized, that's the thing.

[1154] And that's why I think there's a call to virtue in most great religious traditions.

[1155] If you're going to rely on your sense of meaning to orient you, you have to play a straight game, because otherwise you warp and twist the inputs, and then the mechanism won't function properly.

[1156] You know, it's like if you were only, if you were only, if you, If you've blinded yourself to half the world, you can't use your perceptions to orient yourself properly because the half of the world that you're ignoring is going to pop up at you unexpectedly and take you down.

[1157] And so if your relationship with the world isn't pristine, honest, primarily, then you can't rely on your own internal orienting mechanisms.

[1158] And then you either fall into chaos, which is an absolute catastrophe, or you have to rely on some kind of external authority.

[1159] And that makes you prone to possession by tyrannical ideologies, for example, which gives you that sense of meaning that you should in fact have as a consequence of your own action.

[1160] This question is best like as I can, but okay, so if all relationships are sort of predicated on this balance between no conflict and conflict that destructs, then if we were look, if we were to look at an macro level, we see this sort of manifest in history in our world, like with conflict in between countries, in between systems, ideology, et cetera.

[1161] But wouldn't this sort of navigation between the exact line of no conflict versus conflict, how does that not imply that some people are inherently doomed to chaos?

[1162] It might imply that.

[1163] You know, one of the things, so look, so sometimes you don't have an answer that works.

[1164] You have an answer that produces the highest probability of success.

[1165] And like, I could view the archetypal world from a religious perspective and say that there's such a thing as ultimate and final redemption.

[1166] That's a metaphysical claim.

[1167] I don't want to do that.

[1168] I think it's independent of what I'm talking about.

[1169] What I'm saying is that there's an archetypal path that's laid out in the mythology of the hero.

[1170] And it's your best bet.

[1171] That's all.

[1172] It's your best bet.

[1173] It doesn't mean that if you apply it, that everything is going to turn out the way you might want it to turn out.

[1174] But I would say this.

[1175] There's an interesting twist on that too.

[1176] This is one of the things that I came to understand about trying to speak the truth, is that you can make an assumption, you can make a fundamental assumption based on your ignorance, let's say, and the ineradicable quality.

[1177] of your ignorance, that you can't compute the best possible outcome.

[1178] What you can do instead is make a decision, and one decision is, well, I'm going to say what I think and see what happens.

[1179] And then you can define that as the best possible outcome.

[1180] Now, you might say, well, now and then, that's going to lead you into chaos.

[1181] It's like, yeah, it is.

[1182] It is.

[1183] It's a strange inversion.

[1184] But regardless of all that, I would still say, human beings are finite and limited and mortal, you know, and death is.

[1185] And death is.

[1186] final let's say I'm not saying that but we could easily say that doesn't matter this is still the best pathway forward it isn't certainty there's no certainty and it's very frequently in life you have poison A or poison B like you get to pick your poison you don't get to pick the elixir of life but I would but I would say I would also say I don't think there's any reason to be particularly pessimistic because we don't know what would happen if people really tried hard to get their acts together like if they understood the necessity of that and really put it forward.

[1187] I mean, I've had lots of experience with my clinical clients now.

[1188] You know, I've seen dozens and dozens of people, and we have tried jointly to get their lives straighter, and it works almost inevitably.

[1189] Now, that doesn't mean I've had clients who died.

[1190] You know, we were three quarters through a wonderful process of psychological renovation, and they got cancer and died.

[1191] So there's no certainty associated with this.

[1192] But, it's the best solution available and it's also possible that it's a good enough solution you know I was talking to my class yesterday about this you know so you if you pursue the things in your life that are meaningful once you've oriented yourself and that means accepting the challenges that come along with that because one of the things that you'll find you even find this in music if you know a piece of music completely then you tend not to want to listen to it anymore there still has to be some challenge in it you still have to be some challenge in it have to track it and sometimes music is so complex you just can't, it just sounds like noise.

[1193] Modern music is often like that because it's so, well, it tends towards the chaotic and so it's, I find it difficult to listen to because I can't get a handle on it.

[1194] But then, you know, so it's too challenging and then there's other music, pop music is often like this, it's catchy the first two times you hear it and then you never want to hear it again.

[1195] It's too much, there's too much predictability and not enough chaos and hopefully you find a piece of music that's somewhere in the middle you can listen to it 50 or 100 times and each time you listen to it, there's still some new nuance in it that you didn't, that you didn't expect before.

[1196] And so, well, you kind of want to set up your life like that.

[1197] So that, and I think you see that the phenomena of meaning manifests itself at the area, at the locale of optimal challenge.

[1198] So if the thing, so one of the things, for example, I might say, well, let's say you want to set some goals for yourself.

[1199] We say, well, they're remarkable goals, but they're all, they're too unattainable.

[1200] You're just going to find it frustrating to pursue them.

[1201] It's going to be too punishing.

[1202] And then we might say, well, here's a goal and you think, well, I could do that, you know, standing on my head.

[1203] There's nothing, no challenge in it.

[1204] Well, both of those two extremes are going to leave you in a state that isn't characterized by the optimization of engagement and meaning.

[1205] One is too difficult.

[1206] It's too punishing.

[1207] It's the judge and nothing else.

[1208] And the other is the ultimate and merciful mothers.

[1209] It's like you win no matter how you play.

[1210] So then you calibrate it.

[1211] You say, well, you know, I need, I'm, I'm up for a challenge at this level.

[1212] I wouldn't recommend that because that's just a bit like people do that.

[1213] You might want to investigate your character in detail and decide, you know, what's going on at this level of analysis.

[1214] That's pretty harsh.

[1215] But you can certainly continually retool yourself at more micro levels.

[1216] And that, and I think what you do is you pick the level of retooling that optimizes your willingness to be engaged in it.

[1217] And then what's so interesting about that is that, I think, is that you get the benefits of perfection, so to speak, while still being imperfect.

[1218] Your actual imperfection has nothing to do with it.

[1219] What's relevant is the journey that you're undertaking to rectify the imperfection.

[1220] So instead of aiming to be the entity without flaws, you're aiming to be the entity that continues to realize its flaws and overcome them.

[1221] Well, that's a game you can play forever.

[1222] And that's maybe the ultimate in being an unflaught entity.

[1223] It's something like that.

[1224] So I want to show you some pictures that I think are associated with that.

[1225] So this one, to begin with, this is an absolutely amazing picture, I think.

[1226] So this is Berthold Furtmeier, a tree of life flanked by Eve and Mary Ecclesia.

[1227] And this, in some sense, this picture, summarizes the biblical stories in one picture which is that's pretty amazing that that a picture can do that and so let me explain the picture a little bit so the first thing you see here is that this is the tree this is the tree of life and so it echoes the tree of the of the knowledge of good and evil but this is post -fall so we interpreted that story of Adam and Eve already is that human beings became self -conscious they discovered death they discovered morality It was all a consequence of interacting with the fruit and the snake, something like that.

[1228] And you can read that as an evolutionary tale.

[1229] You can at least read it as a representation of the emergence of self -consciousness and human beings.

[1230] And so what does that mean?

[1231] Well, it means that the apple, in some sense, was equivalent to death.

[1232] And that's what you see here.

[1233] You see Eve is picking fruit from the tree here.

[1234] But the fruit is on the skull side of the tree.

[1235] And so Eve, it's the vulnerability.

[1236] of Eve, she's naked there and displayed to the world.

[1237] It's the vulnerability of Eve.

[1238] That's one way of thinking about it.

[1239] It was the vulnerability of Eve that was the catalyst to the development of human self -consciousness.

[1240] And I think that that's true.

[1241] It seems to be a reasonable proposition.

[1242] And so Eve's relationship with the fruit and the snake doomed human beings to the realization of mortality.

[1243] That's what this side of the picture represents.

[1244] And so it's a catastrophe, and it's associated here with the snake and the fruit.

[1245] It's human beings attempts to understand how it is that they emerged into a self -conscious world.

[1246] Okay, so fine.

[1247] So this is on the fall end of the story, and this is on the solution end of the story.

[1248] Now what you see here, there's a skull there, and there's a crucifix here.

[1249] And you see there's all these little fruits on this tree.

[1250] So it's the apple of death that Eve is handing out on this and it's the host that plays a role in the cannibalistic right that's at the center of Christian ritual, that Mary, as the church, is handing out as a medication for this.

[1251] So she's handing out the antidote.

[1252] Well, what's the antidote?

[1253] Well, it's a strange thing.

[1254] It's associated with this crucifix.

[1255] And that's translated into this wheat and host.

[1256] So you're supposed to eat that, and that is the incorporation of whatever this represents.

[1257] Well, the question then is, what does that represent?

[1258] It's a symbol of suffering, obviously.

[1259] It's a symbol of the ultimate in suffering.

[1260] It's the weirdest thing, because the picture proposes that to ingest the ultimate in suffering is to simultaneously ingest the antidote to the catastrophe of the knowledge of death.

[1261] It's a very strange paradox, but it's the proper paradox that's at the center of this, of the great drama that's represented by this picture a little knowledge of death destroys you full voluntary acceptance of it is the cure that's the idea well that's a that's a hell of an idea it's not only to and to accept it is simultaneously in some sense to take responsibility for it Because you don't take responsibility for things that you don't accept.

[1262] You only take responsibility for things that you do accept.

[1263] You say, well, the world is fundamentally flawed because its fundamental nature is intolerable vulnerability.

[1264] I'm not going to take any responsibility for that.

[1265] That's really Kane's attitude in the story of Kane and Abel.

[1266] He externalizes responsibility for the catastrophe of of his life.

[1267] And therefore he doesn't make the right sacrifices.

[1268] And so the paradoxical injunction here is accept responsibility for the catastrophe of your life.

[1269] And that way you transcend it simultaneously.

[1270] And there's an unbelievably hopeful message in there.

[1271] And the message is you're actually strong enough to do that.

[1272] You just don't know it.

[1273] And you won't find out till you do it.

[1274] You can't find out till you do it.

[1275] But if you did it, you'd find out that it was true.

[1276] It's massive risk.

[1277] It's the ultimate in risks, right?

[1278] You have to be willing to lose your life in order to find it.

[1279] It's like exactly right.

[1280] So that picture, when I started to understand that picture, well, every time I look at it, it just blows me away.

[1281] I can't, it's unbelievably, it's an unbelievably sophisticated set of ideas.

[1282] But I don't think it's much different, really, than this idea.

[1283] I mean, Buddha finds his enlightenment under a tree.

[1284] It's not fluke that that's the case.

[1285] That's his natural environment.

[1286] And he's sitting in the lotus here.

[1287] The lotus opens up.

[1288] It's this thing that springs up from the depths.

[1289] And he sits there illuminated the same way.

[1290] He's got a halo that's the sun that stands for higher consciousness.

[1291] And he's transcended by accepting the fact that life is suffering.

[1292] He's transcended the limitations that are part of mortality.

[1293] You see that symbol there.

[1294] that swastika you see it there it's reversed the nazis reversed it well think about that they weren't stupid their symbolism their symbols had meaning is what the swastika represented was what this represents reversed well that's a very bad idea this is the thing that this this idea is what enables people to transcend their suffering and buddhist said well don't don't be too attached to things and what does that mean it doesn't mean deny the world.

[1295] It might mean deny the world if you're too in love with the material like with material well -being, let's say, then your pathway to transcendence and meaning might be to abandon that because it's it's constraining you.

[1296] It's making you less than you could be.

[1297] But the fundamental lesson, the more fundamental lesson that's underneath that is don't let what you are stop you from being what you could be.

[1298] Right.

[1299] And so then the question is, well, what do you identify with.

[1300] Do you identify with what you are?

[1301] Then you're a tyrant.

[1302] Do you identify with with chaos?

[1303] Because that's the opposite of order, say, then you're nihilistic.

[1304] Well, you don't identify with either of those.

[1305] You know that they're both necessary.

[1306] You know that you have to live with both of them.

[1307] But you would, you identify with the capacity to continually transcend what you are.

[1308] And then you seek out error, that's what humility is.

[1309] It's like, I'm error -ridden.

[1310] It's like, so I want to see, I want to put myself in a situation where I can discover one of my errors, hopefully not in a way that's going to knock me completely out of the game, right?

[1311] I want to, I want to seek out a challenge.

[1312] I want to find out where my limits are.

[1313] I want to find out where there's not enough of me yet.

[1314] And I want to do that in a way that's engaging because, you know, you can wear yourself out fighting dragons, so obviously you can exhaust yourself completely and that's not helpful.

[1315] You know, one of the things I learned, for example, when I was coaching, when I was coaching lawyers who, these were people who had very high -end careers.

[1316] And so they had an infinite workload, no matter how much they worked, flat out, there was always way more work that they should do.

[1317] It's a very difficult thing to learn to manage.

[1318] And so they were exhausting themselves.

[1319] And I said, well, you know, you have to work less per day.

[1320] It's like, well, no, that's not happening.

[1321] I can't do that.

[1322] And so what I learned over time was, okay, this is what you have to do.

[1323] Every three months, you have to block off four days and go have a vacation.

[1324] You have to plan that in advance, so it's in your calendar so that your secretary doesn't book your time.

[1325] And then you need that because you have to recuperate enough so that you can work as hard as you're going to work.

[1326] And of course, they were nervous about that.

[1327] And I said, well, look, we can calibrate this.

[1328] Let's keep track of your billable hours over the next year and see if they increase or decrease, because I bet you if you take more time off, you'll actually have more billable hours.

[1329] You'll actually have your cake and eat it You'll get to have a vacation and you'll be more productive and that inevitably that was what happened.

[1330] And so that's a matter of Calibrating the game properly, right?

[1331] You want to play a game that you can play today, but also one that you can play next week and next month We're not talking about, you know, your career this week.

[1332] We're talking about you having a career that lasts 30 years that doesn't kill you that doesn't make you hate yourself or the job that doesn't make you better that doesn't wear you to a frazzle.

[1333] So it has to be optimized and so I think that you You can, in fact, decide to take on the load that's optimally meaningful if you want, and then you get to have your cake and eat it too.

[1334] You're on the pathway to continual incremental improvement.

[1335] You only have to burn off a feather at a time instead of having the whole bloody thing burst into flames.

[1336] But it's a constant source of renewal.

[1337] And there's an idea that to be renewed, you have to drink the water of life, right?

[1338] That's an old mythological idea.

[1339] And what's the water, the water of life, chaos is water.

[1340] Water, water is chaos.

[1341] Water is what washes away too much order and to stay continually let's say refreshed by the water of life is to take on exactly the right amount of chaos to make sure that your garden is properly nourished.

[1342] And I think meaning is actually the marker of that.

[1343] And as I said, you know that I'm not, I wouldn't consider myself either naive or particularly optimistic person.

[1344] I don't think I'm either of those.

[1345] But this isn't actually an idea, this is one of the only ideas that I've ever found that I really believe to be rock solid.

[1346] I actually think that it's true and it's very optimistic because it says you can use your sense of meaning to calibrate your progress through life.

[1347] But there's rules.

[1348] You have to aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive.

[1349] Now, and that's subject update because what the hell do you know, but you start by aiming at the star you can see rather than the dimmer one that you can't yet perceive.

[1350] And then you decide that you're going to do that honestly, right?

[1351] There's That's a big decision.

[1352] So the first decision, I think, in some sense, is a decision of love.

[1353] You're going to decide that being is worthwhile and that you're going to work for its betterment.

[1354] And that's a decision that's based on love.

[1355] And the second decision is based on truth.

[1356] Having made that decision, you're going to play a straight game.

[1357] Having made those two decisions, I think that you can allow your sense of meaning to calibrate your pathway.

[1358] And then what's so interesting is that you hit a state that's as close to paradisal as you're going to hit right away.

[1359] because being engaged like that, it's better to be engaged in the solution of a complex problem than not to have a problem at all.

[1360] And that's no different than saying it's better for there to be being than non -being, because being is a problem.

[1361] And so if you want to have no problems, then you have no being.

[1362] And you could say, well, being is so miserable that maybe that's the root we should take.

[1363] And fair enough, but maybe you can have your cake and eat it too.

[1364] You can have the damn problem, it can be a problem worth solving, and you can be so engaged in solving the problem that it justifies the fact that the problem exists.

[1365] And then you get to have the problem and the solution at the same time, and maybe that's better than not having the problem at all.

[1366] And I believe that, because one of the things I have seen, and I've seen this so interesting, being so interesting when I've been lecturing to people, especially more recently, and this is also manifested itself on YouTube.

[1367] I'm talking to people a lot about responsibility, and it's young men in particular that seem to be responding to that, and I think that's partly because I think that young women, in some sense, have their responsibility map already laid out for them.

[1368] It's also less voluntary, in some sense, for women, because they have more complicated problems to solve in the first part of their life, right?

[1369] Because they have to get the family problem solved.

[1370] But whatever, I've been talking in a very delineated matter about responsibility, which is a strange thing.

[1371] to sell to people, but responsibility is what gives your life meaning.

[1372] And so then you might say, well, then take on ultimate responsibility.

[1373] And what happens?

[1374] You have an ultimately meaningful life.

[1375] And then you might say, well, if your life is ultimately meaningful, it doesn't matter if it's punctuated by tragedy or even predicated on tragedy.

[1376] It's worth it.

[1377] And I think that's true.

[1378] And everything I've seen indicates to me that's true.

[1379] Every time I get my clients to take on more responsibility, you know, and it isn't an injunction.

[1380] You're a bad person.

[1381] You should take on responsibility.

[1382] It has nothing to do with that.

[1383] You can define the damn responsibility.

[1384] It isn't something that someone else should impose on you.

[1385] It's not a matter of doing what you should do in some abstract manner.

[1386] It's not that.

[1387] It's the choice of what game you're going to play.

[1388] And you can play the game of the Seeker, I would say.

[1389] And if you play that game, then everyone wins.

[1390] And it's the best game you can play.

[1391] And so the answer in some sense to the tragedy of life, to the catastrophe of life, to the fall is to adopt the responsibility of mortality that goes along with that and to play that game maximally.

[1392] And paradoxically, it's in the willingness to do that that the solution emerges.

[1393] And I don't, you know, I have done my best with every single thing I've talked to you guys about, I have done my best to do what Dostoevsky does in his novels, which is I make a proposition and then I spend months or years trying to figure out if I can take the bloody thing apart.

[1394] If there's something wrong with it because I want to find out.

[1395] I want to hit it with a hammer and see if it breaks and what I've been trying to do is to tell you all the things that I've Gathered let's say or or laid out or articulated or discovered over the last 30 years that I have not been able to break with the biggest hammer that I could take to them and I guess that's the fundamental one is that I believe that the the idea that lurks in these images derived from very different cultures it's the same idea life is suffering right indisputable what do you do about that you voluntarily accept it and then strive to overcome the suffering that's a consequence of that and you do that for you and you do that in a way that makes it better for other people and then that works and one question might be well how well does it work And the answer is, the only way that you can find out is by trying it.

[1396] That's it.

[1397] That's the existential element of it.

[1398] The proof is to be derived by the incarnation of the attitude in your own life.

[1399] No one can tell you how it will work for you.

[1400] It's the thing that your destiny is to discover that.

[1401] And you have to make the decisions to begin with.

[1402] It's like, because you can't do this without commitment.

[1403] You have to commit to it first.

[1404] That's the act of faith that Kierkegaard was so insistent upon.

[1405] You have to say, I'm going to act as if being is good.

[1406] I'm going to act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment.

[1407] I'm going to act as if I should pursue the deepest meaning possible in my life.

[1408] And there's reasons to do none of those.

[1409] They're real reasons.

[1410] So it's really a decision.

[1411] But you can't find out what the consequence of the decision is unless you make the decision.

[1412] I think the same thing happens when you get married, by the way.

[1413] is that if you think you might leave, you're not married.

[1414] And then you think, well, the marriage didn't succeed.

[1415] It's like, well, maybe you were never married.

[1416] Because the rule is, you don't get to leave.

[1417] And there's a reason for that rule.

[1418] Now, I'm not saying that there aren't situations where there should be exceptions made for that.

[1419] That's not the point.

[1420] The point is that there's some games you don't get to play unless you're all in.

[1421] And the other thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in.

[1422] No matter what you do, you're all in.

[1423] This is going to kill you.

[1424] So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting.

[1425] Because do you have anything better to do?

[1426] Really?

[1427] Why not pick the best thing possible that you could do?

[1428] Why not do that?

[1429] Maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that way.

[1430] I think you could.

[1431] That's what it looks like.

[1432] You know, people find such meaning in the responsibilities they adopt.

[1433] It stops making them ask questions about.

[1434] what life is for.

[1435] If you have a newborn child, for example, like, unless you're really in a bad way, psychotically depressed, or maybe your personality really needs some retooling, you stop thinking about anything but ensuring that that baby is doing well.

[1436] And if someone comes along and asks you an existential question about your commitment to that, the right response is, why are you asking me such stupid questions when when this this is manifesting itself right in front of your eyes like how blind can you be that isn't a time for for questions about the meaning of life the answer is right in front of you and if you can't see it it's not because life has no meaning it's because you're blind I mean that's what the image of of the virgin mother and the child is all about it's like what's the answer to the meaning of life here's an answer it's like Well, I'm going to criticize that.

[1437] Well, go right ahead.

[1438] You know, it's like, what, you're like a, what do you call that?

[1439] A termite, knowing on a temple, there's no, there's no utility in that sort of criticism.

[1440] It's blindness, and it's the same thing with regards to the path of the hero.

[1441] It's like, it glistens in front of you, and you can criticize it.

[1442] It's like, fine, put the cart before the horse and see how far are you.

[1443] get.

[1444] So I thought, to bring full closure to the class, I was trying to solve this terrible puzzle that confronted me for, and many other people, about how it was that human beings got themselves in such a tangle about what they believed, such a tangle that we were pointing the ultimate weapons of destruction at one another, which, by the way, we are still doing.

[1445] And I thought, okay, well, I understand that.

[1446] We need their belief systems.

[1447] They orient us.

[1448] And that means there will be conflict between belief systems, and that can be a catastrophe.

[1449] And that's being played out everywhere again in very many ways.

[1450] What's the solution to that?

[1451] Well, one possibility is there's no solution.

[1452] It's just mayhem all the way around.

[1453] Could be the case.

[1454] But it seemed to me, as I delved into it, that the proper solution to that was to live properly.

[1455] As an individual, because you're more powerful than you think.

[1456] Way more powerful than you think.

[1457] I mean, God only knows what you are in the final analysis.

[1458] You're blind to your own weaknesses, but you're also blind to your own strengths.

[1459] And so then I think, well, if you got your act together, it'd be better for you.

[1460] And instantly, it would be better for your family, assuming they wanted you to get your act together.

[1461] And not everyone does.

[1462] And then it would be better for the community.

[1463] It's like, how far could you take that if you stopped wasting time?

[1464] And if you stopped lying and if you oriented yourself to the highest possible good that you could conceive of and you committed to that.

[1465] How much good could you do?

[1466] Well, I would say, why don't you find out?

[1467] So that's what I think you should do.

[1468] You should find out.

[1469] You don't have anything better to do.

[1470] And there's nothing in it, as far as I've been able to tell, there's nothing in it but good.

[1471] So maybe you could sort yourself out so that you wanted nothing but the good.

[1472] And then maybe you could help make that manifest in the world.

[1473] And maybe we wouldn't have all these.

[1474] terrible problems then.

[1475] At least we'd have fewer of them and that would be a start.

[1476] So it's the answer to the problem of humanity is the integrity of the individual.

[1477] That's the answer.

[1478] So and states that are predicated on that realization are healthy.

[1479] So and states that aren't are doomed to stagnation and catastrophic collapse.

[1480] and personalities that are predicated on self - tyranny and the tyranny of others are doomed and doomed to collapse.

[1481] So, and then you think, well, what's the barrier?

[1482] And the barriers, are you willing to accept the responsibility?

[1483] And part of the answer to that is, reduce the damn responsibility until it's tolerable.

[1484] You don't have to fix everything at once.

[1485] You could just start by fixing the things that you could fix.

[1486] Or you could even do it more.

[1487] You could do it with even less self -sacrifice.

[1488] You could start by fixing only the things that you want to fix.

[1489] God, you can get a massive way that way.

[1490] So do it.

[1491] See what happens.

[1492] That's what you should have been taught in university, right from the beginning.

[1493] It's like aim at the highest good.

[1494] Tool yourself into something that can attain it.

[1495] And go out there and manifest it in the world.

[1496] And everything that comes your way will be, everything that comes your way will be a blessing.

[1497] And so all you have to do is give up your resentment and your hatred.

[1498] I know that's a hard thing to give up because you have plenty of reason for it.

[1499] That's probably a good place to stop.

[1500] So it's a pleasure.