God and the Hierarchy of Authority

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

[1] You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

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

[3] This is part three of the psychological significance of the biblical stories lecture series.

[4] The lecture is entitled, God in the Hierarchy of Authority.

[5] Peter Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre throughout the summer.

[6] Tickets can be found at Jordan B. Peterson .com slash Bible hyphen series, or by finding the link in the description.

[7] I'm really looking forward to this lecture, not like I wasn't looking forward to the other ones, but the stories that I want to cover tonight, one of the things that just absolutely staggers me about them, especially the story of Canaan Abel, which I hope to get to, is like it's so short, it's unbelievable, it's like 10, 11 lines, there's nothing to it at all.

[8] And I've found that it's essentially inexhaustible in its capacity to reveal meaning, and I don't exactly know what to make of that.

[9] I mean, I think, you know, because I said I was going to take as rational an approach to this issue as I possibly could, I think it has something to do with this intense process of condensation across very long periods of time.

[10] That's the simplest explanation, but I'll tell you, the information in there is so densely packed that it really is, it's really, it's not that easy to come up with an explanation for that.

[11] Not one that I find fully compelling.

[12] I mean, I do think that the really old stories, and we've been covering the really archaic stories in the Bible so far, I think that one of the things that you can be virtually certain about is that everything about them that was memorable was remembered, right?

[13] And so in some sense, and this is kind of like the idea of Richard Dawkins' ideas of memes, which is often why I thought that Richard Dawkins, if he was a little bit more mystically inclined, he would have become Carl Jung because there are theories are unbelievably similar.

[14] The similar of meme and the similar of the idea of archetype of the collective unconscious are very, very similar ideas except the Jungian idea is far more profound in my estimation.

[15] Well, it just is.

[16] He thought it through so much better, you know, because Dawkins tended to think of meme as sort of like a mindworm, you know, something that would infest a mind and maybe multiple minds.

[17] But he never really took, I don't think he really ever took the idea with the seriousness it deserved.

[18] And I did hear him actually make a joke with Sam Harris the last time they talked about the fact that, that there was some possibility that the production of memes, say, religious memes, could alter evolutionary history.

[19] And they both avoided that topic instantly.

[20] They had a big laugh about it and then decided they weren't going to go down that road.

[21] And so that wasn't very, that was quite interesting to me. But these, the density of these stories, I do really think still is a mystery.

[22] It certainly has something to do with their absolute, their impossibility to be forgotten.

[23] You know, and that's actually something that could be tested empirically.

[24] I don't know if anybody has ever done that because you could tell naive people two stories even equal length, right?

[25] One that had an archetypal theme and the other that didn't, and then wait three months and see which ones people remembered better.

[26] It would be a relatively straightforward thing to test.

[27] I haven't tested it, but maybe I will at some point.

[28] But anyways, that's all to say that I'm very excited about this.

[29] this lecture because I get an opportunity to go over the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Canaan and I hope we managed both of those today and maybe we'll get to the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel as well but I wouldn't count on it not at the rate we've been not at the rate we've been progressing but that's okay that's that's no problem it's there's no sense rushing this all right so we're gonna go before we go that before we do that I want to finish my discussion of the idea of the psychological significance of the idea of God and I've been thinking about this a lot more, you know, because, of course, this lecture series gives me the opportunity and the necessity to continue to think.

[30] And, you know, it certainly is the case.

[31] So the hypothesis that I've been developing with the Trinitarian idea is something like that the Trinitarian idea is the earliest emergence in image of the idea that there has to be an underlying cognitive structure that gives rise to consciousness as well as consciousness itself.

[32] And so what I was suggested was that the idea of God, the Father, is something akin to.

[33] to the idea of the a priori structure that gives rise to consciousness, that's an inbuilt part of us, so that's our structure.

[34] You could think about that as something that's been produced over a vast evolutionary time span, and I don't think that's completely out of keeping with the ideas that are laid forth in Genesis 1, at least if you think about them from a metaphorical perspective, and it's hard to read them literally, because I don't know what, you know, there's an emphasis on day and night, but the idea of day and night as 20, four -hour diurnal, you know, daytime and nighttime interchanges that are based on the earthly clock seems to be a bit absurd when you first start to think about the construction of the cosmos, so it just doesn't seem to me that a literal interpretation is appropriate.

[35] I mean, it's another thing that you might not know, but, you know, many of the early church fathers, one of them origin in particular, stated very clearly, this was in 300 AD, that these ancient stories were to be taken as wise metaphors and not.

[36] to be taken literally.

[37] Like the idea that the people who established Christianity, for example, were all the sorts of people who were biblical literists.

[38] It's just absolutely historically wrong.

[39] I mean, some of them were, and some of them still are.

[40] That's not the point.

[41] Many of them weren't, and it's not like people who lived 2 ,000 years ago were stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

[42] And so they were perfectly capable of understanding what constituted something approximating a metaphor, and also knew that fiction, in some sense, considered as an abstraction could tell you truths that non -fiction wasn't able to get at unless you think that fiction is only for entertainment, and I think that's a very, that's a big mistake to think that.

[43] So, all right, so here we go.

[44] So, yes, so with regards to the idea of God the father, so the idea is that in order to make sense out of the world, you have to have an a prior cognitive structure.

[45] And that was something that Immanuel Kant, as I said last time, put forward as an argument against the idea that all of the information that we acquire during our lifetime is a consequence of incoming sense data.

[46] And the reason that Kant objected to that, and he was absolutely right about this, is that you can't make sense of sense data without an apriary structure.

[47] You can't extract from sense data the structure that enables you to make sense of sense data.

[48] It's not possible.

[49] And that's really being demonstrated, I would say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, since the 1960s and the best demonstration of that was actually the initial failure of artificial intelligence because when the AI people started promising that we would have fully functional and autonomous robots and artificial intelligence back in the 1960s what they didn't understand and what stalled them terribly until about the early 1990s was that it was almost that the problem of perception was a much deeper problem than anybody ever recognized because like when you look out the world you just see well look there's objects out there and by the way you don't see objects, you see tools, just so you know, in the neurobiology of that's quite clear.

[50] You don't see objects and infer utility.

[51] You see useful things and infer object.

[52] So it's actually the reverse of what people generally think.

[53] But the point is that regardless of whether you see objects or useful things, when you look at the world, you just see it and you think, well, seeing is easy because there the things are and all you have to do is like, you know, turn your head and they appear.

[54] And that's just so wrong that it's almost impossible to overstate.

[55] The problem of perception is staggeringly difficult.

[56] And one of the primary reasons that we still don't really have autonomous robots, although we're a lot closer to it than we were in the 1960s, is because it turned out that you actually have to have in a body, you have to have a body before you can think.

[57] And even more importantly, you have to have a body before you can see, because the act of seeing is actually the act of mapping the patterns of the world onto the patterns of the body.

[58] It's not, things are out there, you see them, then you think about them, then you evaluate them, then you decide to act on them, and then you act.

[59] I mean, that you could call that a folk idea of psychological processing or perception.

[60] It's not, that is not how it works.

[61] Like your eyes, for example, map, one of the things they do is map right onto your spinal cord, for example, they might right onto your emotional system.

[62] So it's actually possible, for example, for people to be blind and still be able to detect facial expressions, which is to say you can, someone who's cortically blind, so they've had their visual cortex destroyed often by a stroke, They'll tell you that they can't see anything But they can guess which hand you put up if you ask them to And if you flash them pictures of angry or fearful faces They show skin conductance responses to the more emotion -laden faces And it's because imagine that the world is made out of patterns Which it is Then imagine that those patterns are transmitted to you electromagneticly Through light and then imagine that the pattern is duplicated on the retina And then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve And then the pattern is distributed throughout your brain And some of that pattern makes up what you call conscious vision, but other parts of it just activate your body.

[63] And so, for example, when I look at this, when I look at this, whatever it is, bottle, that's the word.

[64] You know, when I look at it, especially with intent in mind, as soon as I look at it, the pattern of the bottle activates the gripping mechanism of my hand.

[65] And part of the act of perception is to adjust my bodily posture, including my hand grip, to be of the optimal size to pick that up.

[66] And it's not that I see the bottle and then think about how to move my hand.

[67] That's too slow.

[68] It's that I use my motor cortex to perceive the bottle, and that's actually somewhat independent of actually seeing the bottle as a conscious experience.

[69] So, anyways, the reason that I'm telling you that all of that, and I'm...

[70] And there's much more about that that can be told.

[71] Rodney Brooks, he's someone to know about.

[72] He's a robotics engineer who worked in the 1990s, and he invented the Rumba, among many other things.

[73] He's a real genius, that guy.

[74] And Brooks was one of the first people to really point out that to be able to have a machine that perceived well enough to work in the world, that you had to give it a body, and that the perception would actually be built from the body up, rather than from the abstract cognitive perceptions down.

[75] And so, well, that turned out to be the case.

[76] And Brooks built all sorts of weird little machines in the 1990s that didn't even really have any central brain, but they could do things like run away from light.

[77] And so they could perceive light, but their perception was the act of running away from light.

[78] And so perception is very, very, very tightly tied to action in ways that people don't normally perceive.

[79] Anyways, that's all to say that you cannot perceive the world without being embodied and you know, you're embodied in a manner that's taken you roughly three and a half billion years to pull off, right?

[80] There's been a lot of death as a prerequisite to the embodied form that you take and so it's taken all that trial and error to produce something like you that can interact with the complexity of the world well enough to last the relatively paltry 80 or so years that you can last.

[81] And so I think about that as this may be wrong, but I think it's a useful, at least it's a useful hypothesis.

[82] I think the idea of God the Father is something like the birth of the idea that there has to be an internal structure that out of which consciousness itself arises that gives form to things.

[83] And well, and if that's the case, and perhaps it's not, but if it's the case, it's certainly reflection, it's a reflection of the kind of factual truth that I've been describing now.

[84] And then like I also mentioned that I kind of see that the idea.

[85] of both the Holy Spirit and also of Christ, and most specifically of Christ, in the form of the Word, as the active consciousness that that structure produces and uses, not only to formulate the world, because we formulate the world, at least the world that we experience, we formulate, but also to change and modify that world, because there's absolutely no doubt that we do that, partly with our bodies, which are optimally evolved to do that, which is why we have hands, unlike dolphins, that have, you know, very large, brains like us but can't really change the world.

[86] We're really adapted and evolved to change the world and our speech is really an extension of our ability to use our hands.

[87] So the speech systems that we use are very well -developed motor, a very well -developed motor skill.

[88] And generally speaking, your dominant linguistic hemisphere is the same as your dominant hand.

[89] And people talk with their hands, like me, as you may have noticed, and we use sign language, and there's a tight relationship between the use of the hand and the use of language, and that's partly because language is a productive force, and the hand is part of what changes the world.

[90] And so all those things are tied together in a very, very complex way with this a priori structure and also with the embodied structure, and I also think that's part of the reason why classical Christianity puts such an emphasis not only on the divinity of the spirit, but also on the divinity of the body, which is a harder thing to grapple with, you know, it's easier for people to think, if you think in religious terms at all, that you have some sort of transcendent spirit that somehow detached from the body that might have some life after death, something like that, but Christianity in particular really insists on the divinity of the body.

[91] So the idea is that there's an underlying structure that's got this quasi -patriarchal nature, partly because it's, for complex reasons, but partly because it's a reflection of the social structure as well as other things and then that uses consciousness in the form particularly of language but most particularly in the form of truthful language in order to produce the world in a manner that's good and I think that's a walloping powerful powerful idea especially the relationship between the idea that it's truthful speech that gives rise to the good because that's a really fundamental moral claim and I think that's a tough one to beat man because one of the things I've really noticed is, and this, and it isn't just me, that's for sure, is that, you know, there's a lot of tragedy in life.

[92] There's no doubt about that.

[93] And lots of people that I see, for example, in my clinical practice are laid low by the tragedy of life.

[94] But I also see very, very frequently that people get tangled up in deceit, in webs of deceit that are often multiple generations long, and that just takes them out.

[95] You know, and so, so deceit can produce extraordinary levels of suffering that last for very, very long periods of time.

[96] And that's really a clinical truism, you know, because Freud, of course, identified one of the problems that contributed to the suffering we might associate with mental illness, with repression, which is kind of like a lie of omission.

[97] That's a perfectly reasonable way to think about it.

[98] And Jung stated straight out that there was no difference between the psychotherapeutic, the curative psychotherapeutic effort and supreme moral effort, including truth.

[99] Those were the same.

[100] thing as far as he was concerned.

[101] And Carl Rogers, another great clinician who was at one point a Christian missionary before he became more strictly scientific.

[102] He believed that it was in truthful dialogue that clinical transformation took place.

[103] And of course, one of the prerequisites for genuine transformation in the clinical setting is that the therapist tells the truth and the client tells the truth because otherwise how in the world do you know what's going on?

[104] How can you solve a problem when you don't even know what the problem is.

[105] And you don't know what the problem is unless the person tells you the truth.

[106] That's something really to think about in light of your own relationships.

[107] Because, you know, if you don't tell the people around you the truth, then they don't know who you are.

[108] And maybe that's a good thing, you know, because, well, seriously, people have reasons to lie, right?

[109] I mean, that aren't trivial.

[110] But it's really worth knowing that you can't even get your hands on the problem unless you formulate it truthfully.

[111] And if you can't get your hands on the problem, the probability that you're going to solve it is just so low.

[112] And so then, I've been thinking about as well, this, and this idea has become more credible to me the longer I've developed it, the longer I've thought about it.

[113] You know, the idea that there's, I'll go back, it's partly the idea that, well, let me figure out how to start this property.

[114] A friend of mine, business partner, and a guy that I've written scientific papers with, very smart guy, took me to task, and I think I told you this a little bit about using the term dominance hierarchy, which might be fine for like chimpanzees and for lobsters and for creatures like that, but not for chimpanzees even so much.

[115] And he said something very interesting.

[116] He thought that the idea of dominance hierarchy was actually a projection of a early 20th century quasi -Marxist hypothesis onto the animal kingdom that was being observed, and the notion that the hierarchical structure that you see that characterizes, say, mating hierarchies in chimps, for example, the idea that that was predicated on power was actually a projection of a kind of political ideology.

[117] And I thought, that really bugged me for a long time when you said that, because I'd really been used to using the term dominance hierarchy, and I thought, he told me all that.

[118] I thought, ugh, that's so annoying, it's so annoying, because it might be right, and It took me months to think about it.

[119] And then I was also reading Franz Duol at the same time, and he's a primatologist, and also Jack Pinksep, who's a brilliant, brilliant, affective neuroscientist, who unfortunately just died.

[120] He wrote a great book called Affective Neuroscience.

[121] And for rats to play, they have to play fair, or they won't play with each other.

[122] That's a staggering discovery, right?

[123] Because anything that helps instantiate the emergence of ethical behavior in animals and that associates it with an evolutionary process, which is essentially what Pank's up was doing, gives credence to the notion that the ethics that guide us are not mere sociological epiphenominal constructs.

[124] They're deeply rooted.

[125] If rats, and they're rats, for God's sake, you can't trust them, and they still play fair, you know.

[126] And the wall noticed that the chimp troops that he studied, it wasn't the barbaric chimp that ruled with an iron fist that was the successful ruler, because he kept getting torn to shreds by the compatriots that he ignored and stomped on.

[127] Susie showed some weakness, they'd just tear him into pieces.

[128] The chimp leaders that were stable, you know, that had a stable kingdom, let's say, were very reciprocal in terms of their interactions with their friends.

[129] And chimps have friends, and they actually last for a very long time chimp friendships.

[130] And they were also very reciprocal in their interactions with the females and with the infants.

[131] And I thought that's a friends to Wall is a very smart guy.

[132] And I thought that was also foundational science because it's really something to note that the attributes that give rise to dominance in a male dominance hierarchy, sort of used that word, let's call it authority that might be better or even shudder competence, which I think is a better way of thinking about it, is that that's not predicated purely on anything that's that's as simple as brute power.

[133] And I think too, you know, I think as well that the idea, and this is a deep, Devious and dangerous political idea in my estimation the ideal that male dominance hierarchies Sorry male hierarchies are fundamentally predicated on power in a little in a law abiding in a law abiding society I think is I think is I think about that for like a month say Which isn't that long to understand how absurd that is because most people who are in positions of authority.

[134] Let's say Are just as hemmed in by ethical responsibility or even more so than people at the other levels of the hierarchy.

[135] And we know this even in the managerial literature, because we know, generally speaking, that managers are more stressed by their subordinates than the subordinates are stressed by their managers.

[136] And that's not surprising.

[137] You want to be responsible for like 200 people?

[138] You really want that?

[139] That's hard work, man. And I mean, I know it's a pain to have a boss because you have to care about what the boss thinks.

[140] And maybe the person is arbitrary, in which case they're not going to be particularly successful.

[141] But it's no joke to be responsible for 200 people.

[142] And you have to behave very carefully when you're in a position of responsibility and authority like that, because you will get called out if you make mistakes constantly.

[143] So it's not like you're, it's not like because you have a position that's higher up in the hierarchy, that you're less constrained by ethical necessity.

[144] Now, if you're a psychopath, well, that's a whole different story.

[145] But psychopaths have to move pretty rapidly from hierarchy to hierarchy, right?

[146] Because they get found out quite quickly.

[147] And as soon as their reputation is shattered, then they can't get away with their shenanigans anymore.

[148] So, okay, so all of this is to say that there is something very interesting about the pattern of behavior.

[149] So imagine that sexual selection is working something like this, and we know that sexual selection is a very, very, very, very powerful biological force, even though biologists ignored it for almost 100 years after Charles Darwin originally wrote about it, thinking mostly about natural selection.

[150] They didn't like the idea of sexual selection because it tended to introduce the notion of mind into the process of evolution, because it deals with choice.

[151] So imagine, on the one hand, that you have a male hierarchy.

[152] We know that the men at the top of the hierarchy are much more likely to be reproductively successful than the men at the bottom.

[153] And it's particularly true of men.

[154] So you have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors.

[155] I'm not going to do the math, and I know it doesn't sound plausible, but you could look it up and figure it out.

[156] It's perfectly reasonable fact that actually happens to be true.

[157] So there's twice as many female ancestors because females are twice as likely, on average, to leave offspring as men.

[158] Now, what happens is any man who does reproduce tends to reproduce more than once, but a bunch of them reproduce zero.

[159] Whereas, so it would be the average man who reproduces has two children, and the average man who doesn't reproduce has zero, obviously.

[160] And the average woman who reproduces has one child.

[161] So that means that there's twice as many females in your line as there is males.

[162] So that that's a big deal.

[163] And so imagine that it works something like this.

[164] So the men elect the competent men who are admired and who are, I can't say, dominant, who are given positions of authority and respect.

[165] Let's put it that way.

[166] And it's like an election.

[167] Now, it could be an actual democratic election, but it's at least an election of consensus, or it's at least an election of, well, we're not going to kill him, now, which is also a form of election, right?

[168] It's a form of tolerance, you know.

[169] So, and then what happens is the women, for their part, peel from the top of the male hierarchy.

[170] And so you've got two factors that are driving human sexual selection across vast stretches of evolutionary time.

[171] One is the election of men by men to positions where they're much more likely to reproduce, and the second is the tendency of women to peel off the top of male dominance hierarchies, which is extraordinarily well established, cross -culturally.

[172] Even if you flatten out the socio -economic disparity, say, between men and women, like they've done in Scandinavia, you don't reduce the tendency of women to peel off the top of the male hierarchy by much.

[173] And why would you?

[174] I mean, women are smart.

[175] Why in the world wouldn't they go for...

[176] Why wouldn't they strive to make relationships with men who are relatively successful, and why wouldn't they let the men themselves define how that constitutes success?

[177] It makes sense.

[178] if you want to figure out who the best man is, why not let the men compete, and the man who wins, whatever the competition is, is the best man by definition.

[179] How else would you define it?

[180] So, okay, so why am I telling you all that?

[181] Well, the reason is, is because it seems to me that there's been this complex interplay across human evolution between the election of the male dominance hierarchy and sexual success.

[182] And that's a big deal if it's true.

[183] It could be, Because what would happen, you see, is that as men evolved, they would evolve to be better and better at climbing up the male hierarchy.

[184] Because the ones who weren't good at that wouldn't reproduce.

[185] So obviously, that's going to happen.

[186] But then it wouldn't just be a hierarchy because there's a whole bunch of different hierarchies.

[187] And so then you might say, well, are there commonalities across hierarchies?

[188] That's a reasonable thing to propose.

[189] I mean, they're not completely opposed to one another at least.

[190] If you're relatively more successful in one hierarchy, then it's more probable that you'll be successful in another.

[191] And that's actually a really good definition of general intelligence or IQ, and that's actually one of the things that women select men for.

[192] Now, men also select women for that, but the selection pressure is even higher from women to men.

[193] And general IQ is one of the things that propels you up across dominance hierarchies because it's a general problem -solving mechanism.

[194] And the other thing that seems to do that to some degree conscientiousness and there's also some evidence that women prefer conscientious men so and of course why wouldn't they because you can trust them and and and and they work and so those are both good things so then you think okay so men have adapted to start to climb the male dominance hierarchy but it's the set of all possible hierarchies that they're adapted to climb and so then you think there's there's a set of attributes that can be acted out that and that can be embodied that will increase the probability that you're going to rise to the top of any given hierarchy.

[195] And then you can say, well, that as you adapt to that fact, then you start to develop an understanding of what that pattern constitutes.

[196] And so that starts to become the abstract representation of something like multidimensional competence.

[197] And that's like the abstraction of virtue itself.

[198] Well, and none of that has, then none of that's arbitrary, man. That's as bloody well grounded in biology as anything could be.

[199] And I think that's a really hard argument to refute.

[200] And like one of the things I should tell you about how I think is that when I think something I spend a long time trying to figure out if it's wrong, you know, because I like to hack at it from every possible direction to see if it's a weak idea, because if it's a weak idea, then I'd rather just dispense with it and find something better.

[201] And I've had a real hard time trying to figure out what's wrong with that idea.

[202] It seems to me that it's pretty damn solid.

[203] And then the idea that, you know, if you watch what people do in movies and so on and when they're reading fiction, it's obvious that.

[204] It's obvious that it's, it's that they're very good at identifying both the hero and the anti -hero.

[205] We could say the anti -hero, generally speaking, the bad guy, is someone who strives for authority and position, but fails.

[206] Generally speaking, not always, but fails.

[207] So he's a good, bad example.

[208] A kid, you take a kid to a good guy, bad guy movie, the kid figures out pretty fast that he's not supposed to be the bad guy and figures out very quickly to zero in on the good guy.

[209] And that means that there's an affinity between the pattern of good, guy that's being played out in the fiction and the perceptual capacity of the child, you know, and one of the things I told my son when he was a kid, when I used to take him to movies that were sometimes more frightening than they should have been.

[210] But one of the things I always told him was I never said don't be afraid.

[211] Because I think that's bad advice for kids.

[212] What I said was keep your eye on the hero, right?

[213] Keep your eye on the hero.

[214] And he was gripped by the movie and often quite afraid of them, you know, because movies can be very frightening.

[215] So he just like zero in on that guy and hoping, and you know what it's like in a movie, you hope that the good guy wins, generally speaking, and I mean, why do you do that?

[216] Where does that come from?

[217] You see how deeply rooted that is inside you.

[218] You'll bloody well go line up and pay to watch that happen.

[219] It's not an easy thing to understand, and it's so self -evident to people that we don't even notice that it's a tremendous mystery.

[220] And so is it so unreasonable to think that we would have actually, over the millennia, come to some sort of collective conclusion about what the best of the best guys are, best of the good guys are, and what the worst of the bad guys are.

[221] And to me, architectically speaking, thinking of that as the hostile brothers, so that's Christ and Satan, or Canaan Abel, for example, very common mythological motif, the hostile brothers.

[222] It's like those are archetypes.

[223] It's like the Satan, for example, is by definition the worst that a person can be.

[224] And Christ, by definition, this is independent of anything but conceptualization is by definition the best that a man can be now as I said I'm speaking psychologically and conceptually but given our capacity for imagination and our ability to engage in fiction and our love for fiction and our capacity to dramatize and our love for the stories of heroism and catastrophe and good and evil I can't see how it could be any other way So, well, so that's part of the idea that's driving the notion of the evolution of the idea of God and even more specifically driving the evolution of the idea, at least in part of the Trinity.

[225] So God is an abstracted ideal formulated in large part to dissociate the ideal from any particular incarnation or man or any ruler.

[226] And there's another rule in the biblical stories, which is that when the actual ruler, I mentioned this before, when the actual ruler becomes confused with the abstracted ideal, then the state immediately turns into a tyranny and the whole bloody thing collapses.

[227] So the idea is so sophisticated.

[228] You know, one of the things that we figured out, and this was a hard thing to figure out, was that you had to take the abstraction and divorce it from any particular power structure and then think about it as something that existed as an abstraction.

[229] But a real thing, right?

[230] Real and that it governed your behavior, in everyone's behavior, including the damn king.

[231] The king was responsible to the abstracted ideal.

[232] Man, that's an impossible.

[233] That is such an impossible ideal.

[234] Why would have they agreed to that 5 ,000 years ago?

[235] But one of the things you see continually happening in the Old Testament is that as soon as the Israelite, for example, the Israelite kings become almighty.

[236] The real God comes along and just cuts them into pieces and then the whole bloody state falls apart for like hundreds of years.

[237] It's like, I think that's a lesson that we have not thoroughly, consciously, yet learned.

[238] It's still implicit in the narratives.

[239] We still haven't figured out why that's the case.

[240] Well, again, I think that's a real hard argument to dispense with.

[241] So, all right.

[242] So we looked at this a little bit.

[243] The Trinitarian idea is that there's a father.

[244] That's maybe the dramatic representation.

[245] of the structures that underlie consciousness, the embodied structures that underlie consciousness, and then there's the sun, and that's consciousness, but in its particular historical form, that's the thing that's so interesting about the figure of the sun, and then there's consciousness as such, and that seems to be something like the indwelling spirit, and so, I mean, these psychological ideas came from somewhere, right, that they have a history, they didn't just spring out of nowhere, and they emerged from dreams and hypothesis and artistic visions and all of that over a long time and maybe they get clarified into something like consciousness, but it takes a damn long time to get from watching, you know, from two chimpanzees watching each other to a human being saying, well, we all exhibit this faculty called consciousness.

[246] I mean, man, that's a long journey, you know, that's a really long journey, and there's going to be plenty of stages in between.

[247] One of the things I really like about Jean Piaget, the developmental a psychologist was that he was so insistent that children act out and dramatize ideas before they understand them.

[248] And Merlin Donald, who is a psychologist at Queen's University, wrote a couple of interesting books along those lines as well, looking at the importance of imitation for the development of higher cognition in human beings.

[249] And so the notion that we embody ideas before we abstract them out and then represent them in an articulated way, I think is an extraordinarily solid idea.

[250] And I really can't see how it could be any other way.

[251] And if you watch children, you see that.

[252] Like, think about what a child is doing when he plays house, or she plays house.

[253] You know, the child acts out the father or the mother.

[254] But what's so interesting about and you think, well, look, isn't that cute?

[255] She's imitating her mother.

[256] It's like, no, she's not.

[257] That's not what happens.

[258] Because when your child imitates you, it's very annoying because you move your arm and then they move their arm and you know that you move your head they copy you no one likes that it's direct direct imitation that's not what a child's doing when the child is playing what the child is doing is watching the mother over multiple um instantiations and then extracting out the spirit called mother and that's whatever is mother like across all those multiple manifestations and then laying out that pattern internally and manifesting itself in an abstract world.

[259] It's so sophisticated.

[260] It's just, that's what you're doing when you're playing house, or having a tea party, or taking care of a doll.

[261] It's not like you've seen your mother take care of a doll.

[262] You haven't seen that.

[263] It's that you're smart enough to pull out the abstraction and then embody it.

[264] And certainly the child is attempting to strive towards an ideal at that point.

[265] You know, she's not lighting her doll on fire, you know, Well, with, you know, certain exceptions, but generally ones that we try to not encourage, right?

[266] So you see that capacity in children, and it's something we also know, that if children don't engage in that sort of dramatic and pretend play to a tremendous degree, that they don't get properly socialized.

[267] It's really a critical element of developing self -understanding and then also developing the capability of being with others, because what you do when you're a child, especially around the age of four, is you jointly construct a shared fictional world, we'll playhouse together, let's say, and then you act out your joint roles within that shared fictional world, you know, and that's a form of a very advanced cognition, it's very sophisticated.

[268] I see that, and Piaget did as well, and so did Jung, and so did Freud, these brilliant observers and also Merlin Donald, these brilliant observers of the manner in which cognition came to be, they noted very clearly that embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged.

[269] And how could it not be?

[270] Because obviously we were mostly bodies before we were minds clearly.

[271] And so we were acting out things way before we understood them, just like the chimpanzees act out the idea that, you know, you have to act reasonably sensibly if you're head chimpanzee you're going to get yourself ripped apart.

[272] And you see that in wolves, because when wolves have a dominance dispute, you know, they puff up their hair at each other to look big, and they growl and bark, and, you know, they're very menacing.

[273] And one wolf chickens out, rolls over, puts up his neck.

[274] And basically what he's saying is, yeah, I'm pretty useless, so you can kill me if I want to, if you want to.

[275] And the other wolf says, yeah, you know, you're pretty useless, and I can tear out your throat.

[276] But tomorrow we might need to bring down a wolf, or a moose.

[277] I'll keep you around.

[278] And it's not like they think that, because they don't know, they don't think that.

[279] They acted out as a behavioral pattern.

[280] Then if you're an anthropologist or an ethologist, and you went and watched the wolves, you'd say, it's as if they were acting according to the following rule.

[281] And that often confused me because I thought, well, do wolves act out rules?

[282] And I thought, no, no, no, a rule is what we construct when we are teaching.

[283] a behavioral pattern.

[284] We observe a stable behavioral pattern, and when we articulate it, we can call it a rule.

[285] But for the wolves, it's not a rule, it's just a stable behavioral pattern.

[286] And so we acted like wolf troops or chimpanzee troops, all of that and for untold, really untold tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of years before we were able to formulate that pattern of behavior in anything approximating a story or an image, and even longer before we could articulate as a set of ethical rules.

[287] And I'm dwelling in this.

[288] I know I've repeated some of this before, but it's so important because, you know, there's this tremendous push, especially from the social constructionists, to make the case that ethics is arbitrary, ethics is morality is relative, there's no fundamental biological grounding in relationship to human behavior, especially in the category of ethics.

[289] And I think that that's what we're.

[290] First of all, it's dangerous, because that means that people are anything you want to turn them into, and you bloody well better be careful of people who think that.

[291] And second, I just think that the evidence that that's wrong is so overwhelming that we should just stop thinking that way.

[292] I mean, and that's partly why I'm also attacking this from an evolutionary perspective.

[293] There's lots of converging lines of evidence that ethical standards, at least of the most crucial sort, not only evolved, but also spontaneously re -emerge, for example, in the dramatic play of children.

[294] So, we need to take that seriously.

[295] And so, well, that's partly what we're doing here.

[296] Trying to take that seriously.

[297] So, okay, so the idea there, at least in part, was that the father employed the son to generate habitable order out of chaos.

[298] I also think there might be something more approximately true about that as well, too, because one of the things we do know, here's something that's cool about men.

[299] Men are much more criminal than women.

[300] And that, by the way, that does not look like it's sociocultural, partly because it peaks when testosterone kicks in around 14, like it just spikes the hell up, and then it really, it stays pretty high until about 27.

[301] And so standard penological theory, for those of you who don't know this, is that if you have a repeat offender, you know, a guy, he just won't stop getting in trouble.

[302] He'll just throw him in prison until he's 28.

[303] And it isn't like you're rehabilitating him or anything.

[304] It's like by 28, he's done with his criminal career because the crime curve is, peaks at 15, and then falls down around 27 or so, it burns out.

[305] And that's often, by the way, that's often, that's often when men get married and settle down and stabilize.

[306] One of the things that's cool about that is the creativity curve for men is almost exactly the same thing.

[307] It ramps up when testosterone kicks in, and then it starts to flatten out around 27.

[308] that the curves match very, very closely.

[309] So that's quite cool.

[310] It's the creativity element of it that I'm particularly interested in because creativity is, in many ways, an attribute of youth.

[311] And that's, look, I mean, if you looked at that sentence and you stripped it of its religious context, what you would say is that, well, the older people use, the younger people, to generate creative ideas and renew the world.

[312] It's like, yeah, that's what happens.

[313] And, you know, we also have no idea how many of the things that we discovered or invented as human beings were stumbled across by children and adolescents, you know, because they're, well, they're much more exploratory.

[314] They're less constrained by their already extent knowledge structures, and they're less conservative.

[315] So, yeah, that seems just right to me. And right in an extraordinarily important way.

[316] Because it also means that if, like if you're an actual father, one of the things that it means is that that's part of what you should be encouraging your son to do, right?

[317] Which is, because the role of a father is to encourage.

[318] That is clearly the role.

[319] And to encourage is to say, well, go out there, confront the chaos of the unknown and the chaos that underlies everything and grapple with it, you know, because you can do it.

[320] You're as big as the chaos itself.

[321] and, you know, do something useful as a consequence and make your life better and make everyone else's life better and, you know, you can do it.

[322] And man, that's the right thing to tell, that's the right thing to tell young men.

[323] And now, talking to young women is more complicated because they have more, let's say, issues to deal with, because their lives are more complicated in some ways.

[324] But that's definitely the right thing to be telling your son.

[325] And one of the things that I've really noticed recently since I've been lecturing, especially in the last seven or eight months, most of my audience has been young, man and and I've talked a lot of them to a lot, I've talked a lot to them about both truth and responsibility and I think that those are the two things that underlie this capacity and there's there seems to me to be a tremendous hunger for that idea it's not the same idea as a rights you know it's a very different idea it's the counterpart to rights and so it's you know life is hard it's chaotic it's difficult it's really definitely a challenge and so you can either shrink from that and no bloody wonder because you know it's going to kill you it's it's not it's no joke man or you can forthrightly confront it and try to do something about it well what's better and and then you say to the person look man you could do it like that's what a human being is like and if you just stood up and got yourself together and you'd find out by trying that you can in fact do that and i do think that that's that's a great core religious message as far as i can tell and i think that's deeply embedded in this sort of idea.

[326] So, all right, so this is what I've been telling you.

[327] This is something like how knowledge itself is generated.

[328] First of all, there's the unknown as such, and that's really what you don't know anything about.

[329] And generally, when you encounter that, you don't encounter it with thought.

[330] You encounter it like this, right?

[331] And that's the first representation of the absolutely unknown.

[332] It's something that is beyond your comprehension, and it's terrifying, And because it's beyond your comprehension, you cannot perceive it, you cannot understand it, but you still have to deal with it.

[333] And the way you deal with it is that you freeze, that's what a basilisk does say to the kids in Harry Potter, right?

[334] They take a look at it and they freeze.

[335] That's the snake, the terrible snake of chaos that lives underneath everything.

[336] You see that, that thing freezes you.

[337] And that's because you're a prey animal.

[338] But at the same time, it makes you curious.

[339] And so that's the first level of contact with the absolute unknown, is the emotional combination of freezing and curiosity.

[340] And that's reflected, I think, in the dragon stories.

[341] The dragon is the terrible thing that lives underground that hordes gold or hord's virgins.

[342] Very, very strange behavior for a reptile, as we pointed out before.

[343] But the idea is that it's a symbolic representation of the predatory quality of the unknown combined with the capacity of the unknown to generate nothing but novel information.

[344] And it's a very, you can see that as very characteristic.

[345] characteristic of human beings because we are prey animals, but we're also unbelievably exploratory and we're pretty damn good predators.

[346] And we occupy this weird cognitive niche.

[347] And so one of the things we've learned is that if we forthrightly confront the unknown, terrifying as it is, there's a massive prize to be gained continually.

[348] And so that seems to be true, right, as true as anything is.

[349] And then I would also say that that idea, now we know that one of the metaphors that underlies God's extraction of habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time is an older idea, a more archaic idea, that God confronted something like the Leviathan.

[350] That's one of the words for this serpent -like chaos creature that's often used in the Old Testament, or the there's the Leviathan and the Bamoth.

[351] Yeah, that's the other thing.

[352] And so there's this idea that I think probably came from the Mesopotamians, that God, either in the sun -like aspect or in the father -like aspect, is the thing that confronts this terrible beast that represents the chaotic unknown, and cuts it into pieces, and then sometimes gives the body parts to the populace in order to feed them.

[353] So you can see a hunting metaphor there as well, but it's deeper than that.

[354] And so, all right, so the first thing is that there's the absolute unknown, and the unknown is what you do not understand.

[355] It's what's beyond the campfire.

[356] Maybe it's what's beyond the tree, even more anciently, you know, when we lived in trees.

[357] It's out there where you don't know, and what's out there.

[358] Crocodiles and snakes and birds of prey and cats and all sorts of things, like predatory cats, and they will eat you.

[359] But there's utility in going out there to find out what's there.

[360] Like maybe you go, and you don't kill the snake, you kill the damn nest of snakes.

[361] And that makes you pretty popular, just as you should be.

[362] And that accelerates your reproductive potential, let's say.

[363] And we're descended from people who did that.

[364] And so we have this notion about how the world is structured that's deeply embedded in our psyche, like really, really deeply, way, way down, way below the surface cognition, way down in the limbic system, in these ancient parts of the brain that are like 60 million years old or 100 million years old or older than that, ancient, ancient brain structures.

[365] And so the first thing we do is we act out our encounter with the unknown world.

[366] And we act that out in the same way, in a manner that's analogous.

[367] to the manner that's presented as a description of what it is that God does at the beginning of time to extract habitable order out of chaos.

[368] And I won't tell you about the other part of that for now.

[369] So you acted out first.

[370] And then the second thing is you watch people who acted out and you start to make representations of that.

[371] That's stories, right?

[372] And maybe you admire them.

[373] And then after a long time you collect a bunch of those stories and then you can say what that is.

[374] You can articulate it as a pattern.

[375] And so, and this is something Nietzsche also figured out to begin with, you know, because prior to Nietzsche, I would say, he did so many things first.

[376] It was quite remarkable.

[377] You know, there was an idea that you first think and then you act.

[378] And people like to think that, but of course you know it's complete bloody rubbish because you're as impulsive if you can possibly imagine, you're always doing things before you think.

[379] And sometimes that's a really good idea.

[380] So the idea that you see things and then think and then act, it's like, you really?

[381] No, I'm sorry.

[382] I don't do that.

[383] No one I know does that, and they certainly don't do that when they're emotional.

[384] You know, you act first.

[385] And one of the things that Nietzsche said very clearly was that our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years.

[386] And then when philosophers were putting forward those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas.

[387] They were just telling the story of humanity.

[388] It's already there.

[389] It's already in us, it's already in our patterns of behavior.

[390] And it strikes me that that's, well, he was a genius, and that was one of the genius, one of his many, many observations of pure genius.

[391] And so you can think about it, you know, you can think about it like this too, is that there's the unknown, and then you act in the face of the unknown, and then you dream about the action.

[392] And that's what you're doing in a movie theater.

[393] And then you speak about it.

[394] And so, you know, and of course once you speak about it, that affects how you dream and how you dream affects how you act.

[395] It's not like all of the causal direction is one way, because it's not.

[396] These things loop, but it's still from the unknown through the body, through the imagination, into articulation.

[397] That's the primary mode of the generation of wisdom, let's say.

[398] And you can easily map that onto an evolutionary explanation because the body comes first, right?

[399] And then the imagination, which is the body in abstraction and only then the word.

[400] And of course that's exactly how things did evolve because we could imagine things long before we could speak.

[401] At least that's the theory.

[402] So, and I represented it, this is an image from my book maps of meaning.

[403] And so the idea is that this is the fundamental representation of the unknown as such.

[404] It's half spirit because it partakes of the air like a bird.

[405] half matter because it's on the ground like a like a snake and and that's what you think is there when you don't know what is there that's how your body reacts to what's there when you don't know what is there you know that too because if you're alone at night you know and maybe you're a little rattled up for one reason another maybe you watched a horror movie and you know there's some weird noise in the other room it's dark and you could just try this once it's like so you're on edge you think you want to turn the light on and go in the room and see you Don't do that.

[406] Just open the door a little bit and sneak your hand in.

[407] And just watch what your imagination fills that room with, right?

[408] And then you remember what it's like to be three years old in bed and afraid of the dark.

[409] And I read a good book on dragons lately recently that had a very interesting hypothesis about them.

[410] I thought one of the things the guy did was track.

[411] I can't remember his name, unfortunately, track how common the image of the dragon was worldwide.

[412] It's unbelievably widespread.

[413] It's crazily widespread.

[414] And he thought that this was actually the category of primate predator.

[415] And the predator was, so predator is a weird category, right?

[416] Because like there's crocodiles in it and there's lions.

[417] And they don't have much in common except they eat you.

[418] So it's a functional category.

[419] And so this is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator.

[420] And his predator theory was, well, if you're a monkey, then a bird would pick you off, like an eagle.

[421] And so that's this.

[422] And then, if it wasn't an eagle, it was a cat, because they climbed trees and give you a good chomping.

[423] And then if it wasn't a cat, then you'd go down on the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe a snake would climb up the tree, because snakes like to do that and get you.

[424] And so that's a tree cat snake, basically.

[425] Tree cat snake bird.

[426] And that's the thing you really want to avoid.

[427] You don't want to come across one of those.

[428] And so, and then, you know, the other thing it does is breathe fire, which is quite interesting.

[429] because obviously fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity.

[430] And we've mastered fire for a long time.

[431] It might be as long as two or three million years.

[432] That's what Richard Rangham.

[433] I think it's Rangham.

[434] He wrote a book recently on, I think it was Rangham, who wrote a book on when human beings learned to cook.

[435] That was about two million years ago.

[436] And cooking increased the availability of calories.

[437] You know how chimpanzees are sort of shaped like a big, like they're ugly?

[438] They're shaped like a big bowling ball, you know?

[439] They look really fat and it's, and they're short and they're wide.

[440] And that's because they have intestinal tracks that are like, you know, 300 miles long.

[441] And the reason for that is because they have to digest leaves.

[442] And so you go out in the forest and like sit there and eat leaves for a whole day and see how that works out for you, you know?

[443] They have no calories in them.

[444] So chimps spend about, I think it was, I think it's eight hours a day chewing.

[445] And it's because what they eat has no nutritional value and then they have to have this.

[446] tremendous gut in order to extract anything at all out of it.

[447] And human beings at some point just thought, oh, to hell with that, we'll cook something.

[448] And then we traded our gut for brain, which, you know, more or less has worked.

[449] And I think it's made us a lot more attractive as well.

[450] So, okay, well, so the idea here was that, well, that's the basic archetype of the unknown as such.

[451] And then I like the St. George version of this.

[452] It's so cool because St. George lives in like a castle, and the castle is partly falling down.

[453] and it's partly because there's a dragon that's come up to, like it's an eternal dragon, it's come back to give everyone a rough time, which always happens, because the eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles a rough time, always.

[454] And so then St. George is the hero who goes out to confront the dragon, and he frees the virgin from its grasp.

[455] And I would say that's a pretty straightforward story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown.

[456] It looks just straight, it looks like a straight biological representation to me, and it's a really, really old story, right?

[457] It's the oldest written story we have, and that's basically the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Anumae Lish, which basically lays out precisely that story.

[458] And so, and it's replayed, I mean, I bet you, the moviegoers among you, especially the ones that are more attracted to the superhero, you know, the really flashy sort of superhero -type movies.

[459] You've probably seen the St. George's story like 150 times in the last 10 years.

[460] You never get tired of it because it's the central story of mankind.

[461] So you've got the unknown as such, and that is what you react to with your body, in the existential terror and extraordinary curiosity, are gripping you.

[462] And then it's like the unknown unknowns that, who's the politician under Bush?

[463] Rumsfeld, yeah, I think the reason that that phrase caught on so well is, because he nailed an archetype.

[464] There's unknown unknowns and there's known unknown, and that's the unknown unknown.

[465] And you have to be able to react to an unknown unknown because they can get you.

[466] And you can't just plead ignorance because then you're dead.

[467] That doesn't work.

[468] Human beings are the sort of creature who has to know what to do when they don't know what to do.

[469] And that's very paradoxical and what we do is we prepare to do everything.

[470] That's right, we're on guard, we prepare to do everything.

[471] Very, very stressful, but also very engaging and very much something that heightens content.

[472] And maybe those circuits are permanently turned on in human beings because we also know that we're going to die.

[473] And no other animal knows that.

[474] And so sometimes I think that our stress circuits are just on all the time.

[475] And that's part of what accounts for our heightened consciousness.

[476] So you have your unknown unknowns, and then you have your relatively, you have the unknowns that you actually encounter in the world, like the mystery of your romantic partner when you have a fight with them.

[477] It's like, well, we're having a fight.

[478] Who the hell are you?

[479] I mean, you're not the absolute unknown, because I know something about you, but you're the unknown as it's manifesting itself to me right now, right?

[480] And then there's the known that we inhabit, and then there's the knower, and the known is given symbolic representation, as far as I've been able to tell, in patriarchal form, in the form of a male deity.

[481] And the unknown, as you encountered, is given feminine form.

[482] So we won't get into that too much, but if you're interested in that, you could look at my Maps of Meaning lectures.

[483] or maybe take a look at the book.

[484] But I think it's a good, I think it's a good schema for religious archetypes.

[485] I've worked on a long time.

[486] It seems to fit the Jungian criteria quite nicely.

[487] It maps nicely onto Joseph Campbell's ideas.

[488] He got almost all his ideas from Jung, however.

[489] And it also makes sense from a biological and an evolutionary perspective, as far as I can tell it.

[490] That's a lot of cross -validation, at least in my estimation.

[491] So, okay, so back to the hierarchy of dominance.

[492] Well, let's take a look at it a little bit.

[493] So I'm quite enamored of lobsters, as some of you might know, because I found out, this just blew me away when I found it out.

[494] I mean, I've done a lot of work in neurochemistry, functional neurochemistry, because I used to study alcoholism and drug abuse.

[495] And alcoholism, to study alcohol, you have to know a lot about the brain because alcohol goes everywhere in the brain.

[496] It affects every neurochemical system.

[497] And so if you're going to study alcohol, you kind of have to study neurochemistry in general.

[498] And so I did that for quite a long time.

[499] I really got enamored of a book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray, which is an absolute work of genius, although extraordinarily different.

[500] I don't know how many references that book has.

[501] It's like, it must be a thousand.

[502] And Gray actually read them.

[503] And worse, he understood them.

[504] And then he integrated them into this book.

[505] And so to read it, you have to really master functional neurochemistry and animal behaviorism and motivation and emotion and neuroanatomy like it's a killer book, but man, it's really rich, and it's taken psychologists about 40 years to really unpack that book.

[506] But one of the things I learned about that was just exactly how much continuity there was in the neurochemistry of human beings and the neurochemistry of animals.

[507] It's absolutely staggering.

[508] It's the sort of thing that makes the fact of evolution something like self -evident.

[509] I do think it's self -evident for other reasons that I'll tell you about later.

[510] I think natural selection, random mutation and natural selection is the only way you can solve the problem of how to deal with an environment that's complex beyond your ability to comprehend.

[511] I think what you do is you generate endless variance because God only knows what the hell is going to happen next.

[512] Almost all of them die because they're failures and a couple propagate.

[513] And the environment keeps moving around like a giant snake.

[514] You never know what it's going to do next.

[515] And so the best you can do is say, well, here's 30 things.

[516] that might work and, you know, 28 of them are going to perish.

[517] Or if you're an insect, it's like the ratio is way, way higher than that.

[518] So, anyways, back to the lobsters.

[519] So these creatures engage in dominance disputes.

[520] And I think dominance is the right way to think about it, because lobsters aren't very empathic and they're not very social.

[521] And so it really is the toughest lobster that wins.

[522] You know, and what's so cool about the lobster is that when a lobster wins, he flexes and gets bigger so he looks bigger because he's a winner it's like he's advertising that and the biological the neurochemical system that makes him flex is serotonergic and you think well who cares what the hell does that mean well tell you what it means it's the same chemical that's affected by antidepressants in human beings and so like if you're depressed you're a defeated lobster like you're like this I'm small you know things are dangerous I don't want to fight you give someone an antidepressant it's like up they stretch and then they're ready to like take on the world again.

[523] Well, if you give lobsters who just got defeated in a fight serotonin, then they stretch out and they'll fight again.

[524] And that's like we separated from those creatures on the evolutionary timescale somewhere between 350 and 600 million years ago.

[525] And the damn neurochemistry is the same.

[526] And so that's another indication of just how important hierarchies of authority are.

[527] I mean, they've been conserved since the time of lobsters, right?

[528] There weren't trees around when lobsters first manifested themselves on the planet.

[529] And so what that means is these hierarchies that I've been talking about, those things are older than trees.

[530] And so one of the truisms for what constitutes real from a Darwinian perspective is that which has been around the longest period of time, right?

[531] Because it's had the longest period of time to exert selection pressure.

[532] Well, we know we evolved and lived in trees, something on the order of 60 million years.

[533] years ago, we're talking 10 times as far back as that for the hierarchy.

[534] And so the idea that human beings, that the hierarchy is something that has exerted selection pressure on human beings is, I don't think that's a disputable.

[535] That's not a disputable issue.

[536] How it's done it and exactly what that means, we can argue about, but like that sort of biological continuity is just absolutely unbelievable.

[537] It was funny because I revealed this finding.

[538] You know, I didn't discover this, I read about it.

[539] I talked to my graduate students about it.

[540] I used to take them out for breakfast, you know, and they were a very contentious, snappy bunch.

[541] And they were always trying to one -up each other, and they were quite witty.

[542] And for like six months until it got very annoying, every time one of them one up the other, they'd stretch themselves out and like snap their hands like...

[543] So, that was very funny.

[544] It was really very funny.

[545] So you see this in lobsters, and so that's pretty amazing.

[546] So, yeah, and one of the other thing that's really cool about lobsters is that, um, Let's say you've been like top lobster for a long time, but you're getting kind of old, and some young lobster just, you know, wails the hell out of you, and so you're all depressed.

[547] But the thing is, your brain is dominant.

[548] But you don't have much of a brain because you're a lobster.

[549] And so now what are you going to do?

[550] Because you just lost.

[551] And the answer is, well, your brain will dissolve.

[552] And then you'll grow a subordinate brain.

[553] Yeah, and so that's worth thinking about too, right?

[554] Here, for a couple of reasons.

[555] First of all, if any of you have ever been seriously defeated in life, You know what that's like.

[556] It's like it's a death, a dissolution, and if you're lucky, a regrowth, and maybe not as the same person, that's what happens to people with post -traumatic stress disorder, right?

[557] Their brains undergo permanent neurological transformation, and they then inhabit a world that's much more dangerous than the world that they inhabited to begin with.

[558] But we also know, too, if you have post -traumatic stress disorder or depression, that your hippocampus shrinks.

[559] Right, it dies and shrinks.

[560] And you can sometimes get it to grow back.

[561] Hippocampus shrinks and your amygdala grows, and the amygdala increases emotional sensitivity, and the hippocampus inhibits emotional sensitivity.

[562] And so if you've been badly defeated, the hippocampus shrinks and the amygdala grows.

[563] Now, if you recover, the hippocampus will regrow, and antidepressants actually seem to help that, but the damn amygdala never shrinks again.

[564] And so, well, so that's another lesson from the lobster.

[565] It's quite a terrifying one, but it's one, like, it's so interesting that you can relate to that, right?

[566] I was like, I get what that poor crustaceans going through, you know.

[567] So, okay, here's the rats, and this is from Yak Panksep's work.

[568] He was the first guy who figured out that rats giggle, and he might think, well, what kind of stupid thing is that to study?

[569] It's like $50 ,000 research grant for giggling rats, you know?

[570] But he discovered the play circuitry in mammals.

[571] That's a big deal, right?

[572] It's like discovering a whole new continent.

[573] There's a play circuit in mammals.

[574] It's built right in, so it's not socially constructed.

[575] There's a biological platform for that.

[576] And so what Pank's up would do with rats, he found out, if rats, if you take a rat pup away from its mother, it dies.

[577] Even if you feed it, even if you keep it warm, it dies.

[578] Now, you can stop it from dying by taking a pencil with an eraser on the end and massaging it, right?

[579] Because rats won't live without love.

[580] And the same thing happens to human babies.

[581] And we saw that in Romania when there was that catastrophe after Chochelle.

[582] in the orphanages, where the orphanages were full of unwanted babies because Chowchesco insisted that every Romanian woman was constantly pregnant, so the orphanages stacked up with unwanted babies and lots of them didn't even have names.

[583] And they were warehoused, warmed, shelter, food, devastating.

[584] Lots of them died.

[585] Most of them died before the first year.

[586] And the ones that didn't die were permanently dysfunctional.

[587] Because you have to be touched if you're a human being.

[588] It's not an option.

[589] You have to be played with.

[590] It's not an option.

[591] It's not an option.

[592] It's part of neurodevelopmental necessity.

[593] And you have to also play fair.

[594] So, because otherwise you produce a very disjointed child who isn't able to engage in the niceties of social interaction, which is continual play in some sense in reciprocity.

[595] So what Pangcept did with his rats, he noticed that male rats, juveniles, really like to wrestle.

[596] And they wrestle, just like human beings wrestle.

[597] They pin each other for crying out loud.

[598] It's like, that rat has just lost.

[599] He's down for a 10 count, right?

[600] And so what you do is you take juvenile rats and you can find out that they want to play Because you can attach a spring to them and then they'll try to run and you can measure how hard they're running By how hard they're pulling on the spring and then you can estimate how motivated they are And so you can find out that a nice well -fed rat who doesn't have anything on his mind will still work hard to play If it to enter an arena where he's been allowed to play before.

[601] He'll work for that so that you think while the rat's motivated So the two rats go out there, and they play, and so they're playing like dogs play, and everyone knows what that looks like.

[602] If you're, you know, if you have any sense about dogs, they kind of go like this, and kids do that, and maybe you do that with your wife if you're going to play with her a little bit.

[603] My poor, my poor wife, man, when she, she was a young, she had older siblings, and so she wasn't played with as much when she was little as she might have been.

[604] And I used to, like, you know what, you take a pillow away, and you go like this, three times, right?

[605] That means, look out, a pillow is coming your way.

[606] So I'd go, one, two, three, whop.

[607] And she looked, she was completely dismayed at me. She's like, what do you do that for?

[608] And I thought, well, I eventually taught her that rule.

[609] The other thing I used to do, you know, is sometimes she'd come out and be like this when we were playing around, and I'd grab her wrists, and I'd knock her.

[610] her hands turned her knuckles together and she used to just get completely annoyed about that and I thought right that's what you do you just open your hands well she didn't know that either so she hadn't been played with enough when she was a little rat and so anyway anyway so you let the rat the little rats go out there right and so let's imagine one of them is 10 % bigger than the other and so the 10 % bigger rat wins because 10 % is enough in rat weight to ensure that you're going to be the pinner rather than the pin -e.

[611] Okay, so that's fine.

[612] So, and then the rat, the rat pins, the big rat pins the little rat, and now the big rat is the authority rat.

[613] And so then, the next time that the rats play, the little rat has to invite the big rat to play.

[614] So the big rat's out there being cool, and the little rat pops up and, you know, does the whole, will you play with me thing, and the big rat will deign to play with them.

[615] But if you pair them repeatedly, unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30 % of the, the time, the little rat will not invite him to play.

[616] And Panksep discovered that.

[617] It's like I read that, that just blew me away.

[618] It's like, that is so amazing.

[619] Because you see, well, first of there, there's an analogy to Piaget's ideas about the emergence of morality out of play in human beings.

[620] So that was very cool.

[621] But the notion that that was built into rats at the level of wrestling was, and they're social, they're deeply social animals, right?

[622] They have to know how to get along with one another.

[623] And most of their authority disputes, dominance disputes, you don't want them to end in bloodshed and combat.

[624] Because, you know, if you're rat one and I'm rat two and we tear each other to shreds in a dominance dispute, rat three is just going to move in.

[625] It's really not a great strategy.

[626] And so it be better if we could settle our differences, you know, somewhat peacefully.

[627] And so, well, so rats, anyways, Panktip figured out that rats play.

[628] And not only did they play, they play fair and they seem to enjoy it.

[629] He also figured that.

[630] figured out this was really cool too, that if you give juvenile rats attention deficit disorder drugs, Ritalin, suppresses prey, play.

[631] So that's worth thinking about.

[632] It's like, well, why do you have to give juvenile human beings amphetamines in school?

[633] Well, because they need to play.

[634] Well, you don't get to play.

[635] They don't get to wrestle around.

[636] I mean, that's oppression, as far as I can tell.

[637] They don't get to wrestle around.

[638] That's fine.

[639] Feed them some of it.

[640] Amphetamines, man. That'll shut down the old play circuits.

[641] Well, here's the other problem is Pankset found out that if you don't let juvenile male rats play, their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly.

[642] Surprise, surprise, you're not letting them mature.

[643] It's like, what else would you expect?

[644] So, you know, that's something to think about.

[645] Really hard, I would say.

[646] So, well, so there's some wolves going at it.

[647] Well, not exactly.

[648] There's some wolves.

[649] authority dispute, let's, more technically speaking, and a lot of it's posturing, you know, they tend, they tend not, well -socialized wolves tend not to hurt each other during authority disputes because, well, for obvious reasons, it's too dangerous, and so they have other ways of demonstrating who should be listened to, authorities.

[650] And there's chimps doing that, this particular, I think, if I remember correctly, I think it's right, this is a really cool picture because I think this chimp, Chimps don't like snakes, by the way.

[651] So, for example, if you take a chimp that's never seen a snake and you showed a snake, it is not happy.

[652] It will get the hell away from that snake.

[653] If you bring a chimp anesthetized into a roomful of chimps, the chips will all get away from that and then look at the body.

[654] They don't like that either.

[655] And if you bring a big snake into a chimp cage, even if the chimps have never seen it, like they'll get away from it, and then stare at it.

[656] And chimps out in the wild, if they see a big snake, they'll stand there and they have a noise, that means something like, holy crap, that's a big snake, you know?

[657] It actually means that technically, and I'll tell you why in a minute.

[658] But they stand away from it, and then they make this noise, which means, oh my God, look at the snake.

[659] And then they'll stand there for like 24 hours looking at the snake.

[660] And so the snakes are really, really, they're super stimuli for chimpanzees, so that's pretty interesting.

[661] And this chimp, the theme to learn how to take this dead snake and go scare other chips with it.

[662] And that was partly how he established his authority.

[663] And, you know, well, there's a, there's a threat.

[664] And like, if I was you and I was around that chip, I would take that threat seriously because those things are no joke, man. And you see the same thing here with the, I don't remember what kind of monkey that is, but they're engaged in agonistic behavior.

[665] And so, and there has been, by the way, there has been recent research showing that in higher order primates that there is snake detection circuitry that's built into them.

[666] So it's not learned.

[667] It's not learned.

[668] It's deeper than that.

[669] Now for a long time, psychologists knew for a long time that I could make you afraid in a conditioning experience, experiment much faster using a snake or a picture of a snake than a gun or a picture of a gun.

[670] So we can learn fear to snakes very rapidly, spiders as well.

[671] And so then people thought, well, maybe we were prepared to develop fear to snakes or spiders, that sort of thing.

[672] But the more recent research has indicated that it's more than just prepared is that we have the detection circuitry built right into us.

[673] And, well, it's because, well, why wouldn't we?

[674] That's really the issue.

[675] It's like, it's not really that much of a surprise, unless you think of human beings as a blank slate.

[676] And if you think that, then, I don't know, you should crawl out of the 16th century.

[677] That's how I would look at it.

[678] Because, I mean, that's just gone, that idea.

[679] It's so wrong.

[680] So maybe you can think about this as a dominance hierarchy, but wolves look for, wolves look for credibility and competence as well, and chimpanzees don't like brutal tyrants.

[681] And so we'll talk about it as the hierarchy of authority.

[682] And so, well, this is kind of how it starts to develop.

[683] You know, you see, well, these girls are negotiating the domestic environment here and how to behave properly and how to share and all that and take turns.

[684] And so they're negotiating the hierarchy of authority.

[685] And if you're good at reciprocity, sometimes you're the authority, and sometimes the other person is the authority, that's fair play, right?

[686] And so these boys are doing the same thing, and you see, they're all smiling away.

[687] And so it looks like aggressive behavior, and people who are not very attentive and who are paranoid and who don't like human beings can confuse this with aggression, and they forbid it at schools, which is, you know, I know when my kids were going to school, for example, this was quite a while ago now, they were forbidden to pick up snow on the off chance they might throw a snowball, and we know how terrible that is.

[688] So what I told my son was that he was perfectly welcome to pelt any teacher he wanted to in the back of the head with a snowball, as long as he was willing to suffer the consequences of doing it.

[689] And I don't know if he ever did, but he was happy with, he was certainly happy with the idea, which made me very happy about him.

[690] Yeah.

[691] So, you know, kids need to do this.

[692] They really, really seriously need to do this.

[693] It's what civilizes them.

[694] And that needs to happen between the ages of 2 and 4, because if they're not civilized by the time they're 4, then you might as well just forget it.

[695] And that's a horrible statistic, but it's unbelievably well borne out in the relevant developmental literature.

[696] Like there's lots of aggressive 2 -year -olds.

[697] Most of them are male.

[698] And if they stay aggressive past the age of 4, they tend to be lifetime aggressive.

[699] They make it.

[700] no friends, they're outcasts, they're much more likely to end up, antisocial, criminal, delinquent, and in jail.

[701] And so, your kids need to be socialized between the ages of two and four.

[702] And that's particularly true for the more aggressive males.

[703] And most of the aggressive two -year -olds are male.

[704] And that isn't socialization, by the way.

[705] So there's a more, you know, more abstract representation of the same sort of thing.

[706] And I'm trying to make the case that this, that the hierarchy of authority emerges out of a game -like matrix, and underlying game -like matrix, and that's one of the things that's so brilliant about Jean Piaget.

[707] He figured that out.

[708] It's so smart.

[709] And he was interested in the biological origin of morality, and he identified it, he traced the origin to play and the emergence of morality out of play.

[710] And it's so smart.

[711] It's just, I just can't believe how smart an idea that was.

[712] Because it's the bottom -up construction of morality.

[713] Now, Piaget was a constructionist.

[714] and to some degree, a social constructionist, he underestimated the role of biology.

[715] But that doesn't invalidate his theory.

[716] It's really easy to put a biological underpinning underneath Piaget's theory.

[717] We know the biology well enough to do it quite nicely now.

[718] So, I mean, we, well, the fact that Panksep, for example, could identify the play circuit is a really good start with that, right?

[719] Because play has been around so long that we have a circuit that's dedicated to it.

[720] And so that's a very, very ancient.

[721] That's a very ancient issue.

[722] And so, you know, this is very much of an abstraction of a game here.

[723] And then, of course, you get the ultimate abstraction in a representation like that, where even the landscape of the game is fictional.

[724] And, of course, we've migrated to a large degree into those sorts of fictional landscapes, fictional books, movies, video games.

[725] So it's the same, it's an extension of the same thing.

[726] So, practice for real life, the shades, in some cases, into real life itself.

[727] So, all right.

[728] More representations of God the Father.

[729] I like these representations.

[730] I like the triangle idea.

[731] I mean, I don't know why God is wearing a triangular hat.

[732] It's kind of a strange fashion choice.

[733] But I think it's associated with the idea of the pyramid, and I think that's associated with the idea of the hierarchy of authority.

[734] And I think that's why the Egyptians put their pharaohs inside pyramids.

[735] I know there's more to it than that.

[736] But I think some of that has to do with the notion of this hierarchical structure.

[737] You see this on the...

[738] Now, that's speculative, obviously, and I don't want to make too much of it, but...

[739] But I can't help but think that there's something to that.

[740] See, that's on the back of the American dollar bill.

[741] I like that a lot.

[742] That's like the eye of Horace from the Egyptians.

[743] And so the idea here is something like, at the top of the hierarchy, is something that is no longer part of the hierarchy.

[744] Right?

[745] So if you move up the hierarchy enough, what happens is that you develop the ability as a consequence of moving up that hierarchy, to be detached enough from the hierarchy so you're no longer really part of it and so that you can move in all sorts of different hierarchies.

[746] And the thing, the idea here is that the thing that you're really developing is the capacity to pay attention.

[747] And I would say from a mythological perspective, the one thing that seems to compete with the idea of the spoken word as the source of the extraction of habitable order from chaos is the I, is the capacity to pay attention.

[748] So, Marduk, for example, the Mesopotamian creator god, who emerged in the hierarchy of Mesopotamian gods and came out at the top, right?

[749] He was the victor of the gods.

[750] He had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magic words.

[751] And I really like that.

[752] I really like that idea.

[753] And the Egyptians developed that idea, too, because their god Horace was the eye.

[754] Everyone knows the eye of Horace.

[755] That image is so compelling that we still know about.

[756] Everybody has seen the eye of Horace with a really open pupil.

[757] And what the Egyptians learned was that the open eye was what revivified the dead society.

[758] It's so smart.

[759] So what do you do if your life isn't in order?

[760] Bloody well, pay attention.

[761] And that isn't the same as thinking.

[762] It's a different process.

[763] Paying attention, thinking is like the imposition of structure in some sense.

[764] I know I'm oversimplifying.

[765] But paying attention is something like watching for what you don't know.

[766] And so one of the things I often recommend to my clinical clients if they're having trouble with a family member is, number one, shut up.

[767] Don't tell them anything about yourself.

[768] And I don't mean in a rude way.

[769] It's just like no more personal information.

[770] Number two, watch them like a hawk and listen.

[771] And if you do that long enough, they will tell you exactly what they're up to.

[772] And they will also tell you who they think you are.

[773] And then you'll be shocked because they think you're something, generally speaking, that's not like what you are at all.

[774] And when they tell you, it's like a revelation to both of you.

[775] But attention is an unbelievably powerful force.

[776] And you see this in psychotherapy too, because a lot of what you do, and in any reparative relationship, is really pay attention to another person.

[777] Pay attention and listen.

[778] And you would not believe what people will tell you or reveal to you if you watch them as if you want to know, instead of watching them so that you'll have your prejudices reinforced.

[779] That's usually how people interact.

[780] It's like, I want to keep thinking about you the way I'm thinking about you.

[781] And so I'm going to filter out anything that just proves my theory.

[782] That's not what I'm talking about at all.

[783] It's like, I'm going to watch you and figure out what you're up to.

[784] Not in a rude way, none of that.

[785] I just want to see what's there.

[786] And that'll be good for you, probably, and also be good for me. And so, well, so that's the idea that, you know, climbing up a hierarchy of authority can give you vision, and that vision can transcend the actual hierarchy.

[787] And I think that's also the, I think that's also the That's the metaphysical space that an artist occupies.

[788] Because artists really aren't in a hierarchy.

[789] They're outside of hierarchies.

[790] You've watched the Lion King, most of you.

[791] That's Zazoo, you know, the little bird that's the eye of the king.

[792] That's the same thing there.

[793] And that's echoed in this idea as well.

[794] So, well, that's some more ideas of hierarchies.

[795] Same idea.

[796] This is, right?

[797] Gold, silver, bronze.

[798] gold.

[799] Gold is the sun.

[800] Gold is pure.

[801] Right.

[802] And so the idea is that the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy is incorruptible, because gold doesn't mix with anything else, right?

[803] It's this sort of metal that doesn't ever become corrupted.

[804] It's a noble metal.

[805] It doesn't become corrupted.

[806] And so it shines like the sun.

[807] And it's associated with what's ever at the top of the hierarchy.

[808] And the gold medal is a disc like the sun.

[809] And it's awarded to those people who've occupied the top position and who are manifestations of the ideal.

[810] And here, And here's, I'll tell you a quick story.

[811] So imagine that you're watching an Olympic contest.

[812] I found this happens to me very often with gymnastics because the gymnasts are so absolutely unbelievable.

[813] So you go, you watch a gymnastic performance.

[814] And the person's out there bouncing around like, you know, you can't even imagine doing it.

[815] They're so perfect at it.

[816] So you see this person, they're going through this routine.

[817] They're just absolutely spectacular and flawless at it.

[818] You know, at the end they stop and everybody claps and they're all excited to see what a human being can do.

[819] and that's why we're in the audience watching because we want to see what a human being can do.

[820] And the judges go like 9 .8, 9 .8, 9 .8, everybody's thrilled.

[821] And then the next contestant comes out and it's like, well, they're just basically screwed, right?

[822] It's like this person came out there and was perfect.

[823] How are you going to top that?

[824] That's an interesting question.

[825] Because this is a representation of what you do to top perfection itself.

[826] And you can do it.

[827] And here's how you do it.

[828] And you know this.

[829] Even though you don't know, you know it.

[830] So let's say the next contestant, comes out and they're kind of shaky because it's like oh man the bar's being raised high so what they do is they put themselves right on the edge of chaos and you can tell by watching them that they are one bloody fraction of a second from catastrophe they're pushing themselves farther than they've ever gone in the direction of their perfection and everyone in the room is so tense they can hardly stand it right you can hear a pin drop and that person is flipping around it they're just it's just right on the edge of catastrophe.

[831] And at the end, they go like this, you know, and there's that gesture of triumph that goes along with that.

[832] And everybody rises in one instant and just claps like mad.

[833] It's like, well, why?

[834] What are you doing?

[835] What are you doing when you're doing that?

[836] Right?

[837] You can't even help it.

[838] It grabs you right in the core of your being and you stand up and it's an act of worship.

[839] That's what it is.

[840] And you saw someone go beyond their perfection into the domain of chaos and establish order right in front of your eyes.

[841] And you're so thrilled about that, you know, you're happy to be alive and everyone's celebrating it all at the same time And it's an absolutely amazing thing And that's what, well, sometimes that's what this represents and sometimes that's what this represents And that's what we're trying to get at that because that's at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, right?

[842] Not only are you doing what you should be doing But you're doing it a way that increases the probability that you'll do it better the next time you do it And then you could say here's another thing to think about along the same lines And I know we haven't got Adam and Eve yet.

[843] You tell your kids to play fair, right?

[844] You say, it's not whether or not you win, it's how you play the game.

[845] And you say that, and you don't really know what you mean.

[846] You feel kind of stupid saying it, even though you know it's true.

[847] And your kid looks at you like there's something wrong with you because he doesn't know what you're talking about either.

[848] But you know it's true.

[849] And so here's why it's true.

[850] Life isn't a game.

[851] It's a set of games.

[852] And the rule is Never sacrifice victory across the set of games for victory in one game Right?

[853] And that's what it means to play properly You want to play so that people keep inviting you to play Because that's how you win, right?

[854] You win by being invited to play the largest possible array of games And the way you do that is by manifesting the fact that you can play in a reciprocal manner Every time you play even if there's victory at stake and that's what makes you successful across time and we all know that And we even tell our kids that, but we don't know that we know it.

[855] And so we're not adapting ourselves to the game and victory in the game.

[856] We're adapting ourselves to the meta game and victory across the set of all possible games.

[857] And that's what that, well, that's exactly what, as far as I can tell, that's exactly what this is aiming at, too.

[858] That that's the same idea, that there's a transcend, there's a mode of being that transcends the particularities of the localized contest.

[859] That's the other way to think about it.

[860] and to act morally is not to win today's contest at the expense of the rest of possible contests.

[861] And again, I don't see that as something that's arbitrary.

[862] It's not relativistic.

[863] There's an absolute moral stance there, and everyone recognizes it.

[864] And I also think it's the key to success.

[865] And I would also say it's very much akin in a strange way.

[866] Like the person who is the master at being invited to play the largest point, possible games, number of games, is also the same person, I haven't quite figured out the precise relationship between these two, is also the same person that goes out forthrightly to conquer the unknown before it presents itself as the enemy at the door.

[867] They're the same thing.

[868] Now, I don't, I haven't figured out why that is exactly, but, but, well, I'll figure it out eventually.

[869] And when I do, I'll tell you, well, if you're interested.

[870] So, okay, so here's some other no ideas.

[871] of God as hierarchical authority figure.

[872] So strip the religious preconceptions off what you observe and just look at what you see.

[873] Well, look, there's primate looking upward at dominant figure.

[874] That's what you see there.

[875] Now, it's very interestingly symbolically represented because you have God and Father there with the cross.

[876] And I think what that means, as far as I can tell, is that there's a recognition there in the image that the person who's most dominant has the most authority is the one who's voluntarily accepted the suffering that's part of being.

[877] And that's what that picture represents.

[878] It's like the authority holds that and says, this is what you have to accept.

[879] And that transfixes the viewer because of the fact that it's true.

[880] And you think, well, is that true?

[881] Okay, well, think about it this way.

[882] Do you like brave people or do you like cowards?

[883] Well, that's pretty straightforward.

[884] And what's the ultimate act of bravery?

[885] It's to come to terms with the fact that you're mortal and living.

[886] and to live forthrightly regardless.

[887] Well, obviously, that's at the core of what's admirable.

[888] And why would we presume that that's not the case?

[889] We act as if that's the case.

[890] It's what everyone dreams and wishes that they could do.

[891] I mean, assuming that you dispensed with the idea that you're going to be immortal, I suppose that might be worth wishing for too, or perhaps not.

[892] Immortal is a very long time.

[893] But you certainly want this.

[894] And that image says, well, this is what you should be.

[895] And, you know, we've got that same opening into the sky going on in that image that I showed you before.

[896] It's like this is a transcendent truth that constantly re -manifests itself across time and space.

[897] And Jung would say, it's built into your psyche, that image.

[898] Now, you know, there are elements of it that are culturally constructed.

[899] It wouldn't necessarily have to be the cross, although the cross is a very old symbol.

[900] It's far older than its use in Christianity, and it's been used in many, many religious representations.

[901] But that echoes, the soul echoes with that, you know, and, well, and there's Moses up there on the, on the mount, receiving the, the, the law.

[902] And so we'll talk a lot more about that when we get to Exodus, but if, yeah, yeah, yeah, if we get to Exodus.

[903] So, well, look, where does it happen?

[904] Well, on a mountain.

[905] Well, that's a pyramid, that's up, right?

[906] That's up.

[907] It's up in the stratosphere.

[908] It's up in the sky where you look upward, okay?

[909] And then so what's happening to Moses?

[910] Well, here's a bit of a clue, as far as I can tell.

[911] I figured this out partly again by reading Jean Piaget, because one of the things that Piaget said about kids was that they first learned to play a game, but they don't know what the rules are.

[912] Meaning that if you have a bunch of kids together, they can play a game.

[913] But if you take one of the kids out of the game when they're young, say six, and you say what are the rules, they can only sort of to give you a representation.

[914] So you take six -year -old one and he'll tell you some of the rules and six -year -old two will tell you different rules and you know six -year -old three will tell you different rules.

[915] But if you put them all together, they can play.

[916] So they have the knowledge embodied either individually or in the group.

[917] The knowledge is there to be extracted.

[918] Well then they get a little older, they can extract the rules and then they start to play by the rules.

[919] And then Piaget's last step was, well, it isn't just the kids play by the rules.

[920] It's that they learn that they can make the rules.

[921] And he thought about that as moral progression.

[922] First you can play, then you can play by the rules.

[923] Then you learn, maybe, because he didn't think everyone learned this, that you're actually the master of the rules.

[924] That doesn't mean the rules are arbitrary, but it means that you can be the generator of the rule, assuming that you know how to play the game.

[925] And he thought about that as a moral progression.

[926] And then I thought, well, that's exactly what happened to Moses in the story of Exodus, because Moses is out there leading all those Israelites around and like they don't have a law they don't have a lawgiver they have a tradition they're all like crabby because well they're in a desert it's like they're in a tyranny but now they're in a desert it's like that's no improvement so they're really getting pretty bitchy about it and so they're worshipping false idols and having one catastrophe after another and they get moses to judge their conflicts and so he does that for god only knows how long forever crabby israelites come to moses and bitch at him.

[927] It's like, well, he did this and she did that.

[928] And so then he has to figure out how to make peace.

[929] And he does that so long that one of his, I think it's his father -in -law tells him he has to stop doing it because he's going to exhaust himself.

[930] Well, then you think, well, what's happening?

[931] Well, and I'm not assuming that this is like a literal historical story.

[932] I think, again, it's a condensation.

[933] Well, any group has a set of customs, just like a wolf pack does.

[934] And so then the customs are being manifest in someone who's a genius is watching and thinking, okay, well, what's the rule in this situation?

[935] What's the rule in this situation?

[936] What's the rule in this situation?

[937] And then in his imagination, the rules turn into a hierarchy.

[938] And then he goes up on the mountain and he goes bang.

[939] And he thinks, oh my God, here's the rules that we've been living by all this time.

[940] And that's the revelation of the commandments.

[941] Well, and you think, well, how else could it be?

[942] You think the rules came first and obeying them came second?

[943] It's like, No, the rules come first.

[944] Sorry, the actions come first.

[945] The obeying them comes first.

[946] And then you figure out what everybody's up to and you say, Hey, look, this is what you've been up to all along.

[947] Everybody goes, oh, yeah, that seems to make sense.

[948] And if it didn't, who would follow them?

[949] No one was going to follow them if they don't match what's already there.

[950] You just think about that as unjust.

[951] And so that's portrayed here as a cataclysmic human event.

[952] It's like, oh my God, we've been chimpanzee.

[953] We've been in this hierarchy of authority for so long, we have no idea what we're doing, and all of a sudden, poof, it burst into revelatory consciousness, and we could say, here is the law?

[954] And you say, well, is it given by God?

[955] Well, hey, it depends on what you mean by God.

[956] We could start with that presupposition, but it's not like it just came out of nowhere.

[957] It took a, and this is something else Nietzsche observed so interestingly, and he said, you know, that a moral revelation was the consequence of a tremendously, long process of initial construction and then formulation.

[958] Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years of custom, of building custom, before you get the revelation of the articulated law.

[959] And that's a description of the pattern that works.

[960] Let's say, well, what's the pattern that works?

[961] It's the game that you can play with everybody else day after day with no degeneration.

[962] And that's another thing, Piaget figured out, that's so brilliant, and that's his idea of the equilibrated state.

[963] It's an extension of Emmanuel Kant's idea about the universal maxim, right?

[964] Act in a way so that each action could become a universal rule.

[965] That was Kant's fundamental moral maxim, and Piaget put a twist on that.

[966] He said, no, no, that's not exactly yet.

[967] It's act in such a way that it works for you now and next week and next month and next year and 10 years from now.

[968] And so that while it's working for you, it's also working for the people around you and for the broader society.

[969] And that's the equilibrated state.

[970] And you could think about that as an intimation of the kingdom of the city of God on earth.

[971] It's something like that.

[972] And it's based on this idea that a morality has to be iterable.

[973] And, you know, there's been lots of simulations online already, artificial intelligence simulations of trading games.

[974] Right.

[975] I mean, the people who've been studying the emergence of moral behavior, say in artificial intelligence systems, have already caught on to the idea that one of the crucial elements to the analysis of morality is iterability.

[976] You can't play a degenerating game because it degenerates.

[977] Like, obviously, you want to play a game that at least remains stable across time.

[978] And God, if you could really get your act together, maybe it would slowly get better.

[979] And of course, that's what you'd hope for your family, right?

[980] That's what you're always trying to do, unless you're completely hell -bent on revenge and destruction.

[981] It's like, is there a way that we can continue to play together that will make playing together even better the next day.

[982] That's what you're up to.

[983] And, well, I don't see anything arbitrary about that.

[984] And part of it, and this is also why I think that bloody postmodernists are so incorrect, because you know, they say something like, there's an infinite number of interpretations of the world, and that's actually true.

[985] But then they make a mistake, and they say, well, no interpretation is to be privileged over any other interpretations.

[986] It's like, wrong, wrong.

[987] That's where things go seriously off the rails.

[988] because the interpretation has to be, and this is the Piagetian objection, is like, if you and I are going to play a game, rule one is we both have to want to play.

[989] Rule two is other people are going to let us play.

[990] Rule three is we should be able to play it across a pretty long period of time without it degenerating.

[991] And maybe rule four is, well, we're playing, the world shouldn't kill us.

[992] It's like there are not very many games, like you don't send your kids out to play on the superhighway, right?

[993] So they're not playing hockey on the superhighway because the world kills them.

[994] And so, there's an infinite number of interpretations, but there is not an infinite number of solutions.

[995] And the solutions are constrained by the fact of the world and are suffering in the world, and then also constrained by the fact that we constrain each other.

[996] And so that's where I think that's gone like dreadfully, dreadfully wrong.

[997] So, all right.

[998] It's really fun to look at these old pictures once you kind of know what they mean.

[999] You know, at least that's what I've discovered, is that once I kind of understand the underlying rationale for, I mean, someone worked hard on that.

[1000] That's an engraving, right?

[1001] They took a long time making that picture.

[1002] They're serious about it.

[1003] And when you understand what it means, you know, all those people, they're prostrate at the revelation of the law.

[1004] It's like, well, no wonder.

[1005] It's like, break the law and see what happens.

[1006] Break the universal moral law, man, and see what happens.

[1007] You know, I see people in that situation, well, as you all do all the time, perhaps me more than you, because I'm in clinical psychologist, you know, and if the people I'm seeing haven't broken the universal law, then you can bloody well be sure that people around them have.

[1008] It's no joke.

[1009] Like you make a mistake and things will go seriously wrong for you.

[1010] And so it's no wonder that you'd be terrified at the revelation of the structure that governs our being.

[1011] One of the things that's so remarkable about the Old Testament, this is another thing Nietzsche commented on.

[1012] He was a real admirer of the Old Testament, Not so much of the New Testament, he thought it was a sin for Europe to have glued the New Testament onto the Old Testament because he thought the Old Testament was a really accurate representation of the phenomenology of being.

[1013] It's like stay awake, speak properly, be honest, or watch the hell out, because things will come your way that you just do not want to see at all.

[1014] And it might not just be you, it might be everyone you know and everything about your culture that is demolished for generation after generation.

[1015] It's like, stay awake and be careful.

[1016] And I think that people only don't believe that when they're being hubristic.

[1017] And I think that most people know that deep in their hearts.

[1018] You know, when you get high on your horse, that happens fairly often.

[1019] If you have any sense, you think, geez, I better be careful and tap myself down a fair bit.

[1020] Because if I get too puffed up, man, something's going to come along and take me out at the knees.

[1021] And everyone knows that.

[1022] pride comes before a fall.

[1023] It's like, if you have any, that's why it says in the Old Testament that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

[1024] It's like, I've never, in all my years as a clinical psychologist, and this is something that really does terrify me. I have never seen anyone ever get away with anything at all even once.

[1025] You know, there's that old idea that God has a book, you know, and keeps track of everything in heaven.

[1026] It's like, okay, okay, you know, maybe it's not a book.

[1027] Fine.

[1028] But that is a really useful.

[1029] thing to think about because, well, maybe you disagree.

[1030] Maybe you think people get away with things all the time.

[1031] I tell you, I've never seen it.

[1032] What I see instead is that thing happens, right?

[1033] Someone twists the fabric of reality.

[1034] And they do it successfully because it doesn't snap back at them that moment.

[1035] And then like two years later, something unraveled.

[1036] And they get walloped.

[1037] And they think, oh my God, that's so unfair.

[1038] And then we track it.

[1039] It's like, well, what happened before that?

[1040] This.

[1041] Well, then what?

[1042] This.

[1043] And then what?

[1044] This.

[1045] And then what?

[1046] This.

[1047] And then what?

[1048] Oh!

[1049] Oh, this!

[1050] Oh, that's where it went wrong.

[1051] It's, yeah, because you can't twist the fabric of reality without having it snap back.

[1052] It doesn't work that way, and why would it?

[1053] Because what are you going to do?

[1054] Twist the fabric of reality?

[1055] I don't think so.

[1056] I think it's bigger than you.

[1057] You know, and I think that one of the things that really tempts people is the idea that, well, I can get away with it.

[1058] It's like, yeah, you try.

[1059] You see how well that works.

[1060] It's like, you get away with nothing.

[1061] Nothing.

[1062] And that is the beginning of wisdom.

[1063] And it's something that deeply terrifies me. And, you know, ever since last September, when I've come to more, like, broader public attention, one of the thing, I've been terrified of making a mistake, because I certainly know I'm more than capable of making a mistake.

[1064] And thank God so far, either I haven't made one, or no one's found out about it.

[1065] So, but it's like, you know, we walk on a very thin and narrow edge.

[1066] And we're very lucky when things aren't degenerating into chaos around us, or rapidly moving to far too much order and it's not an easy thing to stay on that line and you can tell when you stay you're on that line because things are deeply meaningful and engaging when you're on that line but if you're not existentially terrified about the consequences of wavering off that then you are truly not awake so and that's what i see in this picture you know it's like look out man because there are rules and if you break them god help you so one of the of the things that seems to me the case with regard, I mentioned this in the question period a bit last time, is that one of the things that seems to be actually one of the advantages to gluing the New Testament onto the Old Testament is the idea of a transformation and morality that is analogous to the Piagetian idea that after you learn to play by the rules, you can learn to make the rules, because I think that's actually what happens to some degree in the transition between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

[1067] Because in the Old Testament, most morality is prohibition.

[1068] Here are things.

[1069] you shouldn't do.

[1070] It's like, you know, fair enough.

[1071] That's a lot of what you do with your kids.

[1072] Don't do this.

[1073] Don't do this.

[1074] Especially when they're happy.

[1075] You're always going around telling them to stop being so happy because all they're doing is causing trouble.

[1076] It's quite painful if you're a parent and you notice that.

[1077] But the first morality is prohibition, right?

[1078] Control yourself so you don't cause too much trouble.

[1079] And then maybe if you get that down and you're good at it, then the next thing is, well, once you're disciplined, then you can start working towards something that's a positive good.

[1080] And that's the transformation that seems to me to be fundamentally characteristic of the juxtaposition of the New Testament onto the Old Testament.

[1081] But in these images it's still something like serve tradition, serve the father, psychologically speaking, support the tradition because you live on it.

[1082] They're in an old Mesopotamian story, the Anumi Ilish, which you can read about if you're interested in.

[1083] The original gods who are really badly behaved, they're like two -year old, in fact, they're a lot like two -year -olds.

[1084] They kill the primordial god, Apsu, who's the patriarchal god.

[1085] They kill them and try to live on its corpse.

[1086] Well, that's what we all do, right?

[1087] Because we live on the corpse of our ancestors, you could say, we live on the corpse of our culture, it's dead.

[1088] And that's not a great place to live, so you have to keep revivifying it so the damn thing, you know, stays active and awake.

[1089] You stay on the corpse for too long, and then the devil or the demon of chaos comes back, And that's what happens in the Mesopotamian story.

[1090] It's like, don't be thinking that you can stay on the corpse of your ancestors for too long without contributing to the revivification of the system.

[1091] Because the chaos that all of that holds that bay will definitely come and visit you.

[1092] And you see that in stories like the Hobbit.

[1093] You know, hobbits, they're nice, they like to eat, they're kind of fat, they're short, they're not very bright, you know, they're hubristic.

[1094] They have no idea what's out there in the broader world.

[1095] They're protected, if you remember, by the striders, who are the sons of great kings, who look like tramps.

[1096] They have nothing but contempt for them.

[1097] They patrol the borders and keep the bloody hobbits safe.

[1098] But out there in the periphery, all hell is brewing, and chaos is generating and forming.

[1099] And that's an archetypal story, and that's why people like that story so much, because that's exactly right.

[1100] Like, we're the hobbits, and we are protected from chaos by the spirits of our dead ancestors.

[1101] And we're too damn stupid to know it, and we think, oh, well, we don't need them anymore.

[1102] And that, to me, that's post -modernism.

[1103] That's what the bloody universities are doing with the humanities.

[1104] It's absolutely appalling.

[1105] And we will pay for it.

[1106] So unless we wake up, and hopefully we'll wake up, because that would be better than paying for it, even though being awake is rather painful.

[1107] So then I had this vision one time, and I kind of portrayed it in this image of what the world was like.

[1108] And I thought, well, it's not a pyramid.

[1109] It's not a single hierarchy of authority.

[1110] That's not what it is.

[1111] It's an array of hierarchies of authorities.

[1112] So you imagine this sort of infinite plane.

[1113] And in the infinite plane, there's nothing but pyramids.

[1114] And inside the pyramids, there are strata of people everywhere.

[1115] Far as you can look.

[1116] Some of the pyramids are tall.

[1117] Some of them are short.

[1118] They overlap.

[1119] It's endless.

[1120] The plane is endless.

[1121] And those are all the positions to which you could rise.

[1122] And everybody's inside the pyramid sort of crammed up, trying to move towards the top.

[1123] and then there's the possibility of sailing across over top of all of them and seeing how the structure itself works and that's the eye that floats above the pyramid and it sees the structure itself and the highest order of being is not to be at the top of the pyramid it's to use the discipline that you attain by striving towards the top of the pyramid to release yourself from the pyramid and move one step up and that's I think that's one of the things that's instantiated in the idea of the for example of the Holy Ghost So, and I think that's akin to that, that's Sisyphus, and Nietzsche said of Sisyphus, if I remember correctly, that one has to imagine him happy.

[1124] Well, if there's a rock at the bottom of the hill, then you might as well push it up the hill, and if it rolls back down, well, then you've got something else to do, don't you?

[1125] enough respect for ourselves that we wouldn't have to turn to hatred and revenge and try to take everything down, because I think that's the alternative.

[1126] So, he's not weak, that's one thing you can say about him.

[1127] Same idea represented there, right?

[1128] That's Atlas, who voluntarily takes the world on his shoulders.

[1129] It's like the idea of Christ taking the sins of the worlds on his shoulders.

[1130] It's exactly the same notion, which is the notion that you should be able to recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity and take responsibility for it, Because that's what that means.

[1131] And the thing that's so interesting about that is that if you can recognize yourself, in yourself, all the horror of humanity, you will instantly have a hell of a lot more respect for yourself than you did before you did that.

[1132] Because there's some real utility in knowing that you're a monster.

[1133] Now, and just because you're a monster doesn't mean you have to be a monster, but it's really useful to know that you are one.

[1134] So, and one of the things that you knew, and this is something that I find so amazing about his writing, I think something that really distinguishes him, for example, from Joseph Campbell, who talked about following your bliss, is like Jung said very clearly that the first step to enlightenment is the encounter with the shadow.

[1135] And what he meant by that was, everything horrible that human beings have done was done by human beings, and you're one of them.

[1136] And so if you don't understand that, and to understand that really means to know how it was that you could have done it.

[1137] And that's a shattering thing, to try to imagine that, to try to imagine yourself as someone who's engaged in medieval torture, to see how you could, in fact, do that.

[1138] You're never the same after you learn that.

[1139] But being never the same after learning that is unbelievably useful, because when you understand that that's what you're like, then you're a whole different creature.

[1140] And I don't think, and this is something I did learn from Jung, is that you cannot be a good person until you know how much evil you contain within you.

[1141] It is not possible.

[1142] And it's partly because you just don't have any potency.

[1143] Like, if you're just naive, if you're just nice, if you'd never hurt anyone, you'd never hurt a fly, you don't have the capability for any of that, why would anyone ever take you seriously?

[1144] You're just, you're a domestic animal at best, you know, and a rather contemptible one at that.

[1145] And it's a very strange thing because you wouldn't think that the revelation of the capacity for evil is a precondition for the realization of good.

[1146] But I believe, first of all, Why would you be serious enough to even attempt to pursue the good unless you had some sense of what the consequence was of not doing it?

[1147] You have to be serious about these sorts of things.

[1148] It's not a, it's not the game of a child, right?

[1149] It's the game of a fully developed adult.

[1150] And you have, I learned this in part when I had little kids.

[1151] I wrote a chapter from my new book called Never Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them.

[1152] And why was that?

[1153] And I read that, wrote that, after I knew I was a monster.

[1154] And I thought, I'm going to make sure I like my kids.

[1155] I'm going to make sure they behave around me so that I like them.

[1156] Because I'm way bigger than them.

[1157] And I'm way more cruel than they are.

[1158] And I've got tricks up my sleeve that they cannot even possibly imagine.

[1159] And if they irritate me, I will absolutely take it out on them.

[1160] And if you don't think that you're the sort of person that would do that, then you are the sort of person who is doing it.

[1161] You know, we're not going to get to Adam and Eve, ha ha.

[1162] I watched this great documentary once called Hitman Hart, and was about Brett Hart, who was the most famous Canadian in the world for a while.

[1163] And he was a worldwide wrestling federation wrestler, you know, and he was a good guy.

[1164] And he came from this famous family of wrestlers who all came from Alberta.

[1165] I think there were seven brothers who were wrestlers and seven sisters and all the sisters married wrestlers.

[1166] And they were all offspring, children of Stu Hart, who was a wrestling impresario like 40 years ago.

[1167] And it was such a cool documentary because I was always wondering, why in the world do people watch wrestling and believe it, you know?

[1168] Believe it.

[1169] Do you believe movies when you go watch them?

[1170] It's like, that's a hard question to answer.

[1171] Well, you're there, you do.

[1172] And so if you're watching wrestling and you're a wrestling fan, do you believe it?

[1173] Well, it isn't a matter of belief, it's a matter of being engaged in a drama.

[1174] And there are different levels of drama, right?

[1175] So let's say worldwide wrestling federation drama is not the most sophisticated form of drama.

[1176] Okay, but I'm not being a smart eloquent when I'm saying that.

[1177] There's drama of different sophistication for different people.

[1178] And that's also why religious truths exist at multiple levels simultaneously, right?

[1179] There's got to be something in it for everyone.

[1180] And that's a hard belief system.

[1181] And that's a hard system to put together, something for the unbelievably sophisticated, and something for the common person.

[1182] Okay, so we have wrestling, and Brett Hart was a good guy, and he fell into the archetype of being a good guy, and that's partly what the story's about.

[1183] It was a bit too much for him.

[1184] But one of the things that he laid out so carefully was because he figured that a hundred and twenty million people knew him, something like that.

[1185] And that everywhere he went, he was treated like a hero, and he found that quite a bit of, quite a burden, as you can imagine, if you think about it.

[1186] But he portrayed what was happening in the wrestling ring as classic good against evil, but not conceptualized and disgust, right, embodied, fought out, acted out, you know, like Thor and the Hulk, except like right in front of you.

[1187] And so, well, that's exactly this sort of thing.

[1188] I mean, we could consider hockey more sophisticated than wrestling, perhaps.

[1189] And as I said, I'm not being a critic of these.

[1190] I'm not being critically minded about these things.

[1191] I understand their purpose, and I would highly recommend that documentary.

[1192] It's a brilliant documentary.

[1193] But it's the same thing.

[1194] It's a silver cup, right?

[1195] It's like, there's the hero of the team.

[1196] That's the hero of the teams.

[1197] You know, here's something cool.

[1198] If you're the fan of the Toronto Blue Jays or the Toronto Maple Leafs, of course, this hardly ever happens to you if you're the fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, because they always lose.

[1199] But if you're watching a game and your team win, and we take your testosterone levels, then they went up.

[1200] And if you watch the Toronto Maple Leafs and they lost, and you're a fan, then your testosterone levels go down.

[1201] So that's pretty damn funny, you know?

[1202] I mean, really, don't you see how deeply instantiated this is in people.

[1203] I mean, it bloody well alters your biochemistry, like your testosterone levels.

[1204] It's all, no, my team lost.

[1205] You know, it's like, there'll be nothing in it for the wife tonight, you know.

[1206] Well, this is the cosmos, I think, from the phenomenological perspective.

[1207] And one of the things that has come to my realization is that this is real.

[1208] This is real.

[1209] It's not a metaphor.

[1210] It's way deeper than a metaphor.

[1211] The most real things about life are the place you don't know and the place you know.

[1212] And you could say, well, that's explored territory and unexplored territory.

[1213] That's real, and it's been around forever, back to the lobsters.

[1214] You know, if you put lobsters in a new place, the first thing they do is go around their territory, finding places to hide, and also making a burrow.

[1215] So the first thing they do is establish what they know against what they don't know.

[1216] And that's real.

[1217] It's real from the Darwinian perspective, and we're going to say that what's real from the Darwinian perspective is plenty real enough, because we're alive and everything, and so that sort of thing matters.

[1218] Like, well, that's what this is, the Taoist symbol, that's what it says, It says, what is experience made of, eternally.

[1219] That's easy.

[1220] Chaos and order.

[1221] And in every bit of chaos, there's the possibility of order.

[1222] And in every bit of order, there's the possibility of chaos.

[1223] And that's the way, right?

[1224] That's the path of life.

[1225] That's life itself.

[1226] And where you're supposed to be is right on the border between the two of those.

[1227] And why is that?

[1228] Stable enough?

[1229] Engaged enough.

[1230] Right?

[1231] So not only are you doing what you should be doing, you're doing it in a way that increases the probability that you'll do it better tomorrow.

[1232] And you can tell when you're doing that because you're engaged.

[1233] You're in the right time and place.

[1234] And your neurology tells you that.

[1235] That's what meaning is.

[1236] That's what transcendent meaning is.

[1237] And that's so cool because I also think that that is the antidote to existential suffering.

[1238] The antidote to existential suffering is to be at the right place, at the right time.

[1239] And you know, you want to get technical about it.

[1240] Okay, anxiety and pain.

[1241] That's the reality of existential suffering.

[1242] Okay, so let's say you're in the right place at the right time.

[1243] What happens to biochemically?

[1244] Dopaminergic activation.

[1245] What does that do?

[1246] Suppresses anxiety and it's analgesic.

[1247] Now, it's more than that because it also produces positive emotion and the desire to move forward.

[1248] And it underlies creativity.

[1249] And so not only do you get the positive engagement from a neurochemical perspective, You get the analgesia and you get the reduction of anxiety.

[1250] So it's not hypothetical.

[1251] And it is the case that the dopaminergic systems, those are the exploratory systems, unbelievably ancient and archaic, are activated when you're optimally positioned to be incorporating new information, which is what human beings do, because we're information foragers.

[1252] And so we want to be secure, but building on our security at the same time.

[1253] And then we want to do it for ourselves, we want to do it for other people, we want to do it for our families, we want to do it for broader society, we want to bring the whole world together in alignment to do that, and that's meaningful.

[1254] And God only knows what we could do about the suffering of the world if we did that.

[1255] You know, we have no idea what we could do if we started doing things properly.

[1256] And maybe so many of the things that dismay us about life, we could stop.

[1257] I mean, we stopped a lot of them in the last hundred years.

[1258] You know, things are a lot better than they were a hundred years ago.

[1259] obviously they're not perfect.

[1260] But 100 years ago, 120 years ago, man, you know, the average person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day in today's dollars.

[1261] It's like, you just try that for a week and see how much fun that is.

[1262] So the Taoists, well, what is this?

[1263] Well, this is the pre -cosmogonic chaos out of which the word of God extracted habitable order at the beginning of time.

[1264] It's the same thing.

[1265] It's the same thing.

[1266] And that chaos, we'll talk a bit more about that later.

[1267] because it's a very complicated thing to describe, but it's certainly the thing that when you encounter, the chaos is what you encounter when the Twin Towers fall, right?

[1268] You remember what that was like, right?

[1269] So, it was September 10th.

[1270] Well, that was the world.

[1271] Everyone knew what the world was like, and then it was September 11th, and everyone walked around dazed for three days because the buildings fell.

[1272] But, so what?

[1273] You can see a building fall.

[1274] You can understand.

[1275] understand what happens when a building falls.

[1276] So then what's going on with the being dazed?

[1277] Well, it's the chaos that underlies our habitable order manifested itself in those buildings collapsed.

[1278] It was a brilliant act of terrorism.

[1279] And everyone was frozen and curious because that's how we react to that sort of thing.

[1280] It's like the shark.

[1281] You know, remember that famous movie poster for Jaws with the woman swimming on the top of the water and that terrible leviathan shark underneath coming up to take her out.

[1282] Well, that's life, man. That's the world.

[1283] And now and then you see that.

[1284] And when something falls like the Twin Towers fall, you remember that the ocean below you, the abyss, right?

[1285] The primordial abyss.

[1286] That bloody thing is deep.

[1287] And you're fragile.

[1288] And that happens when someone betrays you and it happens to you when your dreams fall apart.

[1289] You encounter that chaos again from which the world is extracted and then you're called upon to act out attention and the word in order to bring the world back into order.

[1290] And none of that is, none of that is superstitious.

[1291] None of that is superstitious.

[1292] None of that's even metaphorical.

[1293] It's real.

[1294] It's more real than anything else.

[1295] And I think the reason for that in part is that this has been, it's been this way forever.

[1296] Right?

[1297] As long as there's been life.

[1298] This has been the rule of life.

[1299] And that's the cosmos.

[1300] That's reality.

[1301] That's what we inhabit.

[1302] it.

[1303] And so, one of the things, you know, the so -called new atheists, and I don't want to go on a tangent about new atheists, because I think atheists are often remarkably honest and very consistent in their analysis.

[1304] So, but I just don't think they're taking the problem seriously now.

[1305] Like, I don't think they take their evolutionary theorizing nearly with the seriousness that it necessitates.

[1306] And I don't think that, I don't think that you can dispute the proposition that.

[1307] the longer something has had a selection effect on life, the more real it is.

[1308] It's the fundamental axiom of Darwinian biology.

[1309] And I think the Darwinian world is more real than the physical world.

[1310] That was the argument that I was trying to have with Sam Harrison.

[1311] I didn't do the world's best job of that, although it went not too bad the second time.

[1312] But it's not something to be taken lightly.

[1313] It's a very serious, profound, and meaningful proposition.

[1314] And people act it out and want to act it out whether they know it or not.

[1315] That's Marduk.

[1316] So the story of Marduk, I'll just give it to you very briefly.

[1317] Tiamat and Apseu are locked in embrace at the beginning of time.

[1318] Goddess of salt water, god of fresh water, together.

[1319] Chaos and order.

[1320] They give rise, masculine and feminine.

[1321] They give rise to the world of the elder god.

[1322] And those are, to me, they're primordial motivational forces, there's something like that.

[1323] And their rage and their lust and their love and all these things that possess us that are there forever.

[1324] And they're out in the world acting.

[1325] And they carelessly slay Apsu, their father.

[1326] And they're making a racket and then they kill Apsu.

[1327] And then Tiamat gets wind of that.

[1328] And that's Tiamat right there, by the way.

[1329] She's kind of a rough -looking creature.

[1330] And she's the mother of all things.

[1331] And so she's not very happy about this.

[1332] Her children have destroyed structure itself.

[1333] Plus, they're noisy and careless.

[1334] And so she thinks, all right, just like Noah, just like the God that brings the flood to Noah.

[1335] Exactly the same idea.

[1336] Tiamat comes back and says, yeah, okay, enough is enough.

[1337] I'm going to take you out.

[1338] And she makes this battalion of monsters and puts the worst monster there is at the head of the battalion.

[1339] His name is Kingu.

[1340] He's like a precursor to the idea of Satan.

[1341] and she lets the gods know, hey, I'm coming for you.

[1342] And so they're not very happy about this because they're gods, but like, yeah, she's chaos itself, right?

[1343] She gave birth to everything.

[1344] This is no joke.

[1345] And so they send one god out after another to confront her, and they all come back with their tails between their legs.

[1346] There's no hope.

[1347] And then one day there's a new god that emerges, and that's Marduk.

[1348] And the gods know, as soon as he pops up, they know he's something new.

[1349] Remember, and this is happening while the Mesopotamians are assembling themselves, into one of the world's first great civilizations.

[1350] So all the gods of all those tribes are coming together to organize themselves into a hierarchy to figure out what proposition rules everything.

[1351] And so Marduk is elected by all the gods, and he says, look, I'll go out there and I'll take on time at it, but here's the rule.

[1352] From here on, you follow me. I determine destiny.

[1353] I'm the top God.

[1354] I'm the thing at the top of the hierarchy.

[1355] And all the other gods say, hey, look, no problem.

[1356] You get rid of chaos?

[1357] We do exactly what you say.

[1358] Now, Marduk, he has eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words.

[1359] Those are his primary attributes.

[1360] And so he takes a net, and he goes out to confront Tyamat.

[1361] And he encloses her in a net, which I think is so cool, because it's an encapsulation, right?

[1362] It's a conceptual encapsulation.

[1363] He encloses chaos itself in a conceptual structure.

[1364] He puts it in a net, and then he cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world.

[1365] And then he creates human beings to inhabit that world and to serve the gods.

[1366] And he creates human beings out of the blood of the kingdom, the worst of the demons.

[1367] And that took me to call in DeYoung, who was a student of mine helped me figure that out.

[1368] He thought, geez, that's pretty damn pessimistic.

[1369] It's like, you know, what exactly?

[1370] It's like a fall metaphor.

[1371] It's like the idea of original sin.

[1372] But our joint conclusion with regards to that was that human beings are the only creatures in creation that can truly deceive, right?

[1373] We have the capacity for evil, just like it says in the Adam and Eve story.

[1374] We can actually do that, and that's why we're made out of the blood of King, who the king of the demons.

[1375] We are the thing that can deceive, that can twist the structure of reality.

[1376] Well, so, Marduk.

[1377] Now, the Massopotamians had an emperor, right?

[1378] And the emperor was the avatar of Marduk.

[1379] That's what made him emperor.

[1380] He was only an emperor if he was going to be Marduk.

[1381] He had to be a good Marduk, which meant he had to confront Kiamat, chaos, and cut her up and make order out of her pieces.

[1382] And what the Mesopotamians used to do, at the New Year's celebration, they'd go outside their walled city, and that's explored territory versus unexplored territory.

[1383] They'd go outside their walled city into chaos, and they'd bring all the statues that represented the gods, and they'd act this out, because they're trying to figure something out, right?

[1384] They're trying to figure out what this means, they're acting it out.

[1385] And then they'd take their emperor, and the priest would make them kneel, and they take all his king uniform off, his emperor uniform off, and make him kneel and humiliate him and nail him with a glove and say, okay, how were you not a good Marduk this year?

[1386] Right?

[1387] And then he'd recount all the ways that he was inadequate in confronting chaos, and then they'd do the celebration, and Marduk would win, and the king would go sleep with a royal prostitute.

[1388] The reason for that was it's the same idea as St. George pulling the virgin from the dragon.

[1389] It's exactly the same idea.

[1390] that if you encounter the reptilian chaos, you can extract something out of it with which, if you unite, you produce creative order.

[1391] That's what they were acting out.

[1392] And that was the basis for the Mesopotamian idea of sovereignty.

[1393] It's so smart.

[1394] It's so unbelievably smart.

[1395] And, you know, the Mesopotamians had a massive influence on the civilizations that then had a massive influence on us.

[1396] It's one of the stories of how the notion of sovereignty itself came to be.

[1397] It's the evolution of the idea of God.

[1398] That's one way of thinking about it, but even more importantly, it's the evolution of the idea of the redemptive human being, right?

[1399] And that's taken to one of its conclusions, well, in the story of Buddha, but also in the story of Christ, the idea of the perfect individual.

[1400] And the notion is, well, that's the word that speaks truth into chaos at the beginning of time to generate habitable order that is good.

[1401] That's the story.

[1402] And so with that, I'll just show you these pictures, because they're so interesting.

[1403] Once you know what they mean, they're so cool.

[1404] That's a symbol of infinity.

[1405] Well, that's Hercules and the Hydra.

[1406] What's life like?

[1407] Cut off one head.

[1408] What happens?

[1409] Seven more grow, right?

[1410] What do you do?

[1411] Run home?

[1412] Well, no, that's not what you do.

[1413] This is what you do.

[1414] You fight it.

[1415] It's the chaos that generates partial chaos.

[1416] It's the ultimate chaos that generates partial chaos.

[1417] But that chaos also is what revivifies life, because otherwise it would just be static.

[1418] Mercury, the head of the Hydra, right, freezes you.

[1419] That's St. George.

[1420] He's doing it peacefully, which is so interesting, right?

[1421] He's got a beatific look on his face in that particular representation.

[1422] Another Saint George, right?

[1423] The Virgin in the background, I think that's St. Anne, if I remember correctly.

[1424] St. George, he's the patron saint of England.

[1425] Here's an interesting one.

[1426] This actually sheds light on the human proclivity for warfare.

[1427] St. George, that's a Muslim soldier.

[1428] It's really easy to transform the end.

[1429] enemy into the dragon, right?

[1430] Because the enemy is often the predator, and we do that instantaneously, right, without a second thought.

[1431] And so then we can go to war morally, because why not take out the snakes?

[1432] Well, you know, the problem is, where are the snakes?

[1433] Well, maybe they're outside, and maybe they're not.

[1434] Maybe they're in this room, and even worse, maybe they're in you.

[1435] And that's wisdom when you know that they're in you.

[1436] Why wouldn't she be happy about that?

[1437] Especially if she had a, child, right?

[1438] Seriously.

[1439] And that's Horus, right?

[1440] The god of vision.

[1441] And he was a falcon because falcons have great vision.

[1442] They fly above everything and they can see everything.

[1443] And so that was the Egyptian created God Horus.

[1444] And I'll tell you the story about Horus at some point.

[1445] Well, now here's some pictures that demonstrate what I had described as the emergence of, let's say, the meta -hero out of the hero.

[1446] So there's the person you admire and then there's the set of people that you admire and then there's the meta set of admirable people and the extraction of that ideal.

[1447] As far as I can tell, that's just what's portrayed in these images.

[1448] That's a great one.

[1449] It's very sophisticated image.

[1450] You see the two sides of Christ's face are not symmetrical.

[1451] One's God and one's man. That's what that icon means.

[1452] And so the fully developed person in this representation is one of the oldest representations of this sort that we know.

[1453] the idea is that there's a human person in his ordinariness let's say and then there's this this kinship with the divine that's associated with the willing adoption of the responsibility of moral mortal being and that produces this union and then it's manifest in a book right because that's speech and it's associated with the sun right it's the proper way of being and that's a perfect example, I think, of the emergence of the archetype out of the multitude.

[1454] That's what it looks like to me. And so, I guess now we're done with Genesis 1, and that took three lectures, but God's complicated, you know?

[1455] That's the thing.

[1456] So, thank you.

[1457] And next week, by all appearances, that's where we are.

[1458] So, we've got 20 minutes for questions.

[1459] So in the past, I've done some work with big brother, big sister, and whatever.

[1460] That being said, the most common story I tend to hear from conflict of youth is that they're raised in a single family home, usually with a mom, dad is there on the picture, an alcoholic, whatever, whatever, whatever.

[1461] So we have this child who is trying to seek ways to make himself healthy and empower himself in the ways that a healthy father should have done so, you know, between the form of the years of, like, one to four.

[1462] So I think you know I'm going with this.

[1463] Let's say for someone who born with that, like a good father figure, where would they go out in the world?

[1464] Or like, what spheres of influence would they try to expose themselves to, to, like, gain access to that fountain of health and knowledge that a father?

[1465] They're a good father figure should have provided them to in the first place.

[1466] Okay, well, partly, I mean, certainly to some degree, a good mother can provide that, right?

[1467] To some degree.

[1468] Although it's hard for one person to be everything.

[1469] Right.

[1470] You know, and I think one of the conundrums that face women, and this is a tough one, and this is why I think women are higher in trait agreeableness and higher in trait negative emotion, is that, you know, the primary problem that a woman has with an infant is why not throw it out a window?

[1471] Because it's very annoying, right?

[1472] I mean, it's there all the time, it's constant demand, it's absolutely constant demand, tremendous dependency.

[1473] And so, a woman has to be tilted towards mercy.

[1474] That's how it looks to me. And especially during, it's so important during the, especially the first year when children are so unbelievably vulnerable.

[1475] And so I think it's very difficult for women to be merciful like that and to make the shift to encouraging disciplinarian.

[1476] I think that's a very difficult thing for people to do simultaneously.

[1477] Although, you know, people, people, I'm not saying that women are always only merciful and men are always only encouraging disciplinarians.

[1478] But things do sort themselves out to some degree like that.

[1479] And I think also the biochemical transformations that accompany pregnancy and childbirth and lactation also tilt a mother towards that as well.

[1480] She has to really love that little thing, right?

[1481] It's number one, no matter what it demands.

[1482] And then telling it what to do and making sure it's behaving properly, that's a whole different issue.

[1483] Now, but the kids who lack fathers, I mean, first of all, they can find that to some degree in their friends.

[1484] And that's often what fatherless boys do in particular.

[1485] They go into gangs.

[1486] And they generate the missing man masculinity in the gang.

[1487] Well, that's not so good because like what the hell do they know?

[1488] Well, they don't know anything, right?

[1489] They're just stupid kids and they're like 15 years old and their testosterone is pumping and they're trying to get the hell away from their mother, which is what they're supposed to do.

[1490] And they're not in the right position to exercise any authority over themselves.

[1491] So that's not good.

[1492] They can find it in education.

[1493] They can find it in books.

[1494] They can find it in movies.

[1495] They can find it in sports heroes and so forth.

[1496] because the image of the father is fragmented and distributed among the community.

[1497] But it's very, very difficult to not have a father.

[1498] And, you know, one of the things that we're doing in our society, which I think is, I think it's absolutely appalling, is that we're making the case that all families are equal.

[1499] It's like, sorry, no, wrong.

[1500] And there's no empirical data supporting that proposition, by the way.

[1501] It's much better for kids to have two parents.

[1502] Now, who those parents are, that's a whole different issue.

[1503] Okay, and if I could just add one more thing.

[1504] How would you ask that question to, let's see, a daughter who was raised out of father?

[1505] Because she would obviously have different ways to find those fragments of a missing father than, like, a boy would instead.

[1506] Because obviously they're raised differently.

[1507] At least they should have been.

[1508] Well, I think it's the same issue, you know.

[1509] I mean, I think that another danger that emerges, and this is Freud's, of course, famous observation, is that, you know, if there's mum and child or father and child, that relationship can get a little closer than it should.

[1510] And then the lines get blurry and mixed.

[1511] And I'm not saying that that happens to everyone, obviously, but it's still a danger that's inherent in the situation.

[1512] They're thrust together too tightly without sufficient resources.

[1513] And so the responsibility has to be distributed more.

[1514] And like, I really do think that it's the sign of the degeneration of a society when single parenthood becomes anything approximating the norm.

[1515] It's not a good idea.

[1516] And part of the reason I believe that, and I think this has to do with the...

[1517] overwhelming selfishness of modern life is that marriage isn't for the people who are married.

[1518] It's for the children, obviously.

[1519] And like if you can't handle that, grow the hell up.

[1520] No, I mean, seriously.

[1521] Seriously.

[1522] Once you, once you have kids, it is not about you.

[1523] Period.

[1524] Now that doesn't mean it isn't about you at all.

[1525] But that just seems so self -evident to me. I can't believe that anybody would even question it.

[1526] Oh, it's been questioned.

[1527] Oh, yes.

[1528] Well, I'm certainly aware of that.

[1529] Yes, it's questioned.

[1530] It's almost illegal to question it now, you know, to, or illegal to make the set of propositions that I'm making.

[1531] So that's the best I can do with that.

[1532] Yeah, that's excellent.

[1533] Thank you.

[1534] This question is going to the first part of the first half of your lecture, but it's also something that's been on my mind listening to your lectures over the past few months.

[1535] And that's, when we talk about the psychological truth or significance of the Bible, to what extent does that psychological truth have to be embodied in specific historical events or people?

[1536] And so, for instance, the thing that's sort of been bugging on my mind is there's a part that St. Paul is talking about in the New Testament somewhere.

[1537] in one of his letters, and he's talking with the resurrection.

[1538] And he says, if it didn't happen, then this whole thing is just meaningless.

[1539] The faith is meaningless.

[1540] Like, for him, there had to be that embodiment of that historical person or event in that case.

[1541] Well, the best answer I have to that at the moment is that I'm really happy that I'm not at that point yet in this lecture series.

[1542] You know, because there's a crucial issue there.

[1543] and I don't know exactly what to make of it and my approach at the moment as I said is to approach this as rationally as I possibly can and I hope I know a hell of a lot more about what I'm doing by the time I get to that particular question and I do have the beginnings of ways to answer that but I'm not going to answer that at all right now because it's so bloody complicated it would just burn me to a frazzle and I'm already mostly burnt to a frazzle after that lecture so I I couldn't attempt to even start to sketch it out.

[1544] I don't know.

[1545] I mean, part of it is to be just rational about it, just to be rational about it.

[1546] There is something about the idea that continual death and rebirth is a necessary precondition to proper human adaptation.

[1547] Every time you learn something new, that's important.

[1548] Part of the stupid old you has to die.

[1549] And sometimes that can be an awful lot of you.

[1550] And in fact, it can be so much of you sometimes that you just die.

[1551] You just can't handle it.

[1552] And so, there is a real idea that you have to identify with the part of yourself that transcends your current personality that can constantly die and be reborn.

[1553] Now, then I could say, well, that means that all of this is psychological and symbolic.

[1554] And that's the simplest answer.

[1555] But I'm not satisfied with that answer, even though I think it's coherent and complete.

[1556] Because the world's a very weird place, and there are things about it that we don't understand.

[1557] So I can't go any farther than that at the moment.

[1558] So, yeah.

[1559] Hi, Dr. Peterson.

[1560] I just recently watched one of your videos of you debating with transgendered protesters at UFT free speech rally in October.

[1561] And one of the protesters, one of the comments one of the protesters said to you, which was in particular very, like very chilling, was why do you have the right to determine?

[1562] whether an individual is worthy of you using their pronouns.

[1563] The scary thing to me is how common this type of view is among radical left -wing protesters on university campuses who feel they have the right to tell other people what they can think, what words they can use, and what speakers they can or cannot listen to.

[1564] The even scarier part is that our government is creating legislation to back up their ideologies, which is evident through Bill C -16, M -103, and Bill 89.

[1565] So my question is, what do you think the endgame is in all of this?

[1566] Because it seems every year...

[1567] We're in the process of finding that out.

[1568] You know, and...

[1569] Sorry, I'm sorry.

[1570] Okay.

[1571] We're in the process of finding that out.

[1572] I don't...

[1573] I mean, I think the end game that underlies all of that, in my estimation, is best summed up by Jacques Derrida's criticism of Western civilization.

[1574] It's phalogocentric.

[1575] Now we've already talked about what the Logos means, right?

[1576] And so for Derrida that was a sign of its utter, what would you call it, utter despic, the utterly despicable dominant nature of Western culture.

[1577] Well, that's what animates the postmodernists.

[1578] Now they may not know that because an ideology gets fragmented.

[1579] across its adherence, and then it only acts as the coherent ideology when all those adherents come together in a mob.

[1580] And then you see the animating spirit.

[1581] So, I think that there's a battle going on, that's a battle exactly at the level that Derrida described, and that's a theological battle with a philosophical implications, and out of those philosophical implications come political implications.

[1582] But it's not primarily political and it's not primarily philosophical.

[1583] It's deeper than that and the postmodernists are out Their criticism was designed to be fundamental and it also emerged out of Marxism and let's not forget that the Marxist criticism was not only fundamental But just about resulted in the nuclear annihilation of the world.

[1584] These are not trivial issues and we're back in the same In same boat and so what do I think should be?

[1585] be done about that.

[1586] Well, I've thought about that way before any of this happened, and I think that what we should do about it is we should tell the truth, because there isn't anything more powerful than that.

[1587] And that's the right theological answer, because the spoken truth brings good into being.

[1588] Well, that's the phallogocentric idea.

[1589] And I'm trying to revisit that to explain to people what it means and to see if they think that's a good idea.

[1590] I mean, that's what we have to figure out.

[1591] Is that an idea worth adhering to or not?

[1592] The alternative is the...

[1593] See, for the postmodernists, the world is that landscape of pyramids that I described.

[1594] But there's no transcendent vision that's over above that.

[1595] And all of those pyramids are equally valid and it's a war of everyone against everyone.

[1596] It's like the night nightmare of Hobbs, Thomas Hobbs, except that it's not individuals, it's groups, and everyone's a group.

[1597] You're a group, you're whatever your group is.

[1598] It's like that's death as far as I'm concerned.

[1599] It's it's utterly reprehensible.

[1600] And and we better sort it out because if we don't sort it out, we are bloody well going to pay for it.

[1601] So.

[1602] Thank you.

[1603] Hey, how's it going?

[1604] I just want to say thank you for doing all this and I really appreciate it.

[1605] That's Bob and Doug McKenzie.

[1606] right yeah hey how's it going yeah i'm glad you caught that yeah yeah so um i did a facebook poll and some people who are familiar with your work and a question kind of rose to the top like just right out of the blue it was spectacular and uh what it was you didn't really touch it here but you touched it a bit in your lectures it was uh about integrating the shadow yep and uh one of the main questions was how does one go about that especially in the modern world you know like, we're usually sheltered from anything resembling that kind of concept.

[1607] You know, we don't engage, like, the unknown.

[1608] We don't come into life or death situations, most of us, unless we work as, like, an ambulance, you know.

[1609] Well, that's one thing you can do.

[1610] Well, that is one thing you can do, you know, is that you, well, yeah, you can search out experiences that put you there.

[1611] That's, that's, you know, because, well, you can do that as a volunteer, for example.

[1612] I mean, you can, one of the things I saw once, was in Montreal, I was in this outdoor mall in Montreal on St. Hubert, and I saw this great big 17 -year -old kid, you know, and he had a mohawk, and he was dressed in leather, and he, with, you know, studs, and like he was, he was doing the modern barbarian thing, and he had it really down.

[1613] And, you know, he was standing in the corner with two pink shopping bags, hey?

[1614] So I was looking at him, and I thought, you know, if someone offered him the idea, the, the, the opportunity to drop those goddamn sleeping bags or shopping bags and go fight with isis he'd be there in a second yeah right because what the hell is some monster like that doing standing on the corner of st hubert holding two pink shopping bags so i mean so some of it is that you need you need to find out where you can push where you could you can need to find out that edge that you can push yourself against it's going to be different for different people but But that's the call to adventure and heroism.

[1615] And there are life -and -depth situations everywhere around you if you want to involve yourself in them.

[1616] And sometimes that might be to put yourself together to the degree that you can, say physically or spiritually or intellectually.

[1617] It could be an intellectual battle.

[1618] It could be a moral battle.

[1619] Like the frontier is everywhere.

[1620] The frontier is just the edge between what you know and what you don't know.

[1621] You want to put yourself on that damn edge.

[1622] and make yourself into something and you can retreat into comfort in the modern world and I think that is a problem you know, I mean, I've noticed that it's one of the pathologies of wealth I would say because one of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you're a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity and that's a big problem because they need necessity to call them into being and you know if you don't have a lot of material resources and your children ask you for something you can say no because no is the answer it's like no we can't do that but if you can say yes then it's really hard to say no because then you're just arbitrary well I don't know it's like Kierkegaard said you know they'll come a time when we have so much security and comfort that what will want more than anything else is deprivation and challenge and I think that's particularly what young men want now I think that that's partly because young women they're stuck with that anyways because they have to it's the necessity of living in the world and the responsibility of infant care in particular.

[1623] That occupies them.

[1624] Men have to do it voluntarily.

[1625] Women now, too, because of the birth control pill, but that's 30 years ago.

[1626] We hardly have to talk about that at all yet.

[1627] Thank you so much.

[1628] Hi, Dr. Peterson.

[1629] So I'm actually a Coptic Orthodox and Egyptian, so I found your talk today incredibly interesting.

[1630] I've also taken a deep interest in the early church fathers, We're talking about hierarchies.

[1631] I harken back to St. Athanasius, and the idea of theosis that you brought up last time, that God became man so that man can become like God.

[1632] So I was thinking about the systems of the hierarchies.

[1633] And is that an example of how the top of the pyramid, the hierarchy, sort of gets inverted or descends to the bottom and brings it up to the top?

[1634] And that's sort of an attraction of Christianity that's sort of made Christianity such a powerful idea.

[1635] What are your thoughts on that?

[1636] Oh, well, it's certainly one of the things that made not just Christianity a powerful idea.

[1637] Because one of the things that happened, this was called the democratization of Osiris, if I remember correctly.

[1638] And like what happened, see if I can answer this question using this approach for a sec. Is that going to work?

[1639] I don't know if I can answer that question that way.

[1640] The part of the attraction of Christianity, but this was something that emerged across time, was the notion that even if you were in a lowly position, that there was something about you that was akin to the divine.

[1641] And now you might say, well, that's just wish fulfillment.

[1642] That's what Freud would say.

[1643] That's what Marx would say, right?

[1644] The opiate of the masses.

[1645] I tweeted yesterday something I thought was pretty funny, which was that, like, religion was the opiate of the masses, but that Marxism was the methamphetamine of the masses.

[1646] So, so, so I think the attraction was that it, it, it, it allowed people to recognize their intrinsic dignity.

[1647] And one of the things I've been thinking about is the juxtaposition between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 because what happens in Genesis 2 is that human beings collapse and fall, right?

[1648] And then were these fallen creatures that know evil.

[1649] But in the beginning, in Genesis 1, it's really an optimistic story because it says, well, we're the sorts of creatures that partake in the calling forth of being from chaos.

[1650] And that's in our essential nature.

[1651] And to some degree, if you juxtapose both of those, it's as if that's the entire biblical story rammed together in the first two chapters, which is partly why we're taking so long to get through this, by the way, is that to return to Genesis 1 is the antidote to Genesis 2.

[1652] It's like to continue to act out the doctrine that you're made in God's image, and that means that you're capable of speaking good being into existence through truth, and that that's also the antidote to the fall, which I think is actually the fundamental narrative message of the entire biblical structure.

[1653] And I also think of Western civilization for that matter.

[1654] So there's a nobility.

[1655] And this is also why I think Nietzsche was fundamentally wrong in his criticism of Christianity because he thought about it as slave morality, you know, the vengeance of the bottom against the talk.

[1656] That's more historical than theological.

[1657] It's like it gives dignity, it illuminates the dignity of the human being.

[1658] And it requires responsibility, so it's not just wish fulfillment.

[1659] It's not Freudian wish fulfillment.

[1660] The Freudian theory, which I thought about a lot, is not tenable in my estimation.

[1661] It also doesn't account for the existence of hell.

[1662] Because if it's only wish fulfillment, why bother with hell?

[1663] I mean, it's a lot more.

[1664] If you're really going to just fulfill a wish, it's like everybody gets to go to heaven no matter what they do.

[1665] You don't have hell, which was, of course, something absolutely terrifying to medieval Christians, and then to plenty of people now, for that matter.

[1666] So, it's the nobility.

[1667] It's the idea of the nobility that I think is deeply attractive to people.

[1668] And that's all there is.

[1669] I mean, what you have to fight against your worm -like, fragile, mortal existence is the possibility of transcending that with nobility of speech and act.

[1670] That's what you have.

[1671] And who can hear that without feeling ennobled by that?

[1672] Now, you might say, well, you might shudder and say, well, I don't, I can't bear the responsibility.

[1673] It's like, well, fair enough, man. You know, I mean, that's a reasonable criticism.

[1674] But the consequence of not bearing the responsibility is that's hell, really.

[1675] So.

[1676] Thank you.

[1677] Thank you very much for your talk.

[1678] I don't know if you're familiar with the works of Nassim Talib.

[1679] I'm reasonably familiar with the.

[1680] So I think it's fair to say that he has, he has.

[1681] It talks about the idea that people, and especially modern people, have a failure to recognize the unknowns unknowns, right?

[1682] Yes.

[1683] Yes, right.

[1684] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[1685] Can you move the mic up a bit so that people can hear you a little better?

[1686] Thanks.

[1687] Can you make now?

[1688] Yes.

[1689] Well, I was wondering, do you think that that failure might be in some way related to the way that modern people fail to relate to the idea of God.

[1690] So in the sense that, you know, people can't really grapple with the notion of God.

[1691] As much as you can give a rational argument for it, you can't feel God in the way that perhaps a more religious person or a more an older person might have felt God.

[1692] Do you think that that inability to recognize the unknown unknowns might play into that?

[1693] Well, that's, okay.

[1694] seems to be related to this idea of the absence of necessity.

[1695] Something like that is that, because I think that what you're making a claim, maybe tell me if I've got it wrong, that if you're sheltered too much, then it also separates you from anything that's divine.

[1696] I guess that might be right, because there's not enough intensity of experience and something like that.

[1697] Is that part of the issue?

[1698] It might be more related to the idea of, like, realizing the absolute infinitude of what you don't know, like the, like the Mysterium Tremendom, like that kind of, you know, if you believe that through statistical analysis, you can get everything under control, and you genuinely believe that at some point you'll get it all under, you know.

[1699] Yeah, okay.

[1700] Well, so, okay, so, so, well, that's also, I think, part of the danger of rationality that the Catholics have been implicitly warning against forever is that the rational, is that the rational mind tends to fall in love with its own productions, and then to worship them as absolutes, which is, I think, what Milton was trying to represent by his satanic figure in Paradise Lost.

[1701] I think of that as like a precursor, a prophetic precursor to the emergence of totalitarian states in the modern world.

[1702] And so, yeah, I think that you can believe that what you know is sufficient to banish permanently what you don't know.

[1703] And I do think that that does paradoxically, although you'd think that that would make you secure.

[1704] It also does destroy.

[1705] your relationship with the spirit that might help you deal with what it is that you really don't know, with the unknown unknowns.

[1706] So yeah, I mean, we don't know to what degree extreme experience is necessary to bring forth extreme experience, right?

[1707] What do you have to be through before you encounter a religious revelation?

[1708] Well, people might say, well, you can't because there's no such thing.

[1709] It's like, well, don't be so sure about that.

[1710] I mean, people have reported them throughout history.

[1711] but they don't generally occur when you're, that's my favorite trope, when you're eating cheeses and playing, you know, and playing Mario Brothers, right?

[1712] So, yeah, so that's the best I can do with that.

[1713] Thank you very much.

[1714] This has to be the last question.

[1715] All right, I'll make it quick.

[1716] Earlier when you talked about criminality and creativity trends in men peaking at 14, it reminded me as something you said.

[1717] I think it was Joe Rowan talking about SJWs and how they create their own chaos, talking about how adolescents have this drive to change the world.

[1718] And I was wondering if those three, the criminality, creativity, drive to change the world are linked, and if so, if they manifest differently in men and women, and if they kind of come from the same area.

[1719] Well, I think they are linked, but I'm going to concentrate more on the second part of your question.

[1720] So I'm going to ask you guys to think about something.

[1721] So I talked to a friend of mine the other day.

[1722] He's a very, very smart guy, and we've been talking about, well, all the sorts of things that we've been talking about tonight for a long time.

[1723] And we were talking about the relatively, the relative evolutionary roles of men and women.

[1724] This is speculative, obviously.

[1725] And because our research did indicate, it's tentative research so far, that the, the SJW sort of equality above all else philosophy is more prevalent among women.

[1726] it's predicted by the personality factors that are more common among women so agreeableness and high negative emotion primarily agreeableness but in addition it's also predicted by being female and that's interesting because in most of the personality research that I've done and as far as I know in the literature at you know more broadly speaking most of the time you can get rid of the attitudinal differences between men and women or at least reduce them by controlling for personality So if you take a feminine man and a masculine woman, then, you know, the polls reverse.

[1727] But that didn't seem to be the case with political correctness.

[1728] And so I've been thinking about that a lot because, well, men are bailing out of the humanities like mad.

[1729] And pretty much out of the universities except for STEM.

[1730] The women are moving in like mad.

[1731] And they're also moving into the political sphere like mad.

[1732] And this is new, right?

[1733] We've never had this happen before, and we do not know what the significance of it is.

[1734] It's only 50 years old.

[1735] And so we were thinking about this.

[1736] And so I don't know what you think about this proposition, but imagine that historically speaking, it's something like women were responsible for distribution and men were responsible for production.

[1737] Something like that.

[1738] And maybe that's only the case really in the tight confines of the immediate family.

[1739] But that doesn't matter because that's most of the evolutionary landscape for human beings anyways.

[1740] What the women did was make sure that everybody got enough.

[1741] Okay, and that seems to me to be one of the things that's driving, at least in part, the SGW demand for equity and equality.

[1742] It's like, let's make sure everybody has enough.

[1743] It's like, well, look, fair enough, you know, I mean, you can't argue with that.

[1744] But there's an antipathy between that and the reality of differential productivity, you know, because people really do differ in their productivity.

[1745] So, all right, so to answer your question fully, I do think that, the rebellious tendency of adolescence is associated both with that criminality spike, especially among men and with creativity.

[1746] Yes.

[1747] I think that the SJW phenomenon is different, and I think it is associated at least in part with the rise of women to political power.

[1748] And we don't know what women are like when they have political power because they've never had it.

[1749] I mean, there's been queens, obviously, and that sort of thing.

[1750] There's been female authority figures, and females have wielded far more power historically than feminists generally like to admit.

[1751] But this is a different thing.

[1752] And we don't know what a truly female political philosophy would be like, but it might be, especially if it's not been well examined, and it isn't very sophisticated conceptually.

[1753] It could easily be, well, let's make sure things are distributed equally.

[1754] Well, yeah, but sorry, that's just not going to fly.

[1755] Do you think in terms of the West with SJWs, when you talked about last lecture as well, creating chaos when there is none, otherwise it'd be static?

[1756] Do you think there would be any validity in saying, that in a country like Canada where we're pretty gender equal, is there any merit to thinking SJWs are trying to create chaos, even when there arguably is none on a mass level?

[1757] Obviously, there's still problems.

[1758] Why would they do that?

[1759] Otherwise, it would be static in that drive.

[1760] It wouldn't, but I'm just wondering.

[1761] So I read this quote once, and I don't remember who said it.

[1762] It might have been Robert Heinlein for crying out loud.

[1763] Science fiction author, that springs to mind, but it probably wasn't.

[1764] And the proposition was that men tested ideas and that women tested men.

[1765] And I kind of like that.

[1766] There's something about that, you know.

[1767] And now, obviously, it's an overgeneralization.

[1768] But we also don't know to what degree women test men sheerly through provocation.

[1769] It's a lot.

[1770] Because, like, if you want to test someone, you don't have a, like, little conversation with them.

[1771] Like, you poke the hell out of them.

[1772] And you see, okay, like, I'm going to, like, go after you and see where your weak spots are.

[1773] And it seems to me that this It seems to me that in this constant protest and use of shame And all of that that goes along with this With this sort of radical movement towards egalitarianism That there's a tremendous amount of provocation And God, I'm going to say this too, even though I shouldn't But I don't believe this But I'm trying to figure it out You know, I thought it was absolutely comical When 50 Shades of Grey came out I just thought that was just so insanely comical that at the same time there's this massive political demand for like radical equality and say with regards to sexual behavior and the fastest selling novel the world had ever seen was S &M domination right it's like oh well we can know where the unconscious is going with that one don't we and sometimes I think like because one of the things that I've really tried to puzzle out and it's not like I believe I'm just telling you where the edges of my thinking have been going is that you have this crazy alliance between the feminists and the radical Islamists that I just do not get.

[1774] It's like the feminists is like why they aren't protesting non -stop about Saudi Arabia.

[1775] It's just completely beyond me. Like I do not understand it in the least.

[1776] And I wonder too, I just wonder bloody well, this is the Freud in me. It's like, is there an attraction, you know, is there an attraction that's emerging among the female radicals?

[1777] radicals for that totalitarian male dominance that they've chased out of the West.

[1778] And I mean, that's a hell of a thing to think, but I am, after all, I am psychoanalytically minded, and I do think things like that.

[1779] Because, like, I just can see no rational reason for it.

[1780] The only other rational reason is that, well, the West needs to fall, and so the enemy of my enemy is...

[1781] My friend.

[1782] Yeah, is exactly.

[1783] What is it?

[1784] I got that wrong, but...

[1785] The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[1786] Yes, exactly.

[1787] That's why Islamists tend to vote liberal as well.

[1788] Yes, well, so that could be the case.

[1789] But I'm not going to shake my suspicion about this unconscious balancing, because as the demand for egalitarianism and the eradication of masculinity accelerates, there's going to be a longing in the unconscious for the precise opposite of that, right?

[1790] The more you scream for equality, the more your unconscious is going to admire dominance.

[1791] And so, well, that's, that's, well, that's how you think if you're psychoanalytically minded.

[1792] And, you know, I'm a great admirer of Freud.

[1793] He knew a hell of a lot more than people like to think.

[1794] And so, which is partly why everyone still hates him, even though it's been a hundred years since he's, you know, really, really being around.

[1795] So, all right, we should stop.

[1796] Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1797] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

[1798] of this episode.

[1799] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.