https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EA1fJ-tyK_g
The cosmos is 15 billion years old and the world is four and a half billion years old. There’s been life for three and a half billion years. There were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems 300 to 600 million years ago. We were living in trees as small mammals 60 million years ago. We were down on the plains between 60 million and 7 million years ago. That’s about when we split from chimpanzees. Modern human beings seem to emerge about 150,000 years ago. And civilization pretty much after the last ice age. Something after 15,000 years ago. Not very long ago at all, you know. And that’s the span across which I want to understand. That’s the span across which I want to understand. I want to understand why we are the way we are looking at life in its continual complexity. Right from the beginning of life itself. And there’s some real utility in that because we share attributes with other animals. Even animals as simple as crustaceans for example have nervous system properties that are very much like ours. And it’s very much worth knowing that. And so I think in an evolutionary way. I think it’s a grand and remarkable way to think because it has this incredible time span. Right. It’s this amazing. I mean people at the end of the 19th century, middle of the 19th century, say thought the world really thought the world was about 6,000 years old. I mean 15 billion years old. That’s a lot more. Right. It’s a lot grander. It’s a lot bigger. But it’s also a lot more frightening and alienating in some sense. Because the cosmos has become so vast it’s either easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specks on a trivial speck. Out some misbegotten hell hole end of the galaxy among hundreds of millions of galaxies. Right. It’s very easy to see yourself as nothing in that span of time. That’s a real challenge for people and I think it’s a mistake to think that way. Because I think consciousness is far more than we think it is. But it’s still something we have to grapple with. I’m a psychoanalytic thinker. And what that means is that I believe that people are collections of sub-personalities. And that those sub-personalities are alive. They’re not machines. They have their viewpoint. They have their wants. They have their perceptions. They have their arguments. They have their emotions. They’re like low resolution representations of you. You know when you get angry it’s like it’s a very low resolution representation of you. It only wants rage or it only wants something to eat or it only wants water. It only wants sex. It’s you but shrunk and focused in a specific direction. And all those motivational systems are very, very ancient. Very archaic and very, very powerful. And they play a determining role in the manner in which we manifest ourselves. And as Freud pointed out with the id, we have to figure out how to take all those underlying animalistic motivations and emotions and civilize them in some way so that we can all live in the same general territory without tearing each other to shreds. Which is maybe the default position of both chimpanzee and humanity. So I take that seriously, the idea that we’re a loose collection of spirits. And that, you know, it says in the Old Testament somewhere that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And I think this is akin to that. If you know that you’re not in control of yourself thoroughly and that there are other factors behind the scenes, like the Greeks thought that human beings were the playthings of the gods. That’s the way they conceptualized the world. They sort of meant the same thing. They meant that there are these great forces that move us, that we don’t create, that we’re subordinate to in some sense. Not entirely, but we can be subordinate to them and they move our destinies. That was the Greek view. And there’s something, it teaches you humility to understand that. That there’s a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes. And you’re the driver of a very complex vehicle, but you don’t understand the vehicle very well. And it’s got its own motivations and methods. And sometimes you think it’s doing something and it’s doing something completely, completely different. You see that in psychotherapy all the time because, you know, you help someone unwind a pattern of behavior that they’ve manifested forever. First of all, they describe it, then they become aware of it. Then maybe they start to see what the cause is. They had no idea why they were acting like that. You know, they have to have the memory that produced the behavioral pattern to begin with. It has to be brought back to mind and then it has to be analyzed and assessed and then they have to think about a different way of acting. And it’s extraordinarily complex. So, psychoanalytic. Literary. Well, there’s this new, there’s this postmodern idea about literature and about the world for that matter. That if you take a complex piece of literature like a Shakespeare play, there’s no end to the number of interpretations that you can make of it. You know, you can interpret each word, you can interpret each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph, you can interpret the entire play. The way you interpret it depends on how many other books you’ve read, depends on your orientation in the world. It depends on a very, very large number of things. How cultured you are or how much culture you lack. All of those things. It opens up a huge, a huge vista for potential interpretation. And so the postmoderns sort of stubbed their toe on that and thought, well, if there’s this vast number of interpretations of any particular literary work, how can you be sure that any interpretation is more valid than any other interpretation? And if you can’t be sure, then how do you even know those are great works? How do you know they can’t? Maybe they’re just works that the people in power have used to facilitate their continual accession of power, which is really a postmodern idea and a very, very cynical one, but it has its point. But the thing is, it’s grounded in something real, right? It’s like, yes, you can interpret things forever. I want to show you something here. Just briefly, we’ll go back to it later. Look at this. This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. So at the bottom here, every single one of those lines is a biblical verse. Okay. Now, the length of the line is proportionate to how many times that verse is referred to in some way by some other verse. So you say, well, this is the first hyperlinked book, right? I’m dead serious about that. Like, you can’t click and get the hyperlinks, obviously, but it’s a thoroughly hyperlinked book. And it’s because, well, the people who worked on these stories that are hypothetically at the end, right, which is the end can’t affect the beginning. That’s the rule of time, right? What happens now can’t affect what happened to you 10 years ago, even though it actually can. But whatever. Well, you reinterpret things, right? And then they’re not the same. But whatever. We won’t get into that. But technically speaking, the present cannot affect the past. But if you were looking at a piece of literature, that’s not right. Because when you write the end, you know what was at the beginning. And when you write the beginning or edit it, you know what’s at the end. And so you can weave the whole thing together. And there’s 65,000 cross-references. And that’s what this map shows. And so that’s a great visual representation of the book. And then you can see, well, why is it deep? Why is the book deep? Well, just imagine how many pathways you could take through that, right? I mean, you just journey through. You just journey through that forever. You’d never ever get to the end of it. There’s permutations and combinations. And every phrase is dependent on every other phrase. And every verse is dependent on every other… Not entirely, but 65,000 is not a bad start. And so… Okay, well, so that’s another issue in some sense that seems to make the postmodernist critique even more correct. How in the world are you going to extract out a canonical interpretation of something like that? It’s like it’s not possible. But here’s the issue, as far as I can tell. The interpret… So the postmodernists extended that critique to the world. They said, look, well, a text is complicated enough. You can’t extract out a canonical interpretation. What about the world? The world’s way more complicated than a text. And so there’s an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world. And so how do we know that any one way is better than any other way? That’s a good question. Now, the postmodern answer was, we can’t. And that’s not a good answer, because you drown in chaos under those circumstances, right? You can’t make sense of anything. And that’s not good, because… It’s not neutral to not make sense of things. It’s very anxiety-provoking. It’s very depressing, because if things are so chaotic that you can’t get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency preparation mode, and your heart rate goes up, and your immune system stops working, and… Like, you burn yourself out, you age rapidly, because you’re surrounded by nothing you can control. It’s varying. That’s an existential crisis, right? It’s anxiety-provoking and depressing. Very hard on people. And even more than that, it turns out that the way that we’re constructed neurophysiologically is that we don’t experience any positive emotion, unless we have an aim. And we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim. It isn’t precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy. As you all know, if you’ve ever attained anything, because as soon as you attain it, then the whole little game ends, then you have to come up with another game. Right? So it’s Sisyphus. And that’s okay, but it does show that the attainment can’t be the thing that drives you, because it collapses the game. That’s what happens when you graduate from university. It’s like, you’re king of the mountain for one day, and then you’re like, surf at Starbucks for the next five years, you know? So… yeah. Whether you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility, the Halo app has something for you. 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Halo.com slash Jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 10,000-plus prayers and meditations. So what happens is that human beings are weird creatures because we’re much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment. And what that means is you have to have an aim, and that means you have to have an interpretation. And it also means that the nobler the aim, that’s one way of thinking about it, the better your life. And that’s a really interesting thing to know because, you know, you’ve heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person, and you shouldn’t lie, for example, and you might think, well, why the hell should I act like a good person and why not lie? I mean, even a three-year-old can ask that question because smart kids learn to lie earlier, by the way. And they think, well, why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short-term needs? I mean, that’s a great question. Why not do that? Why act morally? If you can get away with something and it brings you closer to something you want, well, why not do it? These are good questions. It’s not self-evident. Well, it seems to me tied in with what I just mentioned. It’s like you destabilize yourself and things become chaotic. That’s not good. And if you don’t have a noble aim, then you have nothing but shallow, trivial pleasures, and they don’t sustain you. And that’s not good because life is so difficult, so much suffering, it’s so complex. It ends and everyone dies and it’s painful. It’s like without a noble aim, how can you withstand any of that? You can’t. You become desperate. And once you become desperate, things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate. And so there’s the idea of the noble aim. And it’s not something that’s necessary. It’s the bread that people cannot live without, right? It’s not physical bread. It’s the noble aim. And what is that? Well, it was encapsulated in part in the story of Marduk. It’s to pay attention. It’s to speak properly. It’s to confront chaos. It’s to make a better world. It’s something like that. And that’s enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without, you know, cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that’s worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet. So now there’s a… the literary issue is that… So, look. You take a text, you can interpret it in a variety of ways, but that’s not right. This is where the postmodernist went wrong, because what you’re looking for in a text, and in the world for that matter, is sufficient order and direction. So then we have to think, well, what does sufficient order and direction mean? Well, you don’t want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable, right? That just seems self-evident. Pain argues for itself. I think of pain as the fundamental reality, because no one disputes it, right? I mean, even if you say that you don’t believe in pain, it doesn’t help when you’re in pain. You still believe in it, right? It’s… You can’t pry it up with logic and rationality. It just stands forth as what the fundament of existence, and that’s actually quite useful to know. Say, well, you don’t want any more of that than is absolutely necessary. And I think that’s self-evident. And then you say, wait a minute, it’s more complicated than that. You don’t want any more of that that’s necessary today, but also not tomorrow, and not next week, and not next month, and not next year. So however you act now, better not compromise how you’re going to be in a year, because that would just be counterproductive. That’s part of the problem with short-term pleasures, right? It’s like… Act in haste, repent at leisure. Everyone knows exactly what that means. So you have to act in a way that works now and tomorrow, and next week, and next month, and so forth. And so you have to take your future self into account. And human beings can do that. And taking your future self into account isn’t much different than taking other people into account. Right? Because I remember there’s this Simpson episode, and Homer Downs, a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. He says, um, someone, Marge says, you know, you shouldn’t really do that, and Homer says, that’s a problem for future Homer. I’m sure glad I’m not that guy.