https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FljKNSYHDHU
An involuntary encounter with the dragon of chaos. That’s really what it is, is that… And that’s… it’s your home happy and the predator invades your lair. That’s the story of… The Garden of Eden. That’s the story of the Garden of Eden. There’s no place that’s so safe that there isn’t a snake in it. Right? It’s the fundamental story of mankind. Even God himself can’t define a space so tightly and absolutely that a predator can’t… The predator of the unknown can’t make itself manifest within. Now, I read a book here a while back… On dragons. It was only a week or two ago. I just found this book. It was published in 2002 and… The… it’s an interesting book. It’s flawed, but it’s an interesting book. I’ll find the name of it for you. But the person who wrote this book… Was very interested in the fact that representations of dragons can be found worldwide. Really. Like, no matter where you go… That representation seems to exist. It’s the winged-legged serpent. And he was very interested in trying to puzzle out why. And he had an interesting hypothesis. And I do believe there’s some truth to it. He said, like in the case of the vervet monkeys, that there were three class of predators on tree-dwelling primates. Winged… Bodied like a cat. Because cats, in particular, like to eat tree-dwelling primates. And snakes. So you might think, well… Cats… Birds of prey… And predatory… and snakes… Are all different. But then you might think, well, what do you mean by different, exactly? Because categories are constructed in relationship to their functional significance. They’re all the same, if the category is things that eat you if you’re not careful. And so there’s absolutely no reason for human beings not to have produced a category… That’s an exemplar of things that eat you if you’re not careful. And so it’s an amalgam. Snake, predatory cat, predatory bird. Winged serpent with legs. Right? And often it has claws. You see the claws on it. On this one. Are like telons. And they’re often like that in dragon representations. Or sometimes they’re more like the claws of predators. But the telon representation is quite common. Often, like this one, the thing has two legs. Like a bird. Not always, because sometimes dragons don’t have any legs at all. They’re mostly snakes with wings. And sometimes they have four legs. But they often also have two legs. And so you think… You need a representation of predator. You don’t need a differentiated representation precisely of type of predator. That would come second. You know, it’s like the kid who points at the cat… Little kid, points at the cat walking down the street and says, doggy. It’s like, that’s not a dog. It’s like, no, no, that’s not right. The child’s use of dog isn’t a representation of dog. It’s representation of four-legged, peddable entity. And cat is an exemplar of that category. And so is dog. And so is bunny rabbit, for that matter. And you might say, well, so that’s the category of pet. And it’s a perfectly reasonable category. You could say you should differentiate it into bunny, rabbit, dog, and cat. Because there’s important information lost in the low representation, representation of pet. But there’s some bloody useful information conserved. Now, so that’s the walled garden and the dragon of chaos. I’m going to tell you something interesting about Genesis, about the story in Genesis. This took me like 30 years to figure out. I could not figure it out for the longest period of time. It’s a segue, but it’ll give you an idea of how these things operate across vast spans of time. So in the Garden of Eden, there’s Adam and Eve, right? The primordial human beings. And there’s a walled garden. That’s paradise. Paradise means walled garden. And Eden means well-watered place. And so there’s this idea that the proper habitat of human beings is an amalgam of social structure and nature. And that’s exactly right, because that’s what we live in, right? We never live in nature. And we never live in society. We live in an amalgam of society and nature. That’s the human environment. So it’s a walled garden. All right? And so it’s a productive, well-watered place where we could thrive. It’s safe. And it’s ruled over by a father figure in this particular story. And that’s like the… You could think about that as the spirit of civilization. That’s at least one way of considering it. So, well, there’s a snake in the garden. And it’s there unbeknownst to God, roughly speaking. Although he knows everything, so I guess he probably knows about the snake, too. And he tells Adam and Eve not to interact with it. Fine, and they do. And the snake wakes them up, right? Because when they interact with the snake, they’re given a fruit that opens their eyes and makes them aware that they’re naked and vulnerable. And then dooms them to work. Well, I’ll tell you the whole story much later in the course. But I want to give you an overview of it now. But then there’s this really strange idea that developed over the course of the development of not only Christianity, but Judaism and a number of other religions that fed into the mainstream of Christian ideas, including Zoroastrianism. There’s an idea that emerged across a very long period of time that the snake in the garden was the same as Satan, the source of all evil. And I’ve been trying to figure out for the longest period of time why in the world the manifestation of what’s essentially a representation of a predator, so that’s the snake, and, you know, the snake is associated with trees. Well, yes, the reason for that in all likelihood is that we dwelt in trees, right? And snakes like trees, and they’re around trees, and they can climb trees, and the snake was a typical predator on our ancient relatives. And so that’s fine. So you can see that that representation makes perfect sense. There’s predators that lurk in the garden. Yes, obviously. If you interact with them, they wake you up. Well, they better wake you up, because if they don’t wake you up when you interact with them, then you get eaten. So it’s probably just as well to wake up, even though there’s painful consequences associated with becoming conscious. And that manifests itself immediately in the story of Adam and Eve. But then there’s this weird association. It’s very undeveloped in the biblical stories that are part and parcel of this line of thinking. It was more like a consequence of a cloud of mythological stories that surrounded it. But the reason for that, I think, is that imagine that what human beings were trying to puzzle out was the nature of the predator. Okay, so on one level of analysis, the predator is the thing that slinks along the ground and that threatens you. And also it’s the thing that’s your mortal enemy and that wakes you up. But then that’s one conceptualization of predator. And fair enough. You can identify it and you can take precautionary measures. But a better conceptualization of predator might be, where does it come from? Let’s say it’s a snake. Well, there’s a layer of snakes somewhere. And so if we want to get rid of the snake, we shouldn’t be conceptualizing it as a snake. We should be conceptualizing it as one manifestation of a layer of snakes. And what we should do is go down, follow the damn snake wherever it goes, and find its layer and wipe out all of the snakes. And that’s a more abstract representation, right? It’s not predator anymore. It’s the source of predation. And so if you want to solve the predator problem permanently, you don’t kill the snake. You get rid of all the snakes. Okay, so fine. And people are pretty damn good at that. And that’s why you have stories of people like St. Patrick, who chased all the snakes out of Ireland. And all sorts of saints were snake eradication saints. And well, there’s a variety of reasons for that. But then you might think, okay, well the worst predator is the layer of snakes. But then you might think, well wait a minute, the worst predator isn’t the layer of snakes. Maybe the worst predator is the enemies that come to attack us. And those are human enemies. And so what we do is we defend ourselves against the human enemies. We put walls around our cities. We fortify our land. And we defend ourselves against the evil that’s lurking in other people’s hearts. And so that’s like a higher order snake. And then we build these walls around us. And what’s inside gets larger and larger and larger. And then what happens is the snakes start popping up inside the cities. Because, you know, we’ve pushed all the… we’ve protected ourselves from all the evil that lurks outside. But we’ve now created a space where that evil can manifest itself inside. So there’s criminals inside the city. And there’s people who want to bring you down. And there’s malevolence within the city, not only outside. So then there’s the problem of the snake that’s closer to you. And then there’s the ultimate problem, which is the snake that lives in your heart. Right? And that’s each individual’s capacity for evil. And then that was conceptualized as a transcendent spirit. Right? So that’s the spirit of Satan, who’s the adversary of the hero. The adversary of the hero. And that’s why there’s an association between the snake and the garden. And this great series of mythologies about the existence of evil itself. It’s a consequence of our continued capacity to abstract. We started using the predator detection system to detect snakes, and maybe predatory cats, and maybe birds of prey and all that. But that didn’t solve the bloody problem. Because just because you hid from the predatory bird today didn’t mean the bloody thing wasn’t going to be back tomorrow. And tomorrow starts to matter as you get smarter. And then once you’re on that pathway and you’re starting to think abstractly about the predator, the nature of what constitutes the predator starts to become… Because you’re trying to solve it across all situations simultaneously, it starts to become very much more abstract, and it ends up being something like a personality. Like an eternal personality. And an eternal personality that has its effect on everyone all the time. So it’s so interesting to see those ideas, because they basically evolved. People did not understand those ideas as they produced them. Right? It was all put forward in a massive mythological context. In a rich, storied context. And the stories were as conscious as the information got. It was never articulated past the level of story.