https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v_zHaxjs19o
listening to what your new potential partner is saying rather than the background conversations. You might say, well, I want to hear what she has to say. And then you might ask, well, why? And you might say, well, I want to be polite. And you might say, why? I like this girl and I would like to explore the possibility of a relationship. Why? Well, because I believe that having a relationship with someone is valuable and that’s a subset of the notion that having relationships is valuable and that’s a subset of the notion perhaps of having stable, long-term, loving, monogamous relationships are the highest form of relationship and that’s a subset of the notion that, well, as you progress through life, one of the things you do is find a partner and establish a family and perhaps have children and contribute to the community in that way and that’s part of being a good citizen, let’s say, and that’s part of being a good person and then there’s an outside nesting of that too because one question might be, well, what do you mean to be a good person? And of course, that’s the problem of the logos and the answer to that would be something like, well, I want to be the proper mediator between possibility and actuality such that the best possible actuality can be manifested by the possibility that I confront. And every bloody thing you do, everything you see is either nested in a unified hierarchy like that or it’s not. So let’s say what happens if it’s not. Well we actually know what happens if it’s not and let’s say you’re not unified psychologically in your value orientation. Okay, what’s the consequence? Well entropy. That’s the first consequence. It’s like, are you doing one thing which you know what you’re doing and can commit yourself to and can actually undertake or are you so confused that you need to do 15 things at the same time and you don’t know which of them is most important. And the importance, by the way, is diluted by the multiplicity, right? Because if you pick something out as singularly important, you actually elevate it as important. If 15 things all of a sudden become equally important, they’re all one-fifteenth as important because if they weren’t, you wouldn’t have a problem sequencing them and that means they’re not motivating. So one of the consequences of that is that there’s no positive emotion. Because positive emotion, the joy, there’s a couple of types of positive emotion. I won’t talk about satiation but enthusiasm and joy, happiness let’s say, is 100% dependent as far as we can tell on observations that you’re progressing towards a valued goal. It’s not attainment focused, that’s satiation. You get something you want and you’re satisfied about it. That’s a whole different neurochemical system. But enthusiasm and joy that people associate with happiness manifests itself when you’re moving towards a valued goal. So if you don’t prioritize your goals because you don’t exist within a structure of value, then you have no positive emotion. And positive emotion is half of forward-moving motivation. Well, in fact, in terms of forward movement, it’s almost all the motivation because the embodied manifestation of positive emotion is the movement towards a valued goal. That’s what it is. That’s why you have the positive emotion. Because you are a creature that can move towards goals and the emotional signaling of that is positive emotion. No goal, no positive emotion. No hierarchy of goals, dilution or eradication of positive emotion. Because if you’re confused enough and you have a hundred goals and you can’t prioritize them, then every goal has one percent of the significance necessary to really move you forward. And so to be maximally motivated, you need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing all the way up Jacob’s ladder. All the way up. And that brings us to the notion of the macrocosm that’s the heavenly hierarchy. And in some sense, it’s a psychological macrocosm, although not in all senses, because it brings society into the purview. So here’s a proposition. Any system of priorities is a structure of values. So you may or may not accept the proposition that you have to hierarchically arrange your perceptions. You also, by the way, have to do the same thing on the action front. Because if you’re inclined to do ten things at once, you can do none. And consciousness, by the way, is a very narrow channel. And we generally can only concentrate on one thing at a time. And the reason for that in some sense is because we can only act out one thing at a time. And so not only do you have to prioritize your perceptions, which are action-based anyways, you also have to prioritize what you’re going to do. Because you have to do the first thing first, and then the second thing and the third thing. And that’s obviously a structure of priority. And a structure of priorities is a structure of comparative value. And a hierarchical structure of comparative value is an ethic. And so what that means, as far as I can tell, and this is something if it’s true, is that we cannot see the world except through an ethic. And I mean that literally as well as metaphorically. You literally cannot see the world or act in it. You cannot perceive the world except through a structure, a hierarchical structure of value, which is an ethic. And so then I would say, and here’s something else to chew on for like 20 years, a story is a verbal description of a hierarchy of perceptual and action prioritization. And the reason that we’re so attracted to stories is because it’s so difficult to perceive and act in the world that we’re hungry at the level of soul for a narrative that represents to us a hierarchical ethos that we can embody as a model for emulation. And so that’s what our stories are. They’re models, they’re ritual models for emulation, most fundamentally. And the anti-hero story, well that’s easy enough to contend with. It’s like, watch this person who ends up in catastrophe and hell and do the opposite of whatever it is they’re doing. And so that’s a powerful lesson because there’s something very compelling, as we said before, about very powerful negative emotion. And so even if you don’t believe in heaven, you might be able to conjure up a belief in hell and if you can’t, I would say, well, you’re either not using your imagination or you’re hiding or so far you’re just lucky. But I wouldn’t expect that to last. And so you can certainly see the catastrophe and even the hellish catastrophe beckoning. And you might think plotting a route that would make that the least likely seems to be a good idea. And so part of the reason that we’re fascinated by villains and supervillains, for that example, or part of the reason we’re fascinated in the endless sea, so with figures like Lucifer and Satan, is because we’re attempting to flesh out the nature of the antithesis to the worst kind of hierarchy of values. And that’s gripping to us. It’s gripping to us. Now there’s more to it as well because we also will turn our attention to the negative to fortify ourselves against the negative in preparation for confrontation with the negative. And so we can do that through use of fiction. And that’s what we’re doing, for example, at least in part, when we do such strange things as amuse ourselves with horror films.