https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QNYW0_D25Mc
There’s a story in Genesis, it’s the last story in Genesis, it’s called the Tower of Babel It’s a story, a very short story And it occurs after the story of Noah and the flood Flood stories, by the way, are universally distributed, except among desert dwellers who have no experience on which to hang the story And Merchea Eliade, who wrote a great series of books called A History of Religious Ideas Documented the central narrative structure of flood stories And so what happens is that there’s a human settlement and it’s washed away by a flood And the flood is generally envisioned as a consequence of God’s judgment And so, if you take the flood stories that are distributed worldwide and you boil them down to pull out their archetypal substructure You find that there are fundamentally two reasons that a flood occurs And Eliade says that it’s the tendency of things to fall apart Combined with the proclivity of human beings to sin And so it means something, this means something And so it means that everything is subject to entropic decay, right? Things fall apart of their own accord across time That’s why you have to always fix things So if it’s complicated, it has to be maintained And so you can think about that in relationship to say New Orleans, before the hurricane Because people say, well the hurricane caused a flood and that destroyed much of New Orleans And so that’s an act of God, that’s one way of looking at it, right? It’s a random, natural event But then you think, well, wait a minute, the Dutch, their country is mostly underwater, right? So they have these huge dikes to keep the sea back And they build the dike so that only one storm every 10,000 years will be of sufficient magnitude To partially breach the dikes, that’s their engineering tolerance level, one storm in every 10,000 years The US Army Corps of Engineers knew that the dikes in New Orleans were built to withstand one storm every 100 years The biggest storm every 100 years And people knew that they weren’t built to proper tolerance And much of the money that was hypothetically supposed to be diverted or assigned to the rebuilding and maintenance of the dikes Disappeared because of corruption in New Orleans Which is in one of the most corrupt states in the United States And so you might say, well, why did the flood destroy New Orleans? And one answer is, well, it was a hurricane And the other answer is, no, it was corrupt officials who weren’t paying attention to what they were supposed to be paying attention to And the flood came, and that’s the meaning of the stories, because of the sins of men, so to speak Which is the capacity of people to turn a blind eye to their responsibilities when they know perfectly well that something needs to be done And so if you don’t do what needs to be done and something comes along to wipe you out Then it’s perfectly reasonable to view that as a judgment on your refusal to do what you knew to be right So that’s the flood story And then the Tower of Babel is a very interesting story, it’s very, very short And what happens is that it just starts pretty much abruptly after the flood story ends And it’s a story about the decision that human beings take to build a mighty building, like a huge, huge edifice That would reach all the way up to the heavens To supplant God, roughly speaking And so what happens is that the building is built higher and higher and higher and higher And God gets annoyed about this and Divides everyone who’s building the building into small groups who speak different languages Who then disperse and the construction project comes to a halt Now, it’s a very strange story But here’s one way of thinking about it The larger you build a system, the more there’s a proclivity to worship it as if it’s everything That’s the story of ideology, let’s say You want to build a comprehensive, utopian system that supplants anything transcendent You want to build it as large as possible so it accompanies, encompasses everyone Well, what happens as it grows? Well, it incorporates more and more people, but the people within it become more and more different from one another And so, essentially they start speaking different languages And so the entire project of raising this massive edifice to supplant everything Disperses into chaos and comes to a halt Okay, so that’s one story So here’s another story This is a story that John Milton wrote, John Milton wrote Paradise Lost Which is one of the prime Literary masterpieces of The last 500 years Now, here’s what Milton did, Milton said He was trying to justify the ways of God to man That was his purpose, and so what he was trying to do was take a look at the world the way it’s constituted With all its suffering and malevolence and corruption And to make a case why it was still acceptable And so he did the first, what you might think about as psychoanalytic study of malevolence and evil So, around the corpus of biblical writings There’s an idea of heaven and hell, and they’re not referred to much within the corpus of biblical writings But there are what you might describe as legends that have compiled around them So there are stories that never became canonical And those are stories, for example, of the idea that God’s highest angel, who was Satan Lucifer, the bringer of light, the spirit of rationality Fomented a rebellion against God in heaven and was cast into hell as a consequence And so there’s this idea, Milton wrote this before the rise of the nation states, for example There’s this idea that there’s this tension between the political and ideological and rational constructions of the rational mind And the sort of transcendent mythology that guides human organization And that Satan, as the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom Is a personification of the tendency of the rational mind to produce totalitarian systems And then to fall in love with them So to produce a system that encompasses everything, like the Tower of Babel So that nothing outside the system is allowed to exist Well, Milton’s intuition, because he collected the stories about satanic rebellion that had been accumulating across centuries And from far before Christianity was even constituted Turned this into a great poetic drama And his hypothesis was that the element of the psyche, let’s say, the spiritual element of the psyche that characterized the rational mind Would, by its proclivity to produce these totalizing systems, end up casting itself into hell And so you could think about it as a prophetic visualization of what was going to come down the centuries after Milton wrote Because the poets get there before the philosophers, the artists get there maybe before the poets The philosophers follow in their wake The poets are the people who have the visions of what’s coming farthest down the road So this is from Milton This is describing Satan after he’s cast into hell because of his rebellion His totalitarian, the consequence of his totalitarian rationalism For now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him Round he throws his baleful eyes that witnessed huge affliction and dismay Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate As once, at once, as far as angels can, he views the dismal situation, waste and wild, a dungeon horrible On all sides round, as one great furnace flamed Yet from those flames, no light, but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades where peace and rest can never dwell Hope never comes that comes to all But torture without end still urges And a fiery deluge fed with ever-burning sulfur unconsumed Such place eternal justice had prepared for those rebellious Here their prison ordained in utter darkness And their portion set as far removed from God and light of heaven As from the center thrice to the utmost pole It’s an existentialist claim Or maybe it’s the existentialist claim That the conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence Now it’s an important thing to understand It’s also a viewpoint shared by the bulk of the great religious systems of the world Life is suffering. Why? Well, one reason is because of society’s arbitrary judgment Right? Every single one of us has traits and features and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are far from ideal And that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient And so you suffer because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others And you can certainly make the claim that fairly frequently that’s arbitrary And so that’s the claim that society is tyrannical and judgmental And needs to be constantly reconstituted so that the tyrannical element doesn’t take full control And fair enough, you have to stay awake so that that doesn’t happen But the thing is it doesn’t matter what society it is, although they vary in the degree of their tyranny The mere fact that you’re grouped together with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in order to live together Means that many of the things that characterize you are going to be suboptimal And so the price you pay for social being is that much of you is deemed insufficient