https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_I5n1IpRyUk
You remember Mufasa had taken Simba up to the top of Pride Rock and Described to him the fact that his kingdom essentially constituted everything that the light touched and you can think about that as the domain of the Roughly speaking of the great father With the domain of the great mother on the outside of that that being symbolically Equivalent to the underworld or to death or to nature all of those things seem to be approximately equally true and he forbade Simba from going to investigate what was beyond the confines of the light and In some sense that’s exactly what a tradition does for you Because the tradition is precisely what defines the domain of the light and to be moral from the perspective of the tradition It’s akin to playing a Piagetian game, but only adhering to the rules You know how Piaget described the fact that when kids first master a game They learn how to act it out and then they learn what the rules are and then they regard the rules in some sense as Sacred you can’t go outside the rules and then later in moral development if they get to that stage then they start to recognize themselves also as formulators of the rule or formulators of the game and Culture tells you don’t go beyond the rules That’s the definition of morality within the box of culture and you don’t go outside of that and so that’s why Mufasa plays that particular role and it’s wise because if you go outside the domain of what you already understand Then it’s dangerous out there clearly it’s dangerous out there, but The downside of that particular message and this is perhaps this is the mythological reason why Mufasa Isn’t as aware as he could be of scar you know his knowledge is bounded And he’s not aware enough of what lies outside of that in this realm Let’s say of death and destruction and so Scar is he is able to overcome his his brother one you see this sort of thing happening to people very frequently for example who develop post-traumatic stress disorder and one of the things that’s not as well known about post-traumatic stress disorder as might be known is a It happens to you if you encounter an experience that sort of blows out the axioms of your knowledge system That’s one way of looking at it It’s so unexpected that you can’t account for it within the confines of the of the system that you’re using to interpret the world That often happens to people when they encounter something that’s truly malevolent And that can be within them or it can be in the form of someone else who is genuinely out to hurt them They’re often people who develop PTSD are often, but not always somewhat naive and they’re not aware of the full Catastrophe of the world that might be one way of looking at it, and then they encounter someone who’s Truly out to hurt them And they can detect that even in the way the person’s face looks or they encounter a part of them That’s much more malevolent than they had ever imagined It could possibly be and then they do something terrible, and then they don’t know what to do about it, so So Delaire, the Canadian general, wrote a book called Shake Hands with the Devil And it was about what happened to him in Rwanda when he was stationed there as a UN Warrior or a UN soldier and I mean Delaire was not naive But what he encountered was truly malevolent, and it just blew him into pieces and and that that’s what happens and so There’s real utility in staying within the bounded domain But the problem is is that there may be information that’s outside of that domain that you absolutely need to know and so part Of the problem with being alive is that you have to continually determine how much you’re going to maintain your stability and how much you’re going to explore and You have to explore because the stable part of you gets outdated, but if you explore too much or too Too unwisely then you can encounter things that flip you upside down It’s actually one of the problems with being high in trade openness Especially if you’re also high in neuroticism because if you’re open you’re creative You’re always looking for for ideas that are outside of your current systematic way of thinking But if you’re high in neuroticism So you experience a lot of anxiety and emotional pain and that sort of thing you can continually upset your own apple cart Now the other thing that you might want to think about this is really useful as far as I’m concerned is you might want to think about this politically and We’ve been doing a lot of work I’m gonna have one of my graduate students actually come and talk to you about the work We’ve been doing on personality and political belief So what happens with political belief is that if you’re high in openness and low in conscientiousness you tend to be a liberal The openness being the particularly important part of that and if you’re low in openness and high in conscientiousness Especially orderly thus you tend to be a conservative now It’s kind of strange because openness and conscientiousness aren’t very highly correlated So it’s not obvious why those two traits would combine to determine political belief And and the relationship is actually quite strong between temperament and political belief if you measure political belief Comprehensively, but it seems to me that the fundamental distinction And this is the political game at least along the liberal conservative axis is boils down to one thing It boils down to how open borders should be compared to how closed they should be and you know You can see that reflected for example in the attractiveness of Trump to a large part of the general population because he’s going to close the borders build a wall and Fortify the borders and conservatives like that they like to have borders between things stay tight And they don’t even care if it’s state borders or political borders or town borders or ethnic borders or borders between ideas Or borders between sexual identities Conservatives like to have things stay in the damn box where they belong Partly because they’re orderly and partly because they’re low in openness They don’t get any real they’re not interested in what happens if you free up your conceptions all they see in that is the probability of disorder whereas liberals who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness Slash orderliness they get a real charge out of letting things out of the box so that they can creatively interplay Now the issue is who’s correct and answer is you don’t know Because the environment underneath the political landscape moves and so sometimes the right answer is tighten up the borders and fortify and Sometimes the right answer is no no no loosen things up because everything’s getting too static and tight and we need more information and The dialogue that occurs in the political landscape with this is why dialogue is so important is Fundamentally between these two opposing views of borders and because you can’t say with certainty which one is right at any given time An open dialogue has to maintain itself so that the entire political state can maneuver properly along that moving line It’s absolutely crucial. It’s really really really useful to know that people vote their damn temperament It gets you gives you more of an understanding at least in principle of your of those who sit on the other side of you on The political fence and there’s been recent newspaper articles quite interesting I tweeted a couple of them about this company in UK called Cambridge Analytics And they’re using the damn big five they can extract out big five information from your Facebook likes They’ve got a model of every single person in the United States big five personality, and they help Trump craft Political messages right down to the level of apartment buildings to appeal to people based on their big five temperament And that’s all recent work And so one of the things that’s very interesting is we are teaching computers to understand us so fast you can’t believe it And we really do risk Walking into an electronic world where you will only see what you want to see I mean obviously the marketers are trying to do that As fast as possible right they only want to send you ads That you’re going to be interested in because it’s expensive and foolish to send you anything that will annoy you or that you’ll ignore And so the marketers are trying like mad to map who you are even by watching your eyes They’re trying to figure out who you are so they can send you the right information But the danger is that that’ll happen say in the domain of news and broader information Increasing this tendency for people to be siloed in their exposure to the external world It’s a big sort of like each of us is becoming a micro celebrity Surrounded by electronic sycophants who do nothing but tell us exactly what we want to hear It’s a real problem Carl Popper a famous philosopher of science said that one of the things that you should do and this is akin to the Piagetian view is you should always look for information that contradicts your current viewpoint now That’s painful right because who wants their axioms contradicted it can take you apart But it’s the only way that you can ensure that you’re learning at the same time that you’re maintaining your stability And that’s another reason why it’s really necessary to engage in dialogue with people that you do not agree with Because they’re the ones who will tell you things that you don’t know It’s crew it’s of crucial importance in the maintenance of your own stability the worst thing that can happen to a person No, because there’s many horrible things that can happen to a person But one of the worst things that can happen is that you find yourself in a situation where no one is offering you corrective feedback anymore Because you rely on the corrective feedback provided by other people to keep yourself sane to keep moving in the ever-changing environment And if you cut yourself off from that feedback then Well, then you end up static and shrinking. It’s really it’s really not good You get less and less competent you get less and less confident and the threats outside of you loom larger and larger so that’s all to do with the You know the domain outside the light