https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gElujUPvC5s
So then I learned about Piaget, and Piaget had some very interesting ideas, and I think I’ve told you already what Piaget was up to. He wasn’t a developmental psychologist, he didn’t even regard himself as a psychologist. He wanted to reconcile science and religion. That’s what he was doing through his entire bloody life, because it drove him crazy when he was an adolescent. And he didn’t think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together. So he’s working on the same problem. And so one of the things that Piaget, who was very prone to observation, he was an ethologist of human beings. That’s a good way of thinking about it. An ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions. And he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children. And it was so smart, so smart that idea that, you know, when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal, so in play, that a morality emerges out of that. And that that morality, and I’ve mentioned this before, there’s a morality in game one, there’s a morality in game two, there’s a morality in game three. What’s common across all those moralities is a metamorality. And so the metamorality emerges from the particular moralities that are embedded in particular cooperative situations. We could say cooperative and competitive situations. You can expand that out to thy, you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy, right? Every social animal and even many animals who aren’t social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy. The dominance hierarchy has a structure. We couldn’t call it a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchy A, B, C, D, E, thousands of them across thousands of years. You extract out from all of them what’s central to all of them. That’s the pyramid of value. What question do you need answered about the pyramid of value? What’s at the top? Because that’s the ideal. That’s the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden buddha in the lotus. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing as the crucifix, paradoxically enough. And that has to do, it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering. It’s something like that. These are not arbitrary ideas. They’re deeply, that’s my case anyways, they’re deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture. They’re as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology. And we already know the answer to that. The dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years. It’s a long time. You don’t get to just brush that off and say, well, morality is some sort of second order cognitive problem. It’s like, no, it’s not.