https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RZtwVEekpyk
The problem with political narratives, in my estimation, is that they can rapidly transform themselves into ideologies. And ideologies are dangerous for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason for their danger, I think, this is a hypothesis, is because of their one-sided nature. What happens is that they capitalize, parasitize, I think is even a better way of thinking about it, a profound underlying narrative, but they don’t tell the entire story. And so then if you’re looking for orientation in the world because you’re fragmented and chaotic, and somebody provides you with a partial story, that’s going to serve an integrating function, and it’s very… one of the things you see in psychotherapy is that if you’re chaotic and confused, and you go see a therapist who has a particular kind of practice, Freudian, behavioral, cognitive, Rogerian, whatever, there’s a high probability that undergoing that course of therapy is going to be good for you, and that you might even come to view your life in the terms of that therapeutic practice. You might say, well, why is that therapeutic practice right for you? Maybe it could have been Rogerian instead of Freudian, say. And the answer to that is, yeah, well, it probably could have been, because, roughly speaking, any coherent ordering principle is better than none. And so that’s also a good way to think about human development from an intellectual perspective, is that partly what has to be provided to individuals as they mature into adults is some kind of ordering structure. And this is one of the facts that people who criticize the dogmatic element of religious belief don’t really understand. They don’t understand that you have to provide people with a determinate structure of some type, even if it’s constricting and restricting and crushing for that matter. You have to pass through a disciplinary structure before, and even in principle, you could be free. Before your discipline, you’re not free, you’re just chaotic. And so you have to practice some set of routines and rituals. Now, you could say, well, they don’t necessarily have to be religious, and they could be secular, you could become a lawyer, you could become a plumber, you could become a carpenter, and I would say, yes, that’s far better than not becoming anything. But the problem with an identity that isn’t rooted into the archetypes is it leaves you incomplete, because the archetypal rooting of the identity is what helps you grapple with the fundamental existential problems of life. And whether you’re a carpenter or a plumber or a lawyer, your soul is still going to hunger for some deeper form of identity, and you’re not going to get that without having your practical identity encapsulated in something that’s greater from a philosophical perspective, and perhaps even deeper than philosophy, which I think the archetypal stories are… They’re the structure within which philosophy itself is embedded, and outside of that is a behavioral structure. We’ve talked about how those evolve, you know. There’s a behavioral evolution of something approximating a consensual morality, and then stories about that consensual morality emerge, and then inside that, the structures of philosophy nest, and all of those things have to be addressed by your identity to some degree, or you’re weak. That’s the problem. You’re beset by doubts, you’re beset by anxiety, you’re easy to stop, and you don’t have much motivation. And none of that’s good. It’s not good at all, because life presents you with enough real obstacles in the face of genuine suffering, so that unless you’re strongly grounded, and have a real reason for moving forward, you’re going to get stopped, and as soon as you’re stopped, you are one miserable thing. Because it’s almost like the definition of human misery is to be paralyzed by anxiety and emotional pain, and also have no motive force forward. It’s a terrible state. And so you don’t want to be in that state, and you have to have an identity that’s powerful enough, and deeply rooted enough, so the most profound doubts that might emerge about your life are met by something of equivalent force. Okay, so we’re going to review the symbolic domain, briefly, and then I’m going to show you a bunch of different examples of how it plays itself out, partly archetypically and symbolically, but also partly politically, because I want to show you how both of those things parallel one another. And partly what I’m hoping is that understanding the full domain of archetypal symbolic representation will also inoculate you against ideological possession. Because you’ll know when you’re told a half-sided, one-sided, ideological story, you’ll know that there’s something missing in the story. There’s pieces that aren’t being told, or there’s part of the story that isn’t being revealed. So if it’s a story about how tyrannical modern culture is, and how oppressive, you think, well, yes, obviously, but what about the beneficial aspect of it, and how is that being represented and dealt with? And it’s the same story about the negative element of the human being, which you hear stories like that all the time, because I think, perhaps more intensely since the 1960s, but because I wasn’t around before then, I don’t know what it was like previous to that, there is this idea that people hold, and that’s promoted, that there’s something fundamentally cancerous about human beings. It was the Club of Rome, I think, when they pronounced that everyone on the planet was going to die of starvation by the year 2000, that human beings were no better than a cancer on the planet. It’s like, well, yeah, you know, there’s lots of things about us that could be improved, but when you portray the human only as negative, the question should arise, it’s like, fair enough, but what about the positive part? Why aren’t you telling that story? And it doesn’t take you, you know, all you have to do is be sick once and go to a hospital where you get competent care to understand that, and you can get incompetent care too, but sometimes you get really competent care, you think, yes, it’s really good that there’s some people out there who have their act together, and are trying to put things together. You know, and you can’t forget that in your story, and you don’t want to forget that in your story about yourself either. So what is the fundamental landscape? Well, the basic idea is that it’s predicated, you can look at it multiple different ways, it’s predicated on the contrast between explored and unexplored territory, or the contrast between the interpretive structure that philosophers like Kant talked about, and the real world manifestation that underlies, whose existence underlies the validity of empirical thinking, right? There’s you and your structure, you interpret the world, but there’s also the world informing you, and so that’s the explored territory versus unexplored territory, something like that, or it’s order versus chaos, or it’s, another variant of that would be, it’s the hero going out into the unknown to encounter the dragon of chaos, and to gather the information that’s out there in the unknown. And I tried to make the case to you, because I’m often accused, most recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, of making up post-hoc stories. You know, you have a set of stories, you can interpret them any way you want, of course that is a danger, because you bring an interpretive structure to bear on every set of facts, So how do I know that this isn’t just an arbitrary post-hoc analysis, and my answer to that, it’s a technical answer, is it manifests itself at multiple layers of analysis simultaneously, and the probability that it’s merely an imposition of an a priori interpretive structure is decreased by the number of different levels of manifestation that you can detect the phenomena. It’s axiomatic, that’s why you have five senses, that’s why, because they each report a different level, that’s why in science you use multiple methods to detect the same thing. So one of the things I tried to point out is that you can map this archetypal structure onto brain structure quite nicely, even onto hemispheric structure and the function of the subcortical systems, but even more particularly you can map it onto the function of specific neuropsychological systems within the, within the biological neurology, we do have an interpretive structure, right, that’s your map, so to speak, of expectation and desire in the world, that’s your model, there’s a brain area, roughly the hippocampus, although this is an oversimplification, it compares that with incoming sense data, which is also a model, but we won’t get into that for the sake of argument, so that’s explored territory, unexplored territory, and the thing in the center doing the comparison, that’s the knower, and so it strikes me as highly unlikely, although you’re welcome to criticize away, that you’ll see that kind of stacking of evidence across multiple domains of inquiry without there actually being a pattern there, so it’s not merely post-hawk analysis, and even the people who derived these patterns, like Jung to begin with, let’s say, looked cross-culturally at least, to say, well here’s a manifestation of a pattern, and here’s a separate culture, and you can see the same pattern, so there’s some attempt there to be methodologically rigorous, he did the same thing with people’s fantasies and dreams, and then again, by mapping those onto people’s behavior and therapy, also had them test out the ideas in the world, so these aren’t as trivial methodologically as people make them out to be, and especially that’s the case when you can put a biological underpinning underneath them, so the proposition is, explored territory, unexplored territory, and the explorer, roughly speaking, and then a differentiation of those two things into positive and negative, why? Because everything complex has a positive and negative element, and so explored territory can become stultifying and crushing, that’s tyranny, but it also provides the structure that informs and protects you, and unexplored territory, well that can kill you, obviously, but it’s also the place that you need to go when you’re static and dead, and you need new water, and you need new life, and you need new information, so it’s a constant movement out into the unknown and back, and that’s what human beings are like, right? We’re information foragers, and then the individual is both positive and negative, and you know that, because you know yourself and you know other people, and you know yourself, there’s parts of you that are good, classically speaking, or good even by your own definition, and other parts that really could use, to say the minimum, a tremendous amount of work, and you also know that about other people, and if you get truly unlucky with yourself or other people, it won’t merely be that you’re not trying hard enough, you’ll encounter something in you or someone who’s absolutely malevolent and bent on destruction, and that’s also not a hypothesis, you know, the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder reveals quite clearly that people are not the same, typically develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they encounter some form of malevolence, and if it’s ever happened to you, you know that it’s no joke, it’s not some figment of your imagination, quite the contrary, so, and then that entire world, that’s sort of the world that can be comprehended, is nested inside a broader symbolic network, and that seems to be the symbolic network that’s made up of the dragon of chaos, which is something like our representation of the set of all currently unknowable things, it’s a very strange category, right, it’s like the category of zero, or the category of infinity, and the reason that we formulated that category is because we don’t only want to know how to solve a problem, just like we don’t only want to know how to win a game, we want to know how to win the set of all possible games, and we want to solve the set of all possible problems, and so what the human beings have been trying to do for the last forever is trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the set of all problems, and we actually have some ideas, one is play to win the metagame and not the game, that’s one solution, another solution is go out into the unknown voluntarily and gather the information that lies there because that continually updates you,