https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Wo4iN7AGbsk
more mythological representations, I like these quite a bit, so there’s their Hitler as, you know, knight of the faith essentially with I suppose that’s a recreation of the Christian Holy Spirit dove, you know, except it’s an eagle which is a bird of prey, and a, what do you call those things, a scavenger right, so that’s kind of interesting, but that’s Hitler as knight of the blood, roughly speaking there, this is an allied war poster essentially that assimilates the Nazis to poisonous snakes and, you know, we don’t like poisonous snakes very much, and it’s probably because they’ve been preying on us for approximately 20 million years because snakes and primates, humans in particular, co-evolved and so, the snake is a representation of that which lies outside the comfortable domain and that can be, you know, a snake, obviously, or it can be an abstract snake and the abstract snake is your enemy, or an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart and this is going to be a bit of a leap for you, but there’s this ancient idea that developed in the West over thousands of years, far predating Christianity, that, at least its origins that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, which is like a, what the hell, it’s a very strange idea but the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that, you know, we have this circuitry that detects predators and a predator, a good representation of a predator is a snake, or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon, or something like that, or a dinosaur with lots of teeth, or a shark that lives under the water and will pull you down, you know, because I suspect a lot of our ancestors met a nasty death at the hands of Nile crocodiles while they were in the African veldt going down to get some nice water, so, you know, that’s the thing that jumps up and pulls you under and, you know, that happens in your own life, because things jump up and pull you under, you know and we use the same circuitry, we use the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators who were likely to invade our space and so, and human beings are capable of abstraction, and so, you know, you can think about the real predator that might invade your space and maybe that’s a snake, or a wolf, or some kind of monster you know, and that’s pretty concrete and biological, chimps have that, you know, chimps don’t like snakes and so if a chimp comes across a snake in the wild, then, like a big, let’s say, I don’t know what live with chimps I don’t know if they’re pythons, but they have constrictors there anyways so, you know, maybe there’s like a 20 foot constrictor, and the chimp stays a good distance away from it, but it won’t leave and then it has this particular cry that it utters that’s called a snake ra, W-R-A-A and so it makes this noise, which means something like, holy shit, that’s a big snake and I actually mean that because the circuits that primates use to utter distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse, just so you know that’s why people with Tourette’s syndrome swear, because, like, what’s up with that? how can you have a neurological condition that makes you swear? well, it turns out that guttural affect-laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit and that’s the speech circuit we share with the predator alarms of other primates so that’s pretty cool, so anyways, the chimp stands there and makes this snake noise and then a bunch of other chimps come running, and, you know, some of them stay a fair ways from the snake and some of them get pretty close, but they’ll stand there and watch that snake for like 24 hours so they’re fascinated by it, and, you know, if you’ve handled snakes, you can understand that fascination because they’re fascinating, you know, and they’re numinous, I would say, that’s the right way of putting it a numinous is a word that means intrinsically meaningful, like a fire, you know you can’t look away from fire, you know, if you’re sitting in front of a fireplace, it’s like you’re staring at it and that’s because you’re all descended from the first mad chimpanzee who had some weird genetic mutation that made it impossible for him to stay away from fire, it was like the first chimp arsonist you know, and he figured it out, and, well, hey, now he was a chimp with a stick with fire on it like, that’s a mega chimp, man, and so, you know, we have that mutation in spades, and no wonder so, anyways so they make this, you know, they have this reaction to snakes, and chimps that have never seen a snake if they’re in a cage, and you throw a rubber snake in there, it’s like, bang, they hit the roof but then they look at the snake, you know, so it’s like, it’s terrifying and fascinating at the same time and you should look at the snake because you want to know what it does, but you should stay away from it because it’s a snake, so you’re kind of screwed in terms of your motivations, right? one is get the hell away, and the other is, well, don’t let that thing do anything that you’re not watching and so, that’s really the reaction we have to the unknown it’s terrifying, but we watch it and then, you know, the meta story is that not only do we watch it, but we go explore it and so you might think, well, back in the Garden of Eden, so to speak, when we were living in trees the snakes used to come and eat us, and our offspring, more likely and, you know, we weren’t very happy about that, and then we figured out how to maybe, maybe by accident drop a stick on a snake, and that was a good thing, because the snake didn’t like that and then maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to, like, actually take a stick and, like, whack the snake with it, and you can believe that the first primate who figured out that was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire, and so we’re pretty good at whacking snakes with sticks which is why Springfield has a snake whacking day that’s devoted to nothing but that I don’t know if you know that Simpsons episode, but it’s quite comical so, well, so then you think about the snake as a predator, and it’s the thing that invades the garden always, because you just can’t keep snakes out of the damn garden, no matter how hard you try and then you think of snakes, and maybe you think of metasnakes, and like a metasnake would be also a predator, but maybe that’s the predator that represents the destructive spirit of the other tribe because chimpanzees, for example, are quite tribal, and they definitely go to war with one another and so you think, you abstract out the idea of the predator to represent malevolence as such and then you take that one step further, and you realize that the worst of all evil predators is the human capacity for evil and then at that point, you know, you’re starting to, I would say, psychologize or spiritualize the idea of danger and make it into something that’s conceptual, and something that’s psychological, and something that you can face sort of en masse I mean, one of the things people had to figure out was, how do you deal with danger? and so you figure out how you deal with a specific danger, but then because human beings are so damn smart they thought, well, what if we considered the class of all dangerous things? and then, what if we considered a mode of being that was the best mode of being in the face of the class of all dangerous things? well, that’s a lot better, you get to solve all the dangerous problems all at once instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous thing and that’s basically, as far as I can tell, where the hero story came from and the hero story is basically, you know, there’s a community, it’s threatened by the emergence of some old evil often represented by a dragon, that’s sort of typical, say, of the Lord of the Rings stories there’s a hero, often a humble guy, but not always, sometimes a knight decides he’ll go out there, you know, and chase down the snake, maybe even, or the serpent, or the dragon maybe even in its lair, and he’ll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him from, you know, useless, naive hobbit into, you know, sword-wielding hero and he confronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had enslaved and then comes back transformed to share what he’s learned with the community it’s like, well, that’s the human story fundamentally, and that’s our basic instinctive pattern and it’s represented in narratives constantly, and that’s partly what this… see, this has meaning, you know what this means why? why do you know? well, you know, because it draws on symbolic representations that you already understand you understand that a mess of toothed snakes is not a good thing and that maybe the sensible thing to do is stomp them and it’s not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what the poster means and so, you know, that’s two different representations of Hitler that’s sort of the pro-Hitler representation, and I would say that’s the anti-Hitler representation you know, that’s the real Hitler who at this point does not look like a very happy clam