https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=j4q5gSK9-qM
Because you see, the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free in some sense, unless you had been a slave. And by that he meant that you don’t go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality. You go from childhood to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to slavery, to self-imposed slavery. That would be the best scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific, before you might be able to re-attain the generality that you had as a child. And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization. But in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead. And you often hear of that as something triumphant. But for Nietzsche, it wasn’t, because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded. See, Nietzsche understood that, and this is something I’m going to try to make clear, is that… There’s a very large amount that we don’t know about the structure of experience, that we don’t know about reality. We have our articulated representations of the world. And then you can think of outside of that, there are things we know absolutely nothing about, and there’s a buffer between them. And those are things we sort of know something about, and we don’t know them in an articulated way. Here’s an example, you know, sometimes you’re arguing with someone close to you, and they’re in a bad mood, you know. And they’re being touchy and unreasonable, and you keep the conversation up, and maybe all of a sudden they get angry, or maybe they cry. And then when they cry, they figure out what they’re angry about, and it has nothing to do with you, even though you might have been what precipitated the argument. You know, and that’s an interesting phenomena, as far as I’m concerned, because it means that people can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another. So in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body, and they do that in moods, and they do that in images, and they do that in actions. And we have all sorts of ways that we understand, before we understand in a fully articulated manner. And so, we have this articulated space that we can all discuss, and then outside of that, we have something that’s more akin to a dream that we’re embedded in. It’s an emotional dream that we’re embedded in, and that’s based, at least in part, on our actions, and I’ll describe that later. And then outside of that is what we don’t know anything about at all. And in that dream, that’s where the mystics live, and that’s where the artists live, and they’re the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure. And you see, what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don’t really understand, and that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream, then we become dissociated internally. We think things we don’t act out, and we act out things we don’t dream, and that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit. And that sickness of the spirit, it’s cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation. And then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure, to try to organize their thinking, and then that’s a catastrophe. And that’s what Nietzsche foresaw. You see, he knew that when we knock the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this god ideal, let’s say, that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let’s say, and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, you know, and believed and predicted this in the late 1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude, predicted that in the 20th century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dream-like structures with this rational, rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world. And, you know, we’ve been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since, and, you know, with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there and despair. In some sense, that’s the situation of the modern Western person, and increasingly of people in general. You know, I think part of the reason that Islam has its backup with regards to the West to such a degree, I mean, there’s many reasons, and not all of them are valid, that’s for sure, but one of the reasons is that, you know, being still grounded in a dream, let’s say, they can see that the rootless questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture. Now, and it does, I mean, Westerners, us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect, and I’m not complaining about that, you know, I mean, there isn’t anything easy that can be done about it, but it’s still a sort of fruitful catastrophe. And, you know, it has real effects on people’s lives, it’s not some abstract thing, you know, I mean, lots of times, when I’ve been treating people for depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues, you know, it’s not just some psychiatric condition, it’s not just that they’re tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although, you know, sometimes that happens to be the case, it’s that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life, and they’re not sure why it’s reasonable to continue with it, you know, they can feel the terrible negative meanings of life, but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings. I had one client who was a very brilliant artist, and as long as he didn’t think he was fine, you know, because he’d go and create, and he was really good at being an artist, he just, you know, he had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating, but as soon as he started to think about what he was doing, then, you know, it’s like a drill or a saw or something like that, he’d saw the branch off that he was sitting on because he’d start to criticize what he was doing, even the utility of it, even though it was sort of self-evidently useful, then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create, and he always struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being, divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your being, and it’s not a good thing, it’s not a good thing, and it’s really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathology, but also in social psychopathology, and that’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of as, they’re like crippled religions, that’s the right way to think about them, they’re like a religion that’s missing an arm and a leg, but can still hobble along, and it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it’s warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it’s a parasite on something underlying that’s rich and true, and that’s how it looks to me anyways. 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What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct? Like, people get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak. And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. But there’s some, it’s like there’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you’re starting to pull out the logs, you know, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. It’s like, drown in what? And what are the logs protecting themselves, protecting them from? And why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?