https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qalR6Vx3Bpw
So, this is the last lecture. So what I thought I’d do is I’d try to tell you what sense I’ve made over the course of 20, how long have I been thinking about this, 30 years. Thirty years of thinking about the sorts of things that I’ve been teaching you. I’m going to try to integrate the things that we talked about over the semester and tell you what I think they add up to. Obviously, it’s very difficult to make them add up to one comprehensive thing because we talked about a lot of different things and they weren’t necessarily non-contradictory, which doesn’t bother me that much, you know, because I like to think of theories as tools rather than as final statements about the nature of objective reality. You can have tools of different shapes and just because they don’t all fit together in some kind of gigantic meta-tool doesn’t mean that they’re not useful piece by piece. That’s a good way of thinking, especially I think about the different personality theories that we’ve discussed because as far as I can tell, each of them has a valuable place in trying to understand all the things that happen to people, not only all the things that happen to people in their lives, but really also what life is and what it can be. But I’m going to tell you how I’ve integrated this. I think the first thing that’s worth thinking about is what is it that we’re thinking about and I think that those are the two words that signify the sort of greatest of philosophical mysteries, right? It’s like what’s the nature of being and I like the phenomenological approach to that because for me, being, this is the same sort of tact that Heidegger took, is that being is what you experience. And that’s really what you’re primarily and necessarily concerned about and that includes the subjective and psychology has to take account of that. It’s sort of unique among the sciences in a sense is that psychology cannot ignore subjectivity. Biology can ignore subjectivity and so can physics, well, mostly, but psychology is stuck right in the middle of the objective and the subjective and it has to take both into consideration and that’s especially true when you also consider that psychology is an applied science or art depending on how you look at it. And it also has to deal with issues of value because it has to deal with issues of optimal being and suboptimal being or suffering and health, something like that. So it has to be very comprehensive and roughly speaking, I suppose you could think about being as what is currently and becoming as how that’s going to transform, but it’s more than how it’s going to transform too because it’s also how it should transform and it seems to me that when you’re wrestling with the fundamental questions of your life, you have to wrestle with both of those propositions. You have to figure out what it is that’s here and now and where you are and what you are and then you have to figure out what you’re going to do about that. And hypothetically, at least in principle, it seems like people are generally motivated to attempt to make it better and so then you have to figure out what constitutes better and then that also means that you are instantly into the domain of values. And not only is there an impetus to make it better, but there’s also the fact that while you’re trying to make things better, you’re also fighting against entropy itself, the tendency of complicated things to fall apart or complex things to fall apart and so it requires energy to make things better. It even requires energy just to keep things the way they are. So in some sense, life is an uphill battle because you’re pushing against great forces that act in opposition to your existence. And I suppose in some sense that’s the fundamental basis of existential thinking, which is a form of thinking that I’m also fond of because the existentialists make the claim that existence itself is a problem and so that means that in some sense psychopathology is built right into the nature of human existence and it’s partly because we’re limited and we suffer because of that and the flip side of that is, well, we’re limited and we’re working against forces that are in many ways greater than we are and that are pushing in the opposite direction so not life is being and becoming and it’s also the problem of being and becoming and that’s what you’re stuck with. It’s kind of useful to know what you’re stuck with, I think, because it stops you from being isolated because everybody’s also stuck with that. It also makes you understand that if you have a problem, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with you, it’s just that you’re alive and that’s a problem and of course that can get so complicated that it’s unbearable but the central, people think in some sense or people are inclined to think that if life was operating optimally you’d be happy or something like that and I think that that’s an unreasonable hope in some ways because life itself is so complicated because of its fundamental essence that the idea that you can exist in some optimized state on a constant basis is, well, it’s just not how it is. So you have to, when you mature and when you become wiser, you have to take into account what the actual limitations are and then you have to figure out a way that you can exist, not so much despite that but while taking that into account and it seems to me that it’s possible to do that. One idea is that you can hide from that. I think the idea of positive illusions is like that, that you need to construct defenses against the nature of the world. Terror management theory posits that as well, the sort of ideas that life itself is so terrible that you have to build defenses against it and some of those defenses have the nature of positive illusions but I don’t buy that. I think that people are tough. They’re a lot tougher than they think and so I think that people are capable of facing up to reality even though reality as it’s experienced is fundamentally tragic. That’s tragic because people are limited. So that’s sort of the domain that you’re in and I think that for psychology to be something that’s profound, it can’t skirt those issues. It has to address them directly and that’s difficult because they’re not merely objective problems. They’re also subjective problems and it isn’t all that obvious how science can deal with subjective problems but we’re not dealing with science in psychology. We’re dealing with human being in the phenomenological sense and so at least that’s how it looks to me and so I’ve found the sorts of things that I’ve taught you extremely useful in addressing some of these, partially addressing at least some of these fundamental problems. So here’s a couple of ways of looking at domains of knowledge in relationship to those problems. So the problem of being and becoming is also the problem of what is and what should be and science it seems to me concentrates primarily on a subset of what is because it’s concerned with the structure of the world as it presents itself but not to subjectivity precisely but to the collective mind and so the rule with science is well if more than one person can detect it at the same time then it might actually be real or at least it’s real scientifically and that’s a pretty useful tool and I think it’s partly useful because it helps us differentiate our knowledge in a way that makes it more and more practically useful. We need to know the difference between what we can both experience and what only you can experience and what only I can experience and by continually clarifying that what’s happened is we’ve built a much better and much more delineated understanding of the ground of our shared experience and that’s also allowed us to develop all sorts of tools and technologies that we’ve also chosen in most cases to put to work increasing our general quality of life and well-being. So the science end of things has worked pretty well. It’s become hyperdeveloped over the last 500 years and that’s a good thing but it’s left some things in the lurch I believe and when we talked about Nietzsche and his idea of the death of God we talked about one of the consequences of the rise of science as knowledge because science can say that the reality it deals with is the reality of shared experience but it also tends to go farther than that and to say that there is no other reality but what shared experience presents to us and that’s where things get troublesome because first of all from a subjective perspective that just doesn’t seem to be true. It isn’t obvious how you can understand the relationship between the fact that you have your subjective experience and the fact of the objective world. We don’t know how to put those two things together and merely ignoring the subjective well that causes problems because of course that’s what you’re primarily stuck with and it’s the primary problem. How do you deal with your isolated individual existence and what do you make of it and science in some senses it can’t answer those questions but that shouldn’t necessarily lead us to the conclusion that such questions shouldn’t be posed or that they don’t have to be answered. They do have to be answered because they’re still part of the domain of problems that beset human beings. So it seems to me that for a comprehensive picture of experience or of being you have to use two domains of analysis and one is the scientific domain and the other is fundamentally the moral domain. The moral domain for me isn’t, I’m not really saying precisely that the moral domain is the difference between right and wrong although I think that that’s part of it. The moral domain is actually a broader domain of questions which is well how should you act because knowing what is from a scientific perspective does not give you a clear answer understanding of how you should progress through life and because we’re embodied creatures and because we move and because we’re capable of transforming the world both with our consciousness and our communication and our actions there’s no escaping the problem of how you should act. And then it’s an even more complicated problem because it’s not only how you should act because of your limitations and your skills but how you should act given that there’s all these other creatures wandering around that are asking the same questions and trying to act just like you are. So other human beings and then of course the fact of the world, the non-human, the living non-human world as well which is something that you have to have a relationship with. You can’t just ignore those questions because they don’t, because they’re not easily answered by the mechanisms of empirical science. It leaves people bereft. When Nietzsche talked about the death of God, I mean what he meant in some sense was that the claims of science are sufficiently radical so that it’s easy to take them to mean that the sort of landscape of stories that constitute our archaic cultures are invalid. Now it’s a complicated problem because it isn’t at all clear to me that the landscape of stories that make up our cultural past are in fact scientific descriptions and I don’t think they ever were and the fact that the manner in which they describe the world seems to contradict what we understand say from cosmology. To me it’s basically irrelevant because they’re not dealing with the same problem. But you can see how it has been easy for people to become philosophically confused because it’s not self-evident that you may need more than one kind of truth to live. It’s not even self-evident that there is more than one kind of truth. But why we assume that there would only be one kind of truth is a mystery in and of itself. It seems to me that it’s related somehow to the push in humanity for a form of monotheism, you know, a totality of one theory governs all. Well maybe that’s true in some ultimate sense but it certainly isn’t the case that we’re at that point yet. So we might say well maybe we need all the kinds of truth we can get our hands on and all the tools that we have in order to live properly and we can sort out the fact that some of them seem to coexist paradoxically. Well we can just live with that for now and accept it as a necessity that might become, you know, the reason for which might become more clear across time. So it seems to me that for psychology, to be a psychologist you have to take both these domains very seriously. You have to learn everything you can about what science has to tell you about what it is that you’re like and what the world is like and then you have to learn everything you can about what history and culture and also the shared communication between people tells us about what the appropriate ways are to conduct ourselves and to what ends we should be working and those are all valid questions and if you ignore any of them, you ignore them at your peril because you have to know them in order to minimize the degree to which you’re going to suffer unnecessarily or that other people are going to suffer unnecessarily. So it’s not optional. You see that this sort of dichotomous truth, the problem of this dichotomous truth shows up in all sorts of binary oppositions in terms of forms of knowledge, you know, so there’s the objective reality which no one really lives in because it’s a third person perspective, right? So it’s a hypothetical kind of reality but conceptualizing it seems to be very useful and then there’s the phenomenological perspective which is your experience is actually reality and that’s what counts and those two things aren’t the same and that’s sort of like the difference between objective and subjective and it’s sort of like the difference between scientific and moral and it’s sort of like the difference between materialistic and mythological and so those are all dichotomies, they’re paradoxical juxtapositions of forms of conception that seem to be hitting at this paradoxical relationship between being and becoming. So we considered both sides of these paradoxical conceptual schemes as we walked through the class material. I read you this at the beginning of the class. This is from Einstein. He’s trying to clarify what it is that we’re doing when we practice science and Einstein said by the aid of language different individuals can to some extent compare their experiences. Then it turns out that certain sense perceptions of different individuals correspond to each other while for other sense perceptions no such correspondence can be established. We are accustomed to regard as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals and which therefore are in a measure impersonal. The natural sciences and in particular the most fundamental of them, physics deals with such sense perceptions. It’s not a, it’s Einstein and obviously Einstein was a great thinker. There are things missing about this description of what constitutes science because the other thing that constitutes science is a description of the procedures that led to the emergence of the sense perception, right? Think about how a scientific paper is written. It’s not only results. It’s method and results. The method is how I constituted my body in time and space to produce these particular sense perceptions. It’s a way of formalizing behavior and then pairing it with the consequences of behavior and then communicating in a way that someone else could hypothetically duplicate that. Pure focus on sense perception is not complete. You can’t forget about the systematization of procedures in science and it’s easy to forget that. But apart from that, it’s a pretty good summary. And then Shakespeare, he takes another tack at the whole problem and this is where the rubber hits the road as far as I’m concerned in terms of how you constitute your individual being. And Shakespeare says, and it’s not a metaphor in many ways, this. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts. And so from this Shakespearean perspective, your being is more like a play than it is like a collection of objective phenomena. And then what happens is the play itself, like a Shakespearean play, becomes a more accurate representation of being than a scientific description does. And it’s because it plays out, it’s because it accounts for behavior and because it plays out the consequences of behavior from the subjective perspective. Because a good play elicits the sort of passions and emotions and motivations that are subjectively experienced that actually characterize your life as you live it. So what that means is the play, a novel, a book, a story, is an abstracted representation of reality that’s subject to just as much rigor in terms of conception as a scientific description of a given thing. And it’s also real. Well, it depends on what you mean by real, right? Because we already found out what the scientists think of as real, but there’s lots of arguments about that because I might say, well, I would judge what you consider real by watching how you behave, not by listening to what you say about the structure of the world. And that’s an existential perspective as well. And so then I would note that regardless of what all of you might say about what you believe about the nature of reality, it’s certainly the case that you’re going to act as if your own perceptions, your own subjectivity is real. So for example, if something hurts you, you can think all you want about how pain is not objective, but that’s not going to get you out of the painful situation. And you’re still going to configure your behavior so that you’re going to do everything you can even involuntarily so that you will work to avoid that pain. And so you’re stuck with acting as if your subjectivity is real. And that happens at such a deep level that it supersedes your consciousness, right? Like if you put your arm on a burning stove, you’re going to take your arm away from that before you even think about it. So the reality in some sense of your subjectivity is so deep that you don’t even necessarily have a choice about it. So one of the things that I’ve wondered for a long time is what happens if you take this sort of idea seriously, you know, that you need the knowledge that is constituted in stories because it tells you how to behave and because you need to know how to behave because that’s actually one of the fundamental problems of life. It might even be the most fundamental problem of life. From a scientific perspective, the most fundamental problem is what are things made of? It’s something like that. How do they interrelate? But just because that’s a very well-stated problem and just because we’ve been able to produce profound and differentiated answers to it does not necessarily mean that that is the problem that almost everyone faces. And it seems to me, it’s especially the case with people at your age, it’s like, well, what am I going to do seems to me to be the fundamental problem. And if the answer to that is, well, there’s no real guidance for that, it’s just something you have to figure out for yourself, then that’s the sort of thing that makes you question the utility of knowledge per se. And I think it’s a weak answer and I also think it’s a wrong answer. There’s lots of, there is no shortage of information about how to behave and there’s no shortage of information about what happens if you break the rules of behavior. Now there’s arguments about what those rules are and it’s no doubt that they differ contextually. But something can differ at one level of analysis and be the same at another. Languages are like that, right? We all speak a language, the languages are different, but they’re all languages, which means they differ at one level of analysis and they are common at another. And how to act is like that too. Piaget is particularly useful for thinking about that. Because Piaget is the thinker who I think has done the most work in trying to understand how it is that there might be a basis for what constitutes morality. And Piaget starts with the Shakespearean conception fundamentally. He believes that how to act is the problem. And we’re embodied creatures and we’re very mobile and we’re very good at manipulating the world. We’re very good at communicating. And so any psychology that doesn’t take into account the nature of our embodiment is a very weak psychology. And Piaget basically says, well look, you come into the world with some potential for action, it’s kind of minimal, but it’s enough to get you going. It’s enough to kick start you in a sense. And then as you organize your body and you’re doing this neurologically, sort of from the as we discussed, the manner in which you organize your capability for action and perception is continually modified by your social interaction with other people. So your socialized being is built right into your motor circuitry. It’s a pattern. It’s not even a conception, it’s a pattern. So for example, when you’re breastfeeding, you have to do it in a manner that allows your mother to tolerate you. Even something as simple as the first ways that you use your lips and your mouth and the way that you express your emotions is immediately going to be modified by the necessity of social interaction. And social interaction can’t just proceed any old way. So if we have a relationship and it becomes seriously non-reciprocal, you’re a fool if it’s non-reciprocal in your direction. You’re a fool to stay with it. There’s something that’s roughly like the expectation of 50-50. And that’s well established empirically with experiments that you wouldn’t expect to turn out that way. So those are the trading experiments. And I told you about them, I think, if I remember correctly. So the deal is we’ll play. The three of us will play. So I’m going to, I have 100. How much are you going to give him? $30. Would you take that? No. Okay. Okay. So what’s been found everywhere is that people roughly center around 50-50. And so even if the amounts are quite high, and even if the people to whom the money is being offered are very poor. In fact, the poorer the people are to whom the money is being offered, the more likely they are to tell you to go to hell if you’re not being fair. And so that’s built in. And you think about that. Like it doesn’t take much more than that for morality as a system to get going. So if the rough expectation is reciprocity, where that’s possible, then deviations from that reciprocity are going to be punished very harshly. And so right there you have the grounds for the emergence of a complex system of human interactions that’s by no means arbitrary. Now it might be altered to some degree by the particularities of the local environment. There’s no doubt about that. But something can have a fundamental pattern and still be capable of a large number of variance. So what that essentially means, and this is exactly what Piaget observed, is that when you put people together, which you do because people can’t live by themselves, we’re highly social creatures, we have a long period of dependence, we have to make our way in the nuclear family unit, whatever it happens to be, then we have to adjust to the broader group. We have to be acceptable to the broader group, and then we have to learn to maintain the broader group and to contribute to it. Because if we don’t, the quality of our experience will suffer dramatically. So you end up outcast or punished or frustrated or disappointed or alone or all the things that happen if you don’t at least uphold a fair bit of your social responsibility. And so what that means right away is that the patterns that constitute appropriate behaviour are not just arbitrary. Now what exactly they are? Well that’s complicated. You know, it’s just as complicated as Jane Goodall going out into the habitat of the chimps and watching them and trying to figure out just exactly what those chimps are up to. And we kind of know what they’re up to. They organize themselves in dominance hierarchies, because almost every animal does that. And then along with that go certain kinds of rules of interaction, except they’re not rules because chimps don’t have rules because chimps don’t have abstract conception. What they have is rituals of behaviour and shared expectations. But that’s the beginning of rules, right? It’s like Piaget says, well, if you put children together when they’re seven or eight and they play marbles, they can all play. But if you take them away from the group and you ask them what the rules are, they really don’t know. And all that means is they can dance and they can dance with other kids, but they can’t tell you how to dance. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to do it. We’re all like that, right? Because we’re living in these very, very complex hierarchical environments where we inhabit multiple hierarchies. And they’re very, very complicated. And we’re always wandering around trying to figure out, well, what the hell is it that we’re up to? And we don’t exactly know, which is why we need the psychology. But just because we don’t know what we’re up to doesn’t mean we’re not up to something. And it also doesn’t mean that there isn’t something that we should be up to. And I think the social interactionist idea is even deeper than that because almost all the time when you’re interacting with people, they’re broadcasting their desire for you to be some sort of person, right? And it might be kind of like the person you are, but their expectations are higher than that because they would rather in all, especially when they’re seriously involved with you, they would rather that you were a good sort of person. And that’s what they demand from you. They want you to listen to them. They want you to treat them properly. They want you to engage in reciprocal trade. They want you to take care of yourself. I’m assuming they’re not all resentful and full of hate and all that. They’re not just saying, be yourself. They’re saying, no, no, no. Be what everyone needs. And that’s what everyone is broadcasting to everyone else all the time. It’s like, be what I need, be what I need, be what I need, be what they need. And so you’re always being told a message from people, even if they’re just raising their eyebrows at you or smiling or not smiling or calling you on the phone or texting you or not doing that. You’re just being informed about who you should be all the time. And there’s no reason to assume that’s arbitrary either, given that we share a common biological ground. And we have the same emotions, roughly speaking. And we have the same motivations, roughly speaking. So given that pattern, that ground of commonality and expectation, well, why should we assume anything other than a patterned emergence of agreement out of that? So the moral relativist theory assumes that morality is relative. And I think that’s a naive theory. It seems to me that it’s relative and non-relative, which means there are elements of it that are fixed and necessarily so. And then there are other things that can vary without a problem, as long as people agree to it. But I think that societies, and this is also a Piagetian notion, that societies that violate the principle of reciprocity are not very stable because no one’s pleased by those circumstances. Some people are slaves and some people are tyrants. That’ll work for a while, but it’s unstable. And even within a family, it’s the same thing. If your father’s a complete bloody tyrant, what you’re going to do is either be crushed and useless or get the hell away from there as fast as you can. It’s not a stable solution. And non-reciprocal relations at any level of interaction are not tenable. And also, they shouldn’t be tenable. So when you see people in psychotherapy, especially if they tend to be on the agreeable side, one of the things that you teach them is how to speak more about their own needs, so to speak, their own desires or their own values, so that the probability that they’ll engage in a truly reciprocal relationship starts to increase. They won’t be taken advantage of so much. And that seems to be a necessary precondition for their satisfactory embeddedness in a social context. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And that’s the way it works. And it’s foolish and ill researched. At the bottom of the being and becoming question is something else. And this is something that the existential philosophers and the Jungians and most religious systems concentrate on, which is sort of, well, what’s the core nature of being? And systems of that sort are discussing the core nature of being. One of the immediate objects of contemplation is the fact that human beings are limited. There’s lots of things we can’t do. For example, you’re there and you’re not there. Then that’s thrownness from a phenomenological perspective. You’re just stuck with what you are. You’re a certain height. You have a certain eye colour. You’re a certain amount of attractive or not. You’re verbally fluent. You’re smart or you’re not or you’re conscientious. And it’s just sort of those are the cards that you’ve been dealt. And it really is worth thinking about it that way because who you are in some sense is a consequence of a lot of processes, genetic processes, that are in some ways random. And you’ve been dealt a particular hand. And then you have to play it. And that hand has limitations. And so people in some sense are offered opportunities by the nature of how they’re constituted. But there’s also a tragic element to that, which is as you move in life, you bump up against limitations that you cannot transcend. And those are the typical limitations. You bump up against the demands of the social group, which has a tyrannical element. You bump up against nature itself because you’re susceptible to illness and to degeneration and eventually to death. And so are the people around you. And so there’s this issue at the bottom of being that also presents you with a problem. So life is problematic. You’re trying to solve it. And that’s what you’re stuck with. So that’s sort of the parameters of being. And so I think in most mythological language, I like to think of mythology, philosophy, and then mythology as forms of conceptualization that are examining the grammatical structure of being. It’s like what’s common among sets of people? What’s common to the experience of sets of people? And the fact that you are is one of them. And the fact that you are has problems is another. And then a third one is, well, you’re motivated at least to some degree to do something about those things. And so that’s what makes people human in many regards. It’s something fundamental that makes them human. So you can think about that as tragic self-consciousness. It’s self-conscious because you know who you are. And it’s tragic because you also know where your limitations are. And they’re fundamental. And that also sets up another set of motivations, which is, well, is there something we can do about this? Can we limit our vulnerability? Can we extend our scope of power? And how do we do that without causing more trouble than we’re solving? So with that kind of common problem at the basis of our being, that’s also what enables us to communicate because we understand each other, because we’re in the same states of being. So you can talk to someone about your problems without having to explain what problems are. Because you can’t communicate with people unless there’s some things you don’t have to communicate about. You need a shared set of assumptions. And one of them is, for example, that you have problems. Another is that maybe you’re looking for solutions. Another is that maybe communication about that is helpful. None of those things have to be established before you start communicating because everyone’s already got those presuppositions built right into their understanding. So I’ve modeled this. You’ve seen this lots of times now. And I’ve sort of modeled this like this. And this is a cybernetic model in many ways. Although I didn’t know it when I developed it, it’s based on the thinking of Norbert Weiner, who was an artificial intelligence genius. And it basically presumes that it’s a modified version. It presumes that wherever you are, you have some conception of where you are. That’s your current understanding of the world. It’s flawed. Just because you’re here doesn’t mean you understand everything about being here. Hopefully because you have low resolution conceptions. You don’t know anything about the people around you. As long as they sit down and shut up and act normally, that’s no problem because you can easily ignore them. But they’re full of weird potential. And God only knows when that’s going to emerge from one of them. So I’m saying you know where you are. You have a model of what you are. But it’s shallow and potentially flawed. And part of the reason that you can get away with that is because there’s this implicit agreement among all of us not to do anything that violates general social expectation. And so that’s partly how you can get away with the fact that you don’t know anything about anyone. It’s like yeah, they’re peculiar like rhinoceroses and ostriches. And God only knows what they’re up to. But hopefully they’re socialized enough so they don’t show you how peculiar they are when you’re walking past them on the street in public. And so you can get away with your shallow knowledge. So and then you have some sense of where you’re going. And you know maybe that’s vague. It’s going to be there whether you have thought it through or not. And the reason for that is as we’ve discussed, the biologists are pretty good at informing us on this part, is that at the base of your cognitive, emotional, motivational, perceptual structure that gives rise to your being are these systems that are going to push you in some direction as a motivation system or emotion system. So if you don’t drink water long enough, pretty much that’s all you’re going to be able to think about and value. And not only that, see the world through. Because when you see the world as a thirsty person, you’re not seeing the world the same way that someone who has had plenty to drink sees it. So you have this space that defines where you are and this conception about where you’re going and you think where you’re going is better. And you have a theory about how you’re going to transform the present into the more desirable future, but you can make an error at any level of that conceptualization. And that’s sort of a modification of Geoffrey Gray’s theory, the cybernetic theorist, because what they believed was that you see the world. You expect certain things to happen when you act. And now and then when you act, that expectation is violated. And so then you have to reconfigure your behavior or your conception of the future. But that’s not quite right because you don’t see the world. You perceive the world through a fog of preconceptions and in a manner that’s impaired because of your tremendous cognitive limitations. And what that means is that when you’re wrong, you can be wrong anywhere in that model. You can be wrong because you don’t know where you are. You can be wrong because you picked the wrong behaviors to manifest. Or you can be wrong because your conception of where you’re going is flawed in that you’re not going to be happy when you get there or maybe it doesn’t even exist. And I think you see this most painfully when you’re in a relationship and you’re betrayed. Because if you’re in a relationship and you’re betrayed by someone, then it’s pretty damn clear that you didn’t know where you were. Now it’s also then clear you don’t know where you’re going and also that you probably don’t know what you’re doing. So that’s very painful. But it’s in human relationships in particular I think that you find out how fragile your conceptions of the present actually are and that you’re not dealing with the world. You’re dealing with a very oversimplified and presupposition based conception of the world. Because maybe you think your partner loves you and is trustworthy. And maybe you think all people are trustworthy because you’re naive and then you find out, well, if that’s love you don’t want any of it and they’re not trustworthy. And then what the hell? It’s like, well, you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going, you probably don’t know who you are anymore, you certainly don’t know who the hell that person is and because you don’t know who they are or you are, then maybe you don’t know who anyone is. And that puts you in a place too. And so one of the things that I’ve thought for a substantial amount of time is that you can think about that. You can go back like this when you’re thinking about the structure of the world. And one element of the structure is that there’s the place, those are two serpents by the way, I just found out about that recently, two snakes, very common mythological motif. They represent, this is Dao, right, from Daoism and from the Daoist thinkers. And Dao basically means something like being or something like the way, which is like the path of life. And it’s more phenomenological than scientific. What it’s basically saying is that your experience is composed of two domains, always, necessarily. One domain is the orderly domain. And the orderly domain is the place where when you act, what you expect happens, or more precisely, it’s the place where when you act, what you want happens. And that’s orderly because you understand it well enough so that the snakes don’t escape when you walk forward. You know, your limited preconceptions are sufficient so that they map onto the environment as it emerges as you act. That’s an orderly place. And fine, that’s not a bad place, you know. It’s like, most of, you want most of your experience to be that kind of place because otherwise it’s just too overwhelming, right? But the problem with order is that you can have too much order. And all the variability of your experience can be pushed out and then you get bored. So the answer isn’t total order. And we’ve also talked about what happens when the answer becomes total order, right, because that’s the totalitarian solution. And we kind of think that maybe it’s grounded in, not only in fear, but also in disgust, or maybe mostly in disgust. And so the opposite of the orderly domain seems to be the chaotic domain. And the chaotic domain is where you are when you don’t know where you are. And that’s not a geographical place, although it can be, because you can get lost, say, in the city and then you’re in chaos. But it’s more often, I think, an interpersonal place. I think people encounter chaos most often in its deep sense when their relationships with other people go seriously wrong. And so that’s when you’re confronted with all the things you don’t know. It also happens to you a lot when you’re interacting with complex technological machinery and it fails on you. Because as soon as it fails, it’s like, well, at one second it’s your little gray box with keys that you can push and at the next second it’s God only knows what. And you are certainly not capable of, generally speaking, of dealing with that. The Taoists say, well, the world is made up of yin and yang. That’s the terms that they use to conceptualize it. And that’s often translated as yang is masculine and yin is feminine. But that doesn’t mean male and female. It means something deeper, which is human beings have a social cognitive architecture. And so from time immemorial, we were used to mapping the world as masculine and feminine. Because most of our interactions throughout our evolutionary history have been social and interpersonal interactions. That’s the primary reality. And when we developed our greater cognitive capacity and our ability to abstract, we had to use the conceptual structures that we’d already evolved in order to start mapping out the world abstractly. And so we seem to use masculine and feminine, which is sort of like the primary binary opposition, to represent things that are primarily opposed at the deepest of levels. There’s other reasons as well. I mean, chaos is the place from which new things emerge. So if your computer crashes and you have to learn to fix it, then you’ve extracted a whole bunch of information from what was otherwise just a black box, so to speak. That makes you more skillful and it makes your understanding of the world, your detailed representation of the world, more differentiated. So chaos is the place that new information comes out of. And that’s partly also why it’s feminine, because the feminine is that from which new things emerge. And of course, the orderly element is masculine, at least in part, because we tend to conceive of dominance hierarchies as something like a patriarchal structure. And they are something like that. They’re like that among human beings, and they also seem to be like that among chimpanzees, although not so much with the bonobos. So that’s an interesting way of thinking about things. And the Taoists would say, those are universal elements of being. No matter where you are, there’s things you know and there’s things you don’t know. And so that’s the fundamental problem in your life. How to deal with the things you know and can predict and want, and how to deal with the things that you can’t. And then the Taoists would also say, well, you should walk the line between them. That’s the right place to be. And that’s a very, very, very, very smart way of thinking about it. Because if you’re only ever where you know what’s going to happen, you’ve got two problems. One is, you’re not learning anything. Because what you already know is already working, so why bother changing it? The second is worse, because order tends to deteriorate of its own accord, right? Because the world itself continues to change. Just entropy will make a change. And so if all you do is stick yourself inside the order, the order itself over time is going to get less and less stable, and then at some point it’s not going to be there at all. And you’ll fall right into chaos. So you can’t just hide over where everything is predictable and where you get what you want. On the other hand, if you’re in chaos all the time and you never know what’s going on, then you can’t tolerate that physiologically. Because the closer you are to serious chaos, the more your body is preparing for the worst. And that’s because at the bottom of chaos is the worst. So you see in mythological representations, chaos is the underworld. And in the underworld there’s hell, and hell is like the worst place in chaos. And so when you think about conceptions like this, people say, well do those places exist? And the answer to that is, well it depends on what you mean by exist. Does the domain of chaos exist? Well how many of you have been there? As soon as you know the language, you think, oh yeah, that exists. I’ve been where chaos is lots, maybe more than I want to be. And now and then I’ve even been in that part of chaos that’s best described as hell. So that’s the sort of chaos that you visit where everything you do makes it worse. And I’m sure that people, at least some of you, have been in that situation, where things went wrong, and then because of your own foolishness or because of the malevolence of other people, the situation developed so that it went from bad to horrible with each successive decision. That’s a place that people can go. It’s a very real place. Might be more real than anything else. So the Taoists say, well, you know, the chaos issue, well you just can’t tolerate too much of that. What your body does when it doesn’t know what’s going on is basically prepare you for anything that might happen. You know, and that’s the generalized stress response. And that’s associated with massive release of cortisol, and that puts you on alert. And that’s great. You’re awake and ready, but you know, a couple of years of that and you’re old. Your body just cannot tolerate that level of energy expenditure on a constant basis. It wears you out. It makes you old, fundamentally. So bored or terrified, those are sort of the extremes of chaos and order, let’s say. If you’re on the line down the middle, well then it’s, you’re secure enough so you’re not experiencing a level of negative emotion that’s intolerable. A little apprehension, that might be a good thing. You know, imagine that you’re preparing to meet someone that you’re interested in. Well, is the apprehension a good part of that or a bad part? Like would you do without that? Well, you might if it’s like paralyzing you to the point where you can hardly even go through with talking to them, but if it’s just part of expectation, that’s part of excitement. So when you’re on that border between chaos and order, you don’t want to be so orderly that you’re entirely comfortable. And that’s partly because you’re asleep then. Why the hell do you have to be awake if everything’s going your way? And if you’re driving home in your car and nothing is going on, you’re kind of not even there. Maybe you’re thinking about things in the future, but you’re certainly not attending in any real deep sense to what’s going on around you. And that’s because you don’t have to. Well, when you’re a little apprehensive, well then you’re more conscious, you know, and then you’re more engaged in reality. And then there’s the positive emotions that are associated with that too, which is excitement and enthusiasm and curiosity and hope, and all those things are, in some sense, all those things are worth living for. And part of the reason that the Daoists believe that you should walk the line between chaos and order is because it’s at that place where the quality of your existence is high enough so that the problems that we discussed, the existential problems we discussed, are no longer particularly relevant. And you know, you might say, well, what’s the meaning of life? And I might say, well, you can’t really ask that question linguistically, because there isn’t a linguistic answer. Just as the problem itself isn’t linguistic, right? Suffering is not the word suffering. Suffering is something that you embody. And meaning is not the word meaning. It’s something that happens to you. And so the Daoists would say, well, stand on the line between order and chaos. You can tell when you’re there, because you’re awake and alert and excited and enthusiastic and deep into the moment. And that’s a good place to be. And I think the reason that your nervous system does that to you, and this is an evolved issue, is that your brain wants you to be on the line between order and chaos, because that’s where dynamic stability is best attained, right? Because your problem is how do you maintain yourself, right? Then the problem is how do you maintain yourself optimally? And then the problem is how do you maintain yourself optimally in a world that continues to transform? And the answer to that isn’t, well, you stand still. The answer to that is you transform yourself at the rate that keeps you in sync with the transforming environment. And since we’re adapted to transforming environments, there’s no reason to assume that when you feel the best about what you’re doing, so to speak, there’s no reason to assume that that’s not exactly where you should be. Why else would you feel like that? engaged and interested, and not plagued by a surfeit of, say, existential problems. And so then meaning becomes something you discover and attempt to inhabit rather than some conceptual answer to a conceptual problem. So it’s a very interesting idea. And I think the psychophysiological evidence for its validity is quite strong. We talked about how the hypothalamus is constructed, for example. We know that the hypothalamus is concerned with a lot of the basic things that you need to do to survive. So it’s always throwing up these little motivated schemes through which you have to view the world. Fine, you have to deal with those. But when you have dealt with them, it defaults to mild exploration. And that’s governed by pain and by fear and by disgust, because you can’t have your exploration be entirely unbridled. But the optimal state of existence looks like something like engaged interest with what’s going on without too much apprehension. Now not with zero apprehension, because the apprehension also wakes you up a bit. And that’s the place where information flow is maximized. That’s the place where you become more than you currently are. And that’s the place where your description of the world becomes deeper and deeper than the one you already have. So that’s the place where you get to have your cake and eat it too. Sufficiently secure, but also engaged in a game that ensures that that security maintains itself across time. So if your life is composed of order and chaos, in a sense, and that’s part of your fundamental existential problem, how to deal with chaos, how to deal with too much order, in some sense, your nervous system already sets you up for that. Now that’s associated with some of the deeper ideas that have been put forward by people like Jung, and then to a lesser degree by people like Rogers and Maslow, who believed in something like human potential or human self-actualization. And Jung’s idea was, a deeper idea than that, was that when you’re operating on the border between order and chaos, and you’re interested in something, that’s when you’re where you are. That’s when you’re there. You’re interested in something and you’re captivated by it. Jung would then say, if you try to stay there, which means you follow that, it will take you to all the places that you don’t want to go. It will take you to all the places in your past that you haven’t made complete use of, and it will take you to all those places that you’re avoiding in the future and the present. That’s what that mechanism is for. And the reason it will do that is because, with all those experiences that you’ve had in the past that you’ve avoided or you haven’t made thorough use of, there’s still sort of latent world left there. So you see this with people in their relationships. It’s like, say a woman is going out with an abusive guy. She finally drops him. It’s like, boom, next relationship. Oh, look, it’s another abusive guy. And then she drops him. And then the next relationship, it’s like, hmm, it’s another abusive guy. And Freud called that the repetition compulsion. But you might think, well, what is missing in her worldview that makes it such that when she acts, she keeps running into the same obstacle? It’s like her map isn’t correct. And so then you might say, well, if she went back to the first relationship and really dug around in the carcass, so to speak, she might find out what the hell she’s missing. One thing might be, well, when exactly do you say no? And how do you say it? Because abuse, for example, usually starts out, it rarely starts out that the person is calm and then you end up pounded flat. It’s like the person who’s prone to abuse is disagreeable. And so they’ll push you. And then what happens next depends on how you respond. And if you step back and you step back and you step back and you keep doing that, the probability that the aggression, the person can’t control the aggression, say because they’re not well socialized, unless you put a limit on it, it’s just going to chase you. It’s going to get bigger and bigger as you step backwards. Very many things are like that in life. So then you think, well, you have to make enough use of what’s around you, what you haven’t explored, to repair yourself in some sense or to flesh yourself out so that you’re capable of saying, no, that’s not going to happen in a way that actually increases the probability that it’s not going to happen. Now I’m certainly not saying that everybody in an abusive relationship deserves to be in one. I’m talking about a very specific set of circumstances where the same damn thing happens over and over because then you have to ask, well, is this random or is there something going on that increases the probability of that outcome? Now Jung’s ideas, they’re very strange ideas because they take you deep into mythology and we can look back at that a little bit. All right, so the idea, well, you’ve got this little framework that you have to look at the world through. It tells you approximately where you are, approximately where you need to go, and approximately what you should do to get there. But it can be wrong in any level of analysis. So then you ask, well, what produces those little worlds? And one answer is basic biological necessity. So the basic motivational systems, emotional systems, the lines are blurry, partly keep you on track. Right? You’re hungry when your blood sugar falls, you’re thirsty when you’re not sufficiently hydrated obviously, you’re sleepy when you’ve gone without sleep for too long, et cetera, et cetera. And those things have been problems for so long that in some sense you have machinery that takes care of that. Okay, so that’s modeled there. I sort of roughly broke the fundamental motivations into those that keep you going and those that help you propagate because in some sense those are the two Darwinian problems that you have to solve in life. But then you might think, this seems to me to be how you can start to think about how the traits might be organized into this narrative scheme. It’s like the traits seem to me, maybe there’s a hundred, maybe there’s 30 motivational states. Some of them are pure motivational states, maybe, and some of them are just combinations of motivational states. But they’re like the basic elements of motivation. And then maybe they clump together in five different ways. And out of that we get the five traits. And then the five traits are like, they’re kind of like the preconditions for your particular So if you’re a conscientious person, then the world is a little less orderly and a little less well put together than it should be. And your story is, I’m the person who goes in there and fixes that up and makes it orderly. And you know, if you’re an extroverted person, then you think, well, there’s all that social territory out there to occupy and exploit. And I’m the sort of person that is really going to do that because that’s where your interests lie. And if you’re an open person, it’s like, wow, look at all these weird things that I can do and think about. And so that’s the world for you. And those are all, you can think of those as a set of five stories in some sense that have a reasonable probability of success. So there are five modes of being. And they’re composed of these more fragmented fundamental motivations. It’s something like that. So that’s sort of where you can start to see the concordance between the narrative theories of the clinicians and the trait theories of the empiricists. And there has been work done on this sort of thing. So we know, for example, that Jacob Hirsch did some of this work that your trait temperament does influence the words that you use to describe your spontaneous self narratives. So if I say, write about your past, and then I analyze your word use, I can make an educated guess about whether you’re extroverted or introverted or conscientious or open or agreeable. And then Dan McAdams has showed that, you know how the big five clump into plasticity and stability? The plastic people produce more exploratory narratives. And the stable people produce narratives that are more associated with security and order. So there hasn’t been a lot of work done at the interface between traits and narratives. But you know, so I’m sort of pushing the limits of knowledge here. But I think that’s the direction in which the integration will likely take place. Okay. And then we talked a little bit about how emotion might work too. So we say, well, you’re in this little motivated state. So it tells you something about where you are and what that’s like. And it gives you some hints about where you might go with that. And then it disinhibits the relevant behaviors that would be associated with that, including perceptual behaviors. And then you walk forward. Well, what happens? Well, two things roughly can happen. Things you want, which indicate A, that you’re moving towards the goal, and B, that your plan is good, right? It indicates both. And that’s positive emotion, right? That’s incentive reward. That’s dopaminergically mediated. And you like that. As long as it’s not too intense. And then the next thing that can happen is two things. It can be divided into two. There are things you don’t want to have happen. And some of those are, well, there’s just an obstacle in your way. And with a minor deviation in terms of trajectory, you can walk around it. And then the other is something you completely don’t understand happens, and it just knocks the bottom out of your stupid plan. And then it also might knock the bottom out of all sorts of other plans as well, depending on how unexpected it is. And that seems to me to be where the transition from order to chaos occurs. So we use a relationship example again. You go home to invite your girlfriend out to have dinner, and you find out that she’s in bed with someone else. It’s like, well, dinner’s off. Right, right, okay. But that’s not all that’s off, right? So then you might think, okay, well, there’s a lot of things all of a sudden that are off. Because that’s a much bigger catastrophe than if she says, well, I already made dinner. And maybe you’re a little irritated because you can’t take her out now, and you have to eat something else. It’s like, oh, well, that’s not such a catastrophe. But it’s not easy to figure out exactly why those catastrophes differ. Because they’re both unexpected things. So then you have to think, well, one of them seems to disrupt a lot more than the other. And then you have to think, well, disrupt what? And then that’s why I talk to you guys about this. Because this is Piagetian in some sense. I think this is the way to understand why you get upset when you get upset. It’s like, okay, well, you wanted to take your girlfriend out for dinner, and you know how to do that. You go into the elevator, you take the elevator down, you eat, you pay. It’s behaviorally plotted out quite well. And so there’s a bunch of behaviors at the bottom, and then there’s the label, go out for dinner. And it’s a little thing down at the bottom, and it gets disrupted. And so you’re sort of upset in proportion to that little bit of territory that’s been bent astray. And maybe if you’re not too emotionally unstable or neurotic, maybe it’s a pretty seamless transition. Whereas if you’re, say, emotionally stable and extroverted, you think, oh, good, something new. And both of those responses are understandable. But when your partner’s in bed with someone else, it’s sort of more like at the top, which is, well, your conception of the quality of your life or the overall quality of you even. When something major happens, it’s like it blows apart, potentially blows apart your entire structure. Partly your conceptual structure, because what the hell did you know? How stupid could you possibly be? And that tells you exactly how stupid you could be. But then you start to wonder about why it happened to you. And partly that’s because you’re stupid, or at least that’s what you think. But then it’s also because, well, maybe there’s a whole bunch of skills that you don’t have. If you were a better person, if you were more interesting, if you went more places, if you were more caring, if you weren’t quite as selfish, if you were more conscientious, because then you start to think, well, what do I lack? It’s not only what have I misperceived. It’s what do I lack? And when you get hit at a high level, like your partner betrays you, it’s like you’re infinitely stupid and you’re infinitely worthless. And that’s chaos. And so then you’re in chaos, and well, what then do you do? Well, the best answer to that is you avoid it to begin with. You take the steps along the way that decrease the probability that you’re ever going to end up there. And that’s, in some sense, that’s what that means. So you know, if you look at this conceptualization, you can kind of see you’re moving from point A to point B, and then the unpredicted outcome is like a hole in your plan. It’s like that’s not supposed to happen, because if you had a good plan, something you didn’t want to have happen wouldn’t have happened. And so it’s like a hole in your plan, and then you fall through the hole and you find out how big the hole is. And maybe it’s a hole that just ate that plan, and so who cares, or maybe it’s the kind of hole that just keeps growing until all of you falls into it. All right, so how do you deal with that as a possibility, especially given that you have limited knowledge? And so that’s what this means. And this is the same thing, basically, as the Taoist representation, because the Taoist representation, Tao also means meaning, and so being on that line between chaos and order is meaningful. And the Taoists believe that you should be where things are meaningful. That’s the right place to be. And you think, well, it’s a good place to be, if you think about it, about your own experience when you’re doing something meaningful, you think, you don’t even think about it. It’s just this is a good place to be. You can notice it, maybe you can notice it and continue to do it more, and that’s what the existentialists would call striving for an authentic existence. And you can think about that as, well, it’s philosophy. It’s like, no, no, don’t be thinking that. It’s advice about how to structure your life so that its quality is sufficient so that you don’t become resentful and full of hate. It’s not casual, well, here’s some philosophical ideas to think about. It’s like, you’ve got to take this seriously, because if you don’t, not only do you not have a good time, because you just aren’t paying any attention, but you’ll also turn into the sort of person who’s highly motivated to make sure that no one else ever has a good time as well. And so you go from just kind of being useless and miserable on your own, when that becomes sufficiently useful and meaningless and painful, then you’re undoubtedly going to start to dream about taking it out on all the other people whose fault it is that you’re unfulfilled and miserable. And so if you don’t stay in that meaningful place, so to speak, so that your life is acceptable to you, you don’t think that you’re the only one who will suffer. You’re just the beginning of the suffering. Now with this, this is a great image. It’s really old, you know. The oldest story we have, which is called the Enuma Elish, I told you a little bit about it, the Sumerian creation myth, is the myth about a hero basically going out to conquer some vaguely reptilian, dragon-ish, chaos beast. And that’s really, as far as I can tell, that’s really the story of humanity there. And the story of humanity is, you look on the right, there’s a hole. That’s the hole that your plans, that’s the hole that you fall into when your plans don’t work. So that hole is always there. And at the bottom of the hole is something terrible. And that’s what the dragon is. And then the little castle at the background, well, that’s order. That’s where you live. And this thing that crawls out of the hole to face you is always threatening order. And the answer is, well, then what do you do about it? And one answer is, man, get those walls up, you know, 800 stories tall and 500 feet thick. And the problem is, well, you can’t get out of a castle that’s that thick. So maybe that’s not so good. You know, and the other thing is just to throw your hands up in despair and say, well, what the hell is the use of having a castle anyways if there’s just going to be dragons around it? And the other one is, well, maybe we should take care of it when it’s relatively small. And so, you know, when you’re in a relationship, for example, if you don’t want it to fall down a pit, then you have to notice when the little dragons are popping up. You know, and those are things that disturb your equilibrium, that produce some negative emotion, but that also sort of call out to you, this isn’t acceptable. I should do something about it. And the most important ones to not avoid are the ones that call out to you, this isn’t good. I should do something about it. I know what to do, and I could do it. And if you step back from that, well, then all that will happen is those things will multiply and multiply and multiply and multiply until they’re so big that you’re no match for them whatsoever. You’ll trip over it, fall down that hole, and that’ll be that. And so that’s a bad outcome. So that’s part of the moral obligation, say that the existentialists lay on people, and the Jungians as well. It’s like, wake up, pay attention. You know, if things aren’t going the way that you want them to, then do what you can as fast as you can to stay something about it and fix it, fix it, fix it. Do the things you can to repair the things around you that are producing low quality experience. And then what happens? Well, you get tougher. And the reason you get tougher is because you’re engaged in all these little micro battles and the more you engage in those micro battles, the better you get at battling. And so then you become someone who can say no when you have to say no. And that’s a really useful thing to be able to say. Then also the other thing you’re doing is that, well, everything around you is trying to turn into chaos, and the chaos is popping up. You’re just like, it’s like whack-a-mole. You know that foolish arcade game? It pops a little weasel and you hit it with a stick. It’s like, well, that’s what it’s like. Little problems pop up. Fix them as soon as they pop up because then they can’t grow. Well, maybe they still will, but at least you’ll have the best probability that they won’t grow unnecessarily. All right. So that’s what I’ve derived from what I’ve taught to you people. You know that the fundamental problems of life are existential. It’s what to do. The solutions to those problems are not arbitrary. The wisdom traditions of mankind and the profound psychological theories that we’ve collected over the last 200 years, they converge. One of the things they say is, get your story straight. Another thing they say is, if you’re avoiding something that you need to do in order to get to where you’re going, quit avoiding it because the avoidance will cause you trouble. It’ll weaken you and it’ll make the world into a more terrible place. And then the broader sociological, psychological studies like the ones that were done by people who, as you know, isn’t generally utilized in a personality class, but he’s sort of like a meta Victor Frankl as far as I’m concerned. Solzhenitsyn lays out another problem with all of this, which is, well, if you don’t do this, if you don’t get your story straight and you don’t stop avoiding, well, then what’s the consequence? And one consequence is, well, you’re a miserable thing with a very low quality life, and so you’re just going to be tortured by existence, and it’s perfectly capable of torturing you beyond your endurance. And that sort of sucks for you. But the next step beyond that is, well, you become the sort of person who isn’t really all that positively predisposed to existence. And once you’re that sort of person, then anybody who comes along to offer you the opportunity to live inside something rigid and hurt anyone who comes near, you’re going to jump on that, partly because you’re afraid, and they offer you security, and partly because you’re resentful and bitter and full of hatred, and so you’re just waiting for the bloody opportunity to take that out on someone, especially if you can act morally and superior while you’re doing it. You know, and you think, well, that’s basically what Hitler offered the Germans, and that’s basically what Stalin offered the communists. It was an inversion of the order, and anybody who is pathologically resentful had the opportunity to be just as murderous as they wanted to be. And so, you know, the 20th century put towards us a whole variety of problems. One problem was the problem of meaning. You know, Nietzsche sort of announced that at the end of the 19th century. And then the 20th century was, well, what do we do about that? And a lot of it was nihilistic, and a lot of it was totalitarian, and both of those seemed to be not so good. You know, and for me, especially in the universities, the nihilism hasn’t ended. It still infested most of the humanities. But the nihilism and the totalitarianism, they are not the only opportunities. They’re not the only options. And you know, it is possible for people to pay attention to their lives in such a way that they straighten out. And if you straighten out, man, you get tough, and you get useful. And if you’re tough and useful, then life isn’t so horrible. Or even if it is, you can hack it. You know, because making life not horrible, you’ll have limited success with that. But making yourself tough enough so that won’t corrupt you, that’s a possibility. And then the upside to that is, well, you’re not going to be a totalitarian, and you’re not going to be nihilistic, and you’re not going to be like a primary danger to the structure of the social unit around you. And who knows? Maybe it’s even better than that. You’ll be good for you. That’d be good. You’d be good for your family. That’d be good. You’d be good for your community. That would be good. That’s an equilibrated state from the Piagetian perspective, right? You’re living so it works for you. It works for your family. It works for your community. God only knows. Maybe it even works for the planet. I mean, that would be the hope. Well, that’s a pretty good thing to aim at. And the other thing to think about in that regard is, life is hard enough so you need an adventure. You need an adventure to justify it. It has to be worth it. And one adventure, one real adventure is, see if you can get your act together. That’s hard. And it’s an adventure. It’s partly an adventure because if you make that your primary goal, say, to not avoid things, to tell the truth, to aim at the highest value, things start to happen to you. They’re not things that you’re manipulating the world to get. They’re just doors that start to open. And God only knows how many doors will open to you if you do that. And that makes things extraordinarily interesting. And once things are extraordinarily interesting, the fact that life has its limitations and that it’s full of suffering, you think, yeah, well, all things considered, it’s not such a bad bargain. And so to close, one of the things you might ask yourself is, if you’re in a situation, if you’re in a situation where your life isn’t of sufficient quality, then you might ask yourself, are you doing absolutely everything you can to fix it? And then you might say, well, let’s not draw any final conclusions about the utility of existence and its value until we’re sure we’ve got our act together and are seeing things straight. And that’s worth pursuing. That’s what you should be learning in university. Because that’s the proper path of a citizen. It’s the proper path of someone who’s attempting to put the world straight. And that’s the best thing you can do. And it’s not only because it’s right. It’s because what’s right is actually what’s best for you. So that’s what I’ve learned from the stuff I’ve been teaching you. So thank you. Thank you.