https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ov5pYNPi358
Okay. So we talked a lot about the brain last time, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, and then we’re going to talk about organization of hierarchical systems, and then we’re going to talk about their representation in mythology. So, this is from a paper by Swanson. And Swanson has been studying the hypothalamus for a very long time, and brain organization in general. And the way he conceptualizes it is in a rather Piagetian sense, and so the essential outputs of the nervous system are basically patterns of motor behavior, and those are controlled by patterns of spinal cord activity, and those are controlled by patterns at higher brain levels, including the hypothalamus, and then those are controlled by emotional systems. There’s patterned responses at the emotional level, and then those are controlled by patterned responses at the level of the cortex. And the body sort of builds itself from the bottom up. And as it builds itself from the bottom up, it’s trying to integrate the function of all the systems that are necessary for the maintenance of… the biological maintenance of life in the medium term, short term, medium term, and long term, and in a social context that works for the social context, and also works for the individual context. So, you can imagine that that’s a rather… It’s hypothetically possible that there’s only a certain set of solutions to a problem that complex. And if that’s the case, then that would account for the emergence of something approximating a universal morality, and it would also explain why every possible political system won’t work. So… Now, this is Swanson’s map of the hypothalamus. Now, you’ll note that the hypothalamic structures, they’re the ones with little circles and so on, on the left. Like every other element of the brain, the hypothalamus isn’t a homogenous structure. Right? And generally, when you name something, if you think about it, the name presumes a homogenous structure, because otherwise you would differentiate the name, and you would call it a bunch of names instead of just one. And so what happens, for example, that as people learn more about the brain, you’ll notice this as you learn more about the brain, you stop thinking about it necessarily as the brain, which is like a homogenous mass of neurons, and you start thinking about it in terms of its functional subsystems. And then once you learn more about those, you think about those sub-functional subsystems in terms of their functional subsystems, and you can keep differentiating all the way down. You can differentiate all the way down to the molecular level. And so as your knowledge improves, your level of resolution improves, and you can use more and more precise terminology, what you see is that the hypothalamus is composed of a number of systems. And one of the things that Swanson has done with this particular diagram is indicate which parts of the hypothalamus, this is in a rat’s brain, are basically responsible for reproductive behaviors, and which are responsible for defensive behaviors. And that’s part of the hypothalamus. Now, the other part… So, so, so there’s a very archaic system way down in the bottom of the brain, older than emotions, about as old as pain, that’s responsible for these very fundamental motivational drives. So you can think about the hypothalamus, if you want to think about this way, as the part of the biological basis of what Freud would have called the id. Now, we don’t have to think about it in terms of relatively vague statements like the id anymore, because we know more about the underlying circuitry, and we know that it’s quite standard across mammalian species, and even farther back in the phylogenetic chain than just mammals. So, yeah? Yeah, well, you know, systems develop in an evolutionary chain, right? And some systems are more primordial than others. And so, the hypothalamic systems are more primordial than the hippocampal and the amygdala systems. And so, pain… You can think of pain as an emotion. People usually don’t. They usually think about it as a motivational system. But the distinction between those terms is vague anyways. Pain has an emotion-like component and a motivation-like component, like anger does. All I mean by older is that it was there first. So, anxiety, for example, seems to be an elaboration of pain. So, pain represents… Pain indicates damage to the system that’s being stimulated, basically, something like that. Well, let me get to that, because I will get to that, because that’s another… Probably for all of them. Yeah. So, this governs reproductive behavior. There would be outputs from the reproductive system to other systems that mediate positive emotion. But they’re old, too. So, part of the hypothalamus is devoted to these motivation-like processes. I think they’re motivation-like personalities. And part of it is actually devoted… The other half of it is devoted towards exploration. And the exploration system is the source… The roots of the exploration system in the hypothalamus are the bottom part of the structure that produces the kind of positive emotion that’s associated with approach and joy. And it’s also extremely old, because it has its roots in the hypothalamus. So, that’s the dopaminergic system. So, half the hypothalamus, roughly speaking, is devoted towards the regulation of fundamentally motivated behaviors, like sexuality and defensive aggression, say. And the other half of it is devoted towards exploration. And so, that’s quite interesting, because one of the things it means is that exploration… The tendency, the proclivity towards exploration is also unbelievably archaic. It’s really, really old. And as I mentioned, I think I told you this before, if you study the behavior of a decoordicate cat, which is a cat that really has almost no brain left, except the hypothalamus and the spinal structures, that cat is hypo-exploratory. Hyper-exploratory, sorry. It explores more than a normal cat, which is quite strange, given that it doesn’t have much of a brain. But part of the reason it explores more is because it can’t form the memory structures that would inhibit the exploration as a consequence of learning. So, basically, what happens is you’re curious about something until you figure it out, and then you’ve built a representation of it, which is, in some sense, a representation of what to do around that thing. And once you’ve built that representation, it’s not necessary to be curious about that thing anymore, because you’ve figured it out. And you might as well go on to some other thing that you don’t understand. But if you don’t have much of a brain, you can’t store the consequences of your exploratory activity, and so you can’t inhibit it. So that’s why a cat without a brain is hyper-exploratory. So, what I think is really interesting about the hypothalamic work is that we’re going to talk a lot about the representation of exploration in mythology. And it was very interesting to me to learn that the proclivity towards exploration and the positive emotion that’s associated with that is so ancient that it’s grounded in the hypothalamus. So it’s as old, so to speak, as hunger and sex. And those are very, very old things. So, now, you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can do all this, why do you need the rest of the brain? That’s a perfectly good question. Some animals don’t have much more brain than that. It seems to me that the reason that you need it is because when you have motivational system A, and motivational system B, and motivational system C, and motivational system D, there are conflicts, there are potential conflicts between their operations across spans of time. One can interfere with another. And the optimal arrangement is so that the operations of each of these systems is sequenced in such a manner that each of them get what they need on an ongoing basis. And so, part of the reason that you need the rest of your brain is to do the proper sequencing, is to figure out when you should do what. And so, the rest of the brain, in part, is there to take time into account. But it’s not only there to take time into account, it’s also there to take context into account. Because reproductive behavior, for example, has to be context sensitive. Even though it’s a fundamental motivation, it has to be context sensitive because every situation is not the same as every other situation, especially among animals that become increasingly complex. So, part of the reason that you need more brain, or that it might be worthwhile under some conditions to have more brain, is to solve the problem of how to organize multiple fundamental motivational systems working simultaneously. And that’s a lot of the problems that you’re trying to solve on a day-to-day basis, are precisely that. You know, you have to add emotional regulation to that. And you have to also, because we’re social animals, you have to add the problem of the fact that there’s all sorts of other people who are trying to do exactly the same thing, cooperatively and competitively, in the same environment, across different spans of time. So, it’s a very complex optimization problem. It doesn’t seem like it’s precisely computable. A lot of it seems to have to, a lot of the way we do it, seems to have to do with ongoing negotiation. You know, because you might say, well, what’s the answer to the proper hierarchical arrangement of motivational necessities? And I think that the past can offer hints in that direction, and also can probably inform us about what won’t work. But those are sort of vague and broad, and in order to determine how to update that and bring it into the present, there has to be continual ongoing communication and negotiation. So… Okay, so then you can think about the relationship between what we were thinking about as the… fundamental unit of personality, because I think of this not only as the fundamental unit of narrative, but the fundamental unit of personality, is that the basic motivational systems, which I’ve sort of outlined here, in schematic format, I’m not claiming that these are precisely accurate or scientific categories, but you can think of them, the basic motivational states, basically, as associated with self-propagation and self-maintenance. Those are the two big problems that a living creature has to solve, and then those problems are broken down into the operation of more specialized subsystems, like the desire for affiliation, which seems to be a basic motivation among people, sexual desire, those are all self-propagation motivations, thermal regulation, thirst, hunger, elimination, all the sorts of things that you think of as basic biological necessities. And so each of those has the capacity to pop up something that’s approximating a personality when it needs to, and so it’s not a drive, which is an important thing to realize. There’s a drive-like element to the degree that that process has become habitual, or that it’s based in instinct. The more drive-like something is, the more likely it is that lower levels in the nervous system are taking care of it, so maybe spinal systems, for example, so you know if you put your hand on a hot stove, you’ll jerk it back fast before you feel the pain, and that’s because there’s a reflex loop between the sensory receptors on your hand and your spinal cord, it’s very fast, it just goes like that, it’s a sensory motor loop, and it’s basically deterministic, so things at extremely high resolution become increasingly deterministic. So the pain comes in after you’ve pulled your hand away, and that seems to be something like it’s teaching you, in some sense your body is teaching you, that’s one way of thinking about it, not to do that stupid thing again. And people also think maybe that pain immobilizes us, so that we’re more likely to heal, or less likely to keep engaging in the behavior that caused the damage. Our motivational systems are popping up these little personalities all the time, and one of the dictums of psychoanalytic thought is that those little motivational personalities can more or less have a life of their own, because they’re subsets of you, and if they’re not integrated into the complete personality well, then when they emerge they’re going to be rather primordial and unsophisticated, and you see this in people, for example, who have outbursts of anger, it isn’t exactly reasonable to say that they’ve become disinhibited, although that’s one way of thinking about it, it’s actually more reasonable to assume that they haven’t developed enough sophistication to integrate that motivational system, so that capacity for anger, for example, into their personality as a whole, and one of the dictums of Jungian psychotherapy in particular is that it’s extraordinarily useful to integrate those elements of your personality, that might have like a fiery-like nature, a potentially dangerous nature, anger and aggression is a really good example of that, but sexual desire is also a really good example of that, if you’re sophisticated, you have that system at hand when you need it, but you don’t use it in a manner that’s destructive to your operations as a whole across time, and you don’t use it in a manner that disrupts the relationship that you’ve established socially with your family and broader society, so it’s all integrated, it’s like it’s integrated into a game, and one of the things you might think about is that a lot of the games that people do play and that people like to watch are games of aggression integration, so football is a really good example of that, I mean those guys are massive and they’re strong and they’re aggressive, but by and large when they’re in the football game, they use that to further the game, now they’re trying to win individually and their team is trying to win, but at the same time both teams are competing within a framework of rules, and that’s in a broader framework that encompasses the entire audience, which is also continually giving them feedback on the quality of their play, so if somebody does something particularly brutal and unnecessary, the whole audience is going to complain about that, and that’s one of the ways by which the players determine how much force can be used and how much force can’t be used, because as the game continues, it’s not easy to tell when you’re being too aggressive or not too aggressive, so it’s funny, I was reading a little while ago about the Canada-Russia hockey series in 1972, if I remember correctly, the Canadians played by European rules, which meant that there was no body checking, so that was kind of hard on them, because the Europeans don’t check, but the Canadians claimed that in games they played where there was no checking, there was a lot more hitting with the ends of sticks and a lot more slashing, and there were still all sorts of aggression, but it was never able to get up to the point where you could give someone a solid hit, and the Canadians take on that was that the game wasn’t necessarily less dangerous or less rough without checking, it’s just that the aggression got subordinated, and so it’s not an easy thing to figure out exactly what level of force is necessary to push any given thing forward, but none is definitely the wrong answer, and if you’re ever involved, which you will be, and no doubt are now, if you’re involved in difficult negotiations as you move forward, salary negotiations or negotiations about a given project, or even attempts on your part to solve problems at work, like being subject to arbitrary tyranny, or being bored to death by a useless project, or something like that, if you don’t have that capacity for force at hand, you’re not going to win, you’re just going to get walked over, and how much force you need, that’s part of the ongoing dialogue, and that’s really worth thinking about, a lot of what happens in psychotherapy, as well as exposure to things that people are afraid of, and the development of new micro skills, so for example, if I have a client who isn’t very socially skilled, we might practice things like shaking hands and telling each other who we are, because if you don’t have that down as a routine, it’s difficult to make a foray into a broader social environment, so sometimes people are stopped socially because they lack micro skills, and sometimes it’s because they’re afraid, and those two things interplay, but another thing that happens in therapy an awful lot, is that people come in for assertiveness training, and they’re usually agreeable in temperament, but they’re also people who have failed to integrate that capacity for aggression into their personality, for one reason or another, maybe they weren’t taught to, that’s certainly possible, maybe when they manifested aggression they were punished for it, maybe they observed other people who were too aggressive, and decided that they were never going to be like that, that’s a common response, but it doesn’t really matter, because once you’re an adult and you’re working in a competitive world, which you will definitely be, you have to have that capacity, because otherwise you get pushed to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and exploited, and it’s not necessarily because of malevolence, partly it can be that, but often it’s just the consequence of the fact that generally if you’re negotiating for something, there are forces pulling on that from all directions, and what outcome is obviously right is not obvious at all, and so it’s a matter of negotiation, and so you have to be able to put your position forward with some force, and not be timid about it, and be articulate about it, and all that is a consequence of integrating these systems that can be very dangerous if they’re not working properly into your personality, rather than ignoring them and letting them run in an underground fashion, which is what they would do, yes? Are you talking about kind of the mind of Freudian sublimation? Yeah, well the thing about Freud, the comment was that it’s reminiscent of Freudian sublimation, Freud more or less had an inhibitory model of socialization, because he thought of people as pushed by the id, so that the ego, pushed by the id, and inhibited by the superego, and there’s some truth in that, to the degree that you’re subject to quasi-tyrannical pressure by a society that isn’t well integrated, a lot of what’s going to happen to you is don’t do that, and the capacity to not do something that you’re motivated to do, like an impulsive thing, is obviously necessary, sublimation in a sense is the basis of Piagetian theory, and Piaget’s alternative to Freudian thinking is that it’s not inhibitory, especially not if your personality is properly integrated, what it is instead is integration into a game-like structure, we’re going to talk more about that, the point is that you’re starting at high levels of resolution with your body, and you’re building these structures out of your capacity to move, and your capacity to perceive, and these motivational systems that are driving you, and as you become socialized, and as you bring more and more people into the conversation, the hierarchy gets more and more complex and sophisticated, and then it’s the whole thing that’s regulating, it’s not inhibitory, so you don’t want to inhibit your aggression, you want to harness it so it serves the purposes of the greater, the individual and the greater good, if you can figure out how to do that, it’s better that way because you have more power, now it might be better for you to be cowardly and retreating if the alternative is to be impulsively aggressive and destructive, but that’s not nearly as good as having the capacity for aggression at your hand, and being able to use it in a sophisticated manner, so this is a way of thinking about how things, yes? I don’t think you can say that it’s that simple, I mean I think that happens, but how it happens we don’t know, and the thing too is that this organization does not only take place in the brain, that’s another thing that the psychoanalysts I think overestimate it, because they tend to think of psychic regulation as internal, but it’s not, so for example, as long as you’re acceptable to your peers, you seldom have to regulate your own behavior, because they’ll regulate it for you, right, and so when you’re out in the world, I mean you guys are all sitting there in a particular way, partly because if you deviated from the appropriate way to sit there, whatever that is, if you deviated from that sufficiently, the group would turn on you right away, so as long as you’re awake enough to respond to the subtle cues that people are giving you, you don’t even have to worry about the internal inhibitory problem, now what you want is you want your nervous system organized in a way, so that it fits well into the overall organization of the society, and there has to be cross talk between those, but society exists, right, so anything society will do to regulate you, you don’t have to do, and that’s really useful, it’s an outsourcing problem, you know, and there’s lots of things you outsource, so one of the things is, think about something like self-esteem, now self-esteem is a very, I don’t like the word, because self-esteem is really something like extraversion minus neuroticism, it’s close to that, but let’s look at it in a slightly different way, let’s say, well how valuable should you regard yourself, and so then you think, well that, and then we might think, well maybe that has something to do with competence, okay, well so how competent are you, well the answer to that is you really don’t know, and there’s actually no way of telling, so your nervous system has to guess, and the way it does that is that first, you’re put on a normal distribution for negative emotion, and that you’re just sort of given that at birth, that’s your temperament, and then the socialization can pull that one way or another, you know, it can make you more stable or less stable depending on how you interact with your parents and the immediate environment, and how dangerous the environment is, and then the next thing you do is you observe yourself operating in the world, and you see how good you are at solving problems, and that adjusts it, and then everyone else is broadcasting to you all the time what your comparative value is, and so that’s really how you establish an estimate of your competence, and it’s almost always comparative competence, because the question in most groups isn’t can you do something, it is, but the real question is can you do something as well or better than anyone else in this particular group, because there’s no absolute standard for being able to do things precisely, you know, everyone is insufficient when you think of the ultimate task, right, because people’s knowledge have limits, so the question is, well, are you up for the challenge compared to the people around you, so it’s a very complex calibration process, and it certainly doesn’t all take place inside, it can’t, you’re not complex enough to do that, and it’s foolish anyways, you know, partly what the stock market does, the stock market is a massive conversation about the relative value of property, roughly speaking, and it moves around a lot, because you think about all the variables that are being taken into account at the same time, it’s not only every company and every commodity in relationship to every other company and every other commodity, it’s also all that in relationship to the price of all the currencies, and that takes into account political stability or instability in disease and catastrophe and hurricanes and so on and so forth, and like, there has to be something dynamic and ongoing that enables those calculations to be made, because it’s incalculable otherwise, and the same thing is true in some sense of your competence, you can’t calculate that on your own, you have to have help, and so that’s partly why the group also decides where you are in the market, Now the group can also under or overshoot, that happens lots of times, you know, because maybe the local environment that you’re in isn’t a very good representative of the broader environment, this happens to lots of smart people in high school, for example, or junior high, where if they’re intelligent, that is not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is smart, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent, they’re not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years, and if the person is intelligent sub-personalities, because you might think, well, why do you have to hierarchically organize them to begin with? Now, there’s an element here for the postmodernists, you can think of this. So, 130 years ago, Nietzsche announced that God was dead, right? And so that was a reflection of the collapse in some sense of the believability of traditional religions. And you can think of traditional religions as a coherent overarching narrative. Now, you might argue about how coherent it is, but they’re pretty coherent. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re accurate, but they’re pretty coherent. So, the slats were pulled out from underneath those structures. Now, what happened during the 20th century was two things, and one was some of those religious narratives were replaced by ideological narratives, and that turned out to be a really bad idea. And so that was one stream of thought, in some sense stemming from Nietzsche, or at least from his observation. There was another stream of thought which basically said, if religious structures have collapsed, and they had to, that means all grand narratives have collapsed. And that’s really a postmodernist claim. But the problem with that claim is, you can’t act unless you have a hierarchy of values. Because you can’t figure out what to do next. Also, you can’t even figure out if you should do anything. But you certainly can’t figure out what to do next. Because in order to organize your behavior and move forward, you have to say that one thing is more important than many other things, right? Every time you act, you’re making that decision. Now, you might say, well, you can only make that decision at a micro level, like what’s best now, but people who do that are impulsive. That’s how we define them. And that doesn’t work out well across time. You know, what they’re doing is responding to, in some sense, instinctual whims moment by moment. That doesn’t seem very sophisticated. You don’t want someone around like that. You can’t predict what they’re going to do. You can’t cooperate with them. They can’t follow rules. You can’t have a project with them. You can’t trust them. It’s like, that isn’t going to work. And so the idea that grand narratives are obsolete is… It’s based on a misunderstanding of exactly what the narratives are. And it’s also based on absence of realization that a narrative is primarily something you act out before you represent. So a narrative can be latent. So let me give you an example of that. So… I thought I’d puzzled about this for a long time. Let’s say you go out and watch a chimpanzee troop. Now, we know the chimps are organized in a dominance hierarchy. And we know that the dominance hierarchy among chimps is male-dominated. The females have a dominance hierarchy too, but the fundamental dominance hierarchy is male-dominated. It’s not like that so much with bonobos, by the way, which are very much like chimps, but… So you can watch the chimps, and you can see that chimp A knows that chimp B is higher up in the dominance hierarchy, and chimp D knows that chimp C is higher up in the dominance hierarchy. And you can even see that the offspring, like if you have a high-dominant female and she has offspring, all the other chimps know that you don’t mess around with her offspring because she’s a dominant female. So the mapping of the dominance hierarchy… The mapping is quite sophisticated. So then you might say, well, the chimps are following rules. But then you think, well, no, they’re not, because they don’t actually know rules, because, well, you’ve got to ask what exactly is a rule, right? Well, that’s a good question. Like, a rule seems to be the articulation of a principle, but it seems to be something that you have to represent. Like you say, well, a rule is, chimp B always submits to chimp A. That’s the rule that the chimp is following. But the chimp isn’t following rules, because the chimp doesn’t have rules. But there’s regularities there, and so what those really are are behavioral patterns. They’re not rules. Now, understanding that is extremely useful, because what you can understand is that regularities in complex social behavior can emerge in the absence of any conscious representation, any consciously articulated representation of those rules. Because you might ask, well, where do moral presuppositions come from? Assuming that, say, religious systems, for example, are concerned with moral presuppositions, and that social systems are concerned with those too. Where do they come from? Well, there’s lots of theories about that, right? The Marxists would say, well, it’s all about exploitation and economic advantage, and the postmodernists would say it’s all about exclusion and power, because they’re sort of quasi-Marxists, sort of. They’re quasi-Marxists anyways. There’s always this… And, you know, for Karl Marx, religion was the opiate of the people, and he thought about it as a structure that had emerged because the power elites wanted to dominate the people who weren’t empowered to extract out value from them. And it’s like, there’s no doubt that there can be an element of exploitation in any social system, and there’s no doubt that social systems are hierarchical, so that there are people on the top and people on the bottom. But in human society, there’s lots of dominance hierarchies. There’s not just one. And we value lots of different things from people, and it’s by no means obvious that the dominance hierarchies were set up consciously, through conscious thought, by any group of people, over any span of time, for any purpose whatsoever. It’s particularly obvious when you also understand that, well, we are not the only things that have dominance hierarchies. Chimps have them. Wolves have them. That’s why you can have a pet dog. You understand a dog. It doesn’t even want to be the boss in the house. That’s a nervous and upset dog. It wants to have its position as a valued, low-level entity in the dominance hierarchy, and a dog is just absolutely happy when that happens. So, you know, because what is a dog going to do? Buy groceries? It’s like, no, it’s not. So it has to be low in the dominance hierarchy because it doesn’t have the competence. And one of the things that’s very, very bizarre about Marxist and postmodernist thinking is that there doesn’t seem to be any recognition that dominance hierarchies are often structured based on competence, not on arbitrary distribution of power. I mean, if you want to go have your appendix out, what are you going to look for? Are you going to look for the most powerful doctor? Or are you going to look for the most competent doctor? Well, you hope that there’s a rough relationship between power and status and competence, right? Because otherwise, how are you going to figure it out? But if it’s a good hierarchy, it’s based on competence, not on arbitrary power. So we might say that when a dominance hierarchy starts to be based on arbitrary power, or purely on economic terms, then it’s actually turned into a tyranny. It’s no longer a functional hierarchy. It’s already stultified and twisted into a form that can’t be sustained. And then people are going to get upset about that and start talking about it, or worse. They’re going to start doing things that are quite disruptive. But the idea that the hierarchical structure, per se, is pathological, or that it’s consciously imposed, or that it’s not necessary, or that it has nothing to do with competence, it’s like, no, that’s just… That better not be the case, because we would be in serious trouble if it was the case. So I would say the more functional the society, the more the power hierarchy is based on competence, in relationship to what the society deems as actually valuable. Now, obviously, no society meets those criteria perfectly, because you can’t. It’s part of a dialogue and a continual processing of information. So you can’t hit the target. It’s always moving. But you can hope that the dialogue continues. So here’s a little vision I had of how things work, like a democratic society works. Because people often think, if they’re conservative, orderly, low in openness, then they think the conservatives are right, and if they’re more on the liberal or on the left side, high in openness, low in orderliness, then they think that the left is correct. But the left and the right aren’t correct. They represent different systems of values, and the values that they represent are valid, sometimes in some situations. And then the question is, well, when and in what situations? And the answer to that is, not only do you not know, you can’t tell. And so it’s like this. So imagine that people are on a cliff. It’s like they’re on a flat plateau, and it’s a cliff on both sides. And down at the bottom of the cliff is fire and rocks. And so you want to stay on top of that cliff, and it’s quite narrow. And there’s a line you should walk down, right down the middle. But you can’t tell where it is. So what do you do? You put all the lefties here, and you put all the right-wingers here, and you put a rope between them, and you tie the rope to you. And the right pulls this way, and the left pulls that way. And if they’re pulling properly, then you can walk right down the middle. But the only way they can pull properly is if they keep talking to one another. And if the left disappears, then the right pulls everything over the cliff, down into the flaming rocks. And if the left disappears, then the right pulls everything off the cliff, down onto the rocks. And we know that. We know that. And there’s been good personality models developed recently — they’re not public yet, precisely — that show that if you push a virtue to its extreme, it turns into a vice. And that all the vices basically end up in the same place. Yes? What would you say happens if both sides are talking a lot, but not to one another? Like, if there’s a lot of preaching to the choir on either side… Well, it’s dysfunction. It’s dysfunction. Because I was thinking about modern American politics, where they can actually show with data that it’s increasingly polarized, like, just increasingly left and right subcultures… Well, what that means is that people can’t get along. That’s what it means. And, you know, you can say, well, part of getting along is following a shared set of rules, and that’s true, but the rules are kind of low resolution. But to get along, like, you think about your family. If your family is structured so that it’s just a bunch of rules, and you better damn follow them, or there’ll be punishment, that can be better than just sheer chaos. But it’s not as good as general principles encompassing continual dialogue. That works best. And, you know, you might think, well, what are the general principles? And what we’d hope are, well, we can look at what people have done in the past, and we can look at our history and our culture, and we can think, okay, we’re going to try to… We’re going to try not to do the stupid things that people have done in the past that are evidently stupid. Like, maybe Nazism isn’t the way to go. For example. So we’re going to see not… We’re going to try not to do that. We can extract out those general principles, but then we have to talk continually in the present, because the present keeps moving around. There’s no way of mapping it using a structure from the past. You can only approximate it. You know, it’s like, you know, if you took a Google map of Toronto from 10 years ago, and you said, well, this is the map, it’s not going to be updated. It’s like you’d have a real rough time driving around the waterfront, because you’d keep running into skyscrapers that, you know, aren’t supposed to be there. And so there’s… The map is obviously useful, but the update process is also unbelievably useful. And you can also say, if you look at left and right, you can roughly say that the left is on the side of update, and the right is on the side of structure. And you might say, well, how much update and how much structure? It’s like enough to solve the problem. That’s the answer. What’s the problem? It keeps changing. How do we keep up? We talk. And part of that also is, like, if you’re talking, most of you guys are lefties, because most of you are open and not very orderly. Now, there is going to be exceptions in here, but… And you’re young, because youth is often associated with political beliefs that are more on the left. And I think that’s because you’re in a more plastic state of development, right? There’s still a lot of things open to you. So, but… The thing about it is that you have to get along with the right, and that’s partly because the right represents what’s already there. So how do you do that? Well, that’s hard, but the one thing you definitely do is listen. You try to figure out what the hell they’re up to, you know? And why, and what they stand for, and the value of that, and where it’s too extreme. And it’s not easy, but that’s why democracy is a dialogue and not… That’s how it regulates itself, is through the dialogue. Okay, so what you’re basically trying to do is integrate your abilities, your sub-personalities, which is how I’m going to represent it, into a functional hierarchy. And a functional hierarchy is one where the subsidiary parts of the hierarchy don’t conflict. So let me give you an example. You can tell me what… and I based this on the Piagetian notion of the equilibrated state. So Piaget had this idea that… There’s two ways you might be able to run an organization. So, say you’re moving towards a collectively defined goal. And one would be to put someone at the top of it and kind of give them complete control, tyrannical power. And so that meant you were going to do what that person said, or else. Okay, now the problem with that is that that person isn’t always going to be right, and that you’re not always going to be happy about doing what they say, and that the fact that you’re not happy means you’re not going to be as productive, and it also means that the organization is going to have to expend quite a lot of energy keeping you in line. Okay, so here’s an alternative. Alternative is, here’s the goal. Let’s agree on some general principles in relationship to the goal, and then let’s negotiate. So one of the things I did with my kids when they were teenagers was, you know, that there’s a certain set of procedures that have to be undertaken in a household in order for that household to function, right? So, roughly speaking, people need to eat. It should be clean enough so that contamination isn’t a problem. It shouldn’t be so messy. It shouldn’t be so messy that it’s impossible to do anything that you want to do in a house, you know, etc. There’s guidelines that we all basically implicitly understand that constitute a well-regulated familial environment. Well, so then how do you obtain that? And one of the processes that I put into place was we would meet and parse up the jobs and come to a solution, and the rule was you can’t leave the discussion until the solution is found. You have to accept the solution unless you can come up with a better one, and that will implement it over a period of time and see how it works. And that worked, I wouldn’t say it worked perfectly, because nothing works perfectly. But it’s a good process because it brings everyone into the game. They get to define the end, they get to define the game, they get to define the rules, they get to define the processes by which those rules will be enforced, they get to run it as a simulation and see how it works, and then at some point later they get to have another discussion about it. But you don’t want to be discussing it every time there’s dishes to be done, you won’t want to discuss the entire moral substructure of the whole household. You know, and dishes are a big deal because they’re part of, dishes and cooking are a big deal because they’re part of the, there’s a tremendous conflict in that area because of the role, rapid role transformation that characterized men and women since the pill was invented. So it’s a place where, you know, massive social transformations manifest themselves in local landscapes. And that’s also why solving the problems in your local landscape is also the way of solving the big problems, you know. It’s like, who does the dishes, when and why, and what are the rewards and punishments associated with that? Solve that, and you solve like 30% of the tension between men and women. So, and that means it’s really hard to solve. It’s not obvious how you do that, and how you do that over the long run, and what the reward should be and how valuable it is. So, etc., etc. It takes an awful lot of negotiation. But if you don’t get it right, then you have a continual war in your household, and you pay for that because if you’re having a war in your household, then you’re going to be stressed to death and that will kill you. So it’s no joke to get these things right. And when you’re doing it, it’s applied philosophy. It’s sophisticated and applied philosophy because that’s all you have if you don’t have roles. Right? Roles, you don’t negotiate. And that’s good because you don’t know how to negotiate. No rules, it’s negotiation, slavery, or tyranny. Those are your options. So, these are very complicated problems. That’s also, though, why when you work hard to solve them in the domain that you have in your hands, you’re also doing the best you can possibly do to figure out how that might scale up in a broader way. Right? I read a great book once called Systemantics written by a guy named John Galt. It’s a really fantastic book. Yeah, I know, John Galt. Weird enough, man. It was actually his name. John Galt is the name of a fictional character in an Ayn Rand book. He’s one person who stops the world because, for a variety of reasons, he stops the industrial world because he’s thinking he’s getting exploited. It’s had a huge effect on modern American monetary policy, by the way. So, anyways, this guy, John Galt, has written a whole bunch of axioms about organizational structure, which are quite brilliant. And there’s a couple I really remembered. And one is, the organization does not do what its name says it does. I love that one. It’s so smart. And the second one was, large functional organizations grow out of small functional organizations. So, if you want to build something big, you have to start it small and local and then figure out how to make it scale. And in some sense, that’s what you’re doing in your relationships with other people. And that’s what you’re doing in your familial situation. That’s what you’re doing in your intimate relationships. You solve those problems. You develop a template, like a skilled template of perception and action that you can then bring out into the broader world. It’s really important. So, partly, you know, you inherit a hierarchical structure. And you might think about that as whatever principles bind your culture together. And then some of that’s rigid and pathological and half dead and needs to be destroyed and re-updated. And some of it isn’t. And you have to figure that out by negotiation. And that’s hard. But you don’t want to blow the whole damn thing down in one gust, like the bad wolf and the straw house. It’s like then you have nothing to live in. So you want to make modifications in a culturally determined structure with caution and care. Because that is all that stops you. That’s all that protects you from chaos apart from your ability to update your models. And you blow that over and you find out what’s behind it. And part of what’s behind it is the dragon of chaos and the terrible mother. It’s not good. You know, you saw what happened to Iraq when the Americans knocked over the hierarchy. Right? It wasn’t good. Now, it wasn’t good before because it was a tyranny. But it’s clearly, it’s not obvious that it’s better now. You know, and it’s also possible that what’s going to happen is it’s going to be replaced by a way worse tyranny. So, knock over a structure, the water comes flooding in. It’s just like a dike or a dam. So, all right. So, that’s your problem. Now, you know, I set that up as part of a moral hierarchy. So, at the bottom of any process, you say, well, maybe you’re trying to be a good person. We might as well assume that. You might say why. But my answer to that would be because it’s better than not being a good person. You’re going to run into a lot less pain and misery. And you’re going to be a lot less destructive. And you’re going to hurt a lot fewer people. And you might leave everything better than you found it. And that’s not so bad. It’s certainly better than doing the reverse of all of those things. So, unless you think there’s something particularly positively valuable about pain and misery. And that seems to be you could make that case. But if I put you in pain and misery, you’d do everything you could to get out. So, even if you thought that that was a reasonable solution, if I imposed it on you, you’d do everything you possibly could to escape. So, all that means is that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Okay, so, because what you act out is more representative of who you are than what you say. Because what the hell do you know about yourself? You have a vague model of who you are and a vague model of society. And so, you can wrap off some articulated representations. But the probability that they’re going to really map the underlying structure is low. So, okay, so we’ll assume you’re going to be a good person. That’s what you’re striving for. And then we can decompose that. And you can decompose it all the way down to micro-behaviors. And so, the issue is you try to build a hierarchy. At the bottom, it has all your micro-behaviors. You know, the things you can do with your hands and your eyes and your mouth and your body. That’s the highest resolution level. And then you’re trying to organize those into higher and higher, into more and more abstract and powerful structures in some sense. That are also homogenous inside. They’re not full of internal contradictions. So, that’s how you establish peace. That’s how you establish psychological stability. And that’s how you establish peace. And there has to be negotiations at all of those levels. And roughly speaking, it’s better to negotiate at the low levels if you can do it. You know, so I use this example fairly frequently. So, you’ve got a four-year-old kid and their room is a mess because they’ve been playing. And you think, well, that room can’t be a mess. Why? Well, it’s hard to play in a messy room. That might be one answer. So, you have to restructure it so that you can play again. That’s part of why it should be clean. So, then you tell the four-year-old, clean up this room. And then you leave and then you come back and it’s like nothing’s happened. And the reason for that in part, perhaps, is because that’s the wrong level of resolution to solve the problem at with regards to the four-year-old. You could only say clean up your room, which would be maybe at the same level as, say, family care there, to someone who has the underlying structures already in place. So, you might say to the child, see your shelf. And they can do that because they know how to follow pointing and they know how to specify an absence and they know how to link that to language. So, they’ll do that. See that hole? Yes. Okay, so you know the person has enough skill underneath that abstraction to implement it. Fine. Then you say, see that bear. And you know they can manage that. So, they look at the bear and you say, well, pick up the bear. You know they can do that. So, they pick up the bear and you give them a pat. And then you say, put the bear in the space. And they do that and they look at you and you give them a pat. And if you do that with a child for the whole room three or four times, then what you’re doing is building the under structures, right, from the bottom up. And then you can say, clean up your room. So, but if the child, so for example, you come back and the room isn’t clean, you might think, well, what do you do about a child who’s being intransigent and won’t clean up their room? And the answer is, well, the first thing you do is make sure that that’s the right level of instruction. And that’s the case also if you’re negotiating with a partner or an intimate partner. The first thing you should assume if they do something stupid, which they certainly will, is that they’re stupid. You know, and that you have to help them out building the micro structures of whatever it is that you’re asking them to do. Because people aren’t, people are full of gaping holes and they lack social skills of all sorts. It’s like, and it’s a huge part of the tension between friends and between couples. It’s like it’s absence of ability. And so you do your person a great favor if you say, you know, you forgot my birthday. Okay, well, what am I supposed to do about that? Well, you might say, well, that’s up to you to figure it out. No, assume I’m stupid and tell me exactly what you want. And then you’ll say, well, that doesn’t really mean anything. And I’ll say, yeah, but we’re going to be like together for 30 years. So if you teach me this one time and it’s kind of awkward and stupid, then maybe the next time it’ll be 50% better. You know, because, well, because you’re looking at a trajectory, right? And so you can build, because one of the things, look, one of the things you could think about, for example, is let’s say you make a meal. Okay, now let’s say your goal is to make a really good meal in an efficient way so that everybody is really happy about it, including you. So that the probability that you’ll get to eat lots of really good meals across your whole life goes up. That’s a good solution. So then you might think, okay, I made this meal and it was a costly expenditure of time. And I have to be paid for that in some way in order to be happy about it. So let’s think about that for a minute, because it’s a concrete problem. So let’s say you spent a bunch of time making a good meal. Okay, what do you not want people to do? Yeah. Okay, okay, so they’re not supposed to say, what’s this? Okay, that’s a bad response. What else do you not want them to do? Right, right, right, right. Okay, so there’s not going to be a lot of bickering at the table, right? Because then you’re going to think, what kind of stupid idiot would make a nice meal for this lot of, like, insane chimpanzees, right? So you’re not going to want to replicate that. What else would you want them not to do? Yep, okay, what else? Not help clean up. Right, not be grateful. Not notice that you put a lot of time and effort into it. Not notice that it’s above the normal standards, that you sort of went above and beyond the call of duty, right? Maybe show a little bit of thankfulness. Yeah? So then you think, okay, well, I want to set up my life so that I get to eat really good meals for the rest of my life and be happy about making them. You think, okay, well, what are the preconditions for that? Well, then you have to fight for the preconditions, because the alternative is, you cook slop miserably and you fight. Right? And one of the things that’s interesting about, one of the things that I have to do with my clients is we do some arithmetic, because people have a weird idea about what’s important in their lives. So you might think, you got 16 hours a day of awake time, right? So, and you’re going to spend four of those hours, three of those hours interacting with food. Okay, so that’s, let’s say four, let’s say three. It’s one fifth of your life. 20% of your life. Okay, get it right. Get it right. It’s 20% of your life. You got it taken care of. Wow! Perfect! You know, you think, well, who’s going to think about, think through those things? It’s like, well, do the math. It’s not a math. It’s arithmetic. It’s like, you know, and so sometimes people will come to me and they’ll say, I have to fight with my child for an hour a night to get them to go to bed. I think, okay, let’s do the arithmetic. So how long have you been fighting with them? Six months. How long do you think this will continue? Indefinitely. Two years. Okay, so let’s say it’s two years. Okay, so that’s, we’re going to say that’s 800 days for the sake of simplicity in math. Let’s say, yeah, we’ll say 800. And so that’s 800 hours. And so that’s 20 work weeks. So in the next two years, you’re going to spend five months of work weeks fighting with your child. Okay, you expect to like them at the end of that, do you? It’s like you’re going to fight with someone for like five months and you’re going to like them. No. That isn’t going to happen. So you might think, well, how important is it to solve that problem? Well, it’s five months of work weeks worth of importance. You could put a week into it and, you know, it might be helpful. And so it’s very, I’m trying to make a case that you have to look at the hierarchy, the hierarchical structure of your values, you know, and the best way to do that often is by paying close attention to things that people normally, they’re invisible normally. They’re invisible. And that’s not good. You have to fix them. And if you fix all those things, those little tiny things, if you fix them, which is hard, you know, it takes negotiation, but it’s not impossible, you know, because the first thing you want to ask your partner or your family is, well, how would we like to have a meal? You want wretched nasty food that someone just threw together and it’s burnt and we’re going to fight about it all the time and it’s really erratic and it’s not predictable. And the person who’s making it is unhappy and the kitchen is a disaster afterwards. And everybody’s angry about that. So that’s like one solution. Do you want that? And if they all are sensible enough to say no, then you can say to them, okay, well, what’s the alternative? And then you can think, well, we could imagine what the alternative would be. And then we can work on laying out the microprocesses that would lead to that outcome. And we can practice them over time. And we can assume that if we don’t get it right in three months, that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. And so when Freud… Let me give you an example. I was reading a Gottman study the other day on marital stability. Gottman has done some really good analysis of couples behavior. He has set up a lab that’s basically a bed and breakfast. And he brings couples in there for a weekend and he wires them up physiologically and monitors their reactivity. And so he can predict whether a couple is going to divorce with 94% accuracy. It’s like impressive. So what has he found? He’s found two categories of… He’s identified two phenomena that are very much worth knowing. The first is that the couples who are going to get divorced they come into the bed and breakfast and they speak with each other quite calmly. But it’s more walking on eggs calm. And while they’re speaking with each other calmly, their physiology is like… They’re very aroused. And so they’re sort of aroused like someone who’s facing a predator. So you might think of an unhappy couple as predator and prey to each other. And so the words are there mostly to stop predatory activity. Not to actually communicate anything. It’s just to keep the surface calm. So then you might think, well, what’s under the surface? And what’s under the surface? So Freud would say, what’s under the surface is unconscious. But you can say, well, what’s under the surface is one of these hierarchies. It’s all banged up and twisted and not in reasonable shape. And so people don’t want to open the door to that. So, but they do. This is a Freudian slip. So let’s say this goes to the second part of Gottman’s observations. So the woman goes over to the window and she says, Oh look, there’s a cardinal outside. You know, cardinals are that bright red bird. They’re kind of cool looking. You know, it’s kind of a trivial thing in some sense. But by the same token, it’s like it’s a little positive thing. And you know, 20 of them in a day is a good thing. Okay. So then the partner, the husband in this example, has a two by two matrix of choices. One is who the hell cares about your stupid bird? Okay. So that’s one. The second one is, then you go over and look at the bird, right? And the third one is you don’t make the contempt noise, but you act it out. And the fourth one is you go over there like a civilized human being, and that you’re interacting with someone that you care for, and you take a look at the damn bird and you’re happy about it. And that’s as truthful and real as you can manage. Okay. So the option, that’s a Freudian slip, right? Because what it says, there’s a whole monster underneath that. And the monster is all the disorganization in this entire structure. It’s like the might be, we have been tormenting each other about various things for the last 10 years, and none of them are resolved. And I’m not very happy about you for so many reasons I can’t even remember all of them. And I can’t enumerate them right now because that would take forever. And maybe we would have a huge fight. But by the same token, I’m not going to come over there and make you happy with your stupid bird. And I’m going to indicate that subtly so you can’t call me a son of a bitch, because I’m just sighing and that’s what I’ll say if you do ask me. But I’m going to load all that up and I’m going to deliver it to you. And what’s going to happen to you is because you’re smart, is your heart rate’s going to go way up like you’re being attacked. And the reason for that is you are. So what the good couples do, the couples that stay together, is they respond to each other’s bids. He calls them bids. If one person wants to share some little trivial daily positive thing with the other, the other isn’t carrying around a bloody cartload of resentment and is able to respond to that in a positive way. And that way the general interactions between the couples stay positive. But that’s also because they’ve worked this out. Now you know it’s got to be because they work it out. Because the couples who are physiologically reactive to each other, they’re communicating but there’s all sorts of horror underneath the surface. And we’re trying to figure out what is it that’s underneath the surface? What’s the structure of the unconscious? Well, that’s the structure of the unconscious. And it’s either well structured and functional and mutually agreed upon and as explicit as possible. Or it’s this, constantly. And then when the couples fight about it, because they’re not very sophisticated and they’re not very awake and they’re not very aware, and they don’t know how to do microanalysis and they’re tired and unhappy, they don’t say, I would rather that you use cloth napkins when we have a formal dinner than paper napkins. They say, you do a bad job of entertaining. Well, that’s not helpful, right? It’s like you’re wiping out the person that bad job of entertaining would be probably about at the level of family care in the hierarchy. And so what you’re doing is you’re hitting them in a place that if they listen to you, would knock out maybe 10% of their entire behavioral and perceptual structure. It’s like you really want to do that to someone. You only want to do that to someone under extreme conditions, right? Extreme conditions. And that would be something like maybe a warning to a child who’s gone astray very badly, but you know has the skills. You’d say, well, the kind of mistakes that you’re making are sufficiently catastrophic so that your life is going to go off course. And then you might have a conversation with them about, often for kids, for people that say are between 15 and 25, I know they’re not kids really, but my kids are that age. Part of that might be what the hell are you going to do for a career, right? And if that’s unspecified, the person’s just all over the place. So, okay. So, so here’s some slides that represent that. Right? So you see the progression of that. And if things are operating at the top of the hierarchy, that, what that means is you’ve mastered all the subsidiary elements and you’ve built them. It’s not only from the bottom up, but because the levels cross talk, right? You know, so you can use, and that’s the next thing we’re going to talk about, because you’re not just a behavioral creature. You’re not just an animal like a chimp. You’re capable. There’s things you can do that animals can’t do. And what that is, is that not only can you act things out in a manner that, through action, will organize your hierarchy, because that’s what animals do, but you can also represent that hierarchy. You can think about the hierarchy. You can articulate the hierarchy and you can play with it abstractly. And that’s what you’re doing when you’re engaging in philosophy, and that’s also what you’re doing when you’re negotiating. And that’s a really good thing, because it means that you can not only conceptualize changes and then implement them, and you can conceptualize a broad range of potential changes and improvements, and you can implement them and you can observe what happens, but you can also communicate that to all sorts of other people. So it’s a great thing to be able to do. The problem with it is, obviously, that because you can abstractly represent and question, you can also knock the hell out of your belief in the top elements of the hierarchy. It’s like, well, what does it mean to be a good person anyways? Or why should I be a good person? Or is there any utility or meaning in being a good person? Or is it even reasonable to say that there’s such a thing as a good person? It’s like, I think all of those questions, in some sense, are ill-posed. And the reason I think that is because they’re at the wrong level of resolution. You don’t throw the damn baby out with the bath water, so to speak. So if you’re going to critique something, don’t start at the highest level of abstraction. And I think that’s a big part of what’s wrong with what people are taught in universities today, because you’re often taught to criticize systems at the highest level of abstraction. It’s like, well, there’s something wrong with capitalism. It’s like, really? Really? You’re going to do something about that, are you? And it’s going to work better in your lifetime. That’s going to happen. It’s like, no, it’s not going to happen. If you stick a stick in a functioning machine, even if you think the machine, it’s all rattly and it’s pulling people’s arms in and it’s got all sorts of catastrophic problems, you come along and hit it with a stick. It’s like, it’s not going to run better. It’s the wrong level of analysis. And just because you have a stick and you can see that the machine doesn’t work very well, doesn’t mean that you’re very bright. It’s like, obviously it doesn’t work very well. It’s like, that’s not the issue. The issue is, could you improve it without making it worse? It’s like, now that’s a big problem. It’s a big problem. So, you know, you have a wheelchair, you know, and the bearings are gone, so the bloody thing just grinds away, you know, and maybe it’s wobbly, it doesn’t work very well on ice, you know, and you think, well, that’s a horrible wheelchair, and you just take it from the person. It’s like, then they’re lying there on the ice, you know, it’s like, oh, that’s helpful. Well, you don’t have that horrible old wheelchair anymore. It’s like, yeah, brilliant. It’s like, so like a rattle trap thing that works is better than nothing. So, if you’re going to fix something, well, then you have to be, I would think about it more like what you would do if you had to fix a helicopter. You know, like, you’re not going to critique the whole helicopter. That’s not going to be helpful. It’s like, well, that’s not a good helicopter. It’s right. We can tell that because it’s not working very well. Well, what are you going to do? Well, then you have to learn a lot about the helicopter and all of its parts and how they function, and then you have to figure out which part isn’t working properly, and then you have to take that part out, and then you have to find a better part, and you have to put it back in. And then maybe the bloody thing will work. But like a high-level abstract solution to that, like helicopters aren’t useful. It’s like not helpful. And I use the helicopter example because with a military helicopter, if I remember correctly, you have to perform about 30 hours of maintenance for each hour the thing is in the air. Because like, what’s a helicopter? It’s a big lump of metal. It’s really hard to get those things to stay in the air. So, and everything we do is like that. You know, it’s like the fact that the electricity is working in this room is a bloody miracle. Like, it’s unbelievable that it works. And there it is working. We don’t even have to pay any attention to it. And it always works. It’s like, don’t fix that. It’s a major response to nihilism. Yeah, because that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to figure out. Yes. You can’t start at the very bottom. That’s the big talk on Thursday. Yeah. Right, right. You can’t start at the very bottom. Well, you should, so that’s also part of what people talk about when they talk about humility. Because if you look at classic religious virtues, and this is true, I believe, it’s true of virtually every religious system that I’ve been able to study. You know, it’s like humility. Okay, so what does that mean? Start at the bottom. You know, it’s like fix the little things. But then the other thing is little things aren’t little. They’re not little. And we already went through that with the example of meal time. It’s like, well, how much fuss should you make about meals? Well, it’s 20% of your life. So how much fuss should you make about that? Well, you should expend 20% of your energy getting that right. And if you get it right, it’s like an art, right? Because meal preparation is, people are highly social. They’re highly social eaters. If they’re not eating socially, their eating goes badly right away. They can’t regulate their intake, and they eat terribly. You see this with isolated people all the time. They don’t even eat. Or if they do eat, it’s like popcorn and gummy worms or something. It’s really not good. And so it’s very, eating behavior among human beings is very, very complex. We’re omnivores, so we have way too much choice. Plus, we’re social eaters. You know, so it’s hard to get that right. But, and if you don’t get it right, everyone’s sick and miserable, and unhappy and irritable. So, and if you get it right, it’s like you bring it right up to the level of aesthetics and art. It’s like, that’s way better. So, you know, also when you’re thinking about things like the meaning of life, life has all sorts of meanings. Many, many meanings. And then the meanings are arranged in a hierarchy. And so whether there’s a meaning or many meanings depend on where you look in the hierarchy. But if you want your life to be better, which might be some element of meaningful life, you know, one of the things you can start doing is start doing all the things that you actually do right. Now that’ll improve things a lot. And then once you improve those things, then the way you’re looking at the problem isn’t even going to be the same. Fix the micro routines and then see what happens. It’s like you might find that if you get all the micro routines running properly, the whole problem of nihilism just vanishes. So, at least it’s worth a shot. So, okay. Now, here’s the next thing we’re going to figure out. It’s like, how does that hierarchy come into being? Now, for a long time, this is also a Nietzschean observation. For a long time. And this is also the basis of conspiracy theory sociology, I would say, roughly speaking. It’s like Freud critiqued religion. He said that it was a defense against death anxiety. It’s like there’s a couple of problems with a critique like that. It’s like it’s partly a defense against death anxiety. So, one of the things that you really want to watch when you’re listening to thinkers and when you’re trying to figure out how to organize your thought is you really, really want to be skeptical of people who boil things down to one principle. So, for example, Marx, it’s economics and class struggle. It’s like, well, is that relevant to the study of societies? Yes. We’re structured in dominance hierarchies when we trade. It’s a big deal. It’s not the problem. It’s one of many complex problems. And so, if you take a Marxist view of history, what you basically do is you take a look at history and you interpret it through an a priori set of axioms, which is that everything that happened was determined by economic causes. Well, the thing is you can do that because every single thing that ever happened is determined in part by economic consequences. So, all you have to do, or causes, all you have to do is ignore all the other causes and come up with a really coherent narrative that you can do. Anybody who’s a Marxist can do that in like three-tenths of a second because it’s like a machine, you know? It’s like, what was funny, I was talking to a guy the other day. And he’s an ideologue. And I asked him a question. This has been bugging me for a long time. It’s like I thought, you know, in Greece everybody cheats on their income tax, right? And so that’s not so good because the government can’t work and then the economy fails and then everyone starves. So, you might say, why shouldn’t you cheat on your income tax? And the answer is, well, then the government won’t work and the economy will collapse and everyone will starve. So, don’t cheat on your income tax. You know, and you think, well, I can cheat and that won’t really matter. It’s like, no, it matters. Here’s why. So, let’s say you’re doing your income tax and you’re pissed off about it because like, you know, you’re giving away your money and you don’t know it’s being well spent. And of course, mostly it’s not because mostly nothing works very well. And so you think, well, I can cheat because I’m only one person. And you know, how does it matter? But then you think, imagine we were all supposed to put money into a pool and then take money out. And I knew that one of you wasn’t putting money in the pool but that you were going to take it out. I think, well, whatever, one person, you know, crooked psychopath. We’ll just, we don’t have to worry about that person. And then it’s like three people and then it’s like eight and then it’s ten. And then it’s ten percent of the room. And ten percent seems to be something like a tipping point. At some point, certainly, if you’re the only person putting money in that pot and everyone else is taking, you’re, anybody with any sense is going to think that they’re a complete blithering idiot. And they’re going to stop playing that game, right? So the question is, at what point do you collect enough cheaters so that the people who are basically honest start feeling like the game is crooked and quit playing? Well, the answer is probably something like ten percent. So, all right. Back to the, back to the Freudians. Now, I don’t remember why I told you that story. It had to do with economic determination. Oh, right. Thank you, thank you. Okay, so this is the story. So I’m thinking, well, if that’s the case, if like ten percent is a tipping point or 30 percent, I don’t care whatever it is, 50, I don’t care. There’s a tipping point at some point. If it’s a minority of people, if they’re corrupt, can bring down the whole system, how in the world do you ever create a system that isn’t corrupt? Because everybody almost has to play it honestly before the thing will work. And so how do people get from the point where it’s chaotic and corrupt, which is the case in most of the world, by the way, right? Most places are insanely corrupt. Some places aren’t. It’s like, how the hell did that happen? I don’t get it. It doesn’t seem possible to me that that happened. I can’t understand it because the default is obviously chaos and corruption. That’s easy. So anybody can do that. It’s like sometimes systems work and they’re more or less honest. Like eBay is a really good example of that. It’s like poof, a props eBay. What’s the average level of cheating? It’s like zero. You know, it’s unbelievably honest. And it’s a miracle. Nobody thought that would happen. So how the hell does that happen? So I was asking a friend of mine, and this guy too, and I laid this out. And like I didn’t even get finished the question and he said, government. And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, oh, it’s those places that don’t have too much government that are honest. It’s like, well, thank you. I mean, I thought that was a complicated problem. You know, and here you didn’t even have to listen to the whole damn question before you had an answer. It’s government. Oh, well, I’ll stop thinking about that right now. It’s like, God, really, really, come on. You know, one single causal answers to complex questions. It’s like all that’s happening there is that the person is playing an intellectual game. That’s all that’s happening. They’ve got this set of axioms. They’ve learned how to manipulate them. It’s like chess game, basically. And no matter what the problem is that you throw at them, they can run them through the algorithm and pop out an answer. It’s not helpful. It’s like, because for me, for example, that question only sets, even if he’s right, it only sets the problem back one step. It’s OK. If government is the cause of corruption, which it isn’t, it’s a cause of corruption. And it’s also the solution to corruption. But if it is the cause of corruption, then how come some places have more government than others? It’s like there’s no information in that statement. All there is is a rephrasing of the problem. It looks like an answer. It’s got nothing to do with an answer. So, and one of the things that really disturbs me about modern university education is that, you know, a quarter of the people who are in the humanities end of the distribution are being taught to think this way. It’s like, well, here’s a little rubric. Power. That would be the postmodernist deconstructionist routine, courtesy of Derrida, who was a Marxist. And you take his propositions and you can apply them to everything. It’s like it’s not helpful and it’s not thinking. It doesn’t do anything. It just gives you the illusion of thinking. So, OK. Let me just think here now for a minute. So we were talking about ideological propositions. Yes. Yes. OK. So what seemed to happen? Once the slats were knocked out of the assumption that there were fundamental assumptions that you could rely on, so let’s say like the existence of God and that your relationship to God was an indication of the greater good and that the greater good was an actual concrete thing in some sense. Once the intellectual slats were knocked out from underneath that, then, as Nietzsche pointed out, the power of organized religion started to decline. Now, it hasn’t declined as rapidly or as thoroughly as everyone thought it might in the 20th century, right? Because the Americans have a pretty thriving Christianity on the right wing and then, of course, there’s all sorts of fundamentalist movements all over the world. But we’ll just put that aside for now. It doesn’t have anything to do with the main issue in some sense. OK. So then what is the consequence of not having the great cultural narratives anymore? Well, there seems to be two. One is everything’s up in the air and no one knows what to do. And everybody has a question about every single level of the hierarchy, like why are we doing this and what’s the meaning of life and should we bother doing anything at all and are we running around destroying the planet and so on and so forth. So it’s chaotic. And the other one is people just transmute their religious beliefs into the world. Into another kind of monotheistic explanation that’s based on some intellectual proposition. And so with the Marxists, for example, it would be economic relationships with people. For Freud, Freud was not an unsophisticated thinker, but he did try to boil everything down to sex and aggression, mostly sex. And he had his reasons. He said, well, you know, without sex you don’t propagate. And propagation is obviously necessary for the continuation of life. And therefore, sexuality must be the main function. And it’s a powerful claim, but we do know if you look at biological systems, we know that your motivational systems are disparate. They don’t seem to unite themselves into a single motivational system, except maybe at the level of the reticular activating system, which is something like general arousal. So Freud’s wrong about that. But he was wrong in an interesting way. And I don’t think he was an ideologue. But the point is that there are multiple forms of meaning and motivation, and they’re implicit and they have to be organized. And so then the question is, how do you organize them? Now, if you have a conspiracy theory of history, like the Marxists, for example, or maybe like Freud even, because he thought religion was only a defense against death anxiety, then what you basically propose is that the structures of society are rules first, and that the rules were imposed on the society by either someone or some group of people or something. So for Marx, when he’s talking about religion, he says religion is the opiate of the people, and the reason that religion relies itself with the capitalist interests, because it allows people to justify their misery in the hope of an eternal reward, and so then they’re not rattling up the whole economic system and the top guys can keep extracting value from them. It’s like, yeah, a bit, but not all. Okay. Because there’s a lot of propositions about that that are wrong. And this goes back to the chimps. The chimps are out there in their dominance hierarchy. And they understand the hierarchy and they behave in accordance with it. Are they following rules? And the answer to that is no. They’re not following rules. What they are doing is manifesting patterns of behavior. Now then you might think, well, did they think up those patterns of behavior? And the answer to that is no. They didn’t think up those patterns of behavior. So then the next question is, because they can’t think. Not really. So the next question is, well, if they didn’t think them up, where the hell did they come from? You know, and it’s a very interesting question to ask of a book like the Bible, for example, which is a bunch of books, by the way. Of course, you know that. It’s extraordinarily old and it’s been cobbled together over thousands of years. It’s like, where did that come from? Well, it’s an extraordinarily complicated question. Obviously, some people wrote it, some other people edited, some other people put it together. A bunch of different people sequenced it. It got modified over time. It’s full of cross-references. It’s like it emerged, roughly speaking. And I can show you a very interesting visual demonstration of that later. So yes. Do you say something like, is that religion is latent in Maryland? That has kind of a meaning? Well, it’s late. I want to also explain what it’s latent in. That’s because this is the real issue. It’s like, if there’s a claim that was basically brought forth in the late 1800s. It was formalized, which is the systems that we use to govern our morality are arbitrary and predicated on belief. Right. That was the proposition. So the question, and that’s had all sorts of consequences. And it’s a powerful proposition. The question is, is it a correct proposition? So here’s a little diagram here. So that’s from Panksepp. Yak Panksepp, the two top ones, little rats. So we’ll tell a story about rats. This is quite cool. So juvenile male rats are wired to play. Now, rats are in general. Rats are in general, OK? Because rats have a play circuit. It’s a circuit. We have it, too. Dogs have it. Mammals have it. I went to the zoo the other day and I saw a rhinoceros playing. I watched that for like 10 minutes. It has this huge ball in its compartment. And the bloody thing was like dancing around, walloping this ball with its huge horn. And like, it was dancing. It was playing. It’s like, that was really cool. Playful rhinoceros. You know, you go out there and play soccer with it. And of course, you’d get crunched like in two seconds flat. OK, so play. Well, why is that relevant? OK, so here’s a cool thing. I think this is like an earth-shattering discovery, personally. Panksepp is a very smart guy. So you take a juvenile rat and you put him in a play arena. So you throw another juvenile rat in there and they wrestle around him. So then you separate them. Then the rat has figured out that that’s where he can play. So the next thing you can do is figure out whether or not that rat will work to get into that arena. So like, will it pull levers to get in there? Because then you can infer that the rat would be happy to go in there, because otherwise he wouldn’t be pulling the levers. Straight behaviorism, except they wouldn’t say happy. It’s like the rat’s pulling away. Pop! He’s out in a little play chamber. So there’s another rat there. And let’s say that rat is 10% bigger. Now the rats rough and tumble play. They wrestle. Just like kids wrestle. Kids wrestle. They wrestle. Weirdly enough, they’re wrestling around, having a fine time of it. And it’s not aggression. It’s different than aggression. And people can easily see the difference, just like you can tell the difference when, you know, my dog, I’ll play with him, I kind of grab his paws, and he just goes, like, he just has a short circuit. He’s growling his hairs up, and he’s trying to bite me, but the only thing he ever does is hit me with his teeth, you know. And it’s a game. He knows that I’m supposed to be able to, I’m trying to grab his fur, and he’s trying to bite me. And so we do this. And it’s like, if you didn’t know what was going on, you’d think the dog was going to tear me to pieces, because it’s roaring away, and, you know, and it’s having a great time. And I let it nail me now and then. And, but it’s playing, and it’s obvious that it’s playing, and that’s way different than being attacked by an angry dog. Okay, so we know there’s a difference between play aggression and real aggression. So, fine. You get the rats out there. Now, if one rat is 10% bigger than another rat, then that rat can win all the time. Because the weight difference is enough, and the size difference is enough, so the big rat can just pin the small rat over and over and over. Fine. So you might think, well, what does the small rat think about that? And the answer is, okay, they go out there, and they wrestle. And the big rat establishes dominance. He wins, right? So then you take them apart, and then you put them back together. And what happens is that then the little rat, he’s charged with inviting the big rat to play. So that’s his role now. So he goes up and does whatever a rat does when it wants to play. Suspect it does something like a dog does when it wants to play. It probably puts its head down and sort of dances around. It’s like, are you ready for this? So then the big rat jumps on them, and they roll around. Then what happens? Well, let’s say you do that over and over and over, because that’s the thing, is that something that happens once is not the same thing as something that iterates across time. It’s not the same thing. So how rats play, it’s a completely different question if they play once or if they play a long time with the same partner, because then there’s different rules. And so here’s the emergent rule. The little rat won’t play with the big rat if the big rat doesn’t let him win 30% of the time. The big rat has to let the little rat win 30% of the time. So I thought, that’s so cool. It’s so cool, because what you see there, that’s an emergent morality. It’s not codified in rules, but there’s a procedural, there’s a social proposition that emerges there. And the social proposition is, you’ve got to let the little guy win sometimes. And even rats know that. So that’s not a rule. It’s not handed down on high, so to speak. It’s an emergent consequence of the interaction of two rats. Now, OK, so you might think, well, there are some boys doing the same thing. OK, now, Panksepp has also found other things. So he’s found, for example, that if you don’t let rats play, rough-and-tumble play in particular, their prefrontal cortexes don’t mature, and they get hyperactive. But you can treat that in rats with Ritalin. Right. So, you know, Panksepp’s hypothesis, which I think is an extraordinarily credible hypothesis, is that the reason boys, in particular, are hyperactive is because they’re not playing enough. But you can fix that with Ritalin, instead of letting them play. And what you do if you’re going to let them play is you watch them, and they’re going to, like, play, and sometimes they’re going to get a bit too rough, and then you stop them. You say, like, no, if you play like that, the game won’t continue. That’s like the first part of moral rule. You have to play each game in a manner that lets the repetition of those games occur. And so that’s why you would have to be a good sport, for example. Right? Be a good sport. Why? What if I can win? Well, the question is, what does win mean? Does win mean you win this game? Or does win mean that you play this game in such a way so that the probability that you’ll get invited to play more and more games as you mature increases? So it’s two games at the same time, right? There’s the game and the metagame. And what you’re telling a child when you say, be a good sport, is you’re saying, but you don’t know this because you’re not smart enough and what the hell do you know about metagames and so on and so forth, you say, well, be a good sport. Why? Well, because that’s how to play properly. Hollow explanation. But the answer is something like, well, and maybe a parent will say this, because other kids won’t want to play with you. That’s a reason. And that’s getting somewhere with an explanation. You might have to say why, and then you decompose it, and the kid will probably not ask anyways, but the point is that there’s a higher moral principle at stake, and you might say, well, why is it higher? Because one of the things you might ask yourself is, are some moral propositions higher than other moral propositions, right? Which is an anti-relativist claim. So there’s only a binary answer to that. The answer is yes, some values are higher than others, or no, they’re not. No means the hierarchy is flat and it can’t be organized. Yes, it’s not. And it can’t be organized. Yes means either that the ordering is arbitrary and tyrannical, or that there’s some other process at work that applies across wide ranges of contexts and situations. Now, Thomas Kuhn, who studied the structure of scientific revolutions, he said, he never really figured out whether he was a relativist or a Piagetian, and he was kind of wishy-washy on the topic. Now, what Kuhn basically said was something like, science is a hierarchy, and now and then a revolution takes place at the highest level of abstraction. And usually that happens when there’s a theory, and it’s being applied to explain the world, and there’s an anomaly that it doesn’t explain, and for a while you can just ignore that anomaly. But then it gets more and more annoying and aggravating and takes full stage, and you can’t explain it, and that means there’s something wrong with your damn theory, and then poof, someone comes along with another theory which explains that anomaly. Now, Kuhn was never sure if the new theory was better than the old theory, or what better meant, or if it was just a replacement for the old theory. It was like tool A didn’t work, tool B works in this situation. Now, what Piaget said, though, was that when he was talking about revolutions of the same type, so that would be the stage transformation, he said, no, no, no, there’s a rule for better. The rule is the new paradigm accounts for everything the other paradigm did, plus it accounts for some other things. And so why is it better? Well, there’s a definition of better that’s implicit in that, and so imagine that you knew something, and it was only good one place at one time. It’s like, great, that’s a good thing. Let’s say you replaced that with another thing you knew, and it was good in three situations at three different times. It’s like, well, which of those are you going to use? All other things being equal. Well, why not use the one that works in more situations? And so we could say, well, a moral principle is superordinate to another moral principle if the superordinate principle works to facilitate the same ends across longer spans of time with more people. So then the question is, well, how should you play a game? And the answer is, what are you doing while you’re playing a game? And one answer is, you’re trying to win that game. Another answer is, you’re trying to play that game. Another answer is, you’re engaged in practicing a mode of playing that will enable you to play many games in many situations successfully. It’s like, okay, which of those is most important? Well, it’s obvious which is most important. If the game is worthwhile, which is what you propose, if you play it, you’ve already agreed to that, then obviously playing in a way that enables you to play more games of that type better is better. End of problem. So now you can think that through and see if there’s any flaws in the logic, but people have been thinking about it for about 100 years, and I think that’s about as far as it’s got. And I can’t see a hole in that. So, all right, so the boys are playing. Now you might think, what are they doing when they’re playing rough-and-tumble play? Okay, so now I have played with kids that haven’t had any rough-and-tumble play, and it’s really hard to play with them, partly because they’re easily frightened. You know, they’d like to play. I know how to play with kids. They’d like to play. They’re pretty hept up on it, you know, and they’re really excited, especially about physical play. But they’re awkward, you know, so you play with them, they stick their thumb in your eye, or they cry really easily when nothing really happens, and they just don’t have it together. A kid that has done a lot of physical interaction, physical play, that kid, it’s a different sort of kid, because the first thing the kid knows, it’s not a rule, the first thing the kid knows is, how forceful can he be with you, so that it’s exciting and interesting and fun, but it’s not too much? And that’s really an interesting question, because actually, to really play a good game, like a physical contact game, like wrestling with a kid, is that you want to let that kid come right up to the edge of hurting you. And the closer the kid gets to the edge, the more fun it is for both, because the kid will give you a whack, and he’ll go, hee-hee-hee-hee, you know, and that’s good, you know, and then maybe he’ll give you a harder whack to see if he can get away with it. Kids will often, they’ll come up to you, whack you, and then run away, and then they’ll look, and if you’re laughing, then they’ll come back and try a harder one, and then, you know, they’re doing it incrementally, because it’s exploratory behavior, and part of the exploration is, okay, what are bodies like? And the answer to that is, well, what can you get away with doing to them? But it’s a more sophisticated answer, too, which is, what can you get away with doing to them in a way that allows you to continue to explore without fear or punishment, and without blowing the whole game to bits? Okay, so how do you figure that out? You do not talk about it, because you can’t. You have to act it out. So the kid’s hitting you, and wrestling, and pulling your hair, and doing all these things, and you’re modifying its behavior very, very carefully, and in miniscule detail, and then you get a kid who can, like, wrestle like mad, and they’re fun to play with. They bounce around like a dog that won’t bite you, you know, a good, well-trained dog, you can really play with, and you can play with them rough, and it’s a blast. The dog has a good time, the person has a good time, it’s like, excellent, that’s a socialized dog. So the other thing that kids learn, which is quite cool, is what hurts them and what doesn’t, and how afraid can they be and still have fun? So, you know, when you’re wrestling with a kid, you put them face down, you put your elbow on them, you bend them around, you throw them in the air and catch them, you know, you grab them by the leg, and maybe you pull them over, and, you know, and what you’re showing the kid is, here’s a bunch of things that your body can do, and it’s okay that they’re being done, that it isn’t going to hurt you, and you’re not talking about it, you’re showing them, and so the kid gets kind of confident about what he or she can withstand physically, and the difference between pain and not pain, and the difference between fear and not fear, and when something’s threatening and when it’s not. It’s very sophisticated, it’s very sophisticated behavior, and that’s partly why kids love to play. Now, one of the things that’s happened, which is, you know, an indication of a deep sickness in our society, is that I used to work at a daycare center, right, when I was about your age, because I really liked kids, and they liked to play with me, and they liked to play with me, because I know how to play with them, and so one of the things I would do with the little kids was I would draw them horrible monsters, right, like big teeth things on, I’d just sketch them out, they weren’t any works of art, you know, but those damn kids, they would line up to get a picture of a monster. Draw me a picture of a monster, draw me a picture of a monster. It’s like, they love those little pictures of monsters, so that was pretty funny, and another thing I would do is play with them, you know, I’d take them out in the yard and grab an arm and a leg and spin them around, bend them over and, you know, twist them around, let them crawl on me, and there was always one kid in the group who couldn’t do that though, he’s like, he hadn’t been paid attention to enough, you know, so he was, I think he was like a Taoist uncarved block, very vague and ill-defined and clunky, and so a kid like that, you know, you’d sit down, it’s so sad, you sit down and you’re interacting with the kids, and that kid comes along sort of lumping along, you know, like this, and they plop you, plop on your lap, and they, like, they’re about as sophisticated as like a six-month-old, you know, and they’re quite annoying, you know, which is a horrible thing because they’re so desperate for attention, and it’s too late, often, by the time they’re four, it’s like, good luck fixing that, man, it’s not gonna happen, you know, and those kids are just screwed, because what happens to them is they’re so lumpy and ill-formed and uncomfortable in their body and socially clueless and inattentive and blind and ignored and resentful that no other kids will play with them, and it’s no wonder, because the other kids are way the hell up on the play development trend, and so they’re bored stiff by them, it’s like playing with a nine-month-old, which kids will do, you know, but that’s not peer play, and so those kids just drift off, they stay on the outside of the peer group, and they never get into it, they never get into it, so very, very ugly, and so now in daycare centers, you can’t touch the kids, it’s like, what the hell, you know, well, why? Well, because you can’t distinguish play from molesting, it’s like, who can’t distinguish that? You know, and what are you gonna do? You’re not gonna, you’re gonna deprive the kids of play because of your stupid paranoia, that’s the whole process, right? Brilliant, brilliant, you know, what you’re doing is you’re teaching children that adults are so dangerous that they can’t be trusted to be near you, that’s a lovely thing to teach children, especially because they’re gonna be adults. Yeah? You think about the law of the universe and the law of the universe on the plane as compensatory or not compensatory, is there any way that people can… I don’t think it’s compensatory, I think it’s a different level of abstraction, so we’re gonna talk about that next. Okay, so, the rats, even rats need play, right, and rats are smart enough to figure out that the little guy has to win sometimes, okay. Okay. Here’s what happens with chimps, this is quite cool, so, the little male chimps in particular, because chimps are very aggressive, they do a lot of playing, and one of the things they do is tease the older males, so maybe the older males like having to snooze under a tree and like the young chimps will come up and like poke them with a stick or tickle them or poke them and run away, and so, and they’re trying to see what they can get away with, and that’s dominance hierarchy challenge in its childhood form, and it can be a game, if it’s done properly it’s a game, if it’s not done properly it’s insubordination, and it’s aggression, and then something’s actually gone wrong, I’ll tell you a story about that. So, one time I was in Montreal, and I lived in a pretty poor area of Montreal, and it was like historically poor, it wasn’t a slum or anything, but it was a very… on the low end of the working class neighborhoods, so, and, so, and, in the… across the alley, about two houses down, there was this house where things weren’t going on that were good, you know, I don’t know if it was a crack house or some damn thing, but there were people in and out of it all the time, and there was a lot of drinking beer, and which is fine, but it was like, it was like anti-social, you know, it wasn’t fun party, it was like, you know, corrupt biker weirdos, and all sorts of things, and there was a little kid there, he was about three, and I kind of kept an eye on that kid, and he was an unhappy kid, like he was already, he had a contempt, resentment face pretty well developed already, and so, one day I was out in the back alley, and I was building this fence, because I was going to fence my yard in, and so then this little kid came up, and he came up with a bunch of his little cronies, you know, and I was watching them, they were watching me with like, hatred, I would say, basically, and, you know, so I was looking at one of the kids, and they were watching me hammer, and I motioned to the kid, I said, do you want to, I couldn’t speak to him, because he spoke Quebecois, and it was like, Jouel, which, I can’t speak French very well at all, and Jouel, the real Jouel, it’s like, no, I can’t even hear what the hell that is, you know, so, I motioned to the kid, you know, you want a hammer, and so he comes up, and he said in French, I’m going to steal this, and I, so he was tugging on it, and I thought, well that’s pretty weird, so, he was looking at me mad, he’s going to take this, he said, I’m stealing this, well no, I’m not going to give it to you if you’re going to steal it, so, so that was fine, so I said no, and I kept hammering, they were all watching, and then he, he stepped about 15 feet back, and he ran right over the fence, like, running on it, you know, I thought, wow, that’s pretty damn interesting, it’s like, that’s a lot of golf for a three year old kid, you know, it’s like, but it was provocative, right, it was dominance it was provocation, and it wasn’t a game, because he didn’t know how to play a game he didn’t know how to play a game, he just knew like, outright aggression, so he ran over this fence, and then he stood there and looked at me you know, and well, I don’t remember exactly what I did, nothing, I think I was just watching him, I eventually finished the fence and put it away but I thought, that kid’s headed for a prison just as certainly as, as a rock falls to earth, it’s like, and I know the anti-social literature, it’s like, if you’re anti-social at four, good luck to you, there isn’t much that can be done about it, he was so ruined by that point already, that there was, you know, it would have taken me, if I would have had access to that kid I probably would have had to fight with him non-stop for three months, to straighten him out and it wouldn’t have been pretty you know, because he was already, he hated adults already, and they didn’t he thought they were contemptible and useless and that he could prevail over them, and that they were erratic, and you couldn’t trust them to punish or reward, or to pay attention and there was no such thing as real social rules and, you know, power dominated everything it’s like, and that was all in him right, it was built into him I don’t mean to be fast, but didn’t you have a gang of friends? they were mostly watching you know, so, and I don’t know what sort of peer interactions they would have had, you know, but as far as I could tell cause sometimes the more aggressive guys they do form gangs, and the gang is actually, it’s a functional unit there is some social interaction only within the gang generally it’s like a tribe so those are the more socialized anti-social guys but, some of the kids are so anti-social they can’t even work within a gang so I don’t know exactly where he was on the spectrum but, like his behaviour was it was already criminal it was just kid criminal same thing so, ok, so some things I should tell you about so you kind of think of the top chimp like a caveman, you know, the tough caveman with a big club, and so it’s the tough chimp that dominates the hierarchy and it’s sort of like the tyranny theory of male dominance hierarchies it’s the strongest, meanest chimp that wins Franz de Waal has been studying chimps for a long time and he’s found that that’s just not true what he found was what Piaget would suggest which is that the chimps that only use aggression and dominance form hierarchies that are unstable and prone to revolution so he tells one story for example, of this chimp that climbed to the top this was, I believe, in the Arnhem Zoo and he was like brutal chimp, and he was a big tough guy, you know, but he wasn’t very good at consolidating his social relationships say, with other male chimps or with the females because he was too brutal for any of that so he didn’t engage in a lot of mutual grooming with other males, because one of the things you see in the chimps is that the chimps males fight a lot but they also groom each other a lot, so their relationship is more fractious and aggressive, and also more cooperative, so that’s quite cool but he had forgone most of that, he didn’t pay much attention to the females, so what happened was that the two second order chimps jumped him one day and tore him to bits so, that was the end of that and it was brutal, brutal brutal, I think they castrated him with their teeth, if I remember correctly, and tore him to shreds, and the rest of the troop was really agitated by this and agitated for a long time afterwards and chimps are brutal like they’ll catch colobus monkeys and they eat them alive, and things are screaming away and they’re unbelievably strong like a chimp is about six times as strong as a grown man and so you get near a chimp, boy do not get near a chimp those things can break 300 pound test steel cables with their hands they are super strong, and they’re vicious they’re vicious so, and a lot of what seems to inhibit chimp aggression is actually the dominance hierarchy it’s not clear that they have any limits on their aggression internally so, and so chimps will the male juveniles, sometimes in the company of females, will sort of patrol the edges of their territory and if they come across a chimp from a different troop, and they outnumber them, they’ll attack them and tear them into shreds, so that was discovered I think Jane Goodall discovered that first and she was shocked by it, because she was still kind of operating under Rousseauian assumptions and then for a long time she thought, well maybe maybe I’ve corrupted these chimps by feeding them and messing about a bit with their natural order, and so maybe that’s just a consequence of pathological human interaction, but then other chimp researchers reported the same sort of thing, and so that’s really interesting because it means that chimps do territorial raiding, and so that also means that, well one thing it means for example is religion is not the cause of wars, you know, and you might think, well that’s quite a leap, it’s like no, it’s not quite a leap tribalism might be the cause of wars, and religion might be a form of tribalism, but chimps basically engage in quasi-war like behaviour, and you’re not going to lay that at the hands of any abstract conceptual system, it’s territorial protection, so alright, so what de Waal found instead was that the chimps who come to the top who manage to stay there are chimps who are they’re strong, for sure but they’re also they also engage in a lot of mutual social interactions and they pay a lot of attention to the females and so what it appears to be the case is that and this is so cool, it’s so cool if you want to be king of the chimps you have to be a good king and you might say, well what does good mean because you think of that as a moral abstraction, what does good mean good king? okay, let’s figure it out being torn to bits in a violent insurrection seems like failure okay so being constantly hounded from all sides because you’re too rough and not social enough, that doesn’t seem like an optimal solution maintaining order in the hierarchy so the hierarchy maintains its structure across time and so that everybody is attended to properly decreases the probability of violent insurrection a lot so you might think, well what the chimp is trying to do, the chimp at the top is trying to structure the dominance hierarchy in such a way that it can maintain itself without violence in a productive manner with many individuals across large spans of time now there’s nothing abstract about that now you might say, well there may be different ways to do that, it’s like fine, yeah there probably are just like you can be a plumber or you can be a lawyer, you know, there’s many there are different ways potentially of solving that set of problems but it’s within a bounded universe, there are things you can’t do, there may be many things you can do but there’s certainly things that you can’t do okay, so then that’s really useful to know because what we can surmise from that potentially is that even higher order morality is something that emerges it emerges as a consequence of social interactions between motivated beings across large spans of time, and that there’s actually a pattern to that, there’s a pattern so that would be the pattern that characterizes the stable hierarchy so, now what is that pattern? that’s where you get to mythology so because this is where people differ from chimps, so so you might say, well why did the chimps act the way they did? they do, and you might say, well that’s because their parents acted that way and then you might say, well that’s because their parents acted that way, and you can make that argument going as far back in time as you want and I already made it at one point going all the way back to lobsters, right? 400 million years, that’s a dominance hierarchy so how to behave in a dominance hierarchy is something that’s been figured out across 400 million years of evolution at least now you can infer two things from that one is you’re adapted to a dominance hierarchy because that bloody thing is old so you have literally, the forces of selection have shaped you such that if you weren’t able to function within a dominance hierarchy you weren’t going to survive someone would kill you, and you weren’t going to mate okay, so you’re prepared for the damn dominance hierarchy now, the next thing is you can observe and transmit information across the hierarchy, because it’s a living thing that continues across time so it kind of has its own structure that perpetuates itself across the generations so with the chimps for example, the status of a family is heritable now we don’t know if that’s a sociological phenomena or a biological phenomena or whatever, but it doesn’t matter it’s still the case and I think that’s because it’s probably easier for high status animals to produce high status offspring obviously, why not they have better access to everything and they’re more confident, so it stands to reason okay then there’s the constraints of the dominance hierarchy itself because it’s a particular kind of structure it has to operate within particular kinds of principles okay, so, we were chimps and then our brains started to grow we discovered how to use fire we discovered how to use language we discovered how to imitate each other and we’re really good at that we discovered how to specify what someone is interested in by looking at where their eyes were pointing and that’s why we have whites around our iris it’s so that I can tell where you’re looking so I know what you’re up to gorillas don’t have that so what that basically meant was the precursors to us whose eyes weren’t distinguishable the direction of their eyes pointing they didn’t mate or were killed, because no one knew what they were up to so we have all these abilities built right into our body we build the hierarchies they come up automatically they emerge from the bottom and then we watch them and infer the structure and that’s where we start getting into drama so that’s imitation but complex imitation of long term narratives and then representations of the drama so that would be fiction and then extraction of archetypal themes from the fiction or the other way around, it might be that what we extracted out first were the archetypal themes makes more sense really and that would be the primordial religions what’s at the top of the dominance hierarchy? God what’s God? well, it’s a kind of ideal you might think that this is an oversimplification it was frequently the case and I’ll tell you the stories that archaic people like the Sumerians conceptualized their leader they conceptualized their leader as the incarnation of God on earth and he had responsibility to act that way it’s a very common human cognitive operation the Japanese were doing that right up to the second world war and they still do it to some degree so it’s like this is natural human thought the leader is an avatar of God what’s God? we’ll leave that question aside for now what’s a good avatar? well, a good avatar is whatever has sovereign power a good avatar is whatever has sovereignty and authority what is sovereignty and authority? well, we’re trying to figure that out sovereignty and authority is whatever stabilizes the dominance hierarchy with multiple members across large spans of time in a way that won’t be overthrown we don’t know the answer to it because it’s an ongoing investigation and a lot of it’s worked out at the behavioral level but then once we started to observe it and tell stories about each other and imitate each other we could start encapsulating that in stories so we could start encapsulating that in stories what time is it? 3.11 one more sentence I’ll give you a break then I’m going to tell you one of the world’s great stories so here’s the idea we’re banging so just like when I’m playing with my son physically we’re trying to optimize the interaction and the way we do that is by calibrating each other’s strengths and weaknesses and each other’s emotional reactions in a way that we can then and each other’s emotional reactions in a way that makes it fun and interesting and exciting and almost terrifying in a way that both players really want the game to continue how do you do that? you can’t say you can say, well you have to play fair that’s a reasonable proposition you can’t hurt the kid there’s arbitrary things you can’t do you can draw out some general principles but basically you have to figure it out on the fly we organize our hierarchies, we figure it out on the fly but then what do we do? we watch those hierarchies over thousands of years and communicate about it and so we’re trying to figure out what the hell is it that we’re up to? exactly and then we even take it a bit further which is not only what is it that we are up to but what is it that we should be up to? it’s like how do you idealize the dominance hierarchy structure and what should be at the top? and the proposition is something like an avatar of the highest value is the thing that’s at the top and then the next question is what the hell is that? and the answer to that is we’re not smart enough to conceptualize it properly partly because it’s an emergent property it’s very complex biological, sociological, emergent phenomena and so we’re trying to close in on it and that’s what we’re doing when we’re telling stories we’re trying to close in on it what’s the ideal human behavior? so I have a friend visiting right now I have a friend visiting right now he writes thrillers, he’s written like 20 of them and he writes comic books like Batman and Wolverine and so on and so forth and so he’s interested in so the thriller genre most of what he writes about are vigilante stories, you know where someone is wrong, their family is threatened in some manner maybe it’s outside the normal strictures of the law and they’re supposed to do something about it so I asked him what the hell he was up to because he’s a smart guy he’s writing these thrillers, why is that the genre that captures your interest very highly verbally intelligent this guy and he’s very well educated I thought, well what are you up to? and he said, well it seems to be something like this I’m trying to figure out so usually in a thriller the force that is attacking the castle the structure, the family is some male gone mad it’s like animal man some brutal psychopathic guy serial killer or some like arch criminal or something like that, same thing you see in comic books it’s like, okay that’s like the masculine end of the monster but then the protagonist say, typical protagonist might be a man trying to protect his family it’s like, okay what do you do when a monster attacks something that you love? well, if you’re just made out of tissue paper and gelatin you just fall over and die and the monster comes in and steals everything you have and kills everyone and that’s the end of the story it’s like, okay you have to meet force with force now that’s a weird thing, eh, because if you go to a monster on the outside and you’re on the inside and you’re also male, we’ll say for this example if you don’t allow yourself to be the kind of monster that the monster is, he’s gonna win so then the question is how do you allow yourself to be the kind of monster that’s capable of protecting things without turning into the monster? well, so all his books are explorations of that it’s like, okay, here’s a limit situation where even the rules aren’t working your family’s on the line the law can’t protect you what do you do? well, we don’t know, do you curl up and die? do you hide in the basement? do you make a safe room? do you move to another state? do you just take it? do you fight back? do you arm yourself? it’s like, who knows, right? what’s the right thing to do? well, the right thing to do doesn’t seem to be to let that win okay, so he’s laying out various simulations of responses and he has all sorts of reasons for doing so so that’s partly what we’re doing with stories we’re not only representing what it is that we’re doing and if we’re not, you’d go and watch the movie and you’d say that wasn’t very realistic it has to be a good enough model of the world as it is so that you find it credible it can twist a principle or two around and ask you to suspend disbelief for the purposes of exploration you know, like, what would it be like if you had x-ray eyes sort of like a superhero thing and people will put up with that because it’s an exploratory it’s an exploratory process you can’t just break a bunch of rules arbitrarily though, because people get bored of the story it’s not a realistic simulation you’re playing out simulations in a moral landscape so and I would say the simulations that have worked best are archetypal so there’s deep themes that are kind of they’re like templates and they’re somewhat vague the details have to be filled in in your own life but there are broad narrative themes that are the fundamental framework within which the specific moral hierarchy that you need has to be built that’s the proposition so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at those narratives and so what we’re trying to do two things we’re trying to figure out what’s the proper way to conceptualize the world if your problem is that you have to act and live it question number one question number two is if you’re in the world and you have it conceptualized properly how should you act? alright, and so that’s what these stories are trying to solve now are they correct? it’s like they’re low resolution photographs that’s what they are or they’re low resolution movies and people have been working on them for a long time now there’s a twist here which I think is a very cool twist the twist is what is it that’s necessary in a story for you to find the story compelling because that’s an interesting thing it’s like obviously you go to a movie and you say, man, I love that or you go there and you think, that stunk I’d never inflict that on anyone well, they’re both stories they’re both expensive they’re both well produced and sophisticated one grabs your interest you can’t get away from it another doesn’t what is it about some kinds of stories that grab you and won’t let you go and others that don’t well, that’s a complicated thing but one of the things I’m going to posit is that not only are there not only does the dominance hierarchy have a structure that replicates itself roughly across time but you’re adapted to that structure and part of that adaptation is that when you’re presented with patterns of behaviour that are general but that also partake of the quality of being useful within dominance hierarchies you’re attracted to them it’s just like when you’re a little kid there must be people you admire think of someone you admire why? why do you admire them? so give me an answer if you pick someone you admire why do you admire them? just pick someone anybody got an answer to that? okay they have an equality that you think are respectful or paid the way for something kind of useful okay, okay, okay so that seems to be about right there’s something about that but it’s interesting because often the admiration will emerge in the absence of articulated reasons for it it’s more of something that hits you and maybe you post-hoc think well, this is why but it hits you I think with vervet monkeys so you take vervet monkeys in a hierarchy and you take photos of the low ranking individuals and you take photos of the high ranking individuals and then you show the vervet monkeys the low ranking individuals, the high ranking individuals the vervets will look longer at the high ranking individuals so you might say here’s a hypothesis for you if you see someone manifest elements of the rough pattern that across dominance hierarchies that across dominance hierarchies enables people to succeed you’ll be attracted to that right? and that person, by focusing on that person you can flesh out the archetype in some sense you know, because a student asked me once they said, look, if archetypal stories are real why can’t we just tell the archetypal story over and over the same story I thought, Jesus, that’s a really good question why would that be? in primordial cultures, that does really happen it is repetition of the archetypal story but in a sophisticated culture like ours there’s like a hundred thousand fiction works why? well, I think part of it is the archetype in some sense is the template for good person but it doesn’t fill in the details underneath that are relevant for this place and this time and so the fiction, if it’s a good work of fiction the archetype shines through it but it shines through in a way that you can extract out information that actually works here and now in this situation so you need both the archetypal representation which is how to be a good person and then you need information about the particulars of how to be a good person so that you can actually do that and I think that what happens when you find someone you admire is, they embody the archetype but they fleshed out the skills and so if you watch them and you can prensess yourself to them then you can pull that in and it’s a great, magnificent way of developing because it means that you can benefit from their experience without having to go through the same laborious process hopefully, of acquiring that wisdom that’s why you go to university in principle because it’s easier to go to university and learn the information that it is to go out there and bang yourself out against the world and learn all these things the hard way yes? or don’t want yeah, because a good counter example sometimes a counter example is even better because, and this is another way to think about morality I just wrote a chapter I’m writing a book I wrote a chapter called Tell the Truth and then I thought, hmm, that might not be the right title because then you run into Pontius Pilate’s problem what is truth? well, good question it’s like, do I know the truth? no plus it’s dynamic, it moves around so maybe the property is don’t lie that’s different and you might say, well how do I know the difference between truth and falsehood? you might say that, I say, well most of the time you don’t ignore that sometimes you do so when you do know, don’t do it so that doesn’t mean that you know the truth but it does mean that you’ve identified a useful falsehood and that’s a good thing because partly what you need to know to go forward is what not to do and also what to do, but often what not to do it’s like the Old Testament Ten Commandments it’s like, here’s some rough things you shouldn’t do well why? well, we’ve kind of you know, ground our way through that are they absolutes? no, they’re like a pattern it’s a pattern you can vary it but you mess with it at your peril that’s the hypothesis so okay let’s take ten minutes and then I’ll tell you the Mesopotamian creation myth which is a lovely story