https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SsoVhKo4UvQ
This lecture and the next are probably the most explicitly philosophical lectures of the course. Then we move into psychometrics and biological psychology, really. And those are going to be the most scientific lectures of the course. I was thinking this morning about, when I was preparing this lecture about why I approach these topics this way. I guess part of the answer is probably that it isn’t clear that the study of personality, at least in so far as the concern is to further the development of personality, which is a concern that’s associated with the desire for mental health or subjective well-being, which is a term I really don’t like, or meaning. It’s not clear that those can be strictly scientific pursuits. So then if they’re not strictly scientific pursuits, what should you do about understanding them? If you look at studies after studies, the problem with that is you get a very narrow slice of the domain, and it’s often not very comprehensible, because in order to understand the results of a study, you have to have the knowledge, the underlying knowledge that’s necessary to put the study in some sort of framework. And that framework is going to be developed by studying the relevant scientific literature and psychological literature, but behind that, the framework has to be expanded to include the relevant philosophical assumptions. And I don’t really think that you can understand the details without understanding the assumptions. I also think you’re relegated to memorization if you don’t understand the fundamentals. And memorization has very little to do with knowledge. I mean, you might be able to memorize procedures that would enable you to act on something, like perhaps to fix an automobile or to repair or to play a piece on the piano, and it’s not like those things are not worth doing. But for these ideas to take root and have effect and meaning, you have to understand them at the right level of analysis. And one of the things I really like about personality theory, especially the clinical end of it, although not exclusively the clinical end of it, is that the people who were conducting clinical practice and writing clinical theory during the 20th century were in fact dealing with the most profound problems that affect people. I mean, I started my academic career as a political scientist, well, insofar as you’re any sort of political scientist when you’re an undergraduate. I was not interested in it at all by my third year, because what I found was that, at least at this time, and I don’t know how much it’s changed, the political scientists had already decided that people were basically motivated by economic concerns. And to me, that just was no use at all, because I wanted to know why they were motivated by economic concerns. So, it’s easy to understand people in some sense if you already decide what they value. But if you can’t figure out what they value or what they should value, that’s a whole different issue. And that’s psychology. And it’s a deep question, because it isn’t even obvious whether the question, are there things you should value, is a reasonable question, or that it can be reasonably answered. The thing I can tell you about that that’s most closely allied with my own experience, I don’t mean personal experience, but say experience as a clinician, is that aimless people are in real trouble. Now, I don’t necessarily know why that is, and I don’t necessarily know what that means for what your aim should be. But I’ve certainly seen, for example, like if you had to make a choice, which all of you will in the next five years or so, between pursuing something, like diligently, and establishing a fixed identity because of that, or remaining bereft of choice and drifting, I can tell you that if you drift, by the time you’re 30, you’re going to be one miserable person. Now, I’m not sure why that is exactly, and I’m not exactly sure that that necessarily means that picking something and sticking to it, which is a form of apprenticeship, is better than drifting. It depends on what you mean by better. But I can tell you that not catalyzing an identity seems to be a mistake, and it’s a fatal mistake by the time you’re 40. It’s very, very difficult to recover from it at that point, because you’re not young anymore at that point, and if you try to catalyze an identity at that time, which sometimes can happen, you’re competing with all these young, shiny people, and it’s not who are much more full of potential from the perspective of an employer, for example, than you are. It gets pretty dismal. Anyways, today we’re going to go deeper into philosophical presuppositions than we have in the past, and I want to familiarize you with what I think are the great philosophical and psychological movements of the 20th century, because they shape you, and they shape the world you live in, in ways that are incalculable. And if you don’t understand them, you don’t really know where you are, you don’t know where you are in history, and you don’t know what ideas you’re possessed by. You know, I think I told you when we were studying Jung that Jung said that people don’t have ideas, that ideas have people, which I believe to be true. One of Jung’s lasting contributions in some sense was that you should know what ideas possess you, because otherwise you won’t know what the hell they’re doing with you. And when you think about all the irrational and apparently counterproductive things that people do as individuals, and also in a mass, you have to ask yourself if you want to be caught up in that sort of thing, if you could be free from it, if you are caught up in it, just exactly where is it that you’re headed? Which was also something that Jung thought you should figure out in case where you were headed was not necessarily where you would go if you were making a fully informed conscious, where you would like to go if you were making a fully informed conscious choice. And I think the material that we’re dealing with in the next two lectures is the most relevant of all the material we’re going to cover with regards to the possession of people by ideas. The existentialists, who are tightly aligned philosophically with the phenomenologists, basically emerged as a psychological movement after World War II. And there were reasons for this. I mean, one of the reasons was that it was quite obvious, not only that World War II was an ideological battle fundamentally between fascism and Western democracy, roughly speaking, and it was immediately supplanted by another ideological battle, which was the one between communism and liberalism, roughly speaking. And so the issue of ideological possession and the relationship between the individual who is ideologically possessed and their responsibility and the actions of the state became paramount concerns in the 1950s, as they should have. You know, because one of the lasting questions that remained after World War II that still has been insufficiently answered is when the mass goes insane, what is the culpability of the individuals who compose the mass? Now you can circumvent that question, say, with regards to what happened in Nazi Germany, by assuming that it was top-down coercion that turned the mass of ordinary German citizens into majority Nazis. But I don’t think that there’s any evidence that those sorts of ideas are true. There is research bearing on people’s willingness to conform to authority figures, and that is somewhat relevant. You know, the famous experiments, the prison experiment, for example, at Stanford, where undergraduates were divided arbitrarily into guards and prisoners, and then they ran a simulation of a prison, and of course the guards turned into sadistic psychopaths, and some of them did anyways, and the prisoners turned into cringing victims in no time flat. You know, there’s obviously an element there that demonstrates that people are very responsive to situational cues, and that that can go out of hand very rapidly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use your tendency to be accommodating to authority, or the human tendency to be accommodating to authority, as an explanation for the rise of mass movements, say, like Nazism or communism, because the explanation doesn’t really help. It’s like, okay, well, fair enough. Some people in the mass were mere followers. What about the leaders? Well, maybe they’re all followers, right up to, say, Hitler. So it’s Hitler’s fault. It’s all Hitler’s fault. It’s like, well, you’re elevating the guy to the status of a god at that point. You know, now an evil god, but still, if he’s got all the motive power, you can’t separate him from the idea of Lucifer, you know. He’s become an archetypal figure of evil at that point. It’s the same with Stalin and Mao. I mean, they were very, very bad men. There’s no doubt about it. But to localize all the evil in them and to consider everyone else victimized followers is a convenient idea, but it’s not helpful. I mean, now that just makes the followers pathetic for a different reason. They’re not actively self-engaged in cruelty for their own purposes, apart from conformity, but they’re just as pathetic and evil as they would be if they were doing it on their own volition. I don’t see the difference between a bully and a bully’s henchman. In fact, I think the bully probably has more courage than the henchman. You know, it’s courage of a fairly peculiar sort. So the existentialists, this is what they were concerned about. You know, and the locus of their concern was basically… It was basically Nietzsche. And you all know that… And the reason I concentrate on Nietzsche and also on Dostoevsky is because I think those two people summed up the 19th century. I really think that. And that the problems that they laid out and predicted would unfold in the 20th century were the problems that unfolded in the 20th century. So they got their predictions right. And I think they got their causality right, too. And given the inability of social scientists, including psychologists, to predict large-term mass events, the fact that these two people managed it 30 to 40 years before the events unfolded, and even longer than that, seems to me that it’s pretty much worthwhile to consider them psychologists. And certainly Nietzsche thought that of himself, and so did Dostoevsky for that matter. And they had immense influence on people like Freud and Jung and Rogers, all the people that we’ve been studying. Their thinking is lying underneath every issue we’ve discussed. This is one of Nietzsche’s great statements. Of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently, the advent of nihilism. Our whole European culture is moving from some time now with the tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe. Restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that’s afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect, as a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside. Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence. Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical extension of our great values and ideals. Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had. So one of Nietzsche’s claims, for example, was that as Christianity in Europe transformed itself into science, he felt that one of the advantages to the Catholic domination of Europe for so many centuries was that the mind of the Catholic adherents who took the discipline seriously, or the dogma seriously, learned to interpret all events under the schema of a single theory. And he thought about that as a form of discipline. So you could imagine that if I want to teach you how to theorize, I might teach you a theory and have you adopt it. And Nietzsche’s point would be that, well, that means you know a theory, but it also means something else. It also means that now you know how to theorize. And the important consequence of learning a theory may not be the theory. It may be that you’ve learned to theorize. Now Nietzsche also pointed out that once you learn to theorize, you can separate yourself from the theory that gave rise to that knowledge. And so you can start to theorize even about the theory that you mastered. And he thought that’s what happened to Europe as a consequence of its domination by Christianity, especially because of Christianity’s essential insistence on the utility of the truth. Now he thought that was transformed after Catholicism into scientific investigation, but that the spirit of theorizing and truth remained intact, and then that the consequence of that was that the European mind was disciplined by a dogma, then it freed itself from the dogma, then it turned its power on the dogma, and noted that the dogma itself seemed to be grounded in nothing that you could get a grip on, the way you grip things with an empirical mind. And so it fell apart. You know, and that’s not saying much more than science posed a fatal challenge to religion. But it’s saying it in a much more profound and interesting way. And it also explains why he makes this claim, that nihilism is the logical conclusion of the great values and ideals. So he didn’t think about nihilism as a counter proposition, say, to dogmatic Christianity. He thought about it as the logical outcome of that. So now you think, well, is that relevant? Why is that relevant? Well, I think it’s relevant for a lot of ideas, for a lot of reasons. The first question is, or the first observation might be, that a tremendous amount of mental illness, and this is an existential claim, is grounded in nihilism. When someone who’s depressed comes to see you, what they often say is, I can’t see any point in life. And that isn’t what they mean. What they mean is, they see the meaning of life as suffering, which is a meaning, right? And that that’s not bearable. And then the question is, given that, why bother with it? And that’s the fundamental question of suicide. And it’s a philosophical question. I think it was Camus who said that the only real philosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide. Now, you know, that’s a little dark. I mean, maybe old Camus could have used some SSRIs. But you get the point. And it’s inappropriate, in my estimation, to even discuss something, even to discuss depression with someone who’s depressed, especially if they’re intelligent and open, and therefore more tilted towards philosophical wonderings, without actually addressing the issue. Why live in the face of suffering? Okay, so that’s one problem. Okay, so that’s one problem. It’s to the degree that you will find it difficult in your life to build anything solid under your feet that you can stand on and believe, have faith in, let’s say. You’re going to be adrift. And the reason for that is, a lot of the things you’re going to have to do will be difficult, and they’ll involve suffering, which is also an existential claim. So the existentialists, for example, they don’t make the same claim Freud does. Freud claims that, in some sense, that the normal person is mentally healthy, apart from the mild distress of normal life. And then in order to be psychopathological, you have to have been hurt, and maybe multiple times, or there’s other things that could contribute to that. But the existentialists would say, no, no, no, let’s just wait a minute here. Maybe the fundamental condition of human beings is nihilism and suffering, and that something has to be produced to counter that in order for life to be tolerable. Well, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable proposition. Now, it’s a strange proposition, because I’ve seen, in my lifetime, I’ve seen people who are tormented by existential ideas, who can’t get them out of their mind, ideas that relate to the meaning of life, and then other people, and concern about death, for example, and the extinguishing of everything that seems to have any value. It’s a primary concern with them. And then I’ve seen other people for whom those questions never seem to arise. Now, I think those people are, first of all, I think they’re conservative people. I don’t think they’re very open, and I think they’re probably rather low in neuroticism. So they’re not philosophically curious. They don’t go up chains of abstractions. And even if they do, they don’t necessarily get disturbed in the most profound areas of their being by the questioning. But that still leaves plenty of people in the other category. Now, the nihilism. Well, you know, there’s… Nihilism and atheism are closely related. I don’t think they’re identical by any stretch of the imagination. Although I think it’s difficult for atheism to describe why it’s not essentially nihilistic. And that’s Dostoevsky’s big criticism, because Dostoevsky’s claim was that, without any fundamental value assumed, then there’s no reason why you can’t do anything you want. And that’s his famous line, if there’s no God, then everything is permitted. And all of Dostoevsky’s novel writing is an exploration of that idea. And sometimes it’s an exploration of what that idea might mean if it was acted out in the life of a given individual. And so that would be, say, crime and punishment. And another would be, say, in his book, The Devils Are The Possessed, it’s an examination of what that idea means if it’s gripped by an individual who has social and political ambitions. And that’s when Dostoevsky basically prophesied, so to speak, that one of the consequences of the death of God would be the rise, basically, of communist totalitarianism. Because essentially that’s what he predicted in The Devils. So that’s a pretty dead-on accurate prediction. It was really quite stunning to me when I came across it. And Nietzsche made exactly the same prediction, by the way. And so for those two men, the death of an ultimate meaning system, especially one that, you see, when you think about something like European Christianity, it’s misleading in some sense, because the system of beliefs that constituted European Christianity and other great belief systems wasn’t 2,000 years old. It was like 25,000 years old. You know, you can think about it as beginning at year zero, but it’s a mistake from a historical perspective. The ideas that profound religious traditions are predicated on are generally grounded in ideas that are much, much older than the traditions themselves. And so, in some sense, when, at the end of the 19th century, when things fell apart for us and we could no longer rely on our history predicated morality to guide us, it wasn’t merely that we lost an overlay, a psychological overlay that had been laid on humanity for 2,000 years. It was way deeper than that. We don’t even know how old those ideas are. We have some idea about how old they are. They’re at least as old as written culture. But we also know that the people who have been brought into the mainstreams of history, as the world has united, the people who were not literate had mythologies that drew from the same themes. And some of those people, as far as we can tell, had lived a lifestyle that was essentially unchanged for 25,000 years. And so the Australian Aborigines are like that. So there’s plenty of evidence that these ideas are extraordinarily old. And what that means is that when we separate from them, in some sense, not only do we separate from our philosophical presuppositions, but we separate from the historical consequences of our biology. It’s a serious problem. And I think that’s partly why it’s very difficult to distinguish between someone who’s nihilistic and someone who’s mentally ill. That’s not a radical claim. I mean, people especially who are on the depressed side of the distribution will tell you that they’re nihilistic. They may not use that terminology, although they often do. I just can’t see any point. It’s like, well, why does that matter? Why does it matter? It seems to be a fact that it matters. So it’s an interesting fact. That’s a phenomenological fact in some sense, because one of the things that Heidegger pointed out, and he was a founder of the Phenomenological School, was that your primary orientation to the world, he thinks in a strange way, that your primary orientation to the world was one of care. So you could say, well, what characterizes your experience? What sort of creature are you? And Heidegger’s answer would be, well, you’re a creature who cares about things. Insofar as you’re engaged in the world, your primary orientation is one of care. And you can think about that as a value, right? It’s a consequence of your value orientation. God only knows where that comes from. Part of it’s biological, part of it’s developmental, part of it’s historical. It’s very, very complex. But if you stop caring about everything, you’re in trouble. And that’s one of the things that seems to indicate that caring is actually a fundamental reality. You stop caring about things, you don’t stop suffering. And it seems that unless the caring counterbalances the suffering, you can’t maintain an even keel. And that’s partly because it doesn’t seem just, right? I mean, when terrible things happen to people, they always say, well, two things. How is it that being could be constituted in this manner? Like, what the hell is going on at the fundamental levels of reality that such suffering has to be the case? You’ll certainly ask that if you have a child who’s diagnosed with cancer, for example. Or you might think, well, why is this cruelty, as it appears, necessarily aimed at me right now in this place? When, hypothetically, it could have not happened at all, or perhaps been visited on someone more deserving. You know, which is the good remain, the good are punished and the evil remain unpunished. Something like that. So that produces, for human beings, that produces a cry of, um, of, of, it’s a cry for justice. How can the world be constituted that way? And that seems to be built into us. Those aren’t questions we can just avoid. There are questions that will arise in your psyche. They’ll arise as fundamental questions when sufficiently terrible things happen to you. So, the existentialists would say, well, those are conditions of existence. You’re just stuck with that. It’s part of, it’s part of human nature. It’s part of human being to, to be perplexed by those questions. Then the question is, at least in part, is there any way of answering them? Yeah. Nietzsche said, we require at some time new values. Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests. Point of departure. It is an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism. Now, that’s a typical Nietzschean phrase. Because there are three profound ideas in that sentence, and each one is in a different phrase. So, Nietzsche said at one point, I can write in this sentence what other people write in a book. And then he said, well, what other people can’t even write in a book. And this sentence is a good example of that. So, what does he say? Well, you know, if you see that people are suffering and in trouble, one thing you can say that is that the reason for that is that, the economic system is unjust and they’re layered along the bottom, and that’s the fundamental cause of their suffering. But Nietzsche doesn’t allow that to be an interpretation, a causal interpretation, because he says, there are multiple ways of interpreting your position. And mere absence of material luxury does not necessarily destined you to one perspective or another. And so, he says, well, what other people can do is to interpret your position. And mere absence of material luxury does not necessarily destined you to one perspective or another. Physiological degeneration. Well, people are unhappy or suffering because they’re ill in some manner. Well, you could make that a matter of definition by saying that if you’re suffering or unhappy, you are ill, but that’s not a causal argument. It’s just a different way of categorizing the data. And Nietzsche would reject that because he would also note that there’s some correlation between physiological health and meaning in life, but the correlation doesn’t imply causality. And even if it did, the relationship is by no means perfect to the degree that you would want a relationship to be before you accepted it as relevant. Or corruption of all things. Well, that would be the idea that being itself is evil, like an evil trick, which is what Tolstoy said, by the way, when he wrote his Confessions. Because Tolstoy, at the height of his intellectual power, he was the most famous novelist in the world and unbelievably well regarded throughout the world, but particularly in Russia. And he was a very socially benevolent man and well regarded for his wisdom. For years, he was afraid to go outside with a rope or a gun because he thought he would either hang or shoot himself. And the reason for that was that he had been struck by the idea that life is so unbearable that it should be eradicated. And he couldn’t think his way out of that. And it was a form of thought that was actually very characteristic of intellectuals in Russia during his time and in his place. I mean, Dostoevsky wrote about exactly the same sorts of things. But even Tolstoy noted that merely observing that the world was a corrupt and evil place was not necessarily enough to tilt people towards nihilism because there seemed to be people who weren’t nihilistic despite the fact that that seemed self-evident to him. And he thought Tolstoy actually turned to the Russian people. He was very entranced by the idea of the folk and folk wisdom. And he turned to the Russian people as a source of new inspiration, like the peasantry. And Tolstoy actually fought for the freedom of the peasantry. And he felt that their simple faith, so to speak, was something truly admirable rather than something pathetic and weak from an intellectual perspective. He strove to emulate that criticism-less faith. But of course he couldn’t do it because once you’ve taken a bite out of the apple, there’s no going back, so to speak. Nietzsche says, The end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality, which cannot be replaced, which turns against the Christian God. The sense of truthfulness highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history. It’s a rebound from God is the truth to the equally fanatical faith. All is false. An act of Buddhism. Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism. All lacks meaning. Well, that’s rooted in Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity because he believed that Christianity was exceptionally morally flawed because all it offered its followers was the possibility of salvation and redemption from their suffering after they were dead. So it was projected into some other world, which, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, alleviated people of their local responsibility to try to improve things here and now. And Jung’s comments about that were essentially that it was the proto-scientists recognition of the fact that the spiritual salvation that Christianity promised was no longer sufficient that motivated the development of science. So for the early Christians, this is part of the tension between Christianity and science. For the early Christians, the idea was that the earth in some sense was ineradically corrupt and that all you could hope for in your earthly life was suffering. And that you should accept your suffering and hope for salvation in the future after you’re dead. Well, obviously that philosophy appeared insufficient for people. And Jung’s hypothesis about the development of science was that a counter-fantasy developed in the unconscious of the Europeans, which was that the material realm, which had been defined as evil and therefore not worthy of any study or any pursuit whatsoever, actually held the seeds of the redemption that was lacking. And so that was Jung’s commentary on the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone, because the alchemists, who were proto-scientists, were trying to find a material substance, that would be the Philosopher’s Stone, that would offer its holders wealth, health, and eternal life. And so you think, well, why are we pursuing science? Well, hopefully because we think it will do us some good here and now, right, in our bodies. And so Jung regarded science itself as stemming from that compensatory dream. It’s a brilliant idea. It’s actually the only idea I’ve ever read that seems to do a reasonable psychological account for the emergence of science as a discipline. It’s a very strange practice. You know, you have to narrow your interests tremendously to be a scientist. You have to focus on one set of phenomena that might appear as useless to contemplate as how many angels could dance on the head of a pen. You have to devote decades to the study of that thing to make incremental progress. Why in the world would people ever be motivated to do that? Well, Jung’s interpretation was, well, there was a deep counter movement towards the over-spiritualization of the psyche. And that was the revaluation of matter and its possibilities. Well, Nietzsche believed that Christianity, as it stood at the end of the 1800s, was an untenable philosophy because he thought it had abandoned its moral obligations by escaping into some beyond, and therefore damned life as it was actually lived by human beings. So he felt that the demise was a good thing. He points out one other thing, and this is the difference between having a theory and then learning to theorize. He says, look, if you’ve been raised in a tradition, whatever that tradition happens to be, you have a belief system, whatever that belief system happens to be, and it falls apart on you at any one point, you suffer for two reasons. The first is your belief system fell apart, and that’s not a good thing. It leaves everything unfixed and open, and you drown in possibility, in a sense. That’s a Kierkegaardian phrase. But the second consequence is even worse. Once you’ve learned that one belief system that’s solid could be demolished and fall apart, then it’s very difficult ever again to have any faith in any belief systems whatsoever. So not only do you become a doubter of your own creed, let’s say, you become a meta-doubter, which is the doubter of all belief systems, while in the step from that to nihilism, maybe those are exactly the same thing. You could think about that in some sense as the disease of the critical rational mind. It can saw off any branch that it’s sitting on. And the utility of that is, leave no stone unturned. You’re supposed to question things, and the utility of that is you learn new things. But the price you pay for it is that you’re not necessarily ever certain about anything. And you could say, well, maybe you shouldn’t be certain about anything, but you can forget that. You’re going to have to act as if you’re certain many times in your life. For when you choose a permanent mate, for example, if you do that, which you probably will, because you’re university educated, and university educated people still do that, although no one else does. And you’re going to pick a career, and you’re going to make decisions one after the other, about which, if you’re not certain, you can’t make, in which case you have no life. You’re just a whirlwind of chaos. So you’re stuck with the necessity of following a course of action, which is acted out certainty, that your intellect cannot regard as appropriate. And that’s hard on people. Why should I choose this instead of this? Why should I act this way instead of that way? You know, I don’t know is not a very useful answer when you’re a creature that’s as cognitively able as we are. This is a brilliant, this is something absolutely brilliant. It’s very difficult for me to believe that it was written so long ago. So this is Dostoevsky’s criticism of communism. Forty years before communism was a political force. So Dostoevsky’s thinking really hard about this nihilism problem. By the way, Nietzsche read Dostoevsky quite extensively. He’s thinking about it. He thinks, well, there seems to be two alternatives. One is this superhuman nihilism, which is sort of a variant of what Nietzsche proposed, because Nietzsche proposed that it would become the responsibility of every human being, after the death of their religious tradition, to establish their own values. Now you think, that’s it. He didn’t think people could do it. He thought there’d have to be a new kind of person who could manage it. Because he’s basically asking you to generate coherent and pragmatically applicable philosophical structure out of nothing during your lifetime. It’s like, well, good luck with that. Plus, he also assumed that people create values, or that they could create values. And that’s true to some degree. And we’ll talk about this more when we get into the phenomenological end of things. But it’s not self-evident, right? Because one of the things you may notice is that you can’t force yourself to love someone. You can’t just decide that you’re going to value someone, and then poof, that happens. In fact, you may want with all your heart, or at least with all your mind, to value someone, because they deserve it. They’ve never mistreated you. Maybe you’ve said you’d be loyal to them, and poof, someone comes along, you’re tremendously attracted to them, and off you go, like someone who’s possessed. Well, did you create that value? It’s like, well, closer to your own experience, like, can you actually make yourself interested in something you’re bored about? It’s like, good luck trying that. You’d rather clean up underneath your bed than read a paper you don’t want to read. And you can’t just tell yourself, well, I need to read this paper for the following reasons, and poof, it becomes interesting. It’s like, no, no, no. Your value systems, whatever they happen to be, are off doing their own thing. And the reason for that, in large part, is because they’re possessed by ideas that you don’t know about, that have these historical roots, and that play you in some sense like they play puppets. And this stuff is no joke. Okay, so this is what Dostoevsky said way back in the late 1800s. This was in a book called Notes from Underground. And it’s about a man who’s like Hamlet in some sense. He’s a modern man. He’s a 20th century man, really. And his problem is, he’s hyperintelligent and he can’t figure out what the hell he should do with his life. And it’s really bothering him. And it’s worse than that because not only is it really bothering him that he can’t get his act together and act with any degree of consistency and character, but he knows that he can’t do that and he tortures himself about his weakness at the same time. So he’s a very neurotic character, but he’s a sophisticated and intelligent neurotic. And so he’s run through all the arguments that you might conjure up to sort of talk yourself out of being neurotic and suffering. He has nothing but contempt for his own character. He thinks he’s much weaker than people who can just act without thinking. And he’s in this pit, this horrible pit, and it’s a wonderful thing to read. It’s quite blackly comical. And it’s a great philosophical and psychological study. Anyways, in one of the sections of this book, Dostoevsky’s protagonist starts to talk about alternatives to his nihilistic hopelessness. And he thinks about utopianism as a potential alternative. So what’s utopianism? Well, in some sense, medieval Christianity promised people redemption after they died. While a utopian creed does the same thing, except it promises it here and now. So that’s communism was a particular utopian creed. And fascism had the same element, although it was… It was… I don’t know how to describe it. It was less intellectually sophisticated than communism. Communists basically said, look, if you guys just stop being selfish and share, we can transform the world into a place where everyone will have enough of everything, and everyone will be able to do what they want to do. And because of the natural goodness of people, if selfishness can be overcome, that’ll be the next best thing to a paradise. It was a powerful idea for people. Eighty years of our history was spent assessing and battling out the validity of that idea. And hundreds of millions of people died as a consequence of it. And you can understand why it was so attractive. I mean, still utopian ideologies are attractive to people. I mean, it’s hard to read radical Islam as anything other than a utopian ideology. You know, the idea is, once you establish rigid sharia, then poof! You know, you’ve got the kingdom of God on earth. Well, and part of the reason that the radical Muslims are fighting against the West is because they see what they’re doing as a counter position to Western nihilism. And it’s partly because they don’t want to fall into that. You know, we would say, well, that’s progress. It’s like, yeah, it’s progress by our standards. And it comes at a price. And also, we don’t even understand how it was that we paid the price. So the reason I’m telling you this is because you don’t want to be thinking for any time at all that these sorts of issues have disappeared or that they’re not relevant. They’re relevant. Now, the guy who’s advising Putin, his name is Alexander Dugan. And he’s no admirer of Western liberalism. He thinks about it as fundamentally nihilistic. He thinks that its universal application would result in the dissolution of all local culture and the production of this sort of materialistic hyper individuality. And he’s an admirer of tradition, you know, and specifically Russian Orthodox tradition. And he believes that the cult cultures India, Russia, and China in particular should develop their own local cultures, keep the West the hell out and act as a counter position to nihilistic liberalism. Now, you know, you can say what you want about that. I think Dugan’s biggest problem is that, you know, he doesn’t want that the diverse ideas that characterize the West to bump up against Russia and dissolve it. But what he fails to understand is those same ideas are going to emerge within Russia anyways. And if you, you know, if you want to keep them away outside, you have to keep them away inside. And the Soviets already tried that for 70 years with pretty dire results. So I don’t think he can get around the problem merely by, you know, putting up walls. But he’s going to try. And that’s what Putin is doing. So these ideas haven’t disappeared at all. Like they underlie all of the great conflicts that characterize the modern age. Now, Dostoevsky criticized the utopianism. And it’s brilliant, his formulation. So I’m going to read it to you. In short, one may say anything about the history of the world, anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat. And indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. There are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who may get their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible. To be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors. Simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you, what can be expected of man, since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing. Drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. Give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of his species. And even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes. And would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity. Simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It’s just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain. Simply in order to prove to himself, as though that were so necessary, that men still are men, and not the keys of a piano. Which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely, that one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. So clearly that’s Dostoevsky’s criticism of materialistic determinism. Which he felt as a spiritual threat fundamentally. Its proposition being that animals and human beings were deterministic machines. It’s a Newtonian worldview. And that because of that, everything could be calculated and planned ahead of time. Because it could be predicted and measured. And that is not all. Even if man really were nothing but a piano key. Even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable. But would purposely do something perverse. Out of simple ingratitude. Simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means, he will contrive destruction and chaos. Sufferings of all sort, only to gain his point. He’ll launch a curse upon the world. And as only man can curse, it’s his privilege and the primary distinction between him and other animals. Maybe by his curse alone he will attain his object. And convince himself that he’s a man, and not a piano key. If you say that all this too can be calculated and tabulated. Chaos and darkness and curses. So that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all. And reason would reassert itself. Then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point. I believe in it. I answer for it. For the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he’s a man, and not a piano key. It may be at the cost of his skin. It might be by cannibalism. And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know? You will scream at me, that is, if you condescend to do so, that no one’s touching my free will. That all they’re concerned with is that my will should of, should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests. With the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic? When it will all be a case of twice two makes four. Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that. So what’s his point? Well, it’s sort of a Garden of Eden point. You know, what are people like? Imagine you could reconstruct a paradise on earth. You know, hypothetically, that’s what everyone wants. We could go live in the paradise and that would be the end of the problem. We’d all live happily ever after. But in the original paradise story, that’s what people were provided with. And the first thing they did when they were put there was to do the one thing that they were told not to do that would bring it all crashing down. And that was immediately what they did. And so Dostoevsky’s story is actually a retelling of that idea. The idea was that people aren’t like the utopians think. We don’t want it easy. We don’t want it comfortable. We don’t want it good. And the reason for that is we’d be bored stiff. And so that if anybody ever did put us in the kind of nursery that would require us never to exert any effort to do anything at all whatsoever ever again, even if it meant going insane, we’d destroy it. And then he takes that further. He says, and that’s a good thing. Kierkegaard writing earlier, about 40 years earlier, said something quite similar. It is now about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember it quite clearly. It was on a Sunday. Yes, that’s it. A Sunday afternoon. I was seated as usual out of doors at the cafe in the Fredericksburg garden. I had been a student for half a score of years. Although never lazy, all my activity nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality and for which perhaps I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts, I remember these. You are going on, I said to myself, to become an old man without being anything and really without undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about you in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much-heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended commandiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing. And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted. For my cigar was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind. You must do something. But inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely and at the same time it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger. Namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too great. Then there’s only one want left, though it is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere. Now, one of the things you might ask yourself is, sometimes you come to university and people talk about happiness, for example, they talk about positive psychology. I’m not a fan of positive psychology, by the way, because happiness is basically extroversion minus neuroticism. And we knew that 15 years ago, so we didn’t need to make a lot of noise about it. So, anyways, one of the things you might ask yourself is, well, why did you come to university? Did you actually come to university to make yourself happier? Well, let’s think about that for a minute. Here’s one thing to think about. We know that if you put animals in a relatively boring situation, like rats in a boring situation, and you give them free access to cocaine, they’ll just take cocaine until they’re dead, basically. Now, rats in the normal environment won’t do that, but bored rats that are sort of isolated, cocaine is really an excellent thing as far as they’re concerned. They’ll ignore sex, they’ll ignore food. I think they’ll still drink water, if I remember correctly, but it’s cocaine all the way. And if you could inject an electrode into their minds, their brains, which people have done, you can inject the electrode down into the hypothalamus, into the part that’s associated with the reward centers. It’s the source of the dopaminergic tracts, and you can set them up so that if the rat pushes a button, they get a little jolt of happiness, basically. And the rat will sit there and push that happiness button in a rather frantic way, as if it’s looking for something else in some sense. But it will certainly do it, because it’s a peculiar kind of reward. Now, the question might be, would you allow yourself to be wired up like that? Now, you might think there might be some times in your life where you think that might just be a perfectly fine idea, but most of you, I suppose, I presume, wouldn’t do that for a second, for the same reasons, perhaps, that you don’t avail yourself of unlimited access to cocaine, which is a stimulant that’s very good at producing positive emotion. It’s a powerful psychomotor stimulant. And so it affects the parts of your brain that are active when you’re doing something that you think is worthwhile and productive. So why not just do that all the time? That’s the question that Eldous Huxley asked in Brave New World. You’ve got everything you want, take a drug to keep you calm and happy, poof, perfect. Well, is that what you want? And if the answer is no, then you might ask yourself, what the hell do you want? Now, one of the things I’ve thought a lot about lately is, lately being 10 years, I suppose, is there are these statues that I’ve seen. I’ve looked at pictures of them online. They’re statues of Atlas. You know, and Atlas is this god who has the world on his shoulders. And that’s his destiny or his curse is to have the world on his shoulders. And you might say, well, you know, poor Atlas, maybe he should just put the damn world down and, you know, go out for a beer or something. But then you might also think, well, what is that figure trying to, what is that idea trying to indicate? Because it’s an old idea, it’s a profound idea. There’s something divine about a figure with the world on its shoulders. Well, I might say that’s the reason you’re in university, whether you know it or not. You’re here to take the world on your shoulders because that’s a sufficiently profound and worthwhile exercise so that all the suffering that you’re going to have might be regarded as worthwhile. Because the value of what you’re doing is so high, because that’s what you might ask. Is there something that you could do whose value is so high that the fact, for the existentialists, it’s a fact that you’re mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering inescapably, that you would find that not only acceptable but desirable. You’d say, I’ll pay that price. Well, that’s an existential question. You might say that’s the existential question. And one of the things that’s very interesting about that question is, I’m going to talk about this a lot in next class, is what happens if you make the opposite choice? Well, I think the 20th century actually showed us what happened when people made the opposite choice. Because as far as I can tell, when people abandoned their divine responsibility, let’s say, to the utopian claims of a totalitarian state or to hopeless nihilism, the consequence on the one hand with nihilism was despair and illness. And the consequence on the totalitarian end of things, the utopian end, was that, well, you might not die, but you’re certainly going to have a hand in making sure that a lot of other people do. And so, I suppose to some degree it depends on what you want for proof. You know, proof with regards to what you should do. Now, the conclusion I’ve drawn from all this, from reading the existentialist, is that if it’s the pointless suffering of humanity and the inability to extract meaning from that, that makes you a nihilist and that justifies it, let’s say, you’re making a claim, right? The claim is, the implicit claim is that suffering is bad and should be halted. It’s something like that. And so maybe you’ll do that by becoming suicidal or maybe you do that by becoming ultimately genocidal, which is also an option that’s open to more than a few people. But there’s a logical inconsistency in that, as far as I can tell, which is that your initial presupposition is that the suffering is actually bad. It should be mitigated. It should be reduced. It should perhaps even be eliminated. Well, if you pick up the cloak of nihilism, or maybe you pick up the cloak of ideological totalitarianism, then we know what the consequence of that is. The consequence is that everything that’s already really bad becomes so much more worse that it’s almost unimaginable. And so, even by the standards of the nihilist, who says that the suffering of being should result in its elimination, the consequences of thinking that way, or of flipping to the other side and adopting some sort of defensive ideology, is that things go from being, you know, merely the sort of bad state of the earth as it is now, to something as hellish as the Soviet gulags or the Russian concentration camps, or Mao’s great experiment in the Cultural Revolution, which probably killed a hundred million people, about which we generally hear nothing. Now, you know, one of the things the existentialists would say is, what’s the relationship between mental health and responsibility? And that’s a good question, because it also has to do something with something like the definition of mental health and responsibility. It’s like, if you want your life to be well constituted, let’s say, whatever that means, and it doesn’t mean being happy. See, the reason it can’t mean being happy is there’s going to be times in your life where you’re going to be called on to act when you’re not happy. So, for example, when one of your parents dies, you’re going to make a choice. You’re not going to be happy. That will not be, well, hopefully you won’t be. Otherwise, you’re tangled in some sort of fear. You’re not going to be happy. That will not be, well, hopefully you won’t be. Otherwise, you’re tangled in some sort of Freudian nightmare. But let’s assume that that’s not the case. You’re not going to be happy about it. You’re going to be hurt, and maybe even partly broken. So what the hell are you supposed to do then? Well, the answer is, you should be more used than trouble under such circumstances. That’s a good thing to strive for, you know, because your mother’s going to be, if it’s your father, your mother’s going to be equally distraught, and so are your siblings, and everyone else you care for. Maybe by that time you should be tough enough so that in that situation you’re good for something. Someone has to make the damn funeral arrangements. Someone has to settle out the will. Someone has to make sure the family doesn’t degenerate into horrific squabbling, which is something that often happens after the death of a parent. And you’re not going to be motivated to do that by happiness. And what if you have a sick child when you’re a parent? Maybe it’s a chronic illness. You are not going to be happy about that. You know, it’ll be a weight that you carry with you all the time. And it’s one of those things that seems particularly unjust. It’s like, okay, well, you’re no longer happy. Well, if being happy is the purpose of life, well, then you’re basically, that’s pretty much it for you, isn’t it? And, you know, these catastrophes that I’m speaking of, you can be certain that you’re going to be exposed to many of those during your life. You know, it’ll be a rare period. I think it’s a rare period in anyone’s life where one or more of such things isn’t going on chronically. If it’s not you with some terrible health problem or some other terrible problem, then it’s a parent or a sibling or a child or, because, you know, you’re connected to other people and they’re vulnerable too. So that’s the lot of human beings. And so if it’s happiness, and this is what Solzhenitsyn said about happiness too. He said, happiness is a philosophy who’s brought to ruin by the first blow of a guard’s truncheon. It’s like, yeah, that’s about as bluntly as you can put it. Here’s another. I have time to read both of these, I think. This is from Kierkegaard as well. Kierkegaard, by the way, was really the first thinker who identified what we would describe in modern terms as anxiety, especially as existential anxiety or angst. You know, and it would be associated with the condition of questioning the nature of existence, the utility of existence. And so Kierkegaard was really the first person who formalized that into something, resembling a philosophy or a psychology. And then he was trying to think of how that might be overcome, given that it seemed to be rooted in fact, in factual observation. That’s the observation of suffering. And this is a corollary to Dostoevsky’s comments, even though Kierkegaard’s comments were written decades earlier. Dostoevsky’s critique basically said, you can’t solve the problem of suffering by formalizing a utopia and then adjoining it like a mass animal. You can’t do that because you’re not that kind of creature. Even if it was possible, you wouldn’t accept it. You’d cause trouble because you’re interested in trouble. You’re probably more interested in trouble than you are in being happy. So, I mean, you know people like that. That’s another marker, often of serious personality disorder. I have clients, have many of them, who are way more interested in causing trouble in some dramatic way than they are in being boring and stable. They’ll take any form of suffering and inflict any form of suffering on any number of people they can possibly get their hooks into in order merely to escape, you know, drab and secure normality. You know, you call those people dramatic, overly dramatic. That’s one way of looking at it. And they make, as far as I can tell, a relatively conscious choice. Trouble is more interesting than safety. Kierkegaard says something similar, but in a more, in a more, what would you say? In a manner that’s more constructive in some sense, with regards to what you should do with all that insane energy that you’re not going to be able to encapsulate inside a utopia. And it has to do with individual responsibility. There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth. And that in truth itself, there is need of having the crowd on its side. I was on a panel at one point about, I think we were discussing gender differences between, obviously, between men and women. And there are lots of people, the social constructionists in particular, who think that all the differences, there’s biological sex and then there’s gender, and gender is socially constructed. And that all gender differences are socially constructed, and there’s no biological differences in gender between the two sexes. Now, virtually no evidence supports that proposition. If you look at the hardcore psychological evidence, in fact, it’s completely the opposite. And not only that, as you make societies more egalitarian, men and women get more different instead of more the same. Now, the reason that happens is because once you iron out the environmental variability by equalizing everything, all that’s left is genetic vulnerability. And so it springs to the forefront. And so the biggest gender differences in the world are between men and women in Scandinavia. And those are partly personality differences. Women are higher negative emotion and more agreeable, among other things. But more particularly, the differences seem to be those of interest. So the biggest differences between men and women seem to be in what they’re interested in. And roughly speaking, women are more interested in people, and roughly speaking, men are more interested in things. And so in Scandinavia, for example, you have a 20 to 1 proportion of women to men in nursing, and a 21 to 1 proportion of men to women in engineering. And so, you know, the Scandinavian governments now and then try to move that, so there’s more male nurses and more female engineers. And if they really push, they can move the ratios somewhat for a few years, but as soon as they relax, they snap right back to 20 to 1. So anyways, I was citing some of these studies, and one of the people that I was discussing said, well, what are we supposed to do with that? And I said, well, I don’t know what you mean. Those are scientific findings. He said, yeah, but truth has to be established by consensus. And I thought, I don’t want to live in whatever world you’re going to end up ruling, because truth is not merely established by consensus. Or if you think it does, you think it is, then, well, you’re in the position that Kierkegaard describes, which is that as long as everyone else believes it, the appropriate thing is for you to believe it, and also that’s the truth. It’s like it’s a pretty damn dismal philosophy, and it gets people into tremendous trouble, because no matter how many people think there isn’t a wall there, anyone who runs at it head first is in for a vicious surprise. There’s a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth. And in that truth, and in truth itself, there is need of having the crowd on its side. There’s another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd, there is untruth. So that to consider for a moment the extreme case, even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd, a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed, a voiding, noisy, audible crowd, untruth would immediately be in evidence. For a crowd is the untruth. In a godly sense, it is true, eternally, christianly, as St. Paul says, that only one attains the goal, which is not meant in a comparative sense, for comparison takes others into account. It means that every individual can be that one, God helping him therein, but only one attains the goal. And again, this means that every man should be careful about having to do with the others, and essentially should only talk with God and himself, for only one attains the goal. And again, this means that man, or to be a man, is akin to deity. In a worldly and temporal sense, it will be said by the man of bustle, sociability, and amicableness, how unreasonable that only one attains the goal. For it is far more likely that many, by the strength of united effort, should attain the goal. And when we are many, success is more certain, and it is easier for each man, severally. True enough. It is far more likely. And it is also true with respect to all earthly and material goods. If it is allowed to have its way, however, this becomes the only true point of view. For it does away with God in eternity and with man’s kinship with deity. It does away with it, or transforms it into a fable, and puts in its place the modern, or we might say the old pagan notion, that to be a man is to belong to a race, endowed with reason, to belong to it as a specimen, so that the race or species is higher than the individual. This is a hundred years before Nazism. Which is to say that there are no more individuals, but only specimens. But, eternity, which arches over and high above the temporal, tranquil as the starry vault at night, and God in heaven, who in the bliss of that sublime tranquility, holds in survey, without the least sense of dizziness at such a height, those countless multitudes of men, and knows each single individual by name, he, the great examiner, says that only one attains the goal. Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist, Protestant. Dostoevsky was an orthodox Christian existentialist, and Nietzsche, who was also an existentialist, was perhaps the most effective anti-Christian philosopher who’s ever existed. And he made it one of his conscious aims to take a hammer to everything that was foundational against what was left, of what was left at Christianity at the time that he existed. The reason I’m telling you this is because existentialism is a strange philosophical… It’s a strange philosophy. It brings people with very divergent fundamental assumptions together. They share certain assumptions. And one assumption is that life, in its essence, is suffering. And the second is that the individual has a responsibility to adopt responsibility in the face of that suffering, and that that’s the proper response. The proper response isn’t nihilism or ideological possession. It’s something else. It’s something that depends on the person themselves. Nietzsche draws the same conclusions as Kierkegaard, a traveller who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere. And he answered, men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice, they’re all timid. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once as something unique, and then no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity, such a curious and diffuse plurality. He knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience. Why? The last lecture, when we were talking about Rogers, not the video lecture, but the last time I was talking to you about Rogers, I was talking about instrumental speech, and that’s the speech that you engage in. It’s inauthentic from a Rogerian existentialist perspective, when the goal of this speech is to extract something from someone or something. The goal is not mere clarity of communication. And so what that means is that the speech becomes separate from the person, and the speech is being used as a tool for what some element of the person requires. And that’s the hiding behind convention that Nietzsche is talking about, because when people use instrumental speech, they’re almost always pursuing something that other people have told them that they should want. It might be status, it might be career promotion, it might be material progress of other sorts. But the problem is that it’s only part of the person talking. And that part is the part that’s fixated on that local achievement. It’s not the part that is attempting to inquire about what the truth might be in this particular situation, and to describe it as carefully as possible. And that’s the clearest speech of the individual. Now, one of the premises of existential psychotherapy is that that’s the only way you can be healthy. You have to learn to speak and act as a whole, and you have to be directed towards responsibility and truth. And the consequences of not doing that will be, A, that you will suffer pointlessly, which is the worst kind of suffering, and B, which is worse, you’ll bring rack and ruin onto everyone around you. And it gets worse than that actually, because if you do that long enough, not only will you bring rack and ruin on everyone around you, you’ll want to. And that seems, at least potentially, like a bad outcome. Well, you can say, if you adopt a firm belief system, that’ll protect you from that. It’s like the terror management idea of ideology protecting you from death anxiety. Which is a very hopeless philosophy, that. Because it basically suggests that the only reason people have beliefs is because they’re terrified without them, and that if they engage in any sort of heroic behavior, it’s merely a facade that in the final analysis is empty, although necessary. That’s where the idea of positive illusion came from, essentially. You know, that life is so terrible that unless you lie yourself into tranquility, you’ll be mentally unstable and unhealthy. A doctrine for which, by the way, there is no real evidence. In fact, the… what… Anyways. From fear of his neighbor who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbor, to think and act herd fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority, it is the desire for comfort. Inertia, in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveler spoke. He’s right. Men are even lazier than they are timid. And what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret. Everyone’s bad conscience. The principle that every human being is a unique wonder. They dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle. Himself and himself alone. Even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating. As novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it’s their laziness that he despises. For it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products, and appear indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself. Let him follow his conscience, which shouts at him, Be yourself. What you are presently doing, opining, and desiring. That is not really you. That’s a good place to stop. We’ll see you Thursday.