2016 Lecture 06 Maps of Meaning： Part I： The primordial narrative (mJI0hVV-5Vs)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mJI0hVV-5Vs

So I think this part of the course is always a part I have difficulty with because the conceptual transformation is very, very large. Because so far we’ve been talking about, I would say, biological and evolutionary realities in a sense. And we’ve been doing that in a relatively standard manner. I mean there are elements of Piagetian theory that run through it. There are elements of cybernetic theory. There are elements of neurobiology and neuropsychology. And none of it, I would say, in some sense is radically outside the way these sorts of might be discussed in a typical scientific or social scientific manner. Except for maybe the fact that we’ve drawn an explicit distinction between the world as a place of things and the world as a place of action. Now there are consequences to the idea that the world is a place of action that start to become more radical at this point. But drawing the relationship between what I’ve already talked to you about and the The narrative domains that we’re going to explore now requires a radical shift in conceptual focus. And so the way I’m going to handle that is by hitting it from ten or eleven different directions and building up a pattern. You know if you listen to a complex piece of music, or at least this is my experience with complex music, is sometimes the first time I hear it I don’t really like it and I think I also don’t understand it. I actually can’t hear it. You know maybe a musical genius could hear the whole thing instantly. Say Franz Liszt, they say he could sight read anything on the piano first try. So you know some people are so intelligent musically that it’s incomprehensible and I’m sure they hear things just fine the first time they hear them. Then what happens for me is that if I listen to it a couple more times there are pieces, chunks of it that start to fall into place that I can follow and you know I can see the beauty sort of shine through those and then eventually the whole thing links together and then I can listen to it especially if it’s a complex piece of music many, many, many times. And the more complex and probably the better the piece of music the more I can listen to it but if I listen to it enough at some point then I’ve had enough of it. It’s all very strange phenomena because one of the things you might ask yourself is what exactly are you learning while you’re doing that? You know it seems like you want the music, it’s something like you want the music to be just exactly the right amount of predictable and unpredictable and if it’s too unpredictable then you can’t understand it and if it’s too predictable it’s boring and so it’s just like a conversation that way. It’s actually just like life as well. You know because you want things to be predictable and stable and you want things to be unpredictable and interesting and the degree to which you want each of those is going to depend on the time and the context and also on your own intelligence and temperament. So now I’m going to tell you a bunch of stories and give you a bunch of a number of pieces of information and hopefully they’ll click together. Now I think the reason that this information has always been transmitted in story and image form is because it’s very very difficult to transform it into articulated, into fully articulated explanation. It isn’t really how it works. You know we’re not really accustomed to thinking about the idea that there are certain forms of information that are valid forms of information that can’t be transmitted verbally but of course if you think about it we all understand this deeply because well I can give you a bunch of examples. The first example is that when you speak, not only do you speak in words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs but you also speak melodically and in fact part of the reason that you can understand melodies and that they make sense to you is that what artists have done is separated the melodic element of speech from the semantic element and then played with the melodic element and the melodic element tends to carry a lot of emotion and intent. And so if you’re listening to someone speak you can tell when they’re being ironic because they raise an eyebrow and their voice changes slightly even though they might be using, in fact they are using exactly the same words and in fact someone who’s very good at being witty or ironic will set the situation up so that you can barely tell that they’re joking and the better they are at that, the tinier the hint they give you that you can still catch on to, the funnier the situation is. So we know that information can be transmitted through non-verbal channels, it even happens during speech. And then of course we understand that music presents to us an intimation of meaning that’s very difficult to fully grasp and music for me has always been an ineffable phenomena in some sense because it carries the intimation of meaning in a manner that can’t be rationally dismissed or that people aren’t interested in rationally dismissing. So even punk rock nihilists listen to punk rock nihilistic music and they find that meaningful even though they don’t believe in meaning and in some sense they’re victims of their own rationality because they do believe in meaning or they wouldn’t be listening to the music but they can’t understand how they could possibly believe in it so their rational mind has dispensed with the idea and sometimes that’s people dispense with the idea of meaning for lots of reasons, partly because it’s inevitable in some sense with sufficient rationality but also because it’s always useful to look for the underbelly of things because it also justifies not bearing any responsibility for your life and that’s a fairly, what, that can be a very desirable side effect of a particular ideological or rational belief. And then there’s dance of course and dance is even more ineffable than music although it’s often paired with music and it grips people if you see a remarkable dance performance. Well part of it is that you’re sort of thrilled and excited about seeing just exactly what the human form can do because, perhaps partly because you’re human and when you see someone extending a certain ability far beyond the norm then it expands your sense of what a human being is capable of so there’s that. There’s just the pure skill element and then there’s the novelty element because often if you watch a particularly good dancer there’s things they do that you haven’t seen before that you didn’t know anyone could do and that’s pretty fun and then often the dance is joined with the music and the body is expressing what the music means and even though you can’t tell what the music means you can tell that the dance is expressing it. I think what happens there is that music represents the patterns of being. It’s actually because people think of music as a non-representational art but I think that’s wrong. I think it might be the most representational art is that being is made up of layers of patterns constantly interacting and hopefully in a relatively harmonious way and music demonstrates that, mimics it in some sense abstractly and then the dance is an abstract representation like people adapt to the patterns of being and the dancer adapts to the pattern of music and so it’s a symbolic, it’s an embodied display of the place of the person in the cosmos and you can also make that case when you see people dancing in pairs because you can dance alone or you can dance in pairs and that’s basically standard human adaptation. So and music is interesting too because one of the things that you’ll notice is that there’s always music in a movie, almost always. There’s the odd movie that doesn’t have it but it’s quite marked when it’s absent. The movie feels a lot more cold and clinical although it can work but we accept the idea that music can be used to fill in the missing context in a movie without even ever questioning it right? It’s very strange if you think about it that you go to a movie that is doing at least part of its function is to portray reality in a realistic way but there’s a soundtrack playing in the background all the time and you know it’s so useful and so appropriate that you don’t notice how strange it is that that’s okay. So my point is that we, well and then of course you can talk about novels and plays the same way because you know there’s a lot more to a novel than the words themselves. There’s, you know, a novel is a deeply layered thing and part of your understanding of the novel is your understanding of the interrelationships between the layers especially if it’s a profound novel and I mean I think this is why we have the sense of depth in artistic and literary works. Like if a work is deep then it has many, many layers and the more layers it has interacting at the same time the more it’s a useful representation of the essential elements of being and so the more meaningful it is to us. So that’s all to say that there are modes of communication that provide us with information that we can’t articulate but that we still act as if that information is valid and you might say well valid for what? What exactly is it doing? What is it representing? What kind of information is it offering? That’s so compelling and what’s so interesting about it is the kind of information that we’re talking about. That information is so compelling that you’ll pay to expose yourself to it. You know it’s a rare lecture that you’ll go to and have to pay for the lecture itself. I mean you’ll come to the university and you’ll get your degree but if you had your option on a Saturday afternoon or a Saturday night let’s say it’s relatively unlikely that you would attend a lecture and certainly even more unlikely that you would pay to attend one but you’ll certainly pay to go somewhere to dance to music and you know why that is is not obvious. You know you say well it’s entertaining. It’s like yeah it’s entertaining alright but it’s a lot more than that. I think that dismissing things that are enjoyable as entertainment which means they’re sort of peripheral, they’re unimportant in some sense which is often what it’s a real terrible habit of psychologists. So for example when Steven Pinker wrote his book, it’s the book on language and unfortunately I can’t remember the name at the moment. He devoted one chapter at the end basically to non-verbal cultural forms and he talked about them as epiphenomenal fundamentally. They’re just a byproduct and I think that’s deeply wrong. I think that our culture actually grew out of dance and drama and music and science came way, way later than that and I was watching an old video today. It was of the animals playing House of the Rising Sun in 1964. It’s a pretty good video and it’s a great old song. I mean they didn’t write it, it’s an old blues song but it’s a great old song and they do a pretty good job of it and the audience was full of girls and they were screaming madly away. Now it wasn’t quite as bad as The Beatles which was completely unbelievable but it was still you know a fairly continual din of delighted shrieks and you know I think that’s extremely interesting because you never see that at a scientific conference. Well it’s strange eh? Like there isn’t anything else that elicits that kind of response. Maybe sports to some minimal degree but certainly nowhere near with the same amount of enthusiasm and I mean that’s been happening for a long time. It wasn’t merely a phenomena of the 60s. I suspect it’s been happening ever since there’s been wandering minstrels and that’s been a very very long time and I suspect those wandering minstrels left many offspring behind them. And well what’s interesting about that is you know I mean obviously part of the reason that human beings can sing is because we’ve selected each other for that ability right? You mean there’s something very attractive about someone who’s artistically gifted and the idea that women will you know do backflips for a singer is not necessarily any negative comment on their ability to evaluate what’s important. It might be quite the reverse. So anyways the point is there’s lots of different ways that we can convey information and you might say well it’s only simple information that can be conveyed that way and you have to convey the complex information in more formal forms scientific and philosophical but I think that’s exactly backwards. I think we get to articulate the simple stuff first. We get to articulate the simple stuff first which is only what you’d expect right? Because when you’re mastering something difficult like the unfolding of being the probability that you’re going to get to the simple things first and the complicated things later is pretty much 100 percent and I mean different fields advance at different speeds but the artists and the musicians get to the complex matters far before the scientists and the engineers and it has to be that way. One of the deep things I learned from Jung was that as our knowledge expands out into the unknown there are people operating at the periphery and so they really have one foot in the unknown and one foot on dry land so to speak and some of them more and more in the water than others and the ones who are almost submerged up to their neck when they tell you what they’re seeing it has to be poetic and musical and artistic because it’s so far beyond our capacity to articulate that we can’t represent it in words and so all that can happen is the artist can get a hold of it and maybe the religious, the people who are prone to religious like sentiments which at least experiences which seems to be associated by the way with trade openness to have the actual religious experience rather than to be an adherent of the dogma which is associated with low openness. So for Jung it was the artists and the entrepreneurs because they’re the same people who were at the forefront of the expansion of what we know into what is unknown and I think you can see echoes of that in the way that cities are rejuvenated because what happens, you can certainly see this in Toronto, is that a part of the city that has some architectural or contextual interest but is badly run down starts to get at some point the artistic people show up and they think hey, this is kind of cool. If we just did this to it, there would be really something to it and it usually doesn’t hurt that the rents are low because of course artists never have any money. So then they go in there and civilize the hell out of it and of course they’re renting and that jacks up the property values and then the people who are a little less open but kind of interested in art start flowing in behind them and then soon the whole place is rejuvenated and expensive and of course the artists have to go somewhere else. But it’s a very interesting phenomenon because what’s happening is that even in the cities they’re taking chaos and turning it into order and that’s what artists do. So now that’s all to tell you that there are different ways of transmitting, representing and transmitting information and that you can incorporate the information without having any articulated notion of what you’re doing. So of course that’s the case because otherwise you’d have to claim that you understand everything you do and can articulate it and it’s like that’s just wrong. You have a theory of yourself but it’s not a very accurate theory which is why you’re always doing things that are strange as far as you’re concerned which is also extremely bizarre. It’s like who the hell are you if you can’t even control your own behaviour? And what does it mean to control it and what does it mean to not control it? These are very, very complex and strange issues. So, alright, so I think the best way into this is actually from an evolutionary perspective and I’m not convinced that this is correct but I think there’s something to it. So when you think about the nature of experience then you think, well the nature of experience is quite different for different sorts of creatures and one of the primary differences between creatures is the degree to which they’re capable of social interaction and then of complex social interaction and primates generally speaking are very social creatures. They live in troops or packs like dogs which is why we can get along with dogs because we understand each other being hierarchical troop animals. We understand dogs and they understand us and they can fit right in pretty much. And we’re very, very good at figuring out where we are in the troop and by we I mean primates. I mean us going back a very, very long period of time. Monkeys and chimpanzees have very sophisticated knowledge of the social structure surrounding them. They know who’s who and they know what status they are. They know what rank they are essentially and that’s also the case with people. And so one of the things that you might say about people is that our reality isn’t nature exactly, it’s culture. Now you can make the argument that you can’t really distinguish nature from culture and I believe that that’s true and untrue in a sense. I think you can talk about the human and non-human elements of reality and you can identify the human elements of reality as culture even though culture is so old that you can also think about it as an inevitable part of nature. So anyway, so most of our experience in our evolutionary past, at least let’s say for the last several million years, we might as well go back to when the ancestors of humans hypothetically split off from the ancestors of chimpanzees. You know and people know very accurately when these sorts of splits occur by the way because what they do is they have some sense of the rate of transformation of DNA. You know it’s transforms at a rate that’s fairly constant across time and so then if you take two creatures and you determine how much genetic similarity there is between them and how much difference you can calculate how far back they diverged. And so you know the fossil record helps with that, although it’s very sparse, but the DNA record it’s not really sparse at all in some sense and so you can be very accurate about. We can even tell when people evolved or learned to wear clothing and the reason we can tell that is because there’s certain kinds of lice that can only live on clothing and they seem to have diverged from the lice that live in hair about 50,000 years ago, something like that. And so the hypothesis is well we must have been figuring out how to wear clothes at that point because the lice figured out how to live in it. So you know it probably took them a little while but I doubt if it took them very long. You know those little creatures that breed fast man, those things can evolve quickly, much to our dismay. So okay, so a big part of the experiential field of advanced primates is the social world and so we could call that the primate world and then we could also say that another big part of their experience is the non-primate world which would be roughly speaking the natural world. And then we could also say that the other element of their experience, the other elements of their experience that are very constant is their subjective being and we don’t know much about the subjective being of creatures like chimpanzees although you can understand I think the subjective being of a dog well enough to befriend the dog and so you have some insight and I think it’s also reasonable to assume that, I mean for a long time people were unwilling to admit that animals had a soul, that was the first problem, but after that they were conscious and even the behaviourists fought that notion. But I think the simplest thing to do is to assume that animals and human beings are the same except when you can prove that they’re different because we share so much of our evolutionary past that the logical inference is that if you think a dog is doing something that’s sort of like you would do in that situation and feeling that way it probably is with certain exceptions for species difference and if that wasn’t the case I don’t think that you could have a relationship with a dog or cat. You can’t have much of a relationship with a lizard although there are lizards, there are lizards, bearded dragons in particular that are social, they like to lay on top of each other and they hang around together and you can actually have more of a relationship with them and apparently the same is true of iguanas. So you can go quite a ways back in the evolutionary, you know backwards in evolutionary time and still have enough similarity between you and the creature that you’re interacting with so that you can get a pretty good sense of at least some element of their being and so the idea that our subjectivity is a very ancient part of our experience seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable supposition. We certainly know that it’s been around in all likelihood for at least 150,000 years on the conservative side because there have been human beings that are essentially identical to us from a genetic perspective going back 150,000 years but I think you’d have to be a pretty harsh judge to assume that higher order primates like chimps don’t have some consciousness and you know and some limited self-consciousness. You know if you mark a chimps nose with lipstick and then show it a mirror it will at least sometimes take the lipstick off its nose although I’ve seen a gorilla try to fight with a mirror which well I haven’t personally seen that but I’ve seen a very good video of that happening but I think the gorilla would eventually figure out that it was him in the mirror. Dogs will recognize a dog in the mirror but they seem to learn to ignore their reflection very very rapidly and I don’t know if that means that they have a rudimentary self-consciousness and they figure out that that dog is them or if the dog just doesn’t smell like a dog and then the dog thinks well it can’t be a dog because it doesn’t smell like a dog and dogs probably think that something is a dog because of how it smells and not because of how it looks. I think that’s why dogs don’t seem to have any sense of relative size because you can get a little chihuahua barking like mad at a Great Dame you think really you know that’s going to work is it? The dog doesn’t seem to have a clue about that like he’s perfectly happy and the Great Dame weirdly enough will often back off so anyways. Okay so we’ve been in a social world a deeply social world for a long time and I’m also going to make the presupposition that we’ve been in a stratified social world for a very long period of time and I think that you could call that if you would never want to by the way you could call that the patriarchy. I think that I wouldn’t call it that because that’s not what it is but I think that the fact that it’s called that and that that’s accepted as a reasonable representation is actually a consequence of the action of an archetype and the archetype is that it’s the archetype of the terrible great father actually because you think there’s a social structure with striations in it and that has advantages and disadvantages and the advantages are you can live in it and the disadvantages are you have to follow the damn rules and they might not necessarily be to your individual benefit so within a social dominance hierarchy there’s always a bifurcated it also always has bifurcated significance it can be good and is good in so far as it protects you from say from threat from without you know maybe from other primates invading your territory for example but it’s also can be a very dismal structure if you happen to be at the bottom of the hierarchy so anyways as far as I can tell that dominant structure is typically represented as masculine and I think the reason for that although I’m not absolutely certain of this I think the reason for that is that our social hierarchies are probably more like chimp social hierarchies than they are like bonobo social hierarchy so the bonobos are kind of a strange breed of chimps I don’t know how many of you know about them but the bonobos are extraordinarily sexual and they use sex pretty much as a standard means of communication and tension reduction and there’s a lot of sex between the females and the bonobo troops and they the use of sex seems to bond them together in a way that keeps male aggression under control which is quite interesting and so but in the chimps the fundamental dominance hierarchy is male although there’s a female dominance hierarchy as well and some females can certainly be more dominant than some males but the fundamental structure seems to be male and then I would also say well it’s probably dependent to some degree in the primate community and in and other social animals on other factors so we know for example that the gender that has the highest level of testosterone tends to be the dominant gender and so in hyenas the females have larger have higher levels of testosterone they’re actually bigger and more aggressive than the males and the price they pay for that is that they have to give birth through a structure that’s very much like a penis which is not the world’s most pleasant experience and might account for the hyenas temper so but in human beings you know you see sexual dimorphism men are slightly bigger than women and that’s also generally characteristic of creatures that have a dominance hierarchy that’s tilted towards masculine and then the other factor seems to be that human beings have their infants our infants have very very very very very long periods of dependence and it’s very difficult to maneuver your way doing anything really especially anything that has to do with competition and power if you’re taking care of you know one infant let alone three and so it seems to me that those are all valid reasons why the primary power structures among human beings have typically been male and why they’re represented as masculine now I think there are other reasons too because this is a multifaceted phenomena I mean one of the things that’s very interesting about human females is that they’re selective maters now chimp females are not selective maters and what that means is that the dominant males still have most of the offspring but the reason for that apparently is because they chase the subordinate males away from sexually receptive females although the sexually receptive females will sneak off behind a rock somewhere and mate with a subordinate male but as long as the dominant male is around the probability of that is quite low so that the female chimps aren’t sexually selective whereas human females have concealed ovulation so that no one knows when they’re at their most fertile and they’re selective maters and women in every society virtually that’s ever been studied have a typical pattern of behavior which is that if you look at the female dominance hierarchy and you look at the male dominance hierarchy the females will mate across and up dominance hierarchies and the males will mate across and down which works fine both genders because their interests align but it also means that in all likelihood women have exerted tremendous sexual selection pressure on men and that might be part of the reason of the many reasons that we actually you know the theory is that the common ancestor between chimps and humans was a lot more like a modern chimp than like a modern human so for whatever reason we’ve undergone a lot more transformation in the last seven million years than chimps have and one possible reason for that and I think it’s a highly probable reason is that sexual selection operated a lot more viciously so to speak among humans it’s operated to the point where you have twice as many female ancestors as male and you might think well that can’t be possible but here’s how it’s possible it’s like only every second man had children had a child well all women had one now of course that isn’t what happened but on average that’s what happened so the proportion of men who are completely childless in any given generation is far higher than the proportion of women who are so you see an element of expendability in males and that’s typical across the biological community because you don’t need as many males as you need females in order to keep the population moving forward and one of the things that happens as a consequence of that at least in principle is that males are more behaviourally variable and variable across a lot of dimensions than females are and that’s a plus because they’re more variable on the upside but it’s also a negative because they’re more prevalent on the downside so now there’s substantial argument about that in relationship to people you know what the actual implications are of that for human beings one potential implication is that although women and men have equivalent IQs the standard deviation is slightly different which means that there are more males who are intellectually impaired but there are also more males who are four and five standard deviations above the population mean you don’t need much of a difference in standard deviation in order to produce radical differences at the extreme so for example I’ll give you an example males are more aggressive than females among humans but the effect is only about half a standard deviation and so what that means is that if you take two females a female and a male randomly from a population and you were trying to guess who was the more aggressive of the two most of the time you know about 60 percent of the time the male would be more aggressive than the female but 40 percent of the time it would be reversed so you know that’s that’s a lot of overlap but then here’s the rub so let’s say just for example that among the population of men and women combined only the most aggressive person out of a hundred ends up in jail those are all men because that tilt towards aggression is enough so that if you go way out on the distribution the only people who are that extreme are men even though the population difference isn’t that great so anyways there’s a massive debate in the relevant literature about the potential consequences of that for things like cognitive function because there’s some indication as well that men are more cognitively specialized but women are more cognitively robust and so anyways it doesn’t really matter but what does matter is the fact of this permanent dominance hierarchy now the dominance hierarchy also has another the male dominance hierarchy also has another feature so we already said that you know on average men are half as likely to leave offspring as women are and so what that means is that all things considered this isn’t I’m not trying to make this into a circular argument because I could say it’s the more successful males that leave offspring but then you’d say well that’s a definition Darwinian definition of success but I’m not I don’t mean Darwinian success because that’s self-evident what I mean is that if you look in the modern world for example and you try to predict number of available sexual partners for a given male your best predictive measure of that is income and the best predictive measure of that is intelligence and conscientiousness and so what happens is that males orient themselves in groups and then they compete and then women peel off the top and so the women are in a position of judgment on men and the judgment is the judgment of nature now from a Darwinian perspective you know when we think of nature we think of like a friend it depends on who you are but like if you’re an environmentalist you think of a French impressionist landscape you know forgetting that nature is also malarial mosquitoes and cancer and all those and you know rats infected with bubonic plague and all those other lovely things but from a Darwinian perspective you can define nature much more straightforwardly and more accurately as that which selects now you know you hear a lot about natural selection and natural selection basically assumes that there are a random distribution of alterations in genetic structure in any in any population in any generation and some of those random alterations will be more suited to that particular environment suited being they’ll live and they’ll reproduce and genetic transformation takes place across the millennia as the organism chases the landscape roughly speaking but Darwin you know Darwin who is an unbelievably intelligent person was also very very interested in sexual selection and as far as Darwin was concerned sexual selection was just as powerful a force in modifying genetic structure modifying and driving evolution as natural selection and that’s been very underplayed by biologists and that’s only started to switch maybe in the last I would say it hasn’t switched that much yet but it only really started to switch probably in about the last 25 years and that’s because the idea of sexual selection makes things a hell of a lot more complicated you know because well first of all you know in the standard Darwinian account of evolution there’s no place for mind right there’s no place for a creator there’s no place for teleology and teleology is something moving towards an end and goal right but you think is if sexual selection is operative and if consciousness is ancient then mind has been operating through sexual selection as long as there’s been sexual selection I mean so you think you think do you have any choice do you make any choice and who your partner will be a sexual partner will be and the answer to that is well it’s hardly random you make a choice and what’s interesting is that you know if you take 60 people let’s say if you took 60 women and you asked them you showed them a bunch of men and you asked them to rank them in terms of their attractiveness there’s going to be fairly consistent rankings you know I mean we know what makes up attractive facial features for women and for men you it’s easy to determine that what you do is you take 60 faces and you you average the features so you don’t get the average person because the average person is more like a median you get the averaged person and the average person has perfectly symmetrical features that are nicely shaped and fairly big guys and and and they’re there very you know they’re very nice-looking they’re very attractive and so that means that there’s like a central human form in a sense that we’re what we find attractive and we see this in other species for example there are butterflies who won’t mate with another butterfly if it’s if it’s like a sixteenth of an inch out of symmetry because then it’s not a butterfly of that type you know and that’s how people think too is the more you deviation from the averaged person the less canonically human you appear and the less attractive that you appear and so you know we’re chasing this ideal in some sense that’s an emergent property of the nature of our species and then you know there’s certain physical characteristics wide shoulders in men and narrow waist in women its waist to hip ratio is a very common marker of beauty across cultures and across body types interestingly enough so if you take thin women and heavier women and you get men to rate the attractiveness of the women within that category the heavy women and the light women who have a hip waist to hip ratio of about 0.68 are the ones that are judged most attractive physically and so and that actually correlates by the way with fertility because this abdominal fat in a young woman is a sign of ill health and also a marker of decreased likelihood of conception now none of this is operating consciously obviously it’s it’s deeply wired into us it’s part of our immediate perception but it still does indicate that there is an ideal like a platonic ideal lurking at the back of our minds against whom we compare everyone that we meet and then you might say what’s the nature of that platonic ideal and that’s a very very complicated question you know I would say that I would say that you could you could almost literally claim that the well you can certainly claim that the ideal male is represented mythology as a hero so and that’s actually what mythology is about it’s about representing ideal patterns of behavior so it’s hardly surprising and so you know if you go to a movie and it’s a romance and there’s the main lead character that you’re supposed to fall in love with if you happen to be the kind of person that would fall in love with that kind of person then he’s going to act out a particular pattern of behavior and the pattern of behavior is quite identifiable so for example he’s going to be he’s going to move forward and explore and not hide in tower and the probability that he’s going to be creative is very high and the probability that he’s going to be good-looking and strong is very high and so those are archetypal features and those aren’t all the archetypal features because those are in some sense those are the those are the self-evident ones but you know people are also evaluating each other for such things as intelligence and personality and character and you could say in some sense the men are competing to be the best man and the women are watching the male competition to to take the man who wins on the presupposition that he wouldn’t win if he wasn’t the best man it’s a very very intelligent strategy you know because why not outsource the problem you let the men sort it out well exactly it’s too cognitively complex to compute you could say that the male dominance hierarchy is equivalent to the stock market it’s exactly equivalent to the stock market is the many like the stocks are stocks are always competing with one another and with every other commodity for primacy of price and value and that’s exactly what happens with male competition so one of the things that we’ve just discovered in my lab this is Caitlin Burton’s work it’s very cool we took we were trying to understand the fundamental substructure of conservatism versus liberalism we’re we’re and I’m going to speak in terms of conservatism because that’s how we that’s how we construed the data although we could have done the reverse if we were going to construe liberalism and what we did was we took we got a bunch of people to sit down and write down statements they thought that conservatives versus liberals would disagree with hunt you know I think we had I don’t remember how many statements 300 something like that we have a lot of people generate them and take them from news items and so forth because we didn’t want any bias in the in the initial question set you know and or we didn’t want a bias that wasn’t there in the actual world so we have many people do this and then we gave these questions to many many people online in a variety of stages and we we extracted those out that seemed to best fit the data and that were and then assess them for the utility and predicting things like party membership or voting behavior and so we got a good structure it makes a lot of sense and what we found with regards to conservatism was there was an ethnocentrism factor it was the third and weakest factor and that would be associated with in-group preference versus out-group derogation so those are anti-immigrant people fundamentally you know and they’re they’re well they’re ethnocentric that’s that’s that’s the simplest way to that’s the simplest way to explain it and then the next look that the second smallest factor was basically religious traditionalism and so that and most of this was done with Americans you know for a variety of reasons and that was really where the fundamentalist Christians nested you know and not not everyone that was not only a factor that wasn’t only a factor made up of fundamentalist Christian beliefs but they loaded hat hat heavily those were people who weren’t for stem cell research they were anti-abortion they were anti-gay marriage or they were pro-traditional which is how they see themselves and then the largest factor was what was a factor that we called masculine independence and it was more characteristic of men and what it basically consisted of was an attitude that winners win and losers lose and that’s just how it should be so there it was it was it was the men who the personality predictors one of them was extroverted assertiveness for example these were these were hunting and right to own firearms also loaded on this factor but it was like it was masculine competitiveness I think is the best way of thinking about it and I think it’s a good illustration of the kind of individual attitude that makes you more likely to attempt to climb up dominance hierarchies and dominate them from the top down you know and that’s not necessarily something that would be associated with factors like compassion so and then we well I’ll leave it at that it’s just you can see I’m telling you that because you can see how these proclivities emerge and manifest themselves in all sorts of areas of behavior I can tell you something else that’s very interesting about about men and violence I don’t know if I can get this story straight because it’s been a while since I told it yeah so there’s this interesting phenomena that it’s very characteristic of societies I believe being studied now you can calculate an index called the Gini coefficient and the Gini coefficient is a number that represents how much inequality of income distribution there is in a given geographical area so you could calculate a Gini coefficient for a street or you know an area in a city or a city or a state or a country you can do it at all those levels and what you find is you always hear this idea that poverty causes crime that’s a classic left-wing idea but it’s wrong it’s seriously wrong and it’s importantly wrong and it’s definitively wrong not only that so there’s no argument about this it’s already been established what causes crime especially aggressive crime is relative poverty and relative poverty is not the same thing as poverty at all it’s seriously not the same thing poverty is when you don’t have enough to eat relative poverty is when the guy next door has a much better car than you so and there’s lots of relative poverty in the United States and there’s some absolute poverty but even the absolute poverty in the United States is nothing like the absolute poverty say in places like India or in sub-saharan Africa where absolute poverty means you have nothing now what’s really interesting about the Gini coefficient is that if you go to places where everyone roughly speaking is is poor say by national standards I think South Dakota was often used as an example or maybe one of the maritime provinces like Newfoundland where there’s where there’s low average income but it’s pretty flat distribution there’s almost no crime and if you go to places where the everyone’s rich then there’s almost no crime but if you go places where there were poor people and moderately well-off people and rich people and the distribution is really steep then the rate of aggressive behavior among young men and it’s usually within their own ethnic group starts to spot skyrocket out of control and the reason for that seems to be that if the dominance hierarchy is too steep then the young men have no likelihood of climbing to a dominant position while playing the standard social game and so what they do is turn to aggression to make their mark on the world and it works too that’s the other thing is that make no mistake about it if you’re if you’re looking for status in a place where status is hard to achieve and you’re the meanest toughest guy around then and you know around a bunch of people who like you don’t have much money then you’re going to benefit from that status it works yeah sure sure yeah I mean you can make a real conservative argument for making sure that you know the conservatives are very anti-income distribution and we figure that’s because of the guys that have this male independence you know they identify with this male independence factor they don’t want to be distributing resources to people who are down the dominance hierarchy because they will they want them down in the dominance hierarchy they want there to be a difference between the people on top and the people on the bottom so that they can be the people on top so that it increases their relative attractiveness like it’s a perfectly logical game and they presume that well the rules are set up and like every man can go for it do his best and the winner wins and the loser loses and that’s just how it is and don’t ask me to fix it because I don’t want to you know and besides that it’s I don’t find it I find it distasteful to attempt to fix it more than that right because it’s a moral issue it’s not just an intellectual issue so so you you can make a case however you can make a case from the conservative point of view especially with regards to say beliefs in religious traditionalism and the desire to maintain social stability that you shouldn’t let income distribution become too unequal like one of the big things your society has to do is to make sure that that doesn’t get out of hand because it tends to get out of hand it tends towards a few people having everything and almost everyone else having nothing it’s a natural in a sense it’s a natural consequence of economic progression which is actually something that Marx pointed out although an Italian named Pareto had figured it out at approximately the same time and I think with a lot more conceptual clarity but the more unequal you let your society get the higher the probability of of death roughly speaking through through violent causes and you know but but but I’m telling you why it is is that you know men want to climb the dominance arc and the reason they want to climb the dominance arc is because that’s how they get access to women Well we have this contradictory problem we want to be protected by the structure but we want to advance our position within it and so that means what that should mean and this is I think the definition of civilized behavior is that you’re allowed to advance your position within the structure as long as you don’t disrupt it negatively you know and I think most people do do that in fact I think people in civilized countries do that so effectively that it’s an absolute incomprehensible miracle I can’t understand how or why it ever got established but like a psychopath will climb the ladder and cut the rungs off underneath fundamentally right it’s like he doesn’t care he doesn’t even care if the damn thing maintains itself you know he’s perfectly willing to have it destroyed after he’s exhausted it you know but if everyone acted like that or even if a fairly substantial percentage of people acted like that the whole thing would come to a halt virtually like in no time flat so so I mean why see you might here here’s the reason likely you know because one of the things we were talking about was masculine violence now the thing about masculine violence is it only tends to emerge in situations where there doesn’t there don’t seem to be any other reasonably viable means of advancing status so it’s not reasonable to say that men are aggressive you can say that on average men are more aggressive than women and you can also say that if that if you put men in a situation where they have no where they can see status differences but they have no means of moving forward that they’re likely to turn to aggression as a way of establishing dominance and then you can say that that’s the reason for that is because it makes them more attractive what the fundamental reason yeah yeah absolutely that’s right yeah that’s exactly right that the the the evolutionary psychology explanation for the pathology of polygamy is that if once you let it establish itself then the men get ultraviolent many people have said that and yes I think you can make a strong case for that and I think the fundamental reason is the one that you just pointed out you know the idea is well would you rather have one woman or die you know or sorry that’s not quite right would you rather know that’s not quite that’s not quite right would you it’s more like would you be willing to limit yourself to one partner or have a shot at many partners but a much higher probability of dying yeah right and you know some guys will take that they’ll take the the high-risk approach you know so now if this doesn’t eliminate the difference in individual differences in determining who’s going to be aggressive because what will happen is that as the Gini coefficient pressure rises the more aggressive men the men who are more aggressive by nature will get more aggressive first right so you can imagine there it’s a threshold phenomenon in some sense so and what I should tell you as well is the relationship between the Gini coefficient and male-on-male homicide isn’t like point two or point three which is about the correlation that you’d get if you were predicting something like that using personality it’s like point eight or point nine it’s like it eats up all of it it’s the explanation so it’s a huge effect you know it’s so it’s so big an effect that you can basically say oh well we figured that out although psychologists never know when they figured anything out and they keep endlessly retesting it over and over and over because you know we don’t know how to bring our science to a stop but if you don’t accept the Gini coefficient aggression data it’s like you might as well throw the rest of social sciences out the window because the effect is unbelievably powerful it depend you can do it at any level of analysis you can do it you can do it by county you can do it by city you can do it by state and you can do it by country and it works on all of those levels you bet yep yeah and that’s a great question I mean the methodologically sophisticated studies have done exactly that to ensure that well to ensure that it’s actually this phenomena rather than other factors that might be operative in that particular geographical area so countries with a higher Gini coefficient are more violent and cities within that country that have a higher than average Gini coefficient for that country are more violent on average it’s a very very robust robust robust finding so all right so we’re going to say for the sake of argument that you’ve got the male dominance hierarchy and it’s represented as masculine now one of the things Jung said he thought that women carried an image of man in their unconscious and he thought that the image that women carried of men in their unconscious was a group of men not an individual man he called that the animus whereas he believed that the image that women image of women that men carried in their collective unconscious was of a single woman and he called that the anima now I’m just I’m just telling you that and I’m not going to justify it or even but I just want you to keep that in the back of your mind and so I guess part of the reason that that I’m telling you that come to think of it is that I think it may provide some insight into why the idea of the patriarchy has become such a well accepted notion because it is an archetypal notion but it’s a one-sided archetypal notion okay so back to sexual selection now we are already talked about the fact that biologists perhaps were uncomfortable with the idea of sexual selection because it brings a non-random factor into evolution a seriously non-random factor because you have to go back as far as you can in history to where there was no choice on the part of the organism to attribute evolution to natural selection alone and you have to go a long ways back as I said even butterflies are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a high-quality butterfly partner in butterfly terms and a low-quality butterfly partner and you know that that insects have been around for a very very long time so we have no idea what that actually means is that we have no idea what role choice has made in in the evolutionary process but one thing that you can infer is that the reason that human beings are the way they are now and not like our chimp slash human ancestor is because the sexual selection process got started and it was intense and so as a consequence of that well here we are and so you know maybe it was a good thing although it’s it’s very hard in some sense and all those people who failed and that’s you know roughly speaking twice as many men as women so you know so then that also raises the question like who exactly who’s responsible for the male dominance hierarchy because you could say well it’s male competitiveness but you could also say yeah well it’s an inevitable function of female selection and so which is not an argument that you hear very often but I think it’s a very difficult argument to escape from and that leads us to our next hypothesis so we’re going to say well that masculine dominance hierarchy is represented as masculine I’m going to call that the great father and that’s the permanent dominance hierarchy of men and it’s always there it moves through history it’s different men all the time but it’s like the men slot in and out as they are born and die but the structure itself stays intact across forever it’s always there it’s been there at least for millions of years so for our purposes we’ll just call it permanent it’s a permanent part of experience and it’s a big part of it and you know as culture gets more and more covers larger and larger expanses of territory and gets more and more sophisticated it’s an ever larger part of reality so I mean most of us spend almost all our time coping with the dominance hierarchy and almost none of our time combating nature you know you get wet and today you get wet for a little while and that’s it you know but most of the problems that you would face in a purely natural environments like you’re so distant from them that you can hardly even imagine you can’t even imagine what it would be like in some sense to be in an environment like that so yep well that’s a good question so the way I would answer that question is twofold so the question was what drives women to to move to the top of the hierarchy it’s something that’s worth discussing so if anybody objects to what I’m going to say then please do because I’m not you know dishing this out is receive truth it’s it’s I’ve been trying to figure this out and this is what it looks like to me the first thing is I think they’re male and female dominance hierarchies both exist but they’re different and that females compete with each other intensely but they don’t compete for the same things and they don’t compete the same way so let me tell you a little story this is a bit of a divergence but but it’s an interesting point and one of the you know one of the questions I’ve always been asked in this class is because I’m going to lay out a hero story for you and the fundamental hero archetype and the hero is masculine in mythology and so the women always ask well what about the role of the woman and it’s like it’s very very complex which of course all you women already know because it is very very complex so but it isn’t something that first of all I don’t think it was a question that would have been asked before the invention of the birth control pill because we know what the archetypal we know what the archetypal female is prior to that it’s the Virgin Mary with child it’s a virgin with child which means like it means that the unit for woman is woman with child it’s not woman it’s woman with child and well that’s it’s obvious why that is because as soon as you become a woman in most societies you have a child before that you’re a girl and that’s you know that’s in some sense that’s irrelevant you know in terms of your destiny now you might say well what what’s your archetypal pattern if you’re not a mother well the way it looks to me is that there’s two archetypes for personal development for the personal path roughly speaking there’s the hero and that would be the person who explores the unknown and discovers something of value and brings it back and distributes it to the community so it’s like a hunting it’s like it’s probably predicated on a hunting platform because we our bodies are hunting platforms basically so you know and one theory about what men did which is a very probable theory is that they went out and hunted for meat and chimps like meat they’ll eat it whenever they can although they’re not very good hunters but they will definitely eat meat and human beings are so good at hunting that we probably well for example we probably wiped out the mammoths and when human beings came into North America there was as many different kinds of large animals in North America as there was in Africa and human beings killed all of them and that was just with you know like they didn’t have our notion of technologically sophisticated weapons it was bows and arrows and clubs and spears and nonetheless like they got rid of everything you know large cats giant beavers mammoths we’re very very very very dangerous and anyways so but then there’s another archetype which is the I would say it’s the maternal archetype in a sense and one of the things that’s very interesting about human males is that they’re quite maternal by comparison to other animals so for example like the mother bear doesn’t have that the male bear the boar the is it boars and sows with bears I think it is anyways you keep the cubs away from the male because he’ll kill them now not all males will do that but many will it’s they don’t have any filial attachment and that’s the case for many but not all complex mammals you know pair bonding on a permanent basis is relatively rare but joint provision of children that’s exceedingly rare and men are pretty good at taking care of children you know there I would say they’re not as good at taking care of infants as women are because they don’t have the full range of resources at hand and they’re not I don’t think they’re they I don’t think they have the same kind of immediate intuitive understanding of or attraction to babies that men have I think that switches around the age of two or two and a half when the kids can engage in rough-and-tumble play because men are much more likely to engage in rough-and-tumble play with children than women are and rough-and-tumble play seems to be one of the things that civilizes children and it’s partly because you know one of the things that you have to learn when you’re a child is what actually hurts you and what can be ignored and what actually hurts someone else and what can be ignored and the best way to learn that is in rough-and-tumble play because what happens is that if you’re playing with a kid they get more and more excited and they do more and more crazy things until they do something that either hurts them or or hurts you and then you have to say look you know that’s you can’t do that and it’s it’s like a dance in a sense you know when you’re wrestling with a little kid and you have to let them win fairly frequently because otherwise they don’t they don’t continue the game and you can tell that because if they’re if the game is going well they’re laughing with insane delight because kids just love rough-and-tumble play you know and and they love crazy things I mean you can throw them in the air and catch them and they think that’s just great you know and but partly what you’re doing is you’re extending their body in all sorts of ways and getting them to learn in an embodied sense where the limits of that where their limits are and where the limits of other people are and that’s embodied and children who haven’t had that man they’re just so awkward it’s unbelievable you know they might have some hypothetical sense of how to interact with another person but they don’t have an embodied sense of it and they can’t tell the difference between what hurts them and what doesn’t you know because often a young child if they’re startled they’ll start to cry and then you can say well you know that didn’t hurt and then they’ll notice oh yeah that didn’t hurt they’ll stop crying but if they haven’t had their limits tested they’ll cry at anything unexpected even if it doesn’t hurt and that’s not good because if you cry under all conditions the probability that you’ll make friends when you’re three is like zero because another kid will start playing with you and maybe play rough and if you burst into tears you know several times the person the kids just gonna go somewhere else and find a different playmate you know they’ll say you’re just a baby which is roughly exactly accurate roughly exactly roughly accurate so so anyways back to the archetypal representation I think really the way to think about it is that for men the hero archetype is the is the archetype that’s dominant and in the forefront and the maternal archetype is is subordinate and in the background I mean in inside their own psyches whereas with women it’s it’s reversed so each of the genders can play the role of the other gender but there’s a tilt in each of them towards the what would you say well towards gender I would say towards typical human gender normative behavior now the social constructionists believe that no such thing exists but those people are so pathological that even considering what they have to say is a mistake so you know they people they act as if there is no biology and everything’s cultural and it’s like well no that’s just not right now what biology means in practice and what you should do about it that’s a whole different question but to think of all these differences is socially height differences between men and women are not socially constructed and they they’re relevant and the upper body strength differences between men and women are not socially constructed and they’re relevant too you know so one of the things I was wondering about maybe you guys can help me clarify this or tell me where I’m not thinking about this properly and if you think there’s any if I’m missing something let me know one of the things my daughter said she watched my my son one day have a fight with his best friend it was a physical fight you know and so my his best friend did something that my son didn’t regard as appropriate and so he hit him and then there was a fight and then you know three days later they were friends again and my daughter said to me that she was very annoyed by that which wasn’t the fight exactly but the fact that they could have a fight and then they were friends again three days later because she said that that option wasn’t available to women right now and the option is the option that the men have is well if you get out of hand I’ll just sock you one and then we’ll have established where the boundaries of civilized behavior begin and end and I would say that in my experience if I’m talking to someone who’s self-confident and masculine and accomplished there’s always an undercurrent of potential violence it’s an undercurrent and that’s actually an undercurrent of respect which means like there’s things that we can do to each other in a civilized way but there are rules that if you break like all hell’s gonna break loose and one of the consequences of that is that it doesn’t right now the typical bullying pattern for women in high school and junior high is reputation destruction and I’m wondering what does what are the implications for the conduct of behavior if there is no recourse to aggression to solve disputes because they don’t get solved you know I’ve tried to analyze what it means to say no to someone because no means something right no means well if you tell a child no what you’re basically telling the child as far as I can tell is that if you continue doing that something you don’t like will happen to you and then if you’re civilized that’s saying no what happens is you say no a couple of times and then instead of devaluing the word which is what you do if you just said it over and over a hundred times with no consequences you take action that’s nonverbal and so one of the things you might do is remove the child from the situation or you might put them on the steps or maybe you put them on the steps and they run away so you have to hold them on the steps but the point is the point to the child is there are limits and if you exceed them you will be physically controlled what if there’s no option for physical control what happens well I don’t know the answer that I don’t know what women do about that but I also don’t know what men do about that in relationship to women so I was watching something the other day it was this I posted it on my Twitter account as an example of animus possession so this a woman and a man were having a dispute on the street it was a political dispute and this particular woman was like the way she was behaving towards this particular man was such that had she been a man and had he been a man he would have definitely hit her because she was right in his face and she was cursing at him and swearing and calling him an idiot and like really like being hyper aggressive of course he couldn’t do anything about it so then I was watching that I was thinking just exactly what are you supposed to do in a situation like that because you’re screwed no matter what you do if you’re on the male side it’s like you can’t you can’t you certainly can’t intervene physically it’s like you’re dead in the water instant instantly in your eyes the eyes of society and in the woman’s eyes instantly if you move past the boundary if you leave well there’s no glory in running away that’s for sure so what exactly is supposed to happen I have no idea what’s supposed to happen in a situation like that I think what happens what will happen over time is that men just won’t put themselves in those situations right right but you know that’s definitely not seen as an admirable form of behavior among men so I mean I don’t think it’s an admirable form of behavior period but but I mean you know I mean aggression is often not admirable so that you so that’s fine yeah oh definitely oh yeah would have been a real victory for her if she would have got slapped yeah absolutely because it would have it would have proved everything she said instantly yeah yeah definitely yeah yeah well I think that that would be a reasonably effective strategy for us a street con a street confrontation like that I’m not so sure how well it would work in a prolonged competition inside a company for example in a hierarchy yeah because you know the truth of the matter is is that men have no idea how to treat women if they’re in male power hierarchies they have no idea how to treat them and that’s because we have no idea how to do that no one has it’s only been happening in any you know pronounced sense for about well on a societal level really probably since the mid 70s you know that’s it’s it’s three generations it’s a drop in the bucket and it’s a very very difficult thing to sort out so I mean part of the reason that I’m thinking about these sorts of things is because I’ve been very interested in the fact that may up men are doing very badly in junior high and high school and they’re bailing out of the universities like man like in at the rate it’s going there’ll be almost no men in most disciplines within ten years so I mean you can tell that even in this class although there it’s funny because on my YouTube videos I look at the gender distribution for for viewing and it’s 80% male which I’m you know it’s interesting to me I’m not sure exactly why that is but in lots of fields it’s it’s 80 20 women already and so and I can’t I can’t see why that won’t I think it’ll accelerate as we move forward rather than slowing down so all right so anyways back to sexual selection and and the power hierarchy now from a Darwinian perspective one of the things that you might do is call whatever selects nature and so when we think of nature and when we think about nature from a scientific perspective we don’t ever think about humans as as agents of nature right we we tend to conceive of the human being as something that stands against nature right that’s a mythology it’s like the human being against the natural world it’s a very common it’s a very common plot in movies and in stories so it’s man against nature roughly speaking so we tend to think of those as separate categories but if women do the selection among human beings at least they do the intense selection then women are nature for men and that’s exactly what the archetype is it’s mother nature and mother nature has a very vicious element and the vicious element of mother nature is rejection and that can be maternal rejection which is you know certainly something that causes a tremendous amount of trauma but it can also be the more the most fundamental form of rejection which is which and the most fundamental form of rejection is sexual rejection because it it means that you are judged as biologically unworthy roughly speaking so and there’s other reasons why so the reason I’m telling you this is because I’ve been trying to puzzle out what you see in mythology quite clearly is that the dominance hierarchy is represented as male so culture is male and nature is female I thought why the hell would nature be female it’s like okay well I’ve given you one reason and I think it’s the primary reason there’s other reasons because nature is also seen as that which produces natural forms of course women produce natural forms so that’s it that’s a logical association and then well we can leave it at that for the time being so now let me show you how I think that that’s represented I think this is the I think this is the way the world is structured when you consider it as a place of action so the world as a place of action has characters not like the elements are characters and the characters are engaged in in dramatic behavior so and there are classes of characters and as far as I can tell this is a reasonably comprehensive classification of dramatic characters and we’ll start from the inside and go out and you can think of any of these as primary by the way and you’ll see that reflected in different kinds of mythology so sometimes the maternal is primary and sometimes the culture is primary and sometimes the hero the individual is primary and I think that’s because these three things are irreducibly primary in that from from the perspective of consciousness in that to be conscious there has to be you but if you’re conscious you have to have evolved within a culture and that culture is necessarily nested in the natural world and so wherever there’s one there’s all three and the individual is also the thing without the individual there wouldn’t be any separation between nature and culture and so you can see the individual individual consciousness is the generator of the entire structure but you can say that about any of the characters so there’s the archetypal son because the hero tends to be masculine and then it has a that character has a positive element and a negative element and the positive element is the good person and the negative element is the bad person and I would say the archetypal representations of those are like the Savior and Satan and that’s basically there are portrayals like that in virtually every system of mythology and religion now it seems to me that in some sense Christianity and this is probably under the influence of the Zoroastrians developed the most articulated representation of good versus evil at the individual level and that’s why you can identify two fundamental characters in the Christian story so to speak that play out these roles and they’re seen as eternal adversaries locked in battle across time and that would be the battle takes place in the natural world battle takes place in the cultural world and the battle takes place within as well so and you can see that reflected in stories all the time because you know if it’s so it’s so frequently the case that you know the hero the superhero has his nemesis right and it’s the guy that he’s extraordinarily well matched with who continually tests his wits and whose motivation is essentially destructive and so you see that with Batman and the Joker for example or you see it with Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty or there’s always there’s always this this pairing this pairing and that’s partly because I think there are the archetypal realms of human decision-making are something like are you working to make things better are you working to make things worse are you possessed by resentment and hatred so that you want things to degenerate and burn or are you hopeful and and and capable of manifesting faith in the future so that you’re working to make things better and then there’s a battle in everyone in their own psyches and then there’s a battle in culture there’s a battle everywhere between those two fundamental perspectives and then the archetypal son is the son of the great father and the great father represents two things order and tyranny so there’s the hero and the adversary at the individual level and at the social level there’s order and tyranny and so roughly speaking that’s that’s either the wise king or the despot and the despot is someone who tries to eat his own sons which is actually a fairly common mythological trope and you know you’re under the thumb of a despot when you’re not allowed really either to be hero or adversary you’re just a cog in the structure of the of the social world so that’s despotism on the orderly side well culture is what that’s what we’re sitting in right now you know I mean this is social order that encapsulates us everything about it is social order I mean there are rows there they’re roughly linear you know everyone’s in their place everyone knows exactly what to do we’re unbelievably well protected from from from virtually anything you could possibly imagine and so you know we’re in our father’s living room so to speak and in that living room it’s a safe space oh god I should never have said that anyways it’s a well-protected space in which people are able to play and explore and it seems to me that one of the functions that fathers play in a family if they’re playing there if they’re fulfilling their function properly is that what they do is put a perimeter around the territory so that inside the wall so to speak it’s safe and inside the safe walls the children can play and explore and in their playing and exploring they develop their own individuality and so you know you keep the darkness at bay and you can certainly see that that’s what children want because as soon as you put them in a dark room the first thing they say is you know come chase the monsters away out from underneath the bed and you know they wouldn’t be thinking that if they’re they hadn’t had an extraordinary long evolutionary history of being chased by monsters in the dark so and there are monsters in the dark and everyone knows that which is why you tell your children not to go play at night after you know after it’s dark even now so so order and tyranny are the are the representations of culture and the thing is is that there’s a constant interplay between those two because you can never tell exactly when order has gone too far and become tyranny so and you can never tell really when when there’s so little order that well the next thing happens which is the emergence of chaos and chaos is the great mother and it’s creative and destructive and that’s nature itself and so and then on the outside the very outside and this is the most complicated category of all is that it’s the dragon of chaos and it represents something that’s very difficult to conceptualize but it’s the un-configured substructure of being that gives rise to these other categories so Donald Rumsfeld at one point made a very famous comment it become it became famous because because it fits an archetypal structure he said there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns okay the dragon of chaos is the unknown unknown it’s it’s it’s so unknown that you don’t even know it’s there but it can right raise its head at any given point it’s the thing that leaps out of you in the darkness it’s like that is it Zika is that the new virus it’s like the Zika virus it’s like no one saw it coming it’s a completely new manifestation of being and so known unknowns you can make plans to circumvent unknown unknowns they they’re completely unpredictable and what’s so interesting this is where it’s so bloody complicated because you really have to think about things differently to grasp what this means this is part of the reason that I have trouble with the section of this course on alchemy because it’s so complicated that it’s okay so here think of it this way what is the unknown made up that’s a pretty weird question so so I’ll try to walk you through it and we won’t get very far with this because we’ll have to do it 15 or 20 times I think before it starts to become something that you can that you can grapple with all right so it’s September 11th 2011 and the Twin Towers have just fallen sorry 2001 yes yes 9 11 all right what’s emerged what’s happened well one answer to that is that the towers fell but it’s a very very poor answer because that was an unknown unknown I would say and it traumatized people I mean everyone even in Toronto walked around in shock for about two days after that and the reason was for that was that we didn’t know what fell the buildings fell but the thing is the buildings aren’t isolated they’re not some abandoned building standing out there in the middle of the field in a barren wasteland in the middle of an abandoned country they weren’t buildings exactly they’re only buildings at the most superficial level first of all they had 5,000 people in them or 5,000 people died if I remember correctly and then all of those people were networked out with all sorts of other people and they were networked at multiple levels so they were family members but they were also elements in the financial and economic machine and then and in the political machine and then what what was hit was of course not just the buildings but the economic and political system whatever that means and of course the people who took the towers down weren’t trying to knock buildings down which is what you saw happening they were trying to knock down the things the buildings were invisibly related to and then you might ask well what were those buildings invisibly related to and it’s a simpler question to actually reverse the question and say well what weren’t they related to and the reason that people were traumatized in the aftermath was because when we when our bodies in some sense answered that question the answer was oh those buildings were probably attached to everything in every possible way and so God only knows what’s going to come leaping out of that so what what happens when when you see the buildings fall the fact that you see the buildings fall actually blinds you to what’s happening it’s like it’s a very peripheral representation of the actual event because you could also say well it was a psychological event you know it echoed inside of you well you don’t see that you feel it and you don’t really know what it means but it puts a wave of uncertainty a radical wave of uncertainty into everything right and not only the present but also the future for sure because things took a vicious turn after that and almost immediately right the whole political system readjusted itself it became much more authoritarian you know airports became like little fascist enclaves it was for me for many people i i could hardly go into an airport it just drove me crazy to be lined up like that and then subject to search by you know faceless what what do you say they’re they’re faceless representations of the of the paranoid state it’s like god that’s a horrible thing to have to encounter it’s a bloody horrible thing to train people to get accustomed to it’s really dangerous to train people to accept that sort of thing it was a way worse consequence i think than the the buildings falling down themselves but so that was one thing that happened what else happened well the four trillion the one trillion dollar surplus that was projected by the clinton’s at the end of bill clinton’s presidency which was the the prediction for the next 10 years that the economy was moving along so well that the u.s government was going to have a one trillion dollar surplus over the next 10 years turned into a four trillion dollar deficit so that happened well and then we got tangled up even worse in the middle east and of course that that i think has probably got worse as time’s gone on rather than better and we have no idea where that’s going to end you know i mean russia’s involved now and russia rattled nuclear weapons at turkey the other day you know even though turkey’s their largest trading partner and a member of nato you know and then you know a million refugees flooded into europe and god only knows what’s going to happen as a consequence of that it’s like and it’s not like the people who planted the bomb didn’t know that like here’s what they thought they thought oh the soviet union that was the second greatest power on earth and then they waited into afghanistan and they got tangled up in a terrorist war and oh poof ten years later they didn’t exist it’s like maybe we could do the same thing to the united states it’s like well who knows maybe you could i mean they certainly wreaked their response to the 9-eleven disaster was in my opinion much more expensive than the disaster itself i mean one of the things that’s quite horrifying is that here’s one statistic nobody flew in the aftermath of 9-eleven for a while like airplane flight bookings were way down more people died in car accidents because of not flying then were killed in the bombings now no one ever noticed that because people are being killed on the highway all the time right so it’s like it’s background noise as far as we’re concerned but you know it’s a really good example of how not only do you know what the event not know what the event is you can’t even tell who the event killed and so it’s your apprehension of that when it occurs that paralyzes you and that’s the dragon of chaos roughly speaking that’s an unknown unknown it’s like all of reality all of the multiple levels of reality that exist around you are all of a sudden altered in an incomprehensible manner and then you could say that well what happened was the alteration of that reality that is what happened it’s that you could only perceive it essentially as the explosion in the building and the consequent collapse and so you might say that well the nine you know the twin towers were brought down it’s like that’s such a low resolution representation of what happened that it barely begins to describe that event and so it’s that invisible background of complex interrelationships like a very very complex melody that’s always going on around you and as long as it works you don’t even notice it what happens is it manifests itself as predictable and desirable order which you can understand and which is the reason we have predictable and desirable order this room is configured so that you can walk into it without being afraid and what that means is that it’s a radically simplified version of reality you know and you can see that i mean it’s even got padded walls you know and that’s to stop the sound bouncing so that it won’t annoy you you know i mean it’s warm it’s comfortable it’s it’s sort of neutral so it fades into the background everyone here is civilized beyond belief you know you you hear about the radical individualism of the west i think of all the nonsense i’ve ever heard that’s got to be the most nonsensical we’re so bloody obedient that it’s it’s insane if you go to Edmonton at three o’clock in the morning and watch pedestrians they will stop at the don’t walk light and wait until it turns green now the roads are wide and so they you know but it’s still the case it’s like really how’s it how’s you think you’re an individual really it’s like i’m not complaining about it i think it’s an amazing thing because you know we can really zip cars through our cities because people don’t run out into the middle of the streets and get killed they stay where they’re supposed to and so it’s incredibly efficient but we’re so obedient and well behaved that it’s just it’s beyond if you think about us as chimpanzees with clothes you know we’re doing pretty damn well and we set up our environment so that they’re so simplified that we never have to encounter this multi-dimensional layered reality of patterns that’s just moving around us all the time and that actually makes up reality that’s reality that’s what that’s what the world is made out of that’s a way different way of thinking about it than to think about the world as made up say of atoms because you think that way you just think well it’s sort of it’s like marbles in space you know and and of course atoms are marbles and and everyone knows that and god only knows what they are but that’s still the image that’s the metaphor of reality but that’s not what reality is it’s an insanely patterned orchestra of of phenomena and that’s really what it is and then if what happens is that you’re in this little orderly sub-compartment in the middle of it it’s like you’re in a box and the box is inside a box well let’s think about it you’re in a box okay this box is in the building that’s a box the building is in the university that’s a box the university is in the city that’s a box the city is in in the province that’s a box then it’s in canada then it’s covered by the american nuclear umbrella you know and then it’s embedded in this immense history of individual rights and freedoms that have manifested themselves as part of the political and economic order and all of that’s going on around you and people are working like mad crazily to keep all of those boxes intact and here you are sitting and thinking well what you see around you is reality it’s like it is yeah but man there’s a lot of people making that this reality so simple that you don’t have to think about it you can come in here and think about ideas you know for like hours at a time and like you don’t get eaten by a crocodile it’s really and you know no one comes running through here pillaging which is of course the crocodile eating and the pillaging were very very common occurrences in our evolutionary history you know i mean for lots of our ancestors going down to get water from the local river was a life or death mission you know i mean i can’t imagine having to get water from a crocodile infested stream especially when that’s where the lions are hanging out too you know so that’s order that’s the positive element of order now you can say it students say this a lot oh my god i’m so constrained within all these boxes it’s destroying my individuality you know and that’s the tyrannical i mean it’s it’s it’s pathetic in some sense because god you know you’re so privileged it’s just beyond comprehension but but but having said that it is also the case and and it’s it has the case has to be made that you you do have to sacrifice your potential to cultural norms and that is it you can argue that that’s destructive and sometimes it really is destructive like creative people don’t fit very well into nested boxes and in order for them to fit they have to do damage in some sense to their psyches because they’re not naturally made to that isn’t their natural environment boxes within boxes and so they might say well i’m being oppressed and it’s like well of course you’re being oppressed it’s like if you’re in 50 boxes it’s going to constrain your freedoms of freedom of movement but maybe you should be somewhat grateful for the fact that the boxes exist you think well you don’t even notice them the boxes are so effective that you you don’t even notice them you can even criticize them and and you should you know because maybe they could be better than you know you could be you know because maybe they could be better and not quite as rigid and so forth and you know the criticism is the criticism is justified but you have to keep both of the both of the representations in mind at the same time you know your culture is the wise king and the despot at the same time and people hate that sort of thing because and you know our rational minds and our logical and our our our history of logical intellectual thinking has forced us to assume that a thing can’t be itself and it’s opposite at the same time but unfortunately when you’re talking about very large scale categories things are there what they are and they’re opposite at the same time because culture is the wise king and the tyrant and that means it’s very difficult to adjust your behavior in relationship to it because you never know if you’re talking to the wise king or the tyrant you know and you feel that if you do your taxes or if you have to deal with a say you have to deal with the university bureaucracy in some way it’s like you know you’re a number and and you know you’re just annoying like patients in a hospital because hospitals would run a lot better if they didn’t have any patients in them obviously you know and you feel that of course whenever you’re in a very complex bureaucracy it’s like you’re exchangeable and that’s very annoying but by the same token well here you are so you have to criticize this is also a very complex form of moral behavior you have to criticize with gratitude and that’s something that students should really be taught in university you know because the opposite of gratitude is resentment and there is nothing that’s more pathological than resentment the only thing that comes close to resentment in terms of its capacity to produce misery is arrogance and those things are often it’s arrogance resentment and deceit it’s like that’s the evil triad you get all those three things going in your life and boy you’re going to be in rough shape very very rapidly so then let’s take a break it’s for 15 minutes okay