https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=F7T5cg1a77A
Okay, so last week we spent a fair bit of time assessing the structure of the first two stories in Genesis, and I made the case that they were stories about the rise of humanity into self-consciousness, or the descent of humanity into self-consciousness, depending on which way you look at it. I should also point out that there’s been a lot of debate among religious traditions that were associated with those stories about whether the fall was an improvement or a catastrophe. Today we’re going to discuss, at least to begin with, we’re going to discuss the story of the Buddha, and the reason I want to do that is twofold. Well, first because it’s an interesting story, and second because the parallels between it and the story in Genesis are, I think they’re quite remarkable, and it’s not that easy to understand exactly why they’re there. So here’s the story. So a long time ago, King got news that he was going to have a son and an angel visit him and said, your son is going to have one of two destinies. He’s either going to become a great and powerful world ruler, or he’s going to become a spiritual leader. And the king thought, who was a very practical man, thought, well there’s no damn way my son’s going to become a spiritual leader. And so he thought, I’ll make sure that he falls in love with life. So the king built a city before his son was born and walled it in and made it as beautiful as he could possibly make it, and then decreed that within that city there would be nothing but joy. And so there were no people who, the only people that were allowed in were young, attractive, and healthy by express demand. And so the Buddha grew up in that city and fell in love with life just as his father had hoped. Now the analogy that I see there, we’ll pursue it in more detail, but the first analogy is the idea of a safe and segregated space, like a walled space. So paradisa, paradise means walled garden, and I mentioned that Eden means well watered place. So the idea is the same, that if you want to produce a paradise for someone, you wall in a space and you keep everything that’s not acceptable, or that might cause existential distress, let’s say, you keep that out. And I would say, well there’s also a very interesting analogue between that and the Genesis story, but also between that and the role of parenthood in general, because what you essentially do with young children is you wall off a space and you try to make the conditions within that space optimal, and the reason that you do that is so that your kids fall in love with life. And so they have to be cared for properly and attended to and cajoled in some sense into living. I mean, we know for example that children who don’t receive proper physical care, proper love is the right way of describing it, don’t thrive and sometimes they die. And so it isn’t enough to provide children with food and shelter and to protect them from the elements, they have to be interacted with physically, they have to be touched because otherwise they don’t live and they have to be interacted with continually. And that became very clear, well it was first learned in the late 1800s when the mortality rate for orphans under one was 100%. This guy in New York whose name unfortunately escapes me was very curious about why this is because the children were at least receiving what you might think of as the bare minimum of care. And he journeyed to Germany, he had heard about a nurse there named Fat Anna who had the miraculous ability to keep children under one alive, at least in her ward the mortality rate was much lower. And so he went there to observe what she was doing and all she was doing was taking the children out of their little infant cribs and putting them sort of on a carrier on her hip and just walking around with them. And then she put that child back in the crib and take another one out and walk around with the child. And so the child got surface contact and a bit of stimulation and that seemed to be enough. I mean that’s pretty minimal but it was a lot better than nothing. And that was the first time that people understood explicitly that there were necessities to child care other than what you might regard as the bare minimum. With little rats, rat pups, if you take rat pups away from their mother and you feed them and give them enough water and warmth, they’ll also die. The other thing that you have to do with them, or what the researchers do with them is they take a pencil with an eraser on the end of it and then they massage the little rat pups with the eraser end of the pencil and that’s enough to make them feel loved I suppose and then they thrive. There was a woman named Tiffany Fields, I think this work was originally done by Jock Panksepp, the massage work with the rat pups. And there was a woman named Tiffany Field who started a program in Florida where they massaged premature infants who were in the incubators for I believe it was three times a day for ten minutes. And what happens with children, these are premature infants generally, who are in incubators, what generally happens to them is first of all they lose weight and that’s really not good because children, infants near birth are supposed to be packing on a lot of weight. So any loss is not only the loss but also a decrease from the gain. And so it raises their mortality rate substantially and what Fields and her researchers found that was the three sessions of massage for ten minutes a day, the babies who were given that would gain weight as fast as children who were still in the womb. And that you could detect positive physiological, psychological, and so forth emotional benefits six months later, which is a very long time in the life of an infant. So that’s all to say that the role of parents is to set up a protective wall for all intents and purposes around their children so that they’re not subjected to the unabated harshness of life and then to cajole them into living and thriving. Now we know that children have a play circuit that’s separate so they need to play and the touch circuit seems to be mediated by opiates. And so one of the consequences of that is that if a child has scraped his or her knee and comes running up to you and says fix it and you give them a hug and pat them, that fixes it because the touch is actually analgesic. And so it’s also a useful thing to know if you’re ever dealing with someone who’s grieving because there’s not much you can do about grief from a cognitive perspective. You know, I mean you can help allay people’s guilt if they’re suffering from undue guilt about the circumstances, but if they’re grieving they’re in pain because grief is a pain response, technically speaking. You can alleviate it with opiates. You can also alleviate it with antidepressants to some degree, which is also something else worth knowing because sometimes you’ll see someone who’s so deep in grief that they’re going to hurt themselves because of it. It’s traumatizing, it’ll produce brain damage, it’ll really do them in, and that’s just not helpful. So it’s useful to know that antidepressants can ameliorate that. And you might say, well people still have to go through a natural grieving process. It’s like, well actually the grieving process is the pain. The healing process is the rebuilding of a life outside of the person who died. And that takes time and effort, and the antidepressant isn’t going to interfere with that. So it’s not self-evident that people have to suffer themselves three quarters to death in order to begin the healing process post-grief. But touch is also very helpful, directly. And so one of the things I recommend to my clients who are grieving is that they go get massages because it’s comforting that direct human-to-human contact actually has an anti-grief effect. So, alright, so anyways, the Buddha grows up in this beautiful, attractive, safe place. But of course he develops into adolescence, and that makes him curious. So he notices more and more consciously the existence of the walls, and starts to wonder what’s outside. And so he starts to plague his father. He wants to go out, and he wants to go out, and he wants to go out. And of course that’s a developmental story too, because that’s exactly what happens with children. Right? Is that once they hit, oh it’s probably eleven, something like that, I mean even at four their orientation starts to move away from the parental unit out to the social community. So a child should be socialized with regards to his or her ability to interact with people who aren’t part of the family between the ages of two and four. So at two a child is still pretty egocentric. It’s hard for them to play with other children. They can play beside them, and you know, they can play to some degree. Two year olds are actually often quite good at playing with babies, which is quite interesting. It seems to be part of their inbuilt capacity, you know. But between two and four they have to learn complicated lessons like how to share. That’s a tough one. Because it kind of involves taking the place of the other person to some degree, but it also involves comprehending the future. You know, the idea that if you lend something out, someone else can play with it and you’ll get it back and that’ll be okay. That’s a complicated one. And then they also have to learn how to negotiate a script, which is a ridiculously important thing to learn, right? So they can either do that formally when they play, say, a board game that has rules, a simple board game, or a game like marbles that actually has rules, to which they have to subordinate themselves. So basically what’s happening is they’re moving from an egocentric perspective, where they’re only playing their own game under the control of their own motivational structures, to playing a game that two people or more can join into under the rubric of a higher order system of rules and goals. So what they’re basically doing is learning to subordinate their individual motivational states to a state of being that allows multiple people to integrate their motivational and emotional states across time. It’s very, very sophisticated. It’s a very complicated thing to learn how to do. And then of course they also learn how to do, how to pretend play. And pretend play is far more important than people generally realize. The typical pretend script will be there’s a number of kids, you know, two or more, and they’re going to play, they’re going to have a little dramatic episode, like maybe they’re going to play house or, and then they’re all assigned roles, that’s all from mutual agreement, and then the kids basically negotiate what the script is going to be, and then they play it out. It’s a form of thinking, right? It’s a form of embodied thinking. But what’s really interesting about it is that they have to agree on the structure of the game and the rules. Well, when you negotiate with adults for the rest of your life, especially in an intimate relationship, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. If you’re negotiating properly, it’s like, okay, what do we want to have happen here in this space that we share, and how are we going to conduct ourselves mutually so that occurs? And people are really, really not good at that, you know, but it is an extended form of play. And if the relationship is going well, then there’s an element of play in it, because that’s one of the things that makes it enjoyable instead of just, you know, tyranny and necessity. So the child starts to move out into the world, but that increases, you know, the voyage length in some sense increases, because the other thing children do, and this is often but not always with their mother, is they use her as a marker of defined territory. I think that’s the easiest way to think of it. And then they scoot out from that marker and do some exploring until they get tired or overwhelmed, then they come back and they get comforted and padded and, you know, put back into a routine, and then they’re all put back together and then they go out next time a little bit farther and they run back. And so a big chunk of what you’re doing as a parent is not so much 24-7 monitoring as making yourself available as a resource when the child deems that necessary. So that’s part of why it’s useful to be around. Well, I mean, if you’re a parent, your place can be taken by another adult. But that’s only true, really, if the child knows the adult. My children can make multiple parent-like bonds, but one thing they hate is having their primary caregiver changed. Because the primary caregiver is their whole world, and so when you change that on them, you just flip them upside down. And so they can tolerate multiple caregivers, but they have a really rough time tolerating transitions in caregivers, especially the younger they are, the worse that is. So well, then, you know, as the child progresses towards adolescence, then there’s another burst of independent-seeking activity, pretty much at puberty, for obvious reasons. And that’s when the child is going to turn their attention almost entirely to fitting into the social world. And so that’s a form of apprenticeship. We talked about that earlier in class. So you can think the child goes from dependence to, like dependence on the familial structure, to interdependence with other children. And then that sort of would transform into enculturation and the development of a cultural identity. And then perhaps there’s a stage past that where morality is defined as something outside of pure cultural identification. That would be something more akin to individuation. And that’s the stage at which, and this is a Piagetian idea, the person recognizes themselves as a creator and modifier of rules, as well as a follower and adherent of rules. And you can even think to some degree that the divide between conservative and liberal is a divide of that sort. Now the mapping isn’t precise, but the conservatives tend to be low in openness and high in conscientiousness. So they’re not that interested in transformation. They’re interested in maintaining the rules of the game and doing well within that set of rules. And the liberals’ position is, well, sometimes the rules themselves need to be altered, and so you can’t just blindly accept a game and follow it. You have to be willing to adjust it when it’s necessary. So there’s a constant tension between those two positions that’s somewhat like the tension between Osiris and Horus. If it’s all conservative, then things stultify, and that’s not good because the world changes and if your static cultural system doesn’t change, then it falls by the wayside. But the conservatives would say, well, don’t be changing more things than you have to because all you do is invite chaos in. So you could say in some sense that there’s a pit on both sides of the political continuum and the pit on the conservative side is stultification and the pit on the liberal side is chaos. So the whole polity is trying to continually maneuver between chaos and order. And the way you do that isn’t by having the liberals or the conservatives win. The way you do that is by having the liberals and conservatives talk. And as soon as they can’t talk, then there’s trouble because they both stand for a principle that can’t be abandoned. And because the balance between chaos and order shifts with time as the environment shifts, awake and aware people have to continually negotiate to determine exactly where that line is because it’s not in the same place all the time. And that’s not going so well at the moment, especially in the US. That’s not good. Who knows what will come of it, but it’s definitely not good. So by the time a child is adolescent, then there’s a fair bit of impetus to move out into the world beyond the confines of the familial structure. If that doesn’t happen, then generally you could infer that the child is either quite dependent in terms of its fundamental temperament or that its independence has not been properly fostered by the parents. So there was literature, and I haven’t looked into this for probably 20 years now, but there was literature that I was aware of when I was doing research on drug and alcohol abuse that there were two populations at risk. If you look at how adolescents use drugs and alcohol in junior high and high school, there were two populations at risk. One population was those who experimented with everything and used everything to an excess, and it doesn’t take much description to understand where that might lead to antisocial behaviour and whatever damage you might accrue by formulating your socialisation around alcohol, for example. But the other group that was in trouble was those kids who never experimented. And so you’ve got two kinds of pathologies there, and one pathology was a chaos pathology, basically, and the other one was an ordered pathology, and the kids in the middle were ones who had experimented to some degree. Because partly what adolescents are doing is poking the social world, the world of law really, to see where its contours are. You know, because part of their question is, well, is it necessary for me to follow these rules? And you can’t be told that. You have to experiment and see what the necessity is for the rule following, and that means that your parents have to allow you, at least in principle, there’s a certain amount of freedom that you need to be allowed. Or at least that’s one way of looking at it. So there’s at least some freedom that you have to be allowed if the goal of parenting is the production of someone who’s capable of taking care of themself. Now you know, it isn’t obvious that that’s always the goal of parenting, because some cultures are more interdependent and there’s no necessary presumption on the part of the parents that the person is going to live… the person is going to have to be capable of living in a fully independent existence. But okay, so what happens is the king’s son gets curious. Now at this point he also has a retainer, a guy who is with him all the time, who’s teaching him things, but the gods had got wind of the father’s plan and decided that they weren’t going to make things as simple as he wanted them to be, so the retainer is an agent of the gods. And so he’s always whispering in the son’s ear. Well anyways, Buddha, the future Buddha, gets curious and decides, I’m going out, I’m going out there. And so his father realizes at some point that there’s just no way that he’s going to be able to be kept inside, so he pulls a fast one. He goes out to the city surrounding the walled city, to the area surrounding the walled city, and he chases away all the homeless people, and he chases away all the elderly people, and he chases away all the sick people, and he has everybody spruce everything up so that it’s in perfect shape, and then he lines the streets that the Buddha’s carriage is going to go through with the most attractive people he can find, all cheering. And so one day they open the gates and the Buddha rides out in his chariot, his cart, and his retainer is behind him, and they go down the streets and the Buddha’s thinking this is just a fine old day, and then someone who’s ill wanders out onto the road in front of him, and he’s looking pretty rough, this guy, he’s very sick. And it’s evident just by looking at him that things are not going well. And the Buddha stops his chariot and is shocked watching this person stumble across the road, and he asks his retainer, what the hell’s going on here? And the retainer says, well, you know, this person is ill, and something has gone wrong with him, he’s not functioning well, and illness is the law of mankind, and it happens to everyone. And so the Buddha’s not very happy about that piece of information, and bang, he goes back into the walled city. And that’s just like he’s running back to his mother, roughly speaking. It’s the same idea, right? It’s a piece of information, he’s just being offered an anomalous piece of information that’s sufficient to shatter the structure of some of his value hierarchy. Wow, back he goes. And it takes him like six months to digest that piece of information, but he manages to use it, and then his curiosity starts to grow again. And so he starts harassing his father again about going outside again, so the father tries to pull the same trick, but he’s extra careful this time. He makes sure all the sick people are rounded up and put somewhere where no one’s going to see them, and he lines the streets again, and the Buddha goes out, and it’s a beautiful day, and the streets are lined with cheering people, and all of a sudden the gods are involved in this. They’re playing tricks on the father. So they’re the random, that’s the random uncontrollable element, and I would say that’s roughly equivalent to the snake in the Garden of Eden. So it’s the Buddha’s curiosity that drives him out, even though his father tells him that he’s set it up so that he shouldn’t go. And when he goes out there, the anomalous thing occurs and fractures him. So he goes out. Well this time someone who’s really aged hobbles out into the road, all grey and wrinkled and bent over and not moving very well, and the Buddha is shocked out of his mind again, and he says to his retainer, what’s up with this? And his retainer says, look, you know how you’ve gone from small to larger, and you know how you grow, well people continue to do that, but at some point they start to age and things don’t go so well, and that’s the law of mankind. And so the Buddha is like, that’s enough fun for one day, and bang, he goes back into the walled city. And this time he stays inside for a whole year. It’s just like the rats who go out there and see that cat, you know, and then go back to their burrow and scream for two weeks. It’s exactly the same idea. And so finally, a year later, he’s more or less put himself back together and he decides to go out again. And his father pulls exactly the same trick for exactly the same reasons, but this time the Buddha encounters a funeral procession, and he can see the body, and it’s lying there still and cold, and everyone is weeping and dressed in black, and it’s a terrible situation, and the Buddha asks his retainer, what’s up with this? And his retainer says, well you know, you saw someone who was sick and you saw someone who was old, and the worst case scenario for both of those is death. And the Buddha says, well what’s that? And the retainer explains to him as best he can. Well this time, this is such a shock that he can’t even go back to the walled garden, so to speak. So his father, so this is the sort of shock that completely collapses his belief in his, say, infantile paradise. It’s the death idea, then it’s the same idea that comes up in Genesis, right? It’s that when Adam and Eve are driven by their curiosity to interact with this snake-like entity, their realization is one of death, and that blows paradise permanently. They don’t go back. In fact, God makes it impossible for them to go back, which is a variation in the Buddha story because Buddha himself decides that he’s not going back. Well his father has one more trick up his sleeve. So he calls on the most attractive women in the kingdom to go into a forest nearby and to disrobe and to dance erotically and to attract, you know, to bring the Buddha there, to attract him back into life, to make him feel that the pleasures of living are sufficient so that this unfortunate incident can be put behind him. When he goes into the forest, all he can think about is the transformation of flesh into decay and death, and that’s that. Done. He can’t go home again. And that’s what starts his journey. And so the next thing the Buddha does is he becomes an adept at all sorts of different disciplinary traditions. So he becomes an ascetic and he starves himself so thoroughly that you can see a single grain of rice pass down his throat. So he puts himself through martial arts traditions and ascetic traditions and all sorts of religious traditions trying to, in some sense, put himself back together. So the idea is that his fundamental and naive non-self-conscious early belief system is fractured completely by his discovery of sickness, old age and death, and then as a fractured entity he then submits himself to various forms of discipline trying to reconstitute himself. None of that really succeeds. And then the story ends with him going under a tree, the bow tree, and adopting that classic Buddha pose and trying to attain enlightenment through meditation and self-examination, which he actually manages to do. And then he attains enlightenment and is in a state of nirvana, but decides that it’s immoral to stay in that mode of being unless everybody can be there. So he leaves nirvana, which in some sense is his final temptation. He leaves nirvana and then goes out and starts to teach. And so that’s the story of the Buddha. Now the most obscure part of that is what happens underneath the bow tree. Now there’s also an analog between that and what happens in the whole narrative of Christianity, because what happens with Christ is that his identity with God is fundamentally manifested when he ends up on a tree. It’s different, right, because there’s a crucifixion on a tree, and it is regarded as a tree in the mythological tradition. So there’s an idea in symbolic Christianity that Christ is crucified on the same tree where Adam discovered that he was going to die. And there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason for that, and the reason fundamentally is that both Genesis and the story of the Buddha make the proposition that it’s the ultimate extension of self-consciousness that devastates people existentially. It’s the discovery of death, let’s say. But it’s not just that. It’s vulnerability per se. It’s not just death, because there are worse things than death. And that it’s that discovery of ultimate vulnerability that turns people into the creatures that they are, and that one response to that is to build culture, which is exactly what happens with the Buddha. He traverses multiple cultures, right, becoming a master of many specific sub-cultures. And then what happens in the Old Testament is that after the fall and after the story of Adam and Eve and after the story of Noah, those are all the really before the flood stories. Those are the really ancient stories. Then you fall into history and you have the continual creation and destruction of the Israelite states. And then there’s a break in some sense between Judaism and Christianity, and it’s an interesting break. I’m no expert in Judaism, but I think I’ve got this basically right. Is that Christians make a decision that whatever Christ represented was the solution to the problem not only of emergent self-consciousness, but also for the insufficiency of history. Because remember, you get an empire building and collapsing, and an empire building and collapsing, and an empire building and collapsing. One answer to that is a bigger and better empire. And another answer is there’s something wrong with the idea of empire as a solution to the initial problem. And I would say that the Jews and the Christians basically split on that proposition. And so that’s partly why. I mean, from the position of Judaism there may still be a messiah, but that person is not someone who’s yet appeared. And then there’s another proposition which is the state itself is redemptive. And that’s played out at least in part in Israel, where the state is viewed as redemptive, that things will go well for the Jewish people if and only if they can establish a state. Now a skeptic would say, yeah, but all the things that the state was supposed to keep out start cropping up inside. And I think that you have to be rather blind not to see that that’s happened to a large degree in Israel. I mean, one of the things that’s happened, forget about the Palestinians and the Arabs for the time being, but even in Judaism itself there’s a major fracture between the more orthodox Jews, the ones who are very, very, very conservative in their beliefs and habits, and the more secular, westernized Jews. In some sense it’s the distinction between right wing and left wing. But that’s been a very, very divisive battle within Israel. And what it shows in part is that just because you establish a state doesn’t mean you can assume that the kind of homogeneity that will eliminate conflict will then reign within that state. Because people within the state can fragment into different groups just like states themselves can be representative of other groups. Now if you look at the symbolic meaning, I think, or the psychological meaning of Christianity, the idea is that the answer to the pathology of the state is the constant renewal of the individual. And so that falls into alignment with the idea of death and rebirth. So if the problem is the balance between chaos and order, both at the state level and the individual level, you might say, well where should action take place in order to redeem the state? I would say that the central western idea, and this is something that emerged out of Christianity, was that the way to transform the state is through the transformation of the individual. So rather than the other way around, which is you transform the state and hope all the individuals follow. We tried that, for example, in the Soviet Union because you could say that the communist experiment was precisely the attempt to modify the state so that the individuals would follow. Now I’ve been reading, I just bought a new book, a very cheerful book called the Black Book of Communism, and it was published in France in 1999. And the fact that it was published in France is particularly interesting because of all the European countries with the possible exception of Italy, communists had the largest sway over especially intellectual life. So I would say that the life of intellectuals in France after World War II was overwhelmingly radically left-wing, and not just of the socialist type but of the communist type. I mean both Italy and France had communist parties. And the French intellectuals, including people like Sartre, were, Sartre never did belong to the communist party, but he was a supporter of the communist party. And all the people, all the French thinkers that are worshipped, so to speak, in universities today were all radical left-wingers who were involved in the student riots in 1968. And their beliefs were tantamount to communistic. And that’s not a good thing. So this book was written by people, many of whom were former French intellectual communists. It was written in 1999, and I read the foreword and two of the chapters last night. And the first thing that the person who wrote the foreword claims is that it wasn’t possible to do a real analysis of the historical significance of communism until 1999, until basically the end of the century. Because what the communists had done was so obscure and so secret that there was no way to discover it. And I thought, that’s complete rubbish, because by 1945, or thereabouts, George Orwell was already writing Animal Farm, and he wrote 1984 and 1948, he just reversed the last letters, and he knew perfectly well what was happening in the communist countries. And so if your eyes were open, I would say by 1935 you could tell, because that was more or less in the midst of the Ukrainian famine, which killed some 4 to 6 million people. So anyways, there was the 30s, then things were complicated by the fact of the Second World War, because first of all, the radical left was fighting against fascism, say in Spain to begin with, and lots of European and American intellectuals went to Spain to fight against Franco and ended up on the side, roughly speaking, of the communists. So that complicated things, because the Franco faction was definitely bad news, so it was like a prototype of World War II, because Franco was a fascist, and he ruled until, it wasn’t very long ago, well, compared to World War II, I think it was maybe 1980, somewhere around 1980 he finally died, and Spain transformed itself back into a democracy. And I went to Spain just before that, and it was an unbelievably poor country. You could stay in Spain in the middle of Madrid for 5 now, and that got you a private room with a shower and breakfast. And wine there was cheaper than water, it was about 75 cents a bottle, which is something I remember very fondly. But its economy was entirely devastated, so in the Spanish Civil War the left wing rose up against the fascists, essentially, and that was a precursor to World War II. And then when World War II emerged, even though Stalin had made a number of pacts with Hitler, the Russians joined the West as an ally, and so for a while there it was counterproductive in some sense to be criticizing the Soviet Union too intently, because there was something that needed to be taken care of first. So there’s some excuse for focusing on the Nazi horror first, and only then focusing on what happened in the communist countries, but still by the end of World War II anybody who wanted to know could know. And what that basically meant was that a massive swath of the Western intelligentsia put their damn heads in the sand and protected regimes that were so pathological that they defied description. So there are relatively new figures in this black book of communism that describe deaths. So you can attribute 25 million deaths directly to the Nazi oppression and 100 million to communism. So the bulk of that was the Soviet Union, where it’s 20 to 35 million, Solzhenitsyn estimated 60 million, and I should also say something about Solzhenitsyn. So the French intellectuals who were behind the publication of this book, which by the way was a hit in France, it was a best seller and very, very controversial, partly because people said, well if you criticize the left, the radical left, then you give carte blanche to the radical right. And of course the radical right has become an emergent phenomena. Well you’re going to watch it play out because here it comes. You know, Sweden, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Holland, France, the right wing parties are coming back and that’s not going to stop. And of course the same thing is happening in the United States with Trump. So the radical left wingers in France were saying, well don’t pick on the communists even historically because that will validate the claims of the radical right wingers, which I think is an entirely appalling and pathetic argument. You know, it’s like saying don’t criticize the Nazis because that will encourage the communists. It’s just not an acceptable way of comporting yourself. And so, but anyways, it was not politically correct, shall we say, to criticize the communists, especially in France, but that turned around to some degree by 1999. But I should also say that it was 1974 that Solzhenitsyn wrote his book, The Gulag Archipelago, and if you wanted to know what was happening in the Soviet Union, all you had to do was read that book. Like it’s a hell of a book. I think it’s 2,700 pages long and it’s a very small type and it’s one intense piece of work. You know, you don’t read that as bedtime reading because it’s so draw-jobbingly appalling that it’s like permanently traumatizing. But if you wanted to know, you could have known in 1974, and more to the point, you could have known in 1945, you could have known in 1930. But the Western intelligentsia basically covered up the communist pathology, I would say, for something on the order of 70 years. And there’s been no reckoning with that whatsoever in America, in Europe, in higher institutions of learning. And so one of the things I still see, and I see this because I talk about this quite a bit in my Psychology 230 class, is that virtually every student knows about the Holocaust and for a good reason. But very, very few people know what happened in the Soviet Union, or certainly in China, where the French estimates are now 65 million people. Right. So that’s so opaque to us. I know some things about this, but not very much. I mean, I know that you could certainly make the claim that Mao was the greatest monster lived, even though he’s still a revered figure in China, which is an appalling thing all in itself. Now, I don’t know if you guys noticed this morning, you probably didn’t, but one of the things that was trending on Facebook was Kim Young Ills, I think that’s his name. I get all those horrible, wretched dictators confused because they all look the same and have the same general satanic essence. They basically, like back in the, I think it was in the 80s, but it might have been in the 90s, 3 million or so North Koreans starved to death. And what’s his name, the dictator, came out and announced today to his North Korean population that they’re going to have to go back, and he said this, to sucking roots to survive. And not only that, he’s demanding that every family in the capital donate two pounds of rice a month to the state warehouses. So you can see where communist economics gets you. It’s the warehouses that are supposed to be distributing the food to the starving people that are now tyrannizing them into donating what they don’t even have to the state warehouses. And so, you know, that’s the last bastion of Stalinism slash Maoism. And the Chinese, of course, still support North Korea, even though there’s plenty of countries on the face of the planet. But you know, you have to give either the gold or the silver medal to North Korea, where no one has enough to eat except a tiny proportion of unbelievably corrupt aristocracy right at the top. And he’s treated as if he’s a divinity. He is a kind of divinity, but not the positive kind. So back to… so the idea there is, you know, if you’re trying to figure out how to rectify the plight of humanity, that’s a good way of conceptualizing the problem. So the plight is laid out both in the story of the Buddha and in the stories that we covered last week in Genesis. It’s very straightforward. People woke up and noticed that they were going to die. It’s more complicated than that. Because it’s not just death, it’s vulnerability on all fronts. So you could say death, insanity, and social judgment. So death, illness, insanity, and social judgment. That’s what being self-conscious means to people. And I would say that two largest class of fears go along with the mythological categories that we’ve been discussing, because people are most afraid of the terrible mother and the dragon, so to speak. That’s chaos, that’s death. And the other thing they’re most afraid of is tyrannical judgment. And you know, those things are intertangled because of course if you’re rejected by your culture and forced to the bottom of the hierarchy, the probability that you’re going to confront a chaotic death radically increases. So you know, you can’t really separate out rejection from chaos. But those are deaths. And you see this with people with anxiety disorders. They’re almost always afraid of two categories of things. One is death and illness, and the other is social judgment. So if you take the typical agoraphobic, her, because it’s usually she, her biggest fear is that she’s going to have a heart attack on a subway and make a fool of herself while she dies. And you know, because that’s, well it’s like the ultimate nightmare in some sense. It is in fact the ultimate nightmare. Now the problem with the story of the Buddha in part is that the ending, the enlightenment element is vague. It isn’t clear what happens there. Now I have a suspicion that that story grew out of a far older tradition, which was the shamanic tradition. And one of the things that’s characteristic of the shamanic tradition is that the shaman, usually they take some kind of psychoactive drug in the Siberia, which is where shamanism was most widely spread and most established. The drug was emanita muscaria, which is a particular kind of mushroom. It’s the red mushroom with the white caps on it, white dots on it that you see in fairy tales all the time. And there’s a reason for that. And you know, a pole that would occupy the connection between earth and heaven was often a central feature of the shamanic ritual. And one of the things that was happening with the shaman is that when they took the psychoactive they would climb the pole that represented the connection between earth and heaven and they would go up into the domain of the gods, which is roughly equivalent to the idea of Buddha reaching nirvana. And so there’s an uncharted relationship between the most archaic human religions, which were virtually undoubtedly grounded in the use of very powerful psychoactive chemicals and the Buddhist tradition. And I think part of the reason that the vagueness is there is because the direct connection between the theological use of transformative substances and the doctrine per se is not being well specified. I mean, now you see the same thing in South America. The drug there is usually ayahuasca, which is chemically actually… The miscarriage is different chemically from ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is very much like psilocybin and like LSD. It has the same ringed molecular structure. But of course when the Amazonian shaman take ayahuasca, they also communicate with the ancestors and the gods. That’s a classic shamanic pathway. First communion with the ancestors, then communion with the gods. And it’s actually based on the direct experience of the people who are putting themselves into this ceremony. So there’s also some very interesting connections historically between Christianity and the use likely of psilocybin mushrooms. So there was a very weird book written in 1968 or thereabouts called The Magic Mushroom, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. I think that’s the name of it. Where it was a linguist who identified linguistic patterns between the theological claims of Christianity and the language used to describe mushrooms and their effect. Now that book came out sort of at the height of the hippie revolution. And even though it was a serious book, it was sort of shunted off into the hippies wrote this category. Although it’s not a hippie book at all. I’ve read it a couple of times. I have no idea what to make of the book because it’s based on linguistics. That’s far outside my range of confidence to evaluate, but you certainly can’t brush it off lightly. And since then there’s been all sorts of evidence emerge that the use of mushrooms might have been central to early Christianity. Anyways, the fundamental split. You could say that, I think this is a reasonable way to look at it too, is that once the basic problem that faces humanity is laid out rather clearly. And so we’ll say that’s the problem of painful self-consciousness and knowledge of finitude, which is a major problem. I mean the terror management people, the social psychologists who are terror management theorists basically say that that’s rendered people permanently pathological and that they have to use illusion in order to defend themselves against that. Freud basically made the same argument when he was criticizing classical religion. He basically said, well people are using religious nonsense, roughly speaking, as a way of shielding themselves against their fear of death because they’re too immature to be able to tolerate the reality. It’s an interesting criticism and I found it quite compelling for quite a long time. And I do think that people hide in their belief systems, but I think one of the basic shortcomings of the Freudian idea is that it doesn’t really account for why people would invent the idea of hell, for example, because that doesn’t really seem to be a lot more comforting than the idea of death. In fact, it’s a lot worse. It’s like not only do you die, but you die permanently or you die forever, continually, in the most painful possible ways. I can’t really see that as a… why bother with that if it’s an illusion? You could say, well it’s just to make the illusion more believable, but you know, once you have to throw two conspiracies together to account for a phenomenon, I think the onus of proof is definitely on you. So okay, so then the question is, well what’s the cure for the pathology, the self-conscious pathology? And I could say, well there’s two answers to that, and one is the building of a state. And that’s obviously of some utility because the terror management people tend to think of culture as psychological and as a defense mechanism against the fear of death, but that’s an overly psychological explanation because obviously one of the things that culture does as well as protecting you from the fear of death is actually protect you from death. You know, in our culture, it does everything it can not only to protect you from death, but also to protect you from any exposure to death. Part of the reason, and this is something the 60s hippies jumped up and down about too, part of the reason that we have psychiatric nomenclature and an entire psychiatric system is to take people who are so crazy that they’re disturbing off the streets so that they don’t wreak existential havoc on the people who are outside. You can debate about whether or not that’s appropriate, but it’s definitely the case that it’s much more difficult to walk down the street if there’s very many people who are overtly damaged and expressive about it on that street. And you can say, well they have a right to be there, and you can say, well the public has a right to protect itself, and obviously both those claims are valid and there’s, you know, the right way through it is a consequence of dialogue. But it’s still nonetheless the case that we’re almost never exposed to extreme old age, we’re never exposed to death, and we’re almost never exposed to, you know, insanity and physical illness unless you go into a hospital or a place like that. So one answer to the problem that faces mankind is the state has the answer. And the other, well, let’s, and then we can examine that, but the problem with that seems to be that the state can split into something that’s very pathological and something that isn’t. Those are the archetypal elements of the state. And then you could make a case that when the state is fully pathological, it’s actually worse than the original problem. So then the question becomes, okay, well the state has utility, what do you do to stop it from becoming corrupt? That’s the real question, as far as I can tell. And so I would say the Egyptians partially solved that problem when they started to build their mythology of Horus and Osiris because they basically said, well there’s two principles that have to be at work in order not only, in order to maintain the state, and so we’ll say against Isis and the forces of the underworld. Isis being the goddess of the underworld, not the new Isis. It’s pretty damn funny that that’s their initials, you know. So the state’s a necessity, but it has to be updated as a consequence of the careful action of the citizen represented by the attention of the citizen represented by Horus. Now there are many critiques of Christianity. I would say most of these come on the atheistic end of things who make the point that if you take the mythologies of Horus and the mythologies of Christ and you line them up side by side, they’re virtually the same. So many of the mythological elements of Christ’s, because he’s half mythological and half historical, although the evidence for his historical existence is very, very thin. But it’s heavily mythologized, and a lot of the mythology that was used to represent the myth of Christ was just taken completely from the mythology of Horus. And so the atheistic wing of critics of Christianity say, well obviously that means that Christianity is false because its central figure was just granted the attributes of the previous Egyptian deity. Well. But I think that that criticism is fundamentally beside the point in the most important of ways because the ideas of what characterized Horus emerged as a consequence of a lengthy, I would say evolutionary process to define what constituted the central redeemer of the state, roughly speaking, and then that was just translated onto Christ. That is just a continuation of the religious dream, in a sense. It’s not indication that there’s something fundamentally fraudulent about Christianity. I mean, unless you think that Christianity is based on the kind of history that empirical historians regard as history. That’s not the only kind of history. So alright, so then I want to talk about something else in relationship to that. And this is sort of, in some sense, this is the last part of the course, which is good given that we’re coming to the end. When I was working on these ideas, I laid out the logic that I just described to you. Mankind has a fundamental existential problem. I don’t think that’s a particularly radical claim. That claim is made by all sorts of schools of thought, not least the existentialists. But I would say that that problem was already put very clearly in our most ancient religious writings. So it’s not a new idea. It’s a very, very old idea. And then out of that emerged the idea that the state would emerge as a medication for that fundamental pathology. And you see that in Genesis right away, because as soon as Adam and Eve have their eyes open, they put on fig leaves. So the first thing they do is turn fig leaf as an emblem of culture. It’s clothing. And so clothing is certainly one of the things that distinguishes us from animals. And so the idea that we could build structures that would protect ourselves, well, that’s what we do. And they were. But they don’t necessarily solve the fundamental problem. Or at least they don’t solve it permanently. And they lead to another set of problems. And the other set of problems is the pathology of the state. And so the state then, instead of becoming a defense, a genuine defense, or let’s even say an adaptation to our vulnerability, starts to become an exploiter of our vulnerability. And I would say that, you know, there are roots. So the communist idea was a utopian ideal. And the idea was that the pathology that characterized human beings could be laid at the feet of the state. There was no notion whatsoever that part of the pathology of being human is an inbuilt part of being human. Now that’s kind of an original sin claim in some sense, is that we could heap all the culture we want on you. It’s not going to solve your problem. Now, so the Marxist utopian idea had its roots in certain strains of Christian utopian thinking. So because it was St. Thomas More who wrote the first book on utopia. And so Christianity in some sense influenced the utopian element of Marxism, but it was the Marxists in particular who decided that the reason that human beings had problems was because of the organization of the state. Now, so that, and then there was a conclusion from that, and the conclusion was, well if you just got rid of the apparent pathology of the state, then people would enter into a utopian mode of being. And so what are the pathologies of the state? Well there’s still the things that radical egalitarians are opposed to. Hierarchical structure, differential distribution of resources. That’s pretty much, you know, private ownership is part of that, but I would say that’s more like an integrally, that’s tied integrally within the first two problems. And so then the Marxist idea was basically, on the one hand, eradicate private property, distribute resources equally, eliminate the distinctions between the classes, because they thought of classes as the fundamental dividing categories of people. Not race like the Nazis, but class. And then you’d usher in an endless utopia. Well you know, stated like that it just sounds stupid. And you know, because I, maybe that’s too harsh, but I don’t really think it is. In the late 1800s, Dostoevsky, he knew all this was coming. He absolutely knew this was coming. And God only knows how he knew it. I mean Jung would say he was very much in touch with the collective unconscious. And you can think of the collective unconscious in some senses, like imagine that you have a system of ideas, you know, that you articulate and you are aware of. But they rest on a dream, you know, which is the place where the ideas are coming from, but also like the matrix out of which the ideas emerge. It’s a dream-like fantasy, and it’s something that’s more or less shared by everyone. And you could be farther away or closer to that underlying dream-like structure. And the more artistic you are, the more open I would say, the closer you are to that dream-like structure. Well Dostoevsky was immersed right inside it, and I think that was partly because he was epileptic. So because epileptics have transcendent experiences often, and suffer from an overwhelming intensification of emotions. So that did something to Dostoevsky that sort of put him into a different category. That’s what it looks like to me. But anyways, he knew this was coming. In his book The Devils, aptly named, or The Possessed, he says this is what’s wrong with Russia, here’s what’s happened as a consequence of our belief system falling apart, here’s the sort of person who is destined to emerge, and this is what’s going to happen. It’s exactly right. So at the same time, Dostoevsky was thinking this through, and this he did most clearly in the book Notes from Underground, which I would highly recommend that you read, because it’s very short, it’s very interesting, and it’s unutterably brilliant. And the reason it’s brilliant is because Dostoevsky’s main character in the book, you know, who’s partly informed by autobiographical experience, is a failed civil servant who is a nobody and who is super resentful, and he’s a coward. He’s angry, resentful, and cowardly. But he’s very, very smart, and of course he’s very proud about the fact that he’s smart because that’s pretty much what he has to cling on to. He doesn’t have a family, he doesn’t have anything else. So he’s an appalling person. You could say he’s caught in the underworld, but what’s interesting is that being caught in the underworld, in that chaos, he doesn’t degenerate right into someone who’s nihilistic or totalitarian. He kind of tolerates the tension, and there’s certain things that emerge for him as potential truths. And so one of the things he says was that he sort of toyed with the idea of utopia. And he talks about the Palace of Crystal. And so in the Palace of Crystal, it’s a perfect future utopia, and everyone is provided with what they need. And Dostoevsky says they’re so well provided that all they have to do is eat cakes and busy themselves with the reproduction of the species all day. So you could think about it as a realization, in a sense as a concrete realization of an economic utopia. You don’t have to work. Everything you want is provided for you, so everyone’s happy. And Dostoevsky says, well you have to be out of your mind to think that everyone would be happy under those circumstances because people are fundamentally insane. And so that if you gave people perfection, the first thing they would do once they got bored three quarters to death, which would take about a week, is run around looking for something to smash just to cause some trouble just so that there’d be an interesting problem. And I think, well you can see the relationship between that and the events in the book of Genesis at the beginning, because God tells Eve, don’t muck about. Be satisfied with what you’ve got. And her curiosity impels her to go interact with the one thing in the whole place that she shouldn’t interact with, and then all hell breaks loose. And then you have to ask yourself, is that a good thing or a bad thing? And what Dostoevsky concludes is that that’s a good thing. Is that fundamental experience seeking disruptive element of the human psyche is actually the best thing about it. And the idea that we could quell its operation by providing what’s essentially a return to the womb is something. You could think about it that way, where you have no problems. To think that that would actually solve the problem is not only absurdly immature, but also just false on the face of it. You think, well, first of all that’s an amazing conclusion. I mean, think about that. Dostoevsky thought that through. He figured out what was wrong with the idea of communist utopia forty years before the Russian Revolution. I mean, it’s unbelievable. Not only did he see what was coming, he saw what was wrong with it. And you could say the same thing about Nietzsche, although I don’t think Nietzsche ever wrote anything that has the concentrated narrative punch of notes from underground. And what happens in notes from underground, in some sense, is that it’s a novel about someone attempting to take Nietzsche’s route to being a superman. A lot of Dostoevsky’s novels are about that. So Raskolnikov, for example, in Crime and Punishment, who ends up being a murderer, essentially tries to transform himself into a Nietzschean superman, beyond good and evil, making his own values. And Dostoevsky plays that out, and his conclusion is, don’t break rules that you don’t understand, because if you do something will take you down. And that’s basically what happens to Raskolnikov. He kills the pawnbroker and the pawnbroker’s slave slash niece. He kills them with an axe. He gets away with it. He gets away with it. No one has any idea that he does it, and he has access to all her money, which he promptly buries, I think, in an abandoned lot, and wants absolutely nothing to do with, but is constantly haunted by what he’s done and keeps revisiting that area. And then a prosecutor starts to suspect him, even though there’s no reason to, and basically subjects him to a Chinese water torture. He just taps him and taps him and taps him and taps him and taps him until he starts to break down and eventually confesses. The cat and mouse game played by the prosecutor and Raskolnikov is absolutely psychologically terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like that in any piece of literature, because Dostoevsky was smart enough to figure out exactly how you would torment someone with a guilty conscience into confessing. And the prosecutor is patient. He just plays them like you’d play a fish. Well, and Raskolnikov undergoes a… we won’t worry about the end of the story, because it’s not that relevant. In Notes from Underground, a similar thing happens, is that this narrator who’s so pathological and railing against his own cowardice and his own resentment and his own weakness, but also not having any… not granting any credence to the idea of a future modern utopia, he tries to reconstruct his own character. And the way he does that is he ends up in a relationship with this woman who’s being forced into prostitution, which was a very common consequence of female poverty in that era because everyone was absolutely dirt poor to begin with and because the alternatives were few and far between if you fell out of your social class for any reason. And he decides that he’s going to redeem her, he’s going to improve her life, he’s going to rescue her. And so the last part of the book is about him trying to rescue her, but he fails. Because he just doesn’t… He takes on this job which is to help someone in real trouble. And like, helping someone in real trouble, I would say, is you bloody well better be careful before you try that because real trouble is real trouble. And the probability that you’ll have the wherewithal to help instead of making it worse is very, very low. And that’s exactly what happens to him. He sort of becomes narcissistic in his estimation of his redemptive capability, but there’s a part of him that’s motivated by a genuine desire to help. But when push comes to shove, he can’t tolerate the responsibility that it would take to follow it through and he ends up betraying her and so of course she ends up in worse condition than she was to begin with. So it’s an absolutely amazing novel. And there’s more to it, and I should tell you about this too. So the Palace of Crystal was actually a reference to an actual building. And the building was a building that was erected in England, in London, for the World’s Fair that was held at that point and it was the first steel and glass building of any size. And so it was a forerunner of our modern downtowns. The reason in part that every downtown in the world looks the same, if it was built say between the 1950s and the 1970s, 1980s, the 70s were in particular absolutely appalling. But that was the new international style and it was originated in Germany and it was predicated on the idea that the worker would want a barebone structure, glass tower, completely devoid of ornamentation because that was all bourgeois nonsense, and that that style should be imposed everywhere in the world as a movement towards this sort of workers’ utopia. Well you can see what that did. So I’m telling you that because these ideas, they stretch out and they have their tentacles everywhere. So that new international style that was certainly responsible for things like the housing projects in the United States which were absolute catastrophes, all came out of this dream of the workers’ socialist paradise. So Dostoevsky goes on the rampage against that idea on a psychological basis. He just says, well don’t be, you really think that human beings are constructed so that if you give them enough to eat they’ll be satisfied? It’s like that’s not what we’re like at all. We’re not even close to like that. We’re full of snakes and twists and insanity. He makes that case very straightforwardly and says not only are we like that, but that it’s the best thing about us that we’re like that. It’s a remarkable, remarkable book. So okay, so well then we might say, well what happened when these utopian schemes were put into action? Alright so Solzhenitsyn described what happened in the Soviet Union in the Gulag Archipelago. And he estimated that the Soviets killed 60 million people between 1919 and 1959, roughly speaking. Now people have taken him to task for that estimate, but there’s no good records. And certainly it’s between 25 and 60 million. And you know you might say, well really, does it matter? Is that actually the point? Once you’re past your first 10 million, you’ve already established your character, I would say. You know and Stalin said one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. Which pretty much gives you some insight into how Stalin thought. So what happened in the USSR? Well here’s a stat for you. So before the USSR, Russia was Tsarist, right? And so it was a monarchy. Like most European countries were monarchies. Except it was more feudal than most European countries. Certainly far more than England, say, or France. And the radicals regarded the Tsar as an oppressor. So it was the oppression of the Tsarists, the Tsar and the aristocracy, that was partly what provided the impetus for the workers slash peasants, because they were mostly peasants in Russia, to rise up against, let’s say for the sake of simplicity, their class enemies. From 1825 to 19, I think it was 1900. It’s right around 1900. 75 years. The Tsarists sentenced 6,000 people to death for political crimes and executed 3,000. In the years from 1919 to 1959, the communists killed 30 million. So when we’re thinking about the communist revolution as a revolution against tyranny, and a justifiable revolution against tyranny, we should be very careful what it is that we’re defining as tyranny. Now if you want to know what the Russian camps were like for prisoners, you can read Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, because what happened to Dostoevsky is he was one of those people who was more or less satisfied by the Tsar. He was a student radical. They threw him in prison, took him out one day, pretended to shoot him in a firing squad, used blanks, shorted him out completely. There’s some evidence that that’s when his epilepsy either started or really became intense. And then they banished him to a prison in Siberia. And the prison was full of thieves and murderers and rapists, and it was a rough place. And you know, Dostoevsky was an aristocratic guy, an educated person, a young man, he had no idea what to expect, and so he wrote a book called The House of the Dead, which is a very interesting book. But if you read The House of the Dead, and then you read The Gulag Archipelago, you think Like, The House of the Dead was a Caribbean holiday camp compared to the Gulag. I mean, when the prisoners in the prison camp, in Dostoevsky’s prison, sorry, used to go into the villages, which they did, they could go into the villages, I mean they were guarded and all that, but they could go there to work, the people would come out and give them food, little kids would come up to them and give them food, because one of the characteristics of Russian culture at that point was that the peasants in particular felt that the people who were imprisoned were unfortunates, you know, and they felt bad for them, it was part of their Orthodox Christian charity, and they also felt that maybe they were only one step from the same thing. And so their basic attitude was charitable. And you know, they were fed in the prisons, like I mean it was hardly gourmet fair, but of course everybody was so damn poor at that time, that’s not even a reasonable comparison. And you know, it was rough, but it wasn’t the most imaginative rough you could possibly imagine for the most pointless possible purpose, ending up in your death and likely your family’s death. It wasn’t that. And you know, you got out of those camps, you got out, you’d do your sentence and then they would let you go, they might exile you, but even if you were exiled you could have a life there. So that was the extent of the judicial and penitential tyranny of the Tsars. And you know, I’m not saying that the Tsarist system was all sweetness and light, but I don’t think that’s relevant. It was part of the feudal system, it had developed organically in some sense across history. The Russians were sort of on the slow end of the developmental curve, but it was a hell of a lot better than what came afterwards. So after the Soviets, after Lenin took over, now Lenin stepped in, when Lenin stepped in to take power, Russia was basically in chaos. What had happened was World War I, which was a frenzy of insanity and basically marked the end of the monarchical system in Europe. It also marked, by the way, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the fragmentation of the Middle East. And so part of the reason that the Middle East is parsed up the way it is today is because the Ottoman Empire collapsed. England and France still had some dominion there as victors in World War I, and they created the Middle Eastern countries out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. So you know, we’re still playing out the consequences of that, but it’s something useful to note. That’s how that came about. But all the monarchical empires essentially collapsed after World War I. Russia was devastated. The soldiers were deserting the trenches en masse and coming home, partly because the Tsar had abdicated after he took control of the armed forces. Things went south even further. He abdicated. And the new parliament, which was sort of half democratic and half socialist, I would say, was starting to divide up the land among the peasants. And so the soldiers were very motivated to get the hell home so that they could get some of this land. But the whole country, the overarching political system had collapsed. The Russians were starting to organize themselves from the bottom up at that point, and there was the hints of a new governmental structure in Moscow. This was this democratic socialist alliance. But there was still a terrible power vacuum, and the central authorities in Moscow never really seemed to get control of the country. It was into that mess that Lenin stepped. And so sometimes when there’s an extraordinarily chaotic situation, it just takes one seed of order, so to speak, to spread itself out everywhere. It’s like the yin and yang symbol, and that’s what happened. So the Marxist idea was that the thing that made people’s lives intolerable was basically differences in distribution that had been stabilized into class differences. And so the classes were basically the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie were the owners. And so if you owned anything, the theory was that since everything of value was created by workers, the only way you could have any excess value was essentially if you stole it, if you took it. So you were by definition an oppressor, by definition. And that part of the move towards the socialist utopia was that the bourgeoisie would dissolve as a class. Well the communists were a little impatient for the spontaneous dissolution of the bourgeoisie, so what they decided to do was just proactively dissolve it. And so what the Nazis did to the Jews and the other people that they persecuted for the manner in which they were born, roughly speaking, the communists did to people by class. And so essentially, if you were educated and you owned any property, or if someone just didn’t like you and you were a little richer than anyone else, you were going to be dead. And so they sent wave after wave of radical, brutalized, resentful mobs into the Russian countryside and raped and pillaged and killed everyone who was competent. And so part of that was direct, so that a mob would storm your house. Now you have to understand that often when these outside agitators came into the village, there was enough outside agitators so that they could do the storming by themselves. But they would pick up adherents in the village, and those would be the adherents who wanted to go out to someone’s house and strip it of all its valuables and have their way with the people inside. And so you can imagine what sort of people that attracted. Obviously, the highest quality of person. And so they’d go out to a kulak house and surround it. Now often the peasants would fight them off with pitchforks trying to defend the people inside the house. And that worked sometime, but most of the time it didn’t work. And then they’d go in and they’d take everything, absolutely everything, out of the house. And leave it with nothing. And leave the people with nothing. And then eventually those people, the ones that survived, which weren’t that many, the government offered them the opportunity to be taken out to Siberia to start a new life. They could bring two months worth of food in their families and go out there. But of course they didn’t have two months worth of food because everything had been stolen from them. And then when they got to Siberia there was nothing left, nothing there except crowded camps that immediately produced typhus and killed all the children. So that was the beginning of the Russian Revolution. And it was Lenin who did that. So if you read Communist revisionists they’ll basically say, well things were going all hunky dory under Lenin because he had everyone’s best interests in mind. And then that monster Stalin got control of the party. And that’s when it became a cult of personality that had nothing to do with true communism. You know, that’s the rationale. But Lenin was just as good a monster as Stalin. He just didn’t live very long. He died in about 1922, 1923, something around that. And he’d already produced Stalin as his follow-up monster at that point. You know, and that was just… things just barely got going at that point. The next thing was after they got rid of all the kulaks they collectivized the farms. Which meant if you had a farm you were some damn peasant, you just got some land. You know, because your parents were basically… they were basically slaves for all intents and purposes. They were attached to the land. And so you just got some land and some of you were smart enough so that you made something out of it. You were growing food at the same time to feed everyone. So and you know, in any creative enterprise, any creative enterprise whatsoever, it’s a minority of the people who do all the productive work. So you know, if you have a hundred farmers, ten of them grow half the food. If you have a thousand farmers, thirty of them grow half the food. So you go out there and you wipe out your most productive people, it’s like, well, guess what happens next? Well you wipe them out and then you forcibly collectivize. And so everyone who had nothing and who was completely useless is thrilled about that. But the next thing that happens is, well, hey, you don’t grow any crops. And so that’s what happened. Food production plummeted. And then for a variety of reasons the central Soviets weren’t very happy with the Ukrainians and so what they decided was that they were going to take all the food that the Ukrainian collectivist farmers managed to grow anyways, which wasn’t very much, and ship it to the cities. And so they did that. And then they prosecuted women who would go out into the fields with their children to pick up individual grains of wheat that the Gleaners, that the Threshers had missed. And the punishment for that was that you were incarcerated in a death camp. And so six million Ukrainians starved. And cannibalism was so rife in the Ukraine in the 1930s that the Soviet government printed posters saying, it is barbaric to eat your children. So you might say, well that’s a little too late. So that was the first six million deaths, not counting all the Russian civil war and all the deaths that went along there. And that just basically got the ball rolling. While that was happening, the gulag camps that Solzhenitsyn wrote about were well unto being established. And that’s where it was enslaved labour camps, roughly speaking, that the Soviets produced enough of their economic goods to keep lumbering along with these forced five-year planned projects that made everyone into a liar. And so that’s the next part of the story. So Solzhenitsyn probably has done a better job of documenting this than anyone else I ever read. But it’s also something that Orwell talked a lot about. I think that the best introduction to this idea is probably 1984. Because it’s a short book, you know. And basically what happens in 1984 is it’s a satire of communist totalitarianism, clearly. And I mean expressly, that’s exactly what it is. And basically the rule was in the society of 1984 that you were not allowed to think or say anything that wasn’t part of the prevailing dogma of the times. And one of the things that happens in 1984 is that there’s three big power blocks, and they’re always at war with one another, except who they’re at war with shifts. So at one point it’s, I think one of them is called Oceania, I don’t remember exactly, but these two power blocks are at war and then all of a sudden that switches. These two power blocks are at war. So then all the history textbooks are revised and all the news stories are revised. So it’s as if we were always at war with that particular block. And you know, that can change at a whim. And so everyone is required to parrot the beliefs of the state and to praise it continually, no criticism whatsoever. And everyone in the entire state is an informer, or at least enough people so that the probability that you’re going to get nailed if you ever say anything that you actually think is near 100 percent, and the informers are continually rewarded, which is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. So if you were some nasty bit of work with your three families in your 150 square foot apartment, which would have been about what you could expect, and you were hoping that maybe your son and daughter could have their own place, and you saw someone down the hallway that you didn’t like or had animus against or whatever, a couple of words to the proper authorities and they come charging in at two in the morning with their jackboots and you know, take everyone out, bring them to the central prison, shave them bald, strip them of their clothes, put them in ill-fitting uniform, and they were gone. And then you got their apartment. So that was the basis of the Soviet state. So you should just imagine for a while what that would be like. And so one of Solzhenitsyn’s points, and this was something that was echoed by Viktor Frankl, but Solzhenitsyn does the best job of documenting this, was that first of all he takes the Marxist presuppositions as a set of axioms. And he says, well one possibility is that these axioms were never put into practice properly. So let’s look at that idea. And then he says, well, you know, there’s a couple of problems with that because here’s how the axioms were put into practice in the Soviet Union. Directly as a consequence of the axioms themselves, which is like private property is theft, you know, the bourgeoisie is a parasitical class that, you know, that everything should be collectivized and equal among everyone. Those are the basic presuppositions. And that was exactly what was put into practice and used as justification for everything they So that’s a non-starter. And then he also points out, well, we don’t just have the Soviet Union as an example. We have the Soviet Union, we have China, which was even worse, we have Vietnam, we have Cambodia, where Paul Pot, who was trained in France at the Sorbonne by French left-wing intellectuals, who went back, threw everyone out of the city, and killed one in four people in Cambodia in the space of about ten years. And then of course we still have North Korea. We also have the fact that the only countries in Africa that suffered deadly famines in the 20th century were those that were run by communist dictators. So how much bloody evidence do you need? You know, and so people say, and I’ve had people say this to me, is that, you know, that wasn’t true communism. And I think what that means is that person has the following delusion. If they were the leader of the Communist Party at that time, things would have turned out better. And the probability of that is, first of all, if you were the sort of person who was good, the chance that you would live through the massacres and get to the top was zero. There wasn’t a chance of that. You know, so the system basically produced its own breed of horrible monster to lead it. And there was no standing in its way. You know, if you had an iota of compassion, and dared to express that. I mean, think about what you’re doing. If you stand up in a system like that and act compassionately, you’re an immediate judge of every single person around you who doesn’t want to do that. Well, you’re not going to live through that, that’s for sure. You know, they’ll call you an enemy of the state, or whatever the hell it is. You’re going to be gone in no time flat. So what Solzhenitsyn… So, okay, so Orwell made the proposition that states like that could only exist if everyone in them was trained to lie. And the training was… the idea of training isn’t exactly Orwell’s notion. Willing to and punished if they didn’t. Both of those at the same time. And so that’s where the idea of Orwellian doublespeak comes from. You know, and that’s when you say one thing but mean another. You say something that is in accordance with the tenets of the time, but it’s a euphemism to cover up something terrible that’s going on. And so 1984 is the story of a person who basically gets tangled up in that and they find his worst fear. He’s afraid of rats and they punish him with his worst fear. And the way they punish him is by putting a muzzle, like a goalie mask, or like an umpire’s mask on his face, except it’s this long, and they put a starving rat inside that and tie it to his head. So that’s 1984. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that happened in the Gulag prisons. I mean, perhaps not the rat thing precisely, but it doesn’t really matter. And the other thing the Soviets did was that if they threw you in one of their prison camps, you had to sign a confession admitting that you were wrong. Which was its own particular kind of evil. You know, the Nazis, if they gathered you up… the lines were clear cut. It was irrelevant. Your innocence or guilt as a person was irrelevant. You were the member of a racial group deemed unacceptable and so you were dead. But the Soviets, they actually managed to figure out how to make that even worse. So that not only were you destroyed as a consequence of your birth, but class not race. But you had to also admit that you were an enemy of the state and sign that before they would kill you. And so most people did. And unsurprisingly, there were people who didn’t. But they were few and far between. And of course, that’s not surprising. How much punishment do you think someone can take? In Solzhenitsyn’s book, there are stories of people who didn’t give in. And those people are so damn tough you just can’t even… He said that was actually what transformed Solzhenitsyn in the camps. Because he was a moderately committed, although somewhat cynical, communist on entry into the camps. But then he saw people in there who were absolutely unwilling to falsify any of their experiences. And lie, no matter what happened to them, under any conditions whatsoever. And he was so amazed by that, that it actually produced a transformation in his character. And part of what the Gulag Archipelago is about is exactly that transformation. And his discovery of what you might describe as the individual responsibility to truth in the face of state tyranny. And Solzhenitsyn’s basic conclusion was, and this is a conclusion by the way that Dostoevsky had drawn seventy years previously, was that an individual who stops lying could bring down a totalitarian state. And so it’s a very interesting claim. Because Solzhenitsyn’s conclusion, from his detailed analysis and all his personal experience inside the camps, was that no matter how powerful the totalitarian state was, that in the final analysis it couldn’t stand up to actual truth. Now it’s a very radical claim. But it’s borne out in part by his experience, because of course Solzhenitsyn did tell the truth. And his book, the Gulag Archipelago, was one of the things that, well, it was the book that demolished the credibility of communism as a political structure. So he managed it. The first book that he wrote called A Day in the Life of Ivan Dinizovich was published in 1962. So what happened was, Stalin died or was killed in the late 1950s. I think it was in 1957. But it was somewhere between 1957 and 1959. And Khrushchev took over. Now there’s some evidence that Khrushchev and two other people killed Stalin, because they thought he was going to invade Europe with his hydrogen bombs. And Stalin had already demonstrated quite clearly that if he had to drop a hydrogen bomb on Paris and London to make sure that the Europeans got the hell out of the way, that that wasn’t something that he was certainly willing to do. So Khrushchev was one of the people who was involved in Stalin’s death, and he took over. But Khrushchev was also one of the main architects of the Ukrainian famine. But Khrushchev had actually developed a bit of a conscience about all that, and he loosened things up substantially for a period of time, for about five years. And during that time Solzhenitsyn released a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Dinizovich, which is a story about himself. And it’s just one day in a Gulag archipelago camp. And so it’s a very dreary and wretched and horrifying book, but it was the first of anything like that that was seen in the Soviet Union, and another bit of evidence that was disseminated out into the West in 1962, which the bloody French intellectuals could have picked up right there and then and said, oh look, you know, our glorious leader has a lot more problems than we think. Of course that never happened. But then Khrushchev was actually loosening up the strictures in the USSR, but he got wiped out of power in a coup and taken out of power, and the clamps came back down and you know, Khrushchev was sent off to live in exile in his dacha, I don’t remember which one, that’s his vacation home, until he died in about 1980. But you know, there were a few cracks that appeared at exactly that time, and of course that was also at the height of the Cold War, because it was 1962 when Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off over Cuba, and you know, that was one of the places where we got this far away from total annihilation. Now Solzhenitsyn’s proposition was that had people refused to lie, the Soviet government could have never taken hold or maintained itself. So he believed that, you know, because there’s a lot of theories about how a society becomes corrupt, right? So let’s say you take the example of Nazi Germany. You might say it’s the following orders idea, right? The power structure is taken over by thugs, and then what you’re doing when you carry out the orders of the thugs is merely responding out of fear. You’re a good person, but you know, you’d be put in a terrible situation and there’s terrible pressure being brought to bear on you, and that’s why you go do the things that you do. So that theory is predicated on the idea that there’s no real relationship between the populace and the government, and that the government is basically taken over by a coup, and the people who organize the coup are well distributed enough and aggressive enough to maintain authority by punishment under all circumstances whatsoever. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t seem to be true. So the first issue is, did Hitler create the Germans or did the Germans create Hitler? Or could you say that they were involved in a dance? Well Jung’s take on that, because Jung spent a lot of time studying what the hell was going on in Germany, and by his own admission got caught up in it for a short period of time. He said when he was there that the illness, so to speak, was so overwhelming that it was virtually impossible not to get caught up in it. But I think people underestimate the degree to which what they think is true and false is a consequence of the milieu that they’ve been placed in. But I think, and this is partly from reading Jung, that Hitler and the Germans co-created each other, and the Jungian explanation for that was something like, I’m going to update it a bit and modernize it. In a crowd you have dispersal of responsibility, and everyone knows about that. And that means you can do whatever you want in a crowd. You can say whatever you want. You can act however you want, because you’re not going to be held individually responsible for it. So Jung would say the crowd has the capacity of allowing the shadow to emerge. And then he believed that what happened was the crowd shadow had a dialogue, often non-verbal, with Hitler, with Hitler’s imagination. And so Hitler, who was a great retoretician, I don’t know if that’s a word, would talk in his emotional oratory to the crowd, and the crowd would respond in one way or another, and so Hitler would be guided by their response. And being an imaginative person, cobbling together what the crowd is encouraging him to speak, that produces a kind of a theory, and Hitler is able to flesh out that theory. Populist leaders do that. So I talked to Preston Manning at one point. Preston Manning started the Reform Party in Alberta. And it eventually merged with the Conservatives. So it was kind of an offshoot of the Conservative Party. And there’s always left and right wing offshoot parties that are generated in Canada, almost always in the West. And I invited him to talk to a group of people that I had brought together to tell us how he managed to create a whole political party in like ten years. Now he was the son of a premier who was a right wing premier. So he had his connections, and that was part of it. But he said he’d go to… there was a lot of Western separatist agitation at that point. And people in Alberta, some of the political leaders thought that that would become powerful enough so that it would actually be a movement to contend with. And partly what they were doing with the formation of the Reform Party was to take some of the pressure off that side of things. So anyways, they started to go around to talk to people in arenas mostly. And Manning would give a speech. But he said the thing that he liked best was the question and answer at the end. And that what the Reform Party did was derive its policies from the question and answer sessions. So you could imagine that the crowd had concerns which were allowed to be expressed in an articulated fashion. And the party built a lot of its doctrines as a consequence of that conversation. And of course that was partly what accounted for its rapid popularity, because it was actually addressing the desires of the crowd. And so you could even say, well that’s how a democracy should function. But that also assumes that the democratic systems and conventions are in place to protect against let’s say just a mass movement that goes off radically to the left or radically to the right. It was still all taking place within a perfectly functional, monarchical democracy. But by his own admission and will, the policies were shaped by the crowd. Okay, well the same thing happened with Hitler, except it happened in an underground and pathological way. And the people he was addressing were in a hell of a lot worse shape than Albertans in 1980. You know, because they just got back from the trenches. A huge chunk of the young men were dead. The rest that weren’t were brutalized beyond belief. The economy was in shambles. The French had imposed an incredibly punitive peace treaty. Germany had lost most of its industrial centers as part of the redistribution of land after World War I. And then the whole bloody economy collapsed because the German government inflated the currency to wipe out their debt to the Allies and just reduced its value to zero. So people were not happy. They were seriously not happy. And so that was the crowd that Hitler was addressing. Now one of the issues might be, well where does the… this is where things get so tricky when you’re trying to figure out exactly how these things are caused. My sense, I took a political science degree before I became a psychologist because I was interested in this sort of thing, but I became aware quite early that almost all the explanations that the political scientists were offering were economic. And you know, to me that means they were all derived from theories on the left, roughly speaking, because it’s the left that constantly claims that the primary motivations for people are economic. You know, I mean the right does this… I won’t talk about that for the moment because it’s just not relevant in the context of the university. And I thought that’s just not right. There’s all sorts of motivations that people have that aren’t economic. It’s not. There’s lots of things it doesn’t take into account. It doesn’t take into account… well it doesn’t take into account the fact that people have a psyche and that that psyche is perfectly capable of desiring good things as well as terrible things. It’s like, well how are you going to account for that? I mean, economics makes someone into a suicide bomber. I don’t think so. Like economics plays a role, obviously, but there’s lots of people who are under severe economic pressure who do not become mass shooters in the United States or suicide bombers. You need a hell of a lot more explanation than that. And so I was very, very interested in the moral questions that underlie, especially things like what happened in Nazi Germany in the concentration camps, because it seemed to me that the moral question was paramount. How could people do the sorts of things that they did in the concentration camps? There’s a psychological issue there. So that’s when I started to read Jung and Solzhenitsyn in particular, and Orwell and a lot of the people that I’ve been talking to you about. In this book I started last night, the Black Book of Communism. In the introduction they talked about different approaches to history. And there is a positivist approach to history where there’s never any moral judgement rendered. And that was the position putatively taken to many people who conducted an analysis of the 20th century. But my sense is that there’s some things that have happened that are so brutal and terrible that to treat that from a positivist perspective is in itself a form of complicity. Because at some point you have to make a decision. Was what happened in Auschwitz wrong or not? Simple question. You can say it wasn’t wrong because the standards of right and wrong are generated locally. And there’s no ultimate standard against which they can be judged. And so there are local constructions of convenience, and even if you’re not happy with the results they produce, that doesn’t mean you get to say they were wrong. Or you can say to hell with that, I don’t care what irrationalization is, if you perform this kind of action, then what you’re doing is wrong. And then I should also say that that was actually formally determined after World War II, right? Because after World War II the Nazi leaders were subjected to the Nuremberg Trials. And that’s where the idea of crimes against humanity emerged. War crimes and crimes against humanity. And the basic principle, there’s a few of them, but the basic principle behind the idea that there can be crimes against humanity is that it’s wrong to kill someone for the manner in which they were born. So that’s the basic principle. So that could be race, obviously. Could be language. Could be gender. Could be class. Whatever. It’s wrong. Well, okay. A cynic would say, has to say, yeah, yeah, had the Germans won the war the laws would have been different. That was just a law written by the victors. And a cynic would also say, well then I don’t know exactly what you say. I guess the next thing you say is you can’t appeal to universal principles that transcend culture. Because people are cultural creatures only. Which is, by the way, also the claim of the radical left. Because one of the things that the radical left wanted to do in places like the Soviet Union and China and Cambodia and so forth was to produce the new man. And the idea was, wipe out the past. Really, wipe it out. And Mao went a long way to doing that because part of the Cultural Revolution involved the wholesale destruction of almost all of China’s history prior to 1960. So that’s another thing that we can thank the radical communists for. Is they destroyed Chinese culture. All that history. Done. And part of the reason for that was that they ideologically presumed that that culture was transforming people into the wrong sort of person. And so we’re going to wipe the slate clean, which Mao was perfectly willing to do, and generate the new human being out of the ashes. Underneath that is the presupposition that there’s no such thing as human nature. It’s all cultural. And the logical conclusion from that, or illogical conclusion, is A, people are completely malleable. So that’s the radical social constructionist position, which I would say is also the position of most academics at universities now. You know, that things like gender are socially constructed. It’s like, okay, it’s fine. Take your goddamn argument to its logical conclusion. Oh no, I can’t do that. Why not? Because you don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anything about history. I’m completely ignorant of anything outside of my little narrow domain of specialization. And who cares about the hundred million dead people? So you know, you can’t adopt a philosophical or an ideological position without being willing to see what it’s done and to think through the consequences. And so you say, well, people are completely malleable from a cultural perspective. What that means is that I can decide, if I have the power, to make you into anything I want. Because it’s just arbitrary after all. Or you can take a different position, and the position is fundamentally, I would say fundamental position of Western democracy. Is that human beings have inalienable rights and an inalienable character. And as far as I can tell, that’s predicated on the, roughly speaking, on the idea of Horus. It’s that idea, is that the person is the center of the kind of consciousness that creates the world as it acts. You know, because one of the things I was curious about when I was working on these ideas, I thought, okay, look, the communists have one world view and the Western democracies have another. And you could say, it’s just a battle between ideologies. And you would also say, under those circumstances, that all belief systems are nothing but ideologies. And that’s the radical social constructiveness viewpoint. It’s like, its behavior is in some sense taken to its extreme, right? Human beings are a blank slate. Well, first of all, they’re not. We know that. There’s enough biology being, we’ve studied enough biology over the last hundred years that we can just dispense with that idea. It’s wrong. But anyways, we’ll give the devil its due. Okay, it’s an ideological conflict between communism and the West. Okay, it’s arbitrary. It doesn’t matter who wins, but the war is between these two belief systems. Well, why is that a flawed argument? Well, people weren’t flocking into Soviet Union as immigrants. They were trying desperately to escape, which is why there was a wall in Germany. And if you went over the wall, they shot you. Okay, that doesn’t look so good. Well, then there’s all the deaths, 35 million of them. That seems to indicate that there’s a bit more happening on the pathological end in one society than on the other. And then the next thing I was curious about is, okay, where the hell did the idea of inalienable rights come from? Is that just something arbitrary? Is it just an invention? Or is it based on something that’s real? And you know, what does real mean? And so that’s when I started to trace the emergence of the idea back as far as I could trace it. And so, first of all, that was political, so maybe that manifested itself in the most articulated form during the Enlightenment. But that isn’t where it started, because in the 13th century the English had come up with the Magna Carta already, and so there was idea that, you know, the people had some sovereignty that the monarchy was not allowed to steal, and that was the origin of the idea of parliamentary democracy. But that emerged out of another idea, and that was the Judeo-Christian idea that everyone had value before God. I thought, okay, well what the hell does that mean? Because you might say, well if that’s the case, and we’ve dispensed with the idea of God, then the whole idea of natural rights falls, which by the way was Nietzsche’s prediction. He thought as soon as we wiped out the classical underlying structure that the whole idea of rights would just disintegrate. Well that’s exactly what happened in the Soviet Union and China and so forth. And we’ll see, it might not happen here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Okay, so then I thought, well is there anything that might lend some validity in any way to that claim? First of all, what does the claim mean? That people have value before God? So I went back to the theological stories and the religious history and tried to figure out exactly where this idea had come from and what it meant. And I found that you could just trace it farther and farther and farther and farther back. So it disappears at Mesopotamia. But then it doesn’t disappear because if you look at wolf packs and chimp troops and social animals in general, they organize their societies as if each of the individuals in the hierarchy have value. Because the wolves, for example, like if there’s a dominant dispute between two wolves, one wins, one turns its neck over and says, you know, tear out my throat, and the other wolf says, nah, you’re annoying but we’ll keep you around because you’re useful. Well it’s the same idea. The idea is that the individual has integral worth in relationship to the group. And then that’s not an ideological idea. That’s an idea that’s based, as far as I can tell, in evolution and it’s really, really deep. It goes back as far as you can chase it. So that means it’s not just an ideological conflict. Well, okay, maybe that’s wrong. But I can’t see anywhere that it’s wrong. Well, don’t all ideologies arguably come from evolutionary, let’s say, previous positions? Like, maybe communism comes from a desire for a community and a quality and tension between people who are in a different class. Like, would it all come from a… Okay, so that’s a good question. Okay, so the question is, you know, I parceled off one set of beliefs that’s specifically grounded in evolutionary… in evolution. Okay, I’m going to make two distinctions. First, there’s a difference between an idea that’s grounded in evolution and an idea that’s grounded in evolutionary theory. Okay, so the Marxists were grounded in evolutionary theory. They have psychobiological justifications for their claims. That’s not exactly right. I know, I know it isn’t. I just want to dispense with that first. Okay, so then I was thinking, well, what exactly do ideologies do? Because obviously, they’re also not constructed just arbitrarily, because they wouldn’t be attractive to people if they were. They have to be… and I thought, well, like if you look, for example, at Marx, Stalin, and Lenin, so you could think of them as the trinity of the USSR, well I think part of the reason that the trinitarian idea worked as a means of propaganda was because Russia was an orthodox Christian country, and it had the trinitarian idea already laid down in its unconscious. Well, you remember I showed you that diagram of chaos on the outside, and then the great mother, and then the great father, and then the individual, and the valence of each of them. I think what happens with an ideology, and I did point that out at the time, but it’s worth revisiting, is that the ideology capitalizes on certain aspects of that story. It doesn’t tell the whole truth. So it says, for example, the individual is all good, the state is corrupt, and mother nature is good. Okay, that’s Rousseau, and that’s the environmentalist movement, okay, because it’s grounded in Rousseauian thinking, via Thoreau, for example. And then you have the opposite, which is Hobbes, and Hobbes says the individual is, you know, a catastrophe of conflicts and aggression. The state has to be, the state is the only thing that can possibly keep the individual in check, and that protects us from the ultimate chaos of nature. Well those are both true, and you can derive ideologies from them, but I think their weakness is that they don’t take the other side into account. And I don’t think that you can say that about the traditions that I’ve been describing. I think they’ve been around too long. So you look at Egypt, for example, the story has all the elements. It has the adversary, so that’s Seth, right? It has the good king, and that’s Osiris, and it has Isis as queen of the underworld. She’s gone or pause. She’s not as well differentiated in the story, but the elements are still there. And you have Horus, and it says, look, life is this landscape, and all these characters are participating. I think, yeah, that’s as close as we can get to a narrative truth. And part of the reason I wanted to teach this course, once I thought I figured these things out, was to provide people with a defense against ideology. It’s like someone tells you a story that’s causal. Here’s how history laid itself out. Okay, it’s plausible. Like the Rousseau story is plausible, and so is the Hobbesian story. And not only are they plausible, they’re true. But they’re only true like this, you know? And the other one’s true like this, but you want to know where’s the other half of the story. People are inherently good and society corrupts them. Yes. People are inherently evil and society regulates them. Yes. And it’s hard on people, because the classic idea of Western logic is that one thing can’t be itself and its opposite at the same time. But that only applies to unitary things. And like a human being is not a unitary thing, and neither is a state. So that’s the best answer that I have to that question. So like an ideology is like an incomplete narrative? It’s exactly what it is. That’s why it has its power. Because it can extract its motive power from the underlying archetypes, which relates them to the motivations that you just described. Like there is a pronounced demand for egalitarianism in human beings. It’s agreeableness. The trade is agreeableness. So the more agreeable you are, the more egalitarian you are. Why? Because people should share and get along. It’s especially true within the confines of a family or tribal unit, right? Where everyone’s pulling together and cooperating. It isn’t obvious to me that it’s a useful ethic once you get beyond like a kin group size. I think you need conscientiousness then, because conscientiousness is more like a cold virtue. It’s the thing that supports success in bureaucracies. If you’re conscientious, you go into a large landscape of unrelated people, so maybe a functional bureaucracy, and conscientiousness predicts your success. But conscientiousness and agreeableness are orthogonal to one another. They do not have the same value structure. The truth of the matter is that they both wouldn’t exist if they weren’t both necessary. Egalitarianism is necessary. Because otherwise the hierarchies get so damn steep that the people at the bottom die and the whole system collapses. But agreeableness as a universal ethic is no good because it doesn’t allow for distinctions of quality. And it doesn’t allow any decisions to be made. Because if a hundred people have to come to a consensus before action can take place, well someone with a hierarchy who’s invading you, they’re just going to wipe you out. You’re so slow. So there’s this tension, and it is partly the tension between the far left and the right. Because the best marker for the far left is agreeableness in terms of a personality dimension that predicts. Question? Well I think the reason that I don’t think that that’s appropriate is precisely the reason that I told you the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian stories. And the first reason I told you those stories was to show you that those stories exist. And they can’t be taken lightly because those stories are the products of tens of thousands of years of thought. Like, they’re not just any old story. And what the stories seem to indicate is that there has to be a dynamic relationship between the vision of the individual and the integrity of the state. It isn’t saying that one of those is more important than the other at all. that in order for one to remain healthy, in order for both to remain healthy, there has to be a constant dialectic of communication. And so, then you could say, and people have said this, how do you know this isn’t just another ideology? Well I tried to explain why that is. It looks to me like ideologies only take… and I don’t know how to define that because I’m trying to figure it out. Part of that was grounded in the question, was it just ideology that drove the distinction between the West and the Soviet Union? For me it was hopeless if it was. Because if it was just ideology, there wasn’t right on either side, and it was just an endless battle. It was an endless battle. Because one of the things I realized was, and this was the most dismal part of going through all this material for me, because I thought that it was done. I came to the conclusion at one point, for whatever relevance it has, that the problem was unsolvable, technically. People were pathologized by their self-consciousness, completely understandable. When someone comes to me with an anxiety disorder, I never ask why. I think, no kidding. You know, it’s the healthy, non-anxious people that are the mystery. So it is. It’s like, why the hell aren’t you freaking out all the time? It’s a really good question. You know, it’s like you’re like the rat that’s in its burrow. You’ve explored the territory and you’re calm. That does not mean you’re calm. It also does not mean you’re safe. It just means that for some weird reason, you can act like you are. And you can undo that. People have that undone all the time. They get traumatized, and then they start questioning. And that whole protective structure falls apart, and they’re screwed. They’re anxious, they’re in pain, they develop agoraphobia, or they develop obsessive compulsive disorder, and you think, well yeah, obviously. Someone comes to me and says, well when I go into a new building, I always check out the fire exits. What are you supposed to say about that? It’s like, well what if the building caught on fire? Well then you’re dead because you don’t do that. And you might say, well what’s the chance of that? And the person says, one percent chance of an infinitely bad outcome is an infinitely large risk. And there’s no arguing with that. How safe should you be? You can’t argue about that. So the reason that I think this isn’t an ideology is because I think you can make a distinction between stories and metastories. And a story is generally an ideology. It’s a partial representation of the whole. And a metastory is an observation about the set of all possible stories. And that’s what I was trying to do in this class and in the book. It’s like, okay, what’s the landscape of the set of all possible stories? And that’s the structure that I laid out. Now maybe that’s wrong. But it’s an interesting structure because everything has its place. Order and chaos, masculine and feminine, but even more importantly, good and evil. And that’s the landscape. And then we can say, well you can parcel out partial stories from that and they have functional utility and potent motivational force. But they’re dangerously one-sided unless you’ve covered the entire territory. Yeah, that’s exactly how it looks to me. It’s something that’s outside rationality. It’s embedded not in rationality but in biology. And it’s an essential claim that Jung made with regards to the collective unconscious. And part of his, believe me, part of what Jung was doing, and this was partly in response to what was happening mostly in Nazi Germany but also to some degree in the communist countries, is he was asking, does, do human beings have a nature? Are we a certain way? Because if we are, then that should be taken into account when you’re trying to construct a political system. And if we do have a nature, well what is it and how does it manifest itself and how should we take stock of that? Well here’s a question for you guys. You can think about this for a minute. Now there was a paper published a week ago and it was in the International Journal of Psychology, which isn’t the world’s best psychology journal for whatever that means, but it was a large-scale analysis of gender differences across culture. And it concluded the same thing that all the large-scale analysis of gender differences across culture have concluded in the last 15 years, which is that the differences taken trait by trait are rather small, quarter to a half standard deviation, which isn’t, it’s not trivial, but it still means that along any single trait dimension men and women are more the same than they are different. And that those differences maximize as societies become more egalitarian. Now that should have been front page news when that was first discovered because it completely, if it’s true, it completely undermines everything that students have been taught by radical left-wingers since the 1960s. It completely invalidates the claim that people are constructed by society. Because if they’re constructed by society and you make the state egalitarian, then the gender differences disappear. But that isn’t what happens. Not only do they not disappear, which would be bad enough, they maximize. Okay, that’s it. Theory done. Now, you could say, well, the research isn’t that good. It’s like, well, that turns out to be wrong. Most of it’s done with the Big Five personality model, which I hated until like brute necessity made me accept because there it kept coming and why wasn’t it an interesting theory to me? It’s like, it was annoying. These statisticians figure out the structure of personality. How boring. But when you analyze the psychometrics, you’re done. It’s like, personality as encapsulated in language has five dimensions. Now, it’s a little rough around the edges. Yeah, yeah, whatever. It’s there. Okay. Fine. So, how big are those differences? Well, if you add them up, which you could, the overlap between men and women is 10%. That’s it. That means if you constructed a regression equation using the Big Five personality differences to predict who is men and women, just on the basis of their responses to the personality traits, you could identify the genders with 90% accuracy. And it’s worse than that because the new study showed that not only are there differences that exist in personality that are that small individually but that large in combination, but there are differences in blood pressure maximized in egalitarian societies. Differences in the dark triad traits, the Machiavellianism and, I don’t remember what the other two are, maximize in egalitarian states. Like all sorts of differences maximize. And then you might ask, well, why is that? And there’s a simple explanation, and the simple explanation is, differences between men and women have a partial basis in biology. If you eradicate the cultural variability, the environmental variability, by making the state egalitarian, all you leave are the biological differences, which maximize. It’s like, dispute that. How can you dispute that? It’s not like it’s something that someone planned. No one was aiming at that. It’s just, that’s how it happened. Okay. So there is evidence we could say, well, there is powerful evidence that people have a partial of a biological nature, an inbuilt nature, and then you could say, okay, let’s take that set of data. Okay. The biggest difference between men and women is in interest. And the interest dimension seems to be people versus things. Women are more interested in people, and men are more interested in things. And the difference there is about a standard deviation. It’s a big difference by psychological standards. And it’s a nice finding, because for a while, one of the claims was that there were fewer women in STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, was because the standard deviation of male intelligence was larger because the curve was flatter, so there were more intellectually impaired men and more sort of super genius men. And there’s a biological rationale for that. And one of the consequences of that was that if you had five standard deviations out from and you needed that to be like an expert physicist, that was so rare that the only people who were out there were men. It’s like the reason that most of the people in prison are men. It’s because the distribution of agreeableness is skewed, and there’s way more disagreeable men at the extreme, so they all end up in prison. That argument has not been settled. But I think you can just put it aside. There’s a lot of debate about it. So Larry Summers brought it up at Harvard and got fired as a consequence, and then a variety of female psychologists scoured the IQ literature and made the claim that that finding was questionable to say the least. And maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but it doesn’t matter. It’s debatable. What you do find though is that if you look at male and female performance, say in mathematics in junior high or high school, you can find a chunk of three to four standard deviation above the mean females, and none of them go into STEM studies. And why is that? It seems to be because they don’t want to. Now I like that explanation because if you had to have an explanation that was palatable, that would be a good one. It doesn’t make a claim for anything that has to do with intrinsic differences in ability. So that’s kind of nice. It wipes out a whole… it depoliticizes a huge chunk of the argument. But then you could say, well maybe men and women like different things because of socialization. It’s like, no, you can’t say that because that isn’t how it worked out in Scandinavia. So that’s the end of that argument, unless you can figure out how those studies are wrong. Like good luck to you, but I’ve never seen a credible explanation. And then the next thing you could say is, yeah regardless of that, men and women should be the same. Fine. No problem. You could do it. If you want to make… if you want to take… say you have two kids that are adopted out at birth and they’re twins. You assess their IQ and you look at it in relationship to their socioeconomic status. One kid ends up in a family that’s poorer than 95% of other families. Another kid ends up in a family that’s richer than 95% of families. So it’s a big difference. The kid in the richer home will have a 15-point IQ advantage. So what that basically means… I’ve got the statistics a little bit wrong here because I can’t translate it onto the normal distribution. But roughly speaking, what it means is that you need a three-standard deviation move in socioeconomic status to produce a one-standard deviation move in IQ. What it implies is that you can buy transformation of IQ. But what it also indicates is that it’s bloody expensive. That makes sense, right? You can imagine that being the case. If you spend enough money, you can switch something. But I would say that the farther you want to switch it, the more expensive it’s going to get and it’s probably a curve like this, a diminishing return thing. Maybe the first five points would be pretty easy. The next five things are getting expensive. The five after that, it’s really expensive. And then each additional one point is going to cost a lot. Alright, fine. So what that means is that even if the differences are biological, you can shift them. The question is… two questions. How much effort are you willing to put in? And then the next question is, how much effort do you put in before it’s a tyranny? And that’s the real question. So we could say, we’ll radically transform the socialization of boys and girls. Now this has been called for before. There was a guy, a psychologist, an appalling… it was an appalling article. I think he was a social psychologist, which would make sense because most of what they do is appalling. And so he proposed that the way to decrease the radical difference in aggression rates between men and women was to socialize little boys like little girls. And that’s been put into practice a lot. And it will not work because what will happen is that you’ll… You might reduce the aggression of the average guy, but you’re going to pop up the aggression of the pathological guy by such a degree that it will completely overwhelm whatever minor games you make for the typical. So you’re just going to produce more guys that are so bent that they’re like hell bent for revenge, fundamentally. So okay, but you could make that case, you know, like from a scientific or political perspective you could say, look, it’s worth investing in the transformation of the socialization process so we get rid of those differences. Okay, the next thing you’ve got to ask yourself is, why? What’s the end game? Now here’s the end game. Men and women will be represented 50% in absolutely every occupation and there will be zero differences in economic and political power. That end game presumes that that outcome has a value. You know, I don’t know what the value is, but some value. And then the more resources you’re willing to dump in to attain that end, the more valuable you’re acting as if it is. So you could think about it as a utopian end state. And I’m not complaining about the formal proposition that that would be a utopian end state. What I’m complaining about is, or what I’m commenting on is, who says that’s the desirable outcome and how much are you willing to risk to test it out? So because what you’ll have to do, especially for things like interest, is you’ll have to punish boys for being interested in boy things and reward them for being interested in girl things, and punish girls for being interested in girl things and reward them for being interested in boy things. Now I think you could do that, but what if there, you know, the differences exist. Why eradicate them? Do you want them eradicated? Do you really want them eradicated? And you know, the word eradicated, that’s a rough word because you just never know how far you’re going to have to go to eradicate things. So alright, let’s see, what time is it? We better have a break. Yes. Oh, it’s 3.30. Well, there’s not much point in a break. Okay, so let me, yep? I can add to your theory with a bit of modern neurobiology. Yes, well, but that’s an individual relationship issue. Okay, so I’ve had children, and they seem to have turned out reasonably well, and you know, there was a variety of differences between them temperamentally that I observed as they were growing up. It turns out my daughter is quite tilted towards a feminine temperament. I’ve tested her personality multiple times. She tests all the personalities, she tests the personalities of all her potential dates, which I think is really funny. And my son has a very masculine temperament, so he’s very low in agreeableness and very high in emotional stability. And so I can see that manifesting itself. And what you do, if you have a relationship with your kids, is you adjust your interactions with them according to who they are, because in principle you want maybe, it seems to me, that in principle maybe you want who they are to be allowed to emerge. Now I think there’s some evidence that that’s what good parents do, and the reason I think that is because when you’re looking at influences on children, you can look at genetic influences, non-shared environmental variance, and shared environmental variance. So shared environmental variance would be if you and I were brother and sister in the same family, shared environmental variance would be what was common across our upbringings. Unshared environmental variance would be what was specific to you in our family and what was specific to me. And then the biological stuff is biological. What you almost always find in these studies is that non-shared environmental variance is the most powerful after biological predisposition. It depends on the trait. And so what that seems to indicate is that the general milieu in which children is raised has hardly any effect whatsoever on their trait outcomes. Now you can be pessimistic or optimistic about that. If you’re pessimistic, you say parenting doesn’t matter. And people have drawn that conclusion. There was a famous book written about that a while back. But if you’re optimistic, what you say is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t get it. If you’re a good parent, you eradicate the shared variance. Because what you do is have an individual relationship with each child that takes into account their temperamental idiosyncrasies, and you tailor the environment to them. And so the shared environmental variance disappears because there is no shared environment. You know, it’s like go on ten dates and treat each man you meet or each woman you meet as if they were exactly the same and see how far you get. Right? You’re going to be one annoying person. And in all probability, you’re going to get brushed off. So what you want to do is take the gender into account as a broad template because you need to set up your expectations and then rapidly tailor the hell out of that as fast as you can to indicate that you’ve got some social sophistication. Right? Well, you do the same thing with children. But that still begs the question, and this is something that you guys can think about. What do you do about the differences? Do you leave them? Do you encourage them? That’s another thing. Because you could say… see, one of the things I really dislike about the social constructionist stance is that there’s an implication that comes with it. Here’s the implication. Men and women are the same. Okay, well why is that necessary? Well, because that similarity is valuable. Because otherwise why pursue it, right? Because it’s valuable. So people are better off when they’re the same. People are worse off when they’re different. Ah, why are they worse off when they’re different? How about because differences are not acceptable? Okay, well play that out if you want. Differences are not acceptable. Well, you can see where that would lead in no time flat. So the mere proposition that men and women are the same in a world where there are differences has the implication that the differences are substandard and maybe even pathological. And you might say, are they? Really? Is that right? To the degree we differ, we’re not mutually complementary and not acceptable. I mean as individuals and gender. It is true that I feel like a lot of people want to pretend that we don’t have differences. But at the same time, I feel like they’re also very encouraging of other people expressing their cultures and stuff like that. They’re also at the same time of saying, oh we’re all the same, there are no differences. They’re also like, oh we should be multicultural. We have a theory about that now. So we just did a study of political correctness. Because we wanted to find out, I’ll get to you right away. We wanted to find out if political correctness existed. Is it a homogenous set of values? Because it might not be. The left claims that the idea that political correctness exists as a homogenous set of constructs is a right-wing idea. And that it’s just wrong. The belief set is so diverse you can’t characterize it under a single label. It’s easy to test. What you do is you get a bunch of statements that appear to be on the politically correct side, and you can do that relatively objectively. We had a bunch of people generate them and we took clips from news items and all of that. So over-generated a set. Asked a thousand people. Factor analyzed the results and we got two factors. One was sort of radical egalitarianism. And the other was language control. Okay. And we’ve already done this for liberals and conservatives. Okay, so the liberals are high in openness and low in conscientiousness. Particularly orderliness. The conservatives are low in openness and high in conscientiousness. Particularly orderliness. So they’re actually mirror images of one another. The politically correct people, the first dimension, which is radical egalitarianism, they’re primarily agreeable and low in conscientiousness. Okay, so that’s different. They’re not hyper-liberals. They’re off on a different axis. Okay, the second dimension was high agreeableness, low conscientiousness. Is that right? Low conscientiousness? I hope that’s right. Doesn’t exactly matter. And low verbal IQ. Okay, so there was a reason I was telling you that. Ask me your question again. The fact that a lot of left-wing people were there, on one hand they tried to claim that everyone had the same. Oh, right. Good, good, good. Okay, so the commonality. We’ve always felt, and people make this claim, that there’s something about the PC stance that leads itself to a kind of authoritarianism. But it’s weird because a lot of the research on authoritarianism, and there’s historical reasons for that, was predicated on the claim that authoritarianism was necessarily a right-wing phenomena. Okay, so the authoritarian scale, for example, which was derived by Theodor Adorno, who was part of a left-wing think tank. What were they called? They were in Germany. I’ll remember their name. It was after World War II, and they had every reason for assuming that authoritarianism was a right-wing phenomena, except for all the things the communists were doing, but you know, forget about that for a moment. Then there was a huge debate in the psychological literature, really till, still going on about whether only the right can be authoritarian or whether the left and the right can be authoritarian. And it’s never been sorted out. Okay, but what we found, so the conservatives were high in orderliness and low in openness. Okay, so orderliness seems to be the authoritarian aspect, because conscientious people like structure, and they like to compete within structures. And conscientiousness predicts right-wing beliefs. Okay, but it isn’t industriousness, which is another part of the conscientiousness. It’s orderliness. Okay. The second dimension of the politically correct people, the language control, was agreeable and orderly. And then the IQ. Okay, so this is what we think. Now, this is speculative, but it’s a good study, and we’ve been trying hard to pin this down. And this isn’t my idea, by the way. This is my graduate student’s idea. It was a very smart idea. She thought authoritarianism is driven by orderliness. Okay, fine. If you’re agreeable, you are authoritarian by inclusion, and if you’re disagreeable, you’re authoritarian by exclusion. So the goal is homogeneity. But the right-wingers say, all you different people, screw off. And the left-wing says, all you different people, come in here and be the same. Okay, so now, I think the way that that pertains to your question is that I think the left-wing manages that weirdly paradoxical viewpoint by assuming that whatever differences exist are cultural, and so they can just be, in time, they can just be ameliorated. That’s what it looks like to me. I mean, it really does seem paradoxical, right, that you can be for egalitarianism and celebrate differences. And you see, this turns out very weirdly. I’ve met so many people like this. Well, let me give you an example of what happened. So do you guys know who Ayaan Hirzeale is? Yes. How many of you know? Okay, now you do. Good, good. Look, she’s quite the damn character. You know, Ayaan Hirzeale, I would look her up. I think she’s a real hero, that woman. She is tough as a bloody boot. She came from Ethiopia. She escaped from an arranged marriage, and she was in a very hierarchical, authoritarian Muslim family. So she had to run, and she did. And so that was tough, man, to get away from that. You know, she had to forfeit her familial ties and all of that. And then she went to the Netherlands to study. And the Netherlands shocked her. And she said a couple of things that shocked her that I thought were so cool. The first thing that shocked her was that she was at a bus stop, and there was a little digital sign there that said, when the bus was coming, and then the bus came. Like, right at the time it was supposed to. She couldn’t believe that that could actually happen. And if you think about how many things have to be going right for that to happen, you know that her detection of that miracle was accurate. And the fact that we just assume that, that just shows you how well things work. And the second thing she was amazed about was that if you asked a policeman, they would help you. Because in most countries, policemen are just an extension of thug, right? They don’t get paid anything, so all the money they make is from you. And they’re not there to maintain order or to help you. They’re there as a control arm of the state. Anyway, she went and got a liberal arts education. And she was very taken by the idea of individual sovereignty, roughly speaking, and the Enlightenment. So she turned into a really pro-Enlightenment person. And then she got into the Dutch Parliament. And she also had, there was a bit of a scandal about that, which I won’t go into. She also had a relationship, I think it was just a friendship, with this guy named Van Goh, who was actually a descendant of Van Goh. And he made this video that had naked women in it with verses of the Koran written on them. And it was very, very, very, very controversial, because these were anti-female verses, at least that’s what he thought. And so he got stabbed. And what happened was the guy that stabbed him, who was a Muslim extremist, took the note that explained why he was being killed and stabbed it into him. Okay, so that was nasty. So Ayaan Hirsi Ali, eventually her life was endangered to such a degree, and a variety of things happened in Holland, that she had to move to the United States with bodyguards. And so she lives there now. And she’s an outspoken critic of patriarchal oppression, in the best sense. Like she experienced it. It was terrible. Like she got away from it, and in a really remarkable and honourable and admirable way. I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali before she was politically controversial, except in Holland. Well last year, Brandeis University offered her an honorary PhD. And the students set up a petition saying that she couldn’t be granted that PhD because of her objection to radical Muslim faith, and they disinvited her. So that’s a good example of this weird paradox. I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I thought, Jesus, if anybody ever had a case to make about the oppressive nature of the patriarchy, as someone who had personally experienced it, it’s like you read her story and you think, oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. And so then she makes this immensely complex and sophisticated case for the individual rights of women, and Brandeis invites her to give her an honorary degree, and then they rescind it because the students complain about her. And that was the radical left students who were complaining. I just thought, first of all, that’s amazing. I just can’t believe that happened. And second, I couldn’t believe that that pathetic university came and withdrew their invitation to her. She’s a tough cookie, man. And I think she’s a real hero. And that was irrelevant. Like, some students were upset, they made a petition, so who cares about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her amazing journey. Well, generally the problem with a set of axiomatic presuppositions is that you’ll find situations where they conflict. I can give you another example. So that’s definitely one. So you say, well, diverse ethnicity and diverse cultural background is a plus, but then you think, oh well, some of these practices look like they’re not exactly commensurate with what we would regard as appropriate. So you have a problem there. Here’s another problem of the same sort. And I’m using this as an example just to show you how axiomatic systems produce internal conflicts. So the access to abortion has become increasingly universal in Western countries, although it’s backtracked a lot in the US over the last ten years for a variety of reasons. But there’s a weird consequence of that. And one of the consequences is that female fetuses get aborted at a much higher rate than male fetuses worldwide. Okay, so what do you do about that? Is that acceptable or not? Because if it’s not, well then there’s a problem because you have to face… what do you have to face exactly? That there’s an ethical question when it comes to abortion. Because if abortion is not wrong, how could selective abortion possibly be not wrong? Maybe you could come up with an explanation for that, but I’ve never seen a credible one. And that’s a good example of how if you use an axiomatic system, there’s inevitably the case where the axioms collide. And it’s sort of like, am I free to offend you with my speech? Two axioms. Freedom of speech and integrity of person. At what point am I inciting aggression? And it’s also the case, I think, why the Horus Osiris thing is absolutely necessary. So you could think of Osiris as a set of axiomatic moral presuppositions. Like a list of rules like the Ten Commandments. The problem is that not only do the rules get out of date over time, you know, we don’t worry very much about coveting our neighbour’s goat, for example, so they become obsolete across time. But worse than that, there are situations where if you apply both, they conflict. So then what do you do? Well the answer is, you pay attention. You pay attention because you have to mediate between the conflict. Well Horus is also the thing that mediates between the conflicts. And that’s partly why in the Mesopotamian story you have Marduk. And one of the things that Marduk demands when he’s elevated to the highest position, which is, you know, so that makes him ruler of all the gods, and you can think about those as, you know, integral motivational forces or principles, he gets the tablet of destinies. Which means that what he represents is the thing that makes the decisions, and that’s often the decision between two rigid approaches to right and wrong. And so you say, a chaotic approach to right and wrong, that’s a catastrophe. And then you say, well you replace that with a system of rules, which is better. But the system of rules has two potential problems. One is it will age, and the other is that it produces internal conflicts. So then you need a third principle. And the third principle to me seems to be what the Egyptians represented with Horus. And then you get into a communicative dialogue between the Horus factor, which is attention, and the culture. Like this, they mutually inform one another, and that keeps things structured, but also flexible enough to adapt across time. And then the system has to build in recognition for that, and that’s where I think the idea of individual rights comes from. It’s like, you have an individual right because you are a necessary player in the process that keeps the forces of order and chaos balanced across time. And if you’re shut down or oppressed or not allowed to speak, then the society denies itself that corrective action. And the corrective micro-corrections, say. And then what happens is it gets more and more rigid and more tyrannical because people have to falsify their experience to adhere to it, and then the bloody thing collapses precipitously. And that’s what happened with the Soviet Union. So you either make micro-corrections, or you accumulate error and collapse. And I think that, so I looked at that psychologically, and I think the way that people do that in their own life is that they adjust their own psyches with micro-corrections, and then they communicate about it freely. And then that’s enough to keep the society dynamic, but you have to let people speak. So that’s why the freedom of speech is a critical characteristic of modern democratic states. It’s like, it doesn’t matter what the person says. It’s irrelevant whether they’re right or wrong. It doesn’t matter if they’re offensive. It’s not the point. The point is that you have to let the chatter emerge so that you can sort the wheat from the chaff. And if you suppress it, then the error correction mechanism goes away. Oh, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. I was looking today, they just fired a professor at Marquette University. Was it Marquette or Charleston? It was Marquette. Okay, so what this guy did, he’s a self-proclaimed conservative. He has a blog. And he, a TA was teaching a course where the idea of gay marriage came up, and a student approached her afterward and said that he had opposed gay marriage, and she said there wasn’t something like that. There wasn’t going to be any discussion of that in her class. And he recorded that, and then that was released, and then this character wrote a blog and criticized the graduate student for not letting this guy speak. Okay, so fine. So you can read the blog. That caused quite a lot of trouble, and eventually he got fired. Okay, so fine, whatever. I read opinions on both sides. The conservative critics said, oh, this is just another case of someone being hounded out of his job, and the people on the left said he misused his position of authority to go after this graduate student in public, and that wasn’t due process, and so it wasn’t his opinions that got him fired. It was his failure to observe university regulations. So fine, whatever. Something can be said on both sides of the argument. But then I looked at the comments. Well, 20 to 1, this is why we’re voting for Trump. Yeah, yeah, and I do believe that because Trump is disagreeable, and that means he’ll say anything. He’ll shoot off his mouth. He’ll say anything. And the thing is, people don’t care what he says. What they care about is that he’ll say anything. That’s what they’re going after. And they definitely see that as a gesture of hostility towards the PC left. They say that. So the problem is, you know, when you… extremism always calls the devils out of the closet. So if you move too far to the left, in any way you call the demons of the right out, and vice versa. It’s a psychological principle. What happens within people’s character. So I was privy to a line of communication between a bunch of people who weren’t poor white trash, so to speak, the stereotypical Trump supporters. These people were well ensconced in the middle and upper middle class. And virtually, and they were almost all men, virtually to a man they said something like, the system is so rotten, we’re going to bring it down. And I thought, really? That’s what you guys are thinking? You’re that reactively angry. You know, if you’re in a marriage and then you refuse to let your partner speak for decades, you better be careful when they decide to speak. Because you’re going to come home one day. I used to tell this children’s story in this class about a guy who, there’s a little dragon in the house and it’s ignored by everyone and it eventually runs away with the house. And so Mr. Bixby, who’s the head of the household, the guy who’s off working, comes home and his house is gone. And he’s surprised, the house is gone. He asks the neighbours where it went. You know, the basic story is something like, well there was something not going on so good in that house and people ignored it and it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And finally it ran away with his house. Well that happens to people all the time. They come home and their partner has packed up, taken the kids and left. It’s like, I didn’t see that coming. It’s like, C is the right word. Did you have a million warnings? Likely. Now and then someone gets screwed. They’re married to someone who’s psychopathic. They’re just doomed from the start. But generally it’s not that. It’s the accumulation of a million unsolved, unhad arguments. And finally it explodes. And that’s what happens when you suppress free speech. The reason you support free speech is not because people… it’s not even because… it isn’t because people have a right to be heard. That isn’t it exactly. It’s that people have a right to be stupid and ignorant. And you need to listen to them. Because then you know where the stupid and ignorant people are and you can have a discussion with them. Instead they feel oppressed and they go hide. And then that’s not good. That is not good. Because they can say, well we’re oppressed. And that justifies their stupidity and ignorance. And it’s like they are oppressed. Whether that justifies their stupidity and ignorance is a whole different question. But you don’t stop destructive morons from talking. Ever. Because the fact that you don’t let them talk doesn’t mean that what they think goes away. Plus you don’t have a chance to confront them. So anyways. We’ll finish up on this next week, but here’s the central idea. People have an ethical responsibility to embody Horus, let’s say. Because we can take it out of the religious context that way. Because like none of you guys are ancient Egypt worshippers, right? So it’s irrelevant from a cultural perspective. But what the Egyptians carefully laid out was the idea that it’s the force that pays attention especially to corruption and evil that revivifies the state. At its own risk. Because of course Horus loses nine in the conflict. There’s never any indication that this is easy. You put yourself at risk to do it. But the risk you avoid by doing it is the ultimate degeneration of everything into hell. So there’s a risk to be taken to say what you think. But it’s a moral obligation and the consequence of not doing it is that the system deteriorates into hell. And you might say, well is that… prove it. Okay, fine. It’s proved. That’s what happened in the communist countries. And the documentation is so clear that there are many who were formerly radical lefties and communists in France who have written a book saying that it’s true. So you know, when you completely convert, reconvert the converted, you have to think well maybe there’s some power to that. And Solzhenitsyn’s basic point continually was there’s no way the Soviet system could have kept its talons in people if they would have refused to lie. And the lies were always… you’ll face this in the workplace. You wait and see. It’s going to come because what will happen is someone will come, there will be a bit of a bully and they’ll come to you and they’ll say, well how about if you do this work? And you’ll think, hey, really that’s your work. It’s not kosher that you’re giving it to me. But you won’t say anything, you’ll say, okay. Because you’ll think, well I don’t want to cause any trouble. It’s like, hey, no problem. But the next time that work comes your way, you can just remember that you facilitated that process because you didn’t say anything to begin with. And when you get your 10,000th piece of work and you’re crushed right over and you think why is the system so goddamn corrupt, you might remember that you opened the door this much with your first response. And people do that all the time. It’s a minor falsification of their experience. And one of the things I’ve learned about that, and you can think about this as a good guide, if you’re resentful about something, you’re either immature or you have something to say. If you’re immature, well then you should grow up, you know. But if you have something to say, you should say it. Because the pathology of the system has manifested itself within the domain of your experience. It’s right there in front of you. And it’s only gone. It’s only tilted, just this micro tilt, you know, off kilter. And you might think, well I’m not going to make a fuss out of that because it’s so little. It’s like, there’s a book called Ordinary Germans. Ordinary Men, sorry. It’s a famous book. And it’s a story about this troop of German policemen who were taken to Poland once the Germans had marched through. And they were bourgeois guys, all raised before Hitler came to power. I think you could just think about them as middle class suburbanites. That’s basically who they were, you know. Average guys. Okay. They ended up by taking naked women out into the field who were pregnant, shooting them in the back of the head. And so you think, well how does that happen? And the answer is, one tiny little step at a time. And this is well documented in the book. Because the guy who wrote the book was curious. It’s like, well how do you take ordinary people who in principle are no worse or better than anyone else and get them to commit unbearable atrocities? And then he walks you through it. It’s like, they’re asked to do X and they say okay. And then they’re asked to do X plus one and they say okay. And they’re asked to do X plus two and they say okay. And by the time they’re at X plus 100, things are looking pretty dismal and it’s getting hard to step back. You know, and then the descent, instead of being like this, goes like this. And there’s no bottom. There’s absolutely no bottom. And so the trick is to nip it in the bud. And the way you do that is by being very, very careful about what you say. And then when something is not going right and you know it, you have to say something. And you might say, well maybe I’ll get fired. And I would say, how the hell do you know that’s not the best thing that could happen to you? You know, because if you’re in a system that will not take your feedback when you’re being reasonable, then you’re in a nascent tyranny. And it could be easily the best thing that ever happened to you to get out of there before you’re crushed completely. So you know, the most sophisticated political philosophers of the 20th century, in my estimation, came to the conclusion that the reason that horrific genocidal crimes take place is because ordinary people lie. And that’s a radical conclusion. But A, how could it be any different? I mean, if people let the system deteriorate by not opposing it when it does, how could things end up any different than now? Then I would say, well, that maps perfectly onto classical religious ideas. So we could talk about Horace, we could talk about Marduk, but the idea of logos that’s underlying Christianity is exactly the same thing. Logos basically means truthful communication. That’s what it means. And that’s the thing that in the Judeo-Christian tradition identifies people with the part of God that creates order out of chaos. It’s laid out clearly in the theology. And the other part that goes along with that, and this is where the story rolls to a conclusion, is that if you manifest the logos, you end up being crucified and reborn. In principle, that can happen in small enough ways so that it doesn’t actually have to happen. Because if you learn something, if something’s bothering you, it’s bothering you and you think it through, what inevitably happens is that as you think it through and incorporate the information, old presuppositions are forced to die. And that’s painful. It’s hard on people because you have to re-examine your principles at a high resolution level or a broad level. Part of you is going to die, especially if you need a radical change. But maybe if you let the part die and revivify, then the whole doesn’t have to die. And I think that scales. It works within the personality, but it also works within the personalities organized into a hierarchical state. If you don’t allow that death and resurrection process to occur, and you suppress it enough, the whole state has to die. And then the probability that that’s going to take everyone with it is very, very high. So that seems like a bad long-term outcome.