2017 Maps of Meaning 09： Patterns of Symbolic Representation (yXZSeiAl4PI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yXZSeiAl4PI

Music So today we’re going to delve a little bit more deeply into the realm of symbolic representation and I’ll tell you what I think I’m doing and then I’ll show you a bunch of examples of it then I want to tell you a couple more stories and so I’ll tell you the stories in the second half of the class So, you know, it was Carl Jung who popularized and differentiated the idea of archetypes they weren’t his idea, platonic forms are archetypes essentially, ideals are an archetype and so, but Jung, the thing that I think he did that hadn’t been done before was to suggest that as well as suggesting, as Freud did, that human beings are composed of sub-personalities Jung pointed out, as Freud did to some degree, that some of those personalities have a universal character and so that they can be thought about as transcendent entities and you could think about those, while they have been thought about and even put forward as gods of one form or another Now when Jung talked about archetypes, it was never clear what he meant I think the reason for that was because the archetype is a very complicated idea and a very complicated phenomena and you can think about it biologically and you can think about it socially and you can think about it as something that the individual participates in creating so it’s not that easy to localize it and as well it’s not that easy to localize it and as well Jung was never clear about what the universe of archetypes looked like at some times he spoke as if they were a relatively small number and then at other times he spoke as if they were innumerable and I think the reason for that is in part, it depends on the level of analysis, right? the more transcendent the archetype, the fewer they are, but they differentiate because you might say, well how many hero archetypes are there? and one answer could be one but they differentiate all the way out into the diverse range of works of fiction that we have so you could say there’s as many variants of the hero archetype, roughly speaking, as there are works of fiction so you think about it as a hierarchy with the ultimate archetype at the top so then another question might be, what does the landscape of ultimate archetypes look like? and I think that that’s, well that’s what I tried to lay out and that’s what I’m trying to lay out in this diagram so now, why do you want to know that? there’s a practical reason, or the way, there’s a number of practical reasons as well as intellectual reasons one of the most relevant practical reasons as far as I’m concerned is that integrating narratives, and so those would include political narratives, integrating narratives have their force because they draw on universal archetypes, otherwise they wouldn’t have any power right, because they’re basically stories, an integrating archetype, like the story that people that Hitler sold the Germans, or that the Germans and Hitler co-created which is a much more accurate way of thinking about it that had motive force, because it had an archetypal essence and so, political stories derive their power from the underlying archetypal representations obviously, because they have to be concerned with the things that people find important, right? how can you sell a political message to someone if it isn’t about something they find important? and if it’s important to them, it’s going to be grounded, at least to some degree, in their biological substructure, I mean, if you’re talking to hungry people about food, it’s a story that you can tell right, because it hooks them deeply, it hooks deep into their motivational systems to use a narrative of utopia, which is the land of milk and honey, roughly speaking, a very very old idea you’re also tapping deeply into intrinsic human longings and so, the idea that political narratives incorporate archetypal themes is not really it’s not an idea that I would consider particularly controversial putting it that way might be okay, so, the problem with political narratives, in my estimation, is that they can rapidly transform themselves into ideologies and ideologies are dangerous for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason for their danger, I think this is a hypothesis, is because of their one-sided nature, what happens is that they capitalize, parasitize I think is even a better way of thinking about it a profound underlying narrative, but they don’t tell the entire story and so then, if you’re looking for orientation in the world because you’re fragmented and chaotic and somebody provides you with a partial story, that’s going to serve an integrating function and it’s very, one of the things you see in psychotherapy is that if you’re chaotic and confused and you go see a therapist who has a particular kind of practice, Freudian, behavioral, cognitive, Rogerian, whatever there’s a high probability that undergoing that course of therapy is going to be good for you and that you might even come to view your life in the terms of that therapeutic practice you might say, well, why is that therapeutic practice right for you? maybe it could have been Rogerian instead of Freudian, say and the answer to that is, yeah, well it probably could have been, because roughly speaking any coherent ordering principle is better than none and so that’s also a good way to think about human development from an intellectual perspective is that, partly, what has to be provided to individuals as they mature into adults is some kind of ordering structure and this is one of the facts that people who criticize the dogmatic element of religious belief don’t really understand they don’t understand that you have to provide people with a determinate structure of some type even if it’s constricting and restricting and crushing for that matter you have to pass through a disciplinary structure before, even in principle you could be free before your discipline, you’re not free, you’re just chaotic and so you have to practice some set of routines and rituals now, you could say, well they don’t necessarily have to be religious and they could be secular, you could become a lawyer, you could become a plumber, you could become a carpenter and I would say, yes, that’s far better than not becoming anything but the problem with an identity that isn’t rooted into the archetypes is that it leaves you incomplete because the archetypal rooting of the identity is what helps you grapple with the fundamental existential problems of life and whether you’re a carpenter or a plumber or a lawyer, your soul is still going to hunger for some deeper form of identity and you’re not going to get that without having your practical identity encapsulated in something that’s that’s greater from a philosophical perspective and perhaps even deeper than philosophy which I think the archetypal stories are, they’re the structure within which philosophy itself is embedded and outside of that is a behavioral structure, we’ve talked about how those evolve, you know there’s a behavioral evolution of something approximating a consensual morality and then stories about that consensual morality emerge and then inside that, the structures of philosophy nest and all of those things have to be addressed by your identity to some degree, or you’re weak that’s the problem, you’re beset by doubts, you’re beset by anxiety you’re easy to stop, and you don’t have much motivation, and none of that’s good it’s not good at all, because life presents you with enough real obstacles in the face of genuine suffering so that unless you’re strongly grounded and have a real reason for moving forward you’re going to get stopped, and as soon as you’re stopped, you are one miserable thing because it’s almost like the definition of human misery is to be paralyzed by anxiety and emotional pain and also have no motive force forward, it’s a terrible state and so you don’t want to be in that state, and you have to have an identity that’s powerful enough and deeply rooted enough, so the most profound doubts that might emerge about your life are met by something of equivalent force okay, so we’re going to review the symbolic domain briefly, and then I’m going to show you a bunch of different examples of how it plays itself out, partly archetypally and symbolically, but also partly politically because I want to show you how both of those things parallel one another and partly what I’m hoping is that understanding the full domain of archetypal symbolic representation will also inoculate you against ideological possession because you’ll know when you’re told a half-sided, one-sided ideological story you’ll know that there’s something missing in the story there’s pieces that aren’t being told, or there’s part of the story that isn’t being revealed so if it’s a story about how tyrannical modern culture is, and how oppressive, you think, well yes, obviously but what about the beneficial aspect of it, and how is that being represented and dealt with and it’s the same story about the negative element of the human being, which you hear stories like that all the time because I think perhaps more intensely since the 1960s, but because I wasn’t around before then I don’t know what it was like previous to that, there is this idea that people hold and that’s promoted that there’s something fundamentally cancerous about human beings it was the Club of Rome, I think, when they pronounced that everyone on the planet was going to die of starvation by the year 2000, that human beings were no better than a cancer on the planet it’s like, well, yeah, you know, there’s lots of things about us that could be improved but when you portray the human only as negative, the question should arise, it’s like, fair enough, but what about the positive part why aren’t you telling that story? and it doesn’t take you, you know, all you have to do is be sick once and go to a hospital where you get competent care to understand that, and you can get incompetent care too, but sometimes you get really competent care and you think, yes, it’s really good that there are some people out there who have their act together and are trying to put things together, you know, and you can’t forget that in your story and you don’t want to forget that in your story about yourself either so what is the fundamental landscape? well, the basic idea is that it’s predicated, you can look at it multiple different ways it’s predicated on the contrast between explored and unexplored territory or the contrast between the interpretive structure that philosophers like Kant talked about and the real world manifestation whose existence underlies the validity of empirical thinking, right? there’s you and your structure, you interpret the world, but there’s also the world informing you and so that’s the explored territory versus unexplored territory, something like that or it’s order versus chaos, or another variant of that would be it’s the hero going out into the unknown to encounter the dragon of chaos and to gather the information that’s out there in the unknown and I tried to make the case to you, because I’m often accused, most recently on Sam Harris’ podcast of making up post-hawk stories, you know, you have a set of stories, you can interpret them any way you want of course that is a danger, because you bring an interpretive structure to bear on every set of facts how do I know that this isn’t just an arbitrary post-hawk analysis, and my answer to that, it’s a technical answer is, it manifests itself at multiple layers of analysis simultaneously, and the probability that it’s merely an imposition of an a priori interpretive structure is decreased by the number of different levels of manifestation that you can detect the phenomena, it’s axiomatic, that’s why you have five senses that’s why, because they each report a different level, that’s why in science use multiple methods to detect the same thing so one of the things I tried to point out is that you can map this archetypal structure onto brain structure quite nicely even onto hemispheric structure and the function of the subcortical systems, but even more particularly you can map it onto the function of specific neuropsychological systems within the biological neurology we do have an interpretive structure, right, that’s your map, so to speak, of expectation and desire in the world that’s your model, there’s a brain area, roughly the hippocampus, although this is an oversimplification it compares that with incoming sense data, which is also a model, but we won’t get into that for the sake of argument so that’s explored territory, unexplored territory, and the thing in the center doing the comparison that’s the knower, and so it strikes me as highly unlikely, although you’re welcome to criticize away that you’ll see that kind of stacking of evidence across multiple domains of inquiry without there actually being a pattern there so it’s not merely post-hawk analysis, and even the people who derived these patterns, like Jung, to begin with, let’s say looked cross-culturally, at least, to say, well, here’s a manifestation of a pattern, and here’s a separate culture, and you can see the same pattern so there’s some attempt there to be methodologically rigorous, he did the same thing with people’s fantasies and dreams and then again, by mapping those onto people’s behavior and therapy, also had them test out the ideas in the world so these aren’t as trivial methodologically as people make them out to be, and especially that’s the case when you can put a biological underpinning underneath them so the proposition is, explored territory, unexplored territory, and the explorer, roughly speaking and then a differentiation of those two things into positive and negative, why? because everything complex has a positive and negative element, and so explored territory can become stultifying and crushing that’s tyranny, but it also provides the structure that informs and protects you, and unexplored territory, well, that can kill you, obviously but it’s also the place that you need to go when you’re static and dead, and you need new water, and you need new life, and you need new information so it’s a constant movement out into the unknown and back, and out into the unknown and back, and that’s what human beings are like, right? we’re information foragers, and then the individual is both positive and negative, and you know that because you know yourself and you know other people, and you know yourself, there’s parts of you that are good, classically speaking, or good even by your own definition and other parts that really could use, to say the minimum, a tremendous amount of work, and you also know that about other people and if you get truly unlucky with yourself or other people, it won’t merely be that you’re not trying hard enough you’ll encounter something in you, or someone who’s absolutely malevolent and bent on destruction, and that’s also not a hypothesis the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder reveals quite clearly that people typically develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they encounter some form of malevolence and if it’s ever happened to you, you know that it’s no joke, it’s not some figment of your imagination, quite the contrary and then that entire world, that’s sort of the world that can be comprehended, is nested inside a broader symbolic network and that seems to be the symbolic network that’s made up of the Dragon of Chaos, which is something like our representation of the set of all currently unknowable things it’s a very strange category, right? it’s like the category of zero, or the category of infinity and the reason that we formulated that category is because we don’t only want to know how to solve a problem just like we don’t only want to know how to win a game, we want to know how to win the set of all possible games and we want to solve the set of all possible problems, and so what the human beings have been trying to do for the last forever is trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the set of all problems, and we actually have some ideas one is, play to win the metagame and not the game, that’s one solution another solution is, go out into the unknown voluntarily and gather the information that lies there, because that continually updates you the other one is to make sacrifices, and that was discovered in an articulate form not very long ago and the idea of sacrifice is something like, well, you don’t just have to solve the problem of how do you survive in the present which is roughly the problem that animals are always trying to solve you have to solve the problem of how you survive in the present, given that you also have to survive next week, next month, next year, and among other people and the answer to that, in part, is the answer of sacrifice, which is to give up something that you desperately want now that would even be useful right now, so that you accrue more benefit across a broader span of time a very, very difficult lesson for animals to learn, animals have a terrible time learning that but even human beings have a terrible time doing it, because there’s some real intelligence in getting while the getting is good but it’s a suboptimal strategy, if you can stabilize the environment and spread out your adaptive capability over wider spans of time well, so much the better, you get what you need now, and you get what you need later, and you get what you want, and so does your family and other people and that’s a much better solution, but that requires, it requires precisely sacrifice, because it requires sacrificing the present for the future and that idea of sacrifice emerged, like all of our ideas, first in action, in acting these things out, and then conceptualizing them with our bodies like in drama, just the way that Piaget described children, first assimilating the structure of their parents’ actions by imitating them rather than by breaking them down into systems of rules, understanding the rules and incorporating the rules, that isn’t how we work we act and figure things out in action, then we imitate our own actions, and to imitate your own actions is to act yourself out, or to act other people out you can do that without having explicit, articulated knowledge, and that’s, it’s so crucial to understand that because it explains a great mystery, which is how can we tell stories that have meanings that are deeper than we know and the answer to that is, we have information encoded in our behavior that transcends our understanding well, how? well, we’re constantly modifying each other, constantly, and the world’s constantly modifying us, and there’s no reason that while being modified we should also be able to track how it is that we’re being modified we have to figure that out afterwards, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to look at a whole culture, or even a single individual, and to say, well, what is that person, or what is that societal structure it supersedes our conscious capacity for representations, we’re always playing catch up that doesn’t mean that we don’t act out things we think sometimes, you know, that the causal pathway can’t go the other way, because it can but more frequently, it’s bottom up, rather than top down, which is how everything works in the biological world animals do, and have wisdom, but they don’t know what they do, and they can’t articulate their wisdom, so it’s self-evident that a process like this must have occurred I mean, I was talking about wolf dominance behaviors online the other day, and somebody tweeted and said it’s only captive wolves that dominate each other through aggression it isn’t necessarily the most aggressive males that are dominant in the wild, and I thought, well, yes, I know that, that’s what DeWaul has already documented among chimpanzees the thing that emerges as appropriate to lead, and then to be imitated as leader, isn’t untrammeled aggression it’s some process that is akin to my interests and your interests matching over some period of time with all of us considered simultaneously that’s some equilibrated state of social behavior, embodied even in the behavior of wolves, the behavior of rats who know how to play fairly, the behavior of chimpanzees, and certainly in our own behavior much more complexly, in no small part, because our social structures are much bigger than those of animals so therefore much more complex, Robin Dunbar has indicated, for example, that one of the best predictors of brain size, predictors or correlates, more likely one of the highest correlates of brain size, especially, I think he only looked within primates, is group size and that makes sense, right, because the complexity of the social organization increases dramatically as the number of individuals involved increases and I wouldn’t say it’s group size, brain size that determines group size, it’s brain size determines group size, determines brain size, determines group size in a loop and many other factors are involved in expanding cortical representation as well so as far as I can tell, there isn’t anything contentious in those claims and it gives us a basis out of which the archetypal stories can emerge, and it explains why we can see revealed truth in them, so to speak because the truth was instantiated in the behavioral realm, not in the conceptual realm and through the, you know, you see this in your own life, you watch yourself and one day you go, aha, that’s what I’ve been up to this whole time, that happens to people in therapy all the time or you’re dealing with some other person and they tell you something, it’s like the last piece fell into place and he says, oh, I had you completely wrong, now I get what you’re up to and what’s happened is, my representation has become more complete, but also matches your behavior better there’s a concordance between what I’ve observed and what actually manifests itself and so, well, so for the derivation of wisdom from the observation of behavior you do the same thing when you analyze a Shakespeare play, you know a Shakespeare play never happened, but Shakespeare extracted out patterns that happen all the time and if he hadn’t extracted them out, no one would watch the plays, right, the plays are interesting precisely to the degree that the play is about something that’s about you and something that’s about you and something that’s about you it has to be something that’s common to everyone and you watch the play and you partake in it through imitation, even though you’re sitting down you partake in it through imitation and then maybe later you go for coffee with your friends and say, well, what was that all about? and that’s your attempt to take the behavioral wisdom that’s coded in the story and make it articulate and we’re doing that all the time, whenever you discuss a movie, you do that and that’s how educated people actually interact with literature, right, because if you’re uneducated roughly speaking, you go see a movie and you just go see it you never think about it as something that was produced you never think about it as a cultural entity and you never do that higher order analysis and when you first encounter the idea of even doing that, you might be resistant to it because it seems in some sense to destroy some of the magic of that pure immersion in the form but that doesn’t mean that people who go to movies and don’t talk about them afterwards aren’t learning anything quite the contrary, they’re just learning using a very abstracted form of imitation and then you might imagine you don’t go to a movie, you go to a hundred movies and you imitate something that’s in common across all the movies well, what’s that? well, that’s an archetype the archetype is what’s common across stories and so we’re trying to get to the bottom of what’s common across stories and this is the best I’ve been able to do it also maps quite nicely onto Heidegger’s representation of the world, which is something I only found out later he has three domains of reality that correspond to this very very precisely and then Freud’s conception is also very similar id, ego, superego, right? the id is the natural force within you, positive and negative, because Freud was smart he knew there was always that dichotomy then the ego, that’s you, the individual, positive element, negative element and the superego, which controls you, represses you, inhibits you, and civilizes you but can also be a complete tyrant and so part of the reason Freud’s theory obtained such purchase so rapidly was because it filled a hole, an archetypal hole that needed to be filled for psychotherapeutic practitioners who in some sense had taken the place of priests and ministers and rabbis and that sort of person so, okay, so that’s the representation and then, well, we’ve talked about the representation of chaos, and I would think about that, and this is a radical thing to think it’s sort of predicated on the idea that what you confront in your experience is not so much the material world, but potential as such, it’s the potential that you’re constantly contending with that can destroy you and bring you down, but also has, as part of its nature that which you can extract and use to build and grow and we don’t think of ourselves as interacting with potential we think of ourselves as determined by a material substrate but I don’t think the idea that we’re determined by a material substrate is as powerful an idea as the idea that we interact with potential and I also don’t think that the idea that we’re determined by a material substrate is a more scientific idea than the idea that we’re interacting with potential, because I think that, and I do this with hesitancy, because any time you delve into the quantum realm the hypothetical quantum realm to ground your arguments, you’re doing something very dangerous, but the quantum view of the world seems to be something like being is a field of potential from which forms emerge, it’s something like that, and some of the physicists like Wheeler for example, believe that consciousness plays a key determining role in that, whatever that role might be so it’s not reasonable to think of these ideas as somehow outside of the realm of scientific conjecture, not in the least especially because they can also be given a deep evolutionary grounding, and that is, why do we represent potential with a symbol like this well it’s because that’s a great symbol for what lies outside our field of competence, what is that? predators, dangerous predators, snakes, raptors, carnivores, all amalgamated together in a monster and it’s the monster that, well it’s also the monster that even offers fruit, that’s the story in the story of good and evil or in the story of Adam and Eve, well obviously, because you always hunt for nourishment in the face of predation, obviously, always and that’s a paradox, but it’s a paradox that’s embedded in everything that you do the strange thing about these categories is they’re not exactly logical categories, they’re paradoxical categories and those sorts of things aren’t supposed to exist, because generally the rule for a category is it can’t contain itself and its opposite at the same time but if you’ve ever dealt with a person on an intimate basis, you know perfectly well that the category indicated by their name contains many paradoxical elements, and they might be paradoxical enough so you can’t even live with the person they’re not homogenous enough so that you can plot a path forward with that entity too many things pulling both you and them apart so some things are A and only A and not B, but some things are A and B at the same time and complex categories have that nature I showed you some of the representations of Osiris and Isis emerging from the conjoined serpent and that’s what this diagram represents to some degree it’s well, what does the chaos of potential first differentiate itself into? you could say, well it differentiates itself into yin and yang that’s the right way of thinking about it, it differentiates itself into chaos and order and those are the father and the mother of everything that comes after them, that’s one way of thinking about it and they each have their symbolic realms, and so I’ve listed some of the common symbols that are associated with these two realms now, it’s a difficult thing to pin down, because what one of the symbols mean has to be defined in relationship to the other so for example, if you think about the sky, the earth in relationship to the sky, it’s easy to make the earth feminine and the sky masculine that’s a common symbolic representation but if you contrast the earth with the water, then the water tends to be represented as feminine and the earth as masculine and so the symbolic representations can shift depending on the literary context, let’s say, the broader literary context and that means you can’t just do a one to one mapping of the symbolic entity onto the underlying archetypal structure you have to be attentive to context and nuance, of course, because we’re talking about literature it’s not like you can use a dictionary of symbols to get your way through something as complex as Shakespeare but you can see the underlying patterns and use them, especially if you know the fundamental map but anyways, so here are the more common symbolic representations chaos transforms itself into the great mother, that’s the queen, it can be the evil queen or the good queen it can be the fairy godmother or the queen that provides the poisoned apple to Snow White or the queen that locks the prince, what’s his name, I don’t remember, the prince in Sleeping Beauty in the dungeon and tries to destroy him the queen, Tiamat, we’ve talked about Tiamat the material world, material, matter, mother, right? so the material world is the mother of all things and matter is mother the land of the dead, dark water, unexplored territory, nature, mother nature, obviously the night sky, contrasted against the day sky Isis, queen of the underworld, the womb, the forest, barbarian lands, anomalous occurrences in the grave and the great father, the king, the emperor, Apsu and Tiamat locked together as we discussed in the Mesopotamian creation myth the ancestral spirits, the family, the city, explored territory, culture, the day sky, Osiris, god the father the village, the nation, the predictable, the monument stone, anything that’s built in stone to last is a representation of the great father that’s why there were monolithic religions spread across the northern hemisphere for thousands and thousands of years those people were building things and carving things in stone to make memories that’s what their monuments were for, to bring the past into the present and future on a permanent basis and to try to instantiate something solid that everyone could stand upon well sometimes solid isn’t what you need, sometimes what you need is fluid and liquid but the solidity is there to give you something to stand on even though it can become something arid and dry you see in the story of Exodus, Moses is a master of water and the pharaoh is the king of desert stone roughly speaking, and the pharaonic Egypt is portrayed as a tyranny because it’s nothing but dry stone and Moses brings water to that, that’s chaos, that’s partly the Red Sea story and partly Moses’ ability to get water out of rocks and when that’s necessary, and part of the reason that he’s found to begin with floating on water when he’s an infant which is also something that almost killed him, right, because you don’t want to put your infant in a basket of rushes and put them to float on the water so that’s a brief overview of the manner in which images and stories can be used to represent the first division of this underlying reality you know nothing, what do you do? You establish a center, you explore from the center it’s a domain of safety, and that’s surrounded by the unknown so that’s what children do, we already know this, if you watch how children explore, it’s more evident if you look at children who are somewhat inhibited because really extroverted and emotionally stable children, they’ll just explore, they won’t recede but children that are sort of balanced in their emotional response, imagine you bring an 18 month old to a new playground a mother standing there, she’s the pillar at the center of the world, around her is explored territory and the reason it’s explored is because the child knows how to interact with the mother and so one thing you want to know about kids is you can have multiple caregivers for your kids you can have a nanny, you can put them in daycare, but they do not like having their primary caregiver switched it’s like everything transforms when that happens and it destabilizes them badly, so if you’re going to have other people take care of your kids it’s better that it’s the same other person well obviously, they’re going to form an intimate and loving relationship with them with any luck and if that disappears, it’s like a death, but it’s worse than that in some sense or the reason that the death is bad, because the child’s conceptual world, their familiar world, familiar family their familiar world collapses, so children hate that, now they can bond to multiple people, that’s not a problem but they do not like having their caregivers shifted, because that defines their territory so the child is adapted to the mother’s presence and has been ever since birth, if everything’s gone well so it’s a place of security and stability, partly because the child knows how to act around the mother but also partly because if the child encounters anything that he or she doesn’t understand well in the presence of mother, the mother will instantly intervene to provide the knowledge necessary to encapsulate the unexpected occurrence okay, so the child’s by the mother, and maybe he’s holding on, and that gives him ventral contact it’s comforting, it produces opiates, it decreases pain, it’s directly comforting and so then the child is maybe, they’re shy, they’re going to take a few looks at what’s around first they’re frozen, clinging to something secure, and then if nothing negative happens, they start to relax just like a rat that’s been put into a new cage, they start to relax, and they’ll start to look and that’s the first manifestations of voluntary, exploratory behavior and maybe if there’s other people around, they’ll look and smile, and then they’ll hide and the smile is an invitation to play or interact, so it’s a foray out into the world, smile, eye contact, then hide maybe they’ll do that multiple times, and get a game going, that establishes something stable going on between them and the stranger does the stranger know how to play? and then maybe they’ll loosen up, and they’ll start to explore and then they go out away from the mother and start interacting with the world, until something happens that overwhelms them then they’ll run back, get a hug, maybe have a sleep, because maybe they’ve processed enough and then you can encourage them to go back, and so what they’re doing is, they have the flag planted on unknown territory that’s mum, the flag, right? they circulate around there, because it’s secure make forays outwards, where the dragons are, gather what’s of interest, and if it’s too much, they run back and the mum says, it’s okay, no problem, or gives them a little rock, or maybe feeds them something and lets them have a little rest, and then off you go, play again, out they go again and so, what the child is doing is continually moving out, extending its explored territory into the unknown just like the Star Trek Voyagers, and then moving back to security, and then moving out farther, and then moving back to security and hopefully at some point, they carry with them their own security, once they become competent once you’ve incorporated all the competence of your parents, you don’t need to go back, and even if you do, it isn’t going to help you’ve transcended the security, and that’s what makes you an adult, hopefully that happens so, that’s why the hero archetype is the central human story, it’s because that’s how we learn it’s an imagistic representation of the process by which we make sense out of the world so of course it’s redemptive, because by definition, that’s the pattern we use to expand our competence in the world how could it be anything other than redemptive? and it’s tied in with the idea, here’s how it’s tied in with the idea of sacrifice every time you learn something, especially painfully, which really means you learned it there’s a bunch of things that you already knew that you had to let go of, because they’re wrong and so there’s no learning without sacrifice, and now that means that there’s no learning without the retooling of structures that you’ve already been using and that’s because you actually have a complete map of the world, always but it’s low resolution, it’s low resolution, and then if you go out there and into a particular area that you’ve only mapped in a low resolution way you’ll learn details that force you to update the low resolution representation and sometimes that can mean abandoning whole pieces of it, because they’re just wrong you think this is like this, you think your girlfriend is like your mother well you may find out that that’s absolutely wrong, and the degree to which you use this low resolution map to map her, you’re going to experience nothing but trouble so in fact, in all likelihood, that’s what you’ll experience, because your girlfriend is not your mother or at least she shouldn’t be so when you go out and you encounter something new, it always means the demolition of parts of you that are still unformed and incomplete, and so there’s a sacrificial element to exploration and that’s partly why people don’t like to talk to people who have ideas that are different than theirs because you might think, well sure, we differ, why can’t we just talk? if you know things I don’t, all the better but no, if you know something I really don’t know, it’s going to challenge something I already presume and if it really challenges it, it will disintegrate, and I’ll do a little trip into the underworld before I can restructure myself and if you really challenge me, it might be almost complete dissolution so who wants that? well, here’s how you want that the only circumstance under which you will want that is if you know that the alternative is worse continual small updates differentiate you and make you strong you shy away from that, your map stays low resolution, and you make yourself weak because you’re not practicing that process of letting go and transforming and letting go and transforming, because you want to become a master at that you don’t want to be a master at darting your territory, even though that’s extraordinarily useful you want to become a master of taking the walls apart and extending them and building them up and taking the walls apart and extending them and building them up because you’ll never run out of utility for that and that can mean that the unknown becomes something that’s your friend instead of your enemy and that would be a wonderful thing, because of course people respond to the unknown as if it’s their terrible enemy it’s like, don’t be so sure about that what you know might be your enemy what you don’t yet know might be the best friend you have and it’s highly probable, because what do you know? and there’s an infinite number of things you don’t know, so you might as well make friends with them and then you also start to understand that you are precisely the thing that can move into the unknown as if it’s welcoming, and grow and develop as a consequence and that makes you a much different thing than the thing that has to be terrified of everything it doesn’t understand you’re just in a permanent state of existential horror under those conditions and you’re dangerous to other people too, especially if they don’t agree with you there’s another way of representing it the dragon of chaos stands for the potential that surrounds us inside of that, there’s the unknown, the unknown that you actually come into contact with that’s the unknown as it actually manifests itself in your world as something you don’t understand instead of just the potential for that because we say, look, you know perfectly well that as you’re sitting here there’s all sorts of things you don’t know everywhere but where are they? well, they’re not manifesting themselves at the moment, they’re only in potential but we could have a discussion that became argumentative and then all of a sudden it would be as if emissaries of that unknown had entered the space and that’s the unknown that’s defined in relationship to what you know that’s what you actually experience, instead of it only being potential it’s a tough thing to get, because they’re both unknown, right? you think, well how can there be two different categories of unknown? well, latent and manifest, that’s a good way of thinking about it you know, in a relationship it’s going stably, but you know that sooner or later something will come up okay, up, from where? why up? from beneath, well, what do you mean beneath? well, it’s from, you’re complex, the person you’re in a relationship with in with, is complicated and complex that’s implicit in you it’s inside your conceptual structure, that’s a way of looking at it now and then, when there’s a disagreement, it will manifest itself and you know that, you know that there’s still trouble brewing ahead in a relationship, always, and that’s part of what keeps them alive there’s an interesting piece of empirical work done on this a while back so you might think, well, what does the optimal relationship look like in terms of positive and negative emotion? you might say, well, utopia, nothing but positive interactions it’s like, no, imagine you get people to code the interactions they have with their partner during the day, you know, you sample it you say, was that interaction positive or negative? and then what you’re trying to do is predict the longevity of the relationship okay, so here’s the data if it falls under five positive interactions to one negative interaction the relationship doesn’t continue fair enough, too much negative that’s easy to understand if it exceeds 11 positive to one negative, the relationship doesn’t last why? no challenge right, what do you want from your partner? bliss? no, no, no, you don’t you want periods of peace punctuated by a good fight and that, because that means you respect them means you have something to offer each other and it means that you’re both growing and so you don’t want the fight to be too dramatic because, well, then you retreat, you can’t settle it but the person that you can completely map and who only does positive things for you it’s like, A, you don’t know that person B, they’re not communicating with you nor you with them maybe they’re just subordinating themselves to you or you to them and you’re not growing you want someone who can it’s, a real relationship is a wrestling match it’s a grappling, it’s a grappling phenomena that you both emerge transformed from and that’s what people want they don’t want to push over not unless there’s something wrong with them and when narcissistic person who never wants to be challenged will want a partner who does nothing but deliver exactly what they’re told to deliver but they will mistreat them beyond belief and perhaps deservedly so alright, so here’s some symbolic representations the two on the left are Jonah Jonah and the whale so the story of Jonah is an interesting one I’ll just go over it very briefly there’s a city and the city is full of people who are sinful what does that mean? well to sin is an archery term it means to miss the mark so these are people who aren’t oriented properly and so the city is in a chaotic state and God tells Jonah that he’s gonna go to that city and tell them just exactly what’s up with them and Jonah thinks, no, I’m not going to do that and why? well, that doesn’t require much explanation it’s like, how popular are you gonna be if you go to a city full of chaotic people and tell them why they’re stupid and wrong it’s, Jonah thinks, no, I’m not going to do that I don’t care if God’s telling me to do it so his conscience is telling him to do it or his destiny is telling him to do it or his orientation with higher morality is telling him to do it you can read it any way you want and so he thinks, no, I’m hopping on this boat and I’m getting as far away from that city as I possibly can and so he does that and then the storm comes up because God thinks, no, you’re not getting away if I told you to do something, you’re not getting away from it a storm comes up well, what does that mean? well, it’s easy betray your destiny and see how long it takes you to be drowning in a storm it’ll happen immediately and of course it will because what’s calling you to be your best is exactly the thing that’s pushing you forward to manifest yourself most fully in the world it’s what you need you run away from that the boat’s going to start to rock very, very quickly well, you all know that you know that perfectly well all you have to do is not study for an exam that you know that’s coming up to see everything start to the storm waters start to rise and everything start to rock it’s pretty bloody obvious so anyways, he’s on this boat and there’s a storm and all of the people on the boat who can’t quite discriminate chaos from weather because they haven’t differentiated the world to that degree think, oh, the boat wouldn’t be about to be swamped if we hadn’t some of us hadn’t done something stupid and wrong and there’s logic in that you know, you might think, well, God has nothing personal against you because of the storm so you’re confusing levels of analysis but you’ve got to give these people some credit it’s like, maybe they did do something stupid maybe they didn’t caulk the damn boat properly maybe the ropes aren’t in as good a shape as they might be maybe they weren’t paying attention to the weather when they went out on the ocean you know or maybe they haven’t made peace with their brother and so their hearts are bent and twisted out of shape so they don’t make particularly good sailors it’s like the idea that you encounter a storm because you’re stupid and wrong is a really good idea even though it’s not of infinite applicability anyways, they draw lots it’s a primitive thing to do it’s like, well, it’s someone’s fault we don’t know who we’re going to throw someone overboard the worst sinner obviously that’s what God wants some kind of sacrifice so they all draw lots and someone loses and then Jonah stands up and says well, sorry guys like, I know that I’ve got a problem with God at the moment so it’s probably me you better throw me over and they don’t really want to but he finally convinces them over he goes and the storm settles well, you know sometimes if you’re in a group of people in an organization there is someone in the organization whose head isn’t screwed on exactly straight and they know exactly why it is and what they’ve done wrong and what puts them in that position and they are poisoning the entire enterprise and if you throw them overboard or better if they agree voluntarily to leave then the storm will abate and everything will be okay so anyways, they throw Jonah overboard and a whale comes up and swallows him and takes him down to the bottom of the ocean well, we already know what that means because we watched Pinocchio it’s like, when God abandons you because you’ve abandoned your destiny and the storms come up the probability that you’re going to be taken down to the depths is extraordinarily high and that happens in people’s lives all the time also down there Jonah repents well, what do you do when you’re in the underworld? well, you’ve been there before when things fall apart on you your friends have abandoned you you’re not as popular as you could be you can’t stand to look at yourself in the mirror into the underworld you go and you think geez, I’ve done a lot of things wrong, you know maybe I should reconcile myself with the world and I could get out of this well, so that’s what Jonah does he thinks, all right, I’ve got this destiny I better go do what God says so the whale spits him out onto the beach and off he goes to the city to tell them what’s wrong well, that’s what that represents that’s these symbols, you know it’s so cool this second one, I really like it’s so interesting because you see Jonah reemerging from the whale and he’s got a halo around his head you say, well, what’s a halo? well, have you ever looked at a quarter? well, think about a quarter a quarter’s the moon and who’s on the quarter? the queen the queen is surrounded by the halo of the moon the queen’s queen of the night gold coin, that’s the king’s head on the sun that’s the halo well, what comes out of the belly of the fish? it’s the illuminated human being it’s the spirit of the illuminated human being that’s what that means well, what does that mean? well, what else would come out of chaos? if you fall apart and then you put yourself back together what is it that comes back out? at least you’re in better shape than you were before and then maybe you do that 20 times in your life or 50 times and you do it voluntarily every time you do it, you’re more like the thing with the halo and less like the thing that’s being thrown overboard by your friends and then you see this representation on the right this is a very complicated representation so in this one you see Christ who’s carrying his cross with the sun behind him that’s the halo that I was talking about he’s the person who’s voluntarily accepted the necessity of death and renewal that’s what the cross represents and so it’s a, what would you call it? an abstracted representation of this a further developed idea of this and then you see in the back this is a feminine symbol right, it’s a symbol of birth and you’ll understand more when I show you the symbols later this is the eternal opening in the world from which new forms emerge it’s the place from which babies emerge and you can tell that if you look carefully because you see all these little heads there with wings on them those are all spirits waiting to be born and so the hero emerges from the eternal feminine willing to die and suffer and in doing so defeating the snake, the snakes down there and the adversary at the same time well it’s no wonder we don’t understand those images I mean they’re so unbelievably rich that how could you possibly articulate them? that’s why they emerged in imagistic form to begin with the artists get there before the philosophers long before the philosophers the dramatists get there way before the artists even and so we’ve figured it out we represented it in art and literature and music and drama and then we’re on the cusp so to speak of understanding it in a fully articulated manner and not a moment too soon so what does it mean for this symbol to emerge from the feminine symbol let’s say to emerge from chaos well this picture, this is a picture of Venus, the goddess of love, right? and so I cut this picture out of a larger picture and it’s Venus manifesting herself in a transcendent space in the sky in the same way that Christ did in the previous representation and she has rays coming off her and there’s all these men who are knights kneeling in front of the image well what does that mean? well it means that men use the image of female perfection to motivate themselves and that’s exactly right that’s precisely what they do you see that in the Tom Sawyer story so Tom Sawyer is about 12 years old and he’s still hanging around with his friends like Huck Finn and this girl moves across the street, Becky and she comes out and he’s struck by her for the first time in his life something’s changed and the first thing he does is hop up on a picket fence and show off and balance in front of her and he’s saying well look at me, look at me he’s like the male bower bird building something beautiful so the female will approve of it and it’s motivation you know and that’s something that I think modern women don’t really understand about men they don’t understand that at least to the degree that males are uncorrupted and not better because of being rejected they’re doing everything they can to kneel before the eternal image of the feminine and try to make themselves worthy that’s the chivalry story, right? that’s what you should encourage in your partner and so out of chaos emerges this first form it’s the feminine form it’s partly the form that represents novelty as such so and on one hand it’s promise and on the other hand it’s threat that you wouldn’t believe and I don’t know, because I don’t know I don’t understand the situation with women as well as I understand the situation with men obviously being a man but I don’t know if women have any idea how paralyzing they are to especially young men very large number of my clinical clients but also young men I’ve talked to in general are absolutely terrified of women because they’re terrified of being rejected and the terror exists in precise proportion to their attraction to the woman which is a horrible paradoxical situation to be in it’s often why men make such fools of themselves in front of women that they’re attracted to it’s because first of all they don’t see the woman that they’re attracted to because what the hell do they know about her? they don’t see her as an individual they see her as the manifestation of a judgmental ideal and then it’s only in establishing the relationship with the actual woman that they can start differentiating between the judgmental ideal and the actual individual woman and that also requires a sacrifice and the sacrifice is you never can have an ideal woman so to have a relationship with any woman you have to sacrifice the relationship with the ideal woman and you have to see the individual woman and separate her from the ideal and that’s the same thing that happens to the hero in Sleeping Beauty he sees the evil queen who actually turns into the dragon of chaos and it’s not until he can defeat her that he can establish a relationship with the actual princess and that’s exactly the case I had one of my clients who ran this men’s group which was quite interesting one of the things they had the initiates do which was very intelligent was to go out and ask 50 women in one day for their phone numbers why? politely, properly, you know it wasn’t a game but it wasn’t a stupid game and the idea was get over your fear of rejection and how do you do that? by encountering it continually and continually and continually so that you’re no longer paralyzed by this here’s, I love this cartoon this is from an underground comic for people who smoke way too much marijuana it’s called, these people are the fabulous furry freak brothers and they were created by Gilbert Shelton who was one of the first underground cartoonists and one of the least pathological ones with the best sense of humor and he writes these stories about these stupid hippies three of them, the fabulous furry freak brothers you see two of them there and all they do is smoke pot and avoid responsibility and run away from the police but it’s a nice satire and they have this cat and the fat one, Fat Freddy has the cat and they’re too lazy to even give the cat a name so it’s Fat Freddy’s cat and it has its own adventures mostly with an army of cockroaches that lives inside their horrible, slummy hellhole of a living place and so anyways, it’s quite comical and so the hippies have stumbled across a small fortune and stoned out of their minds on cocaine they go out to set up a utopia in the countryside they buy this terrible piece of property but they’re so deluded that they think it’s like a mansion and they bring their cat and I don’t know if you’ve ever had a cat but cats don’t like to move it really bugs them and so they’re not comfortable when you bring them to a new place they’re like the rat that’s been taken out of its comfortable cage and put into a new cage and the cat, you put a cat in a new room and it, depending on the cat obviously but generally they’ll retreat into a corner and meow piteously and be very unhappy for quite a substantial amount of time and so the cartoonist actually mapped this out quite nicely so the hippie takes the cat out of the box and says our new home it’s there out in the forest this is an urban cat it’s never been in the forest it doesn’t know what the hell’s up in the forest and the cat’s looking rather dubiously and thinks so this is the country and then it’s put on the ground and it starts to slink, as he says slink, slink, out into the forest and that’s actually what animals do it’s a predatory evasion crouch and so if they’re put in a new territory they’ll hunker down and freeze first and then they’ll slowly unfreeze and start to explore they sniff first and then they’ll start to move but they do it like with trepidation and slowly and try to hide and so that’s what the cat’s doing and the cat goes out into the unknown far enough sniffing and all of a sudden pow! it goes underneath the house it’s like the toddler running back to the mother and the other hippie there I think that’s Phineas says where’d the cat disappear to now and the Fat Freddy character says under the house and then the cat’s under there in the dark with big eyes looking terrified saying you’d hide too if you’d smelled what I did and so what it smelled was this thing that has like the head of a wolf and antlers like a deer and the tail of a skunk and the feet of a chicken and horrible claws it’s like well what is that? well it’s a monstrous amalgam of that which lurks in the unknown and so the cartoonist the comedian got it perfect said well what is there what is out in the unknown well you need one representation not a thousand and so you take pieces of what’s out there that are relevant and you create a single image out of that and you say well this is what’s out there and you might say well no such animal as that exists and that’s actually incorrect an animal very much like that exists it’s just a superordinate low resolution category it includes all those weird animals that might hurt you that are out in the forest that’s a useful category weird animals that might hurt you and that’s a real category you know you might say well there’s differentiated things within that category it’s like yeah every category has that nature it can still be further differentiated maybe not protons you know they can even be differentiated with regards to location at least so every category can be further differentiated the question is whether the category has some functional utility or at least that’s one of its questions it’s like that’s the thing to be afraid of okay good now you got it this is the category of all things to be afraid of what do you do in response to that category all right so then we go to the next representation this is kelly a-a-l-i hindu goddess of destruction she’s the thing that you encounter she’s the thing that makes things go bump in the night what is that thing well let’s take it apart a little bit because you can’t see this image until you until you understand it you wouldn’t be able to if you were hindu because you’d be in the culture and you’d know what the image represented but some people don’t but some people in here might be hindu but not very many people so okay so let’s talk about this image it’s horrifying image and so here’s how this image emerged it emerged in the imagination of people who were tormented for millennia about just what the hell lurked out there in the unknown and some some artist was seized by a revelation a horrifying revelation of just what that was okay so what is it well first of all she’s in a container of fire why fire well fire is useful and destructive and you also cannot look away from fire and so it’s a really good symbol of that which you cannot look away from it’s eternally meaningful fire is eternally meaningful why we can’t keep our hands off fire we’re descendants of the first insane ape who was so obsessed by fire that he couldn’t stay away from from a burning landscape and learned how to master it he’s our forefather that person we’re obsessed by fire it’s magical to us and it transforms it burns and transforms so from a symbolic perspective it’s a very use useful source of of imagistic representation okay the fire is there and then inside the fire these are skulls you see them all lined up there so it’s not just fire it’s it’s the fire of death that consumes so that’s where kelly lives so that’s that’s fun to start with and then there she is with her with her hair hair on fire because her hair is on fire in case she isn’t frightening enough just because of where she lives her hair is on fire and her headdress is made out of skulls so that’s nice and then she’s like an insect like a spider see she has all these legs and why is that it’s because we don’t really like insects and you know they set off our bug detectors and they can bite us and they’re quite horrifying and many people have spider phobias particularly and and no wonder and then she’s got a weapon in one hand here and but and then her you see she’s eating something and you see here her belly is concave well why well she’s in a birth position she’s just given birth to this unfortunate character who happens to be lost who she happens to be standing upon and he’s disemboweled and she’s eating him intestines first and that’s kelly it’s like that’s horror it’s a representation of horror and death and destruction and transformation it’s feminine as well what do you do in the face of his mother nature that’s a negative element of mother nature what do you do with something like this well that’s the eternal question and the answer is quite straightforward you make sacrifices to her and if you make the proper sacrifices then she turns into her beneficial counterpart and that’s exactly what you do do in life if in the face of horror and death you make sacrifices so you transform the terrible destructive element of nature into that thing that continually offers you what you need and so it’s it’s of that discovery is one of unparalleled brilliance and you know we don’t get it we think it’s primitive it’s and no wonder you know you you can understand human sacrifice that sounds pretty primitive man it’s terrifying but the idea of sacrifice it’s an act the the idea itself is a conceptualization of utter genius and why do you expect it to come forward first in its perfect form it’s not going to do that it’s going to come forward imperfectly and roughly and brutally and then hopefully be refined across time which is exactly what has happened you see even in the biblical stories the transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice and then with us now it’s a transition from animal sacrifice to psychological sacrifice because we’re sophisticated enough to do that we can let go of concepts and abstractions and things that we’re holding on to that we should no longer hold on to and progress in that manner it’s it’s increasing articulated psychological sophistication but we still make sacrifices and we hope that they’ll be accepted and we hope that they’re of high enough quality so that they work well that’s a representation of diana you could think of diana there’s an opposite durga in hinduism and she comes forth if you make the proper sacrifices to kelly but i wanted to show you alternative representations from different cultures of these archetypal forms this is diana positive feminine what multi-breasted right she’s the thing that nourishes the world and so that would be on one hand your mother who obviously protects you from the terrible aspects of fire and danger but also nature conceptualized as the positive feminine in general the source of all fertility and all food and all beings and all good things something that you want to have on your side that’s for sure and you might say if you acted heroically properly and you played the metagame and not the game and you made the proper sacrifices then you’d never encounter kelly you’d only encounter her benevolent counterpart and so then you might say well does she even exist then that’s something that’s very interesting is because the degree to which the terrible part of the world manifests itself in your life is proportionate to how insufficient you are and we don’t know the full extent of that if you got your act together completely maybe all the suffering would disappear from your life or at least maybe all the unbearable suffering and maybe all the suffering or the unbearable suffering from the lives of people around you too and you already know that because there are people that you’ll go to in a crisis that you can rely on and you know they’ll help you and you wonder what the world would be like if you were like that and everyone else was like that too we’d have a lot fewer crises and the ones that we do have would be a lot more manageable and so when people say well why is the world so rife with suffering one answer to that is because we’re not yet what we could be and at least that’s an answer that we have some control over right you’re not going to talk god out of making the world suffer that’s for sure and you’re not going to negotiate directly with mother nature but you might be able to put yourself together a little bit and see if that works at least it’s under your control and god only knows what the upper limit of that might be well here’s the decomposition of the fundamental archetype the dragon of chaos differentiates on the one hand into the feminine that’s the unknown and the feminine differentiates further into the negative feminine than the positive feminine the negative feminine is the reason for witch hunts it’s the reason for you know there’s a whole group online called men going their own way M-G-T-O-W that’s a very interesting group to go study there’s lots of them I don’t know how many of them there are and most of them are older many of them are men who’ve been through a particularly horrifying divorce for one reason or another and they’ve had enough of women so they tell the young men that they’re teaching never have a permanent relationship never share your territory with the woman never share your possessions make sure you never live together and don’t stay with one long enough to enter a common law relationship because you’ll be stripped of everything that you have well that’s a hell of a thing to be telling people but what’s happened is that the female has been manifested in their life only as the negative archetype and they’ve got that confused with all women and that’s partly, you know, you’ve got to ask yourself if you know the mythological stories maybe if you made the right sacrifices you wouldn’t have so much trouble with women it’s a good question to ask yourself first and I would also say you know, if you’re a woman who has trouble with men or you’re a man who has trouble with women it’s not the women and it’s not the men it’s you because the women are telling you what’s wrong with you and the men are telling you what’s wrong with you and if you don’t listen then it’s you it’s either you or all men well that’s easy, it’s all men well that’s certainly how it’s played out in the world right now it’s like, no, it’s not all men you can be, by definition by definition and it’s not all women, that’s for sure I don’t want to have anything to do with women it’s like you’re a pathetic weasel that’s the same statement here’s some lovely representations this is Mary represented in very different eras this is a very old one this is about 12th century I absolutely love this image it’s so profound so what you see here is Mary as eternal mother of the infant, okay she’s sitting on the crescent moon here she’s tween at the night and underneath, you can’t see this very well but underneath the moon there’s a reptile and she’s got it crunched nicely underneath her feet and that’s Satan in part which means protect your children from malevolence and it’s the predator and so what’s the proper orientation for a mother? protect your infant from malevolent predators obviously, right? that’s the holy image of the mother so she’s holding the infant safely in her arms she’s queen of the universe and she’s coming out of this strange tunnel it’s the same these are called a mandorla by the way this tunnel and it’s actually this is going to be very strange but I’m going to tell you what it is anyways it’s like a hole into the fabric of time and space and it’s revealing an image that’s eternal that’s outside of time and space and it’s outside of time and space because it recurs all the time it never ages it’s an image that transcends temporality now you might say, well, is it real? and the answer to that is, well, it depends on what you mean by real something that transcends temporality is pretty damn real and so that’s what that hole in the sky represents it also represents the place from which all forms emerge so there’s a biological component to it too so it’s as if these divine figures are standing in front well, I’ll show you in a minute what they’re standing in front of and you see here the same thing with these little puti that’s what they’re called sort of embedded in the flesh-like folds around here and you see Mary here holding the infant again away from the terrible predator that’s the serpent of chaos down there in the ocean and that’s again, what does that mean? why would the serpent of chaos be in the ocean? well, how many of our ancestral infants do you suppose were eaten by crocodiles at the water hole? plenty, plenty of them and so that’s something to be terrified of and to take precautions against and so, and then this image here, the older one see all these weird little figures in the background here you can’t see them, but they’re musical instruments they’re all sorts of archaic musical instruments and so here’s what the image means it means the potential from which this figure is emerging is like a musical construction so it’s like a symphony it’s this patterned layer it’s patterns, layer upon layers of harmonious patterns that make up being and out of that emerges this image and that’s what that image represents and that’s what music represents it represents this patterned potential that we’re constantly interacting with it’s deeply, deeply meaningful that’s why we love music so much but that’s an absolute work of genius to put those two things together it’s remarkable, remarkable image so… well, let’s stop there and we’ll meet again in 15 minutes and then this, so that’s the positive feminine on the left and then on the right, that’s the gorgon and that’s the thing that fills you with terror when you look at it there’s another representation of the positive feminine there’s another representation of Mary there are representations very much like this of Isis with Horus on her lap and people often consider those precursors as the opposite of the opposite and so that’s the thing that fills you with terror and people often consider those precursors they’re Egyptian statues precursors to the Christian iconography and… well, I suppose in some sense they are insofar as they predated them in time but the fundamental issue is that well, that… this image has to be held up as transcendent and by that I mean it’s got to be it’s an image that’s got to be at the basis of a value structure that actually works insofar as there’s going to be human beings because there aren’t any human beings without the infant and the mother and so if that’s not held up as an image of ultimate value then everything falls apart and it’s something our culture does extraordinarily badly I had a client recently admit to me in ashamed tones that she wanted to have children, I thought and I said, well, you don’t have to be ashamed of that especially not if you’re talking to me and she said, oh, that’s such a relief because I can’t talk to anyone about it at work they seem to think that it’s degrading you can hardly diagnose a culture as more pathological than that that’s so appalling and it’s so hard it’s one of the things I really feel badly for young women because they’re not guided through this with any sense whatsoever and I’ll tell you what my experience has been working with women and you can take this for what it’s worth and I’ve worked with women who’ve achieved the highest levels of their profession I don’t mean just in academia but in a number of different fields this is what happens we’ll take the typical woman, conservative woman because they’re more typical, conscientious not particularly open, so they’re dutiful people you know, they’re existing within the structures of their society so I’ll take female lawyers as a classic example so they’re very good at high school very hardworking, very intelligent but very dutiful and often rather agreeable and that’s important because it means to some degree that they want to please and they’ll do what they’re told and so part of the reason I think that women are outperforming men in elementary, junior high school, high school and universities because they’re more likely to be obedient and I know that to some degree because we did analysis of students in Quebec and found out that one thing that predicted grades over and above intelligence and conscientiousness was agreeableness and agreeable people got better grades than their IQ and conscientiousness would predict and that’s particularly negative for men so imagine this is what’s happening so you’re a borderline student and you’re also a bit rebellious and antisocial I’m going to fail you like you’re right on the cusp, don’t like you much, you fail you have exactly the same grade profile but I like you tick, you move ahead, you don’t and so one of the things that’s dividing men from women as they progress through school is the degree to which they’re agreeable now that works out to some degree for women insofar as the agreeableness moves them forward but they encounter the negative elements of being agreeable later in their careers anyways women are very good in high school, then they go to college, they’re very good in college they nail their damn grades, they do their studying, they get their A’s and they ace their LSATs so they’re smart too then they go off to do their articling and they’re really really good at it and then they get offered an associate position and they’re really really good at it and then by the time they’re 30 they make partner and let’s say they’re in high pressure, high paying jobs $250,000ayear,$300,000 a year, $500anhourokay,wha{t}^{\prime }syourlifelike?youworkallthetimeperiod70hoursaweek,75hoursaweek,flatoutandyoudo{n}^{\prime }tgettomakeanymistakesandifyourclientcallsyouat3inthemorningonSundayyousay{I}^{\prime }mreallygladtohearfromyoubecauseifyoudo{n}^{\prime }tther{e}^{\prime }ssomehotlawfirminNewYorktha{t}^{\prime }lltakeyourclientfromyouatamomen{t}^{\prime }snoticeandtheclientispayingyou,whatever,thefirm$750 an hour of which maybe you get $350andwhattheywantisanansweraboutsomethingreallycomplicatedrightbloodynowandyoucansayallyouwantaboutthefactthatwomenhaveadifficulttimewiththatbecausei{t}^{\prime }samale-dominatedpatriarchyanyfemalelawyerwh{o}^{\prime }shit30andhasapartnerthathasanysenseatallknowstha{t}^{\prime }scompletebloodyrubbishi{t}^{\prime }smarketdeterminedrighttothecorewhathappenstothewomenwhenthe{y}^{\prime }reintheir30s?theyallleavethehigh-endlawfirmswhy?becausewhointheirrightmindwouldwanttolivelikethat?tha{t}^{\prime }stheissueright?onceyoumakeabout$60,000 a year for your family but let’s say for you personally additional income makes zero has zero impact on your quality of life zero so why work 80 hours a week? well men will do it, some men, very few a handful of hyper-competitive men who are obsessed with hitting the pinnacle of the given dominance hierarchy they’re in will happily work 80 hours a week and they’ll forgo everything else relationships, family, children way in the second category and so those men are often very difficult to live with too because they’re so obsessed with their career it’s hard to have a relationship with them and maybe they don’t have much of a relationship with their kids but they’re damn good at what they do and part of that is they’re smart and disciplined and they’ll work non-stop all the time it’s like an obsession and that’s the sort of people who run things those are the people who run things well they’re often also disagreeable too because you want to manage people? really? they’re not going to like you you know, and it’s not an easy thing to not be liked and actually if you’re an agreeable person and women are more agreeable than men it’s quite painful to be disliked but if you’re in a managerial and executive position the probability that people are going to like you is quite low now if you’re a real son of a bitch then they’re going to dislike you more but those positions are very stressful partly because of the interpersonal dynamics and they’re also incredibly, incredibly competitive so the women hit that at 30 and they’re completely qualified and the law firms are bloody desperate to keep them because it’s really hard to find highly qualified people especially once you’ve put all that time into training them especially if they’re also good at bringing in business the law firms trip over themselves to try to keep them they can’t the women think, why in the world am I doing this? why in the world would anyone in their right mind do this? especially because they’re often married by that point too and generally they’ve married a husband who makes as much money or more than them so they don’t need the damn money and so they think, well there’s more to life than this which is exactly the right thing to think and so they go and find a job that’s nine to five and controllable so that they can hire a nanny and have some kids and have a life and it’s like, yes, that’s the intelligent thing to do so we’ve got things backwards in our culture we’re thinking, at least in part why aren’t there more women in positions of power? wrong question the right question is, why are there any men at all who want those positions of power? because it’s not just positions of power you have to be such a not head to think that oh, it’s a position of power, it’s like, sure but it’s a position of overwhelming responsibility and if you make mistakes, you’re done right, it’s not like you occupy that position of power and everyone does what they’re told all the time and your life is easy it’s like, forget about that people are on your case to do exactly the right thing all the time 100% of the time and maybe you want that, maybe you don’t so the, what, I don’t know what people think is these people are all sitting in their offices with their feet up on the desk smoking cigars and oppressing the world it’s like, that isn’t how it works those people, they work flat out all the time so, and it’s fine if that’s what you want and some people are like that they’re hyper industrious people, right? from a trade perspective no matter where you put them if you put them in a forest with an axe they just wander around chopping down trees non-stop, right? because it’s built into them but if you want to have a balanced life and you should want that, you know? because the other thing you’ll find and this is God’s gospel truth is that the older you get, if you have any sense at all the more important your family is to you like, the utility of your career maybe that peaks around 35 or 40 and it starts to decline pretty rapidly after that and what happens, if you’re fortunate you have someone in your life that you love that you’ve woven yourself together with and you have some kids so that you have something to do from the time you’re 50 till the time you’re 80 and so it’s a real mistake it’s a barren future without children, man I can tell you that it’s a real mistake and so we do a terrible job of, say putting that image forward and saying well, yeah now, you know, because women have access to the birth control pill now and can compete in the same domains as men roughly speaking there is a real practical problem here it’s partly an economic problem now because when I was roughly your age it was still possible for a one-income family to exist well, you know that wages have been flat except in the upper 1% since 1973 why? well, it’s easy what happens when you double the labor force? what happens? you have the value of labor so now we’re in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before so we went from a situation where women’s career opportunities were relatively limited to where they were relatively unlimited and there were two incomes and so women could work to a situation where women have to work and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise and now we’re going to go into a situation this is the next step whereas women will work because men won’t and that’s what’s coming now so there was an economics economist article showing that 50% now of boys in school are having trouble with their basic subjects and you look around you in universities you can see this happening I’ve watched it over decades I would say 90% of the people in my personality class are now women there won’t be a damn man left in university in 10 years except in the STEM fields and it’s a complete bloody catastrophe and it’s a catastrophe for women because I don’t know where the hell you’re going to find someone to to marry and have a family with if this keeps happening and you think when you’re 19 because you’re so clueless when you’re 19 you don’t know a bloody thing you think well I’m not really sure I want children anyways it’s like oh yeah you tell how well you’ve been educated Jesus, dismal dismal without fail I gotta tell you without fail I’ve watched women go through their professional careers many many of them it’s a very rare woman who at the age of 30 doesn’t consider having a child her primary desire and the ones that don’t consider that generally in my observation there’s something that isn’t quite right in the way that they’re constituted or looking at the world sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal you know by temperament they have a masculine temperament disagreeable they’re not particularly compassionate they’re not maternal they’re not that interested in kids fair enough man but there aren’t that many of them and there’s plenty who will not admit to themselves that that’s what they most desperately want do you think women would be better off if they had kids earlier focused on careers say in their 30s who knows like it’s like it really is a problem that seems like a more rational decision to me it’s a really tough one I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that because if you’re 35 and your kids are say 10, 11 yeah then you can go get a bachelor’s degree get your master’s well it seems it’s even more easy that way yeah then having the career first and then trying to raise young kids yeah I can’t answer that because I’ve seen women do a good job of it both ways and you do get the odd woman who manages a high-powered career and kids but Jesus those women man like they buy more powerful microwaves because it’ll take 45 seconds to cook the food instead of a minute and I’m not kidding it’s like they’re up at five they exercise for half an hour they make breakfast they get their kids ready to work they go to work they work 14 hours at 14 hour days flat bloody out they come home and work for another two hours to get their kids organized they have a nanny to help them out then they work for two more hours before they go to bed at like one and then they’re up at five and they do that again and I’ll tell you you better be tough if you’re going to do that physically too because you’ll just burn yourself to a crisp I’ve seen some women manage it you know but they’re like they’re tough and they’re rare because that’s a hell of a hell of a regimen and then if anything goes wrong you know you have a sick kid or something like that or there’s any sort of crisis in your family it’s just you know it’s then it becomes too much and I don’t know the answer to that you know I mean the advantage women have is they live about eight years longer than men because testosterone kills men so well that that that’s right they pay up front and and gain on the on the on in the long run but how it isn’t clear how our society should sort this out we don’t know and it’s partly we don’t know what to do now that women have control of the reproductive function it’s a big mystery yep I don’t have an answer to that either but I think from a practical aspect of this goes for both men and women even if women were to enter the workforce later on they be at competition with people who are younger and that’s always a conflict in the workforce and people are always hiring younger talent because they don’t have a lot of experience in the workforce yep yes well and the thing is young stupid people have the advantage of being young middle-aged stupid people have the disadvantage of being middle-aged and so if you’re going to hire a young stupid person or a middle-aged stupid person you’ll go for the young stupid person and I’m by stupid I mean you know not I’m being sarcastic obviously but I mean without without experience and just getting started in the world you’re much more likely to favor someone young because there’s an instant explanation for their relative cluelessness and it’s a problem you know so so I don’t know what the answer is but one one answer certainly is at least in part is to start letting young women know what being 30 and being female is like because and also to disuse them of the notion that there’s something magical about a career first of all most people don’t have careers man they have jobs and the reason you get paid for a job is because you’re being asked to do things you wouldn’t do unless you were being paid and so it’s not it’s not some it’s not some utopia of cigar smoking with your boots up on your desk that’s for sure not not that that would be such a utopia to begin with but all right so so anyways so this is more differentiation of the archetype fundamentally so you see the dragon of chaos here the potential manifesting itself into this ambivalent feminine figure both both promise and threat and then I’ve I’ve mapped this one out so the ambivalent feminine figure so sort of multivalent gives rise to the positive mother and then the positive mother gives birth to the hero and that’s hercules there and this I like this image a lot so hercules is in this container so that’s that you can interpret that both as something feminine in the container but also as a representative of culture because it’s a boat that’s floating on the chaotic ocean here so that’s hercules he has to be in a container that sustains him in the murky water of chaos and you see he’s going out into the unknown and he’s got a lion skin on and that’s partly because one of the initiation rituals for for young men when there were lions say in the middle east and that wasn’t very long ago is that you had to go out and kill a lion with a spear or with a bow and arrow or something like that it’s like that’s you know impressive all things considered I mean you really think about that for a minute you really want to go out try to kill a lion with a stick it’s like it probably you probably wouldn’t be quite the same after you did that that would be my guess and so anyway so there’s hercules he’s got his lion skin on and that shows that he’s assimilated to the lion the dominant sort of animal and that he’s also mastered it and he’s got his bow and arrow so he’s he’s gonna hit the target properly he’s not he’s someone who doesn’t sin because he can hit the center of the target and he’s got this club which I really like because it’s covered with eyes just like marduk the misopotamian hero well what do you want to do when you go out into the unknown it’s like arm yourself and pay attention and so that’s what you’re trying to produce if you’re a good mother is this figure that can go out into the unknown armed accurate and able to pay attention and that’s a hell of a thing to participate in it’s really fun I found having children incredibly entertaining it’s ridiculously entertaining thing to do because for a bunch of reasons one is that it’s the only relationship you’ll ever have in your life where you where you actually have a chance of establishing something that’s close to perfect is with your kids because when they’re delivered to you so to speak they’re they’re in some sense they’re perfect and your job is to maintain that perfection if you can and you do that by being a good parent by being encouraging by being on their side by taking care of them and you can have a absolutely pristine relationship with the child that doesn’t mean it’s not full of trouble because it is but it’s it it can easily be the best relationship you’ll ever have in your life and in fact I think that’s it can be the worst too and you know sometimes you get unlucky and your child is sick mentally or physically and things fall apart and it’s not your fault but and sometimes it is your fault but it’s a real gift and you have to play this game of protection and encouragement right protection and encouragement and get that dynamic right and then you build you help someone develop into something that’s well exactly this that can take on the trouble of the world forthrightly and man that’s what you want that’ll make it worthwhile that’s for sure now let’s see I gotta figure out where I want to go next well I’ve talked about the dragon fight so I won’t do that oh yes we might as well look at some of the the we’ll look at the same thing on the patriarchal side of the equation so the it’s the great father and the great mother that emerge out of chaos let’s say that you you can think about that over the evolutionary time span too because it’s the fundamental differentiation of life into one into two sexes you know the fundamental differentiation of being into two sexes that interact creatively to produce to produce new being it’s a very very deep motif and so the dragon of chaos differentiates itself into the great father and that’s god the father that’s an image there and you see he’s sitting in front of the sun and the sun is behind him and the sun is the thing that comes up out of the darkness in the morning and then shines the light on everything with which we can see and then collapses again into the darkness at night right and so and at night it fights its battle with the forces of darkness and chaos and emerges triumphant in the morning and that’s why we have solar gods because the the highest deity is assimilated to the dominant the dominant phenomena in the sky and well and no wonder because the sun is also what gives life and that provides light and that does send the darkness away and to notice that there’s something symbolically useful in that that you can also apply to the ideal person is another active of conceptual metaphor genius and so behind god the father is the son of son and you see he’s ruling over a walled city here and you can think about god the father here as the spirit of the walled city that’s a good way of thinking about it and so and why what does that spirit mean well forget about the supernatural element of this or the transcendent element of it even how do you represent society okay you’ve got your walled city okay why is it walled that’s the fundamental structure of a city why is it walled well because you have to have a border between what’s yours and what isn’t yours or a border between your territory and outside world right otherwise it’s not delineated and defined so the first thing is it’s something that’s walled off it’s a it’s a defined space inside that there’s a dominance hierarchy it’s a masculine dominance hierarchy because like chimps our fundamental dominance hierarchy is masculine okay so the dominance hierarchy is what’s the same across all the men and then it’s more than that it’s it’s what’s it’s what’s the same across all men insofar as they found their position in the dominance hierarchy insofar as they’re supporting it insofar as they’re expanding it and insofar as they’re trying to strive up it so it’s averaged across that but then it’s more than that because it’s not just the men that live now it’s also the men that used to live and the men that will live and you think what are you relating to when you relate to other people well in part you’re relating to the spirit of the men that will soon live and that’s what a contract is right you make a contract with the potential society of the future it’s embodied as a spirit and so you act appropriately in relationship to the patriarchal spirit because if you act in accordance with that structure then you can extend your contractual relationship with other people across time it’s brilliant it’s a brilliant conceptualization that’s independent of any supernatural or transcendent reality i’m not saying it exists in in necessary opposition to such things i’m just saying that you don’t have to introduce the idea of such things into the conceptualization in order to understand the symbolism now i think it’s more complicated than that because if you think about this thing as a spirit a spirit is an essential pattern of personality let’s call it that to the degree that you’re a well civilized representative of the social world you are actually inhabited by that spirit and so what should happen as you mature is that as you become older you should become god the father that’s what you’re aiming at you want to embody that central spirit that characterizes the civilization and that spirit’s very complex and that’s why you see often see it in relationship with the representation of god the son because the masculine spirit isn’t the spirit in general the spirit of civilization isn’t exhausted by its patriarchal representation that’s the dogmatic form like osiris right it’s only the structure that has to be allied with the thing that keeps the structure alive so you want to be both of those things at the same time the embodiment of the civilization and the force that transforms it and moves it forward and that’s what you’re supposed to be being taught that’s what university is for well that’s what it used to be for now it’s mostly there to produce politically obsessed idiots oh anyways sorry about that but it gets very frustrating so all right so that you get the picture that’s what that’s what that represents that’s what it’s trying that’s that’s an idea that’s been trying to emerge in the human imagination since the beginning of time and it’s not a trivial idea it’s an unbelievably profound idea and it it differentiates too and this is what makes it complicated what kind of relationship do you have with your father your real father it’s often ambivalent right because there’s an element of him that encouraged you hopefully because without the encouragement of your father man the world is a dismal place it’s very difficult to be a courageous person unless you have your father in body and spirit behind you it’s very dear demoralizing like it really kills people not to have their mother they just don’t recover from that but and and i think people can recover from a fragmented father relationship but it’s the next worst thing you know because if your father rejects you or doesn’t form a relationship with you it’s as if the spirit of civilization has left you outside the walls as of little worth it’s very difficult for people to recover from that so the father should be an encouraging force but can be a tyrannical and crushing force and so that’s very that’s a very difficult thing to get right partly because if you’re my son then i should impose the highest standards of behavior on you and i should always be judging what you’re doing i should be judging it with with the aim of making the best in you come forward but but getting that balance exactly right is very difficult and so it’s easy to for a father to swing too much into judgment let’s say and then of course mothers can play this role too to swing too far into the domain of judgment and to be too harsh and to the degree that the father has his own pathologies he’s going to do that imperfectly you know he might be someone who’s who’s the father who devours his son because he’s jealous of the new possibility the new potential that the struggle for for attention and love from the mother or from the other children in the family there’s all sorts of things that can go terribly wrong so that’s the father as wise king and that’s another symbol that’s been lost i would say to a massive degree in modern universities because all we’re taught is to tear that down and and to not even notice that it manifests itself everywhere especially in the universities which are like they’re as close to an ideal environment as you could as human beings have ever been able to create it’s as simple as that and if you can’t be grateful for for the structure of the university with all its imperfections then then you’re completely blind to this element of the archetype and that’s the opposite of it that’s the son that devours the king that devours his own son that’s a tyrant you know that’s like the mother who’s too overprotective it’s the male version of that and the mother that’s too overprotective says i’ll never let anything happen to you it’s like well maybe you actually want to have something happen to you you know it’s a bit of an all-inclusive statement it’s like no i’m going to make you strong so any number of things can happen to you and when you’re when you need some care i’ll be there but otherwise like out into the world with you that’s the right attitude and for the father it’s like get your bloody act together but i’m on your side it’s because not because i want to destroy you or demean you or push you down in the dominance hierarchy but because i want the best in you to emerge and so you need standards it’s like what are you doing waste in your life there’s way more than that to you get your act together and and bring it out and that’s a message that people really want to hear if they have any sense at all and generally they do want to hear it so you know i was talking i’ve been talking to a lot of people recently as perhaps you know and i was talking to one of the leaders of the conservatives this morning and they’re they’re asking me about the person was asking me about bill c16 but more specifically about talking to young people because the conservative leadership struggle is going on right now i’ve been talking to a bunch of them and i said well look one of the things you could do for young people that no one’s doing is to talk to them about responsibility because everyone talks to young people about rights it’s like we need our rights it’s like oh god how many rights do you need you know really like you have more privileges than any people who’ve ever lived anywhere well it’s so dull to hear that’s so dull it’s so pathetic and and uh what would you call it it’s so demeaning that you have to be protected and have your rights it’s like i said there’s a huge marketplace for responsibility that’s what you want to talk to young people about it’s like get your act together and do something worthwhile with your life for the first time in my entire adult life the conservatives actually have something to sell young people right they can sell them responsibility it’s like well why because that’s where life has meaning with responsibility the more responsibility you take on the more meaning your life has and the the higher degree of responsibility that you agree voluntarily to try to bear the richer your life will be and no one’s ever told that and it’s the case you know it’s like you have you have four kids say well that’s plenty of responsibility you’re going to have meaning it’s going to be rough you know because it’s complicated you have a complicated job and you try to help the careers of the people around you you try to solve tough problems and aid suffering and do all of that it’s like it’s weight it’s responsibility but it’s there’s glory in it there’s real glory in it there’s deep meaning in it and and and young people are starving for that because no one ever tells them that it’s like you’re way more than you think man stand up do something difficult do something difficult and heroic right burst out of your bonds it’s like that’s a good message that’s a necessary message because we have to be more than we are because if we if we aren’t we’re not going to survive well that’s the son devouring father that’s a painting by medina of satan it’s a pretty horrifying one and that’s captain hook i really like the figure of captain hook some of these popular mythological stories myth-based fairy tales modern fairy tales have got things really right captain hook well he’s a pirate so i think i told you that in the google engineer’s investigations of female sexual fantasies the pirate played a large role werewolf vampire pirate surgeon billionaire incredibly comic comical well pirate you know captain of the high seas and someone willing to break rules there’s a romance in that figure well so the idea of the great father as the pirate is a good one well hook is kind of a pathetic pirate and of course pirates are precisely that because they’re all so crooked and so what makes him pathetic well it isn’t because he’s got a hook precisely because maybe that’s just a sign of adventure it’s because he’s being chased by a crocodile with a clock in its stomach well that’s the dragon of chaos right that’s time tick tick tick your life is going to end it’s already got a piece of you and it’s coming for the rest and so hook is terrified of that he’s terrified into resentment and and evil roughly speaking is why he can prey on other people and so that’s the father in the peter pan story out in neverland which is the archetypal domain captain hooks the father well why would peter pan want to grow up to be captain hook well he doesn’t and so he stays pan pan means everything right like pantheism he stays everything he’s this divine child he never wants to grow up well why would you sacrifice the potential of youth to become nothing but a death obsessed tyrant well that’s the story in in peter pan and of course wendy’s in the story and so is tinkerbell tinkerbell is the imagined feminine she’s just he she doesn’t even exist she’s just this perfect little thing that’s always around whenever peter pan needs her but the problem with tinkerbell is that she’s a fairy and fairies don’t exist he has wendy there she’s a real girl she grows up and actually marries someone peter pan stays king of the lost boys forever and you know maybe it’s better to be king of the lost boys but than not to be king at all but maybe not to king of the damned is not exactly something to it’s not a dominance hierarchy to strive for dominating so that’s the peter pan story and it’s a right it’s the right story for the modern age that’s for sure so that’s a negative element of the great father there’s a positive element of the great father these are both this is a representation of moses receiving the the the rules for living from god on high well we talked about that already you know and i see that that’s a story of the revelation of structure that’s the story of mankind we’re acting out a moral structure well what is it now and then we get a glimpse of what the moral structure is and it hits people with the force of a revelation then it can be articulated and that’s partly what the story of moses lays out you see here this picture i really like this one too this is a supplicant basically someone who’s who’s hit hard by a divine vision it’s god in heaven again very very similar to this with with the cross in the background and it’s something like to transcend your littleness because look he’s looking up that’s what’s at the top of the dominance hierarchy it’s what the father is at the top of all possible dominance hierarchies look up that’s the father who supports the son that’s transcending his own vulnerability right willing to bear it voluntarily and not to and not to shirk from that it’s exactly right and it is what you admire in people you know you admire people who are courageous and they were strong and when you decompose that it means that they’re able to act appropriately and in a helpful compassionate wise and tough manner despite the fact that they’re beset with all of the problems of mortality that beset everyone else well how does it go wrong well that’s all propaganda for hitler look at the imagery you know he’s a knight that’s on the right he’s the he’s the knight of nationalism well that’s god the father too you know it’s a little bit one-sided right because there’s more to the father than the state that’s the thing and that’s the problem with nationalism and its totalitarian variance and we’re moving in that direction fast right you see europe right now fragmenting again because the european union is too amorphous and maybe not well enough bordered and everyone is getting nervous and they’re saying back to the state back to the state it’s fair enough fair enough you you need to be around people who are like you so to speak that you have built a consensus with but to subordinate yourself to the state and to make its head the the bearer of the the the archetype of the knight without having that element of individuality and it is absolutely pathological we’ve already been down that road right because the national socialists were hypernational just like well both in germany and in italy and it’s attractive again it’s interesting here you see hitler as a knight and up here there’s a bird you know and that bird should be the dove because that should be the holy ghost if the iconography was proper but it’s not it’s an eagle and an eagle is a bird of carrion eater right it feeds on corpses well it’s worth thinking about so that’s the woman worshiping the strong father another representation of hitler as a knight and then there’s hitler as wise father you see surrounded by people there who focused in on him as if he’s of architect archetypal import and then this is a a poster from from the allies an anti-nazi poster from the allies and you see right there that hitler and the nazis are assimilated to a mess of predatory snakes it’s like well why well if you want to appeal to someone’s determination to destroy you say well here you are and you’re all ready to go let’s go kill some snakes and everyone can say yes and then you say well there’s the snakes right there and the thing is it’s true to some degree because you you have plenty of snakes just like everyone else and so it’s easy that’s the first step towards demonization and you can do it just like that it’s no problem the archetype will map perfectly especially if there’s already tension between the groups or if the other group is identifiable in some manner or you can make it identifiable disgust is the best way to do that not fear disgust fear to fear someone you have to respect them you don’t want to burn everything that the person that you fear owns you want to burn everything that the person who disgusts you owns and so you’ll see people who are pushing the nationalist agenda hard and hitler did this beautifully everything that was outside of the arian domain of purity wasn’t to be feared it was disgusting it was contemptuous and it should be destroyed and purified by fire and that was his message the nazis were unbelievably great at using fire of purification as a symbolic message well it has an archetypal power then you see here this is an english poster from the world war two asking people to buy bonds to fund the american or the the british war effort and you see these these talon-like claws japan and nazi germany reaching out to the virgin mother and her infant child right deep deep use of deep subordination of archetypal imagery for the purposes well i hesitate to say propaganda because world war two in some sense was pretty clear cut but you you get the point and there’s the uniform reoccur that uniformity of the state right so the goose step everybody moves exactly the same way everybody’s turned into exactly the same carbon copy of everyone else all the diversity is pushed out of the state it’s subordinated to the supreme leader and the hierarchy becomes incredibly rigid and and and and and and and homogeneous it’s like well that’s great for fast action but it’s terrible if you don’t know where you’re going you need some diversity you need some flaws in the crystalline structure in case you’re on the wrong path and that’s why you can’t have everyone being the supreme leader’s acolytes the whole bloody thing wanders off in one direction and because we don’t know the right direction to go wandering off in a single direction is extraordinarily dangerous you will eventually fall over a cliff so there’s the nazis use of of light at night they were unbelievably good at their at their this is one of the things that made fascism so difficult to fight because with communism because it was a fully articulated philosophy you could attack it rationally but fascism never really did that what they did instead was use ritual right huge mass rallies and highly emotionally supercharged meetings and then the use of light and fire and so hitler built the biggest parade grounds in human history to host the nuremberg rallies and he would get in front of them on this huge stage with you know with greek columns very impressive looking and have blocks of thousands of people organized perfectly orderly the germans are good at order and order is associated with disgust sensitivity incredibly organized orderly displays complete and then at night with fire and behind them he would have all of the search lights from the luftwaffe lined up dozens of them shooting their light straight up miles into the sky so we stand in front of these incredibly impressive displays of light long before there were rock shows and so forth doing that you know it was unparalleled in history and and address the crowd and he was very good at addressing the crowd he’d say something and if people were listening he’d say more of it and if they were listening he’d say more of it and because he was addressing the mob the mob got exactly from hitler what they wanted and we saw what that was like right 120 million people dead in no time flat and the worst horrors that were ever perpetrated on people maybe because there’s no shortage of perpetrated horrors stalin same thing stalin the great father right wise man at the helm of the ship of the state this is after the wall came down some old man kissing a gilded statue of stalin before it’s going to be before it’s going to be torn down there he is with happy children and not the children that his policies starve to death as you as you might well imagine there he is in his military uniform sitting on what’s all for all intents and purposes a throne and this is this is really an uncanny one it’s very positive right that’s hitler is or still in his head of state he’s in this hellish mandorla of fire perfect with god the father at his head that’s lennon you know who people still who people still revere um you may know and perhaps you don’t that i was nominated to be rector of the university of glasgow and so which is an honorary position and um today yesterday the uh different candidates put up their manifestos and and the student newspaper put them up and then wrote analysis of the manifestos which were biased and they were appallingly biased and one-sided and i wrote and told them that they said well we have a perfect right to our political opinion and i thought yeah well for sure but you know you are journalists after all and maybe you could be just trying to tell what’s happening it’s like no no no there’s none of that and they said that one of the candidates that they uh that they clearly recommended who seems to be a person who’s perfectly heroic in his own right i mean he’s taken on very many difficult legal cases and and worked for the oppressed and downtrodden who clearly exist um it was either him or another candidate doesn’t really matter that they described as bolshe and outspoken bolshe meaning bolshevik like it’s like well you know he’s appropriately bolsheviks like it’s no different than saying well he’s appropriately nazi like like what the hell is that i mean there were 50 million people that were killed in the soviet union by the bolsheviks and maybe twice that many in in china and that just says nothing about cambodia and all the other places there were radical left bloodbaths you think it’s cute to call someone bolshevik jesus it’s appalling it’s appalling it’s not some fashionable thing that you do it’s the participation in some of the deepest intellectual morasses of evil that human beings have ever managed to create and yet it’s fashionable it shows you what the universities are worth well there’s the downside of stalin yeah as stalin is hangman that sort of cartoon would have gotten you killed in the soviet union there’s stalin as satan himself in his stained glass representation there’s a statue of stalin covered with red paint for the blood after the wall came down there’s stalin as what it’s very much like modena’s satan right you look at that and it’s exactly the same marketable idea there’s the americans going it had a cap in hand to get a little largesse from papa stalin that’s a painting of the communists forcibly collectivizing the productive farmers in the soviet union in the early 1920s the kulaks right everything from whom they stole and raped them and murdered them and shipped them off to siberia and killed them and wiped out the productive farmers of the soviet union and then starved six million ukrainians to death and there’s some poor kid in the 1930s whose ribs are showing you know taking a bath in this pot with his eyes wide and you know he’s one of the fortunate ones because he’s still alive it’s like bolshe yeah cute pretty fun fashionable lovely well that’s the decomposition of chaos into god the father half providing security and order and half providing tyranny that’s the archetype you have to put up with it that’s what your society is like you try to interact with it in a way that enables the positive part of it to come forth and then it does the same thing chaos gives rise to the father who’s nurturing and encouraging and that gives rise that produces the son it was very hard to find that image i could tell you so and then that gives rise to the the proper balance of the proper attitude from the father produces the same thing the son who’s the hero the individual who’s the hero the consciousness the confidence consciousness of the child that’s willing to go forth eyes open and voluntarily confront chaos and turn it into order and that’s the proper pathway for human beings so here’s a way of thinking about it i showed you that diagram you know of how you decompose a value structure and you can do it right down to the level of detail you know so you want to make dinner you go below that higher resolution you cut up vegetables you move your arm it decomposes all the way differentiates down all the way to skill you put these skills together and you represent them with abstract concepts i can make dinner i can take care of my family i can undertake this job at work that makes me a decent father that’s part of being a good that’s part of of being a good person the question is what’s at the pinnacle of that at the upper end of the abstraction hierarchy because these things should be organized all the way up into a complete hierarchy what does it mean to be a good person well it means we’ve walked through it it means you win the set of games you go out into the world and explore and you bring back what you’ve found and you build yourself out of it and you share it with other people that’s an old old story that’s no different than the story of the collective hunt it’s exactly the same thing right you you build yourself into someone that can have a long-term relationship with someone of the opposite sex generally speaking so that you can bring children into the world and turn them into exploratory heroes and stabilize the state that’s what should be at the top and that thing that’s at the top it’s the same thing it’s the integration of all of those things into the same thing and that’s the same as the sun that’s the same as the halo it’s the same as the thing that emerges from the belly of the whale it’s all of those things and you also know that because you know that you have the capacity for admiration it’s in you it’s in you it’s locked into your biology and it’s locked into your sociology you see what you admire and that’s a partial representation of the ultimate ideal it’s as simple as that so i i kind of nested this so i should just explain this diagram briefly so it was a map i tried to make in some sense of my own identity i mean just using myself as an example of someone typically situated in society so you know i have this role which is kind of a high resolution role i’m a father and a husband and i also run a business and so the father and husband thing is sort of nested inside of that because it’s dependent on my economic success to some degree and then that’s nested inside a capitalist structure and then that’s nested inside well i said american personality but it’s sort of that’s good enough and then that’s nested inside the humanistic western personality and inside the judaic christian personality and that’s all nested inside this thing that’s best conceptualized as something approximating the exploratory hero and so that’s a that’s a value structure that’s and you know you can differentiate you can differentiate that to a much higher level than father and husband and we did that when we decompose things right down to you know their motor actions and you want what you want and this is i think there’s something that’s transcendent about this you want all those things stacked up so they’re all operating properly at the same time all the way up and and all the way down and i don’t even know how far down means like if you get all those things together your physiology be organized and oriented properly too oh you know and that means your organs work properly and the micro elements of the work properly and all the way down and then if everything is organized like that too the society starts to work everything starts to organize itself along a horizontal axis where each level of the structure supports every other level and you can feel that i believe that’s what you feel when you’re engaged in doing something meaningful you can feel those things coming together and you can also feel like that that as a as a kind of strength that pushes you forward instead of pulling you backwards so and it i i think that your our nervous systems are very sophisticated and they orient us in time and space and they can tell us when they’re in the right place at the right time and people love that and i think you experience that when you’re deeply engaged in music as well it puts you there momentarily right say you’re in a cathedral and you’re listening to some remarkable music and the light pouring in you’re in trees because that’s what a cathedral is that’s what this that’s what the the arches is it’s light coming through the trees that’s what’s represented in the stones you’re in there you’re looking at the light it’s it’s it’s pouring down at you you’re in this you’re at the center of the world and there’s a great piece of music playing and it’s an indication that everything is stacking up along this one pole that’s what it’s supposed to produce that produces a religious experience if it works properly you know that you go to rock concerts you go listen to music what the hell do you think you’re doing there if you’re not having a quasi religious experience you think you’d go otherwise and just because you don’t know that that’s what happened that’s what’s happening doesn’t mean it isn’t what’s happening people have been gathering together in groups and transcending the limits of their pathological individuality through music and rituals since the beginning of time why would it be any different for us and the lights there that’s what the light show is for it’s the same thing it’s just that the religious element of it is stripped away partly because we’ve criticized that to death so carelessly that we can’t integrate it anymore into ceremonies like that and i mean fair enough but but it’s not like that comes without a loss people hunger for that more deeply than anything else questions yes you touched on this today but also in your conversation with sam harris i wanted to ask is there a relationship between a mythological idea of sacrifice and human sacrifice or whatever type of sacrifice and the psychological idea of delayed gratification and if so could it be a factor in the relation in the correlation between contentiousness and it’s exactly the question is there a relationship between the idea of sacrifice and delay of gratification and is that related to conscientiousness yes well the conscientiousness relationship is a tough one you know we tested to see if conscientious people were more likely to delay gratification in classic delay of gratification tasks and we found no effect we found iq effect and we found a reverse effect for extroversion and positive mood and so what happens is that happier people are more impulsive they’re more likely to grasp what’s right in front of them in the present but conscientiousness is an extraordinarily tough nut to crack and i do think it’s associated to some degree with the proclivity for sacrifice of the present to the future but finding ways of testing that has proved very very difficult so but the the relationship between sacrifice and delay of gratification those are the same words right delayed gratification is a sacrifice that’s it’s and you know there’s famous experiments you know you may know the marshmallow experiment and that is well basically you take kids four or so and you say you sit them in a room and at a little table and you say here’s a marshmallow if you don’t eat that for 10 minutes we’ll come in and give you another marshmallow right and so the kids and they videotape the kids and the tapes are actually pretty funny because the poor kids do everything they can not to look at that candy or marshmallows like they sit on their hands they hum they look at the ceiling it’s like they try to distract themselves and some of them just you know it’s like oh to hell with it and they eat it and then others can manage it and and those well the the the data showed you know and i wouldn’t say this study has been replicated many times but the data showed quite clearly that the kids who could delay gratification at an early stage were doing quite a bit better later in life now i don’t know to what degree that was controlled for iq because such things matter but the point is is well the point is the point that you’re making is that you can delay you can only delay gratification intelligently though if the social structure is stable right because basically what if you delay gratification you’re making a bargain with the potential future and the bargain is everybody’s going to keep acting the same way so that the future is the same as the present because otherwise you’ll delay gratification and then everything will fall apart and you won’t get your cake and you won’t get to eat it and so society has to be quite stable it has to be stabilized by the contractual relationship between people before delaying gratification is a useful strategy this is also why you see in chaotic circumstances where the future becomes uncertain people forgo delay of gratification very very rapidly and and and perhaps appropriately so although you can get a spiral going in the other direction so yeah i would say it’s a chicken and egg problem because what happens as you stabilize societies being conscientious conscientious becomes more useful and so then you’re going to be selected for as a consequence of being conscientious and that’s going to stabilize the society even more these are these are roughly known as baldwin effects so that’s where let’s call it a genetic transformation produces a behavioral transformation that transforms the environment so the genetic transformation is more likely to propagate you can get unbelievably rapid evolutionary movements when when you get a loop like that developing and and they happen frequently and that’s that’s also how in some sense a meme can be turned into a genetic can manifest itself genetically so if you have an idea that spreads through the culture and it tilts the culture in a certain way such that those who hold that idea are likely to be more successful then the meme and the biology will align themselves across time and and well i think you see that happening that’s that to some degree that’s what’s happened as religious stories have propagated themselves as well because as as the idea of the hero becomes clearer so to speak and then it manifests itself more clearly in the society then there’s more rewards for doing it then the selection pressures get more positively related to that kind of behavior and the whole thing loops upwards so it’s something like that in terms of treating mental health disorders where do you think we should draw the line or how should we draw the line between pharmaceutical interventions and various other psychotherapy methods i mean to what at what point is depression and anxiety should be treated with medicine and at what point should it be is it a okay that’s a good question so the question is how do you differentiate the utility of behavioral slash psychotherapeutic treatments for conditions like depression versus medical treatments okay so the first thing i would say is don’t underestimate the utility of medical interventions depression is a catastrophic it carries with it a very high suicide rate and it also levels people out and it’s really hard on their families and so and it and it’s physiologically extraordinarily damaging and so if you’re in a depressive state and it’s severe you can try an antidepressant you’ll know in a month if it works if it works well maybe it’ll help you get your life together like we could say well maybe you’re depressed because your life isn’t very well together could be sometimes people are depressed their life is just it isn’t fine because no one’s life is fine everyone’s life is a tragedy but sometimes people have their lives in order as much as you could expect anyone to have they have friends they have an intimate relationship they have a career that they like you know they’re they’re qualified industrious people working hard on what they’re doing and and and really playing a minimum number of games with themselves and they’re terribly depressed antidepressant man that’s sometimes that will just fix it and so hooray like you’re a biological entity if if there’s something out there that can help you strengthen yourself so that you can prevail great and you know people you hear everyone takes antidepressants you know everyone’s taking them it’s like no one takes those bloody things without serious consideration half the time I spend with my clients who are depressed is often the two years long attempt to get them to tentatively try an antidepressant because they’re so guilty that they’re relying on an external crutch to sort out their lives that they can’t even tolerate it but you know I say well look man what if you had diabetes you’re not going to take your insulin it’s like you got stressed you blew out at your weakest point that’s what happens when you get stressed if there’s something out there that might help you it’s like try it for god’s sake you’ll know in a month and and you just stop if it doesn’t work now having said that you want to do a multi-dimensional analysis it’s like well do you have friends do you have an intimate relationship or are you pursuing one do you have a reasonable career are you as educated as you are intelligent do you have something useful to do with your time outside of work do you have a drug or alcohol problem are there other behavioral issues like sleep dysregulation and lack of eating that are contributing to the pathology you want to differentiate all of that and wherever you can make a behavioral intervention so much the better but sometimes too you’re dealing with people whose lives are so wrecked that they don’t even know where to start they’re different than the ones who have everything in order say and you say well try this man maybe you won’t cut your throat in the next month because if you’re dead it’s going to be hard to work with you and so so medical interventions anything if you’re sick you do what it’s necessary to get better and you leave your pride behind if you if you have to and that that says nothing about the utility of the behavioral interventions you want to hit the problem with everything you have at your disposal but some antidepressants especially especially for people whose lives are together and who are depressed antidepressants can be absolutely miraculous so you know when you hear about the clinical evidence in their favor being iffy and that’s partly because the diagnosis of depression isn’t very well formulated it’s very different to have a terrible life than to be depressed and antidepressants can only help you so much if you have a terrible life so yeah yes you’ve spoken about you know these activities that are meaningful and how our consciousness might be very good at identifying those and are they almost showing themselves as a light you know i’m talking about right and i feel like some things can hijack some things that are not actually meaningful or useful to can make themselves sure that’s what the subpersonalities you know video games are okay so the question is can that sense of meaning be hijacked and the answer to that is absolutely absolutely because you could say that the ultimate sense of meaning is composed of the union of fragmentary senses of meaning and the fragmentary senses of meaning can be overwhelmingly powerful anger sexual lust and and and the sorts of things that you experience say when you’re playing a video game which are very carefully calibrated to keep you on the on the edge of exploration let’s say now i’m not a foe of video games because games are complicated and it isn’t clear what people are doing when they’re playing them you know they may be expanding their cognitive skills they may be learning to cooperate they may be learning to engage in complex problem solving and so but part of it’s also a matter of balance you know 50 hours a week probably not unless you’re going to go pro right because there’s other things you need to be attending to it’s not a stable solution for you your family your society it’s two one-sided yeah and you can get pulled down rabbit holes of all sorts that that are one-sided pursuits of meaning so and it’s something we’re actually going to talk about as the later classes unfold the question is how do you stop yourself from falling prey to a pathologized sense of meaning and i think one of the answers to that is don’t lie because what you’re hoping is that your nervous system is sufficiently healthy and well programmed so that what it reads out to you is reliable and if you pathologize your psyche by either through sins of omission let’s say or or outright deception you’re going to warp that internal structure and it’s not going to read out properly to you and then your sense of meaning will lead you astray so like one of the reasons for speaking the truth i shouldn’t say that because you don’t know how to speak the truth but you do know how not to lie and it’s a game you’re playing with yourself you can define the damn lies no one else has to do that for you you you try not to utter falsehoods because you warp your neurological structure by doing so and then it will read out pathologically and then if you rely on it to guide you it will run you right off a cliff so that’s why there’s a moral element to this is if you’re going to rely on your sense of meaning make sure that you don’t pollute the mechanism see this is this is partly why people go to confession right which is my which is like i said a psychotherapeutic technique it’s like okay what stupid miserable wretched things did i do this week that’s a good thing to to make conscious right because maybe you cannot do them the next week and you think well why would you bother it’s like well you’re in a ship it’s sailing across the the stormy seas if if you’re if you’re hacking holes in it with a pickaxe you should probably pay attention to that before you sink so it’s a good idea to keep to keep what you’re doing that’s stupid in mind so that you can stop doing it and so then you can more and more rely on yourself and your and your you know your own conscience let’s say as a guide to proper action you know in the pinocchio story is that the conscience was not an unerring guide for pinocchio it had to learn and so and so it’s also partly pushing yourself into new situations and differentiating yourself so that you get wiser and and so it’s courage as well as truth those might be the two there’s more beauty courage truth you know the fundamental virtues yeah why be virtuous that’s the question and so that you can bear the suffering of life without becoming corrupt right it’s practical it’s practical and there’s nothing more practical than that so unless you want misery and people do you know it’s exciting misery so other questions all right then see you next Wednesday