https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HbAZ6cFxCeY
Music Now, you know, I used this picture to represent my class, and you might not know anything about this picture. It’s a picture of Jonah being thrown up out of a whale’s belly after spending three days inside it. It’s an old biblical story. It’s a myth. It’s a fairy tale. That’s one way of looking at it. And I don’t mean that in a derogative manner. We know, for example, that some of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales are perhaps 15,000 years old. They’ve been traced way back. They’re really, really old. And old stories are strange. And they’re strange because, well, they’ve been told generation after generation after generation. So you could imagine that something retold over such an expanse of time has been reduced to its gist many, many times. And nothing that’s in the story anymore is superfluous. It’s all meaningful in some sense. It’s sort of like a meta story. That’s one way of thinking about it. Imagine that you took 100 books, 100 adventure books, and you had to extract out the central features of an adventure book. Now, it’s hard to do that. It’s like you’re averaging across them or something like that, distilling them in some manner. Then you’d get a meta adventure, and it would be like a myth upon which all adventures are based. And this story is actually one of those stories. And I’m going to tell you what I think the story means. And I’m not saying that this is all it means because most stories of this sort are in some sense inexhaustible. Just like great works of art are inexhaustible. There’s more information in them than you can possibly articulate. That’s what makes them profound. That’s why you go look at them. Because otherwise someone could just tell you about the painting, and that would be the end of that. But that doesn’t work. So Jonah is being spit up by this whale. And of course, on the face of it, that’s an impossibility. Because, well, you can’t live inside a whale. That’s why it’s impossible. Now you may remember, and likely do, that you all know a story about someone who is inside a whale. That’s Pinocchio, right? And you know, you go to that movie, maybe even as an adult, you watch that movie, and Geppetto’s down there in the whale, in his little boat. You know, it’s a big cavernous inside. You don’t really care that that’s… there’s a bunch of things you don’t care about. You don’t care that those are drawings and not real people. You don’t care about that. And you don’t care that the inside of a whale isn’t a cavern. And you don’t care that Pinocchio’s a puppet, for that matter. None of that matters to you at all, and that’s because you’re really strange creatures. And you don’t even notice when you’re doing something absolutely absurd, and that’s one of those times when you are. But if someone taps you on the shoulder and says, you know, you’re just watching drawings of a puppet, puppets can’t really move autonomously, and now he’s at the bottom of the ocean, you have no idea why he’s going to rescue his father, and you’re just sitting there and you’re okay with that. And you’ll say, shut up, because I want to finish watching the movie. And so that’s interesting, you see. That tells you something about your unconscious, if you’re psychoanalytically minded. Because you’re doing something that you cannot account for. Now you might say, well, it’s enjoyable. Well, that’s deep, man, you’re really going a long ways with that. The question is, A, why is it comprehensible? B, why is it enjoyable? C, just exactly what are you doing there? And you think that whatever you are doing there is so valuable that you’ll actually pay to do it. Weird. Very, very weird. And you know, when you read about, let’s say, the archaic rituals of tribal people, and you ask yourself, just what are they up to? You might think, well, they’re up to the same thing that you’re up to when you go see a movie. So, and then you might also notice that the most expensive artifacts, or among the most expensive artifacts that human beings create, are movies. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on them. And we consider that a good deal. And you know, it drives our technology too, because the high-tech movies, like the Marvel movies that require so much computer animation, they actually drive the demand for high-end graphics chips. So, our technological advance forward is actually motivated in part by our desire to represent things fictionally in ever more spectacular manner. So, Jonah. Well, let me tell you the story of Jonah. And I’ll tell you why I’m going to tell you it. This is from Camille Paglia, who’s a critic of the modern university, and a very brilliant woman, I would say. Very controversial, incredibly rapid speaker, and she can think so fast, it’s just unbelievable. She’s really fun to watch, if you like that sort of thing. Vicious adversary in an argument. She says, the number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students, but ignorant professors. Professors. Who have substituted narrow expertise and theoretical sophistication, a preposterous term for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. Art is a vast, interconnected web work, a fabricated tradition. And over-concentration on any one point is a distortion. Here’s the problem. I wrestled with this when I was trying to understand some of the things that I’m going to teach you about. There’s some things that you kind of have to grasp as a whole. You know, sometimes you have a flash of insight, and a bunch of things that you didn’t know were related fall together? That’s supposed to happen in psychotherapy, when you link different disparate patterns of behavior together, because you’ve linked them, say, with a single cause. And you get this, like, excited feeling of illumination and possibility. And there are forms of communication that require the simultaneous realization of a multitude of disparate phenomena. Like, a movie can be like that. You know, you listen to a movie, you watch a movie, and then you don’t know what the hell’s going on, and then something happens near the end, and bang! Everything clicks together. And it’s because you’ve sort of seen the thing as a whole. And a lot of the things that we, a lot of the ways that we interact with the world that are mysterious, are like that. And this is what Peglia is referring to, is that, and this is a psychoanalytic proposition, I would say, or a romantic proposition. The idea, roughly, is that way out in the periphery of reality are all those things that not only do you not know, but you don’t even know you don’t know. Right? They’re completely blind to their existence. And then there’s unknown things that you have some suspicions about. And then there’s unknown things that you can start to imagine and act out and dramatize. And so, all of that is on the periphery of our knowledge. That’s a psychoanalytic dictum. Where do thoughts come from? Well, partly they’re nested in dreams. Dreams are the birthplace of thoughts. Fantasy, it’s not that surprising. Fantasy is the birthplace of ideas. You know, if you’re thinking about what you’re going to do in the future, you enter into a reverie, a dream state, and you contemplate multiple possibilities, and then you start thinking them through. Use your imagination to search beyond where you are. And the collective human attempt to do that is our mysterious humanistic artistic tradition, which is very difficult to justify from a formal, articulate point of view. What good is dance? Like, what is it that you’re doing when you’re dancing? Well, you don’t care because you like to dance. Why? Well, you don’t know. Like you do. It’s built into you. Music. Music’s a human universal. Cultures use music to organize themselves, right? They use music to catalyze their identities. They use music to unite around, you know, in more archaic societies, less differentiated societies, let’s say. You know, a mask that represents part of the family tradition will have a particular design, and there’ll be a particular song written for it, and there’ll be a particular dance about it. And the song and the dance are something like the symbolic representation of a mode of being in the world. Like, maybe the mask is a wolf mask, and so you act out the wolf, and there’s music that goes along with that. And you think, well, what are you doing when you’re acting out the wolf? And part of that is, well, you’re trying to understand wolves. You know, it’s imitation in part, and you know, if you live in the natural world, and if you hunt, and if you’re preyed upon, then understanding the things that you’re hunting and preying upon is useful, and there’s also perhaps useful things to learn from them. And so we play this strange symbolic game with the world, like children pretending. That’s another way of thinking about it. And we do that to act out and to begin to understand things we don’t understand, like how to act. That’s, now for me, the most important question in life is not what the world is made of. And in fact, I would say that’s a relatively new preoccupation of humankind. You know, we didn’t really formalize, you could say that the ancient Greeks originated, laid the groundwork for the emergence of an empirical science. And then it emerged more formally with Bacon and Descartes and Newton. Five, six hundred years ago, not very long, like a blink of the eye in human terms. Before that, people were engineers, they could build things and so forth, but they didn’t know how to, they weren’t scientists. They didn’t really conceptualize the world as an objective place. We do that automatically because science has seeped so far into our set of presuppositions. That doesn’t make us good scientists, by the way. But it does make us believe that the fundamental reality of the world is an objective reality. And I’m not going to dispute that particularly. But leaves one set of questions unanswered, probably by its nature, because it wasn’t designed to answer the question. And that question is, how should one conduct oneself in the world? And that’s an important thing since you’re alive, and hypothetically you’d rather stay alive. And while you’re alive, you probably don’t want to suffer any more than you have to, and no more stupidly than you have to. And it might also be good if some of the things that you wanted actually happened. And so, you know, you’re motivated to know how to act. And people are always telling each other how to act. We’re sending each other information all the time about how to act. We do that with the expressions on our face. And of course, when we talk to people, we always look at their face. And that’s because their face tells you what they’re up to. You know, if they’re smiling and paying attention to you, well, then you can assume that you’re doing something right. And if they’re looking annoyed or disgusted, that’s a particularly bad one, then you might think you might take a hint from that, especially if, you know, three or four people are doing it at the same time. And so we’re reflecting, we’re reflecting some ideal to one another constantly. And the more attentive you are, the more likely you are to act in accordance with that ideal. And the more likely you are to move towards it. You may not even know what the ideal is in an articulated sense. In fact, you probably don’t. You know, you could come up with a, well, you know, a good person is nice and friendly and, you know, cooperative and yeah, yeah, you know, that’s all just cliche. But you don’t, you know, your conception might be very hollow. It’s very likely that it’s very hollow, even though you may be able to act in a very sophisticated manner. All right. So anyways, this is a story. I’d say it’s a meta story. It’s what would happen if you collected a bunch of stories and then you extracted out a story from them. And it’s sort of a story about destiny. And it’s couched in a religious language. But that’s okay, because most of these distilled stories are, form the foundation of religious texts and religious texts and myths and stories are, as I said, part of the outer perimeter of our society. They have a coherent nature and it’s all and they form a foundation. And it’s on that foundation that everything that you take for granted rests, even if you don’t understand the foundation. So I can give you an example. There’s a metaphysical idea that underlies Western civilization. And that metaphysical idea is that the individual has transcendent worth. That’s the idea from which the notion of natural rights is derived. And of course, our legal system is predicated on the idea that you have certain natural rights. They’re enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for example. And in the states when the Bill of Rights was being formulated, when the legislation, original legislation that founded the state was being formulated, the formulator said, We hold these truths to be self-evident. What does that mean? They’re axioms of faith, right? They’re propositions. And there’s no proof for them. They’re a mode of operation in the world. And so the hypothesis is something like, well, if I treat you like there’s something about you that has transcendent value, implicit intrinsic value, whatever that might be. And there are stories about that, and we’ll talk about that. And you do the same to me. And then we set up a body of laws that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual, so that the law itself has to act with respect towards every individual, even if that individual has done something reprehensible, which is very weird, if you think about it. Then our society will work better. And, well, perhaps that’s true. But for better or worse, that is what this society is predicated on. And that’s a very, very, very, very, very, very old idea. And it’s an idea that people came to with great difficulty. Because it was over thousands of years that people learned how to take their little tribal groups, which were always squabbling with one another, right? Because they’re human beings, they’re very violent. And tribal groups are by no means civilized. There’s no noble savage like the Europeans thought. If you study tribal groups in the world today, the murder, the death rate by violence is unbelievably high. So something unites a tribe within a tribe, it’s often kinship. But then tribes come together to form larger civilizations, and they have to determine some sort of meta-principle that guides them so that they can cooperate and come together without destroying one another. And they have to extract out a principle by which the society might function. And that has to work. And then as societies get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, they have to bring more and more of these diverse traditions together and extract out something from them that has power and functional utility. And that allows people to unite. And so this is one of the stories that talks about that. It’s a story about individual responsibility and what happens when it’s not heated. So, you know, because we could say you are a social creature, right to the core. And most of your environment is other people. And those other people want something from you, and you want something from them, so you’re going to play games with them. You’re either going to be good at it or you’re going to be bad at it, but you’re going to play games with them. And so the game might have rules, really sophisticated rules, in fact. And you’d expect that because as your behavior more and more approximates an ideal, assuming such a thing exists, then you’re more and more sophisticated. And the nature of the ideal is perhaps more and more complex and difficult to understand. You get a hint of this, though. You can get a hint of this because you will see if you pay attention to your own soul, your psyche, your unconscious, you’ll see that there are people that you admire and that there are people that you have contempt for. And it isn’t necessarily that you’re 100% accurate in your judgment. You know, it’s not such a bad idea to criticize your first impressions. But those states exist, and so there’s a reason you admire someone, and there’s a reason you have contempt for someone. There may be multiple reasons. And that’s a hint to your intrinsic value structure. It’s a hint about your intrinsic value structure, right? You wouldn’t admire someone unless there was something about them that you valued and perhaps that you would also like to be able to do. And you wouldn’t despise someone or have contempt for them if you didn’t feel that something they were doing was wrong and that it would be wrong if you did it, too. And so you’re bringing to bear on the situation an implicit morality. And you have to do that because, as I said, you can’t act without a morality because if you’re going to act, you’re going to try to make things better. Otherwise, why bother? And if you’re acting to make things better, then some things have to be better and some things have to be worse, and that’s a value structure. So you have one. All right, so Jonah, he gets a call from God, and God tells him that there’s a city, Nineveh, that’s falling into moral disarray. Now, what does that mean? Well, it’s a universal story. It’s like all cultures are always falling into disarray. It’s their nature. Just entropy does that, right? Things change. The world changes. The environment changes. And the culture doesn’t keep up very well, and then, of course, it has corrupt elements. And so it’s an eternal story. The individual is always placed in relationship to a culture that’s somewhat corrupt. And then the question is, well, what do you do about it? And if the answer is nothing, well, then it’ll just get more corrupt. And if the answer is be corrupt too, then it will just get more corrupt. So the answer has to be to oppose the corruption, because that’s the only way it’s going to stop. Now, God threatens to destroy this city because of its corruption, and I don’t think you need to presume anything particularly metaphysical about that to understand it. It’s very straightforward that the more corrupt the culture is, and the less trust is possible between individuals, the less productive the culture is going to be. Because why do anything if some corrupt person is just going to come and take it? You know, it might even be that the culture is so corrupt that if you are good for something and you produce resources, you’re actually more likely to get killed because you have something of value. So, like, you’re just not going anywhere with that. And why would you work if you didn’t have any sense that, you know, you could store up the value of your work for some reasonable time in the future? So if the society is corrupt and there’s no trust, it’s degenerating. And, you know, it might live for a while, but it isn’t going to last very long. And so that’s the idea, corrupt society’s collapse. That leaves open what corruption means. Anyways, Jonah thinks, no, no bloody way. I’m not going to that city. They can go to hell as far as I’m concerned, and that’s really what he thinks. And why in the world should I do anything about it anyways? And these are good objections. It’s like, why would you do that? And you’ll face this, believe me, in your life. You will face this. In fact, you already do. Always. Constantly. Continually. In small ways, perhaps. When you’re interacting with people who aren’t treating you properly. When you’re acting, and those might be your parents, they might be your friends, they might be people at your workplace, they might be professors. They’re playing a crooked game, and you don’t like it. And you know it’s crooked. And so then the question is, well, what should you do about it? Well, if you know it’s crooked, it’s not so good to play along with it. I mean, we’ll say that you know it’s crooked by your own standard of values. It degrades you to play along with it. You’re going to stand up and oppose it? Well, no. Probably not. You’re probably going to do what Jonah did, jump on a ship and get the hell out of there. And you know, that’s a logical thing to do, but it doesn’t solve the problem. And I think this has something to do with human ethical responsibility, because there are other old stories. And I’ll tell you one likely, where the son of the king, the lion king, the son of the king, he goes off and he’s some pathetic adolescent, and then he’s shamed by the reappearance of his old girlfriend into turning into something vaguely useful. And he opens his eyes and he goes back and he fights Scar, and you know it’s a scene of hell, right? Because there’s fire everywhere, and he fights Scar, finds out Scar killed his father, casts him into the pit, roughly speaking, and then the rain comes. And then, you know, the movie returns to its beginning, fundamentally. Paradise, paradise lost, paradise regained. That’s the movie. And that’s the story of human beings, you know. You’re in a place that’s working out pretty well. Something happens to knock you off your perch. You’re down in the chaos for a good amount of time, and maybe you never get out. But maybe you learn something down there. Maybe you strengthen your character. Then you pop up to a new place, and maybe it’s better. Better aim, better you. Now, I’m not being overly optimistic about this. I know perfectly well that people encounter impediments during their life that they find almost impossible to recover from. But it’s the best shot you have. So anyways, Jonah runs away. But God isn’t very happy about that, because it’s actually Jonah’s destiny. It’s necessary for Jonah to repair the city. So God sends a storm, and you know, the waves are high. And I think what that means is because the water is often a symbol for the unconscious. And that’s because things lurk down there in the water, and that you can pull up that are useful. Monstrous things that you can pull up that are useful. You can fish for them. You can go fishing in your own being for answers, which is what you do when you try to think. You ask yourself a question, and you wait. Maybe an answer appears. It’s like, where did that come from? You didn’t know what the answer was before it appeared, but it just popped into being out of nowhere? Who knows? So you fish. So anyways, the waves come, and the boat’s going to be knocked over. And that’s what happens, I think, when you know you should do something. I mean, everyone has this experience, I believe. Perhaps you would be willing to put up your hands if this experience is foreign to you. Okay? There’s part of you telling you, you should do something. And it’s hard to do it, effortful, and maybe you’re afraid of it. And so you don’t do it. You just procrastinate. Right? And so how do you feel about that? Good? I mean, so you feel that you’re betraying yourself. Your anxiety actually gets worse, not better, even though you can put it off moment to moment. But that doesn’t help, because every time you put it off, the anxiety just grows a little bit. You’re not proud of yourself. You have a sense that you’re making things more chaotic than they should be. You know, and if you do that long enough, and I’m sure many of you have had that experience, if you do that long enough, if that becomes habitual, things will get so stormy around you that you’ll fall right into the chaos, into the watery chaos. And maybe you’ll drown. So it’s not a very good idea to run from your destiny, let’s say. Whatever that might be. And you need a destiny, you need a place to aim at, because that’s what gives your life meaning. And you need meaning in your life, because life is hard. So you need something to buttress yourself against that. So anyways, they wake Joan up, and Jonah says, that’s probably my fault, because I’m running away from something I’m supposed to do, and God isn’t very happy about that, so why don’t you just throw me overboard? And the crew isn’t very happy about that, but the waves are really starting to come up, and Jonah’s pretty insistent that he’s the cause of the problem, and so they draw lots, and Jonah is chosen, and so they decide to toss him into the ocean, and immediately everything’s calm. So he’s a center of chaos, because he’s not doing what he’s supposed to do. Fine. Well, then a whale comes up and swallows him, and then he’s in the whale for three days. Now, that’s a weird thing. The whale, that’s the whale that Geppetto’s in. That’s a dragon. It’s that thing that you have to go out there and conquer to get something of value. Now, when you’ve made an error, when you’ve fallen off the pathway, when you’ve deviated from what you know you should do, it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern. You’re thrust into the unknown, you’re thrust into unknown territory and chaos. You don’t know what to do, and that’s often symbolized by the encounter with a monster, like a dragon, or something that lives under the water. And I think the reason for that, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is that human beings, because we’ve been prey animals forever in our battle with carnivorous lizards, for example, and alligators, and even dinosaurs, because there were dinosaurs around at the time of our most distant ancestors. There was even a cat at one point that was adapted with teeth to pierce human skulls. So it had a head that was exactly shaped to grab you here and put a tooth through the back of your skull. So like, we’ve come through some rough times, man, and we have a system in our mind that’s a threat predator detection system. That’s the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark, right? Because while there is monsters in the dark, parents always say, well, there’s no monsters in the dark. It’s like, that’s not true. The dark is full of monsters. There might not be any in your room right at that moment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t monsters in the dark. Crimes take place. Like, criminals don’t get up at six in the morning and like, you know, have breakfast and go rob a bank. They do that sort of thing at night. People do the things that are fit for the night in the night. And lots of predators are nocturnal, and you can’t see very well in the dark. And kids aren’t stupid, you know. They’ve evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire. Because the kids that wandered away from the fire got picked off by hyenas and lions and, you know, crocodiles and whatever else the hell was out there to eat the unwary. So, the circuit that we use to defend ourselves against predators, as we’ve evolved cortically, that circuit has come to represent what we don’t know in general. Because the predators, of course, inhabit where we don’t know. And so, evolution is a conservative force, and we use the circuits that we’ve evolved to represent new things. And so, the unknown, the chaos, is often represented by a monster that swallows you up and pulls you down. And, you know, when you’re feeling terrible, you don’t say, well, I’m feeling up. You say, I’m feeling down. Well, why is that? Well, down is worse. I guess you’re flat on the ground when you’re down, or you’re in a hole, or something like that. You’re hiding in a hole. You know, it’s down. And you’re threatened by something. You know, maybe you’re threatened by your own inadequacy. That might be part of it. Maybe that’s partly what you imagine as a monstrous force, because, you know, your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld. And that’s the underworld, the mythological underworld. That’s where you go when things fall apart. And if you understand that, if you know that that’s what that means, then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you. And you understand things. Your life can be organized, going very well, and then something comes up, and poof! Everything changes. Some axiom that you were living by, and it might be the existence of a partner, or it might be a job, it might be your health, any of those things. Gone. And you go somewhere when that happens. You go somewhere. It’s a state of being. You’re still in the same world, but it’s not the same at all anymore. Everything about it is different. It’s all negative and dark, and you don’t know what to do. You’re confused. And so, what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart? Especially if it’s the worst possible case scenario, and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise. That’s really annoying, you know, when something bad happens to you, and then you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened, and then you realize that, well, you are playing a causal role. Now, sometimes you’re so depressed, you assume you’re playing a causal role, and you work, it’s not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination. And it isn’t that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it, but sometimes you find that you are off the path somehow, and maybe even that you knew it, and didn’t attend to it, and that’s why all of this hit the fan. And so then down there in that chaos, you decide that you’re going to do what you’re supposed to do instead. And then maybe you get to rise up again, renewed, if you’re lucky, and then you can go fix the city. And that’s what this story is about. And that’s why I picked the image to represent the course, because really what happens, you see with the psychoanalysts, the road to health, if you’re not doing well, which means that as you act in the world, you’re not getting what you want. There’s something wrong with the match between your presuppositions and your actions, habitual, and the way the world is responding to you. And so it’s not turning out for you. And the question is, well, what can you do about that? And one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well, and to find out what they are and what to do about them. And maybe some of that is maybe you’re not moving forward because of fear, and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you’ve never been able to understand. And maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could, in fact, live properly in the world, is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them. And that’s what psychotherapy is about. In large part, psychoanalytic, behavioral, doesn’t matter. What are you afraid of? What are you avoiding? What are you failing to develop? Maybe from fear, maybe from avoidance, God only knows, maybe from disgust. How can you get over it? How can you reclaim those parts of yourself? I said in the first lecture that I was going to try to provide you with a schema into which you could place the theorists that we’re going to discuss. And it requires going down deep to do that. And there are presuppositions. My presupposition, and this is a psychoanalytic presupposition, it’s predicated on a poetic tradition, I would say. On an ancient tradition. I learned most of it from reading Jung. It was Carl Jung that helped me understand that we’re nested inside a dream. That we have to be. Because we don’t know everything. We have to take things as givens. And the things that we take as givens are nested inside stories. And we accept the stories as valid. And then outside the stories is the absolute unknown. You know, and that’s partly, the stories are tricky, you know. One of the classic stories, it’s a variant of the Jonah story, I would say, is St. George and the Dragon. That story was represented during the Renaissance and during medieval times. Thousands and thousands of ways. It’s like the story of St. Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland. Same idea. And the typical St. George story is the Hobbit. Or Harry Potter. So in the second volume of Harry Potter, correct me if I have any of these details wrong. You remember there’s that snake? The basilisk? So there’s this magic castle, right? You guys have no problem with that. Magic castle, no problem. There’s an orphan. He’s an orphan. He goes to the magic castle to learn how to be more than normal. Right? The muggles. He has a muggle family. We’re not too happy with the muggle family. Like as representatives of normal people, they have some lacks. Now of course the reason for that is that, well that’s what teenagers often feel about their parents. They feel, Jesus, these couldn’t really be my parents. I must have some other parents who are like together. Those are like magical parents, right? Parents that live in the sky. And of course Harry Potter has earthly parents. That’s the muggles. And Dursley, I think, is the kid. He’s a wonderful piece of work. And you know, ill-formed, eh? Spoiled, ill-formed, selfish, very far from the ideal. He’s a foil for Harry. And of course he’s appreciated and doted on. And Harry is actually punished for his virtues. That’s a classic story, right? To be punished for your virtues. I mean, if you look at the central story in Christianity, The central story in Christianity is about someone who is precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues. That’s what makes it an archetypal story, because there isn’t anything more unfair than that. And so it’s a limit in a sense. It can’t be worse than that. Being punished for being unworthy, it’s like, yeah, yeah, well, at least makes sense. But to be punished because you have your act together and you’re a good person, that’s real punishment. And that’s what happens to Harry. So luckily he finds out that he’s magical, which is quite convenient. And off he goes to wizarding school. And you know, that’s actually like taking, that’s actually like going and studying the humanities. I mean, it was when they still were. You know, because it’s through the humanities that you make contact with the magic of your culture. And that makes you more than merely the child of your parents. Because you are more than merely the child of your parents. You’re the child of nature. And you’re the child of culture. And until you understand what that means, understand that you have two sets of parents, like the divine hero always has two sets of parents, you can’t construe yourself properly as an individual. You’re not situated properly in the world. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You can’t orient your values properly. And you will suffer for that. Because, as far as I can tell, because life is so difficult, you have to do something that’s truly worthwhile in order to justify it. And so, well that’s what all these stories tell you. That’s what the story of Jonah is telling you. It’s like you have an ethical duty to straighten things up. And if you don’t do it, you’re going to be sorry. And that story is echoed everywhere. Well now St. George, well let’s go to Harry Potter. That’s what we were talking about. So he goes off to the magic castle, and he’s learning to be a wizard. And he’s kind of an interesting character, eh? Because he’s not really good. And we find out, I think, that’s because he doesn’t have a piece of Voldemort in him. Isn’t that what happens? Yeah. And what that means is that to be good, truly good, you can’t just follow rules. That’s very clear in the Harry Potter story. And you also have to be able to understand malevolence. And in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it, you have to understand that part of you that’s malevolent. Because if you don’t, you’re naive. And if you’re naive, you’re easy pickings. And so that’s a union idea too. And the union idea is that part of personality development is to understand your shadow. And the shadow is those things about you that you do not want to admit to. And you can learn about your shadow by reading history. You can read about Auschwitz. You can read about the concentration camps in Russia. And you can imagine yourself as a guard instead of as a heroic rescuer of unfortunate victims, which would be very, very unlikely. And once you can imagine yourself as a guard, which is a terrifying thing to do, then you understand something about yourself. And I actually think, and I think this is also from studying Jung, that you cannot have proper respect for yourself until you know that you’re a monster. Because you won’t act carefully enough. You know, if you think, well, I’m a nice person, I’d never do anyone any harm. It’s like, you’re no saint. You can be sure of that. And the harm that you do people can come in many, many ways. And so, if you regard yourself as harmless, inoffensive, nice, well, why do you have any reason to be careful? You’re like a teddy bear sitting on a shelf. Even if you throw it at someone, no one’s going to get hurt. But that isn’t what you’re like, because you’re a human being. And human beings are some vicious creatures. And there’s utility in knowing that, because it’s also the case. You know, in the Harry Potter series, Harry could stand up against Voldemort and understand him and speak his language, because he was infected by him to some degree. Very, very interesting idea. Anyways, in the second, and the reason I’m telling you this, and this is worth thinking about, it’s like, how long were each of those books? Like, 500 pages? They’re long, eh? And there was, how many of them? Seven? And how many of them were sold? I mean, how many of you read every Harry Potter book? Right. That’s a… How many of you read at least one? Okay, how many of you saw the movies? It’s like, you’re all in a cult. You are, I’m telling you, really, that’s the truth. It’s really the truth. So, in the second volume, there’s this snake that’s zipping around there, the basilisk, right, and it lives in the underground. That’s chaos. That’s chaos. And that’s because wherever you are, you’re on thin ice, and underneath your thin ice is chaos. And here we are, in this unbelievably civilized environment, and everyone’s getting along so perfectly. But, you know, we’ve got lights, we’ve got electricity, the sewage system is working, no one’s hungry, it’s like, we can be peaceful. But if any of that fell apart, and it could easily fall apart, because it’s a bloody miracle, it ever works at all, then the chaos that’s just underneath the surface is going to come up right now. And it’s useful to know that, because it makes you properly grateful, if you really understand it, it makes you properly grateful for the bloody miracle that it is that you can be here in peace. So anyways, there’s this snake that’s underneath the surface, and it’s, you know, no joke, that thing. It’s big, and it’s ancient, it’s always been there. And what happens if you look at it? It turns you to stone, right? It paralyzes you. Well, that’s the Gorgon, that’s Medusa, the woman with the head of snakes, and if you look at her, it paralyzes you. Well, what does that mean? Well, you’re walking through the jungle, and a big snake appears. What do you do? You freeze, and no bloody wonder, because you’re a prey animal, and that’s what they do when they see things that are going to eat them. And so, the snake, well, lots of people still die from snake bite. And our ancestors were, and I mean our ancestors, like, you know, tens of millions of years ago, when they were living in trees and weren’t very big, they made a nice snack for a snake. And there’s a woman named Lynn Isbell, who’s an anthropologist at UCLA, who’s correlated the presence of carnivorous snakes with the acuity of primate vision. And what she found was that the more snakes around, the better the primates could see. So, and we’re particularly good at picking up patterns like snake camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant. You know, and people generally don’t like snakes, you can learn to handle them, but snake fear appears to be innate. It’s innate in chimpanzees, and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing. You can overcome it, but, well, my daughter had snakes, and one day her snake bit her. It was a fairly big snake, and she hadn’t paid attention to it for a while, so it nailed her. And from then on, she had very difficult time grabbing the snake. It was like, bitten once, you know, shy permanently. She also told me years later, she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room. It’s like, you know, and I think it was probably the smell. So anyways, so Harry Potter decides he’s going to go after the basilisk, right? He’s going to go out there and face the thing that he’s most afraid of. So he does that, way down in the depths. So it’s like Jonah going down into the depths, and he faces the basilisk, and it bites him. And you know, that’s right, because if you go down into the depths, you can get bitten. Like, it’s no joke. And this is a hero story, but the thing about the hero story is it’s actually real. The thing that you’re facing is actually dangerous. And even though facing it voluntarily might be your best bet, and is likely your best bet, because that’s the central story of humanity, that doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed. It’s the real thing. So anyways, he gets bitten, right? And he’s going to die. Now, he’s rescuing Ginny. So that’s the St. George story. If you go after a dragon, dragons like to capture virgins. God only knows why. I think it’s because… I think it’s because one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is chase the damn predators away. And I suspect that the males from God only knows how long ago, who were particularly good at that, were rewarded with female attention, and why the hell not? So it’s deeply rooted inside of us, that idea of facing the unknown and freeing the woman. So the idea there is that if you… it’s a male idea in large part. I can talk about the central female myth, and I will as we proceed. The idea is that if you’re the sort of person who can stand up against the unknown and the frightening, then you’re also likely, if you develop into that sort of person, then you’re also likely to develop into the sort of person that other people will find attractive. So, you know, and that’s why Jung believed that inside the shadow was the anima, which is like a female figure. And so his idea was something like, you know, if you look, watch movies, there’s always this beta male guy, if they’re romantic movies. And he’s a nice guy, and he’s the friend, and you know, the woman tells him everything, but she doesn’t like him a bit. She likes the guy who’s like got an edge, and who’s capable of, I would say, mayhem, but at least of aggression. Now, that doesn’t mean she wants him to be aggressive, but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive. That would be good. And so he’s the romantic target, and so he’s the person that’s incorporated the shadow. And he’s someone that is respectable and perhaps useful. And so, well, that’s a very old story. So let’s think about this for a minute. I’ve already offered you a proposition. And I think it’s an important proposition, and I’m offering you this proposition so that you can make sense of art and literature and mythology and religion and dance and all those strange, ritualistic things that human beings do, which seems central to us, including, not least, the ineradicable tendency of us to seek out stories of heroes. I should finish the Harry Potter story. So Harry Potter goes down there to rescue Virginia. No, that’s not her name. What is it? Ginny. Yeah. But there’s a formal name for that. It’s a variant of Virginia anyways, which is a variant of virgin. And he gets bitten. Yes, Ginevra, that’s it. He gets bitten, and the bite is poison. And so there he is, dying, which doesn’t seem to be so good. And then what happens? And again, you guys swallow this, it’s no problem. So what’s his name, the Gumbeldor character? He’s got a bird, right? So he’s the wise old man. He’s the ruler of the castle. He’s the ruler of the magic castle. He’s the magic king. He’s like God the Father, as far as Harry Potter is concerned. And he has a bird. What kind of bird is it? It’s a phoenix, right? And one of the things that’s very strange about a phoenix is that, well, it’s immortal, but in a strange way. You know, it lives and lives, I think, a hundred years, and it gets older and older, and then one day, poof, it bursts into flames and turns into an egg. And then you get a new phoenix. So that’s a symbol of transformation. It’s a symbol of transformation. The bird is a spirit, or psyche. And so here’s what it means, in part. You know how when you learn a lesson in your life that that’s not very pleasant? Right? It’s not like when you learn something important, it’s the best day of your life. It’s often the importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it. You know, you learn things the hard way. You learn things by getting hit. Because obviously, if what you’re doing is working, you get what you want. There’s no learning in that, and that’s happy. It’s when you’re doing something and you hit an obstacle, and maybe you bloody well hit it hard, and then you recoil, and then you’re down into the depths you go, and you have to sort yourself out, and you realize that you’re this particular kind of idiot, and that you should probably fix that, and that’s really annoying and difficult. And maybe you’re down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while, and then you get it repaired, more or less, and you put yourself back together. That’s the phoenix. Poof. Into flames. Bang. Egg. New you. And so, you know, that’s the ability to learn. Now human beings are very strange creatures, right? Because we’re very malleable compared to most animals. You know, like grizzly bears now, and grizzly bears a thousand years ago, it’s like, whatever. They’re the same thing. They do the same thing. There’s no transformation. Human beings, we have this massive brain, and it’s a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they’re 40, and that’s a big burden. And so, you know, we pay a big price for it. It also makes childbirth very difficult. And it’s costly. You have to eat a lot because you have a big brain, because it uses up a lot of energy. And so, you know, you pay a price for it. But the advantage is you’re plastic. You can learn. Now, learning is a strange thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information. But you could also think of it, and this is more accurate, as finding out something that you’re doing wrong, so that it’s sort of built into you, like a character, a element of your character, a presumption of your perception, or a deep habit. It’s really built into you. It’s a neural structure, right? It’s alive. And you have to kill it because it isn’t working properly. And the pain that you go through, in part, when you’re suffering because you did something stupid, is something like the neurology. I can never get this quite right. It’s the pain of the death of that structure. And that can be a huge chunk of you, you know, if you really have to go through a massive revision. It’s like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all. You know, that happens, for example, if you’re trying to combat alcoholism, which is just, you know, a wretched thing to do because, well, all your friends are alcoholic. All your family drinks too much. The only thing you know how to do when you’re socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much. You know, you spend like 20 hours a week on it. It’s like, it’s not just that you’re addicted to the substance. It’s like that’s how you live. And so if you want to stop being an alcoholic, not only do you have to stop drinking alcohol, but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends, and maybe you’ve had them for your whole life, and you have to have continual battles with your drunk family. And then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that’s now like hanging around your neck like an albatross. And so you have to let that whole part of your personality die. And a new part has to spring forth. And that’s what the phoenix is. And the phoenix is the capacity of the person to transform. And so when Harry gets bit by the snake that freezes him, he gets seriously injured, the phoenix comes in, cries some tears in his wound, it repairs him, bang, he’s back to life. And the strange thing is that that’s okay with all of the viewers. Now why would that be? There’s nothing about it that’s rational. Nothing. Right? Magic castle? That’s not rational. Giant snake underneath it? That’s a little more rational. Turning you to stone, going down there to face it, being rejuvenated by a phoenix? Yeah, yeah, that’s okay. We’ll watch that. We’ll swallow it. We’ll be completely engaged in it. And the reason for that is because it’s a myth. It’s about how people, it’s a meta story about how to act, about how to conduct yourself in the world, to face the things that you’re afraid of that would otherwise paralyze you, to let the death of what is insufficient about you occur, and then to wait for the rebirth. Okay, so science is about what the world is. And myth and drama and dream and the unconscious, all of that. Let’s say the aesthetic and artistic and fantastic side of humanity. That’s more about how things should be. It’s more about how to act. There are lessons in how to act. And there are abstract lessons. People are capable of abstraction, right? So you say, well, there’s something good about you, and there’s something good about you, and there’s something bad about you and you and you, and so we’ll take all the good things and make one good thing out of that. We’ll take all the bad things and make one bad thing out of that. And then we sort of understand the difference between good and bad. And we get better and better and better and better at that over the centuries, as we distill that, and then we have a figure of ultimate good and a figure of ultimate evil. And that helps us understand what those two things are. Those are the hostile brothers. That’s a very common mythological motif. And you can say, well, they’re at war inside you. And I think that that’s a universal truth. It’s an existential truth. The domain of ethics and morality is how are we in the world and how should we be? What’s the good? And the reason I’m telling you all this, apart from the fact that you should know it, because this is what you should know if you go through university, is that it bears directly on issues of health. You’re trying to accomplish something, say, if you go see a psychotherapist. You could say, well, I’m trying to get healthy. But that’s not really right. What you’re trying to do when you go see a therapist is get your life together. And that’s not the same thing. Mostly when I’m acting as a therapist, it’s not like I’m directly treating mental disorder. Mental disorders, they’re just not neat little boxes. It’s not like someone has a fully functioning life, but they have an anxiety disorder. And then you bring them and you treat the anxiety disorder and they go back to their fully functioning life. It’s not like that at all. The disorder is tangled out into their life. If you’re depressed, well, usually your workplace isn’t going very well and your relationships with people around you are damaged. You’re connected in the actual world with all of these things. And so when you come to see a therapist, you have to work on putting your life together in a sustainable manner. And that’s certainly not just removing the mental illness. It’s very rare. Now and then you see someone who’s depressed, whose life is together. And they’re just depressed. Something’s gone wrong, probably biochemically. And so with someone like that, you can often give them SSRIs. I can’t give them to them, but I can recommend them. I recommend they go see a doctor anyways. And that sometimes just does the trick because their life is actually pretty good. They just can’t see it. But that’s bloody rare, man. It’s usually the case that someone comes and sees you and things are in a serious state of chaos. And all of that has to be addressed. And some of it’s psychological and a lot of it’s just practical. It’s embedded out there in the world. That’s what the behavioral psychologists are particularly concerned about. So anyways, psychology, especially the clinical end, is predicated on, it’s necessarily predicated on the question, how is it that we obtain the good? How do we aim at the good? And what would that be? When my clients first come to see me, one of the things I often ask them is, Okay, well let’s say you look a year ahead. What do you want? What are we aiming at? Your life isn’t the way you want it to be. How would it look if it was the way you wanted it to be? Or at least partly that way? And we aim at that. We look for impediments, psychological impediments, fears, avoidance strategies, that sort of thing. And we develop strategies. And we try to move towards that, I would say, ideal. Alright, to understand the categories of myth, we’ll say, we have to understand something about the nature of categorization. Now, categorization is a tricky thing, and we’re going to run through some complicated ideas relatively quickly. You know, you think you put things in the same category because they’re similar. But the problem is, is that, first of all, that’s not an answer. It’s just the restatement of the initial proposition. And second of all, you can put things in the same category that are by no means identical, and you often do that. And third, things that are similar are often also importantly different. And so, picking which element of similarity, you know, like let’s say you have a group of books. Well, are they the same? Well, obviously, no, unless they’re all the same book. But the category of books is a pretty strange category because the content of the books differs completely. Well, you can still make a group of books, and you pick some arbitrary element that unites them, and consider that grounds to make a category. There’s other categories, more scientific categories, and scientific categories tend to actually contain things that are very, very similar across multiple dimensions. Like protons are like that. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that distinguishes one proton from another. And the same with electrons. And, you know, the set of triangles is like that because you can define it precisely. But most of the categories that human beings use aren’t so neat. And the problem with that is that unless the categories are neat, like scientific categories, it’s very difficult to investigate them scientifically. So, for example, you might do research on a group of people with anxiety disorders. But the problem with that is that the anxiety disorder category is so heterogeneous that it’s almost impossible to identify the commonalities across all the people who are in that category. And that’s partly because the category isn’t actually a scientific category. It’s a hybrid category. It’s a practical category. I can give you an example of that. No, I can’t because I must not have saved it. Anyways, many of the DSM categories, so these are categories for psychopathology, require if you’re part of that category, imagine there’s seven symptoms that you could have or eight symptoms that you could have that would put you in that category, like antisocial personality. Eight symptoms. You steal, you kick, you hit, you bite, you, you know, you’re abusive. I don’t remember the categories precisely. But you can be in the category if you have symptoms two through five, and you can be in the category if you have symptoms six through eight. They aren’t the same symptoms, but you’re in the same category. And you think, well, how the hell can that be? Well, that’s a family resemblance category, roughly speaking. And lots of the things that we use are family resemblance categories. There’s a prototype. And then if you have enough of the features of that prototype, imagine the prototype has 10 features. And if you have six of those features, you get to be in that category. But it means that the category is actually quite diverse. And that’s one of the problems that plagues psychiatry as a science and clinical psychology as a science. It’s a really big problem because if the categories aren’t homogenous, then it’s very difficult to draw conclusions about the members of the category. And the psychologists and the psychiatrists claim that those are scientific categories, but they’re not. And they can’t be, partly because they’re aimed at the classification of health or ideal versus nonhealth or nonideal, and partly because they play multiple roles, say. I mean, the category isn’t there just to provide neat demarcations for scientific study. The category is there to give people language to talk about certain sets of symptoms, to diagnose, because when you come in and you have a set of symptoms, you might want to know what they are so that you also know what they aren’t. It’s really a relief, often, to find a diagnosis. And then, of course, the diagnosis has certain implications for treatment and for billing and for all of that. So the category has to play all of those roles. So there’s multiple types of category. And the categories that we’re talking about in relationship to mythology aren’t scientific categories. They’re categories about the world construed as a place to act. So here’s a way to think about it. You’re always looking at the world through a framework of reference. And you have to do that because there isn’t very much of you. You can’t see the whole world at once. And in fact, the amount of the world you actually see is so small you can’t believe it. The central part of your vision is zipping around, producing a pretty high resolution representation of exactly what you’re looking at. But outside of that center, like if I look at you, I can’t see her eyes. I can see her glasses, but barely. I can’t even tell whether you’re male or female. The person past that, I can’t see at all. Now you don’t notice that. You don’t notice that you’re that blind because your central vision is always popping around, illuminating that tiny space. But you’re so damn blind it’s just mind-boggling. And I’m sure some of you have seen the invisible gorilla video, where a gorilla comes into the video and you don’t notice, which is somewhat shocking because you would think that you would notice a gorilla. But what happens is that you actually don’t notice something unless it interferes with what you’re doing. Because what are you going to do? Notice everything? You can’t do that. You can hardly notice anything. So what you do is you pick something to focus on. It’s usually something that you value because why else would you focus on it? So that means that your value system determines the direction of your perception. Bloody well think about that for a minute. That’s a Buddhist idea, right? People live in a kind of illusion. And sometimes that illusion causes suffering and they can transform the way they look at the world and that can release them from their suffering. But the idea that you do live in an illusion, well I don’t know if it’s exactly an illusion, but you certainly do live within a framework of perception that’s determined by your values. Now that is so weird. You know, because we never think of the world as something that reveals itself through our values. But of course it does. Because you look at what you want. You aim at what you want. And once you’ve aimed, the world lays itself out for you. And that’s exactly how perception works. That’s why I represented it this way. You’re always somewhere. That’s point A. That’s somewhere, in some place, in some time. And you always have some notion about what you want to have happen next. You know, you’re going to go to the next class maybe. You’ve got a plan after this. In this class you have a plan. You’re hoping to learn something, I presume. Maybe you have a goal with regards to a grade, and that’s nested inside your desire to get a degree. And that’s nested inside your desire to be educated and to have a career and have a successful life. So, attending to me, at the moment, the reason you’re doing that is because all of those values exist within you, simultaneously focusing your attention. And so, you’re attending to me and not to something else, assuming that all of you with your computers open aren’t surfing the web, which you might be, but assuming that you’re focusing, whatever you’re focusing on is directed by what you value. And some of that can be unconscious. In fact, a lot of it is unconscious. Because you know, it’s very difficult for you to get control of what you pay attention to. You know what that’s like. You’re trying to study, kind of a boring paper. Christ, your attention is just like everywhere, you know. Maybe you’ll vacuum under the bed instead of reading the paper, you know. You can’t get grip on that thing, so your attention has an autonomy. And that’s another psychoanalytic idea, you know, because you kind of think, well, you’re in control. It’s like, really? You ever try telling yourself what to do? How does that work for you? I’m going to go to the gym three times a week. Right, sure you are. I’m going to quit eating sugar for a month. It’s like, how long does that last? It’s like 15 minutes, and you’re eating like three chocolate bars. So, you’re, and this is Freud’s central insight, I would say, you’re an autonomous group of spiritual agents, let’s say, personalities. And they don’t really get along very well. And you, the ego, we’ll say, is by no means necessarily in charge. And that’s a very strange thing to realize. But you can really realize that by noticing how little control you have over your attentional focus. Okay, so, you’ve got your point A, you’re going to point B, you’re always doing that. You inhabit a structure of value. And it changes what the point A is and what the point B is, but the structure itself doesn’t change. And when you’re looking at the world, what you see is not objects. You see tools, and they make you happy. Those are things that facilitate your movement forward. And you see obstacles, and those are things that make you unhappy. And when you encounter an obstacle, one of the problems is, is, well, you don’t get to where you’re going, and that’s a problem. But the other problem is, if you encounter an obstacle, the frame might be wrong. Right? Because you never know. It might be just something that you could detour around real easily. It might be a fatal flaw in your whole plan. And so obstacles have this dual nature. They get in your way, but they can also take your plan down. And so they can produce anxiety. So my point is, and this, there’s a book called Visual, an Ecological Approach to Visual Perceptions, great book by Gibson, J.J. Gibson, if I remember correctly. And this is, although I thought of this a while back, I realized eventually that it was a variant of his theory. And what he believed was that when people looked at the world, they saw value first and inferred objects second. So, for example, for Gibson, if you’re standing by a cliff, you don’t see a cliff and then think about the fact that you might fall and then feel frightened. You see a falling off place. And part of the seeing of that, part of the act of seeing is being afraid of that. Because your eyes are connected right to your emotional systems. And part of what your eyes do is tell you what the object is. But your eyes do all sorts of other things, like they prepare you for action. They prepare you for gripping. They prepare you for emotion. And none of that actually requires the existence, necessarily the existence of your perception of the object. So there are people who have blind sight. And if you show them, so they think they can’t see, but if you flash them an angry face, they’ll show a skin conductance response. And that’s because the visual pathways to the amygdala, which does facial emotional processing, can still be active. These are people who have usually had a stroke, so their eyes are okay, but they’ve destroyed the visual cortex. So anyways, it’s perfectly plausible that at least at one level of analysis, when you look at something, you see its utility first. So you see a chair. And you might say a chair is an object, but I wouldn’t say that. A beanbag is a chair. And a stump is a chair. And they don’t share much in common, except that you can sit on them. And the chair is basically conceptualized by its functional utility. And when you look at a chair, what you perceive is its functional utility. And the chair tells you what to do. It says, sit on me. And there are people who have prefrontal damage, and they engage in something called utilization behavior. And if they’re walking down a hallway and there’s a door open, they have to walk through it. They can’t not do what the object tells them to do. That’s called utilization behavior. So that’s how the world is laid out. And I would say inside that domain, you’re in the predictable world. You’re in the world that you understand, that you know. And that if you hit an obstacle or if you’re outside that domain, you’re in the unknown. You’re in unknown territory. In the mythological world, in the world for action, you could conceptualize the world as a stage for action. And this is a Shakespearean quote that sort of sums it up quite nicely. All the world is a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. And you might say, well, is that really true? And the answer to that is, well, it depends on what you mean by true. And that really is the answer, because there are different ways of defining true. So… And it isn’t self-evident that there’s only one way of defining true that’s appropriate. You know, the definition of truth might be more like a tool. And, you know, we are tool-using creatures, and really what we’re trying to do with our conceptions of truth is to work through the world successfully. So even science is subordinate, should be subordinate, to our use of the world as a tool. Because if it isn’t a useful tool, like, what are we doing with it? You know, just generating technology that might destroy the world. That seems like a bad idea. So… So I think that the world as tool is actually the fundamental sort of truth. And I think that that’s a Darwinian idea, right? That our notions about the world have evolved through a Darwinian process, and that it’s appropriate for us to regard as what is most real those things that reliably ensure the continuation of our life and the probability of our propagation. And if you’re a true Darwinian, I don’t think there’s a way out of that argument. And it isn’t self-evident by any stretch of the imagination that seeing the world as objects is the way that our brain works. In fact, I don’t think it’s the way it works at all. And I think that that’s why we’re so wired for stories. Right? It’s a mystery. You know, like, you won’t line up for two hours to go see a lecture. But you’ll line up for two hours, maybe you’ll even camp overnight if your mythological imagination has been seized for God only knows what reason by Star Wars. And, you know, that’s a source of mythology. It’s the mythology of the modern person, and it fills a gap. And that’s why people do it. So that, to me, speaks of the manner in which our psyches are constructed. And that’s a Jungian idea. That’s the idea of the archetype, essentially. That to be human is to participate in a certain pattern of being. And that that pattern of being is acted out socially, it’s acted out individually, but it’s also part of your structure, even your perceptual structure, as a living organism of your particular type. And it would be the case, at least in part, that the hero myth, which is go out where no one has gone before, face the terrors of the unknown, gather something of value, and return, is the central story of humankind. It’s not the only central story, but it’s up there in the top three. And many of the dramas that you engage yourself in are variations of that story. And you watch it over and over and over, because you’re trying to learn how to do that. Because that’s what you need to do to live. Okay, here’s an idea. What’s common among people? Well, we’re self-conscious, so we know of our own existence, and we know of our own limitations. And so that means that we have a certain innate terror and fragility. Our existence is a problem to us. And in some sense, what we’re trying to do when we search for meaning is to search for a solution to that problem. And that can be security, but it can also be mode of being. And so, for example, being engaged in something worthwhile seems to be a good medicine for being fragile. Because you think, well, I’m doing this, it seems worthwhile. And the fact that there’s a price to be paid for it, and that things could befall me that aren’t good, I’m willing to put up with that, because what I’m engaged in seems to be of sufficient significance to justify all that. We all become self-conscious, and we’re all trying to do something about that, figure out how to deal with it. So there’s a landscape that we inhabit, I would say, within which that takes place. So there’s a human being, self-conscious, doomed to tragedy, and doomed to be aware of that. The human being has two elements, and that’s the element that seeks the good, and there’s the other element that seeks, I would say, revenge and destruction. And we have our reasons. If something tragic happens to you, it’s tragic and unfair, and it really brings you low, the probability that you’re going to become resentful and want revenge is extraordinarily high, and no wonder. And the archetypal representation of that is evil itself, and the archetypal representation of the good that you could do is the hero. And so those things inhabit us, they’re permanent elements of the human psyche. And then what else is universal to us? Well, we live in a society. You could say, and that’s deep, that’s deep. It’s not just human society. Like, we’ve lived in a society forever. So, you know, lobsters live in dominance hierarchies, and they use their serotonin system, at least in part, to keep track of their dominance position. And so you can use antidepressants on lobsters when they get defeated, and they don’t feel so bad from being defeated in a fight. And so you just think about that, because antidepressants do the same thing to us. We’re so bloody social that the circuits that evolved 300 million years ago, when the lobsters and us had a shared ancestor, are still operating at the base of your brain. That’s why status is so important to people, and reputation. I mean, that serotonin system governs your emotional regulation, how people respond to you and what they think of you. Man, that matters. That’s why you’re on Facebook all the time and checking your texts and obsessing continually about your online presence, assuming that you’re doing that. And, you know, contacting people frantically and seeing what the updates are. It’s like, how are you held in the esteem of others? Very, very important. And that’s because it determines your emotional regulation. It’s really important. So we exist in a society, always. And the society has two elements. The tyrannical element of the society, that would be the tyrannical king, roughly speaking, a very common mythological theme. You see that in the Lion King, too, right? Because that’s Scar. And of course you see it in the real world, almost continually. And then the benevolent king, who is the source of all the good things about culture. You know, and you can see these things play out as mythologies in political terms. So I would say, for example, the continual harping about the oppressive nature of the patriarchy is part of a myth. And the myth is that society is oppressive. It’s like, well, yeah, obviously. You know, because you have to be quite a bit like you, and you have to be quite a bit like you, even if you’re not, so that you can get along. Everybody sacrifices a tremendous amount of their individuality to the common mode of being. There’s a tyrannical element to that. But, you know, by the same token, it’s the basis of cooperation and the stability of society. And the final element is, that’s often represented in a masculine manner, by the way, society. And I think that’s because our primary dominant structures, given the creatures we are, like chimpanzees, the primary structures of dominance are masculine. And then outside of what’s known is the unknown. And we always have to contend with that. And it’s wonderful in that it’s the source of all new things, and it’s terrible in that it’s the place where all the things that destabilize you come from. And so this is a good representation, although not the only one. So that’s the feminine nature, that’s the masculine order, and that’s the individual who’s destined to suffer in the grasp of those two things. And… I’ll finish this next time. What have we got here? Yep. Alright. Good enough. We’ll see you next time. So today, to begin with, we’re going to finish the last lecture. And then, with any luck, we’re going to start the next one. They’re thematically linked anyways. Well, you know, all the lectures for the next… Well, for the whole course, hopefully, will be thematically linked to some degree, given that, nominally, they’re about the same topic, but some are more tightly linked than others. So, I started telling you last week about this idea of the voyage to the underworld, and I want to tell you a little bit more about that. Jung, in particular, conceptualized the voyage to the underworld as a journey into the unconscious. And the unconscious for the psychoanalyst is a place of fantasy and dream and implicit presupposition and habit. And that’s all correct. You know, there is an unconscious, and it’s perfectly reasonable to conceptualize it that way. The big difference, I think, between the psychoanalysts and the later, more empirical scientists is that the psychoanalysts sort of envisioned your psyche as a place of living partial personalities. Instead of cognitive computational systems. You know, they took into account the fact that you’re alive, and that the parts of you are alive. And, you know, there’s a neuroscientist named Gazzanigga… I don’t know how to say his name. Gazzanigga. That’s wrong. Gazzanigga. Yeah, I think that’s it. Anyways, he did some of the earliest experiments on split brains. And so sometimes if you have intractable epilepsy, which I wouldn’t recommend, by the way, one of the surgical procedures for mediating its negative effects is something called a… you cut the corpus callosum, and it’s a very large structure in the brain that connects the two separate hemispheres. And, you know, it’s not obvious why we have two separate hemispheres, although I’ll tell you a little bit about why I think it is. But anyways, they do communicate. And what Gazzanigga demonstrated was that you could tell one hemisphere something without the other one knowing that both hemispheres were conscious, and that the consciousness was somewhat independent. Really strange. It makes very interesting readings. Reading. You know, because it suggests that fragments of ourselves… you can think of… you have fragments of yourself within you that are like low-resolution representations of you, you know? And the psychoanalysts would think of those more as… they’re kind of like one-eyed giants. That might be a way of thinking about it, if you were thinking about it in a fantastical way. So there’s the angry you. And, you know, you all come in contact with the angry you. It’s rather rigid. That’s the first thing you might say about it. It’s impulsive in short term. It doesn’t think much about the past. Unless it’s bad things about whoever you’re angry at, in which case it thinks about them a lot. But it’s not too concerned with long-term future consequences, and mostly it wants to be right. And, you know, when angry you disappears and normal you, assuming such a thing exists, reappears, you can be perfectly shocked about how angry you behaved. And, in fact, sometimes if angry you really gets out of hand, like it might in a battle, like a war, it might do things that you just can’t imagine that you would do. And under those circumstances, you can reveal parts of yourself to yourself that are so foreign and so horrifying that it will leave you with post-traumatic stress disorder. Because it is the case that many, but not all, people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, especially if it’s battlefield related, get it because of something they did rather than something they saw or something that happened to them. And that’s really worth thinking about, you know. I mean there’s a lot of weird potential nested inside people, and you know you don’t see it under normal circumstances because the circumstances are normal. And part of the reason that we like the circumstances to be normal is precisely so that we don’t see those parts of people we don’t want to see. And that’s really worth knowing, it’s really worth knowing because that’s why people are so identified with their culture and why they need a culture. You know, the terror management theorists types, they kind of think of culture as a mechanism that inhibits anxiety, and they think about it psychologically, like it’s something inside your head, let’s say. And it gives meaning to events and stops you from collapsing into chaos and protects you from death anxiety. But that’s not right, it’s sort of right. But that isn’t what your culture is. Your culture is a set of value-laden presuppositions that you orient yourself in the world that match the set of value-laden presuppositions that everyone in your culture has and acts out. And so what that means is that when you believe something and you’re among your own people, you believe something implicitly, it’s the way you look at the world, it’s the way you act things out. Everyone expects you to act about, they’re happy about it in fact, so there’s a match between what you’re doing, what you see and what you’re doing, and what other people expect. And it’s that match that regulates your emotions. It’s not the belief system, it’s the match. And so part of the reason that people are so tied to their cultural identity is because their cultural identity regulates their emotions. And in a profound way, like this is no joke, you know, I mean one of the things that stabilizes human nervous systems is, imagine that you have a domain of competence. There’s many domains of competence, and of course in some of those domains you’re completely incompetent, but that may not matter because you don’t go into that domain. So you have some area of specialization which you might think of as your sub-tribe, you know, your university students. And so some of you are lower status by the rules of the university game, and some of you are higher status by the rules of the university game, by the tribe. And so the higher status people tend to be the ones who fit into the academic environment, you know, and find it conducive to their mode of being, and who also do well. And their serotonin levels rise, and you know, the neurochemicals that moderate mood particularly are serotonergic. It’s serotonin, it’s lots of other things, it’s an oversimplification, but that’ll do for now. As you become dominant in a hierarchy, your serotonin levels rise. And what that means is that happy things make you happier, and sad things make you less sad. It tunes your nervous system. So if you’re down at the bottom of the hierarchy, and you’re failing, it’s like, hey, hardly anything makes you happy, and everything makes you nervous. And it’s no wonder, because it’s not very good down there. So the societal structure, which is an elaborated dominance hierarchy, regulates your emotions because of the match between your expectations and the behaviors of the people within that structure. And then your position within the hierarchy regulates the ratio, let’s say, and the intensity between positive and negative emotion. So you mess with people’s status at your peril, and you disrupt their culture. They don’t like that. And no wonder, because when it’s disrupted, they fall into chaos. And chaos isn’t just anxiety. I mean, anxiety is bad enough. But it’s not just anxiety, because when you fall into chaos, when things fall apart for you, of course you’re uncertain and anxious, because you don’t know what the hell is going on, and you don’t know where you are, and you don’t know what to do. That’s anxiety provoking. And maybe you can’t even understand your past properly anymore. As I said, that happens when people get betrayed. And so you fall into this state where nothing is certain. The way you construe the world isn’t certain. And even the way the world is, is no longer certain, because you don’t know how to act, or your actions aren’t working. And so the world is presenting itself as something that’s chaotic. It’s not just psychological. The chaos is a weird intermingling of the chaotic world and the chaotic self. I mean, that’s what happens when you get unemployed. It’s like, it’s devastating. Right? It’s devastating to people. And you can say, well, that’s psychological. It’s like, well, yeah, but they’re unemployed. That makes the world far more incomprehensible and uncertain. It’s not just psychological. It’s psychological, and that’s bad. But it’s also real, and that’s even worse. And then those two things can spiral, which they often do, because, you know, if you don’t set your expectations properly for a job search, and assume that you’re going to get 49 rejections for every interview, which you really need to know, because if you get 49 rejections, it’s not because you’re useless, it’s because the baseline for rejection is 98%. And that’s okay, because the base rate for rejection for everything is 98%, no matter what you do. But you need to know that so that you don’t feel that it’s like something wrong with you. And of course, you only have to get it right once, and then you have a job that’s a lottery. But you have to set yourself up. You have to think, okay, well, I’m going to look for a job. How many resumes can I tolerate sending out a day? You know, it has to be enough so you don’t feel like a useless moron. And it can’t be so many that you’re overwhelmed by the burden. And I help people do this sort of thing all the time. So maybe you decide, well, you’re going to send out 10 a day, and you’re going to work two hours on it, and it’s going to take six months. And then, you know, you’ve got your parameters set properly, and you know what to expect in the world, and your emotions are regulated. But the state of being unemployed doesn’t just produce psychological consequences. So the distinction between the psyche and the world, in some sense, is quite arbitrary. And the psychoanalysts, I think, err too much on the side of the subject. They tend to think that too much of you is inside of you, and too little of you is outside of you. And part of the reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience. I love the psychoanalysts, man. They’re brilliant. They’re brilliant. They’re deep. They grapple with real problems, like with the problems. When people have real problems, and I mean profound problems, they’re really profound moral problems. They’re problems of good and evil, really. You know, there are things going on in their family that are so terrible that, well, that they’re sometimes fatal, you know, lie upon lie upon lie upon lie for decades and decades and decades. It’s awful. And that’s not exactly inside them. It’s out there in the world. And lots of the people that I see, very famous critic of psychology, I can’t remember his name, but I probably will, criticize the practice of psychology quite effectively in the, I believe in the early 60s. The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Saz. S-Z-A-S-Z. It’s a classic. You should read it. If you’re interested in psychology, read it. Like, it’s a classic. And he basically said, most people have problems in living. They don’t have psychological problems. And so I’ve experienced, despite my love for the psychology, I’ve experienced a lot of psychological problems. They have problems in living. They don’t have psychological problems. And so I’ve experienced, despite my love for the psychoanalysts, very frequently what I’m doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work. You know, and you can parameterize that. It’s like, what do you need? How about some friends? That. People kind of like that. How about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust, that maybe has a future? That’d be good. How about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere, so at least you’ve got some possibility of rising, some possibility of stabilizing yourself, and a schedule and a routine, because no one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don’t have a routine, I would recommend, like, you get one going, because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine. You need to pick a time to get up, whatever time you want, but pick one and stick to it, because otherwise you dysregulate your circadian rhythms, and they regulate your mood. And eat something in the morning. I had lots of clients who’ve had anxiety disorders. I had one client who was literally starving. Very smart girl. There was very little that she liked. She kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day. She came to me and said, I have no energy. I come home. All I want to do is watch the same movie over and over. What? Like, is that weird? And I thought, well, it depends on how hard you work. You know, it’s a little weird, but whatever. It’s familiar. You’re looking for comfort. So I did an analysis of her diet. It’s like three quarters of a cup of rice. It’s like you’re starving. Eat something. You know, you’ll feel better. So she modified her diet and all her anxiety went away and she had some energy. It’s like, yeah, you gotta eat. So a schedule. That’s a good thing, man. Your brain will thank you for it. It will stabilize your nervous system. With a bit of a plan, that’s a good thing. You need a career. You need something productive to do with your time. You need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol. Most particularly alcohol, because that does eat a lot of people. You need a family, like the family you have. Your parents and all that. It would be nice if you all got along. You could work on that. That’s a good thing to work on. Then, you know, you probably need children at some point. That’s life. That’s what life is. And if you’re missing, you know, you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions. It’s not mandatory. But I can tell you that if you’re not operating reasonably well on four, I think I mentioned six, if you’re not operating reasonably well on at least three of them, there’s no way you’re going to be psychologically thriving. And that’s more pragmatic in some sense than psychological. Human beings have a nature. There’s things we need. And if we have them, well, that’s good. And if we don’t have them, well, then we feel the lack. And so behaviorists, behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing. You know, it’s practical. It’s like strategizing. Make a career plan. Figure out how to negotiate, because that’s bloody important. Figure out how to say what you need. Figure out how to tell the truth to people. Figure out how to listen to your partner in particular. Because if you listen to them, they will actually tell you what they want. And sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they’ll return the favor. And if you practice that for like 15 years, well, then maybe you’re constantly giving each other what you want. Well, hooray. That would be good. And then there’s two of you under all circumstances. And it’s better to have two brains than one, because people think differently because of their temperament mostly. And so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises. And it’s part of the transformation, the psychological transformation that’s attendant on an intimate relationship. And one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship. Anyways, when that falls apart, chaos ensues. And that’s why chaos is represented so continually in myths and stories. And I’m going to walk you through a bit of that more today. I talked about the story of Jonah. Now, here’s something to think about. The internal representations of language meaning evolve partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors’ knowledge of social relations. Like modern monkeys and apes, our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive and cooperative. The demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex, abstract, conceptual, and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication. Although baboons have concepts and acquire propositional information from other animals’ vocalizations, they cannot articulate this information. They understand dominance relationships and matrilineal kinship, but they have no words for them. This suggests that the internal representation of many concept relations and action sequences does not require language. And that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought. Well, you know, you can think without language. Well, take the case of someone who’s deaf and mute. They have no language. Well, they can operate in society. They learn how to represent other people. And they do that with image. Now, the postmodernists, who I despise would be a reasonable way of putting it, have this proposition that there’s no meaning outside language. And it’s a powerful argument, by the way, but it’s seriously wrong. There is a meaning network outside of language, and it’s what language is grounded in, and that’s this pre-verbal comprehension of the world. It’s an embodied comprehension of the world. Animals have it. Lobsters have it. You know, this particular scientist, Seyfarth, talks about our shared history with, you know, higher primates. That probably goes back 20 million years, something like that. Split from the common ancestor with chimps about 7 million years ago. But, you know, lobsters have dominance hierarchies. They hardly have a nervous system at all, which is partly why they’re studied quite extensively. And so they have a social structure, and they understand it. Like, if one lobster, if you’re a lobster, which would be quite a shock to you if it happened, and you were fighting with another lobster, and you lost, you would remember that. And the next time you saw that lobster, you’d scuttle off somewhere else. And you’d know that. And all the lobsters in an area know who’s top lobster and who isn’t. And top lobster gets the best bloody place to be and the best food. So this dominance issue, this cultural issue, you know, the fact that we live in a social environment, is far deeper than people usually consider. And it’s also worth considering, and this is what you might think of from an evolutionary perspective. You know, you think of natural selection as producing evolution, right? Well, random mutation with natural selection. But here’s something to think about. And Darwin knew this. But Darwin was really smart. And the biologists who followed in his footsteps, even up to now, have only expanded out a fraction of what he had to say. You know, he was very interested in sexual selection. Now, one of the things about human beings that’s unique is that human females are picky maters. They’re choosy. They’re also sneaky because you can’t tell when they’re ovulating. And without many other female animals, you know. So they have hidden ovulation and they’re choosy, and they tend to choose men who are more successful in the dominance hierarchy. Well, there’s a shock. I mean, if you have a choice, why not… If you pick someone who’s at the bottom of the competence hierarchy, well, that’s probably not going to work out very well for you. And since women bear the burden of reproduction, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to search out someone who’s going to be helpful. So productive, fair, generous. And you know, when you think of a dominance hierarchy, you might think, well, it’s the powerful guy, the aggressive guy, say, that rises to the top of the dominance hierarchy. And that’s not true. It’s not even true among chimps. Like, you can get a chimp tyrant, but then what happens is other chimps gang up on him and tear him to pieces. And they don’t do it nicely. They don’t do it nicely. And the chimps that tend to maintain their dominance for long periods of time have a pretty wide network of friends, roughly speaking, with whom they engage in reciprocal interactions like grooming. And they actually pay a lot of positive attention to the female chimps, who have their own hierarchy, by the way, and to their offspring. So they’re like baby-kissing politicians. And so the idea that it’s raw power that produces dominance is just wrong. It’s wrong now, you know, tyrants, you know. It’s pretty damn unstable business being a tyrant. There’s lots of people who want to kill you. Plus, you know, you tend to rule over something approximating hell. So maybe that’s worse, better than being a subject in hell, but it’s not much better. So anyway, so this social. Now, so what this means, think about this for a minute. So imagine, you know, imagine what I’m telling you bears some vague resemblance to the truth. I think there’s quite a lot of evidence for it from a biological perspective. I mean, this choosy mating thing occurs with lots of species, you know. There’s this bird called the bowerbird. You’ve got to look up bowerbirds, man. Those things are. You just can’t even believe they exist. And so the male bowerbird, he makes this really complicated nest that’s close to the ground. He weaves it. It’s really quite nice. You couldn’t make one. So and then he sweeps the yard in front of the nest. And then he runs around the forest or flies because he is a bird, finding pretty things. So maybe he’ll find a nice collection of red leaves. And so then he’ll take the red leaves one by one and fly back to his front yard and make a little square. You know, he’s a bird, so it’s not a great square. But he makes a little patch of red and he takes a look at that and then he goes off and finds something blue. And and he decorates, he makes a little piece of abstract art in the front of his nest. And a lot of male bowerbirds do this all at the same time. And so then the females come along, they hop on something nearby and they kind of look at it like this, checking it out. And if they’re happy with it, well, then things proceed. But if they’re not, they fly off to someone else’s piece of abstract art. And if a male piece of art is rejected by like three females in a row, he gets irritated and brushes it all off with his wing. And then he makes another one. It’s like, God. Well, they obviously have a sense of very well developed sense of beauty. It’s so cool, you know. And I guess the idea is that who knows what the hell the idea is. The female birds like artistic males, something like that. But if you’re thinking about it biologically, maybe it’s an indication of intelligence. Right. It’s a marker of intelligence. You know, and it’s certainly the case that female humans prefer creative men. So, and no wonder. Of course. We wouldn’t be creative if that wasn’t the case. So then imagine that there’s two primary forces of evolutionary selection operating on us. And they’re not really the natural world, which is what people always think, like the environment, you know, the animals and the trees and nature. But it isn’t nature that selected us. It’s two other things. Well, partly. It’s two other things. So one is the dominance hierarchy, the male dominance hierarchy is one of the primary mechanisms of selection. So it’s like, well, women are faced with a hard choice. Which guy to go after? Right. That’s a hard choice. Well, so they do the same thing that people do with the stock market. They outsource the cognitive problem, the computational problem to the male dominance hierarchy. Then they just let the male sort themselves out, however they’re going to. And then they peel from the top. And so what that means is the male dominance hierarchy itself is a selection mechanism. Because if you fail at it, then you don’t leave any offspring. And so what that means, at least in part, is that we have adapted to be better and better at attaining status in dominance hierarchies over God only knows how long a period of time. And that doesn’t mean just power. You know, it might mean cognitive flexibility, because you could imagine dominance hierarchy A, dominance hierarchy B, dominance hierarchy C. Okay, so if you’re really successful, you climb up dominance hierarchy A. Right, but B and C, no, if you happen to land in those, you’d just be a failure. So then you could say the ideal human being is someone who can climb to the top of a dominance hierarchy no matter what the dominance hierarchy is. Right, so we’ve evolved such that success across the set of possible dominance hierarchies is the target. And I think that’s why we have general intelligence. Because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism. And it’s a single factor even. Like, there is, intelligence is a single factor. It’s not divisible despite what people like Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner falsely claim. So, and then from the female perspective, females are the next gatekeeper. And that’s why they’re often mother nature. It took me a long time to figure this out. Why the hell is nature feminine in mythological representations? It’s very, very, it’s extraordinarily common. Mother nature. You don’t think of father nature, you think of mother nature. It’s like, why? Well, nature brings forth new forms, so that’s feminine. And nature selects. In fact, that’s the definition of nature from a Darwinian perspective. Nature is that which selects. Women select. Their nature. And that’s partly why far more men than you might think, like far more, are terrified of women. Because to be rejected as a romantic partner by a woman is to be classified as vaguely acceptable life form. No value in propagating it, though. Right, so it’s a major, major rejection. And, you know, I’ve had dozens of clients and many, many people write to me whose primary problem is that they’re so terrified of women they can’t even approach them. Very, very, very common. So, alright. I want to show you this little triangle thing. This is kind of cool. Okay, so. Non-verbal, right? Non-verbal. So what happened? Well, there’s mother triangle, I would guess. And mother triangle has circle as a child. And triangle is maybe a friend, but not one that’s very welcome, according to mother. And child circle goes out to try to play with triangle child. And mother doesn’t like that, so she goes out there and pecks the hell out of him. Chases him away. Pushes child circle back into the home. And goes into the home. And then child circle isn’t very happy about that. Running around causing trouble. And manages to escape. And then bad child triangle shows up and they play together and run around and run around and run around and run around with mother chasing them. And then they, well maybe they elope, who knows. And then mother triangle has a fit and blows down the house, right? It’s obvious. Reasonable? Would you consider that a reasonable story about what happened? Perhaps you had other interpretations, but I suspect they were vaguely along that line. Well, but the point here, and this is the point of this experiment, is how much information do you need from which to derive a narrative? And the answer is, like, none. It’s just immediate. You can watch some triangles moving around a box and instantly you personalize it. And that’s because that’s what you’re like. And the reason you’re like that is because your environment isn’t nature. Your environment is culture. Your environment is other people. Other people. And that was even more true for chimpanzees and so forth, and especially animals that had a limited diet. Like gorillas, they pretty much only eat, like leaves. You know how a chimp spends like 12 hours a day chewing? And that’s why they have a gut like this. It’s like, you can’t eat leaves. You know, have you tried? They have no nutrition. So if you’re going to eat leaves, you have to eat a lot of them. And then it takes like three months to digest them. And so what we’ve done, and this is pretty cool because we’re so smart, is that we’ve traded gut for brain. And that’s why we’re so svelte. And the way we manage that, it appears, is that we learned how to use fire to cook things. And that meant that we had high quality nutrition, much higher. It’s easier to digest cooked things, especially meat. And so because we invented fire, we didn’t have to have so much intestine. And we could spend a little more time on the brain. So human beings really are fire users. We invented fire or discovered it or whatever, man mastered it at least a couple of million years ago. A long time. So that’s all pretty cool. As far as I’m concerned. So that’s partly how you think. And that’s naturally how you think. You think a certain way. And so we’ll say that your fundamental architecture is social cognitive. You tend to view the world as if it’s personified. And the reason for that is that the world in which you emerged as a being was primarily social. And what you needed to know was who’s the big primate, who’s the little primate, who’s related to who. And you know among chimps, if a big chimp is threatened by a small chimp, well you know the big chimp could just tear the small chimp apart. But the big chimp will back off if it knows that the little chimp is associated with some really big chimps. And so the little chimp can bully the big chimp because it’s part of a dominant family. And that’s because the nervous system of the big chimp doesn’t respond to the little chimp like a little chimp. It responds to the little chimp like it’s a little chimp with four great monsters attached to it because it’s true. So its nervous system is actually responding to the network around the chimp. And so that’s exactly what you, well it’s not exactly what you’re like because you’re not chimps, but you know it’s that kind of platform that constitutes the evolutionary underpinnings of your psyche. So what does that mean? Well it means this is like perfectly fine to us, right? We can animate things, we can, rabbits are people, no problem. We’ll go along with that. You remember Roger Rabbit? I presume most of you have watched that. So this is the detective whose name I don’t remember. He has to go to Toontown because there’s cartoons and there’s people and you know they share the same world. And you can go to Toontown although it’s kind of annoying because cartoon figures are kind of annoying. Like there’s slapstick types and so he’s not very happy to be there. And this is what it looks like. Everything’s animated, meaning alive. Anima means soul, by the way. So everything has a personality. And you know when you’re reading books to kids, the sun has a personality, train has a personality, jet has a personality. Doesn’t matter what it is, it has a personality. And that’s because the child is learning to understand the world using the architecture, social cognitive architecture. And the thing that’s really interesting about that, this just blows me away. You know evolution is conservative and so once it’s produced something, it has to build on it. It’s like DOS, the operating system. It’s like really, it’s still there, if I remember correctly, under Windows 10. You can’t get rid of the damn thing because it’s part of the structure now. And it’s like the keyboards we use, which were actually designed to slow typers down. Because with mechanical typewriters, if you type too fast the keys would jam. So they devise the keyboard to slow you down. And we still use it, which is stupid. You know, you want the high frequency letters close to your middle fingers. That isn’t what it’s like at all. But we can’t change it because everyone uses it. So your body plan, that thing has been around a long time, man. If you look at mammals particularly, but even lizards, there’s so much like us in their skeletal structure that it’s just mind boggling. And we’re all variants of the same symmetrical, four-legged, mouth here structure. And so you have to build on what you have. And if you have a social cognitive architecture, then you have to first understand the world through the social cognitive categories. And what’s so bloody strange about that is it actually seems to work. We actually seem to develop a coherent representation of being, I would say, of being. That’s not the same as nature. It’s not the same as the world. Because when we think of the world, we think of the objective world. And I’m not talking about the objective world. I’m talking about the world of human experience. And we see that through social cognitive filter. And it makes perfect sense to us. And it works. That’s so strange. So anyways, everything’s got this animated nature. And we don’t have a problem with that. In fact, we actually find it quite fun. You know, people go visit the Disney Toon Town and participate in it and have fun with it. And so that shows you as well how natural it is for us to view things this way. You know cars have faces, right? Designers know that. They know that. People don’t want a car with three headlights. Because like who wants to be associated with a three-eyed monster? No one. It’s like two eyes. That’s something you could be comfortable with. And so cars have faces. Like the BMWs, the new ones, they really look cat-like. And they have sexy curves. They do. They do. There’s been MRI studies of that. So if you show men photographs of attractive women looking directly at them, there’s a little part of their brain called the nucleus accumbens that lights up. Because to have someone look directly at you, especially if they have like a smile, is interpreted as an invitation to approach. And women, they have the same damn problem. Because with women, because if you go into drug stores, say, and you look at women’s magazines, they’re all the same. They’ve all evolved to the same endpoint. They all have an attractive woman on them, all of them. And they’re looking right out. And so when women see that, they actually see it as something to approach. It’s an ideal. And you know, when people say that those beauty ideals are oppressive to women, and all ideals are oppressive, but the empirical research, some of it done here, suggests that interacting with those images helps the… it performs the psychological function of helping the woman equate herself with the ideal. And in most cases, that actually produces an elevation in mood. And you know, think about it. You’re really going to go to the magazine store when you’re just looking for something to do, and you’re going to buy something that makes you feel depressed and oppressed. It’s like, no, you’re not going to do that. Magazines that do that to you, they will die because no one will buy them. And there’s a reason they all turned out the same way. It’s like they’re just responding to demand. So… Faces. Oh yes, with regards to the sexy curves. So a woman who looks… a woman’s picture looking right at a man will produce this activation in the primary reward system. Cocaine produces the same response. And so do sports cars. Especially curvy red sports cars. And so that’s why you often see an attractive woman sitting on a curvy red sports car in an ad. Because it’s, you know, if there’s an ad for beer on the side, it’s like, hey, everything’s perfect. So… and you know, those are all primary reward representations, and they produce attraction. Because part of positive emotion, the dopaminergically mediated element of positive emotion, is an approach emotion. It’s not a satiation, satisfaction emotion. It’s, oh good, there’s something good here, I can move towards it. And that is what happiness is. That’s directly what happiness is. It’s not attaining something, because that just puts in a whole new problem. You’ve got to figure out what to do next. Alright, so I suggested to you… That one of the problems that we have, the problem, I would say, is not what the world’s made out of, but how we should be in the world, because we’re alive. And how we should be, well, it’s fairly straightforward. Not so much pain would be good, that’d be good. Not too much anxiety, hey, we’re on board for that. A little pleasure now and then, some stability. Not dying, that’s a big one. That’s a big one. And then, let’s say from the Darwinian perspective, propagating. And so that’s what we’re aimed at, and the reason we’re aimed at that is, you just think about this, it’s so amazing. So every single one of the relatives you have in your ancestry, every single one of them, successfully produced a child, who successfully produced a child, all the way back to 3 billion years ago. It’s bloody unbelievable, like the probability that you exist, well it’s 100% because there you are, but the probability of predicting that you would exist, you know, if you tried to predict it, it’s like the chances that you’re here are so infinitesimal that it’s just absolutely mind boggling. Think about that unbroken sequence of success over literally over billions of years. God, it’s amazing. And so you have to, obviously, you have to think that there’s a pretty strong proclivity for that to happen. I mean, some of that obviously was necessity, but not only that. I mean, it’s necessary that impregnated females have an infant. It isn’t necessary that they keep it alive. So you can’t account for that continuity merely from necessity. You have to interject at least a small amount of consideration that the care that’s associated, especially with taking care of infants, because they’re, you know, they’re a lot of work. That’s there too. It’s in us. It’s actually, I think, it’s manifested in the personality trait agreeableness. It looks to be like agreeableness is one of the dimensions where men and women vary most substantially. Agreeableness looks to be like the manifestation of the maternal instinct. Now, men can be agreeable too, because, of course, male human beings take care of children. You know, if you’re a grizzly bear, female, you just chase the damn male away because he’ll kill your cubs. That’s not so helpful. They’re not maternal at all. Quite the contrary. But, you know, human men are pretty damn maternal. They’re not as maternal as women on average, although some women are less maternal than some men, because, you know, the curves overlap. But on balance. How are we in the world? Well, we’re aware of our own vulnerability. We’re aware of our own shortcomings, let’s say. And I think that’s partly from being a social being, because people are always signaling your shortcomings to you, to such a degree that you even signal your shortcomings to yourself. Because, well, you might as well fix them before someone else points them out. That’s guilt and shame. You know, and Freud called that the superego. The superego is kind of like the internalized representation of the judgmental father. And culture, I think, is represented as a father figure. God the father, let’s say, because it’s actually quite a bit like there is an all-seeing eye that’s always watching you. It’s a really, really intelligent way of conceptualizing it, because the group, which is more or less eternal, is watching you all the time. All the time. And it’s judging you all the time. And we know that if you put people in a room and you put a big eye on the wall, you give them an opportunity to cheat on some little cheaty thing, you know, nothing too important. If they’re in the room with the big eye, they’re less likely to cheat if they’re in a room with no eye at all. And what do you do? You keep an eye on your kids. And the reason you do that is so they don’t misbehave. And we keep an eye on each other. And so we have a representation of that. And as far as I can tell, we represent it as a transcendent figure of judgment. And it’s like, yeah, hey, that’s a pretty good metaphor. So, one of the… This is a major intellectual battle. The major intellectual battle. And it’s raging in universities. It’s basically a battle between postmodernism and traditional… and tradition. I think that’s the right way of thinking about it. For the postmodernists, human beings have no nature. We’re blank slates. Everything that we are is inculturated. So we’re completely malleable. And all elements of our identity are malleable. On the other side are the traditionalists, who are, I would say, grounded more in biology on the one hand, but also in the historical humanities tradition that suggests that people have a nature. I explained some of that nature. Most people want to have friends. It’s part of your nature. Most people want to find love. Part of your nature. And you suffer without it. You could say those are all social constructs, but… You can say anything. And don’t ever trust someone who has one explanation for everything. How much intelligence does that take? You’ve got one explanation. You just trot it out for every phenomena. This is an alternative. Now, here’s what happened in part. Nietzsche, back in the late 1800s, was very interested in the dissolution of traditional faith in the West. We fell out of our myth. That’s a way of thinking about it. We stopped believing in its fundamental axioms. We stopped believing that there was such a thing as a transcendent deity, for example. It didn’t mesh well with the emerging scientific viewpoint. And so, in the late 1800s, Nietzsche announced the death of God. Which sounds fairly presumptuous. But it wasn’t something he was celebrating. The full quote, and I haven’t got it exactly right, is, God’s dead. We’ve killed him. And we’ll never find enough water to wash away the rivers of blood. So, like, that’s a lot different than what you see scrawled on bathroom walls. And Nietzsche hypothesized that, in the 20th century, millions of people would die in the conflicts over what values were going to reign as an alternative to that tradition. And he particularly, brilliantly, pointed to communism. He said, that’s where it’s going to be. And Dostoevsky did the same thing. And so, and since then, there’s been this battle. And the battle is kind of like this. The battle is, on the one hand, between social constructionist utopians, who believe that human nature is infinitely malleable, and that, with the proper transformations in society, you can bring about the perfect state and the perfect human being. And traditionalists, and Jung, I think, is the classic example of this, who believe that there is a human nature, and it’s deeply embedded within us, and that the cultures we set up have to manifest themselves in accordance with that nature, or they will fail. Jung believed in the existence of a meta-narrative, the hero myth, roughly speaking. And he explained its connections to various religious traditions in a staggeringly brilliant manner. Emil Paglia, who I would recommend, and I think I already told you that, she’s already concluded, after going through a radical feminist period, early in her life, that the proper way for society to orient itself is within a mythological structure, and that that’s part of what the humanities provides. And the alternative is rational arguments over what values are going to dominate. And it isn’t obvious that rationality can solve that problem. I don’t think it can. That’s Hume’s point. David Hume said, you can’t derive an ought from an is. You cannot use science as a guide to behavior. So what do you use? Instinct? Instinct manifested in imagination, and the evolved structure of your organic cultures. Something like that. Do they have a structure? That’s the question. Okay, so you ask yourself this question. What is it that every human being shares, regardless of place and time? So any universally comprehensive language, that would be a meta-narrative, a myth, a hero myth, let’s say. A myth about what a human being not only is like, but should be like. Has to speak to us about those aspects of experience that we all share, because otherwise we wouldn’t understand the damn story. Now we go to stories that we understand all the time, like Star Wars. And it really doesn’t matter what country. Everybody gets it, more or less. So obviously there’s stories that we can understand, and mutually. We understand love stories, we understand stories of conflict, we understand stories of betrayal, we understand stories of anger. And that’s because we can feel jealousy, we can feel love, we can feel anger. It’s part of you. It’s right there. We even know where the circuits are. And then you’re like other animals. They feel it too. So very similar emotions, as far as we can tell. So, this is derived in large part from Jung, but not only. Here’s what we share. Natural world, social world, and the fact of our existence as an individual. And that can be represented in different ways. It can be represented as you, the known, and the unknown. Or it could be you, culture, and nature. All the same representations. And the cultural representation tends to be male. That’s God the Father, let’s say. And the representation, the feminine representation, tends to be female. This is the known, the culture, Apollonian control, that’s associated with the sun, consciousness, the king, the patriarch, the plow, because it pushes up the earth. The phallus, obviously. Order and authority and the crushing weight of tradition, the wise old man and the tyrant. Dogma, the day sky, the countrymen, the island, the heights, the ancestral spirits, the activity of the dead. Captain Hook, he’s a tyrant. And that’s why Peter Pan doesn’t want to grow up to become him. And that’s why Peter Pan doesn’t want to grow up at all. Because he thinks that adults are all tyrants. Why is Captain Hook a tyrant? Because a crocodile ate his hand. And the crocodile has a clock in its stomach. And the reason for that is that the crocodile is time. And time’s already got a piece of Captain Hook, and he’s not very happy about it. He’s bitter and resentful and tyrannical. And when Peter Pan looks at adulthood, that’s what he sees. And he thinks, why should I sacrifice the potential of childhood for the singularity of tyranny? And so he stays immature his entire life. And he’s king of the lost boys. Jesus. Great. There’s a porn star named Jeremy… Christ, I can’t remember his name. He’s really an ugly guy. He is, he is. He is an ugly guy. He admits it. And he said something funny. I was watching a documentary about him. And he said the funniest thing, he said, I’m the hero to people who think people like me are heroes. Like, what a drag, eh? I mean, he’s just in this horrible situation. He doesn’t admire the people that admire him. But he gets admired by them all the time. Well, it’s sort of like Peter Pan. It’s like, well, he’s king of the lost boys. He doesn’t get Wendy either. Right? She grows up. She has a family. He has to contend himself with Tinkerbell. And you know what? Tinkerbell doesn’t exist. Well, that’s what happens when you don’t grow up. That’s a representation of culture. That’s a nasty one, eh? That’s a nasty one. Hell will kiss a statue of Stalin. Who cares that he murdered 30 million people? Culture. Well, you know, in the university you hear a lot about the patriarchy and how oppressive it is. It’s like, yeah, yeah, right, definitely. No kidding. But you know, it’s kind of useful as well since it provides light and the heat and the food and all of that, which kind of counterbalances it to some degree. Culture has a positive element and a negative element. The individual has a positive element and a negative element. Nature has a positive element and a negative element. And if people tell you a one-sided story, which is an ideological story, they leave out that. They say all culture is terrible. The human being is a despoiler and nature is perfect. It’s like, no. Nature kills you. Culture keeps you alive. And there’s things about you that are honorable and good as well as things about you that aren’t. And you need to know both of those. And that’s what the great stories tell us. All right.