https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hJrEaLYacwc
Sacrifice. You get to pick your damn sacrifice. That’s all. You don’t get to not make one. You’re sacrificial whether you want to be or not. This is the Peter Pan story, roughly speaking. Peter Pan is this magical boy. Pan means, Pan is the god of everything, roughly speaking. So it’s not an accident that he has the name Pan. And he’s the boy that won’t grow up. And he’s magical. Well, that’s because children are magical. They can be anything. They’re nothing but potential. And Peter Pan doesn’t want to give that up. Why? Well, he’s got some adults around him, but the main adult is Captain Hook. Well, who the hell wants to grow up to be Captain Hook? First of all, you’ve got a hook. Second, you’re a tyrant. And third, you’re chased by the dragon of chaos with a clock in its stomach. Right? The crocodile. It’s already got a piece of you. Well, that’s what happens when you get older. Time has already got a piece of you. And eventually, it’s got a taste for you. And eventually, it’s going to eat you. And so Hook is so traumatized by that, that he can’t help but be a tyrant. And then Peter Pan looks at traumatized Hook and says, well, no, I’m not sacrificing my childhood for that. So that’s fine, except he ends up king of lost boys. In Neverland. Well, Neverland doesn’t exist. And who the hell wants to be king of the lost boys? And he also sacrifices the possibility that he’ll have a real relationship with a woman, because that’s Wendy. Right? And she’s kind of conservative, middle class, London dwelling girl. She wants to grow up and have kids and have a life. She accepts her mortality. She accepts her maturity. Peter Pan has to content himself with Tinkerbell. She doesn’t even exist. She’s like the fairy of porn. She doesn’t exist. She’s the substitute for the real thing. And so, but the dichotomy that you’re talking about is very tricky, because there’s a sacrificial element in maturation. Right? the pluripotentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame. And the question is, well, why would you do that? Well, one reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not. You can either choose your damn limitation, or you can let it take you unaware when you’re 30, or even worse when you’re 40. And then that is not a happy day. I see people like this, and I think it’s more and more common in our culture, because people can put off mat maturity without suffering an immediate penalty. But all that happens is the penalty accrues, and then when it finally hits, it just wallops you because when you’re 25, you can be an idiot. It’s no problem. Even when you’re out in a job search, it’s like, well, you don’t have any experience, and you’re kind of clueless. It’s yeah, yeah, you’re young. You know, it’s no problem. We can, that’s what young people are like, but they’re full of potential. Okay, well, now you’re the same person at 30. It’s like people aren’t so thrilled about you at that point. It’s like, what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, I’m just as clueless as I was when I was 22. Yeah, but you’re not 22. You’re an old infant. Right? And that’s an ugly thing, an old infant. So the part of the reason you choose your damn sacrifice, because the sacrifice is inevitable, but at least you get to choose it. And then there’s something that’s even more complex than that in some sense is that the problem with being a child is that all you are is potential, and it’s really low resolution. You could be anything, but you’re not anything. So then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship, roughly speaking, and then you become at least you become something. And when you’re something that makes the world open up to you again. You know, like if you’re a really good plumber, then you end up being far more than a plumber, right? You end up being a good employer. Not that plumbers, I’m not putting plumbers down. It’s like more power to plumbers. They’ve saved more lives than doctors. So hygiene, right? So you know, if you’re a really good plumber, well, then you have some employees, you run a business, you make you train some other people, you enlarge their lives, you’re kind of a pillar of the community, you have your family. Once you pass through that narrow training period, which narrows you and constricts you and develops you at the same time, then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hand. When Jung talked about that, he thought that the proper part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to rediscover the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing. And so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time. Very, very smart. Well, he was very, very smart. So that’s very wise. Very wise thing to know. Sacrifice. You get to pick your damn sacrifice. That’s all. You don’t get to not make one. You’re sacrificial whether you want to be or not. That’s a good thing to know as well. Dostoevsky said that in Notes from the Underground, a great, great book. And you know, he said, I love this. It was his early criticism of the notion of a political utopia. He said, look, if you gave people everything they wanted, they had nothing to eat but cake and nothing to do but sit in warm pools and busy themselves with the continuation of the species. That was his lines. That the first thing they would do, well, maybe after the first week, was like go kind of half insane and smash everything up just so that something that they didn’t expect would happen, so that they’d have something interesting to do. And it’s so right because, you know, the utopian notion that if you just had all the material stuff you wanted that you’d be, well, what would you be? What would you do? Would you just sit on the couch and watch TV? I mean, you’d be, I don’t know what, you’d be cutting yourself just for entertainment in no time flat, you know, and that’s the sort of thing that people do. So we’re not adapted for security and utopia. We’re adapted for a certain amount of security because, you know, we are vulnerable. We want to have one foot out where we don’t know what the hell is going on because that’s where you’re alert and alive and tense and with it. And you know, I think, I believe this, and I believe it actually has something to do with the hemispheric structure of the physiology of your brain, because the right hemisphere looks roughly adapted to what you don’t know and the left hemisphere, and this is a very, this is an oversimplification, but a useful one, is adapted to the world that you do know and the right place for you to be is halfway between them because that, and you can tell that, that’s what’s so cool, and this tells you that this is actually reality that’s manifesting itself to you. You know, that sense of active engagement you have in the world when things are working well for you, you know, where you’re, where you should be at the right time. You’re alert and on top of things and engaged and you don’t have much of a sense of time and the sense of the tragedy of life sort of recedes, and that’s when you’re, that’s when you’ve got one foot where it’s secure and one foot out in the unknown and your brain signals to you that you’re in the right place by making what you’re doing meaningful, and that sense of meaning is actually a neurophysiological signal that you’ve got the forces of the cosmos properly balanced in your being at that moment, and that’s why it feels so good. And then what else could it possibly be? I mean, you know, our brain is capable of looking beyond our vision. That’s what it’s for. And that sense of engagement, there’s no reason to assume that that’s anything but a real signal and you can reduce it. You could say, well, the problem with being where you know only is that you don’t know everything and that’s going to be a problem in the future. And the problem with being where you know nothing is that’s just too much, man. Like you know, you go into panic mode and because anything can happen there and you can’t handle it. So you’ve got to mediate between those two things. You want to be secure enough so that your physiology isn’t revving out of control and you want to be out there in the unknown enough so that you keep updating yourself constantly, constantly, constantly. And that’s the place where information flow is maximized. And you know that because that’s where you are when you’re having a really interesting conversation with someone or you’re gripped by a book or you’re really into a movie or maybe something that you do as a, you know, apart from your work or maybe even in your work you’re into it. And that’s because you are in the right place at the right time and your whole nervous system is signaling that to you. And I would say that’s the sort of place that you should be all the time. Of course you can’t be because no one’s perfect, but it’s that’s that’s the recreation of paradise on earth. It’s something like it because you are in the right place at the right time when that is happening. And so we’re mobile creatures, right? We need to know where we’re going because all we’re ever concerned about, roughly speaking, is where we’re going. That’s what we need to know. Where are we going? What are we doing and why? It turns out that the way that we’re constructed neurophysiologically is that we don’t experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim. It isn’t precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy. As you all know if you’ve ever attained anything because as soon as you attain it then the whole little game ends. And you have to come up with another game, right? So it’s it’s Sisyphus and that’s okay, but but it does show that the attainment can’t be the thing that drives you because it collapses the game. That’s what happens when you graduate from university. It’s like you’re king of the mountain for one day and then you’re like surf at Starbucks for the next five years. So yeah. So what happens is that human beings are weird creatures because we’re much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment. And what that means is you have to have an aim and that means you have to have an interpretation and it also means that the nobler the aim, that’s one way of thinking about it, the better your life. And that’s a really interesting thing to know because you know you’ve heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person and you shouldn’t lie for example and you might think well why the hell should I act like a good person and why not lie? Even a three year old can ask that question because smart kids learn to lie earlier by the way and they think well why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short term needs. I mean that’s a great question. Why not do that? Why act morally? If you can get away with something and it brings you closer to something you want, well why not do it? These are good questions. It’s not self evident. Well it seems to me tied in with what I just mentioned. It’s like you destabilize yourself and things become chaotic. That’s not good. And if you don’t have a noble aim then you have nothing but shallow, trivial pleasures and they don’t sustain you. And that’s not good because life is so difficult, it’s so much suffering, it’s so complex, it ends and everyone dies and it’s painful. It’s like without a noble aim how can you withstand any of that? You can’t. You become desperate and once you become desperate things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate. And so there’s the idea of the noble aim and it’s not something, it’s something that’s necessary. It’s the bread that people cannot live without, right? It’s not physical bread. It’s the noble aim. And what is that? Well it’s to pay attention, it’s to speak properly, it’s to confront chaos, it’s to make a better world. It’s something like that. And that’s enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without, you know, cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that’s worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet. And whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it, which is a very strange thing, you know. You can conceptualize a future in your imagination and then you can work and make that manifest. You participate in the process of creation. That’s an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos. The conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence. Now it’s an important thing to understand. It’s also a viewpoint shared by the bulk of the great religious systems of the world. Life is suffering. Why? Well, one reason is because of society’s arbitrary judgment, right? Every single one of us has traits and features and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are far from ideal and that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient. And so you suffer because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others. And you can certainly make the claim that fairly frequently that’s arbitrary. And so that’s the claim that society is tyrannical and judgmental and needs to be constantly be constituted so that the tyrannical element doesn’t take full control. And fair enough, you have to stay awake so that that doesn’t happen. But the thing is it doesn’t matter what society it is, although they vary in the degree of their tyranny, the mere fact that you’re grouped together with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in order to live together means that many of the things that characterize you are going to be suboptimal. And so the price you pay for social being is that much of you is deemed insufficient. Now hopefully there are various ways that you can be within a society that’s sufficiently diverse so that you can find a place where what’s good about you in the eyes of others and perhaps in your own eyes can flourish of its own accord because you don’t have to be good at everything. If you can be good at one thing well enough, that might allow you your niche. And hopefully a healthy society allows for that. Certainly societies can become so tyrannical that they don’t. So you can lay one source of human suffering at the feet of tyrannical social structures, but the other element of it clearly is the mere fact of the arbitrariness of the natural world. You have a lifespan that’s going to be counted in the number of decades that you can count on two hands. And that has nothing to do technically with the tyranny of the social structure. Now you could say if we got our act together more completely perhaps you could live longer and fair enough, but the fact of the limits of your lifespan and the suffering that’s necessarily a consequence of that, the death of your parents and the death of most people that you will know before you, means that that part of suffering is an integral part of existence itself. And so that can’t be laid at the feet of an insufficient social structure except insofar as it’s tyrannical and blind. It’s a condition of existence. And then by the same token you have your own responsibility for some of your unnecessary suffering because there’s things you could be doing to make your life better and to make life better for other people that you know perfectly well that you’re not doing. And so if you stopped doing all the unnecessary things that make your life bad, then it would improve to some degree that is not really computable because you don’t know how far you could push that. So there’s three reasons why you suffer and one is, well, look at you and the way you’re built, it’s inevitable. There’s not very much of you and there’s a lot of everything else. And so you just don’t last that long and you’re fragile across multiple domains and then you’re harshly treated by society and there’s no doubt about that. And then there’s responsibility that can be laid at your own feet. Well the existential take on that and the thing that all these diverse people that we’ve been talking about, including Viktor Frankl and including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as well as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and the people that I’ve already talked to you about is that the proper pathway through that is to adopt the mode of authentic being. And that is something like refusing to participate in the lie, in deception in the lie, to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people. And there’s something about that that’s meaningful and responsible and noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces, say, the nihilism or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with. You need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability. You can adopt a comprehensive description of reality that’s formulated for you by someone else that neatly divides the world into those who are innocent and perhaps innocent victims and those who are guilty and perhaps the perpetrators of the suffering. But none of that has anything to do with you and in addition it’s simply not a reasonable way of assessing the world. The suffering is built in. So that’s why there’s an existentialist insistence upon that. So for the Freudians, the psychoanalysts, and even for people like Carl Rogers to some degree, if you’re in a situation that’s characterized by psychopathology, if there’s something wrong with you mentally, that’s a consequence of something gone wrong. But that’s not the existentialist take. The existentialist take is, no, that’s just how it is. That’s just how it is. You don’t have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control. It’s a terrifying doctrine. But it’s not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there’s a way forward. There’s a pathway forward. And the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who’s capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by, well certainly by the avoidance of deceit, particularly in language, but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them. And the thing that’s so interesting about that is, well too, as far as I’m concerned, and some of this is from clinical experience, you know, if you take people, and I’ve told you this, and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of, you know, that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals, their self-defined goals. If you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they’re afraid of, they get stronger. And you don’t know what the upper limits to that are, because you might ask yourself, like if for ten years, if you didn’t avoid doing what you knew you needed to do, by your own definitions, right, within the value structure that you’ve created to the degree that you’ve done that, what would you be like? Well, you know, there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time, and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were, if they said, if they spoke their being forward. And they get stronger and stronger and stronger, and we don’t know the limits to that. We do not know the limits to that. And so you could say, well in part, perhaps the reason that you’re suffering unbearably can be left at your feet, because you’re not everything you could be, and you know it. And of course, that’s a terrible thing to admit, and it’s a terrible thing to consider, but there’s real promise in it, right, because it means that perhaps there’s another way that you could look at the world, and another way that you could act in the world, so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now. And then the second part of that is, well, imagine that many people did that, because we’ve done a lot as human beings, we’ve done a lot of remarkable things, and I’ve told you already, I think before, that today, for example, about 250,000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty, and about 300,000 people attached to the electrical power grid, we’re making people, we’re lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate than has ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin, and that’s been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000. The UN had planned to halve poverty between 2000 and 2015, and it was accomplished by 2013. So there’s inequality developing in many places, and you hear lots of political agitation about that, but overall, the tide is lifting everyone up, and that’s a great thing, and we have no idea how fast we can multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it. Because you know, my experience is with people that we’re probably running at about 51% of our capacity. I mean, you can think about this yourselves, I often ask undergraduates, how many hours a day you waste, or how many hours a week you waste, and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day. You know, inefficient studying, watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch that you don’t even care about, that make you feel horrible about watching after you’re done, that’s probably four hours right there. Now, you think, well, that’s 20, 25 hours a week, it’s 100 hours a month, that’s two and a half full work weeks, it’s half a year of work weeks per year, and if your time is worth 50,000 a year, and you are doing that right now, and it’s because you’re young, wasting $50,000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it, because I’m not going to last nearly as long. And so if your life isn’t everything it could be, you could ask yourself, well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you? You’d be who knows how much more efficient? Ten times more efficient. Twenty times more efficient. That’s the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient, efficient people get. It’s completely, it’s off the charts. Well, and if we all got our act together collectively, and stopped making things worse, because that’s another thing people do all the time, not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse because they’re spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package. If people stopped really, really trying just to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that. So there’s this weird dynamic that’s part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability, social judgment, both of which are major causes of suffering, and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt. And that’s the thing that’s interesting too, is that it isn’t merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you’re going to live out your own genuine being. It isn’t only your fate, it’s the fate of everyone that you’re networked with. And so you think, well, there’s nine billion, seven billion people in the world, we’re going to peak at about nine billion by the way, and then it’ll decline rapidly, but seven billion people in the world, and who are you? You’re just one little dust mote among that seven billion. And so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, but that’s simply not the case. It’s the wrong model because you’re at the center of a network. You’re a node in a network. Of course, that’s even more true now that we have social media. You’ll know a thousand people, at least over the course of your life, and they’ll know a thousand people each, and that puts you one person away from a million, and two persons away from a billion. And so that’s how you’re connected, and the things you do, they’re like dropping a stone in a pond. The ripples move outward, and they affect things in ways that you can’t fully comprehend, and it means that the things that you do and that you don’t do are far more important than you think. And so if you act that way, of course, the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do, and you might say, well, that’s better than living a meaningless existence. It’s better for it to matter. But I mean, if you really ask yourself, would you be so sure if you had the choice? I can live with no responsibility whatsoever. The price I pay is that nothing matters. Or I can reverse it, and everything matters. But I have to take the responsibility that’s associated with that. It’s not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path. Now when you say, well, nihilists suffer dreadfully because there’s no meaning in their life, and they still suffer, yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility. So that’s the payoff, and I actually think that’s the motivation. Say, well, I can’t help being nihilistic. All my belief systems have collapsed. It’s like, yeah, maybe. Maybe you’ve just allowed them to collapse because it’s a hell of a lot easier than acting them out. And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering. But you can always whine about that, and people will feel sorry for you, and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr. So that’s a pretty good deal, all things considered. Especially when the alternative is to bear your burden properly, and to live forthrightly in the world. Well, if you live a pathological life, you pathologize your society. And if enough people do that, then it’s hell. Really. Really. I hope you found this animated lecture selection engaging and useful, and would like to thank the After School team for their work and their generosity. I would also like to extend to all of those watching and listening a sincere invitation to further explore what my team and I are offering on this YouTube channel, my podcast, and in my books. Your engagement is most welcome, and your attention and interest most genuinely appreciated.