https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MFmgMHswH-M
So you’re all wondering about your papers, no doubt. They are marked. Do I have the marks with me? No. I’ll leave the papers outside my office on my bench, hopefully tomorrow morning. I have an abstract hypothesis about the relative value of things, including the self and others. This might not make much sense. It’s a pretty complicated idea. What page is it on? Don’t you have that memorized? It’s toward the end of the section about the north, the known. It’s somewhere around 128 or 129. I don’t think. It’s in there somewhere. 130? 130, middle of the first bar. Oh yes. Yes, okay. Okay, so we haven’t… Well, things get complex here rapidly. So that’s what we’re going to do first a little bit, is do some recapitulation so that everyone knows where we are before we go somewhere new. I’ve been trying to convince you of the notion that when we model our experience, we’re coming up with two different kinds of models, which are usually conflated. We’re not really clear about the difference between them. One is a map of fact, and that map and its construction has… The construction of that map is being formalized as the scientific endeavor. The map itself is the sum total of scientific knowledge. Science is how we generate our knowledge about fact. And I would say that a fact is a consensually apprehensible phenomena or its pattern of transformation. Because science is not only interested in clarifying the nature of objects, but also wants to be able to tell how an object changes into something else over time. And as Einstein pointed out in the quote that I provided by him, we’re generally used to regarding that sort of phenomena as real. Einstein wasn’t a philosopher of science, but he was obviously a great scientist. And at the very least his quotation, he talks about the consensually validatable properties of things, describes the manner in which people conduct science under normal circumstances. That’s what we think we’re doing. And there’s a different kind of map. And that’s a map not of facts about things, but about what those things signify for behavior. And I mean for motor output, what they signify for what you should do when you’re around them, when you encounter them. And we don’t really understand that map very well. We don’t naturally, I don’t think we naturally think of it as sort of a separable phenomena. It strikes me that you can make a reasonable case that it’s actually the type of map that preceded the formal development of science. Because we, like animals, are primarily concerned with how to act rather than with what is. In fact, if you understand that, then you can answer some questions that otherwise remain somewhat mysterious. For example, how do you know when you write about something? On a fundamental basis, you never write about anything. Because wherever you look, there’s an infinite number of mysteries, at least from the factual perspective. They tend not to disturb you. And it is the case that we have placed implicit faith in the notion that we know things and that what we know is sufficient. Even though we know that what we know isn’t sufficient in the final analysis, not only is it wrong, but it’s sufficiently wrong so that over the course of centuries, it transforms itself into something that’s often even non-recognizable. But it still strikes us as knowledge. And that’s because I think, we think we know something when acting on that knowledge. We produce results that we want. And that’s sufficient. If you get from point A to point B using procedure C, then you’re convinced that you’re right. Because that’s right enough. And that’s our criteria. Antonio D’Amesio, for example, he’s thrown a new book called Big Heart’s Error. Big Heart’s Error being, I think, Therefore I Am. D’Amesio is pointing out that people with damage to their prefrontal cortex start to lose the ability to make decisions to decide between trivial things like, or to decide trivial things, not necessarily just between them, like when you throw out old newspapers, or which restaurant to go to. You don’t sum in total all the facts about a given restaurant and everything you can think about it, and then contrast that restaurant with all conceivable restaurants when you go out to eat. The process is pretty automatic. And D’Amesio argues that we do it by recourse to emotion. The frontal lobes help us determine what our emotions are signifying. And as a consequence, we can eliminate vast swaths of material that would just sort of clog up our cognitive faculties otherwise. But the thing is, knowing a little bit about how stories work, about how we pause our ideal features and how we move towards them, instantly gives you some insight into how it is that we determine that we actually know something. And when we say we know something, we basically mean our knowledge is sufficient to get us from point A to point B. And that’s enough. That keeps us in the expected world. It keeps our emotions regulated. And I would say that the purpose of knowledge is to regulate emotion. That’s what you have it for. So, I mean, you’re always engaged in the endeavour to increase… Well, this is kind of a behaviorist way of looking at it, but it’s sufficiently accurate so that it’s useful. You want to live in a world where there’s lots of hope for the future, but where you’re satisfied all in all, at least you’re working to maximize your satisfaction. You also want to avoid anxiety to the degree that that’s possible within the context of maximizing hope and satisfaction. And also the same goes for pain. You’re always trying to regulate your emotions. In fact, the reason we modify the external world is to regulate our emotions. We tend to think that emotional regulation is actually a psychological process. It’s like, calm down. Bring yourself under control. That’s only true in the most trivial of circumstances. Almost all the time, what we do to regulate our emotions is to change things around us with our behavior so that we’re satisfied, more or less, with the manner in which our limbic system is conducting itself. That motivates our behavior. The kind of knowledge that you have, that enables you to act so that what you want appears, I’d call that wisdom. That’s what we’re contrasting in this class, I guess, the domain of mythology. That’s how wisdom is transmitted, not factual knowledge. Wisdom is how to act so that you get, not only, it’s not really so that you get what you want. That’s a really simple way of looking at it. It’s so that your emotions remain regulated, stably over time, in a situation that’s primarily composed of others who are doing the same thing, who all have to act, including you, in a manner so that that stable regulation is flexible enough so that it can update itself when necessary across time. So there’s a lot of constraints that have to be satisfied in order for your solution to the regulation of your emotions to be considered optimal. When you talk about how to act in a given situation, it sounds as if we’re only, I only think of social situations. That’s primarily what I’m talking about. Because most of our environment is a social environment. Most of what I consider my environment is you and everyone else that I encounter. What about when you pop the disk into the computer and it says the drive is not working and you want to know how to act? Is that wisdom also? Or is that some other… Well, I would say, look, okay, that’s a perfectly reasonable question. I wouldn’t say wisdom is an abstraction of behavioral knowledge. So I wouldn’t say necessarily that knowing how to open up the box of the computer and fix whatever particular electronic part happens to be followed up constitutes wisdom. But I would say that… But usually what happens if your computer falls up is that you don’t know what to do, but what you do know is how to figure out what to do, and basically what you do when you’re trying to fix a computer. Based on the presumption that you can fix it, which is like the presumption that leads the whole behavior, is to hold everything constant and vary one thing. You engage in a process of trial and error that’s devoted to solving the problem. And I would say being able to engage in the maneuvers that allows you to generate the specific answer to the problem, that’s pretty much akin to wisdom. So… So, I mean, that’s… With the computer, it’s a little different, because the computer’s a bit peculiar, though, because it’s an artificial environment in that it isn’t something of infinite complexity, in a sense, at least at the level at which you want to interact with it. It’s a finite domain, so a real standard set of problem-solving techniques can be applied to it. Right, scientific techniques. Yeah, yeah, so the computer is probably the only part of the universe that actually works exactly as you’d predict it would from the scientific perspective. So there’s not a lot of remaining mystery in it. But if it says system error, you freeze, actually, the first time. Yeah, especially if you’re doing something important. And then you sort of figure, then don’t you need a strategy to allay your anxieties, which is calling the help number? Right, right, that’s recourse to authority. Yeah, that’s a common mode of problem-solving. Yeah, I was planning on knowing it for most of the time. You had to walk with it. No, no, that’s true. That’s true. I would still say that the process of generating solutions is more akin to wisdom than the actual knowledge of any specific solution. And that sort of action serves as a good introduction to the kind of things we want to talk about today. Okay, so anyway, so I was summing up. I’m reiterating the distinction between the domain of myth and the domain of science, making the additional point that mythology is both, it’s the story we tell about our wisdom and it’s also our means of transmitting it, basically. And the same can be said about narratives in general, which are sort of specific examples of more general myths, I would say. So, okay, well then, okay, the next question that pops up is, well, if you can conceive of the world as a collection of objects and their transformations, but we’re not doing that, we’re conceiving of the world as a place to conduct action in. And so then the next question is, if you conceive of the world as a place in which to act, what’s the structure of it? And it strikes me that you can determine the structure by contrasting myths and seeing, picking out their commonalities. There’s a bit more to it than that because there are creation myths, and creation myths explicitly state that what they’re dealing with is a description of the genesis of the world. So it’s also a natural field of inquiry for mythology and what I have been attempting to describe, it’s my summary, I guess, of these various myths and the world that they portray. And the mythological world has, basically has three constituent elements, you could say four. There’s the chaos that precedes the construction of anything, and that’s represented as the Ur-Gros, that’s the dragon that eats its own tail, and it’s the winged serpent. And the winged serpent is simultaneously a creature of spirit, that was the sky, that’s the masculine world, and a creature of matter, that’s the feminine world. The masculine world has two aspects, one is more akin to spirit, speaking traditionally, and the other is more akin to the patriarchal structure, to the great father. The masculine world is both the process by which knowledge is generated and that knowledge. That’s why, for example, in the Egyptian mythology that surrounds the pharaoh, the live pharaoh is simultaneously Osiris and Horus. Osiris stands for the state as a historical entity, that’s one way of looking at it, and Horus stands for the process by which that state is updated and generated. And the live pharaoh, insofar as he’s doing his job, is both the dead state and the process by which the dead state is regenerated. Remember when Horus goes to the underworld to find his father who’s blind and living a semi-vegetated life after he overcomes Seth, by the way. He gives him his eye, and that brings him back up to the surface, so to speak. Now you know what that story means, that’s a very common story, that’s the myth of the rebirth of the king, basically. Part of the hero’s journey, you saw a little bit of that echo in Pinocchio. It was really kind of a peculiar place to find Osiris and Horus, I think, if you think about it. It’s kind of hard to figure out how that might have come about, unless you’re willing to entertain an hypothesis that some of these images were going to do get saved and passed around in all sorts of bizarre forms. So remember Pinocchio, to be the true hero, which meant to be real, which meant to be born again, he not only had to go into the belly of the whale, that’s the unknown, the herburus, but he had to save his father. He couldn’t just abandon him and save himself. He had to bring the culture along with him. That’s a really potent story, if you think about it. And obviously true, since your culture protects you. To abandon it, or to fail it when it needs help, so to speak, means to turn your back on precisely the thing that protects you from things that you understand so poorly that you don’t even know they’re there. So, remember, in the Hobbit, this isn’t the Hobbit, it was very popular in the 60s, I mean it’s a myth. The Hobbits live in a kingdom that is threatened by vague forces from the outside. They’re little people. Among them are large people who they call the Striders. And the Striders look like vagabonds, and they troll the perimeter of the Hobbit’s kingdom, sort of unknown to the Hobbits. But they’re the mythical ancestors. The Hobbits have a fair amount of contempt for them, actually, thinking of them as tramps. But they’re actually the forces that keep the vague unknown at bay so thoroughly that the Hobbits don’t even know that it’s there, really. Well, that’s the position that we’re in. I mean, that’s one of the things I want to convince you of, so to speak, in the course of this class. I think they’re the remnants of the old kingdom. Right, they’re the remnants of the old kingdom. Absolutely, they’re the ancestral powers. There are lots of cultures worship their ancestors. They erect stone monuments to them, for example, so they don’t forget them. And, well, the ancestors, it’s easy for ancestors as well to turn into gods. In fact, that’s what ancestors do over time, is they turn into gods. Iliadic points out, for example, that among archaic people, and that in this context means people without a written tradition, among people who only transmit information orally. Historical events get transformed into mythological events when they pass out of living memory. Which is to say, when the last person who’s alive that remembers the event dies, then that event is immediately, in a sense, remembered as an event that took place in the unspecified time that preceded the construction of the world. And I think the reason for that is that you don’t want to burden your memory. All you want to remember is the things that are important. We’re talking about remembering things, say, over the course of 25,000 years. All of the unnecessary information that gets burned away, and all that’s left is the core pattern of information that any historical event worthy of note necessarily contains. When we consider an event historical, this is part of the reason why history sort of sits on the boundary between mythology and science, in a sense. To consider an event worthy of historical note necessarily has to contain elements of hero mythology, because otherwise, if it didn’t contain an element of conquering the unknown, for example, we would never regard it as sufficiently valuable to even relegate to the domain of necessary fact. This is troublesome for history, because the study of history is supposed to be formalizable, in a sense. This is a big problem in history in general. Historical stories are told from within cultural perspectives. A classic example of that is how you conceive of Columbus. If you’re a European, say, a traditional European, the standard story four years ago was Columbus was a hero who conquered new territory. Columbus, by the way, this is a historical fact, Columbus was in fact looking for paradise when he went out on his missions. That was his express motivation. He thought, like many people of his time, that the paradise described in the Old Testament was an actual location on earth that perhaps could still be found somewhere. Columbus hypothesized that paradise could be found in the domain of the unknown. You remember the medieval maps. There’s vaguely defined territory with terrible monsters surrounding it. Columbus presumed that paradise could be found in the domain of the unknown, and out he went, conflating a mythological viewpoint of the world with the actual world. It’s very peculiar because, of course, even from the perspective of pure fact, even though we wouldn’t regard that as an accurate description, it is the case from the mythological perspective that paradise still does reside out in the unknown because the only way you can ever get there is to explore it and constantly regenerate new information. So in a sense, he was wrong, but he was also right. It depends on your framework of interpretation. Anyways, the problem is that reading of Columbus is necessarily in contrast with the reading of Columbus, for example, that might appear more natural to the North American Indians. So it’s hard to figure out the appropriate historical perspective. And if you separate all the facts from the fiction, so to speak, the problem then becomes that the facts are dead. And you end up in the position of having to memorize endless states and lists of places that will not embed themselves in your memory because they have no significance for behavioral output, which is what students mean when they say, why is it necessary for us to learn this? The students then say, for me, this holds no intrinsic interest. And they’re saying, because my limbic system is intelligent enough to discriminate between information that has the potential to impact my behavioral output or the way I frame the world and that which does not have that capacity. And since I only have a limited time, I should probably attend to what’s important and generally what we mean by what is important is what will actually change the way we conduct ourselves if we learn it. This is something that we seem to have either never quite figured out or forgotten, I think, much of education. But the purpose of education, the purpose of facts even, is to aid the generation of wisdom. And if it fails to produce that end, then it’s useless. It’s worse than useless. It’s just noise, that’s all. But we don’t have a formalized method for the transmission of wisdom. But we’ve forgotten the domain in which it’s transmitted. And we know a lot about facts. If in any given story one person’s hero is another person’s worst nightmare, like the day means Columbus wasn’t the hero, he’s the worst nightmare. And different cultures share different stories to such an extent that one person can be seen as the opposite role by two different cultures, then why aren’t more cultures constantly at war with each other every day? Has the whole thing become so diluted that we all recognize one basic story? Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by every day. There’s been more than 150 wars since the end of World War II. Which we consider, in a sense, the last war. Well, with certain exceptions, obviously, in Korea and Vietnam, certainly, in large. But conflicts of the sort you describe do occur all the time. And the other thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that wars can be conducted at many levels of analysis. It’s like one of the advantages to being able to abstract ideas is that we can have a war that proceeds at the abstract domain without it necessarily degenerating into physical conflict. Which means that there’s at least the possibility that if you hold one ideological stance, which means that you ascribe one meaning to an object, and I ascribe another meaning, that we can discuss it, and fight, and conduct the war in words. And as a consequence, come to an agreement, which I suppose might be considered the construction of a new ideology or new mythology, without necessarily having to allow the process to cascade back down to behavior, where force determines the outcome. So what is peace then? It’s just like a lack of social aggression, like battling it out with fists. Is that peace, or is it just contending ourselves to just be verbally at each other’s throats? Is that the best we can do? Well, that’s a perfectly reasonable question. I guess the question is what attitude most essentially characterizes the attitude of peace. I saw one time when I was in Montreal, I saw a 19-year-old guy standing on the street in an outdoor shopping mall. He was a big character, tough looking. He had a punk haircut and a leather jacket. And he was standing on the corner holding a pink shopping bag full of something or other. I thought he looked somewhat idiotic, and I suspect that he thought he looked the same way holding this. And I thought, when you look at someone like that, they wear their capacity for aggression on the outside of their skin, where everyone can see it, but there’s no domain for its proper expression. So people in that situation end up doing things that are essentially observed, like working in a 7-Eleven, for example, or standing on the corner of a shopping mall with a pink shopping bag in their hands. One of the things that you might wonder under those circumstances is that, is there any way that you could construct an attitude towards peace that was sufficiently difficult and aggressive that it would satisfy someone who’s in that particular position? We tend to think of peace as a state of, as a default condition, I suppose, as the state that reigns when nothing is necessarily happening. And it strikes me that in order to make peace an attractive proposition, it has to be demonstrated incontrovertibly in a sense that it’s actually a more dangerous and interesting enterprise than a war. I’m just trying to clarify, war, I think I understand it to be now different perceptions of wisdom, meaning like different ways of regulating emotions, and the fact that cultures regulate emotions differently than one of the societies to maintain order and regulate the emotions of the people. Well then, because I was thinking about wisdom and I was like, well that’s kind of a subjective term, like you may, I think of your wisdom as dysfunctional, whereas I think of mine as functional, and you may handle things to regulate emotions, but it may not be the truth or I may think it’s not the truth. So is a war being fought because of different opinions of wisdom? Right. That’s why? Right. Okay. So, you can push the argument down a level of analysis even, and say, which is basically the point of this particular quote, that our maps determine the meaning of objects in our experiential field, so to speak, and wherever there’s a difference, wherever you presume that this object has a different implication for your behavioral output than I do, or for our mutual behavioral outputs in its presence, then there’s an unknown right there. And there’s also instant room for conflict, because you can only do, well this is not always the case, but it’s frequently the case that only one set of behavioral outputs can be manifested in any particular situation. That’s certainly the case for an individual. That’s why you have to solve your problems, is because you can’t do two things at the same time. You can only do one thing. So. This is going back a little bit. I’m curious that you tend to refer to the domain of myth as the domain that we have forgotten, because it seems to me that if we were to know it now, we would know it in a way that we never could have known it before. Yes. The only thing that I realize that’s not exactly forgotten is that it was, we now live in a whole, it was the whole way in which we now know was built out of that and left it behind. So I didn’t forget it because I never knew it. Well I think that’s a reasonable, but that’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, except I would say that there’s one more twist to that, and that is that at a defined time in the past, and I would say starting approximately 500 years ago, when the scientific methodology really came into its own, we made the misattribution that we did in fact understand what we had never understood. And not only that we didn’t understand it, but that we understood it thoroughly enough to know that it was no longer a valid form of knowledge and that we could safely discard it as superstition or as a primitive form of science and move into the future. But it seems to me that there was never a point at which we said what we were doing then was silliness and what we were doing now is the road to understanding. Sorry, can I interrupt? I have a real problem and Jerry Higgins needs the overtime. Your class goes on for a little while. As soon as you mess with the object, because it’s mapped in accordance with this mythological structure, you instantly start to wreak havoc on the whole structure that determines your appropriate behavioural outputs. You know already what that structure inhibits. It inhibits, well one of the things it inhibits is anxiety. One of the things that you may have found yourself doing, by the way, when this unexpected occurrence arose, was doing something that children do when they don’t know what to do, which is called referencing. If a child does something unexpected, say it drops a glass of milk on the floor, the first thing it will do is look at its mother or whichever adult happens to be present. Because the unexpected has just revealed itself, which is to say that an event that occurred contrary to plan emerged. It’s indeterminate in significance, although it evokes anxiety. The fastest way to get rid of the anxiety is to reference, which is that you look at your parent and you watch your parent’s actions and the parent’s actions determine the actual significance of the event, thus reducing its infinite significance, so to speak, to a definable category. What you have to understand for children is, and I think this is true anyways, that even if the parent is angry, the definite anger is better than the indeterminate significance. Well, children, that’s why children prefer order to chaos, even if it’s relatively strict order. So your dominance hierarchy, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’re talking about the meaning of the projector to you as opposed to the meaning of the projector to him. That had a conflict? Absolutely. But not only the meaning of the projector, so to speak, but everything that the dispute implied, say about relative importance of pursuit. In an institution like this, there’s at least the theory of equality of access to certain things at any number of levels, like access to audio-visual equipment. The fact that someone’s been around here longer than me, for example, has no bearing, in theory, and in actuality, under almost all conditions, on their access to things like audio-visual equipment. So when Dean comes in here and says, despite what you’re doing and the fact that you followed the rules, someone who’s senior, so to speak, wants this and that’s that. So there’s a lot of information in that sort of interaction about relative importance, and not just relative importance of the projector, but of the parties who were engaged in negotiation for the projector. Anyways, with regards to referencing, I was wondering, like you can think back about your own reactions, do you look around? Did you look around when that was going on, to see how other people were responding? Because that’s a way of coming up, that’s a way of trying to instantly acquire consensus, right? What the hell’s going on? I don’t know. Maybe some of these other people know. I’ll look at them. They can tell by their facial reactions or their patterns of behaviour what this event might signify. That’s exploratory behaviour. You’re exploring the environment, but the environment in many cases is composed of other people. In fact, the most important part of the environment is composed of other people, and when we have a map of the environment, who we’re mapping is other people in relationship to ourself and vice versa. So that’s referencing. You approached them, like you wouldn’t back up. I thought, I mean, you could have considered getting a fighter jet. Well, that’s the other purpose for the demonstration, is that if I have a map and you have a map and they conflict with regards to a particular object, which happens very frequently, then one of the things that’s interesting to do is to consider the options for eliminating the conflict. One option is to eliminate one of the conflicting parties. That’s an option that’s very commonly held. What people generally do is they start to negotiate verbally, which basically means that they’re using their verbal behaviour to put their plan back into action to get what they want. And as that’s blocked, say it doesn’t work, more and more emotion builds up and other strategies that are sort of lower on the access hierarchy get brought into play, culminating possibly what I wanted to get Dean to do. He’s a little bit nervous, I think, doing this, because it’s not part of his character. I wanted him to take the projector. I was going to hold it and see if I could get someone to help me pull it away to illustrate this. Now, one of the things that we want to figure out is, given that maps of meaning are going to conflict with regards to the importance of objects, including in this notion of object, including ourselves and other people, what’s the appropriate strategy to adopt in the process of negotiation? Which is very much related to your question. You said, well, what constitutes the essential aspects of peace? Well, one of the things you have to figure out is, when you’re in unknown territory and you’re being put there by someone else who’s also there because of you, what do you do? How is it that you should act so that you’re acting optimally, so to speak, to resolve the problem in the most positive of ways, most positive of conceivable ways? Which is to say, we need to figure out a set of rules that everyone can agree on for operating in the domain where there aren’t any rules. Excuse me, Professor. We could have blackmailed him. Because I had him on tape going like this. Yeah, yeah. I can’t believe the other professor. Leave the projector and blackmail him. So we know that between, you know, if culture A has this story and culture B has this story, and they meet, as soon as they meet, the members of both cultures are no longer in these stories. They’re in some domain in between them. And the rules that apply here and the rules that apply here do not apply here. So then, of course, the question is what rules apply here? And, well, the other diagram that I keep showing you, some would describe it as the bouncing ball, which is kind of a good way of describing it. The rules that apply outside of the domain here are the rules that constitute the way that the heroes pass. So you would say that the hero, this is interesting, I think. This is why you get archetypal hero figures. They’re really the ideal figures for culture and they’re also, as a general rule, representatives of peace. This is very common. Buddha, for example, is sort of the embodiment of peace and the same thing is true for Christ. That’s because their patterns of behavior characterize the optimal form of action that is to be undertaken in the domain that’s between two specified domains. I guess he came into our territory and we’re part of your culture, all of us sat down. I was just wondering in terms of general meaning, what do you think would happen in maybe its significance if instead of just your map against his, all of us stood up, all of us perhaps crucially stated its crucial meaning for us. Well, Daniel did toss an insult out at him as he left. I don’t know how thoroughly you were taken in by this particular demonstration, but one of the things that you have to try to appreciate as clearly as you can is just what were your responses during the interruption. Because this was the entrance of the stranger, so to speak, the hostile stranger. He had his own agenda. Actually, it wasn’t really even his agenda. It was an agenda that he was acting out for someone else. So he’s kind of, in a sense, just the emissary of bad news. This is a pretty minor example of hierarchy disruption. But you think, for example, had it been real, there’s a, well one of the things that I was told before I came to Harvard was that there was a certain amount of tension between junior and senior faculty members. This is not nearly as true as I was led to believe before I got here. Much of the distance that exists is a function of age and, well, in large part anyways. But one of the things that this sort of disruption would do to me, if it really happened, would be to undermine my confidence in my position here. And since I’ve devoted a lot of my life to attaining this particular position, or at least that’s how it’s worked out, that sort of objectively minor intervention could have all sorts of highly negative consequences. In this case though, would it really have had such consequences? Because what really made me think that this must be staged was that you were taking it too poorly. Yeah? Well that’s okay, okay. That’s a good point. That’s partly because Dean wasn’t as forceful as I would have liked him to have been. I actually asked him to come in here, because his natural politeness overcame his acting ability unfortunately. I wanted him to come in here and just tell me what was happening, more or less abruptly, and just take it. So certainly I had made it fairly believable. I mean that it was true. True. We were all anxious, but we’re not anxious anymore because we’ve redefined what it means now. Right. Before it was clear to everyone in the room that it was staged. No. Like as soon as he left, we started talking about it as an example. So now everyone got what they wanted. Going with his story, he got the projector, and we took the event of having the projector taken from us to mean, well great, now we have an example to talk about for a while. Right. So we changed our sort of like revisionist history to… Even before I realized it was staged, we started talking about it. What a perfect example it was. I thought it was inappropriate though, so I was pretty sure it was staged because I thought it would be highly inappropriate for him to come in front of all of us. Absolutely. Before like down here, when you all are up there, and have that like… No, no, no, absolutely. Absolutely. If that was the real situation, that some professor was in the lecture of 300 people and had to have this machine and this was the only one, I don’t think that wouldn’t be an unreasonable situation. Well, no, but it would have been more appropriate. Right, exactly. Exactly. He never would have done that. Right. He should have asked me to step out of the room. More equipment. What does this mean? Interest. Now why do you think it took you such a long time? Yeah, I probably will be able to use it again. So, sorry, somebody else has a question. Why do you think it took you such a long time to… So like at first the issue was you needed to finish the class. Well, that was at least, that was my cover story. I mean the real issue is, what the hell are you doing barging in here in front of my whole class, taking this damn projector and making me look like an idiot, but the cover story is I need this projector to finish my class. You know, there’s… Anyways, that’s how it would work out in reality, I think. Yes, okay. Are we coming back in? You know this is hoax, they… This is? Yeah. What is that? Well, I don’t remember, when did you leave? Immediately after. After Dean? Okay, that was a stage. That was stage. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. I just saw Jerry Kagan in the basement using the overhead projector. Did you? Yes. Large lecture class. Oh well, I asked Dean to come in here. Do you have a dispute with me about the meaning of an object? Did you? Yeah. So… That’s convenient. Let’s go. I actually think you’re lying. Well, I’m not really that unimportant. Jerry Kagan isn’t. I stayed straight. Never take the projector. Great, well that’s a classic example of denial. That’s right, that’s when the ugly anomalous event rears its head, then you… That’s right, you read the… The delusional fantasy. That’s right, back to the most appropriate fantasy. The fantasy being an alternative story where the motivational significance of things is the way that you wish they would be. I find myself sort of entertained by it because I was actually seeing if you would act the same way that you’ve been telling us that you would act. And seeing if you would actually go through it. It was cool to see you standing in front of the projector. I was standing in front of the projector. Yeah, but I don’t think you would have given the projector up. That’s like, on the fact that… Oh really? I thought there would have been a projector. That’s unprofessional behavior. You could never have ever have done that in real life. You would have had to be like, okay, here’s the projector. You’re like, sir, sorry, give it to Jerry. I don’t think so, though. I don’t care. It’s like, what are you going to do? No, I think it would just be a matter of politeness. He’s like, okay, I mean… Well, it depends on how you approach things. Of course, if the cover story is plausible and the emergency seems to justify the intrusion… He’s jumping through that projector. Well, that’s another… I mean, that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to point out, too. The meaning of an event depends on the behavioral strategy that you use in the presence of the event. So even with Dean, for example, and his intervention. It’s the strategies that he used to offer me the anomalous information are going to determine the phenomena that I am in that particular context. So if he would have called me outside and said, look, excuse me, but here’s the situation. And it’s a large context situation. Like, let’s say, Kagan needed the projector because he was involved in some major fundraising episode for the department and it had broken down suddenly, etc. Well, then, basically what you’re doing under those circumstances is… I can erase this now. Remember this idea. Little story inside. This is a dominance hierarchy, by the way. Hi, Dean. Thanks a lot. It’s just perfect. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good morning. Thanks, too. Good things multiply. So, anyway, what Dean would have to do in order to convince me that his intrusion into my story was justified, say, my story being at this level of analysis, would be to make reference to a larger story of which I was also a part that I considered, as well as him, superordinate to the things that were going on now. So he would say, yes, I know that this event has meaning A from the frame of reference of this ongoing class, but from frame of reference B, which you also share, it has this alternative meaning, will contrast the meanings and come to some sort of agreement about them, and I’d say, well, you know, if I found his story convincing, I’d subordinate, I’d alter this story because it would be less motivationally challenging than for me to engage in altering the superordinate story, assuming I shared it. So that’s the kind of decisions you’re always making. If you’re negotiating with someone, for example, you do the same thing. If I want something from you that you don’t want to give me, I have to offer something to you that is sufficiently important to counterbalance your loss, or offer you the possibility of that in the future, or anyways. That’s okay. Okay. So, yeah. There were two things right after he left, turning the incident into, beginning to talk about it as an experiment, so it changed the whole valence of the thing right away. And the humor was also part of that too. It became a source of humor at the same time. It was just interesting to watch whether everyone immediately saw that it had been a hoax or not, treating it as if it had been, treating it as an experiment, took away all the anxiety and negative elements attached to it, and neutralized it and put it in this new story. Right. So what that is, is the instant provision of a story. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, that’s the classic demonstration of the fact that the story is in fact what regulates your emotions. And you’re always trying to regulate your emotions in the face of the unknown, so to speak. So, the notion of the humor is interesting too, because one of the mythological precursors of the figure of the Savior, which is sort of the archetype of the hero, is the trickster. Right, right, right. The trickster is Bugs Bunny, for example. That’s his classic role in Warner Brothers cartoons. He always gives events a twist, negative events, a twist that make them turn out right. And the twist may not look exactly on the straight and narrow when it occurs, but as the story unfolds, it appears to be the right thing. Trickster figures are very common figures in mythology, especially apparently at the stage of cultural development, where the figure of the hero is really being elaborated up into something identifiable. So he’s sort of a transition figure, an adolescent, you might say, in a sense. So the irony is that there’s an ironic distance, right? I mean, the humor is in a kind of an ironic distance, isn’t it? Well, you know, it’s something that turns out to be not what it seemed to be. Right. I mean, because the trickster seems to be, but it turns out it’s that, so there’s a kind of double meaning. Well, I think we also find things humorous when we become spontaneously aware that once again we’ve transcended a set of arbitrary limitations. So I think humor occurs at least in some instances when you move from a bounded domain to outside the domain and then back into another one, because you have a fleeting moment there where you recognize yourself as sort of a transcendent figure, and people find out, well, they find out the word empowering springs to mind. It’s a word I particularly hate, but who is it? What I don’t really understand is that my feeling in the scene, which I didn’t realize until the end of the stage, which is great embarrassment, between you and… Okay, why were you embarrassed for me? See, that’s an issue. Because I think similar to what she said was that instead of, like, we sit here and we listen to you as a professor, and you are then placed in the position of a bickering little boy. Right, right. And just being like, your credibility was seriously underlined. Right, right. And so I was just feeling like it was… Yes, you see, I think the phenomena of embarrassment is one of those things that occurs when you watch rapid movement down a dominance hierarchy. Like, sometimes in your own case, for example, if you feel ashamed about something, say you turn red, well, that’s because you’ve just manifested a behavior which you know full well is in very poor accord with the way you conceptualize your position in a given dominance hierarchy, which basically means that you’ve acted below yourself. And that makes you self-conscious. It also puts you out… The other thing that happens under those circumstances is that, like, if you’ve adopted a story, and it protects you, the story has certain rules that you have to follow. Right. And if you don’t follow the rules, then you immediately forfeit the protection of the story. So if you’re, like, high up in the story, so to speak, climbing up the dominance hierarchy that’s associated with a particular story, and you pull off a behavior that’s, you know, it’s tricky and it works, but it’s really… it’s immoral from your own perspective, then you get self-conscious. And you’ve also exposed yourself to the unknown there in a big way, because you’ve just broken your own rules. And the problem with breaking your own rules is your rules are what protect you. So it’s easy to… that’s a good trick on yourself. From yourself as well as from others. Well, and from the unknown in general. I mean, no matter where it manifests itself. Right. Including inside yourself. That’s right. Because the story that you act out is how you ensure that you remain predictable to yourself. Which is… that’s another thing that you don’t want to underestimate the significance of. Is that one of the reasons for the shared story is so that we don’t have to have fights about the projector. And we have… and that is dominance… determined by dominance hierarchy. It’s also so that we don’t reveal any of our own mysteries to ourselves unexpectedly. It’s not just to keep other people in line. It’s also so that… so that we can, I think, so we can tolerate looking at ourselves in the mirror. Not in any sort of horrific sense, but just as… Well, it’s comforting to consider yourself a predictable entity. Even when in many ways that’s an illusion. Because there’s way more to you than you know about. And you don’t exhaust your possibilities when you’re participating in most stories. I mean, that’s why if the context shifts… Well, if the context shifts, your personality shifts. Because much of what you consider your personality is the story you’re acting out. If things really fall apart… You mentioned the small possibility for physical altercation here. I mean, you could say I would develop an argument, and then there’d be a little physical dispute, maybe. I’d grab the projector and sew a deen, and he’d pull it, and that would embarrass me more, and that would make me angry. And maybe I’d give it a push, and he’d fall over by accident, and that would hurt him. And then, you know, it’s just like the whole system spirals out of control because of this one entry point. So then you say, well, you have grounds for the beginning of a small war. And the problem is, is that as soon as you’re outside the bounded domain, where your emotions are regulated and controlled, you’re literally in the grip of forces that you poorly understand. I mean, this regulates your aggression, for example, and predictability that’s implicit in shared participation in the story. As soon as you step out here, it’s like there’s all the gods of the unknown, in a sense, are waiting for you. It’s like you’re now controlled by anxiety to what degree? Depends on how much of your story has been disrupted. The same thing goes for regression and emotions that under normal circumstances you don’t feel. You don’t have a personality built up for them either. Because they’re not a part of your environment, even though they’re part of you. So, okay, so the goal, I guess, of all our adaptation is to have our emotions regulated, right? But that gets disrupted by when something anomalous comes in, and there’s always something anomalous. However, should we exist until the anomalous information comes and hits us? Or, because I sometimes feel myself just going for things that I’m afraid of just because I want a thrill or whatever. But that is my searching for it and dysregulating my emotions. Well, one of the things that sort of complicates the idea that novelty is threatening on first exposure is magnitude. Because it’s not always true. There’s an optimal level of novelty where the magnitude of the event is sufficiently small. So that what’s activated primarily is your incentive reward systems. And that’s the sort of thing that, if you’re operating optimally, so to speak, you’re consuming novelty at the rate that’s precisely appropriate for your particular temperament. That’s interest, I think. When people say, I’m following my interest, or I’m interested in this, what they mean is there’s an appropriate amount of novelty in this area of my experiential field, and I’m feasting on it, so to speak, at my own rate. But then you’re aroused, and, well, you’re optimally adapted at that point in the sense because you’re updating your models of adaptation, and perhaps everyone else’s as well. Well, at the same time, remaining relatively secure. Remember that’s, oh, I’ll get you right away. Remember this diagram. That’s Dow, right? The world, the cosmos is constructed of chaos and order. Too much of either is deadening. Your place is right here on the line. That’s the razor’s edge, so to speak, a very narrow line, halfway between chaos and order, where one is being transformed into the other, but neither predominates. And that’s, there’s two translations for Dow. One is the way, which is the path of life, and that’s the bouncing ball diagram, and the other is meaning. And that’s because if you’re on the path, then your life has meaning. And the meaning is contact with novelty at the appropriate rate. So it’s something you feed on. That’s the source of that spiritual bread. That’s what that is. Yeah, I was just thinking about this kind of thing the other day, and I can’t remember in exactly what context, but it seems that there are instances all over our lives where there is, where we encounter novelty or where novelty is actually a predictable part of our lives. Yeah, I think, and what I just thought was that the part of the manuscript here where you’re talking about chaos theory, in which there can be a bounded region of unpredictability. So that you know everything in there, so that everything in there is unpredictable, and nonetheless it has very well defined boundaries. So that you can, there are whole classes of phenomena that are completely unpredictable in and of themselves, nonetheless you know what their effects can be and cannot be. Absolutely. Games are like that too. Somebody wrote an essay in this class, I believe this time on games, and games are another example of exactly that. They’re a bounded domain in which novel events can nonetheless take place. So, I mean, your emotional response to novelty depends on a number of things. It’s not necessarily terror or a priori. One of the things that hero myths tend to point out, because there’s sort of two class of hero myths. There’s the hero myth that describes the successful hero, and there’s the hero myth that describes the unsuccessful hero, like the eatable myth. And the unsuccessful hero is someone who encounters the unknown accidentally. So one of the things that transforms, yeah, and he’s the one who gets devoured and never comes back. So that’s what happened to Edith, by the way. And he’s the one who’s in the process, by the way, he accidentally slept with his mother. His mother, she’s the great mother. That’s incest. That’s the incest motif. Now, Freud read that sexually, but really what the incest motif refers to is the possibility of creative union between the hero and the great mother, which is between the explorer and the source of all new information. But the problem is if it’s accidental, well, then it might kill you. And Oedipus blinds himself. His consciousness is destroyed because of this accidental encounter. And Freud, Freud thought that was the core story that underlies the development of humanity. It’s a very, well, it’s a very, depends on your level of analysis. But if you know what that story means, it’s very, very pessimistic. It’s a failed hero myth. If you think of Freudian psychoanalysis as a form of religion, which is a perfectly reasonable supposition, because Freud tried to provide people with a map of meaning. There’s one of the few religions that I know of where the central hero is a failure, not a success, because almost all religions, religions organize themselves around successful heroes. I mean, that’s why they’re useful. That’s why I was talking about substituting ordinary misery for extraordinary. Right, right. Well, it’s also the case that Freud explicitly presumed that the domain of culture associated with religion, which is a broad domain and for which Freud also included literature and art, was a defense mechanism, an illusion, a defense mechanism erected against death inside was an illusion. Well, wait, that’s true. Well, it can be true, but it doesn’t have to be true. Dogma, it’s true for dogma. The known serves to protect you from the enemy. Right, right. Look, there’s nothing trivial about Freud’s objection. It’s also the case that people hide inside rigid ideologies precisely in order to protect themselves from not just death, but from all those things they don’t understand. But the fact that something can be true doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true or that it’s true in all cases. Last week you had mentioned positive delusion and how there was a literature that it was healthy to have some positive delusion. But that that is being debunked at this point. Well, there’s a big debate about it. All right, well, just thinking about, okay, what if your way, what if your path to get from the unbearable present to your future goal included thinking of the unknown or intrusions from the unknown as lessons? So in other words, you are looking at them as a positive. Every time anomalous information came to you, you said, this has been brought to me to teach me a lesson. I will learn something from this. And that would take the anxiety away from it. Well, at least it turns out… But it would still be a positive delusion. Well, no, I guess it’s okay. That’s a perfectly interesting argument. The last part of it, I think, I don’t think you have to classify that as a positive illusion. I think that the transition in Western culture from Old Testament morality to New Testament morality is a transition of exactly that sort because the message that’s sort of implicit in the Old Testament God is a pretty horrible figure. I mean, very powerful, but quite frightening and constantly displayed in that manner. The God that’s in the New Testament is theoretically a God of love. At least that’s the attitude that you’re supposed to have. Now, why is that? Well, it’s for the reasons that you just pointed out. Contact with the unknown is inevitable. The only thing you can do about it is change your attitude to it. And hero myths tend to point out that if you approach it voluntarily, it’s the source of new information. If you run from it, it kills you. Well, those are your options. Your option isn’t to not have it. If things didn’t change, there wouldn’t be any life. But you do have the option of how to face it. And it does work. I mean, if you’re engaged in an argument with somebody, like somebody that you have to argue with and that you have to come to a solution with, say, someone you’re married to or someone in your family, it’s like you have to solve the problem or not. You can just fight about it for the rest of your life. That’s the other option. Fight about it futilely for the rest of your life. If you actually have to address it, then when they present you with anomalous information, which is essentially like a poisoned apple, something that’s undigestible in its present form, your only option is to sit and think, what is there in this that actually constitutes usable information for me? So you might say. Someone’s objecting to the way you conduct yourself. You think that they’re being hostile and unfair, but you’ve laid down some ground rules so you more or less trust each other. Your only option under those circumstances is to remove yourself from the argument symbolically or in actuality and think, is there any truth in the information I’m getting? And if so, how do I have to adjust my behavior or my scheme of interpretation to take that information into account? That’s presuming that what you want from the argument is the reestablishment of harmony and the capacity to continue to move forward. So that is the attitude that you… I don’t think that’s a positive illusion at all because the way things manifest themselves is dependent on your attitude towards them in a non-trivial way. It’s like you, in a major way, you determine the valence of phenomena by your approach to them. And we don’t know the limits of that. Okay, so you’re saying basically then, before the hero can venture out into the unknown, he has to take care of the anxiety, right? Before he can do the exploratory behavior? Well, not necessarily, but I wouldn’t say that because the anxiety might accompany the exploratory behavior. It often does. I would just say that what the hero pauses… This goes back to your point about last week about… What’s the… Transference in Jungian psychoanalysis. What the hero has to do implicitly or explicitly is posit his… Or what the individual has to do implicitly or explicitly is posit his identity with the hero as a potential fact Whose validity can only be tested as a consequence of actual action, which is to say, you have a schema, some anomalous information comes in, you have a choice. Act on it or not. If you decide to act on it, what you’ve done implicitly is identify with the hero. So that’s an act of faith. And that act of faith is that, despite the way the anomalous information appears in its destructive context, There’s something within me that I don’t know about that will enable me to cope with it if I make the effort. It has to be faith because it’s anomalous, you don’t know the outcome. You can’t know the outcome. Now you made a… When you talked about the rate of unknown being related to temperament, What temperament do you think the ideal hero would have? I don’t think it matters. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Because it’s a subjective phenomenon. It’s like, it’s the same with intelligence, you could say. For someone who’s profoundly retarded, learning how to tie their shoes might be regarded as a heroic act. And justly so from the perspective of morality. Because they had to overcome what were innumerable subjective obstacles. So temperament or intelligence or innate ability, this is a level playing field. It doesn’t determine that a person can be a hero. However, you might say that there are different kinds of heroes. There could be a hero that ties his shoes or a hero that takes America to a different place. The Mesoamericans believed that shamans had stronger temperaments. And they were seen as basically the heroes. And they could go into their… They were more passionate in essence. So it seems to me that there is a difference between them. Okay, I want to read you something. Just hang on a minute. This is something that I… This is really interesting. It’s very relevant to your question about levels of heroism, so to speak. Okay, this is an Indian doctrine. Doctrine of cosmic cycles. Okay, I want you to think about it with regards to this. To this diagram, alright? We know already that this is kind of a schematic representation of a story with all these other stories embedded within it. And they organize themselves over time. It’s a dominance hierarchy because the most dominant story, so to speak, occupies superordinate territory. So if you’re in a dominance hierarchy, the most powerful person determines the story that has the greatest domain. And it is the case, I’ll read you some examples of this soon, that the story of dominance disputes between the gods are very, very common in mythological tales about the movement towards monotheism, for example. The gods are very often portrayed as at war. And it’s the victorious god that becomes the supreme god. I think that’s a mythological representation of the fact that those processes actually occur in time on Earth. We dispute, we dispute constantly the meaning of things, the relative meaning of things. And over time, at least within cultures, we come to agreement about them. It means that some positions win and other positions lose. And that’s a Darwinian competition of ideas. Although sometimes it’s cooperatively induced as well. Anyways, these are stories. We know that stories, when they transform themselves, they go through this cycle of dissolution and reconstruction. So you could say that if this is the arrangement of stories, at every level of analysis, each of these separate stories is constantly undergoing dissolution and reconstruction. So that’s happening all the way up the chain. Listen to this, this is really interesting. The doctrine of cosmic cycles from India. A complete cycle, a Mahayuga, comprises 12,000 years. It ends with the dissolution of Haleya, which is repeated more drastically. Maha-Haleya, the great dissolution, at the end of the thousandth cycle. For the paradigmatic schema, creation, destruction, creation, etc., is reproduced ad infinitum. The 12,000 years of the Mahayuga were regarded as divine years, each with a duration of 360 years, which gives a total of 4,320,000 years for a single cosmic cycle. A thousand such Mahayugas makes up a kalpa. 14 kalpas make up a man-van-terra. So named because each man-van-terra is supposed to be ruled by Manu, who’s the mythical ancestor king. So one of the implications of this is that the cyclical or that… If you pick a domain of this cyclical process, you can ascribe its establishment to the mythical ancestor king. A kalpa is equivalent to a day in the life of Brahma, a second kalpa to a night. A hundred of these years of Brahma, in other words, 311,000 million of human years, constitutes the life of Brahma. But even this duration of the God’s life does not exhaust time. The gods are not eternal, and the cosmic creations and destruction succeed each other forever. So the Indian notion is that this is kind of an infinite. This thing is infinite in structure, all the way up as far as you can go, and all the way down as far as you can go. And in every level of analysis, there’s these constant cycles of creation and destruction. That sounds almost like alchemy. It’s a way of playing with symbols in a scientific sounding way. Yeah, well, you know, people had scientific intuitions prior to the onset of science as a formal enterprise, as well as mythological intuitions. This doctrine, I think, is obviously representing something like this. You mentioned earlier that the dominance hierarchies are this way, and for some reason it doesn’t make sense in my head. Because it would seem to me that they go, instead of going up, they are within each other. So if Sean came in, and say you have one of the three right there, the little ones, right there, you both had a story. But he gave you a bigger story, then that would change yours. Instead of looking at it as going up, I would look at it as just being different. And he has to give you one that encompasses yours. Yeah, but I would say that’s a more dominant story. It contains more territory. It rules more territory. That’s the notion. Literally. It rules more territory. So I’d be willing to subordinate my story to this larger story, say for the Mesopotamians. That’s ruled by Marduk. So you see there’s a real neat twist in this. I think it’s really something else. You have a real paradox. You need known territory to protect yourself from chaos. But the problem with that is that known territory has real disadvantages. It gets rigid, that’s one thing, and it makes you have conflicts with other people who have known territories that are different. Well, the way the Mesopotamians solved this was by saying that the thing that makes the superordinate story, which is Marduk, is actually the process that transforms all stories. So they put a paradoxical loop into this process. That’s absolutely brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. They say, well, all your conditional stories have to be dependent, have to always remain dependent on your ultimate subordination to the process by which all conditional stories are generated. So that’s an amazing idea. So I understand that the bigger the territory, the more powerful the story. But how can, on the level where they don’t come from the same territory, how can one be above another? Graphically, it’s not up. It’s up in terms of power. We’re talking about an abstract amount. Right. So is it power? So the bottom one is lower in power than the top one? Yes. The middle one is lower in power than the outside one. It goes from in to out. It goes from in to out. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. When we’re talking about… Look, here’s an example. You’re working for a corporation. You’re not the chief executive officer. You’re a vice president. Okay? This is your story. There’s three vice presidents. There’s one chief executive officer. Okay. You’re going to be concerned. One of your domains of concern is the viability of your position and of everything that’s… Because you’re also the head of a whole set of other subordinates who are beneath you, so to speak. So that’s your particular domain of concern. But it would be rational, so to speak, under most conditions, to subordinate your desire to maintain this territory in favor of maintaining the entire territory whenever there’s a conflict. I mean, generally speaking, you can envision perhaps some cases where that wouldn’t be the case. Yeah, I understand. Okay. So my question is really, do the vice presidents… Is there a hierarchy amongst them? You mean this way? Yeah, yeah. That’s what I’m asking. Oh. Well, there would be if they were ever engaged in a task that would require them to arrange themselves. I mean, I’m not really… This isn’t a fixed picture of… There’s not necessarily three of these subsystems or whatever. Right. I’m just saying that if you place them that way, does that mean that… Well, it is possible in a dominance hierarchy for them to be relative equality of position. Although I think that would necessarily break down if those, say if there’s three vice presidents, they have to organize themselves to do a job. There’s going to be a dominance hierarchy that actually is hierarchical emerge in the course of their cooperation. But then they’ll be tying themselves into another story. That’s right. Then they’re tied into another story. It’s also the case that your position in the dominance hierarchy shifts across stories. It’s like, well, you might be a senior at Harvard so that you’re at the top of at least one part of the dominance hierarchy there, but then when you go in the workforce, it’s like whack, you’re at the bottom of another dominance hierarchy. Or you can just shift in and out of them during the day. That’s partly because we’ve been able to abstract our dominance hierarchies up to such a degree that you can participate in innumerable, some of them even symbolic. I mean, you can change the valence of a phenomenon just by shifting your reference point. So it depends on what you contrast it with. Like you say, the big picture of things. Right. That’s the big picture. Exactly. Take the big… If something terrible happens to you, I take the big picture. If the picture’s too big, then everything becomes worthless. This goes back a little ways to what you said about when anomalous information is promising as opposed to threatening. Yeah, yeah. It sounded like you were saying that it relates to the feelings of efficacy of the hero or of the confrontor. Yeah. Which you described as an act of faith. Yes. I’m just curious about that. I mean, what creates… I mean, is that what you… Did you mean to say feelings of personal efficacy? You mean instead of an act of faith? Well, or how would you relate the two? I guess what I was saying about it is… Well, I would say that if you undertake to voluntarily… If you undertake to voluntarily expose yourself to an aspect of the unknown, that is an act of faith. And whether you know it or not, you are emulating this heroic model. So one of the things that Jung attempted to point out was that since you’re doing that, you might as well know it. Because as soon as you know it, then you have access to this incredible wealth of information that sort of details the structure of that process. And that can provide you with more explicit knowledge about what it might mean. Say, because you’re… If you say… Well, I wrote down what I think of as the historical hypothesis. Let me see if I can find it here. Oh, yes. Revolutions in procedure bring about revolutions in experience. That’s the hypothesis of historical man fundamentally, which is to say that… You can posit that through your actions you can transform your environment. That’s an act of faith. And it’s the act of faith that precedes the construction of culture. Because by doing that, what you are saying is that the individual, despite the immense power balance that appears between the individual and the unknown, the individual is in fact part of a process that’s of equal magnitude, equal size. Remember, I showed you these pictures. Let’s see. Yeah, this is a good one. Look. Okay. Yeah, I know. This one is weird. Anyways, you know, I would regard this as pre-Columbian. I would regard this as an image constructed by the member of a culture for whom the hypothesis that the individual was of equivalent potency in comparison with the great mother, as not true, or just barely dawning on consciousness. Because there’s the hero. I mean, there’s a huge difference in terms of perceived relative power. And then you see, well here, this is a much more modern issue. You see, there’s much more indication of equality by this point. So, the notion of the divine individual, like that’s what I think. I think that idea is a mythological idea. Because it has to do with meaning. That’s at the core of the democratic notion that everybody is equal before the law, which has its roots in the idea that everyone is equal before God. But what that means by equal, what equal means is that your capacity for heroism is not limited by your innate abilities. Which I think is really interesting, because it’s very difficult for us to think of anything that you can do that there really is an equal playing field for. Like most things are dependent, say, on your intelligence. That’s heritable to at least a substantial degree, or your physical ability, or your gender, or your race, or these things that are really built in. But your capacity to face things that are anomalous, that’s really a part of your character, I think, that’s above those biological constraints in a way. Because what’s anomalous to you is very much dependent on your personal nature. So you get problems that are exactly the same size that you are. So that’s another part of the reason why you get this weird notion of equality before God. I wrote a story about that later in the manuscript to try to make that clear. I wrote a story, I met this woman when I was a behaviour therapist. This was a devastated woman. I mean, she had every problem that you could imagine, essentially, and then a bunch more. She was so pathologically shocked that she could not look at anybody that she thought was up higher in the dolmen’s heart. And that meant anybody, I mean, literally. She was at the block. And when she approached people, say, who were doing therapy in this one unit, she’d go like this. Just like an archaic figure approaching an emperor. She couldn’t bear to look at the person. And part of the behavioural treatment was to help her stop doing this because she would do it in public as well. And, of course, people who act oddly in public tend to have a lot of social trouble. So we were hoping to get rid of this particular symptom. But she was also, she was not an intelligent person by any stretch of the imagination. She probably had an IQ of somewhere in the neighborhood of 70, which is about two standard deviations below the mean, or about four standard deviations below the average in this room. So she’s not a smart person. And unless you’ve tested people with IQ tests, you really have no idea how much difference there is, how much difference four standard deviations means. It means a lot. She had very poor personal hygiene, and because, I think, probably because she was raised as badly as you could possibly be raised. She wasn’t particularly attractive as a person either. She was, well, okay, what else? Well, her boyfriend was a schizophrenic, and he was also alcoholic, and he was violent. And he used to accuse her of being possessed by the devil, and he beat her. She lived with her mother, who was old and sick, and an aunt who was bedridden, and they were on welfare. She had no education to speak of, and really no hope for a job. Like when I saw her, she was probably close to 40. Anyways, like this woman, the cards were stacked against her. You know, in every way you could possibly imagine. But what her primary, this was interesting, her primary concern in therapy was not really what could be done for her. Like she’d gone through behavioral treatment, kind of worked temporarily, but she reverted to her old habits very soon. What she really wanted from me was to help her sort of make a dent in the, she was an outpatient, in the hospital administration. So that she could find an inpatient, and these in, like the inpatients that are left in mental hospitals now, like these people are seriously troubled. Because anybody that could possibly be let out has been let out. So like I used to go into the basement of the Douglas Hospital of Montreal. It was like something out of Dante’s Inferno, it was an old building. And the people, like there was a coke room in the basement, and the people that were in there were just, well, you know those midi, you know the midi little paintings of disfigured people, they’re very common. Well that’s what it was like down there, and that’s what most of the inpatients were like. They were just totally destroyed, and some of them had been that way for like 30 years. So anyways, what she wanted was not help for her, and she didn’t come in to complain about her situation, even though there was lots of reasoning to play about. She wanted to find somebody in the hospital grounds that she could take out for walks. So yeah, and she had a dog that she used to take care of, you know, take it out for walks. She was, I thought she was remarkable, this person, because from the deterministic standpoint, so to speak, there’s no reason at all that she should have been anything but hostile and bitter. But her problems, for whatever reasons, were not her primary focus of concern. And well, I thought that was just a good example of how, you know, regardless of your particular circumstances, it is possible that you might make the right choices. So, and that’s maybe not dependent on things that you might consider biological givens. So, and then I do think it’s true that the broader your talents, the bigger your responsibility. So, and that’s how things work out justly, because that’s one way you can make sense of the theoretically unequal distribution of talents. The more talent, the more responsibility. Simple as that. I guess I asked that because earlier it sounded as if you were describing the promising anomalous as occurring sort of within a space. In other words, you could define a space within which, like in a game, a space within which the anomalous occurs and it’s safe. Yeah, well we do, yeah. But this is an account in which it’s more in the self as able to deal with the anomalous wherever it occurs. Right, right. No, that’s a perfectly reasonable contrast. I mean, when we play, that is what we’re doing. The first thing. We’re carving out a defined space. We say, look, here’s the actual borders within this. We will allow a certain amount of anomaly to occur so that we can practice coping with the anomaly. People like that. They like watching games, for example. That’s why kids play games as well. Kids, you know, if you watch them if they’re eight or nine years old, they get together in the playground, they’ll say, well here’s the rules. Blah, blah, blah. That defines the territories, right? Well, the rules are just enough to get something going so that some anomaly can occur. And formal games are like that even. And it is often difficult to distinguish when it is that you’re not playing a game anymore. I mean, some people play games their whole lives formally. And a lot of the things we do as academics ideologically are abstracted games. That’s for sure. But there is a difference between that and the general sense that if anomaly arises, I’m capable of dealing with it. And that’s the more… Well, they’re both hero types. I mean, sports heroes are heroes, right? They’re ritual models for emulation. They deal with anomaly in bounded circumstances. I would say they’re paragons of normal adaptation. They master a bounded domain. They’re not necessarily mastering the transition between domains. That’s a different type of heroism. But it’s still a form of heroism. Are you saying that the greater your biological gifts, you say the bigger your responsibility, do you mean the bigger your responsibility to go out and encounter the unknown and bring it back? I would say… Or you’re really happier. Well, there’s more. That’s right. That’s part of it. Right off the bat. What you don’t know is defined in contrast to what you know. So the structure of what you know and its size, so to speak, is proportionate, in a sense, to the kind of unknowns that you’ll encounter. Like, in a sense, I read it, I don’t remember where, that one of the hallmarks of genius is the capacity to see mystery where others only see certainty. So you won’t even see the same things. With variance in capacity comes variance in perception. So, and I would say that, so like… Coping with stresses of a well-run household might be a sufficient challenge for a given person. I mean, in reality, they may do a very good job of that, and that’s at the limits of their ability. But when you meet someone like that, you regard them as admirable, sort of intrinsically. For someone whose talents are greater, their field of conflict has to be greater. Otherwise, they’re putting artificial limitations on their development and all that unused talent, that’ll just work against them. You know, there’s nothing worse than the neurotic intellectual. Because the neurotic intellectual is incredibly devious, even to themself. I mean, if you’re dealing with someone in therapy, there’s an IQ of 130, say, and they’d be telling themselves lies for 25 years, these lies are unbelievably coherent and convincing, because they’ve used all that intellectual talent to erect this thing that’s really going to devour them. So then you’ve made it, you separated, okay, so there’s the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, and the left hemisphere produces the pleasing sensations in the unknown and the right hemisphere the fearful ones. But you’ve also separated the dimension of, it’s not related to, in the left hemisphere, the ability to organize, etc. and in the right hemisphere, creativity. Well, I think there’s a certain amount of, I don’t know exactly how to answer that. Anti-social personalities have, or people who are in prisons, whatever, they have generally low intelligence, but are also stimulated very easily by things, right? Well, that’s one line of theorizing, yeah. There’s more to the story than, like, temperamental loan doesn’t, I don’t think temperamental loan is enough to make you conduct disorder or anti-social. I mean, I would say that among, like, every temperamental type has its own, has the kind of pathology it’s most prone to. Like, if you’re really inhibited, you’re likely to develop anxiety disorders, like, that’s your sphere of weakness. Like, everybody has the sin towards which they’re most attractive, so to speak. But I think under very few circumstances could you say that temperament was destiny. And even then, if temperament is destiny, you say, well, the story that someone’s participating in is a consequence of biological forces. I would say then that the morality of that person is still, can only be calculated by looking at how they dealt with what they were particularly given. Like, I had a friend, for example, who grew up, who had an extensive familial history of alcoholism. Like, went back at least three generations and affected a lot of his male relatives. And by the time he was 14, he was an alcoholic. And I would say, well, how do you judge someone like that? Well, I mean, what you say is that there was much more temptation there. So how he dealt with it, that was his particular problem. It didn’t work out very well for him, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that… Well, it’s the same thing I was trying to say with that story about the woman at the hospital. You know, you’re handed an array of problems that are unique. Some of those problems are biologically determined. The manner in which you approach them determines the integrity of your character. It’s hard to judge that from outside. I think that’s another reason why in various religious traditions there is the notion that the only accurate judgment can come after death, for example. You know, you have to be judged by something of transcendent origin for it to be accurate. But it would seem, like you said, of this person with a Q of 70, that intelligence could help them to develop a better story. Well, it depends on what you mean by better. I mean, that’s the issue. More death, okay. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s like if you’re smarter, you have bigger problems. That’s possible. Well, at least it’s conceivable that that would be the case. I mean, you could look at this on a broader evolutionary scale and say, well, our intelligence, does that make our life better? Well, I would say, well, it’s a toss-up. Because on the one hand, well, here we sit and everything’s perfect. On the other hand, we’ve invented the atom bomb. And like, it’s only been 40 years. And we don’t know whether the fact that here we sit and everything’s wonderful is sufficient to counterbalance the fact that using the same intelligence, we’ve also created this massive weaponry, which is still around and will always be around to pretty much bring things to an end. So intelligence is amoral. That’s my take on it. You can use it one way or another. And it broadens your domain of action. But there’s nothing intrinsically good about it. It’s a tool. And it’s not related to temperament. Well, I don’t know if it’s related to temperament or not. Does this relate to like the dualism and the hero myth of the hero has a divine parent, but the hero also comes from humble origins often? Yes. And sort of like from unexpected places? Right, absolutely. It’s the same idea. Yeah. That’s the same notion like in Christianity, there’s the notion of an eternal Christ and a Christ that has a historical moment. And what that idea is trying to portray is the notion that the hero is a transpersonal force, so to speak. It’s a constituent element of the psyche. It’s eternal because it’s always regenerated. But at the same time, it’s perfectly reasonable to view that eternal thing as something that also necessarily exists within a specific set of constraints. And I would say that it could not exist without that set of constraints, which is something that we’ll also deal with more in the latter half of the course, the manuscripts. The constraints not only are constraints, but they define the capability for action. I was talking with someone the other day and they said, if everything was orderly, there’d be nothing left to do. And that’s the same sort of notion that Dostoevsky describes when he points out that if we established a political utopia where everything was predictable, basically imperfect, the first thing that people would do would be to drive themselves crazy just so that something unexpected could happen. And so in literal truth, that life could go on. So anyways, this is something that’s really useful to consider, and we will get into it, because one of the questions that people always pose is, why is it that terrible things have to happen? And what the myth basically suggests is that, well, for there to be something, there has to be a division between a limited domain and an unlimited domain. There has to be. It’s a precondition for existence. So then the question is, if the existence of limitation is a necessary precondition for existence, is it justifiable? And that’s the big question. If limitation is a precondition for experience, is limitation justifiable? And I would say what these mythological stories are trying to do is to tell you the story about how it could be that limitation might be rendered bearable, if it’s, say, it’s a precondition for experience. Well, this is, like, for me, this is something really worth knowing, because that’s a big question for people, especially when something really traumatic happens. Why? How can I make sense out of this? Or isn’t this event so terrible that it undermines the utility of any possible story I could tell myself? That’s what happens when someone close to you dies. This is such a catastrophe that everything in the light of this is evidently futile. Well, that’s sort of the bottom line of questions. Can you make sense out of that? So… Other questions? Okay, you won’t? Okay, well, that’s probably good enough for the day. I will put your papers outside my office on this little black bench there. Every paper will have a sheet attached to it that has detailed comments in the grade, and I hope it’ll be there. Don’t come till Friday morning to see it. It’ll be there Friday morning.