https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=59p7ASzfVVw
スースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースースー Okay, well since we haven’t been at this for a while, I’m going to briefly review what we’ve come up with and then where we’re going. I guess the basic idea… Well, maybe I’ll start with something new instead. I guess we’ve probably reviewed enough. I’m going to read you something from Tolstoy, which you probably read, theoretically read. One of the things we’re going to discuss today is the manner in which anomalous information presents itself, the different manners in which anomalous information can present itself, and how anomalous information as a category is represented. Basically, we know already that anomalous information tends to adopt symbolism associated with the feminine and with chaos, because it’s anomalous information, which is information you don’t expect, of course, that produces emotional chaos because it disrupts your versions of the emotional significance of the present and of the future and conceivably how to get from one to the other. Our whole discussion so far has been based on the idea that you can look at the world from two different perspectives, and when you’re thinking about the constituent elements of things, you can take the straight materialistic perspective, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and talk about how things are constructed scientifically, as if they’re independent objects. And we’ve got a long ways doing that. But there’s another way that you can look at the world, and that’s as a place that exists as experience and as a place that exists as a stage for action, basically. And it is the case, I think it’s well known and not frequently disputed, that the world as a place to act is not derivable from the world as it exists, which is to say that you can accumulate all the facts you want about a given situation or a thing, and that doesn’t tell you how you should conduct your behaviour in that situation or around that thing. And the reason for that, basically, is because you have to choose. You have to make decisions about what constitutes the optimal solution to your particular emotional problems. And I said before, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, I think one of the reasons that average people, or the non-academic community, has contempt for the academic community is because we have been laboring under the presumption that knowing facts is what intelligence is for, and that’s not right. Intelligence is to tell you how to regulate your emotions. That’s what it’s for. You do that by figuring out how to behave. If you’ve explored something thoroughly from this perspective, it means that you know how to act when you’re there. It doesn’t mean you know everything about the situation from the factual perspective, and that’s obvious because you’ll never find yourself in a situation where you know everything from the factual perspective. And that brings up another interesting point, which is how is it that you can stop asking questions, since you’re always surrounded by an infinite number of mysteries? And the answer to that is, as far as I can tell, you stop asking questions about a situation when what you know is good enough to get you where you want to be in that situation. And that constitutes grounds for presuming that your exploratory behaviour in that situation has gone far enough. So if I want something from you, despite the fact that I don’t know everything about you, or even anywhere near everything about you, I know you sufficiently when my interactions with you produce the results that I desire. And so that gives us some insight into how it is that your knowledge can both be limited, but sufficient. And that’s a useful piece of information to have. You’re in explored territory when what you do produces what you want. And from the mythological perspective, explored territory is one of the constituent elements of the universe. That’s the known, that’s the patriarchal system. You’re in unexplored territory whenever something you do produces a consequence you don’t expect. And that’s an interesting notion, because we tend to think of territory as the place that you’re at, but this is in a sense a way of making a leap up into the idea of a spiritual territory, because psychologically speaking, you can be in the… Psychologically speaking, despite the fact that you’re in the same place, you can be in two different places if… sorry, let me get this straight. Even if I don’t shift position, I can be in two different places. If I’m talking to you and what I want to happen happens, that’s one place. And if I’m talking to you and something I don’t expect happens, that’s another place. Even though I haven’t moved, the emotional significance of those two places is entirely different. And those are psychological places. And as far as mythology is concerned, it’s psychological places that are real. And that’s at least with regards to their significance for behavior, which is what myth is concerned with. You know, myth is concerned with morality. That’s not news. So there’s the place that you’re familiar with, and that’s the place that you’ve explored sufficiently so that what you want to happen is happening. And there’s a place that you’re unfamiliar with, and that’s the place that emerges when you make a mistake. And then there’s the process that turns one into the other, which is to say that if you make a mistake and you continue to explore, you might be able to modify your behavior so that the consequences of your mistake vanish. Which basically means that you can figure out how you should have behaved in that circumstance and that you rectify your behavior in the future, or that you can smooth things over so that the consequences of your mistake go away now. So that’s the capacity to turn chaos into order. And it’s also the case that you can turn order into chaos by continuing to explore in territory that other people have already defined as sufficiently explored. And that means that the process of creative exploration can bring order, and it can also bring chaos. These are forms of anomaly here. They’re written down in the manuscript. The revolutionary hero as a bringer of anomaly is someone who continues to explore when everyone else says, we’re getting where we want to be at the present time. Which is to say they’re saying you should leave well enough alone. Alright. One of the things that we’ve been trying to do, well we looked at mythological representations of the unknown, and they tend to take two forms. Basically they tend to manifest themselves in feminine shape. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, but the basic reason is because it’s the unknown that everything comes from. When you explore something unknown you generate new information. So it’s reasonable to conceive of the unknown as a matrix. And the idea of the matrix is contaminated, cognitively speaking, with notions of creation and notions of the source. That’s reasonable to think of the unknown as the source of all things. It’s reasonable as a consequence to think of it in the same category as feminine things. And the unknown as a feminine thing takes on two sets of characteristics. One is the creative characteristics and the other is the destructive characteristics. Because the unknown can disrupt things and destroy them. But it also serves as the ground for everything. So it has an affectively ambivalent status. It’s permanent, so that’s a constituent element of experience. The unknown always has this structure. It frightens you and it makes you hopeful. It does both of those simultaneously and that puts you into a state of intra-psychic conflict. Which has really nothing to do with your psychological state. As an individual, it basically means that no matter who you are, if you encounter something unknown, those two sets of emotions are going to be generated. And then the other thing we tried to do was to think about how the known itself is structured. And that brought us to this idea. Which in its sort of elaborated form. Which is that if you know where you’re at and what you’re doing, it means that you have a stable view of who you are and also of where you’re going. And also of how to get there. And that’s all one thing. That’s one story. If you’re cooperating with someone and you’re doing something, then your story is shared. You’ve hammered out your differences and you’ve defined a territory that’s bound basically where almost nothing unpredictable can happen. One of the things we tried to do was to figure out how… well, the simple model was that you have a theory about where you want to go and a theory about where you are. And you have a series of plans to get from one to the other. But we also have discussed the fact that the plans themselves are actually theories of the same sort. So that diagram presents what are basically nested stories. Your small ambitions are nested in your bigger ambitions. You come to a class to graduate from a class. You graduate from a class in order to get your degree. You get your degree in order to pursue your career. Your career is part of your duties as a citizen. So on and so forth. So the stories tend to become nested in one another. And this nesting also has the form of a dominance hierarchy. Because if we’re engaged in a dominance dispute, what that basically means is that we’re arguing about whose story is going to occupy a superordinate position. That’s one way of looking at it. We might also both be arguing in order to get a good position. But we’re also arguing about who’s going to be the dominant one. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. So that’s the argument. If you’re in the same culture as someone else, it means that you share at least a certain set of stories with that person. And what we’ve been trying to figure out is what those stories consist of, and also what might be the most superordinate story, like the story that governs all other stories, which you might think of as the king of all stories. And that’s part of the reason why I told you about the Mesopotamian creation myth. The creation method in the Mesopotamian creation method, Marduk, voluntarily confronts Tyemann, who is the agent of chaos. He cuts her in pieces and he makes the world. And for the Mesopotamians, that was the role of the king. As long as the king acted out Marduk, then the culture progressed properly. And so the Mesopotamians said, except they didn’t say it, they acted it out, they acted out the idea that the most superordinate story should be respect for the process that generates all stories. Right? And that’s sort of the paradox, I guess. We represented that. This way. Same. You have a story when you’re a child, and it’s basically an authoritarian story, which is that someone else is God, usually your parents, at least if you’re lucky. But that doesn’t work forever, because it soon becomes evident, not because your parents fail, but because you change, that your parents aren’t God and that there’s problems that they can’t solve, which is to say that there are unknown or anomalous phenomena that emerge that your parents can’t attribute determined meaning to. And usually what that means is that you have to adopt the… what it means is that you come to adopt the beliefs of a group. And initiation rituals, which usually involve a… well, Iliad says all initiation rituals involve a regression to the beginnings. In fact, Iliad was convinced that all archaic peoples, whenever they attempted to create something anew, whatever it was, they always construed the creation of something new in terms of reference to the cosmogonic myth, which is, you know the myth, the myth of chaos gives birth to the original set of parents, who in turn give birth to a divine son, who in turn separates, and that’s the cosmogonic myth. And for the archaic people, every act of creation replays the cosmogonic myth. We know a little bit about why that is now too, because it does seem that whenever you rearrange any aspects of your story at any level of analysis, you do go through a routine like that. It says your presumptions are wrong, which basically means that the meaning that you attribute to things is not stable, and you have to readjust those, and during that period of readjustment, your emotions are dysregulated. And the mythological way of referring to that is that, in a sense, at least in part, you return to the state preceding the division of order and chaos. Every act of creation has the mythological structure of the construction of the world. Anyways, a group tells you how to be, and it provides a good answer when you’re an adolescent to the problems that are posed to you as a consequence of your development that your parents cannot answer. But the problem is that a group provides a determined answer, which is a list of rules, essentially, that says that good is such and such, and that bad or evil is such and such, which is perfectly fine under most conditions, but it does, upon occasion, occur that the fact of the group presents a problem, or the group’s notion of how to adapt to the environment is wrong. That happens, for example, when if you have a group belief that’s very strong, and I have one that’s very strong, we engage in a dispute that results in our mutual demise. For me, that indicates that there’s a problem. I mean, it’s a strange situation, because it is the case that under many conditions, people will risk their own extinction in order to maintain the structure of their groups. So you can take the position that the best thing to do is to die for the fatherland, which basically means that even a problem as extreme as the fact that your group identification might kill you isn’t sufficient problem to indicate that there’s something wrong with its structure. That’s an extreme authoritarian position. But we’re going to take the position that the fact that groups in opposition to the fatherland cause conflict is an indication that there’s something wrong with the idea that the group is the final solution to all of your problems. It’s a choice. We know that you have to have group identification in order to make sense of your emotional experience, because you need a way of limiting the meaning that they’re giving you. To some comprehensible and acceptable domain. But we also know that group identification has its own set of problems. So what we need is a solution that has all of the advantages of group identification without any of the disadvantages. And the positive answer, the positive alternative is portrayed in this chart as the capacity not to identify the problem, but to move to a state where giving due respect to the group, you identify with the process that brings it into being, which makes you the agent that constructs it, which makes you determine that the process that constructs the group is actually more important than the group itself. And that gives you the ability to identify the problem. Which makes you determine that the process that constructs the group is actually more important than the group itself. And that gives you a way to be, which basically means a structure that regulates your emotions, and also something that attributes determinant meaning to all of the experiences that you encounter. Question? The first analysis is identification with the parents, and then the second one is identification with the group, and the final identification with the hero. Okay, in the first case it’s not identification with the parents, it’s reliance on their word, dependence. And then dependence on the group. Yeah, and that would be identification with the parents actually in the second stage, because that’s basically, if you think of the group as sort of an abstracted parent, which is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. In fact, usually what your parents are when you’re a child is not so much your parents as those representatives of the group that you have to come into contact with. That’s part of the reason I think why it’s often difficult, this comes up frequently with people who have the dependent type of neurotic personality, so they can’t dissociate themselves from their parents, because they don’t know that what they see in their parents is the group and not the parents. This is especially true I think with the father. I mean, your father is more than an individual in a sense, he’s also the intermediary that you first encounter who embodies all of culture, and as a consequence he’s a figure in a sense that’s much more powerful than he is when construed simply as an individual. Yes? Where is the identification or dependence on the cell? If the goal of the journey is identification with the hero? There’s a particular neurotic dependence on the parents, which is also the dependence on the culture. Where is the dependence on the cell? Well, what do you mean by the cell? I think in terms of a different form of neurotic. Oh, you mean selfishness? Yes. Oh, I see, I see what you mean. We’re being filled by the self, like self dependence, self dependence. Oh yes, I was reading something about that just before I came down. There’s a newspaper article about one of Roy Ballmeister’s new papers, Ballmeister has been making the claim recently that aggressive behaviour is associated with inflated self-esteem. Now he puts that, it’s an interesting paper because he puts that in the following context. You know in elementary schools and junior high schools across the United States, the self-esteem movement has been making great inroads, and the self-esteem movement basically proposes that as long as you feel good about yourself, nothing else matters. And the problem with that is that it uses indiscriminate positive reinforcement, which I regard actually as a form of abuse. So it makes the world unpredictable. If I reward you, regardless of what you do, what I’m telling you essentially is that what you do has zero meaning. Because it’s not informative. You change your behaviour, nothing happens. That means you’re powerless basically. Anyways. I just saw an article in The Globe about that, they were saying that some studies done where they had asked a group of Japanese students and a group of American students who had both taken math tests, how they felt about themselves, and the Japanese had scored a considerable amount higher, and they sort of didn’t feel so good about themselves as the American kids, and that’s where they felt great. Yeah, right, right, right, exactly. Yeah. But that brings up another point there. If the whole point of behaviour is to regulate your emotion, and you’re able to regulate your emotion that way, why bother with… Well, because it only… No, that’s a perfectly good question. That ties into some other social psychological research on self-deception actually. Feeling good about yourself, despite the actual environment, only works for a very short period of time. That’s the problem. It’s a good short-term solution. You know, if you fail an exam, you can say, well, that’s okay, I’m still alright. Well, that’s fine, except that failing the exam might actually mean that you don’t get through graduate school, for example. Like, sooner or later, these things that you’re not going to pay attention to, that you’ve decided not to pay attention to, are going to accumulate and eat you up. So, that’s the problem. We know neurotic solutions work, that’s why people use them. We know that’s true. It’s like… The problem is they don’t work in the long term. That’s why… let me read you some… I still haven’t answered your question, I just sort of zipped around a little bit. It’s a complicated question, and that’s why I’m sort of hitting it from different perspectives. And I know you’ve addressed this issue before. The thing that you’re talking about has more to do with presuming that you’re right, despite all evidence to the contrary. And that’s worship of the self, in the sense that you mean it. And I’m not going to talk about that anymore, because starting next week, everything that we discuss for the rest of the course is directly related to that. Look, we’ve given this diagram here. We’ve talked a little bit about the structure of chaos, the chaos that exists prior to the division of things into order and chaos, so that’s represented by the dragon. We’ve talked about the unknown in its positive aspect and in its negative aspect. We’ve talked about the known in its beneficial and secure aspect, and as tyranny. But we’ve only talked about the individual in terms of the positive aspect, which is the process that separates the sky and the earth, or that distinguishes between order and chaos. We’ve never talked about the negative aspect of the individual. And I think that’s probably why this question keeps popping up in your mind, in the sense that we only have five-sixths of the story, and there’s a big hole where the other sixths should be. And that’s what we’re going to start to talk about next week. So part of the question is, why is it that… why would you ever put yourself in a situation where you tell yourself a story that you know not to be true? It’s a very peculiar idea, because animals don’t do that. I mean, chimpanzees will use a little bit of deception on other chimpanzees, but that’s about as developed as deception seems to be in the animal kingdom. I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that animals actually ever fool themselves. We do that all the time. That’s part of the path that’s defined in mythology as a very dangerous one. Part of what we want to figure out is, why would people be motivated to do that? It’s like part of the problem is that you’re cruising along your track, and a piece of information emerges, and you think, that piece of information is so terrible that I can’t deal with it. So it’s just shunted aside. And you’re in a box, which is your story, that you know to be insufficient, but you’re also not sufficiently convinced of your own adaptive potential to risk stepping outside of the box. Then you’re in a little trap that gets smaller and smaller all the time. There’s a story in this manuscript about a North African tribe called the Marabouts, and they do this interesting little ritual with a scorpion. I don’t know if this is a true story or not. It might just be a myth, but it doesn’t matter. They take a scorpion, they put it in the sand, and they draw a big circle around it. And the scorpion, who’s sort of upset about being surrounded by these larger creatures, attempts to escape. And as soon as it comes up to the groove in the sand, it just runs around the circle. It won’t cross the border. So then the Marabout takes the circle and divides it in half, and the scorpion zips around inside the half circle. And then the Marabout divides the circle into quarters, and the scorpion is getting more and more frantic all the time, confined to the smaller and smaller space. Finally, they bisect the area so drastically that the scorpion can’t move, and then it stings itself again. That’s a good story of what happens to you if you constantly believe that you’re in a position that’s actually better than the one that you’re in. I’m telling you that story again because I do think it’s related directly to the question that you’re asking. When the sloth is down. Yeah, well, have you started reading Paradise Lost? Well, that’s a story about what happens when you think that what you know is all that needs to be known. That’s right, that’s the adoption of a position of false omniscience. And the consequences of that are that you end up in a situation that’s very much analogous to that of the scorpion. Okay. I don’t really know whether to close this discussion and start the new section or finish, because we haven’t talked about these different forms of anomalous information yet. Or we should just go to the next section. Let’s take a look at this. I guess I’ll do what I have time to do. Okay. Okay. One of the things that we discussed just before the class broke was how it was that stories came to be constructed. And part of the reason that we were interested in that is because it’s obvious that some of the stories that you tell yourself, you don’t actually know. For example, if you would have read the Mesopotamian creation myth three years ago, my guess is that it would have struck you as a bizarre tale, but not as something that had any meaning that was relevant to the present time. It’s not that easy to figure out what it might mean for a god to be elected as the highest of all the gods and then go out and cut out the dragon from the purely literal perspective. That doesn’t seem to be a story that has very much meaning. But it’s a very old story, and if you track its development historically, you can see how the ideas that were embedded in that story conditioned all sorts of behaviours that we actually engage in. And as far as, this is of course open to any amount of historical interpretation, but it seems to me that you can make a reasonable case that the Mesopotamian idea that there’s something divine about the capacity to conquer the unknown and to construct things as a consequence developed into the Egyptian idea that the optimal pharaoh was someone who simultaneously embodied the state and updated the state. And it’s not much of a leap from that to the Judeo-Christian perspective, which says that there’s something eternal, immortal and divine about each person. Now, if you accept that line of logic, then you have to also accept the idea that you can act out stories by yourself and with others in huge groups, without understanding what the stories mean. And the next step of logic after that is that if you don’t understand what the stories mean, what form do they take? How is it that they’re coded? How is it that they exist? They’re not part of the objective world, so to speak. They’re not something that you can talk about unless you tell stories. They’re not something you know. At least you don’t know them well enough to say what they mean, but nonetheless they condition all of your behaviours. That’s the question that is, well, what form do they take? That’s what this diagram was attempting to illustrate. In fact, every level of analysis in a story you tell yourself is informed by a variety of sources of information, ranging from the purely behavioural to the entirely abstract, which is to say, your question is, how is it that I should act? And the answer is, well, you should act, and here’s a list of rules that are explicit, or you should act like person A acts, which means that you should imitate them, which is what you’ll do naturally anyways, or all act out some hypothetical sequences and you can copy them, and that would be the whole drama, or I can tell you a story and you can absorb whatever information you can from that. Use that to govern your behaviour. The stories you tell yourself are constructed as a consequence of your encounter with information at all sorts of different levels of analysis, and different stories are coded at different levels of analysis, and it strikes me that the farther out you go, as I’ve said before, the farther out you go, which is the more superordinate the story is, the less explicit the story becomes, which is to say, it’s more coded in procedural knowledge, and also the older it gets, which is, I do think it’s reasonable to think that as you move up the hierarchy, you move back in time. That’s a good way of looking at it. So the stories that you act out at the most superordinate level of analysis are unconscious. And what does that mean? It means that everyone just acts them out and can hardly even describe them, or we have some stories about them and that’s the best we’ve been able to do. No one actually says, well, this is what that story means. We just act as if the story is true. We act as if it’s true because, well, that’s a tough question, at least because it works. And the funny thing is, the same story keeps emerging in culture after culture, so it kind of leads you to the conclusion that there is actually one story that works only. Who knows if that’s true? So anyways, we tried to tie this idea to the idea that there are different memory systems. Does that make sense? Do you understand how it is that you can figure out how to behave without being able to come up with a description of how it is that you behave? That seems reasonably clear to everyone. I mean, we’re conditioning each other’s behaviour all the time. That’s the basic idea. That’s right. Whenever we’re engaged in any sort of interaction, we’re modifying our own behaviour and the behaviour of others. And we do that to everyone we encounter, and everyone does it, and everyone does it over a huge expanse of time. And as a consequence, a pattern emerges that we more or less all accept. And when we don’t accept it, there’s a big fight. And someone wins and someone loses. And whoever wins, their behaviour continues in the future. So we gather patterns of behaviour over time and integrate them into a statement that’s more or less coherent. And what we’re trying to do is to figure out what’s the essence of that coherent and long-lasting statement. I agree with what you’re saying that people can’t come up with a conscious representation of how they act for a lot of things. But I think they do know ways of acquiring, even if they can’t consciously say what somebody else is doing, and they want to exhibit those behaviours themselves, they know that they should imitate other people. Absolutely. That seems to me, that’s a very peculiar thing, and it’s the thing that I think provides the strongest evidence for the existence of something like Jung’s archetype. Because one of the things you could say is, well, why do you admire someone? Well, you might say it’s because they can get something that you want. Well, that’s a pretty mechanistic explanation, and you don’t really have to posit any underlying predisposition. It’s just that you have to want something and you have to be able to observe that someone else gets it. And maybe that’s sufficient. But it strikes me that the capacity to admire someone is more deeply rooted than that, and it’s not purely driven by observations that someone else gets what you want more effectively. And it seems to me that that’s actually one of the things that bootstraps children’s development. I remember when I was very young, not all that young, I guess in grade one, how much I admired the boy across the street who was in grade three. For me, that was a huge gap at that time. He was someone I wanted to be like. And I don’t really think it was, perhaps it was at least in part because he could do things I couldn’t, but it seemed to be something that was more global than that. It wasn’t built up, I think, from repeated observations that he could ride a bike faster than me. But maybe that was it. Do you think it’s just that same sort of idea, but embodied in a more general way, like he knows what to do? He’s just more comfortable in doing things. True enough. You just, that you sense that his story is better than yours. Okay, fine, fair enough. But it is also the case that children start to imitate at such an early age that it’s hard to believe that the reason they’re doing it is because they’ve drawn an inference. You know what I mean? Like, kids, kids, there is some evidence that newborns can imitate. They can imitate facial gestures. It’s debatable. It doesn’t take very long after that. It isn’t much after birth that children do imitate. And you can say that’s because they’re driven by these sorts of mechanistic inferences, but it looks to me like it’s something more profound. I want to just tell you one other piece of evidence that’s something equivalent to this. People who have Tourette’s syndrome, it’s disinhibition of procedural memory habits is what it looks like. If you feed them little bits of antipsychotic medication, it will often dampen out their motor tics, but they’re called tics, and people think of a tic as something like that. But tics can be very complex. Like, people who have Tourette’s syndrome can do very complex things. I saw a film once of a sculptor who had Tourette’s, and he was a realist sculptor, and he was very, very good at it. But he had Tourette’s unbelievably badly, and his motor behaviour was completely dysregulated. And basically, he’d sit down and a motor tic would get him, and so he’d get up and walk over, and then he could sort of control it. So he’d adjust the stereo, and that was it. It was all involuntary behaviour until he got near the stereo, and then he could control it enough to just add his twist to the behaviour, and then he’d come back and sit down. And he was bouncing up and down like this all the time, and that’s how he’d do his sculptures. He’d be sitting, and he’d have a tic, and he’d get up, and he’d move, and then his sculpture would be over there, and he’d pick up his knife and he’d go, And Tourette’s, the reason I’m telling you this story is because people with Tourette’s syndrome are very, very, very imitative. There’s a story, actually, where I used to live in northern Alberta, a little bit farther north, there’s a group of Hutterites. I think they were Hutterites. They might have been Mennonites. Anyways, the problem with these isolated religious populations is they tend to get somewhat inbred, and one of the consequences of this in this northern culture is that they tend to get a little bit more of a negative attitude. And one of the consequences of this in this northern colony was very high rates of Tourette’s syndrome. One of the stories I remember about that was all these, I think they were Mennonites, sitting in a church together. A bird flew into the church, and they all flapped, a large proportion of the population of the church involuntarily flapped their hands, because they were imitating the bird. And Tourette’s, one of the things that Tourette’s also does to people is give them an uncanny ability to mimic and caricature other people by copying their motor habits. Anyways, the reason I’m telling you this is because it looks like the capacity to mimic is something that’s underneath the capacity to form abstract representations. It’s more primordial. Oh, so this is just to say that it’s like a biological, it’s hardwiring. That’s right, that’s what I’m saying. That’s why I was talking about, why I think there’s some support for a union notion of an architect with regards to imitation. You can come up with a good explanation for why people imitate by saying, I see that what you do is more efficient than what I do. And I think that does drive imitation to some degree, but there’s also another level of imitation that’s more primordial than that. How do you select what to imitate? What’s the selection process? Why the boy did you focus on it? Well, that’s a good question. I guess I don’t know at what level of analysis you’re asking that question. Do you mean in general? Why do people do it? Well, the way you’re describing imitation without the inferential part, I mean not as a result of the practice, then what’s the process of selection? That’s a good question. I guess I would… I don’t know the answer to that. I guess I would surmise. Did I ever show you that eastern picture of the recurrent bodhisattva? Do you remember that? Basically the image of the saviour that’s constantly recurring throughout time. I think that the notion that we have an innate sense of what’s appropriate globally is true. So I would say that… but it’s like with grey-legged geese, I guess. A grey-legged goose will attach itself to something. So it has the capacity to develop an exceptional attachment. But it also has to see something in its environment for that capacity to manifest itself. That’s imprinting. And I suspect that’s what our general proclivity is like. It’s like… say it’s analogous to the notion of the possibility for developing conditioned fears more easily to some phenomena than others. It’s like if I want to make you afraid of something. Say I take you into the lab and I show you some pictures of an electric outlet and I give you an electric shock every time you see one. Or I show you a picture of a snake and I give you an electric shock every time you see it. You’ll develop conditioned fear to the picture of the snake faster than to the picture of the electric outlet. So it’s not exactly as if you’re innately afraid of the snake. It’s just that in the presence of a snake, it’s easier for you to develop fear. And my guess is that we kind of have the same, a similar sort of mechanism operating with regards to heroic behaviour. We have the capacity to know it when we see it. And it’s at the level of global pattern recognition. So that’s a speculation. Isn’t everything that we know how to do imitation? When a child learns how to speak by imitating or feeding out… Well that’s another good example of the same sort of thing. A child does not exactly learn to speak by imitating. A child has to have the capacity to speak. It’s like if you take a chimpanzee, no matter what you do to the chimpanzee, it’s not going to learn to be a concert pianist. It’s because a chimpanzee doesn’t have the capacity to imitate that sort of behaviour. It’s also the case that no matter what you do to a chimpanzee, it’s not going to learn to talk. Because the chimpanzee doesn’t have the capacity to imitate speech. Now some people say that’s because of the structure of its, the morphology of its speech unit. But they’re not very good at manipulating symbols either. You know, they can get a little ways but not very far. A child will pick up language very, very rapidly. What if it’s never spoken to? What’s that? It never hears. Well then no. And there also seems to be a certain critical period. Like if a child isn’t exposed to language within a certain span of time, say at least by the age of 13, then there’s not going to be any language development. It’s not, and it’s not just imitation you see. Because the grammatical, children make standard types of grammatical errors that they didn’t hear their parents make. So it isn’t straight imitation. That’s what Skinner thought by the way. It’s not true. Because children don’t hear. The grammatical errors that children make their parents don’t make. So they… They learn rules. No. No, they act as if they learn rules. Right. But that’s different. Right? It’s different. Oh, perfect. Yeah. But language, see language is not imitation. Like I have a problem with that because it’s very much innate in the hard world. Right. It’s a unique capacity. Children say words, they have syntax ability that they’ve never heard from their parents. Right. They can put a noun and verb together and create sentences that spontaneously they’ve never heard before in their life. Right. I think it’s reasonable. Right. I don’t think it’s really comparable to say that I think that both language and the myths that we play out or don’t understand fully tap into the unconscious. Because these myths, though we may not understand them, have symbols just like the snake. And that taps more into our unconscious than the electric. Yeah. Well, I think it’s reasonable. Noam Chomsky, whose name you’re undoubtedly familiar with, is a very famous linguist at MIT. He’s posited the existence of a language acquisition device, which is not really all that informative a concept because it doesn’t really say what it is. But he says, well, you need the capacity to develop language as well as exposure to the appropriate environmental stimuli. I really do think that something similar operates at the mythological level. It’s like we’re hard-wired to appreciate the structure of a narrative. I mean, otherwise, you don’t know. I mean, how else do you explain the capacity of children to be interested in stories? It’s not like you teach them that. It’s that if they weren’t bloody well interested in stories, you couldn’t teach them anything. It’s like that’s the precondition. You can grab that and then use it to funnel information into them, but you don’t teach that. It’s there first. And I think that’s a form of grammar. And really what we’re looking at in large part is the grammar of mythology. So your recognition of heroic behavior in that boy is like a pattern. I mean, it’s not like a process of inference from discrete behaviors. Right. The boy does this. Yeah, right. I mean, that may contribute to it. But it’s around this recognition of a pattern of behavior. That’s right. That’s exactly right. He matches a pattern that’s latent in the ideas. Or could it be a pattern you learn as a child with your parents? Well, it could be. I mean, you can make a plausible case for the mechanistic acquisition of some of this sort of thing, except for the fact that imitative behavior seems in some ways pre-abstract, and also that I don’t think children learn to be interested in stories. I really don’t. I think they have that first. If everything useful comes to us in the form of a story or a pattern of some sort, then it makes sense evolutionarily that there’s going to be huge selective pressure to be interested in patterns and stories. Well, if that’s how you learn to behave, I mean, yes, it is the case that Well, here’s an example. This is a good example. I went to Montreal last week and talked. I’m working on an experimental project there dealing with children who fight in school. So we have a population of kids that were tracked from kindergarten right till they graduated, basically. And in six of the first ten years of their schooling, they were raided by teachers for fighting. So we can identify kids who are stable fighters over the long term. Now, it’s interesting about these kids. You know, you hear the standard routine about antisocial personalities. They don’t feel any anxiety, for example. But these kids are extraordinarily anxious. And I just had an honors student write me a thesis about men who abuse their wives enough to be brought to the detention of courts and convicted. They tend to be criminal, as you’d suspect, have lower IQs, but they’re very, very, very anxious and depressed, which again doesn’t fit very well with the classic picture of antisocial personality. It looks more like an antisocial personality feels anxious but can’t use that anxiety to regulate their behavior as opposed to phenomena being separable. Just to say you could be very, very anxious, but unless you know what to do with the information, it’s not very useful. And there’s a lot of reasons for believing that’s true. Anyways, I still want to stay focused on your question. Okay, so you have these kids. I’m trying to figure, what are these kids like? Well, they’re aggressive because they fight, and teachers rate them as fighting. That’s the one thing we really know about them. But they’re very anxious and they’re very depressed. The gentleman I’m working with there has been studying antisocial behavior in children for a long time. I told you before, the children’s aggressive behavior peaks at two and then goes downhill from there. You’re more aggressive at two than you are at any other time in your life. You get socialized somewhere around between two and three. You learn these behavioral patterns. What happens if you don’t learn them? That’s the question. And that’s what’s relevant to your topic. Well, Tromblay said, and he’s the character who runs this study, he said, you know, when you’re an adult and you don’t fit into your peer group, like you really don’t fit in, you get put in prison. He said, these kids in kindergarten, they’re already in prison. There’s just no walls around them. Which is to say that because they haven’t learned the proper behavioral rituals, they’re ostracized by their peer groups. So they don’t fit into the standard hierarchy. Outside that hierarchy, they build their own hierarchy. And it’s based on force. So all the kids who get thrown out cluster and the toughest kid wins. And that’s the genesis of not only the antisocial personality, but that whole antisocial lifestyle. It’s the same in prisons. The dominance hierarchy in prison is like, I mean, it’s the son of a bitch rules. Well, that’s because outside of the proper dominance hierarchy, the proper dominance hierarchy being normal socialized behavior, that’s the default strategy for the erection of dominance hierarchy. The most natural moral system. That’s what Nietzsche was always talking about. Well, it’s the most natural if you’re very impaired. It’s dysfunctional. That’s right. It’s primitive then. Well, in a sense. Well, it’s what you’ll come to if you’re not given anything else. Right. That’s right. It’s what you’ll come to if you’re not given anything else. That’s a good way of putting it. So when you say, well, it’s very important to pick up on the appropriate sorts of behaviors, well, that’s the story about why it’s so important. And if you don’t learn to be properly pro-social, like these kids, they don’t, if someone else is hurt, they won’t go over to comfort them. They don’t know how to… Even if you’re highly aggressive and you fight a lot and you’re quite anxious and depressed, if you’re helpful and you know how to share, that’s enough to get you into the group. If you’re lacking even the most rudimentary forms of non-aggressive social behavior, then you’re an outcast. And that’s the consequence of not picking up these initials for whatever reason. So yeah, the consequences are very severe. So these kids, by the way, I think, they’re the ones that are indiscriminately reinforced, because that’s how you ruin a child. It’s like you make sure that the rewards and punishments they receive are completely uncorrelated with their behavior, because that makes them powerless. Completely. And makes the world a very frustrating place. I remember I had a friend in adolescence. He drove a white truck. And that truck was dented on every quarter panel as a pickup truck. Including inside quarter panels where various parts of people’s bodies had come into contact with the dash or the roof or whatever. Before he was 16, he wrecked four or five vehicles. The most dramatic example of which was one day I went at a job on the main street of our small town in the middle of winter. I looked up the street about three blocks and there was a small convenience store there with a truck parked halfway inside of it. Covered with tarp. And it was a white truck. And I thought, that’s very likely my friend. Anyways, he was indiscriminately reinforced. Because every time he wrecked a truck, he just thought, you know what I ever said? Stop. Anyways. Okay. So back. Now, are there other questions? Okay, let’s go. I have a question. Yeah. Okay, so there’s a difference between someone like, I don’t know much about Buddha, but maybe Jesus or something. Could you say that a lot of the behaviors that they learned came from their parents? And then they added to that in their lifetime. So is there a difference between that and a child who’s antisocial or whatever? They are not given the opportunity to learn those adaptive behaviors or social behaviors, whatever, because of the peer group ostracism? Yeah, well, I guess if you thought about it in this terms, well, those kids are even followed up at this point. It’s hard to say how, because they don’t ever have anyone reliably that they can depend on even in childhood. It’s like, this success here is a precondition for success here. These kids are identifiable at kindergarten. They didn’t even get to the point where they’re acceptable to a peer group. So the question is, what happens to you if you don’t even make it here? I guess what happens is that you’re thrown out into chaos where you organize yourself, according to the principle we just discussed, which is, what can you do when you can’t do anything else? The answer being hurt. And that, of course, is pretty much just dependent on how mean you are and your size, I guess. So, okay. Okay, I’m going to read you something from Tolstoy, and this will help us discuss the different sorts of, the different manners in which anomalous information can present itself. This is in Tolstoy’s confessions. I remember that when I was 11 years old, a high school boy named Volodinka, now long since dead, visited us one Sunday with an announcement of the latest discovery made at school. The discovery was that there is no God, and that the things they were teaching us were nothing but fairy tales. This was in 1838. I remember how this news captured the interest of my older brothers. They even let me in on their discussions. I remember that we were all very excited that we took this news to be both engaging and entirely possible. Okay. Tolstoy’s confessions are basically a description of the consequences of having been exposed to that piece of information on his entire life. And it is the case, or it was the case for him that, at least by his own interpretation, the dramatic consequences of that discovery didn’t manifest themselves fully in his consciousness until he was middle-aged, and well established as a successful author. Say, well, he hid a piece of anomalous information while he was pursuing some relatively trivial task, and was unable to determine the proper magnitude of that anomalous information for perhaps 40 years. It kept moving up the hierarchy of stories, destroying them as it went. Because, as Nietzsche pointed out, Judeo-Christian morality, which characterized the behaviour of the Russians in 1838, is predicated on the idea that there is a God. That’s the most fundamental presupposition. And if you blow that presupposition, then you blow the morality. Now, you may not know that it’s gone, but the fact that you don’t know that it’s gone doesn’t necessarily mean that it will… It’ll disappear whether you know it’s gone or not. Nietzsche said at one point that if you kill the roots of a tree, eventually the branches will die. It might take a long period of time. Anyways, Tolstoy said, The very tools of thought by which I judge life and condemn it were created not by me but by them. I was born, educated and have grown up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us how to cut the timber, tamed the cattle and the horses, showed us how to sow crops and live together. They brought order to our lives as the mythological ancestors. They taught me how to think and how to speak. I am their offspring, nursed by them, reared by them, taught by them. I think according to their thoughts and their words. And now I have proved to them that it is all meaningless. It happened with me as it happens with everyone who contracts a fatal internal disease. At first there were the insignificant symptoms of an ailment which the patient ignores. Then these symptoms recur more and more frequently until they merge into one continuous duration of suffering. The suffering increases and before he can turn around the patient discovers what he already knew. The thing he had taken for a mere indisposition is in fact the most important thing on earth to him. Is in fact death. And that’s the story of the information moving up the hierarchy of stories I think. I guess his comments there are very interesting. I guess his comments there are you could draw an analogy to discovering that you have a fatal illness. Let’s say you wake up one morning and he says and he uses the metaphor of fatal illness. You have a stitch in your side and you think, well that’s going to make it much more difficult to get to work. So you construe the anomalous event with regards to a particular story. You say, well this thing which I am now encountering has the status of a minor inconvenience. It’s only going to interfere with a story that’s nested way down. But it doesn’t go away and perhaps it gets worse and you start to wonder, well perhaps it’s more serious than I thought. Which means there’s more to this bit of anomalous information that first met the eye. It’s sore enough the next day so that you have to stay in bed. So then you start thinking, well what’s the proper level of analysis to consider this anomalous information with respect to? Well you don’t know. Well then you go to the doctor and the doctor says, well you need some more tests while this information is starting to. Think of it. This is the best way to think of it. It’s only metaphor. It’s only metaphor. So here’s something anomalous occurs. There’s a hole in the way that you look at the world. And that hole can widen or narrow depending on your interpretation. And what you see through the hole is the unknown. And your job in a sense is to keep all the holes covered. Now here’s something, the unknown is peeping its head through. And you don’t know how big the thing that’s peeping its head through is. It’s just the tail of a dragon or just the nose of a dragon. Well what you’re trying to do is to figure it out. I guess interjecting anomaly would be a good way to find out what someone’s dominant hierarchy is. Go ahead. How do you mean? Well here’s the example of an athlete. Let’s say that you get the stitch and then you get someone else stitching your side. And at first you think to yourself, well this may get difficult for me after my day. And you keep going and it gets worse and worse. And you see what level of analysis they take it to next. And then they next say, well because this will interfere with my schoolwork, do I need to lay off my sports? Or is it the other way around? I guess that would be an example. With the status of the various nested goals and sub-goals. You can see that by forcing someone into an anomaly. I see what you’re saying. So if I put a limitation on your behavior or if one emerges, you’re going to determine what’s worth tossing. And that will give you what’s worth throwing away basically. If you can only do 90% of the things that you’re doing right now, what falls into the category of the 10% that can be eliminated? Sort of. But I think more along the lines of what are the order in which you’ll consider them. Yes, yes, fair enough. Fair enough. So yeah, well that’s… That’s the… Yeah, well I think that’s perhaps part of the reason why people who have recovered from a very serious illness or sometimes people who aren’t even going to recover say, well at least this has taught me what was important. So that’s a perfectly reasonable observation. So anyways, you go to the doctor and what your attempt is when you ask the doctor what is going on, what you’re basically saying is, what subsection of my nested stories is this event going to destroy? That’s what you want to determine. I read… This is quite interesting. You see it’s… And that’s a terrible situation to be in. So you’re at the doctor and you’re faced with something that’s unknown. So then you’re very anxious. I read… All the educational attempts so far to convince homosexual men to use condoms have resulted in failure globally, by the way. When AIDS first manifested itself, there was a decrease in the kind of behavior that spreads AIDS and an increase in use of condoms for a substantial period of time. But now that AIDS is sort of run of the mill, so to speak, the behaviors have basically returned to baseline level. And there is some studies that demonstrate that men who engage in extremely high-risk sexual behavior are more anxious and depressed before they are diagnosed with AIDS than after. And the reason for that, I think, is that any possibility is better. That’s right. Any defined actuality is better than the unknown. And that’s a good story for illustrating how that’s the case. It’s better to know than not to know, no matter what it is that you know. Does that mean that threat is worse than punishment in the same sense? Yes, that’s what it means. That’s what it means. That’s why in psychotherapy people will always… will continue to do things that they know will hurt them rather than risk change. Because threat, that’s right, that’s what people are like. Hope is better than reward, and punishment is better than threat. Right. So our primary reinforcers are less salient than our secondary reinforcers. That’s peculiar. It is peculiar. It is peculiar. But I think that is the case. Because it is drugs that activate the systems that mediate hope that we find most enthralling. And it is the case. I do believe that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. That’s one of the reasons why this sort of theoretical approach is so useful. It’s because it gives you insight into why people won’t change. But why won’t they change? Well, in order to change, you have to stop believing in and stop doing what you’re doing. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means for an intermediary period of time, all things are novel. And all novel things produce anxiety. And if you’re terrified of anxiety and you don’t believe you can cope with it, well, you can’t do it. So one of the jobs you have as a psychotherapist is not to minimize the anxiety that your patient feels, but to endeavor to demonstrate to them that they can tolerate more of it than they think. Right. That’s catalyzed. That’s your attempt to catalyze identification with the hero. The fact of anxiety isn’t so bad. It’s the fact that you think that you can’t deal with it. That’s what’s so bad. Because you’re never going to convince anybody that the world is not a threatening place. So, okay. Anyway, so one of the things that you’re doing when you engage in exploratory behavior is trying to figure out at what level of analysis a particular anomalous piece of information actually, where it’s actually most appropriately conceived of, which is to say, what does it mean? You’re trying to fit it into a framework. Well, Tolstoy basically says that this piece of information that he accidentally encountered at school, which was pretty much inevitable. You know, the Russians in 1838 were still pretty backward society compared to the rest of Europe. And Europe had gone through its great contact with the idea that God was dead as early as 1838. As the times when Galileo came into conflict with the Catholic Church. And this would be going on in Europe for a long time, for 400 years before the news washed in from Western Europe over Russia. Russia was a feudal society that was tottering on very shaky legs, just waiting in a sense for something to push it over. The news from Western Europe pushed it over. It took Tolstoy 30 years to figure out, or for the information to have its full impact on Tolstoy. And I would say that I think it’s reasonable to say that what that information did to Tolstoy, did to the whole culture 50 years later. That’s why I want you to read Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Because Dostoevsky was writing about a Russia that had held on to feudalism 200, 300 years longer than it actually should have. It was the last European country to undergo a modern revolution. Well, we know the consequences of the revolution. Orthodox Christianity was pushed over, left a huge void in the Russian psyche that was filled by Marxism. Anyways, Tolstoy was a genius, and one of the consequences of being a genius is that those things that eventually happened to everyone happened to you first. That’s an interesting thing. It seems to me that… This is a strange thing to think. We tend to think that the future happens everywhere at the same time. It’s like we all come into contact with the future at the same time. That’s not really true. The people that we think of as geniuses are people in whom the future is not going to be the same. The people that we think of as geniuses are people in whom the future happens first. That usually isolates them. That’s why they look like prophets, I think, in a sense. It’s almost as if the future pours through them first, then out into the culture. I mean, it depends on what you think of thinking. If you think of thinking as something you do, then that whole line of argument is nonsensical. If you think of thoughts as something you encounter, then it starts to make a little bit more sense. Anyways, the thing he had taken for a Mirian disposition is in fact the most important thing on Earth to him. This is exactly what happened to me. I realized that this was not an incidental ailment, but something very serious. And that if the same questions should continue to recur, I would have to answer them. And I tried to answer them. The questions seemed to be such foolish, simple, childish questions. But as soon as I laid my hands on them and tried to resolve them, I was immediately convinced, first of all, that they were not childish and foolish, but the most vital and profound questions in life. And secondly, that no matter how much I pondered them, there was no way I could resolve them. So Tolstoy had not only got here, he was the paradigmatic example of having got there. He was as successful as you could possibly be within the confines of a group. And even perhaps had made some movements towards the next stage of development, given that he was undoubtedly a very creative individual. So he says himself, I should have been considered a completely happy man. This was when I was not yet 50 years old. I had a good loving and beloved wife, fine children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding without any effort on my part. More than ever before, I was respected by friends and acquaintances, praised by strangers, and could claim a certain renown without really deluding myself. Moreover, I was not physically and mentally unhealthy. On the contrary, I enjoyed a physical and mental vigour such as I had rarely encountered among others my age. Physically, I could keep up with the peasants working in the fields. Mentally, I could work eight and ten hours at a stretch without suffering any after effects from the strain. And in such a state of affairs, I came to a point where I could not live. And even though I feared death, I had to employ ruses against myself to keep from committing suicide. A perfect example of an entirely well-adapted man, the incumbent piece of anomalous inclination that blew his ability to believe in all of the determinant meanings that his group identification had provided for him. And as a consequence, he descended involuntarily into chaos and just about died as a consequence. He said, and he details this to some degree in his confessions, that Tolstoy literally was suicidal for a long period of time. It seems to be one of the tragic consequences of abstraction. I mean, it’s coming from the top down there. Right. Right. There’s no reason why you should be unhappy from a practical point of view. Right. Well, that’s one of the things that I wanted to sort of deal with today. I mean, this story is this. Right. I mean, what Tolstoy encountered was a strange idea. And the problem with an idea, and this is again why the pen is mightier than the sword, The problem with an idea is that once it’s up here, you can just say it. Like, you can make your point in a paragraph or two. Say if the point is, it’s absurd to believe in religious presuppositions, and you buttress that with a page or two of documentation of the reasons why it’s absolutely obvious that it’s absurd. Then you’re providing information whose ease of communication belies its danger and also obscures how difficult it was for the information to have been generated. That’s the thing about abstraction is that for me to make a statement like that meant over a long span of time that any number of people may have had to die in order to make that information, in order to generate that information. And I think that’s part of the reason why we’re so constantly interested in the story of Galileo. He was someone who produced a piece of anomalous information and was branded a heretic by the Catholic Church. And he was a person who opened the doorway for the scientific overthrow of religious ideas. But the fact that we can calmly discuss issues like that now is a consequence of the fact that centuries of battles about ideas like this have taken place in the past, sometimes purely intellectually. Sometimes as the consequence of actual wars, all compacted up into a few abstracted phrases that can easily be delivered, also delivered across cultures. So you can see the actions of strangers can become abstracted up into words and then transmitted. Well, that’s the thing that’s so funny is that once it’s abstracted, you can be a very ineffectual personality and nonetheless have the capability to have a huge impact on things. Because you can serve as the carrier of information that you could not possibly have generated yourself. And that’s part of the reason why our technological power makes us so increasingly dangerous, I think. Because we have access to all the power that people have developed in the past, regardless of whether or not we have the kind of personalities that are capable of using that power wisely. So… There’s politics in it, actually. Right. Not just politics, though. It’s the case with every field of endeavour. It doesn’t matter where you look, it’s the case. And as we develop our technological power more and more, that’s increasingly the case. That’s why someone like, I don’t remember his name, a character in Southeast Asia who brought down Bering’s Bank. That’s a good example of the power of abstraction. He’s playing with nothing and devastated the whole community. He’s just playing with abstractions. They were just numbers. They’re bits, even. But because things had been abstracted up so tremendously, his casual movements had huge impact. What makes an anonymous idea threatening and not just ridiculous? I mean, Galileo’s suppositions were threatening. Why were they perceived as, not as suppositions, but as speculations or as theory, was considered threatening? That’s a really good question. I suspect. Look. That’s a really good question. It also ties in with other peculiarities. Like Jung pointed out, for example, that… Well, and everyone knows this to be the case. Sometimes you’re a prophet crying in the wilderness, which basically means that you have a message that no one will listen to. And the reason for that is, well, it might be because you’re fundamentally deranged and what you have to say has no relevance. But it also may be that you’re so far ahead of your time, so to speak, that no one that you talk to can understand what you’re saying, which is pretty much related to the question that you’re asking. I guess I would say that there must be an op… Then this ties into the last chapter that we’ll discuss, which has to do with the ability to use your interest as a mode of regulating your progress. Vygotsky said there’s a zone of proximal development. This is a complicated thing to try to understand, and I really haven’t got it completely straightened out, although this diagram helps a bit. But you’re saying, if you’re faced with an anomalous piece of information, what makes it meaningful instead of incomprehensible? And it must be that there must be… Like, if the idea is here, maybe it’s pretty easy to move it to here. But maybe it’s pretty difficult to move it to here, if it’s here. So I would say… The reason that the Russians, Tolstoy, for example, was so overwhelmed by the idea from Europe is because at other levels of analysis they already knew the idea. So it was like dropping a seed crystal into a super saturated solution. The ground was already prepared. I also think that’s why people sometimes experience things as revelations, because they already know, you already know. I tell you a piece of information. This is very much relevant to mythological teachings, because, again, what we’re discussing in this class, everyone knows at least up to about here already. So when you say, move it to here, well, I can always make reference to what you already know here. Also… That’s… So I sit with my children and I watch Bugs Bunny cartoons. Or any movie for that matter. There, the oldest one is four. And I see by watching my daughter how much of what’s portrayed on the movie is opaque information. And that’s because she doesn’t understand any of the references. Like yesterday, we were watching Casper. She doesn’t know what a ghost is. Now, you can’t really explain to anyone what a ghost is, you know, because, well, you think about it. That’s complicated. I mean, it’s really complicated. You have to… there are a lot of presuppositions involved in understanding what a ghost is. For her, that’s just opaque information. It’s because she doesn’t share… Like the movie, all the movie presumes a certain shared frame of reference, right? A shared background knowledge. And that’s… Is it related to the way of knowing and not just the idea? I mean… The church had a way of knowing. Galileo had a different way of knowing. It wasn’t just the idea that was new. It was a way of knowing. Yes, that was certainly true in his case. That’s right. Well, that’s because the church, I think, was most concerned, although it didn’t know that explicitly, with knowing as knowing how to behave. Whereas Galileo was on the track of knowing as knowing facts. And, well, we know what the consequences of that have been. We haven’t been able to distinguish them very well. But, you know, if you… I noticed, wandering through various art museums in Europe, I mean… I don’t understand many of the Renaissance paintings. They don’t mean to me… They don’t even look to me like they look to the people who painted them, because I don’t know the mythological reference. Even the Christian ones, for that matter. A lot of the paintings lost on me. And that’s because… If we share a community, that means our unconscious presuppositions are identical. And so we can communicate at a level where, having those shared presuppositions as implicitly accepted, we could toss information back and forth at the level of abstraction where we don’t yet agree. I guess that must be the story. Well, if you and I are talking, there’s a whole bunch of things we’re not talking about, that we already agree about. And so we don’t have to talk about them. What we talk about are those things that, at a level of analysis, where there’s still some dispute. And I guess that as things become increasingly beyond dispute, they also get encoded farther back down the hierarchy. So, in this class, for example, we’re not at each other’s throats, ever. Because, and we don’t ever argue about the propriety of that. It’s so much accepted that it’s not even an issue. There’s no aggressive behavior in here. It seems to me that part of this sphere of anomaly must come from a recognition, or an unconscious recognition, perhaps, of human nature, which is that exploration is intrinsically rewarding. I mean, would you agree that that is true? It seems that exploration for exploration’s sake seems to be something that motivates people. I notice one of the things that Tolstoy said was that he and his brothers, they brought the strange idea home from school. One of the first things he says is that we were more than happy to entertain this idea. Why? But simply because it’s new, and anything that’s new is interesting. Right, right. Right. Yeah, well, they were definitely interested in the information. Partly, I think, because they told them something they already suspected, so to speak. Yeah, there was a receptivity. Right, right, the ground was prepared. And they had to receive it, and it’s almost as if there was an unarticulated experience. Right, absolutely. That the idea provides a way of articulating. And that’s the crystal, it’s the water. Right. But it doesn’t put the experience there. It articulates. Right, right. Okay, you’ll see this later in the manuscript, too. When Moses gets the Ten Commandments from God, he’s on the top of a mountain, which is a standard place of enlightenment, or illumination. When he comes down the mountain, his face is glowing so brightly that no one can look at him. Now, what Moses did, let’s assume for the present time that if he is not a mythological figure, he’s at least a mythicized historical figure. The notion of the lawgiver is fairly prevalent in archaic communities. The same role is played by Hemerabda, for example. Someone who codifies the law. Well, the notion there is, again, that what Moses did basically could be construed as having observed how everyone behaved in essence anyways, he codified it. Right, so he took information that existed at the level of creative behavior, imitation, play, ritual, drama, myth, religion, and maybe even literature, and he said, well, look, this is what we’re doing. And the consequence of that, that appeared as a revelation. I think part of the reason, I mean, I’m trying to figure, because you do this in therapy, too, eh? You say to someone, look, here’s a pattern of behavior. First of all, that in itself can be a revelation, you say. The person says, yeah, you know, I’ve noticed myself doing that. They’re quite interested in that piece of information. I think the affect that’s generated as a consequence of encountering that sort of information is partly due to apprehension of all the possibilities that are then revealed. Right, the more, as you move information up the hierarchy of abstraction, the information becomes more and more powerful, which basically means that you can do more with it with less work. Right, that’s why money is more powerful than barter. It’s more abstract, so it’s more flexible. And I think when you move information up a level of abstraction, it produces a release of affect, because you get an intimation of the possibilities that are released as a consequence of the increase in abstraction. I also think it’s the case that if I can tell you, well, look, your story is such and such, but you act this way and this is your theory, well, then you have the possibility of moving those three levels of analysis into an isomorphic arrangement so that you’re not three people anymore, one who acts some way, one who imagines another way, and one who plans a third way. You’re one person, all of whose efforts are devoted towards attaining the same end. I also think that that’s the utility of integration. And I think one of the things that we admire in people naturally, I think, is the consequence of the unification of the operation of those three systems, is just to say, who do you admire? Well, someone who doesn’t say anything more than is necessary, so to speak, and who acts out what they tell you. I was about to say that I think you’re talking about positive affect, and I think that positive affect works in this direction if you’re talking about procedural as the outside and abstraction towards the middle. Andy, because I think that, I think when you present, once you have a level of abstraction, the best way to present to somebody else is not by telling them, but by presenting it in as procedural, in as big a circle as possible, which is probably more difficult to do. Well, this sort of, okay, information that’s behavioral anyways. Well, Freud thought that merely becoming conscious of something was sufficient to bring about a cure, at least at the early stages of his career, but by the end he realized that unless it had been transformed from pure conscious awareness, back down to the level of behavior, that you didn’t know it. Knowing it means that it’s embodied. I think that’s the point that you’re making. But it seems that what Tolstoy was doing is that he was moving from abstraction maybe into procedural, and that produced negative affect. Yeah, but it wouldn’t, yeah, in this, I would say that your interpretation is accurate, but that it wouldn’t necessarily have to produce negative affect. The problem is that Tolstoy encountered that information involuntarily. It was sort of accidental in a sense. He was walking along as a, it’s a hell of a piece of information for a 12-year-old schoolboy. You know, it’s like, it’s a piece of information that you can say in one sentence, God is dead, that took literally thousands of years of concentrated effort and any number of wars to produce, and then you can hand it to someone on a plate. This is also part of the reason why our, this is kind of a leap, but it’s exactly the same sort of thing. It’s why a lot of foreign aid projects don’t work, is because there’s a lot more information embedded in the things that we distribute than we think. There’s a good example. In the South Pacific Islands, the introduction of steel axes to the Stone Age population devastated their whole culture. Part of it was missionary work, but the thing is these cultures had progressed to the point where if you were at the top of the dominance hierarchy, you had access to a stone axe, and we think, well, stone axe, who cares, basically. But when there aren’t that many of them, and that’s the thing that’s the most technologically advanced product you have, stone axe is a symbol of ultimate value as well as a stone axe. And when you distribute steel axes, which the missionaries did relatively indiscriminately, it was very hard on the story that the Pacific Islanders told, because you think, what does that mean? It’s like, okay, it’s a steel axe. What’s a steel axe for? Well, it’s for cutting down trees, and you can do a better job with a steel axe than you can with a stone axe. But the thing is, it’s like Elvis Presley’s guitar, right? Elvis Presley’s guitar is not just a thing to make music with. It’s also Elvis Presley’s guitar. And a steel axe is not just a thing to cut down trees with. It’s a cultural artifact that has sort of embedded in it a whole bunch of implicit messages, partly about the relative power of two cultures. In large part that. It’s like if you have to work your whole life to get a stone axe, and then your four-year-old child walks down the street and brings home a steel axe, this is going to be somewhat hard on your frame of reference. Hey, Dad, the people down the street are giving away machines that create money. So, anyways, when we introduce our artifacts into alternative cultures, we are putting a lot more into the culture than we actually think, because the artifact, it’s like Marshall McLuhan said, the comedian is the message. The artifact is something other than just a tool. It has a story that’s embedded in it. But now in Tolstoy’s case, it’s almost, the artifact was rather a story. I mean, it was an idea that crystallized an experience that was already there. Right. Right. Almost the opposite in a way. Well, yeah, it was something abstracted up anyways. So, okay, so anyways, well, normalist information can come in the form of a strange idea. I guess what I was trying to do with this is something I didn’t really recognize until this morning when I was working on this stuff again. Anomalous information can enter your purview at any level of abstraction. I guess that’s what it means, is that if someone acts differently than you act, say, well, why does that bother you so much? The bearers, let’s take the Germans, for example, prior to the Second World War, okay, their culture is a little unstable as it is. Very high rates of unemployment, terrible inflation, an immense threat of communism from the East, and a non-trivial threat. I mean, the communists took over Russia after all. So, you know, there’s enough novelty, enough anomaly floating around in the air, so to speak, to make everyone perfectly well-uncomfortable. Under those circumstances, anybody who acted differently was an additional anomaly that I think appeared as something pretty much intolerable. So, under normal circumstances, it’s possible that the alternative behaviors of someone who’s different than you aren’t going to pose that much of a problem to you, but all you have to do is perturb the system to some degree to make that sort of anomalous information that much more intolerable. If someone’s from a culture that’s different than you, even if you don’t talk to them, and even if they don’t come into contact with you that much, the mere fact that they’re around is definitive evidence that a story that isn’t your story can be as successful, can make someone as successful as you are, or perhaps even more successful. Sometimes you can tolerate that, and sometimes you can’t. So, anomalous information can come in the form of pure procedure that’s acted out by someone else. Sometimes that’s not a problem, but sometimes it is. The final, this is even less abstract, I guess. I wanted to read you something, because I can’t make the argument as well as I wrote it. Page 168. The question here is, what can disrupt you, I guess? And the things that can disrupt you can come in the form of direct challenges, indirect challenges to your cultural structure, and these are all things that are other cultures, basically, right? Or, sorry. These two things are other cultures. The stranger and the strange idea. This is schismatic movement within your own culture, and this is the unknown doing its thing, more or less, all by itself. So, cultures come to a halt. Well, let’s say, your culture, this is a good example, I suppose. You raise goats. So you have an agrarian culture. The problem with goats is that they produce environmental transformations. Goats like to live in deserts. And the thing about goats is that if you put them out somewhere, soon what you have is a desert. And the problem with deserts is that they don’t support that many goats. So, the point is that if you have an adaptive structure of one sort, the consequences of that adaptive structure can be the transformation of the environment in such a way so that the adaptive structure no longer works. Now, this took me a long time to work out because mythological representations of the emergence of the negative unknown are always contaminated with mythological representations of the tyranny of the known. It’s almost as if from the mythological perspective that there’s no difference between the over dominance of this and the emergence of this. And I thought, how the hell could that be? Why would that be? Let me just read you something here. The insufficiency of cultural adaptation cannot easily be distinguished from natural catastrophe. Society, light on its feet, so to speak, is constantly in a position to adapt to the unexpected, even to the rapid and catastrophic unexpected, even to transform such change into something positively beneficial. Likewise, this means that affect and cognition are in fact… It’s funny, think about it this way. Germany and Japan lost the second world war and England won. You’d never know it now. And that’s partly because, well, it’s partly because the Americans, in a fit of historical anomaly, gave their enemies money instead of killing them all and plowing their land and assault. The only country you can do historically is lose a war to America. The only country that’s ever really won a war against us is Vietnam, look where they are now. Whereas you look at Japan and Germany and, well, we’ve just made it. It’s a good example of the integral relationship between this and this, because the Germans and the Japanese underwent a catastrophe, a sociological catastrophe, whose consequence was something very beneficial in the final analysis. And the point is that you can’t necessarily distinguish the valence of an unexpected phenomena from the pattern of behavior that’s manifested in its presence, which is to say that it’s very difficult to specify a particular situation that is in and of itself negative. Without any relationship to how you act in the face of that thing. So, let me read you. You have to think about this from the perspective of image. Myth and literature constantly represent the parched kingdom. The society victimized most frequently by drought, which is the absence of water concretely and the water of life or spirit symbolically. It’s scorched as a consequence of the over-perlonged dominance of the ruling idea. This idea in the narrative and frequently in actuality is the king, the ancestral spirit representative of his people, made tyrannical by age or pride, unbearable disappointment, or withering under the influence of some malevolent advising force. Development of such circumstances call, of course, for the entrance of the hero, who is the lost son of the true king, raised in secrecy by alternative parents, the rightful ruler of the kingdom, whose authority was undermined during vulnerable youth or who had been journeying in far-off lands and was presumed dead. The hero overturns the tyrant and regains his proper place. The gods, pleased by the reestablishment of proper order, allow the rain once more to fall. In the story of this type, the creative aspect of the unknown, or nature, is locked away metaphorically by the totalitarian opinion of the current culture. Such a state of affairs might be represented, for example, by the sleeping princess in the kingdom brought to a standstill, or by some alternative variant of the existence of the treasure hard to attain. Paralyzed by patriarchal despotism, or frequently by fear of the terrible mother, kingdom remains stagnant while the princess, nature and her benevolent guise, waits for the kiss of the hero to wake. Her awakened and revitalized beauty subsequently reanimates her people. See, these stories basically say that if the unknown, if the environment is turned against you, kill the king. Because whether you know it or not, he’s a tyrant. And so from the mythological perspective, there’s no such thing as the negative aspect of the unknown as such. It’s always only negative in relationship to a ruling idea. And the mythological idea is that if it’s negative, there’s something wrong with the ruling idea. That’s the basic notion. It’s a strange idea. That’s the opposite of circling the wagons, though. Sorry, you’ll have to elaborate on that. Like becoming more rigidly holding onto your idea. It’s not precisely the opposite, because… Can you repeat that again? Okay, then I’ll get back to this. If the environment has become… has turned against you, then that’s a sign that it’s time to sacrifice the king. Because this… the unknown is only negative in relationship to an idea. We already know that, right? I mean, that’s what we’ve been talking about with regards to the structure of these stories all along. You construe the motivational valence of something with respect to your current story. So the mythological story basically says if negative things are happening all around you, it’s not the environment as an objective thing. There’s something wrong with the way you’re living. That’s why, well, say in an archaic society, this actually frequently happens. If things aren’t working out, like there’s a prolonged drought, it’s time to kill the king. You think, what a stupid idea that is. You know, what the hell does the king have to do with the drought? But the point of this story is that the environment in large part is a consequence of your adaptive response in its presence. At least in terms of its valence. So it’s very intelligent to kill the king when things aren’t going well. Because after all, the king is the pattern of behaviour that constitutes the kingdom. And if the kingdom isn’t going very well, which means that the negative face of the great mother is constantly appearing… Well, and who do you sacrifice them to? Well, you sacrifice them to the great mother, right? In hopes that her positive face will reappear. And the funny thing is, it works. This is another… this is an… That’s a… like you people are going to have to evaluate these ideas over a long period of time, I suspect. But I’ll tell you, I’ve never read anything anywhere that explains why people engaged in sacrificial rituals. Nothing that ever made any sense to me, although people did it all over the world. So this makes sense. It’s ridiculous to think that people participate in activities like that in so many places over such long periods of time, for no reason whatsoever. This is the idea of the reacting oaks. If what you’re doing isn’t working, kill it. Do something else. Good thinking. So I don’t understand why you have the… why in that diagram, why are they opposite each other? Well, it’s the positive aspect of culture that protects you from the negative aspect of the unknown. Right. And it’s… They’re stacked disks. That’s right. They’re stacked disks. That’s right. It would be better if you had four… if there were four faces. So that the positive aspects of the king could line up with the positive aspects of the great father. And so enhance it. Because in that… Okay, you’ll have to shoot it. If you’ll sketch that, I’d appreciate it. Because I know, you’re right, there’s something… like there’s something missing from this diagram. Okay, see where the… in the king, where the negative sign is? Yeah. Well, just make it a… go. Where the known can enhance the positive aspects of nature and also… Yeah. Remove the positive aspects. Well, I don’t know either. I’m thinking about it. No, no, I mean… Well, what do you mean? Isn’t the idea that since they’re stacked disks, the known blocks you from the… But that still works, right? Because this is still inscribed inside the circle. So then this… right? Yes? No? Well, but then you have the positive… I mean, if it’s not something that works by blocking, then you have the positive aspect of the known blocking the positive aspect of the unknown. Which is why in the other way you have the negative. But yeah, right. Because the negative of the… But that’s true too, though. Therefore it blocks the positive… This is true too, though, because they say the good is the enemy of the better. Which is to say that, you know… well… You know what a Dvorak keyboard is? Well, a Dvorak keyboard… the keyboard on a computer is laid out so that you can type slowly. And the reason for that is because it was designed for a manual typewriter, and really fast typists would jam the keys. So some bright character figured out how to separate the most commonly used keys so that a really fast typeist couldn’t jam a manual typewriter. Now there’s a Dvorak keyboard where the keys that you use most are laid out very close to each other, and you hardly have to move your fingers at all. Now, I would like to learn to use a Dvorak keyboard. But I already know how to use the QWERTY keyboard. So I don’t. And that means that what I know stops me from learning something. Because what I know is good enough. It stops me from learning something better. So I see your objection. It makes sense. Sometimes it’s hard to make adjustments… Well, I’m not saying that it’s wrong. I’m just saying that you’re sort of mixing the metaphor of blocking with the metaphor of revealing. Right, right, right. Well, I’ll have to keep this in mind and see if there’s a way of balancing both. So then where the reaction to threat in the environment is to cling more rigidly to the king as opposed to kill the king. Right. That would be the negative negative? I don’t know. Are you getting double whammy? Yes. That’s right. I see what you mean. Yeah, that’s exactly what happens. Good short-term solution, but not in the long term. Disasterous. All you’re doing is accumulating… What you’re doing is like… Here’s a whole bunch of disasters. You can have them one at a time over a long span of time. Or you can shove them all into a clump out there in the future and go along merrily until you fall into them and have them all at once. Right. So that’s basically the… that’s the authoritarian answer to the problem. Right. That’s the circling away. That’s right. Yes, yes, yes. One of the things I want to make more clear in the second half of this manuscript, which isn’t very well laid out right now, is that there are three patterns of response to Enol. One is face it and do something about it, which is basically admit it’s there, number one, and then engage in whatever modification of your story is necessary to produce something positive from your encounter with it. The second one is circle the wagons, which is to say some anomaly is facing me from outside. I’m afraid of anomaly because I’ve sacrificed my relationship with the hero. That’s what an authoritarian does. I’m not creative. Like, the emperor is creative for me. I just do what he says. When you circle the wagons, you also restrict the amount of novelty that exists within your constricted environment and dampen down your affect as a consequence. Right. Because you make everyone the same, which is what authoritarians do. So that’s one way of going about it wrong. The other way of going about it wrong is… It’s supposed to be the king is dead, long live the king. The wrong way of going about it is the king is dead. Period. And people are motivated to do that. That’s the thing. It’s like you’d say, why the hell would someone do that? Because we already know that you need the king around or you’re flooded with anxiety. So why kill him? Well, the thing is people do that. That’s the anarchistic or rebellious sort of style of adaptation. But the problem with having a king is that you have to do what he says, and that’s the price you pay for your security. You might be willing to get rid of him if you can’t stand any responsibility. And that’s the alternative, improper mode of adaptation, I think. That’s where you get this. In Chinese medicine, there’s order and chaos. And if you’re ill, it’s because you have too much yin and not enough yang. Or you have too much yang and not enough yin, and the job of the Chinese doctor is to analyze you, so to speak, to ensure that the balance between the two phenomena is optimal, which means that you’re here, instead of over here in the authoritarian zone of the world or over here in the chaotic zone of the world. Okay, so next week we start talking about this, the final part of the story, which is this. I’m interested, you see, because we know that you have a very good reason for protecting your culture, which is that it regulates your emotions. What I’m interested in is, given that it’s necessary for you to maintain your culture, even in the face of threats from other cultures, are there patterns of personal behavior that amplify the danger of culture and patterns of behavior that reduce it? So is there something about your relationship to your culture that can either exacerbate the intrinsic problems of group identification or reduce them? And that’s what we’re going to try to find out in the last part of the course. It’s like, culture is necessary. The problem with the necessity of culture is that it virtually ensures the existence of conflict. Given that, is there a way to act to make it worse or to make it better? And that’s what we’re going to talk about here.