Maps of Meaning 10 (Harvard Lectures) (G_5_wSDKMGg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=G_5_wSDKMGg

They’re not necessarily, but we’ll hear. Right. Interested in research on that. And I’d like to basically quote my correlation to the creativity of the psychology team. And what did you think of the fact that the rest of them are here? Oh, it’s very sort of true. Sunday morning, they’re here. I can’t even think about how to change the world. And I think this, oh, but definitely, I see why I’m interested. I know somebody that I think is interesting. So of course, it’s a little cool. Yeah. A solid, sub-integrated, and very cool laboratory. OK. So there were, it was much better. Yeah. Yeah. I have to teach you the things that I’m saying. I had a light. I had a light. I had a light. Right. Right. Anyway, I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ll try to understand. Really? So everyone should have a copy of it. Looks like everybody. Hello. Hello. Looks like everybody’s here this week. For those of you who weren’t here last week, you could really miss anything. All right. So does everybody have a copy of this? OK. I’ve been rewriting the introduction to this manuscript. I do take my own advice, by the way, at times. I had mentioned to you before that I think I mentioned to discuss. And if I didn’t, I should have. In terms of the techniques for writing an essay, you should write the essay. And then you should put aside what you wrote and write an outline that’s like 10 sentences long. And then you should write it again. I do that all the time. So what you have here, let me see in terms of pages. Well, on the first page, 16 to 16 and 1 half, that’s stuff you’ve already read that’s hopefully written more clearly. But from 17 and 1 half to the end of 18 is actually an outline of the argument in the whole book. And hopefully, I’m going to go over that. And that will provide the transition to the second part of the course, which starts today. I tried to start it last week, but I had a hard time because I wasn’t in the right sort of mood to discuss this sort of material. And also because I’ve been working on the first half of this manuscript for about a year. I spent the previous year working on the second half, but a year goes a long time. And I’d forgotten a lot of what I was trying to say. And it took more effort than I was willing to engage in last week and the week before to make sense out of the chapter on contamination of experience with death. I mean, what I’m trying to do in that chapter is to describe the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness and also to portray how mythology represents the consequences of the emergence of self-consciousness. And I want to do that for a particular reason. It’s not because I’m really necessarily all that interested in that as a topic. It’s sort of a precursor to discussing why it is that we differ in our emotional responses from animals, why our emotional responses, I think, are more heightened and also maybe why we’re actually more conscious. So it’s a lot of background work to describe that. Trying to figure out how self-consciousness differs from consciousness, but that’s difficult. That’s a difficult procedure in and of itself, let alone when it’s just the basis of another argument. So let’s go over the outline of the manuscript. Hopefully that will help clear up in your minds some of the things that I’ve been discussing. It helped clear them up in my mind. Okay, so this is the basic argument. The world can be construed as a forum for action as well as a place for things. And we’ve discussed that in great detail. And I would say, well, scientific methodology constitutes the formal process whereby we describe the world as a place of things. Narrative, on the other hand, myth, literature, and drama portrays the world as a forum for action. The two forms of description have been unnecessarily set at odds because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former, that is, the world as a place of things, is what is from the perspective of intersubjective perception. So we can get a description of the objective status of things by comparing our perceptions. The domain of the latter, that’s the domain of mythology, describing the world as a forum for action, is what is and what should be from the perspective of emotion and action. You can see why those two things would have been confused because both, in a sense, are an attempt to describe what is, although myth also attempts to describe what should be. But you can describe what is in terms of its implications for your behaviour, which is a perfectly valid approach. Or you can describe what is from the perspective of objective description, which is also a valid approach. Because in both cases, you’re engaged in a process that looks similar. It’s easy to confuse one form of description and its purposes with the other. And I would say, well, that’s being basically, that confusion has led to the dissociation of scientific knowledge from moral knowledge or from mythological knowledge into their unnecessary opposition. I mean, look, either they’re both valid and we don’t understand how that can be, or one’s valid and the other isn’t. And it looks like all the evidence suggests that it’s scientific. If one’s valid and the other isn’t, all the evidence suggests that scientific knowledge is valid. It seems a bit unreasonable, given that all human cultures up to the European culture, essentially 500 years ago, lived according to mythological presuppositions. We have pure science, but we also have applied science. And it’s important to a lot of… Like clinical psychology. Right. And in any branch of science, we talk about basic research, but also applications. Sure. Are we talking about that second domain? I would say absolutely. Pure science is meaningless if it doesn’t imply what you should do, but the application of science necessarily implies what you should do. That’s right, but I would say as soon as you’re applying science to what should be, it’s not science anymore. It’s mythology that’s operating under the guise of science. And this explains, for me at least, why, for example, there are… I teach a personality course. There’s endless numbers of competing personality theories, many of them predicated on completely different presuppositions. They all provide a coherent story, more or less. Fairly coherent, as a matter of fact, even though they don’t agree. And the truth of the matter appears to be that if you’re a therapist and you pick any of those stories and you apply it according to the rules of that story, it works, about as well as any other story. I mean, people don’t like to admit that if they’re adherents of one theory or another, and behaviorism seems to be good for some specified things better than perhaps some other doctors. But I think you can understand that not from a scientific perspective so much as from the perspective of mythology, which is to say that if you come to therapy and you have no story whatsoever, the provision of a coherent story for you is already an improvement over your current status, even though you might not be being exposed to the best of all possible stories, so to speak. But I’d also say that this is part of the reason why there’s such a problem in constructing psychiatric classifications for mental illness, because they’re not scientific. At the bottom of them is some conception, implicit or explicit. It’s implicit in the DSM by design about what constitutes mental health, because you have to define illness in contrast to health. And as soon as you start talking about health, whether it’s mental or otherwise, you’re not in an objective domain anymore. You have to make judgments about what constitute ideals. And I think this is part of the problem that psychiatric diagnosis has not dealt with. It’s part of the problem with psychiatric diagnosis in general and it’s a problem that’s generally not dealt with explicitly. So if it’s an applied science, it’s pulling in some mythological presuppositions. I don’t think there’s any way around that. I think we just have to recognize that that’s the case. So you have the world as a place of things and the world as a forum for action. As a forum for action, it appears to be composed of the three constituent elements that we’ve discussed in detail. Unexplored territory. Explored territory. And the process that mediates between the two. If you analyze the characteristic emotional responses of the human brain, that analysis reveals that the brain has adapted itself to the world as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. This implies to me the fact of this biological adaptation implies that the environment is in reality a forum for action as well as a place for things. So that implies, I mean, if you buy the argument that adaptation does take place to the environment, and if we’ve adapted to the environment as a forum for action, then it implies that descriptions of the world as a forum for action are in fact descriptions of something that’s real. That’s a strange idea, but it still strikes me as if you accept the presuppositions, then that’s a necessary conclusion. Each of the three constituent elements of the world as a forum for action has a characteristic nature or personality, and it has garnered mythological or narrative representations as such. These representations have the structural aspect of natural categories and appear relatively stable across cultural place and time. Un-explored territory is the great mother, source of all determinate things, creative and destructive, threatening and promising. Explored territory is the great father, cumulant of ancestral wisdom, simultaneously protective and tyrannical. The process that mediates between the two is the individual, son of the great father and mother, the heroic word who creates the cosmos, that’s a Christian viewpoint, and the adversary who spitefully rejects that creation, about who we will talk for the remainder of the course. Group identification, which I think might be conceptualized as ritual imitation of the dead, protects the undeveloped individual from the terrible forces that rule unexplored territory, which is only to say that when you’re on familiar ground you’re not anxious, you know what to do. The reason you know what to do is because you’re imitating the actions of people who at some point in the past figured out what to do and transmitted that knowledge to you across the generations. And you also tend to act in the presence of others who also constitute your own culture, who are also beneficiaries of the same old culture that you have been taught to have. Who are also beneficiaries of the same wisdom and who therefore act predictably. And it’s the fact of the predictability in fact that protects you from unpredictability by definition. Absolute identification with the group, however, interferes with the process that maintains and updates the group and increases the likelihood that protective strategies designed to maintain the integrity of the group with necessary strategies will escalate into uncontrolled warfare. So then the question is, given that if you identify with your group too strongly, it will actually come to undermine your group in the long run, plus increase the likelihood that you’ll engage in perhaps unnecessary counterproductive conflicts with other groups that surround your group. So why do people do it? What is it that motivates us to adopt absolute identification with the group? We know group identification has its problems. If I identify with the group and you identify with a different group, the stage is set for our conflict. But we also know that you have to identify with the group. So there has to be a balance struck while people there are situations in which that balance is undermined and people adopt absolute identification with the group. Then you get the construction of totalitarian or authoritarian states. And the motto of a totalitarian state is everyone should act exactly the same way. So we’re all absolutely predictable. That’s what totalitarian means. Act the same way, think the same way, look the same way, believe the same things in your individualities absolutely constrained by your dogmatic identification. And the advantage to that is that everyone becomes extraordinarily predictable because everyone is a clone fundamentally. The question is why would people do that? What’s the attraction of absolute identification given that it’s all evident that such identification also has negative consequences? Why would you bother with it? Well, that’s what we’re going to try to discuss for the rest of the class. What forces motivate us to subjugate or to subjugate the group? What are the forces that motivate us to subjugate the group? What are the forces that motivate us to subjugate our individuality to the group? Well, then the question immediately arises essentially. What are the consequences? First of all, what is individuality? What does it mean? And second of all, what are the consequences of that individuality? That’s what I’m trying to address in the chapter on self-consciousness and the contamination of experience with death. Where would you put something like religious order? In terms of group identification? And individuality? Well, I actually discussed this immediately in the last class on the subject of self-consciousness because Amelia invited me for dinner last night at the Thaugley dinner and this is something that we discussed there. I mean, it strikes me that the purpose of a religious order or any discipline for that matter is partly the erection of necessary boundaries of order. I mean, you have to have boundaries of order. What those boundaries are can differ. I mean, to some degree, there’s variation across groups. But the fact that the boundaries has to be there. It’s partly so that you can carve out a domain of self-consciousness so that you can carve out a domain in which you’re comfortable to act. But it’s also partly because and this is Nietzsche’s observation, primarily, if you don’t identify with a group, you never discipline yourself. You never subject it to any discipline. As a consequence, you’re never able to actually foster any sort of true individuality. So I would say voluntary slavery is a precondition for freedom. And a dogmatic group or a dogmatic group is a precondition for freedom. And a dogmatic group or a dogmatic group or a doctrine, let’s say a doctrine, because that’s less rigid. A doctrine is something to which you can adhere voluntarily. And the purpose of that is that it excludes all sorts of possibilities so that’s its negative aspect in a sense. But it also allows you to develop the skills necessary to do something. And so, I mean, the example I was thinking about, that’s the apprenticeship law. So you want to be a concert pianist? What you do first is learn how it was that all other concert pianists essentially behaved in the past. You develop your technical skills and that means that your individuality is essentially subjugated to a discipline. Once you’ve got the skills, then you can transcend the limitations that that discipline placed on you. So that’s why I wanted everyone to read the abuse, use and abuse of history because this is a problem that he had dealt with for a long period of time, despite the fact that he was a radical anti-Christian. One of the things he constantly pointed out in his philosophy was that Catholicism was a precondition to European greatness in a sense because although it was arbitrary and unfair and authoritarian and doctrinally bound and destroyed all sorts of useful things, it also forced people to discipline their other spirits in a sense, but their minds were not able to discipline their other spirits in a sense. So that’s why I wanted everyone to read the abuse of history and to understand the importance of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline of the discipline in a sense, but their minds at least. He said if you could learn to think one way in a disciplined manner, then once you develop that ability then you could use the ability to think in all sorts of different ways. But you could never do that. You would never have the freedom without first of all having gone through the disciplinarian procedure. So like the Jesuits or the Franciscans would you consider the totalitarian freedom of the people that the people that the people Would you consider it a totalitarian group? Well, it would depend on the particular group. I mean, groups tend towards a totalitarian status, partly because for a group to last for a length of time, it has to protect its structure, which means it has to exclude information that would result in the undermining of its structure. So for a group to exist, it has to say, so to speak, this group is the best group, and the best thing you can do is be an eminent member of this group. That’s a perfectly reasonable moral statement. It’s just incomplete, at least as far as I’m concerned, because the problem with that statement is that it eliminates the fact that, in order for the group to maintain itself, at least some of the group’s members have to transcend its limitations so that they can update the group. But there’s a tension. There’s a tension between the group and the individual that cannot be resolved. I think that’s a more or less reasonable statement. I mean, if you’re a great Newtonian physicist at the end of the 19th century, what that might mean is that you’re actually such a great Newtonian physicist that you undermine the whole structure of Newtonian physics. So there’s a tension there. And you see this in mythologies as well. In the New Testament, for example, Christ is presented as someone who mastered his culture’s doctrine completely by the time he was 12. That’s why he could argue with the elders of the temple. So there’s tremendous recognition in that story of the fact that before a doctrine can be transcended, it has to be absolutely mastered. Otherwise, you risk. Otherwise, your heroism, so to speak, risks only being surface heroism, which is it’s actually undisciplined rebellion, and you’re just using the mask of heroism to hide the fact that you’re undisciplined from yourself. See, I think this is particularly important for people in cultures like the North American culture, because we tend to have a notion in our minds that I think was fed by humanistic psychology mostly in the 60s, that groups are necessarily tyrannical and that what a group does is squash your individuality. That’s true. It does that. But the other side of the coin is that, well, as it’s squashing it, it’s also fostering it, and there’s no way that you can get one without the other, although some groups are more totalitarian than others. So that’s what a group does. It has to do that, or it will disappear. And if it disappears, well, we know what a group does. It brings order to chaos. So if your group disappears, then there’s nothing but chaos. So the classic oriental viewpoint is that the cosmos is supposed to be properly balanced, right, for there to be the proper meaning. There has to be the right amount of order and the right amount of chaos. And, well, that’s that. But both things are absolutely necessary. Okay. So I said, absolute identification with the group is motivated by the negative consequences of the development of self-consciousness. So I guess you see, I was interested in trying to answer a number of questions sort of simultaneously. Why is it that you would say you’re a neo-Nazi? That’s a good example. To say that you’re a neo-Nazi is kind of a strange thing to say, because if you’re a neo-Nazi, you’re the same as all the other neo-Nazis. So the you has almost disappeared entirely. You picked this group identification. Now, the consequences of the group identification are that you surround yourself with a whole group of people who think exactly like you. So there’s no threat within the group whatsoever. All anomalous information is placed in the outside of the group. But the other thing that’s interesting about being a neo-Nazi is that you’re in it, theoretically, at least as far as you’re concerned, because that’s the best group to be a part of. So you’re very moral and upright as a consequence of your identification. The thing that’s peculiar is that it also gives you an immediate target. And the target is a target for all your resentment and hatred and cruelty and all those things that you wouldn’t really think that you would have as the member of the most optimal conceivable group. Of course, you justify that to yourself by saying that all that cruelty and resentment and hatred is necessary in the service of the group ideals. But, see, this makes me very skeptical. And that’s a rationalization as far as I’m concerned. I think the person in that situation has constructed up the world so that simultaneously they can be protected, although they’re cowardly, they can be protected from anomalous information with the group identification. And they can have all the advantages of retaining their cruelty and resentment and hatred while justifying them morally. The question then becomes, where does that… this is something I think psychology has a real problem with because we don’t have a very good time grappling with higher order emotions like resentment or jealousy or cruelty. And we have a hard enough time with base level emotions like anxiety. It says, why are… where does the resentment and cruelty come from? It’s what’s at the base of it. Why is it that someone would turn against… well, let’s not necessarily say turn against life, although you certainly do see that. But at least turn against large segments of life and attempt to stamp it out of existence. That’s why I’m trying to write this chapter on the consequences of the emergence of self-consciousness. So this is the basic idea. Development of human self-consciousness has contaminated the domain of unexplored territory with the threat of death. That’s something that makes us different than animals. I think that the valence… we know from a very early age, it’s hard to say how early, four or five maybe, that we not only are able to react emotionally to phenomena that we can’t predict, I mean we can do that when we’re two. And animals do that a long ways down the phylogenetic chain. We have added to that the possibility of inferring from the mere presence of the known, the possibility of our imminent demise or painful demise, one of the two. And that’s something that’s unique to people. And I think that’s a very large part of what it means to be self-conscious. And that’s the sort of thing we’re going to try to discuss today. When you’re self-conscious, it means that you can view yourself as an object, although you’re a subject, you can view yourself as if you were an object in relationship to other objects. And the thing about an object is that it’s something that has defined characteristics, right? If you can identify an object, you know its borders. So this book has four sides basically. And it’s certain extension in space. That’s what makes it an object. Well, if you’re self-conscious, what that means is that you can view yourself as an object that has limitations. And we know our spatial limitations, they’re not that hard to define. Maybe even animals are aware of their spatial limitations in a sense, their extension in space. But the thing that really makes us unique is that we’re aware of our temporal limitations, which is that we have a beginning and an end. And that is something I think that there’s no evidence for at all in the animal painting. It’s something that makes us absolutely unique. And one of the things that that’s done to us is height, I think, has heightened the emotional significance of the unknown. Because we know that, well, you see this, say, in hypochondriacal conditions. Someone has a, well, maybe they have what a normal person would regard as a backache. And the normal person, so to speak, would say, well, my back hurts in the way they go to work. But the hypochondriacal person says, my back hurts, that’s the phenomenon. But the inference is, I might die. And so you say, well, the anomalous information is the backache. But it’s a window into a realm of unknown phenomena. Those unknown phenomena have a range of possibilities. And the range of possibilities is defined by death, fundamentally. So I think that’s one of the, when we say that we’re conscious, or much more conscious than animals or, say, self-conscious, one of the things that we’re saying is that the emotional valence of phenomena is heightened for us, because we can understand cognitively the consequences of things that strike us emotionally. So there’s a feedback. The way things are supposed to work is that, so to speak, simply put, your limbic system recognizes something as anomalous. So you focus your attention on a message that goes up to your profound cortex, and the message is anomalous information, reconfigured behavior so it goes away, or reconfigured mode of interpretation so that it’s no longer threatening. That’s perfectly fine. But if your pre-vital cortex then says, oh, yes, that really is much more threatening even than you might think as a consequence of your natural impulses, then there’s a feedback loop that develops where you see this in panic attacks, for example. Heart palpitations. Oh, no, I might die. Well, there you go. The whole system cycles out of control. The point being that the inhibitory mechanisms that have developed evolutionarily to help us conquer our fears can also be used to dramatically heighten them. And when we talk about the development of self-consciousness, that’s one of the things that we’re talking about, because that’s one of the things that it implies. I’m trying to understand, is self-consciousness possible within the context of group identification? Well, it’s much less possible. That’s one of the underground purposes of group identification. That’s underlying the argument that I’m trying to make all along. Why identify with the group? It essentially kills it. Subjugate suicide. That’s exactly right. Now, see, the problem with that is that, well, the question is, in some part, what’s the archetype of self-consciousness? What’s the hero? Now, this is a strange thing because it’s very paradoxical. Because something like us that’s self-conscious, part of that self-consciousness is self-consciousness of vulnerability. And you think, well, that’s the opposite of something as powerful as the notion of the hero. But it’s not at all. It’s a precondition for heroism. Because courage, which is an essential aspect of heroism, is predicated on recognition of vulnerabilities. You have to know you can be hurt before you can be brave. Otherwise, you’re just stupid, basically. I hear you saying two things, one of which I agree with, though, and I’m not sure if that’s what you’re saying. The first is that we can abstract death. We can think about it, and it can raise this emotional balance. Right. It’s also a defining characteristic of our being, the fact that we’re vulnerable to it. Okay. And the second thing that I hear you saying is that humans respond stronger to the presence of anomaly. That’s right. That’s the argument I’m making. We react more strongly to the presence of anomaly in general because we can make inferences about what the unknown might mean. Which is only to say, you’ll plan for the future. And why is that? Well, it’s because you can draw conclusions from the present, from occurrences in the present, about possibilities that may happen in the future. For example, you have a healthcare program. Well, that’s because you’ve drawn the inference that a being such as yourself is vulnerable to a whole class of phenomena. Which includes, well, certainly the possibility of illness of any set amount of severity up to a fatal illness. So you make plans to take that fact into account. The fact that we’ll do that is one of the things that drives us to construct cultures, I think. And that’s part of the argument I’m trying to make as well. Why are people engaged in construction of cultures? I still tend to see it as, I wouldn’t say that humans react stronger to the anomaly. Because, like you said, when a rat is presented with an anomalous something in the cage, it freezes. And you rarely see humans freeze. That’s true. But the reason is, I think, because animals don’t have this cognition to be able to, they can’t necessarily remember or make these natural categories. Whereas we can. And so what we would say is anomalous information only breaks certain levels. And when it does break, maybe we can break these levels consciously with our thought. But I wouldn’t say that that reaction is stronger than this. You’re touching on another argument that we’ll get to really near the end of the course, which is that although self-consciousness heightens the affective valence of something like the unknown, it also provides a mode of dealing with it that animals don’t have. That’s why, well, I don’t want to get into that part of the argument right now, though, because it’s very complicated and it sort of presumes that we’ve gone through all this as a presupposition. So because self-like, I’ll put it very quickly, the Christian myth essentially presupposes two things. One is that, and I’ll talk a little bit about Buddhism here in a minute, too. One is that it was the development of self-consciousness that knocked people out of paradise. So that’s number one. Into the normal world, and that’s the world that’s characterized by awareness of nakedness that’s manifested as shame, which I think is precisely equivalent to knowledge of vulnerability. What else would it mean? And knowledge of death, and knowledge of good and evil, right? All those things are congregated together in the Genesis story. But the rest of the Christian story, so to speak, the rest of the story, is how heightened consciousness can actually be used as an antidote. So the thing is that although a small dose of something might kill you, a larger dose might cure you, and that’s basically the notion that underlies the depth of mythology in general, as far as I can tell. So a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. That’s the apple that the snake provides. Eat this, you’re like a god. You know who you are. Well, what happens when you know who you are? Well, in the human case, it’s not. You get all the knowledge of god, so to speak, without any of the power. So you can see your borders all of a sudden. You know that you’re going to die. You have to start making plans for the future. That means you have to work, which is another thing that happens in Genesis as well, so you’re condemned to work. Well, why do you work? Well, it’s because you can view the future as a place of negative possibilities, all of which are hypothetical, all of which you attempt to conquer even before they appear. That’s planning. And when you store up grain for the winter, it’s because you can perceive anomalous information where it hasn’t even manifested itself in a sense. That’s intelligence. We don’t tend to emphasize the emotional aspect of intelligence. We don’t have that much of an aspect of intelligence that much. But extraordinary anxiety, I think, is part of the force that drives intelligence. So anyways, we’ll get to the other part of that argument later. Okay, so I’m trying to make the point that the fact that people have developed self-consciousness has made us much more susceptible to anxiety and also to curiosity, I think, as it turns out that other animals are. It’s also provided motivation for us to try to reject the fact of our self-consciousness in any possible way. And that provides additional motivation for adoption of an authoritarian stance. It’s the fact of your ignorance and limitation that bring about all the painful things that are associated with vulnerability, basically. I mean, you think about the occasions when you have to admit to making a mistake, for example. It’s absolutely necessary, but it’s very, very annoying. It’s embarrassing, as a matter of fact, because what it means to make a mistake is that you admit to yourself an essential aspect of your vulnerability, which is that you’re obviously imperfect and so on and so on. You have to actually make a statement about that. It is the case. If you want to embarrass someone, I mean, that’s basically what you do socially, right? It’s like they’re doing a good job of hiding their vulnerabilities and just pop up a little information that makes one absolutely evident. They’ll turn red and fall into themselves, so to speak. One way of dealing with that is to try to rid yourself of your individuality, as one of the things group identification serves. The contamination of the unknown with the threat of mortality, like an animal, a deer or something that’s in a herd, an antelope, in a herd of antelopes, if they see a lion nearby, well actually herds of antelopes will graze quite quietly with lions nearby, as a general rule. The lions have to manifest a particular pattern of behavior before the antelopes become afraid, and that’s not really because they’re afraid that the antelopes would kill them. It’s because they’re hardwired to recognize a particular pattern of predatory behavior and respond to it with fear. And if antelopes were self-conscious and could think they’d get the hell out of the way whenever there was a lion anywhere near, and they don’t, they’re not afraid of death. They’re afraid of anomaly. We’re afraid of anomaly, but it’s contaminated. For us, it’s contaminated with the possibility of, it’s not just death, that’s just the biggest aspect of it, but it’s all imaginable suffering, basically. That’s how your imagination can grip onto things. Say if you’re alone at night, that’s a good example. You’re a little bit less stable than you might otherwise be that day. If, say, some little nagging thing is worrying you, it’s easy for your imagination to take that little chunk of information and blow it up in any number of possible ways. So it seems like for animals, the anomaly either gives you this emotional valence or you’re here. Whereas humans have this huge array of, you know, we’re normally down here because we construct these stories that protect us, but then the thought can bring us, can heighten us to a level where we might need it to get us the heck out of. Well, that’s, I mean, you’re referring to the possibility of moving the information to sort of up and down levels of stories. Well, I think that’s one of the things, that’s another one of the things that our cognitive flexibility has allowed. It’s a negative thing in some ways because it doesn’t, it means that you can make a mountain out of a molehill. It’s positive for all sorts of other obvious reasons. And then you look at, in regards to what the threat of death does for civilizations. You think about the Egyptians. I mean, the Egyptians spent their whole time, essentially, dealing with death. That was the basis of their whole culture. I mean, their civilizations were devoted in large part towards construction of these massive pyramids. And that took a lot of work. It took a lot of cultural energy. We know some of the mythology behind that. I mean, for the Egyptians, the Pharaoh was the intermediary between heaven and earth. To the degree that you participated in the life of the Pharaoh, you were granted at least partial status, the partial status of having an immortal soul. Well, that was a potent enough motivator for the Egyptians so that, you know, they engaged in what was essentially a recreational cultural activity. You can’t really define what they’re doing in terms of any simplistic notions of making sure there was enough to eat or any rational economically motivated activity. Ideas, as far as I can tell, anyways, they put a lot of work into building those monuments. The same thing is true for medieval Christians with regards to the cathedrals. Often the constructions of those cathedrals are sort of equivalent in a sense to the space program in the 1960s. It’s not a height of technological endeavor. You know a lot of our cultural activity is motivated by fear of death, as we plan. It’s not just death, it’s vulnerability in general. Alright, so the idea is this. The fact of the development of self-consciousness has meant that for us the unknown is contaminated with the threat of death. It has much more extreme emotional valence for us than it does for other animals. Now, one of the consequences of that is we’re much more motivated to plan for the future and to construct cultural structures in general. The other thing is we’re much more motivated to get ourselves away from any information that’s anomalous, to reject it, to protect ourselves from it. That’s one of the things that underlies our temptation towards the adoption of authoritarianism. As an authoritarian says, and what’s at the basis of authoritarianism? The authoritarianism is either the personal adoption of omniscience, say in Hitler’s case or in Stalin’s case, or it’s the secondary adoption of omniscience in an even more cowardly manner. Someone like Hitler, at least this is the way I look at it, he was sort of on the front lines of the authoritarian struggle and someone could have taken a shot at him at any time. But all the followers of Hitler, they got to identify with his power and his beliefs without actually even putting themselves on the line. And that’s the essential nature of an authoritarian stance is I know everything that needs to be known. So if you offer any information that’s foreign to my particular theory, it’s obvious that you’re an agent of what we say an agent of chaos. Something to be eliminated as efficiently as possible. It’s adoption of omniscience, that’s what authoritarianism means. And the motivation for that is that if you know everything, there isn’t anything unknown. And if the unknown has this sort of valence, you can understand why people are motivated to get rid of it. Now the problem with the development of an authoritarian personality, this is why I wanted you to read Milton. Because Milton’s parable, Paradise Lost, is about the consequences of the adoption of an omniscience stance. That’s the devil’s sin, right? He says, I want to be like God, I want to take the place of God. As soon as that happens in Milton’s story, the devil’s cast down into hell and he can get out of it at any time just by admitting he was wrong. But he won’t admit he was wrong. And the reason for that is that if he admitted he was wrong, he’d have to face all the chaos that he’d been avoiding. This is more of a prize reading of the same parable. It’s a good parable about the rise of states like the Soviet Union. There was a cumulative evidence gathered up over the course of it. I mean it was certainly, if it wasn’t evident by the 50s that communism wasn’t working, it was certainly evident by the end of the 60s. It still took another 20, 30 years before the system, well it’s not like people gave it up really, it’s just more like the, it just, it wasn’t even self-supporting anymore, it couldn’t go on any farther. They wouldn’t admit to any anomalous information, which was information that would suggest that their particular theory was wrong. I mean it’s not as if it’s a stance that only characterizes communists, that’s certainly, it’s just the stance of authoritarianism in general. Now, you know, what we’ve talked about so far, given the constituent elements of the world, chaos, order, and individuality. We’ve only talked about the positive aspect of the individual, not the negative aspect. That’s what we’re going to talk about from here on in. The positive aspect of the individual mythology is the part that voluntarily admits to the existence of the unknown, and that admission is a precondition for the next stage, which is creative exploration of that unknown, and then it’s transformation into something that’s either irrelevant or something beneficial, and then, you know, communication of that among the group. Well, the question is, what’s the pattern that’s opposite to that? And you can’t sum it up in a sentence or in a few words, like these other, these are all natural categories. Natural categories are full of all sorts of vaguely related information, so to speak. I actually think this is the reason why mythology tends to present these different domains of the world as a form for action, as personalities. Because a personality is something that’s very complex, and it’s got lots of different levels of motivation, lots of different potentials for action, and the adversary of the hero is a personality, Christianity, that personality is the devil, and it is the case, It is the case, this is a claim by Eliade anyways, that Christianity has the most well-developed notion of the negative aspect of the individual. That’s potentially arguable. Anyways, I wanted you to read Milton’s, well, the funny thing is, if you look at the Old and New Testament, there’s almost no reference at all to the mythological figure of the devil. A few sentences and that’s it in the entire book. All of the mythology that we all vaguely know about that describes the devil, that’s all. It’s dreamlike imagery that sort of surrounds the canonical writings of Christianity. It’s all storytelling and mythology, and Milton tried to codify it. That’s kind of interesting, and I would say, well, why did it develop? And it’s because people have always been fascinated by what constitutes the essential aspect of evil. And the theory that we’d be discussing in this class suggests that, well, evil, for the sake of argument, it’s a pattern of action, and a pattern of interpretation that leads to actions. We tend to, those patterns of action, although we see them in story form, first of all emerge from the forms of behaviors. And people observe the behaviors and tell stories about them and imitate them and so on until we got to the point of abstraction where we could construct an image about the pattern of behavior. Say, well, mythological representations of the devil, it’s not just the devil, but the negative counterpart of the hero throughout history, are cumulative attempts to formulate an image of the pattern of behavior and interpretation that characterizes all the negative aspects of the individual. So we’re going to try to figure out what those attributes are. Well, one of them is, and this is why I think perhaps the one Milton stresses above all else is pride, and that’s refusal to admit to error. And what does that mean, if you think about it? It means that refusal to admit to error is refusal to admit to the existence of anomalous information. It’s precisely the same thing. And you know that, well, it’s easy to figure out too, because all you have to do is observe yourself in the course of an argument. So you’re arguing about someone, arguing with someone, about something that’s meaningful to you. And you know you’re wrong. Because you know sometimes, maybe, either their argument is just so much more well-constructed than yours, or you know perfectly well that the moral ground they stand on is much firmer than yours. The thing that stops you from admitting to the anomalous information, which is actually that you’re nowhere near as good as you think you are, the thing that stops you is pride. Why is it pride and arrogance for that matter in the context of the devil and who is telling the stories and what context? Why isn’t it simply the refusal to submit to the authority of the church? Well… And to the authority of God. Look, often… Why one interpretation instead of the other? Well, okay, that’s a good question. Look, there’s been a lot of books written lately by Elaine Pagels, for example. She wrote a book about the devil. She basically said that the whole concept was extraordinarily dangerous. It was primarily a Christian concept. She said that the function of the image of the devil was essentially to allow Christians greater ease in defining those who didn’t hold the same beliefs as them, as enemies. You know, I mean, you can see the rationale in that argument. That’s what happens. As soon as there’s a war, the enemy gets demonized. Well, it’s not much of a leap because a stranger is an agent of chaos anyways. Chaos has a reptilian aspect, so to speak. You don’t have to push people very hard before they’re willing to buy that interpretation. What I’m trying to say is that basically, is that these natural categories, they tend to merge and meld and mix together, sort of helter-skelter in our heads. They’re not very well defined, and they have fuzzy borders. Now, it’s very simple for someone to say, all those individuals who do not accept established order are prima facie agents of the devil. And you can understand why they would say that. Because if you don’t accept established order, then you’re a threat to stability, and you are an agent of chaos. Fine. But the problem with that line of argument is that, by that definition, you can’t distinguish those who update the group from those who want to destroy it. Right? Isn’t that, in fact, quite often difficult to tell? Yes, it is difficult to tell. But if you want to make a categorical statement about what constitutes the essential aspect of evil, you can’t say that evil is the process that undermines the group. Because you can’t distinguish the process that undermines the group from the process that updates it. And you know the process that updates it is evil. So whatever evil is has to be something else. So, like, people also tend to… I would also say that, in the Old Testament, one of the great sins for the ancient Hebrews was making idols of God. Which is essentially to say that it was considered immoral to categorize something like God in terms of something that was actually understandable. You always had to allow for the transcendent aspect of God. Well, I would say that people make the same mistake when they’re discussing evil. They want to make an idol of it, which is to say they want to make a thing that’s definable. So it might be the process that undermines established order. Or it might be aggression. It might be jealousy. It might be whatever. There’s all sorts of emotions. It might be sexual desire. And that’s being demonized time and time again. That’s making an idol of it. Well, I would say just as you have to regard the individual, known as a thing that can be defined but as a process… Which is to say, I would say, in archaic language of spirit, you also have to do the same thing with the negative aspect of the individual. It’s a process, known as a thing. And it’s the process by which anomalous information is rejected. So, is that a reasonable answer? Does that satisfy your question? Well, the thing is, look, it’s confusing. And what we’re trying to do to some degree is clear up the boundaries of these natural categories. Because it’s very easy for the figure of the devil, so to speak, to take on the aspects of the tyrannical aspects of order. And also the negative aspects of chaos. I mean, Girtha described the devil as the strange son of chaos. And we tend to think of anything that’s at the moment negatively valence as evil. That’s just an example of fuzzy thinking. Since we’re trying to get at the basis of what constitutes motivation for social conflict here, it’s very useful to start clarifying up the descriptions. We can’t say, well, the unknown is evil. That’s not any good. Because although it’s very dangerous, if you don’t have any around, you come to a halt. And you can’t say, well, culture is evil. Although you can say, well, it tends towards authoritarianism. That’s a problem. It also provides you with necessary security. You can’t say that the process that transforms order is evil either. Because although it can be very upsetting, if you don’t have it, you come to a halt as well. So by a process of elimination, in a sense, you’re left with the question, what can you define as evil? Where does it go, assuming it exists? Assuming it exists is a good question. Well, it depends on your definition. It exists. It’s Christianity, I don’t know. No, it doesn’t just exist as a religious abstraction. We know that. It exists. That’s why we have things like the Nuremberg Trials. And that’s why we have things like the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I mean, even though we’re not very good at defining it, and we don’t exactly know what it means, when it occurs, even in terms of consensus, people can tell. So, hopefully what we can do is try to figure out what it is and what it isn’t. Because it’s easy to say, if I’m part of group A, all members of group B are evil. And you can understand why there’s motivation to do that. It’s like group B poses a real threat to group A. It’s not a non-trivial threat. It has nothing to do with their moral nature, in a sense. And it’s very easy for people to make that presumption. So one of the things I want to do is clear up the categories. So that it’s no longer possible to rationalize the notion that just because you’re part of group B and I’m part of group A, you as a member of group B are necessarily evil. And I’m necessarily all good. So, in a sense, when you label another group, when you say that group is the devil, you’re sort of taking on the devil architect yourself. Well, I would say that that’s necessarily the case, yeah. As soon as you adopt, because that’s one aspect of it anyways, it’s the inappropriate adoption of omniscience. Like let’s say you can even know it is necessary for me to protect my group. And also that my group is valuable. Two things which, for me, would never create any debate. We know the function of a group. The problem is when you say, one, I personally am actually, what would you say, the most admirable possible exponent of my group. Which means, first of all, that I actually understand its structure. And that, given such understanding, I actually acted out, both of which are highly debatable propositions. And also that my understanding of my group process is sufficiently profound for me to determine with absolute certainty that you’re wrong. That for me, that’s arrogance, I think. That’s pride. It’s also the underground adoption of an omniscience stance. As soon as you do that, well, there are certain consequences which we’ll detail. Okay, I’m confused. We have the positive part of the individual as somebody who accepts anomaly. And we have the negative part of the individual as a process that rejects anomaly. However, we’ve already discussed how the positive part updates society. And yet, we’ve also discussed how the negative part is a process that also updates society. You know, through the devil updates. No, no, the idea here, the idea essentially was that if you’re in a group, say you’re the expo of a particular group, from within the group, it’s very difficult for you to determine the difference between the power that wants to just lay the group to waste and the power that will update it. Because they look very much the same. Which is why revolutionary heroes, who are often heretical, are so badly treated by group members. It’s like it’s because they’re indistinguishable from random agents of chaos. Well, at least more or less indistinguishable. Usually I think you can tell the difference, but people are not necessarily willing to admit it. Okay, so we’re still saying that the negative part of the individual is the one that rejects anomaly. Right. Knowing that it’s there. Knowing that it’s there. Which is to say, something occurs and at least at one level of analysis you know that it’s undermining one of your theories. And you say, well, no. It doesn’t exist. I think given that the individual is the process, the positive aspect of the individual would be an aggressive means toward the unknown. Which would be the hero. And then the negative would be the group or the culture. Which is instead of… Well, it’s partly that. I mean that’s why in the diagrams that I’ve drawn, the relationship has always been like this. Because the negative aspect of the individual heightens the catastrophic danger of the group. Which is to say that if you take a group that’s entirely composed of individuals who reject anomaly, what you have is a tyranny. So to the degree that the group is composed of individuals who reject anomaly, it will become a tyranny. One of the things that we’re trying to discuss in this class and to formulate over time is the relationship between individual action and group identification. Which is to say, what can you do to ensure that your group does not only… Your group tending towards tyranny as it necessarily will, will not absolutely transform itself into tyranny over time. And the only thing you can do as an individual is to ensure that when an anomalous piece of information pops its ugly head up. And makes you realize that you’re vulnerable and mortal. That you admit to its presence and take the necessary action. Whatever those actions happen to be. Now the problem is under some circumstances that doing so will be very dangerous to you. That’s essentially what culture is though. Culture is protecting you and denying that which you know, threatens you. Well that’s part of it. It’s also, that’s only part of it. It’s also, I think to think of it as a parent, which is to put it in its personality guides, is very accurate. Because a parent both protects you, but exposes you at a rate that you can tolerate. Now one of the things we’re going to talk about at the end of this class is how you can tell if you’re being exposed to the unknown at the proper rate. And I would say just in passing, that you can tell when you’re doing something that’s interesting to you, that’s meaningful. That’s an indication that you’re sufficiently secure so that you’re not going to fall apart, but also sufficiently open so that your stability will be maintained over time. The way that manifests itself is in the feeling of interest. That’s when self-consciousness vanishes in part, and time tends to disappear as well. So therefore can the hero be part of the group? Well the hero is necessar- well the hero has to be from the- The pre-condition of the hero is the group. Right. Right, but the hero can’t necessarily- can the hero identify with the group while still being a hero? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a matter of recognition of the value of the group, and also the necessity of its being. Yeah, without saying- well without trying to get from childhood to individuality without any group intermediation whatsoever, or without saying that the group is the be-all and end-all, which is what all groups want you to say about them, or without saying that the group is only an impediment to individuality, which it is not. It’s also a pre-condition. So it’s more a matter of appropriate- look, here’s an example. This is a really good- this is a good little parable. It’s from the Gnostic Gospel, that were discovered in the late 1950s. Christ is walking down the road, and it’s Sunday, or Saturday actually, it’s the Sabbath day, and there’s a man in a ditch and his sheep has fallen into a hole, and he’s picking the sheep out of the hole, which you’re not supposed to do on the Sabbath because that constitutes work. And Christ says to the man, if you know what you’re doing, then you’re blessed, and if you don’t, you’re a transgressor of the law and you’re cursed. Well, and then he wants to show him down the road, and that’s really quite an interesting philosophical position, because he said to the man, if you actually understand the significance of your actions, which is that you’re breaking a moral rule that’s there for a reason, you know why the rule is there, you appreciate its necessity, and you’ve decided as a consequence of that appreciation that it’s still worthwhile to pop the sheep out of the hole, no problem, but if it’s just a casual gesture, you know, there’s something wrong with the way you think, and you’ll pay for it sooner or later. It’s a nice little story. So in fact, there are a number of parables in the New Testament that are very much like that, but that’s, you know, it’s very simple. It’s a very powerful little story. Anyways, I want to read you a Buddhist myth briefly, because it will put into story form some of the ideas I’ve been trying to describe to you about the relationship between the development of self-consciousness and the contamination of things with the idea of death. Before you start, I just wanted to ask you something, because there’s something that’s been bothering me, which is our reference to the identification of the individual with the process, rather to the individual as the process. The thing that strikes me is that the group can be no more than a bunch of individuals. I mean, a group is a way of, it’s an abstraction that puts a bunch of individuals who are similar together. And furthermore, an individual is not the process unless it’s already has something to work the process on. I’m saying it’s, I mean, the known is as much a part of the individual as the process is part of the individual. I find that’s a perfectly good objection. This is the archetypal individual, right? Like, this is a map of experience in total, the whole thing. And you could say, well, you’re the sum total of your experience, which basically means that there’s an aspect of you that’s characterized by both participation in the unknown and the consequences of being exposed to it, and the group inside you and the archetypal individual inside you. But as an individual, your experience is all these things, and you can say, I am my experience. Okay, and I think that’s perfectly reasonable. But it’s the archetypal representations of the individuals that constitute the process. Because those archetypal representations of the wise king, for example, that’s an individual who just occupies a part of the whole, of all of the experience. So, yeah, I mean, what got me into this to begin with, at least in part, was the recognition that to the degree that there’s a group, it’s in your head. Right. Right, I mean, because it is an abstraction, it’s like people, you know, you see people, you go to the Canadian and the US border, they get out of the car, they look at the border. Because they think the border’s on the ground. It isn’t. It’s in their head. But they have it confused with the actual world. So the group is in the same way. The group is an intra-psychic, is something that has an intra-psychic incarnation. And that’s part of the reason that this course is called Social, it’s got a terrible title, it’s called Social Identity and Information Processing. Because social identity plays a role in the way you process information. It’s incarnated inside you, so to speak. Alright, yeah, because I’ve just been seeing every once in a while in this class, it seems like we’re confusing the archetypes with actual… Right, right. Well, that may be the case as well. I guess maybe that emerges in part because people’s natural tendency is to identify them more particularly with the group. And to counterbalance that, I guess I’m trying to put more stress on this aspect. And perhaps even someone on this, the negative. Positive. You’ve got both of the unknowns are positive and both of the unknowns are negative. Oh, yes, that’s a good problem. Alright. Positive. Right. Thank you. Okay, so let me read you this story. And what I want you to do is to… you may be ready, but what I want you to do is to think about it in terms of the categories that you know because you should be able to figure out what the story means now. The father of Prince Gautama, the Buddha, savior of the orient, determined to protect his son from desperate knowledge and tragic awareness, built for him an enclosed pavilion, a walled garden of earthly delights. Walled garden, by the way, means paradise. Only the healthy, the young, and the happy were allowed access to this earthly paradise. All signs of decay and degeneration were kept hidden from the prince. Now you remember what Buddha’s father had been visited by an oracle and the oracle told him that his son was either going to grow up to be a great religious leader or a leader of… like an earthly leader, a politician basically. And his father wanted him to be a politician, so he was trying to keep him away from anything that would lead him towards more spiritual concerns. So you could say in a sense, Gautama’s father wanted him to identify with the group, which is perfectly reasonable. So he built this walled enclosure and inside it were only things that were good. Everything terrible was kept outside. Immersed in the immediate pleasures of the senses, in physical love, dance and music, in beauty and pleasure, Gautama grew to maturity, protected absolutely from the limitations of mortal being. However, he grew curious, despite his father’s most particular attention and will, and resolved to leave his seductive prison. He wanted to find out what was beyond. So his father made preparations to… I think this was a procedure that was often followed in the Soviet Union. I think it was called a Potemkin village, if I remember correctly. Is that right? A Potemkin village was a village that the Soviets would construct to fool stupid global Westerners. So the Soviets would say, we have a wonderful society, come and look. So they’d construct this beautiful prison camp, and the Westerners would come with him and everyone would look at him healthy. And the Westerners would go back home and say, the Soviets aren’t so bad, look at this model prison. Anyways, that was a Potemkin village, and Gautama’s father’s basically trying to do the same thing here. So he wants to get outside of the wall, so his father whitewashes all the shacks and gets the beggars and everyone off the street. And there’s a little root carved out, and that’s the first trick. So he covers his path with flowers and displays alongside the road the fairest women of the kingdom. The prince sets out with all of his retinue in the shielded comfort of a chaperone chariot and delights in the panorama prepared for him. So he thinks, well outside world’s not so bad. The gods however decided to disrupt his most carefully laid plans and sent an aged man to hobble in full view alongside the road. The prince’s fascinated gaze fell upon the ancient interloper. Compelled by curiosity, he asked his attendant, what is that creature, stumbling, shabby, bent and broken beside my retinue? And the attendant answered, that’s a man like other men. He was born an infant, became a child, a youth, a husband, a father, a father of fathers. He has become old, subject to destruction of his beauty, his will and the possibilities of life. Like other men you say, hesitantly inquiring the prince. That means this will happen to me. And the attendant answered, inevitably with the passage of time. That’s a piece of anomalous information. What happens? Back to the walled city. The world collapsed in upon Katama and he asked to be returned to the safety of home. That’s a story about creative exploration. That’s exactly how children operate. They use their parents as a stable base and they explore outside that base of stability to the limits of their tolerance for anxiety. And when that tolerance is exceeded they go back to their parents. And the whole exploratory procedure, which is in fact the procedure that leads to maturation, is a constant interplay of moving out and coming back, and moving out and coming back. Theoretically, with each move out being slightly farther out, as the child learns that he can in fact tolerate exposure to the unknown world outside of the family. So you’ve got Katama’s father builds him a walled city and only good things are inside of it. That’s exactly what we do for our children fundamentally. I mean, what you do if you have a child, if you treat the child properly, is to protect it from all those forms of anomalous information that it cannot, by any stroke of imagination, deal with. So, you know, or even understand for that matter. And there’s all sorts of things that you don’t discuss with children unless the necessity arises. And it’s absolutely necessary. And that’s what it means to take care of them fundamentally. By the same token you don’t shield them from those things that they are capable of actually conquering. Anyways. He’s back home. In time his anxiety lessens. His curiosity grows, and he ventures outside again. It’s time to go out and send a sick man into view. This creature, he asked, is attendant, shaking and palsy, horribly afflicted, unbearable to behold, a source of pity and contempt. What is he? And the attendant answered. That is a man, like other men, who was born whole, but who became ill and sick, unable to cope, a burden to himself and others, suffering and incurable. Like other men, you say, inquired the prince, this could happen to me. And the attendant answered, no man is exempt from the ravages of disease. You see, this is a story about the development of self-consciousness. Because what Kutama is discovering are aspects that he encounters in the external world that are actually also characteristic of him. So it’s a consequence of being immersed in society. He sees that it is possible for people to die knowing that he is in fact a person. The inference is pretty easy to draw. That changes the structure of the world substantially. So now he knows that he could die and that he can become sick. So back to the castle once again. This time, however, it doesn’t work so well because he’s not so happy with the things that used to make him happy. So he goes out a third time. This time the gods send a dead man in a funeral procession. This creature, he asked his attendant, laying so still, appearing so fearsome, surrounded by grief and sorrow, lost and forlorn, what is he? The attendant answered, that’s a man, like other men, born of woman, beloved and hated, who once was you and now is the earth. Like other men, you say, inquired the prince, then this could happen to me. This is your end, said the attendant, and the end of all men. The world collapsed a final time and Katama asked to be returned home. But the attendant had orders from the prince’s father and took him instead to a festival of women who were occurring nearby in a grove in the woods. The prince was met by a beautiful assemblage who offered themselves freely to him without restraint in song and dance and play. In the spirit of sensual love, Katama could think only of death and the inevitable decomposition of beauty took no pleasure in the display. So for him, the consequences of the emergence of self-consciousness were the contamination of all good things with the possibility of death. That’s a funny story because it’s a descent from paradise, right? He falls out of the protected city, and that’s a catastrophe. But it’s also a precondition to his eventual regeneration as the Buddha. So that story is the story that we’ve been talking about over and over and over, which is this story. So this is the walled city. And outside of the walled city there’s nothing but chaos. And if a piece of anomalous information knocks down your structure, then you end up in a place that’s defined by chaos, which of course appears to be a complete catastrophe to you because your emotions are dysregulated and there’s nothing left but anxiety and depression. But it’s also the case that this descent, which in these stories, it’s absolutely inevitable. This is very interesting because the concept of original sin isn’t explicit in Buddhism, but it’s very much explicit in that story. Because the reason that Buddha goes outside the wall is because he’s curious. It’s like, hey, he’s happy. Everything’s going real well. So you might think, well, you know why spoil a good thing? But the point is he does spoil a good thing. It’s like, it’s not good enough. What’s outside the wall? And so it goes and looks, and the consequences are, it’s like that’s the end of paradise. Boy, and you’re not going to get back. At least you’re not going to go back to the same place again. It’s gone. Well, that’s exactly the same idea as original sin in Christianity. That’s Adam’s, Adam and Eve’s sin, right? They take the apple. That’s the forbidden thing that makes them self-conscious, makes them aware of their own death, makes them aware of their own nakedness, makes it necessary for them to work and tosses them out of paradise. It’s curiosity. Original sin is curiosity. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Well, and it’s a funny thing because it’s also, well, it’s also, although that’s an original sin, it’s also the precondition for the whole redemptive story because although this was paradise, so to speak, this place is on a higher order of being than this place was. I guess, and I think that’s because here, the paradise that precedes the original descent is characterized by complete lack of consciousness. There’s no consciousness there. And the paradise that emerges as a consequence of this whole story is one in which self-consciousness exists and is whole. So it’s, well, I think, personally, I think that’s a really profound sort of idea. Partly because, here’s one reason. In a sense, this preconscious paradise is nothing. It’s paradise because it’s nothing, which means there’s no suffering there, but there’s nothing else either. And here, at least, there’s actually the world, but it’s the world, so there is a world, there’s the possibility for suffering, but it also represents a sort of mode of being where there can be a world and simultaneously people can live in it, which is the question, I guess, that everyone’s always trying to figure out how is it that there can be a world and that it can be tolerable at the same time. So… Isn’t it also that story? Because that’s simply what does happen. I mean, it’s an explanation. I mean, how did we… we came to it originally simply by watching what does happen. Right. Well, the other thing about this story, too, is that it’s a story of maturation. Like, you can think of it as, it’s theoretically a description of what happened at the dawn of time, so to speak. And in a sense, that’s accurate. In a sense, because there wasn’t time back, who knows how long ago, when we weren’t self-conscious. And this is something that’s emerged as a consequence of, you know, who knows what processes that seem to emerge very quickly. And if you assume that the development of self-consciousness is related in some way to the expansion of the cortex, which seems to be a pretty reasonable hypothesis, the human cortex expanded unbelievably quickly from the evolutionary viewpoint. So our development of self-consciousness was a historical event. I wouldn’t say that this is an accurate description of a historical event, because it’s not really trying to be that. It’s trying to describe the meaning of a series of processes. But more importantly, also, it’s a story of what necessarily happens when you mature. Because the thing, like when you’re, say, you’re very young, two years old, your mother does protect you. I mean, it is literally the case that she shields you from your vulnerability. That’s right. You have a screwdriver and you’re heading towards the electrical outlet, and your mother says, well, no, you know, there’s a wall. There’s a wall there. She tries to make sure that you don’t fall down the stairs, or at least that they’re soft, if you do, and that you don’t stick your hand on the oven, and so on and so forth. She’s always there as an intermediary. And that’s a form of paradise. And you say, well, what drives you beyond that paradise? Well, it’s your curiosity. It’s like, as you mature, you develop a larger and larger repertoire of behaviours, more and more interest in what’s going on in the outside world. And finally, you get to the point where the things you know, because of your own curiosity, because of your own exploratory activity, are so complex that your mother and father, they can’t protect you anymore. It’s like, you’re outside the walls, and that’s it. If you try to go back, it just means you’re sick. That’s all. I mean, it’s not a solution. It’s really not a solution. It’ll just make things worse. So this story, which is a mythological story, is a story that characterizes everyone. That’s why it’s not such a very logical idea to make light of a notion like original sin. So you figure out what is it? A heritable characteristic of humanity. Fair enough. As far as I can tell, especially if you look at the consequences. Once you’re self-conscious, it’s very easy to view the world as an unfair place. And it is the case that you’re tooling along, doing just fine, and acting appropriately as far as you’re concerned. It’s like one day, bang, you have cancer, something equally horrible. There doesn’t seem to be any justice in that at all. It’s not very difficult to turn an animal into something that’s aggressive. All you have to do is punish it. Unpredictably and unjustly. And what does that mean? What means that the animal can’t figure out how to avoid the punishment? And also that the punishment, well, that’s the primary aspect of it as far as an animal is concerned. And we’re in that position all the time. It’s like terrible things happen to us that seem completely independent of our particular behavioral patterns. And that’s one of the things that turns people against the world. Right, absolutely. Sure. In fact, in an earlier version of this manuscript, in this chapter, I had a sexual unlearned helplessness. Because it is the case that if you punish an animal and it can’t escape, well what happens to it? Does it also get aggressive? Well, aggression is one of the things that might happen along the way. It depends on the circumstances. For example, if you take an animal and you shock it, it’s in a cage. Well, it can’t really get aggressive because there’s nothing to get aggressive about. But let’s say you take a rat and you put a mouse in its cage, and then you shock the rat, it’ll kill the mouse. So to some degree, the effects of punishment are situation dependent. And punishment does do two things. It’s an unconditioned stimuli for aggression, and it’s also an unconditioned stimuli for extinction of behavior, which is unlearned helplessness. So there’s these two pathways to punishment. And it’s also the case like in, well, say, it’s a thought experiment. There’s a cat here and you chase around with a stick, and you corner it. And you poke it with a stick. It’s going to hiss and hiss and fight. But if you keep doing it sooner or later, the aggressive response is going to extinguish, and it’ll just, you know, its best bet is to lay there and take the punishment. The thing that’s funny about your example is we are in that situation. It’s like the learned, like our conditions of existence are very much analogous to those experiments that psychologists conduct that produce learned helplessness, which is to say that we are constantly subjected to unpredictable punishment. But our problem is we have to learn how to deal with it nonetheless. And that’s part of what we’re trying to discover in these minutes is, is there a possible way of doing that? Also while admitting to the fact that it is the case. Because one way of doing it is just to deny it. It’s like to deny the fact that terrible things happen. In fact, that’s in the recent social, psychological literature, there’s a whole body of studies that suggest that that’s the best way to do it. Positive self-illusions. I know, it starts with, it’s only, all these things that happen to one are only punishment if one thinks that there’s some reason they’re happening to me. In other words, you know, I miss the train. Is that a punishment because it’s a negative experience or it just happened that I miss the train? It’s not anything that gets to me. Well, see, yeah, no, no, I see what you mean. I think the inference that we generally draw is that regardless of whether there’s a will behind it, it’s arbitrary and unfair. I mean, the train thing is slightly, it’s too minimal to make a case of. But, I mean, if someone close to you develops, like say someone that’s close to you that’s also universally recognized as good, develops some absolutely atrocious disease, which happens with a fair amount of frequency. Under those conditions, it’s very difficult not to draw the inference that despite the lack of will behind the disease, it’s evident that the world as its constituted is a very unfair place. Because it certainly, those sorts of things run contrary to all our notions of what constitutes fair. Do you have an expectation that the world is a fair place? That’s how you define it as unfair? Or do you think that it’s, that, I mean, it seems to me, I don’t know why I’m not getting it. No, no, no, that’s okay, go ahead. Okay, well, it seems to me that until the current age where everyone fairly well accepts the whole idea of evolution, where there’s no real reason, there’s no meaning for us to be the types of creatures that we are, it just sort of happened. Before that, I think philosophers strove very hard to find the meaning to explain why everything was the way it was. Yes. In that sense, there was an expectation that the world should be just. Right. There’s no reason for it not to be, unless, if it’s not just, there must be a reason. I’m not sure now that… Okay, I guess I would say that, I see the logic in your argument. I guess what I’m trying to figure out is that, you know, is it possible for us to exist in any sane manner, which I would say sane being in part not adopting authoritarian identification with the group, and simultaneously be able to accurately apprehend the fact that the fundamental structure of the world is neither fair nor unfair, but at least appears to us under many circumstances as we are. Under many circumstances as very unfair. And the answer to that seems to be no, I think. Is that people who are faced with that sort of choice frequently take a root out of the problem that actually makes it worse over time. For example, they’ll adopt an authoritarian stance as a means of protecting themselves against types of information they can’t tolerate. So I guess part of what I’m trying to find out is that, is there a story that makes sense out of things that we necessarily perceive as unfair? Well, that’s kind of one of the things we’ll try to discuss over the rest of the course. So, I’m just saying, what I’m trying to do today is outline some of the consequences of the dispute. I think people do have an implicit idea that the world is fair, because in part they’re given that when they’re brought up, when they’re kids. That’s one of the things you try to do with the child’s environment. You make sure the rewards and the punishments are distributed in an equitable and predictable manner. And that constitutes justice in large part. And one of the things the child discovers, and it’s necessary to do that, the child will just completely, like, will be enveloped by chaos. And terrible things will happen. It’s necessary to do that. But if you do do that, then when the child goes out into the world, he will discover, she will discover in short order that there are all sorts of things that happen that don’t fit into that framework, even though the framework is necessary. So I would say that that is our natural response. This is unfair. And that’s, I think, that’s part of the reason why tragic things, especially those things that appear possibly unnecessary. Say someone that you’re very close to is brutally murdered, sort of on a whim by some half-witted psychopath. I mean, that’s the sort of thing that not only seems incredibly tragic, but also completely pointless. It is those sorts of things that really undermine our ability to believe that our existences have any meaning at all. That our existence is predictable. I don’t want to take a lot of people in their hands out. But if somebody very close to you develops cancer, say, the attribution could be that this is unfair, but what you’re really saying is that it was unpredictable. There’s no way that it’s predictable. That’s one aspect of the unfair attribution. It’s unpredictable. Plus, I think it’s also unjust. But if you’re intelligent enough, you don’t add that. Isn’t that true? If you don’t add what? If you don’t add the fact that it’s unjust. Well, because… I don’t know if you do. What do you think? I mean, you might say it’s not logical to do so, but I would say that if it happens to you, you’ll do it. Yes, I agree with you that that is generally the way we work, but I don’t think that’s across the board the case. And I think I don’t see why you can’t get beyond that. What I really wanted to say, though, is something that you said about when you were saying that you teach children that the world is fair. Well, it seems to me that that’s often not the case. I think children often use that as their complaint. That’s not fair. And one of the things that I’ve always heard parents say to kids is, well, life isn’t fair. Yeah, I know. When you say that to a child, you’re not actually communicating any information. You’re just rationalizing the present situation. Because the truth of the matter is that if you’ve set up a stable environment, everything you’ve done has led the child to believe that in fact the world is fair, which means it is predictable and it’s just. But don’t you think that maybe you’re just exposing them to that? You’re exposing it to them slowly? Like in a small thing. Like you can’t have the ice cream because, well, life isn’t fair. I do think that’s what you’re doing. And eventually maybe they will learn that life isn’t fair. Why shouldn’t they learn eventually that life isn’t fair? Yeah, but the question is, once they learn that life isn’t fair, what do they do? Rage and despair. Let’s take the Unimarmor for an example. Because I think I know what he’s like. He’s someone who thinks that the world fundamentally is an unfair place and that it’s his moral obligation to take revenge against it. Now, he’s picked certain aspects of the world to take revenge against. But in his self-consciousness he construes himself not only as a victim of unfair and unjust forces, but as the kind of victim who has the right to cast judgement on his victimization and to take action in, well, vengeful action essentially. So look, where does he live? In a cabin in Montana. But why is that? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s so that he won’t get contaminated by the rest of the human race. That’s for sure. So he might have been rejected, but he’s sitting there thinking, like, in the back of his dark and stormy little brain that… That the human race is fundamentally evil and the only appropriate thing to do is to detach yourself from it. And there’s also a tremendous amount of omniscience, posturing and arrogance at the back of that, which is why he could spend all this time constructing bombs and sending them off to more rural areas. Or less random targets that he inappropriately identifies with the natural mythological categories that make up his thinking. So he’s mad at universities, so he bombs individual professors. I mean, this is not appropriate. So the question is, if you construe the world as an unfair place, what do you do? Well, I would say you can either change your action or you can change your thinking. Yeah, but you have to have an alternative that you can believe. You can’t just say, look, this is a problem. I mean, the problems that self-consciousness poses is an emergent problem. Let’s say it’s only a problem that’s been around for a million years. Nobody’s figured out what to do about it. Because as soon as you become self-conscious, it appears that the world is an arbitrary and unfair place. Then the question is, if the world is an arbitrary and unfair place, how should you respond to it? Now, an animal subjected to evidence that suggests that the world is arbitrary and unfair develops learned helplessness, which is depression. Now, lots of people develop that. They just quit. Why bother? Which is a really potent argument. Why bother? If such and such is likely to happen to you, which it undoubtedly is, why do anything? Well, lots of people don’t accept that, pardon me, because they never think about it or whatever. For whatever reason, they’re protected from that line of logic. But another line of logic is, well, let’s take some revenge against the world. That’s a potent line of logic as well. Geirtha, for example, his notion of the fundamental philosophy of Mephistopheles, who’s the literary incarnation of the negative aspect of the archetypal individualist was. This is Mephistopheles’ credo. The world is such a horrible place, intrinsically, that the best thing you can do for it is to work for its eradication. Hey, lots of people accept that line of argumentation. I mean, you say, well, why did the Nazis kill six million Jews? Well, it’s hard to say exactly why. But I suspect that at the bottom of the individual psyches that participated in that sort of act was the notion that, you know, after all, the world is a relatively harsh and unfair place. It might not be so bad to take a little bit of revenge against it. It’s like balancing that. You know, the world has done a lot of terrible things to me. It’s like, what’s your attitude to that? Revenge is one. It’s like, I’ll show those whatever they happen to be. I’ll show those Jews. Whoever you pick as your target for having inappropriately persecuted you. And what I’m trying to do is to get at the bottom of that. Why would people be like that? Well, I think it has something to do with it. The necessary consequences of self-consciousness. As soon as you’re self-conscious, well, that Genesis story says it quite clearly. What happens? Well, you cover yourself up because you’re ashamed. And why are you ashamed? It’s because you know you’re naked. Well, what does that mean? It means that you can view yourself as a somewhat vulnerable pink thing that really could be… who’s also subject to all sorts of social pressures, many of which are negative, who needs a substantial amount of protection just to ensure survival continued from day to day, given even that that survival is doubtful in the long run. That’s the basis of shame. Another thing that happens in the Genesis story is as soon as Adam and Eve discover they’re naked, God comes walking through the garden and they’re hiding. Why would… this is a strange bit of the story. Why would you hide? Well, if you think, say, maybe you could look at it this way then. From the mythological perspective, God’s voice, so to speak, is the thing that calls you to do your best, to perform to the maximum of your ability. Now, why wouldn’t you do that? Why would you hide from that? And the truth of the matter is that we all hide from that because what we recognize most profoundly about ourselves is our inadequacies. And those inadequacies make it impossible for us to believe that we could do our best or that it would even be worth doing. And that’s what the story about hiding means. And it’s certainly the case that we do that. So what happens if you hide from the best in you? Well, we know if that’s the archetypal hero. If you hide from that, then you have no defense at all against chaos because that is the defense. Abandon that because you’re afraid. What’s left? The only thing that’s left is the protection of the group. So if you abandon what’s best in you, the only thing you can do is become authoritarian. And as soon as you do that, well, lots of things happen. So you have to have the group then. Because if it disappears, you’re dead. Because there’s nothing left of you. Plus, anyone that’s out there that reminds you of what you might have been, you hate. Well, so then you have a good reason for rubbing them out. What’s the Job’s answer to this? Isn’t this what the book of Job is about? Well, you don’t view that book as sort of a narrative precursor to the story of Christian redemption. So he said it was like that the whole Bible basically tells a redemption story. And that one of the things that the story of Job necessitated was the emergence of a full-blown hero myth. That’s why Frye says, for example, that the idea of Christ is embedded in the Old Testament. It’s implicit in there, which is to say that the Old Testament is a story that cries out for a hero. And that’s also why there are notions of prophecy, for example, saying this person, the Millennium is going to arrive. Which is to say we are in a position, which is this position, that calls for the… We know the story. We happen to be here. The rest of the story is the arrival of something that will move us out of there. It’s like these are all people that are caught in the belly of the beast, for example. They’re waiting for the hero to go down into the belly and free them. So… It’s such a kind of unsatisfying story, the Job story. Right, right. I mean, that makes perfect sense. Right. Yeah, well, it’s just a chunk of… I’m not following this. Why is Joe…I don’t understand. Why is Joe the story that cries out for a hero? Well… Well, because he never learns what to do. That’s right. He learns exactly what to do. God comes and tells him to suck it up. I mean, Joe has this big, like, speech about how wonderful wisdom is and how God created the world. And since he created it, he has the intimate knowledge of how everything works. And only he has true wisdom. And then God comes in a whirlwind and says, like, I’m God, you’re a peon, suck it up. And then Joe says, you’re right, I’m sorry. And then he gets all the stuff he ever lost. Well, would you rather suck it up or figure out what to do for yourself? Well, there’s nothing you can do. Was it like a completely arbitrary… But that’s not the message of Christ is that there is something that you can do. Yeah, but this was… Well, this is… That’s why I imposed the message of Christ on the story of Joe. The whole…like, look at what Job’s, like, predicated on. Like, God and Satan are talking and Satan makes a bet. Which is kind of an interesting thing in and of itself. I’m not really mature on God’s part. Like, okay, sure. I mean… Realistic, though. Anyways, well, there is a book that was written specifically to address this problem, which is Answer to Job. That’s Jung’s book, and it describes him. Yeah, it describes this issue particularly. But we also want to make sure that we distinguish the… Or that we put the story of Job sort of in a broader perspective, which is the story of someone who’s desperate, fundamentally, for very good reasons. And the thing about desperation in general is that it calls out for a solution. That’s all I thought. The only point that I was making is that the story of Job is the story of someone who’s in as desperate a circumstance as can be imagined. And that’s how the story is structured, right? It doesn’t get a solution. It gets a solution, right. Well, yes, it’s a solution, but, you know… Maybe it’s not the best solution or one that appeals to our sense of fairness, but it’s the answer. Right, right. That’s exactly the issue, though. That’s exactly the problem. That’s what makes it unsatisfactory. That’s exactly the issue. Only if we demand fairness exists. Right. Yeah, but we do demand that. We do. See, we have to get past that. No, we don’t. No, we don’t. Because as soon as you get past that, then you’re… Like, let’s say, we’ll abandon fairness as a principle. Well, you better watch out for me, then. Well, then if you look at it from God’s point of view, it was fair, because God is God, and you can do whatever he wants. And there was a pre-existing bet, which… Yeah, but it’s very hard for us, like, to… It’s very hard for us to accept that. Well, that’s what religion is for. You have to have faith. There’s some greater, like, plan out there that we can only see a small snippet of, so we can’t possibly understand, so, well… Well, that’s fine. Look, faith is an answer. Is that right? So let’s just consider for a moment that some of the fundamental interpretations of these things are culturally bound. Yes. Okay? By the Christian tradition. Yes. That they’re not necessarily universal. Yes, absolutely. And that some of those questions are arising here, in terms of… Yes, yes. Well, this is a problem. But that’s why I said that we should try to look at the story sort of outside of both traditions, if that would be possible, and to see it as a story of something, of someone who’s in desperation. That’s all. And the question is… We may not be able to. Well, that’s… Well, isn’t the point of this class that it’s better than both. That’s true enough. I mean… Unless we got a very diverse representation of peoples from all different traditions. Well, that’s kind of what we’re hoping… Seeked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. True enough. But that’s what we’re trying to do in part in this class, even though in terms of personal representation, we don’t have… like, we’re not as diverse a group as we might be. One of the things, hopefully, that we’re trying to do is contrast and compare enough traditions, so that we can see the stories that are common to all of them. Now, this is going to be a problem in all sorts of different ways. But I’m hoping that enough information in general, not just in the context of this class, has been gathered, so that we can start to see patterns that transcend particular viewpoints without undermining. How do you avoid the problem of seeking confirmation in other traditions, so that you have already, within one tradition, a sense of what the fundamental elements are? And then, because traditions are broad and inclusive, you can find… Good question. …the answers to everything. Good question. And you can check out the ones that are most important to you, and how do you avoid that problem of bias? That’s an excellent question. I mean, look, that’s an absolutely solid question. The fundamental… like, I think one of the reasons why there has been such a discrepancy between scientific viewpoints and mythological viewpoints is because, in science, we have a mode of determining what constitutes a truth, at least a provisional truth, regardless of the desires of the exponents of any given truth. There’s a methodology. The problem with moral viewpoints is that we don’t have a methodology. Now, and this may be, in some ways, it’s an insoluble problem, I think, because I don’t think that we can come to a conclusion about what is good by the same sort of process of consensus, necessarily, that we use in science, because it’s hard to point to an object. Okay? So then the question is, well, so how do you get to what might constitute a fact? Well, the only way that I can see that it can be done is by looking at various cultures and various historical traditions, and also by drawing in information from other fields of endeavor, if that’s possible. That’s why I’ve been trying to look at both the neuropsychology of the emotional and information processing, plus looking at various historical traditions. So the problem of looking for what you want and finding it is a big problem. And maybe there isn’t an entirely satisfactory solution at the present time, but it strikes me that there’s enough data gathered so that we can at least make some movements towards that end. So, you know? I think I have a solution. Oh, this is what we’ve been waiting for. Well, I think that would be the hardest way to do it. The way you’re doing it now is presented on a conscious level, and you’re presented on an unconscious level and create your own story. Of course, you have to have confidence in what you’ve come up with and say that it is something that is more right or whatever. But anyways, you create the story, and through the behaviors that are embodied in the story, you are passing on this kind of wisdom and knowledge, the same thing that Jesus did in making his parables and all that figurative language and stuff, and he said he was able to pass that on through those stories, not necessarily through the conscious. This is also an issue with rigorous methodology. The problem with discussing truths about how to act is that the only form that you can actually test them out in is in your own experience. So if you say, well, I should act such and such a way, you can’t ask anybody else, should I act this way? Because they can’t tell you. You should listen to them, maybe they have some good information for you. But in the final analysis, you’re the only one that can figure out if the way you’re acting is right. And not only that, it’s worse than that because you have to define the criteria by which you determine if the way you’re acting is appropriate. So you’re kind of caught with decisions to make no matter which way you look. Well, that’s one of the things that I’m going to try to address later in the course because these sorts of things pop up. Since you can’t rely on anyone else in the final analysis, you have to rely on yourself. And then the question is, well, how is it that you can be sure that you can rely on yourself? Why do you say that you can’t rely on anybody else? You have to rely on yourself. Well, partly because nobody else can feel your pain. I mean, that’s the basic, because there’s an aspect of your experience, the subjective aspect that no one else has access to. And what’s right for you is going to share, there’s going to be overlap between that and what’s right with other people and what’s always going to be right. That’s going to be unique to you. What about, we can recast a lot of this whole thing in terms of interpersonal interactions as opposed to an individual’s actions against the world. So for example, when you were talking about how the child learns, the child explores his territory, it’s a very Piagetian experience, learns information and the mother is there as sort of a protector to protect you from the world. Rather, there’s a whole other way of looking at that interaction, saying the child learns through interacting with the mother. Look, absolutely, absolutely. And you’re on the top of the story of Buddha. Buddha goes out into the world, rather than anomalous information, he’s confronted with an interaction with a sick person, an old person, and a dead person. But these are interactions that were previously… Look, I’m going to look at this diagram again. I mean, one of the ways that an individual generates information is through contact with the unknown. But the other way that he generates information is through contact with culture. And in the case that you’re describing, the mother who’s providing information is an intermediary for culture. But also another person. I mean, people… Sure, but a lot of cultural information is embedded in other people. Not just in what they say, but in how they act. As soon as you interact with someone else, they’re providing you with all sorts of cultural information in the interaction. Is there still something else you mean? Yes. Yes. Asking some of these questions… I’ve asked a lot of these same questions, Lupin, but my area of concentration is social psychology. And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out at what level to ask the questions. Why does an individual harbor a need, for example, to do horrific acts? Or what is it about a group that needs the group to do horrific acts? Or what is it about the dynamics between two groups that causes one of them to do these things to the other one? And it seems to me that you can ask the question at every level. It’s hard for me to understand why one… Is this view of all those levels put together, or is it focusing on one level? Well, it’s two things. It’s an attempt to integrate ideas about group… The question really for me isn’t why do groups engage in conflict. It’s why do the individuals that make up those groups actually conduct the individual acts that make up the conflict? And, since I’m interested in the individual as the forerunner of the group, what can the individual do personally to reduce the likelihood that given the preconditions they will engage in those sorts of horrific actions? That’s my… specifically, that’s my concern. But if you have a group, in which individuals are doing these things? So, for example, if I were a Nazi in Germany, a German Nazi, and my job was to, I don’t know, throw the switch on the train line somewhere down the line, and you may ask now, why would I do that? Well, one reason is because if I don’t do it, somebody else will do it. It becomes irrelevant why did I throw the switch, because the switch is going to get thrown whether I throw it or not. Okay, well that’s a variant or an argument similar in some ways to also carrying it out as a consequence of orders. It’s like, you’re a functionary in a hierarchy. No, I’m asking why did I throw the switch. I’m asking why are you asking why did I throw the switch? I’m telling you don’t ask me why I did it, ask me why the switch got thrown. And to answer that question, maybe you have to look at something beyond me. No, but I would say you don’t have to look at something beyond you. I would say that it was the pattern of your whole life up to the point where you threw the switch, that made you into the sort of creature that would think that that was a normal act. Like Hannah of Rot said, evil is banal. I think she was wrong, actually. I think that it’s not banal. It’s just that many of the things that we think are banal are actually evil. So that’s harmless things, so to speak, that we do every day. They don’t have any immediate consequence. We write them off. So they’re banal, but they’re not banal. Because if you look at what you’re doing, the consequences of that over time are safe. Why do societies go insane? Well, it’s because the individuals that compose them conduct activities they think are sane. No one notices, no one says anything. They’re not sane. They’re completely off the wall. And the culmination of all those minute actions is a society composed of individuals that all think they’re good, who are acting en masse in an absolutely abhorrent way. So, I could say in part, I mean, one of the things I’ve been trying to answer is Nietzsche’s question posed in the late 1800s. He said, are there psychopathologies of health? And what he meant was, was it possible for someone to be perfectly normal and well-adjusted and well-adapted and even admirable by the standards of their society and still be sick? And, you know, from the perspective of cultural relativism, the answer is no. But from the perspective of the Nuremberg trials, the answer is oh, yes. So what I’m trying to figure out is, if you can be sick by doing what everyone else is doing, does that imply that there’s some universal standard by which being sick can be judged? I would say, well, yes, there is. He says, if you are open to the existence of anomalous information, you admit it when it occurs, and you update your behavioural models as a consequence, then you’re healthy. If you’re not, well, then you’re not. How can an individual read up within a group? So how could I, in the train station, admit the anomalous information all by myself? Right, absolutely. There’s two preconditions. One is that you have to admit that you’re vulnerable, even to being killed, and to accept it. And the second is to risk putting up with the fact that the group might actually do it to you. So that’s what you have to do. You have to leave the group. That’s right. Not only that, you have to leave the group knowing that if you do leave, they might kill you. And are very motivated to do so. And that’s classic hero myth as well. There’s two things. Death waits at the end, and so does the negative reaction of the group. So if you want to transcend the group, that’s what you do. Say, can you do it? So that’s too much for any individual to do. Well, that’s the question. I would say it’s kind of a paradoxical solution, actually. If you tried, it is possible that if one tried it, it might be possible. And if it were possible, it may be that there were side effects to doing it that might actually eliminate all the things that appear negative about it. So, and I would say, well, look, I mean, the basic problem is how do you adapt to the presence of chaos? It’s unfair and unjust aspects. Because one way is you identify with the group. That’s what the group’s for. The other way is that you learn how to deal with it on your own. And the question is, can you? And if the answer is yes, then that implies that you’re a different sort of creature than you think you are. And if you’re a different sort of creature than you think you are, maybe the world is not configured in an unfair and unjust manner. It may be that it appears that it is because you have an inadequate opinion of your own power to adapt. And I would say that the purpose of hero myths, generally, is to provide you with some evidence, culled from history, that there’s far more to the individual that meets the eye. Enough more so that the conditions of existence that we normally regard as unjust and unfair aren’t. But the only way you can find out is if there’s a big risk. We know what the risk entails. What we’ve been trying to figure out the whole time is why do people identify with groups? Well, there’s good reasons. It helps them regulate their emotions and protects them from terror so people are well motivated to. Can you get beyond that? Now that’s the issue. Okay, so that’s that for this week. Thank you.