https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u6CsGY8wpGw
Hello everyone, I’ve got lots of questions here and so welcome to the first live question and answer YouTube session that I’m hosting. So I’m going to get right into it and answer some questions. There’s lots coming up on the screen here. Mac13571979 asks, what does it mean people don’t have ideas? Ideas have people. Are we… okay, okay, because I’ve got an error here. Sorry about that. We’re going to… you’re going to hear some technical talk during this because we don’t exactly know what we’re doing yet. Okay, so what does it mean people don’t have ideas? Ideas have people. I learned that mostly from Jung. In fact, I think that’s virtually a direct quote from Carl Jung. One of the things I learned from Jung was that it’s perfectly reasonable to think of ideas as something that’s living, as something that’s alive, an idea as something that’s alive. And I think the reason for that is that the beings that have ideas, and so that’s us people, are alive. to use our cognitive ability to further our living. And so we create ideas that… and the purpose of those ideas is to have them played out in embodiment, to have them acted out, because otherwise they’re not of any utility. And so we conjure up ideas, let’s say originally, but they take on a life of their own over time. And as they take on a life of their own, their capacity to dominate someone increases to the point where the idea is arguably more powerful than the person. So if you look at religious ideas, for example, maybe you could think of what happened with regards to Islam in the latter part of the first Christian millennium. A set of ideas exploded out of one source and swept through a vast population. The same thing happened with Christianity. In fact, the same thing is happening with Christianity right now in China. In China Christianity is spreading faster than it did in the Roman times. That’s not something we really notice because our time frame is small compared to thousands and thousands of years. But ideas have their own goal and their own perception and their own way of interacting with the world and it’s always possible for them to possess people. Why do we feel exposed and vulnerable when we know and do what we really like? Our words. That’s Zell H. Well, lots of times people hide behind a shell, even at cost to them, because if the shell gets criticized then it’s not really that relevant because it doesn’t have any direct bearing on them. And so if you’re not showing your true self, so to speak, to the world, and what you’re showing is something essentially that’s false or just constructed and that gets criticized. Well, you can always comfort yourself with the idea that it’s not really you that’s under attack. So it doesn’t wound to the same degree. And I mean that’s partly why people protect themselves with falsehoods and ideologies and it’s an attempt to shield their genuine vulnerability from assault by the world. But the problem is that if you don’t allow that vulnerability to manifest itself, then the probability that you’re actually ever going to get what you really like or even discover what it is is zero. So by protecting yourself to that degree, you end up losing, certainly losing what it is that you’re most trying to protect. I mean I don’t want to be cavalier about that because it’s understandable that people attempt to shield their vulnerability because the vulnerability isn’t just felt, it’s real. People are fragile and we’re subject to the terrible forces of nature and to the terrible forces of culture. So we put all sorts of masks in front of ourselves so that our exposure is limited. People even do that to themselves to some degree. If your front is false enough then it’s also false to you. And I suppose people do that to some degree to protect themselves against their own self-criticisms. David Guida says, how can high school teachers best promote virtue, cultivate morality and tackle the meaning crisis in the face of an increasingly chaotic, violent and dehumanized future? Well I would say it isn’t obvious to me that the future is increasingly chaotic, violent and dehumanized. That the past was pretty rough. Now the future is definitely ill-defined. We don’t know what’s going to happen and I think maybe that’s more true in a general sense than it ever has been in the history of mankind. But I don’t necessarily think that there’s reasons to be particularly pessimistic. However, the first part of the question I think is well worth addressing. How can high school teachers best promote virtue, cultivate morality and tackle the meaning crisis? Well I think the best way that people in general promote virtue and cultivate morality is by promoting virtue and cultivating morality within their own life. But I think that in order to do that for yourself and then also in order to transmit that information to your students, you have to understand that morality isn’t a set of injunctions of the nature of don’t ever do anything impulsive that you like, which is generally how morality is put forth. You know, you think about morality as something that a puritanical person might preach and that it has to do mostly with self-control and self-constraint. I think that that’s a very shallow vision of morality. I think the way that you convince people to act morally, if that’s something that you’re interested in doing, is to meditate on the utility of the truth. Because I think the highest form of morality is following the truth. So you might say, well why would you bother following what’s true? And the answer to that, I think, is quite straightforward. If you follow what’s false, then you’re going to end up somewhere that you weren’t planning to go and the probability that that’s going to be good is low. I mean, following what’s false is like attempting to use the wrong map for the territory that you occupy. And if your eyes are open and you pay attention, then the probability that you’ll be able to maneuver around the terrible sharp obstacles that will emerge in front of you is that much higher. And so when you’re having a serious discussion about morality with people, there’s a couple of points that you’d make to begin with. And these are fundamental points. One would be, do you want things to be better or do you want things to be worse? And you might assume that people are going to automatically answer that they’d rather have things better, but that’s not so self-evident because to make things better usually requires that you adopt a tremendous amount of responsibility and that’s effortful and difficult and frightening. And the buck sort of stops with you, which is also part of what makes it terrifying. But if you do want things to be better and you have your mind straight and oriented in that direction, then the truth is your best possible guide because it’ll help you get to that point. So I think one of the things that people who talk about morality fail to understand is that it’s not abstract, it’s practical. Morality is precisely what’s proved to be most practical over the longest possible span of time. The moral act is what’s best, all things considered. And part of the reason that it’s necessary for people to follow conventional rules is because convention is part of the wisdom of mankind. And the wisdom of mankind has basically said, all things considered, here’s a pathway that you can follow that is going to work out in principle best for you. And so one of the considerations there, speaking in terms of convention, is the standard path through life, say in Western culture, has been to grow up, to form an intimate relationship of some stability, to do something productive that other people approve of and will trade with you for, to raise children and to establish yourself in a community. And the reason that that’s conventional morality is because that’s not such a bad deal compared to most of the alternatives. And if you can pull all those things off properly, then there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll at least have a life that isn’t completely full of unbearable suffering with nothing positive in it, but there’s also a reasonable possibility that you’ll have a good life. And so then you might want to try to do that correctly. Why act morally? Why act in a virtuous manner? Because it’s in your interest and it’s in everyone else’s interest as well. And so that seems like a good deal. Now it will mean that you’ll have to put off certain forms of impulsive pleasure, but the problem often with impulsive pleasure is that, well, you have pleasure at haste and you repent at leisure. And so part of what standard morality is trying to do is to inform you about how you might act in the present so that the present is acceptable, but so that tomorrow is also good and next week is also good and next month is also good and next year is also good. And for you and for your family and for your community, for this broad swath of humanity. And partly what you ask people, you ask high school students is, well, do they want to be part of that or do they want to do something else? And if they want to do something else, maybe they want to make things worse. Well, they should think that through because that’s just not a very good plan. Unless your goal is to make the world a more miserable place. And you know, often people’s goals are precisely that. Alex Fiannder asked, is mindfulness really beneficial or is it just a trend? Mostly it’s a trend. The problem with mindfulness, as far as I’m concerned, is that it’s a word that’s like a giant box. You can put anything you want in it and claim that that’s not only what it is, but that’s what it does. And so I’m, you know, I would be very hesitant to make a blanket statement such, you know, like no one practicing mindfulness or teaching mindfulness is producing any benefit for their students. But yeah, I think mostly it’s a fad. So… How can Disney produce an archetypal masterpiece in the mid-90s, Lion King, and then turn around and create propaganda in the new millennium? Frozen. That’s why Sam Colette. God, that’s a good question. But there’s an even better question that goes along with it. Not only could Disney turn around and create propaganda in the new millennium, because I do believe exactly that that’s what Frozen is. But if I remember correctly, I think that that’s the highest grossing animated movie now that’s ever been made. So it’s not only that they created propaganda, it’s that people are extraordinarily hungry for it. Why would that be? Well one of the ideological motifs in Frozen is that, you know, the classic idea that the sleeping beauty needs a prince to awaken her is absurd and old fashioned. And that there are alternative ways of traveling through life that don’t require the subjugation that that particular story might appear to entail. I think that’s really naive beyond belief, because a story like Sleeping Beauty, where the feminine is waiting for the masculine to awaken, it’s true. It’s just as true for men as it is for women. It’s not about men and women precisely. It is to some degree. It’s more about the masculine and the feminine. The feminine part of a man, which is the part that enables him to have a relationship with a woman at all, is awoken by the archetypal masculine qualities of clarity of mind, for example, just as much as the female’s femininity is awoken by masculine clarity of mind. And you can read those old stories, Sleeping Beauty in all likelihood is a very old story, but it’s read at multiple levels simultaneously. But I think that people want the propaganda because it tells them that what they already think is correct, and that all the old wisdom, or much of the old wisdom, it can just be dispensed with and people can conduct their lives in any manner that they want. Well, that doesn’t work. So Julian T. N. says, you have said that to study history is to study oneself, and that one will be much more grounded and strong if they do so. Will you please more talk on this? Please talk more on this. Well, you know, it’s easy for people to think, let’s say you’re 30 years old, it’s easy for you to think that you’re actually 30 years old, but you’re not. You’re in many ways, at least at one level of analysis, you’re three and a half billion years old, because that’s approximately how long the genetic structure that has given rise to you, at least in part, has existed. And you’re the consequence of this massive, massively extensive evolutionary process extending back billions of years, it’s conditioned every aspect of you. And so you’re a very, very ancient creature from a biological perspective. And if you don’t view yourself across that entire span of time, so to speak, you have the wrong idea about what it means to be a human being. And then on the cultural end of things, well, you’re deeply shaped and inhibited and offered opportunity by the entire history of human cultural endeavor, which has also interacted in a causal manner with the emergence of our biology across time. And if you don’t understand history, then you don’t understand who you are because you’re a product of history. Everything you think, someone else already thought, every word that you use, someone else came up with. And so a naive person thinks, for example, that the thoughts that they have are their thoughts, but the probability that you’re going to have a thought that’s original is extraordinarily low. And so just to understand your own thought process, you need to be deeply… You understand your own thought process far more deeply if you were an astute student of history. You also understand the problems that confront you in the world. You’re born into the world in a particular historical configuration. That’s an archetypal truth. Your spirit is born into the world when the world is a certain specific way. And that certain specific way is also a consequence of vast patterns of processes that have been laid themselves out on a historical timeframe. Just a simple example. A lot of the interpersonal complexities that young people face, say, in their intimate relationships are a direct consequence of the birth control pill. That’s only been around for 50 years. So it’s not deep history, but it’s certainly history. And if you don’t understand that the birth control burst in on humanity like an atomic bomb, maybe like a hydrogen bomb, you don’t understand what it is that’s driving your own interpersonal problems. So there’s no difference between studying history and studying psychology. And there’s no difference between studying history and psychology and trying to understand who you are and what you should do. History is about you. It’s not about the world, or it’s about the world and you. And if you can’t see the sense in it, then you’re not approaching it properly, or you have bad teachers, or you don’t know how to read, or something like that, because history is unbearably interesting. And so I suppose that’s another marker that you can use to determine whether or not your attitude towards studying history is correct. If you’re not fascinated and horrified by it, almost beyond belief, then you’re not studying history properly. And I think if you were studying it properly, you’d never ask why you should study it. It would be so evident, so obvious, that it was necessary. Why do humans enjoy sad stories? That’s Alex Fyander. Well, I don’t know if they actually enjoyed them. Although I think you could make a case that they do. I mean, sometimes maybe someone’s watching a story that’s somewhat sentimental. That’ll make them tear up. And you might say that that’s an element of being sad. But I would say that’s more an element of being compassionate and participating in this fictional way, in the love and intimacy that human beings are capable of. So you can do that by proxy, and that can certainly produce sentimental emotions, and nostalgic emotions, and those can be associated with tears. But you could go deeper than that and say, well, people will watch tragic stories, and that’s certainly the case. Any Shakespearean play virtually is tragic in many regards. And I think part of the reason that people are compelled to do that is because we’re compelled to understand the tragedies of our life. And so to see that tragedy laid out on a stage, which means that it’s distilled and amplified in some sense, is to simultaneously engage in the problem of wrestling with what it means to exist in a tragic world. And any information you can get about that is going to be well worth the momentary negative emotion that you might experience while you’re engaged in the play. So people like sad stories because life is often sad, and we have to figure out how to deal with that. And stories can tell you how to deal with it well and how to deal with it badly. And that can be absurdly informative. If Christianity has much historical wisdom to offer, why is it so derided in the academy? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Why? Well, I think that people generally think of Christianity as science for stupid people. It’s something like that. You know, and it’s often reduced to its more fundamentalist manifestation. So you know, the straw man version of Christianity is fundamentalist Protestantism of the sort that makes the case that the Bible is literally true and that the cosmos is roughly several thousand years old. Well, it’s easy to make fun of that. I’m not sure it’s so wise to make fun of it. People generally have reasons for what they believe, and sometimes it’s fear and narrow-mindedness and ignorance, but sometimes what might appear to be fear and narrow-mindedness and ignorance is actually the attempt to preserve something of extraordinary value, the value of which has not been fully articulated. I guess partly I see the ability for people to generate the straw man version of Christianity and then just feel intelligent by comparing their own knowledge to that. And you know, that’s pretty weak, I would say. I think Marxism contributes to it a lot. I mean, I think that the universities and our intellectual life in general is still saturated with Marxist and neo-Marxist presuppositions, and I really think that’s a terrible thing. I really don’t think that that’s any better than having our intellectual landscape populated by neo-Fascist ideas. I don’t see from a historical perspective that there’s any reason whatsoever to assume that neo-Marxist ideas are any more morally appropriate than neo-Fascist ideas. And I think a lot of what drives them, the neo-Marxist analysis of Christianity is… some of its simple-mindedness. I mean, the Marxists tend to reduce everything to power or to economics, and I mean, power and economics are important, but to reduce everything to that is… to reduce everything to any one thing is a mark of a weak mind. I mean, most problems are multivariate problems. They’re not univariate problems. I think there’s a hatred for the responsibility that genuine Christianity lays upon a person. Because at an archetypal level, I mean, if you just speak about this psychologically, that Jung said, for example, the soul is naturally Christian, it’s a hell of a thing to say, but he had his reasons for saying that, and part of what he was saying was that… or what I believe, and Elders Huxley talked about this a bit too, is that… there are elements of Christianity that have taken conceptualization as far as it can go, and that’s what makes it archetypal. So I can give you an example of that. So there’s a presupposition in Christianity, speaking psychologically, that… Good beings make progress by making sacrifices. That’s a good one. You see this acted out to begin with, to some degree, in the Old Testament, where the sacrifices that people make are genuine archaic sacrifices. They take something that they believe has value, perhaps a prize animal, and burn it and offer it to God. The reason that it’s burned, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is because the archaic conception of the world was that the world was a flat disk, and on top of that disk was a bowl, and the bowl was the sky, roughly speaking, and then outside the bowl, that’s where the gods existed. And I think archaic people believe that for the same reason that we feel awe when we look up in the night sky. You don’t want to make the mistake that just because people didn’t know some of the things we know now, that they were stupid. They looked up at the night sky, or the day sky, and felt awe. Part of the intuition that came along with that awe was that while they were looking at the night sky, or the day sky, they were looking into the infinite, and that’s allied very tightly with divinity. So there’s those ideas going in the background. If you burn something and offer it up to God, the smoke rises and God can detect the quality of your sacrifice. You might think, well, again, that’s pretty simple-minded, but it’s not. It’s the dramatic representation of an unbelievably profound idea, and the profound idea is that sometimes in order to make things go properly, you have to let go of something that you deeply love or deeply want to do. And what it means to sacrifice is to let something go in the present so that the future can be better, or to let something go personally so that other people can have it better. There’s no difference between the idea of sacrifice and the discovery of the future. As soon as you discover the future, one of the things you realize is that you have to sacrifice things in the present so that the future manifests itself in a more acceptable manner. So then you think, well, that’s also an amazing discovery. Here’s the discovery human beings made. If we change our behaviour in the present, better things could happen in the future. Well, no other animal really has ever discovered that. Okay, so that’s very tightly linked into the idea of sacrifice. So you might say, well, you have to sacrifice something of value. And so sometimes I ask my students, a lot of them are children of immigrants, what did your parents sacrifice so that you can go to university? I mean, everyone understands that question. The students immediately tell me of the things that their parents have done. They moved from some foreign country. They spent 18 hours a day working their fingers to the bone at a laundromat or a dry cleaner so that their children could have a richer and fuller life. They’re sacrificing. And the sacrifice is based on faith. And the faith in, it’s essentially a form of religious faith, but we don’t have to get into that at the moment. The fundamental driving idea is that reality can be positively shaped by sacrifice. Well, that’s an amazing idea. Well, so then you might say, well, okay, the higher quality the sacrifice, the more profound the positive effect on the future. So reasonable proposition. And so then you might say, what’s the most valuable possible sacrifice? And the answer to that is, well, obviously yourself. So then you could say, well, that means that the ultimate moral injunction is to sacrifice yourself in a manner that makes the future better. Well, that’s the central idea of Christianity. The central idea, the central figure, mythological figure at the core of Christianity is the person who voluntarily sacrifices themselves to the benevolent will of God. Well, if you have any sense, you’re terrified of that idea. And especially if you’re, I would say if you’re a rationalistic intellectual or a rationalizing intellectual, I mean, who the hell wants to believe that? That that’s your moral obligation? Is to sacrifice yourself for the best. Well, God, you don’t know what that means. I mean, the archetypal story is it means that you end up crucified. Well, there’s lots of reason to be not very happy about that idea. But then you say, well, is the fact that Christianity is derided in the academy a good thing or a bad thing? Mostly, it’s a terrible thing. You know, it’s not like Christianity can’t use some criticism. Although I think, you know, Nietzsche, in many ways, Nietzsche took care of that for us. But mostly, I think what we’re doing in the academy is running as fast as we can from the responsibility of burying our culture and revivifying it. And we’re using any number of appalling rationalizations and ideological maneuvers to try to not only make that acceptable personally, but to proselytize about it to others. You know, the more, I wouldn’t say cynical, maybe I would, the more cynical part of me sometimes thinks that the universities now view students more harm than good, especially on the humanities end, because they take students at a very formative period of their life, when their belief systems and their ability to identify strongly with life are already somewhat in question because they exist in a culture that’s been badly fractured. And they take those kids and they, you know, they expose them to ideas that are absolutely destructive. And it’s not like I’m against ideas like that. Reading Nietzsche, for example, or reading Dostoevsky, I mean, that can be a very destructive act, but the purpose of Nietzsche’s writing and Dostoevsky’s writing is not to destroy, it’s to remove detritus so that something new can spring forth. And I just don’t really see that happening in the universities. I think they’re too cynical. And I think that there’s also a strong streak of serious anti-humanity among modern intellectuals, and that’s been the case for at least a hundred years. You hear people say, you know, like, and I think this was a statement from the Club of Rome, the people who are so concerned about a population explosion back in the mid-1960s, that the world would be better off if there were fewer people on it. Or maybe that there were no people on it. Man, you can’t say anything that’s more appalling than that. You know, if you said the planet would be better off if there were fewer black people on it, it’s like, well, no one’s going to put up with that. Or the planet would be better off if there were fewer European colonizers on it. Well, you might be able to get away with that a little bit more, but probably not. But as long as your sentiments extend to humanity as a whole, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to say something like that. That’s the most horrific thing you could possibly say. I mean, the kids who go into high schools and shoot them up, the Columbine kids, that’s certainly what they believed. The planet would be a lot better off if there were fewer people on it, and maybe we’ll take a few steps in that direction. So, Bob Smith says, nice jacket. Well, thank you, Bob. I appreciate that. Alright. Can you explain Nietzsche’s general philosophy and some of his most famous ideas? He’s really hard to comprehend. Nietzsche’s general philosophy. I probably can’t do that. I’ve been putting together, with my students here, I’ve been starting to plan a seminar on existentialism, which would focus a lot on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. I think Nietzsche’s so damn complicated that you can’t really do that. I don’t think you can explain Nietzsche’s general philosophy. First of all, he wasn’t really a systematizer. He was skeptical of systematizers. It’s very difficult to distill someone who’s not a systematizer into a few general principles. The thing is, with some of the greatest thinkers, you actually have to read what they wrote. You have to read the original writings, because the brilliance is encapsulated in the original writings, and they can’t be condensed. So let’s see, can I do any better than that? Can I explain Nietzsche’s general philosophy? Truth serves life. That’s a good one. I guess we can unpack that a little bit. I mean, it’s a good example of exactly why Nietzsche is so staggeringly brilliant. One of the things he presumes when he makes a statement like that is that a human being is in an existential situation that’s characterized by the necessity of determining what he or she will actually accept as truth. You might say, well, truth is something you can prove, and that’s how you know it’s true. But unfortunately, it’s not that simple, because you have to decide what criteria you’re going to accept as proof. And there’s an act of faith in that, and there’s an inalienable word that argument seems to be lacking, and this is the famous is-ought conundrum that David Hume described. The object is, okay, well let’s say that you use science to lay out a very detailed description of the nature of the objective world. Well that still doesn’t mean that you know how to act in that world, and that’s a big problem, it might be a fundamental problem, if the fundamental problem of people isn’t what is the nature of the objective world, but how is it that you should conduct yourself while you’re alive? Well, Nietzsche believed that the fundamental question was how you should conduct yourself while you’re alive, how should you act, and I would say that’s the fundamental question of meaning. And science can inform you, but it can’t really solve that problem for you, and that’s a problem. And then science also has this other terrible attribute in some sense, which is that because science can’t solve the problem of how you should act in the world, it impels people towards the conclusion that there is no answer to the question how should you act in the world. And so that way, that opens up a door to nihilism, and nihilism is destructive, it does not facilitate life, in fact it has the opposite effect. It takes the spirit out of people, it takes the motivation out of people, it makes them bitter, it makes them resentful, it makes them hateful, it’s not a good thing. Also Nietzsche is primarily concerned in some sense with how to act. And part of the reason that he decomposes Christianity to the degree that he does is because he believed that Christianity was a very, very serious attempt to answer the question how should you act? And he also believed that it had become fatally flawed for a variety of reasons, at least in its typical socially instantiated form. So he took it upon himself to subject it to a criticism. But I’ve always thought of Nietzsche, it’s a terrible image, but I’ve always thought of Nietzsche as like a maggot in a wound. What he’s doing is clearing away dead and diseased tissue so that something else can And it’s a terrible thing to watch, it’s a terrible thing to apprehend, and it’s a terribly destructive thing to involve yourself in. Because Nietzsche, he said he philosophized with a hammer, and that’s certainly true. But he was trying to clear the path for something new, and that’s something new. He was trying to formulate with his conceptions such as like the superman, the next version of human beings, so to speak, and he thought of them as people who would create their own values. And that that would be the way forward out of the wreckage of Christianity, let’s say. I think Nietzsche was wrong about that, and I say that with all due respect, believe me, and I say it cautiously, and I don’t think it’s an original idea of my own that Nietzsche was wrong, and I think the reason that he was wrong is because people don’t create values, they discover them. Or maybe they co-create them. But you can’t create values by conjuring them out of non-existence. You could say if you were scientifically minded that values are in some sense arbitrary, and then if you believe that values are arbitrary, you might then believe that people could create them out of nothing. But values aren’t arbitrary, and most of the time people discover them. And maybe they co-create them. And one of the reasons that I have been so attracted to Jung’s thinking is because Jung is in many ways a Nietzschean, a student of Nietzschean, also a student of Freud’s, but more primarily a student of Nietzschean. Jung’s lifelong endeavour was to understand what the way forward might be given the situation that Nietzsche described. And the situation that Nietzsche described in some sense was that Christianity laid so much emphasis on truth that it ended up undermining its own axiomatic presuppositions. And so then Jung thought, following Nietzsche, well, okay, in principle we have to create new values. But that’s partly why Jung got so interested in the unconscious, because one of the things he found, particularly in his analysis of the collective unconscious, was that the values that Nietzsche thought people should create were actually lying dormant in our imagination. That’s one way of thinking about it, because that’s a good way of thinking about the collective unconscious. And that it was a return to the deepest, the way forward in terms of the generation of new values was a return to the deepest recesses of human existence and a rediscovery of what was actually there. I touched on that a little bit today when I was talking about the necessity for sacrifice. There’s an archetypal idea that the saviour, the messiah, is by definition the person who is willing to sacrifice him or herself for the ultimate good, whatever that happens to be, and that that’s the appropriate pathway forward. Well, that’s an archetypal critique of Christianity, and I think that Jung was right. I think he’s correct. That’s a terrible thing to say, because Jung is such a radical thinker that it’s funny, because Jung is subject to a lot of criticism. I read Richard Noll’s book on Nietzsche, I think it was called The Aryan Christ, and Noll basically, who I think is or was a very resentful person. I think he did a hatchet job on Jung. The cover of his book made Jung look like he was a Nazi. I mean, what a cheap shot that is. But he accused Jung of basically fomenting a cult, and I read Noll’s book, and it just made me laugh, because what Jung was actually up to is so much worse, so to speak, than merely starting a cult. It’s like accusing an axe murderer of what? Annoying his pet cat. The difference is that extensive. The sorts of things that Jung was actually messing around with are so complicated and terrible compared to just building a little cult that it’s absolutely clear that Noll had no idea what he was talking about. Like Nietzsche, like Dostoevsky, it’s a terrifying person. And I think part of the reason that Jung is not well regarded in the academy, and also why Christianity is subject to such continual rationalistic criticism, is because people open up Jung and take one look at what he’s doing, and either just don’t get it at all, or they get a little bit of it, it scares them so badly they think, there’s no damn way I’m going there. And I can really understand that. I think anybody with any sense would be very, very careful about trying to figure out what Jung was talking about. Is cognitive behavioural… Sorry, here. Oh, I missed that. Sorry about that. Is it a good idea to believe in something, healthy delusions, like karma or life after death? That’s any wall socket. Well, there was a whole line of social psychology that was very popular about 15 years ago. In fact, the most cited social psychological paper ever written was about the necessity of positive illusions. The basic hypothesis was life was so tragic and dismal that unless you bolstered yourself against it with defensible optimism, I suppose, if you’re being charitable, or just positive illusions, lies is what I think they are, that life would actually be intolerable. And I think that’s an unbelievably nihilistic and vicious philosophy. I think the fact that that was actually seriously put forward by a generation of social psychologists as a medication for the modern disease of meaning is an absolute indictment of the entire field. No, there’s nothing about illusions that are healthy. But that doesn’t mean that cynicism and despair are forms of truth, or that nihilism is a form of truth. There’s no such thing as healthy delusions. Now, you know, any wall socket says, like, karma. Well, I don’t know if karma is a healthy delusion, and I’m not so sure about… I mean, there’s some elements of karma that I think are extremely interesting from a psychological perspective. I mean, scrap the reincarnation element of it, because I’m… well, for obviously, at least for the sake of simplicity. But I believe in karma. I think that no one gets away with anything ever. I think every single thing you do that is immoral… because an immoral thing is an attempt to warp the structure of reality. Everything you do that’s immoral comes back to haunt you, and it generally comes back in multiply form. Now, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to draw the causal connections. Like, you might have done something immoral, who knows, five years ago, and that produced like a crack in the structure of your being, and like, it’s five years later and all sorts of things are falling into that crack, and you have no idea that that initial act was what produced this, you know, cascading consequence of events. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t. So… What did kamu mean by revolt in the myth of Sisyphus? What are some ways to revolt without being destructive? Or should one simply be a good ant? Thank you. Well, that’s 19Kmitch. Well, the first thing I should say about that is it’s not so simple to be a good ant. I think being a good ant is better than just being a chaotic and useless ant. And so you should probably go from chaotic and useless ant to good ant. That’s a process of maturation. That’s what happens when you move from being a child to an adolescent to a young adult. You adopt the strictures and responsibilities of your culture to discipline yourself. Now if you stop at the point where you’re a good ant, well then I think, you know, that’s not so good. Then you’re an avatar of the pathologies of your culture as well as an avatar of the virtues of your culture. But it’s fighting against mere enculturation is that’s not virtue. That’s failure. That’s just failure to mature. You know, that was actually one of Nietzsche’s questions of conscience. Are you leading or are you just running away? Well the answer to that almost always is you’re running away. You might think you’re leading, but the probability that you’re leading, especially if you haven’t seriously considered the possibility that you’re running away, is like really, what’s the chances if you really think about it. It’s not that easy to lead and it’s pretty easy to run away. So if you’re not doing what other people are doing, you’re probably running away. And you might say, well that’s pretty rough. It’s like fair enough, you know. If you’ve got some absolutely unique destiny that you have to manifest, more power to you. But most of the time what I see are people who think they have a unique destiny and really what they’re doing is wandering off the beaten patch into some thorn-ridden ditch where things are not going to be good for them. So what are some ways to revolt without being destructive? Revolt against what? That would be the question. I mean, it’s a very, you could try revolting against your lack of discipline. Like that’s good. That’s a war. That’s a war. If you want a war, maybe you do because people need war. I think it was William James who said that people need a moral equivalent to war. I think that’s what Jung was trying to discover, by the way, the moral equivalent to war. And I think he did discover it as well. And that’s tied up with the idea of sacrifice. If you want to revolt, you should revolt against your own pathology and inadequacy and uselessness and resentment and cruelty and blindness. Yeah, you could have a war against that. You could revolt against that. That would give you something to do. Professor, MRA people are often quite smart. Why do they have this strong tendency towards atheism? Oh well, you know, people who are half smart get atheistic right away because, you know, it’s obvious. You really believe in God. You believe in an old man in the sky. You really think the world is only 7,000 years old. It’s like, do you really believe Christ turned wine into water? You know, no one who wasn’t foolish would believe that. Well, that’s the statement of someone who’s… I guess who’s smart enough to start to notice something about what people believe. But, you know, they’re 10 steps along a 50,000 mile journey. So and then the other thing I already mentioned is about atheism. People like to think that the reason they’re atheistic is because they’re clear headed and rational. It’s like, well, first of all, no, probably they’re not because how often you meet someone who’s clear headed and rational. Being psychoanalytically minded, I’m always way more likely to look for the dark reason that someone is doing something rather than the light reason, you know, the reason that’s moving them towards the light because it’s hard to move towards the light. And so I would say most of the time people are atheistic. Well, it’s kind of… it’s fashionable in some sense. It’s a fashionable way to revolt if you’re rational and if you’re kind of an intellectual. But also you can just dispense with responsibility if you’re atheistic. And I think that’s 90% of the reason that it’s… especially in the modern world, that’s why people are proponents of atheism. You know, or they have some particular hatred for the church. I think Richard Dawkins has a particular hatred for the church. I would… I would… I’ve thought of this many times. I would swear that something happened to him when he was a kid that wasn’t good and that the church was involved. Because he has such an animus against the church. It’s… that… it possesses him. There’s a reason for that. Alright, so let’s see here. Can you explain why the conventional wisdom about ancient people are so at odds with your ideas about ancient people? Yeah, that’s Harold Bohm. I can explain that. People like to think they’re smart. And they like… and the easiest way to think you’re smart in many ways is to think that other people aren’t. And so we think, well, the people who came before us all these thousands of centuries, you know, they just didn’t know what we knew. Well, their cultures didn’t have the same degree of staggering technological capacity that ours did. But that didn’t mean that they were stupid. I mean, you throw the average person back into ancient Athens, they’re not going to last very long. It’s lack of respect. And, you know, that is a definite hallmark of modern culture. You can hardly even tell… you know, you can hardly even say, well, be respectful. It sounds like you’re from 1890. Be respectful. Well… if you’re not… if you don’t want to be nihilistic, you better be respectful. Because being nihilistic and having respect for nothing are exactly the same thing. So you can start by having some respect for your ancestors and try to figure out what the hell they were talking about. You read the Old Testament, for example, it’s a very weird book. It’s a very, very, very, very weird book. Lots of people wrote it. Lots of people edited it. It got sequenced together and turned into this volume for reasons that we just can’t understand. It’s a collective work of the human imagination. And people read it. So simple… in such a simple-minded way. They read it like fundamentalists… like simple-minded fundamentalist Protestants think about science. You know, the fundamentalist Protestants think the Bible is literally true, science is literally true, thus the Bible is science. Well, you know, no. The people who wrote the Bible weren’t scientists. That’s just not how it works. But then the modern critics of religious thinking, of traditional religious thinking, they’re just… they do the same thing except backwards. They say, no, no, no, religion was science. It’s just bad science. And so, you know, we don’t have to pay any attention to it. Well, it’s not science. It’s something else. It’s ethics. It’s morality. It’s drama. It’s all of that. And drama is about how to live. And religious drama is… it’s a definitional issue. There’s nothing deeper than religious drama. And the reason for that is that depth defines what’s religious. And, like, I know this firsthand, partly because in my clinical practice, like, I often see people who are in terrible, terrible, terrible trouble, and often that trouble is ethical. And if the trouble they’re in is bad enough, there’s no other language to conceptualize it in that isn’t religious, because the religious language comes into its own when you’re dealing with problems not only of life and death, but literally of heaven and hell. And, you know, modern people think, well, there’s no such thing as heaven, and there’s no such thing as hell. It’s like, okay, fine. There’s no such thing as heaven. Let’s accept that. But if you think there’s no such thing as hell, it’s like… I can’t see how someone who’s educated would ever dare to make that claim. Like, after everything that happened to us in the 20th century, I can’t see that someone could ever say that there’s no such thing as hell without being terrified that a bolt of lightning would obliterate them on the spot. You know, hell is real. And if you want to talk about it, use religious language. And if you want to figure out how to get away from hell, you use religious language. And that’s what religious language is for. So, and, you know, that’s actually understandable now. I would say if you want to learn about this, you can. You can read Nietzsche. You can read Dostoevsky. You can read Jung. It’s hard. You can read Jung’s student, Eric Neumann. Eric Neumann was a genius. Like, a lot of this information is there waiting for people to begin to understand it. But it’s hard slogging. And part of the problem is that you get to hell way before you get to heaven. You know, and one of the things, Jung is sometimes conceptualized as a new age thinker. And I think that’s absurd. I think it’s completely absurd. One of Jung’s fundamental propositions is that if you follow a meaningful and truthful path, that will take you to the worst place you can imagine. And then, possibly, having gone there, the journey uphill, you know, towards the light can begin in earnest. Well… Who wants that? Well, no one if they have any sense. But, you know, Jung also made another statement which really cut me to the bone when I first understood it. He said, anything you don’t thoroughly understand, you act out in the world as fate. And so, one of the lessons I took away from that is that, you know, if you don’t want hell to manifest itself in the world, then you better understand your role in producing it. And I would say that’s actually the primary religious injunction. And I would also say that that’s a big part of the reason why belief systems such as Christianity, I’m talking mostly about Christianity because that’s what I’m most familiar with. And also because it’s definitely the foundation of Western civilization. I’m actually quite a fan of Western civilization. I mean, the fundamental moral injunction is in Christianity, or one of them, I mean, they’re all tangled together, I guess to some degree, is like, you want to constrain hell within yourself. Well, that’s no joke, man. I mean, you know, another thing I learned from Jung and from Nietzsche was that, if you look at the sorts of things that happened, say in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Union or in Mao’s China, or that are still happening around the world, where there’s systematic torture and persecution of millions and millions of people, where the entire state was devoted towards making things as bad as they could possibly be, and then making them even worse after that, is that people played a role in that, and they were people like you, and that means that people like you play a role in that. And so then the question is, what’s your role, and is that the game that you want to be playing? Well, that’s a serious question because it is people like you who were responsible for that, and it means that to the degree that you’re a person, and you don’t want that to happen anymore, you have to sort that out within yourself. So I can explain, and I think I’ll close with this, another deeply religious idea. There’s another idea, this is an archetypal idea about the image of the saviour, the messiah. The messiah is the person who takes the sins of the world onto himself. That’s a classic archetypal idea. It’s like, what does that mean? It means that you look for the motivations that drove Hitler in yourself, because they were there. And that’s what it means to take the sins of the world onto yourself. It means that you have to view yourself as the perpetrator of archetypal evil. You know, one of the things Jung said, for example, was that if you take a small moral failing that a person manifests, and you dig into that as deeply as you can, you end up in the centre of hell. The roots of that unethical behaviour go all the way down to the archetype. And in my experience, that’s been true. That’s right. That’s why people won’t have conversations about this sort of thing. You see it happening in intimate relationships all the time, where there are things that the two people who are involved in the relationship will just not talk about. Why? Because they don’t want to go there. And where is it that they don’t want to go? They don’t want to get to the bottom of things. Well, no wonder, because, you know, that’s an archetypal idea too. Hell is a pit. It’s at the bottom of things. It’s like, yeah, that is where it is. And you have to go there if you want to straighten things out. It’s like, who the hell wants to do that? Well, the alternative is that it plays itself out in the world. And we’ve seen that. And that doesn’t look like a good idea to me. So, well, I guess we should probably end there, because I’m getting fuzzy-minded. That’s always a good time to stop. So thank you very much for tuning in. And if this seems to have been successful, kind of at a slow start as far as I was concerned. I was kind of muddled, but headed to begin with. But, you know, maybe we’ll edit all that out. Anyways, I’m thinking about doing this on a regular basis. So, you know, let me know what you think. And we’ll see how many people watch it. And we’ll see what happens. And, like, thanks to all of my RAs, I’ve got lots of research assistants here who are really helping me out with this. So, mastering the technology and figuring out what to do with YouTube. So thank you very much for tuning in. And hopefully I’ll see you again. Ciao.