I should tell you first
about the genesis of this
theory I suppose is the right way of putting it
when I was about your age
that was back in the
early 80’s
or thereabouts
and this was particularly true around 1984 but it was true before that too
every generation has its worries
real or imagined
the primary worry
for people of my generation was nuclear war
and you know it was a genuine worry
at one point many years later
I went down to Arizona
to visit an ICBM, a decommissioned ICBM
nuclear missile silo
and ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile were, very large rockets
right they
flew at, they could fly half way around the world
it was deep underground and behind very thick
steel doors, it was light green you know that pastel green
that everyone seemed to like in the 1950’s
it was like pastel green Star Trek console
that’s what it looked like
and ah,
so we went down
out in the yard, it was in the desert, out in the yard there was a very
I would say
magical object
for lack of a better word
and that was the nose cone
for the ICBM
and it was quite big
about that big, about that high, pointed like the point of a bullet
about ¾’s of an inch thick, plastic
you know kind of a resin
and it was designed to melt on re-entry
so that was just sitting there
so that was fairly
thought provoking, let’s put it that way
and then we went into
the missile silo
interestingly enough
appended to the front of it, it had been decommissioned under Regan, by the way
in the front of it there was a museum
with
artifacts from the 1980’s featuring Reagan
and Gorbachev meeting multiple times
and it was staffed by these
Southern
these Americans from the South who were grandparent age and they were
and they were just super friendly
and you know , they were happy to be in the museum, and it was like going to visit
your grandma’s nuclear missile silo
and so it was jarring you know, because it was obviously a portentous
place, and yet it was conjoined with hospitality and welcoming
it was surreal in that manner
anyways we went into the
into the silo
and they ran us through a
simulated launch, so imagine
a panel like this made out of metal except twice as long with another one of these things at the other end 16 feet across or so
basically 1950’s technology
but updated and then imagine what you had to do to launch it
was that there was a guy with a key and there was another guy with a key and if I remember correctly the keys were around their necks
although I don’t think that they were stored around their necks permanently but
and so to launch the missile you had to put the key in the lock
both of you that was the safety
precaution, had to be two of you
put the key in the lock and hold it for 10 seconds and then
away the missile goes and it wasn’t as big, the missile wasn’t as big as the rockets that went to the moon
but
but it was plenty big you know the silo itself would have easily been
as wide as this room is
and perhaps larger and many, many, story’s tall, you know because it was nested underground
so they ran us through a simulated launch which was
surreal, I would say and then they told us that
someone asked, that the keys were in once
now, they wouldn’t tell us when but
you know that would have been during the Cuban missile crisis
because, we were that close
and we were close again at other times, although perhaps not that close
and there seemed to be another peak of
conflict, in 1984
when there was a movie showed at that time called
“The Day After”
which at that time
garnered more views than any movie ever had on TV, and it was
a story about
the aftermath of a nuclear war and the people that were left and it was
pretty realistic and
and pretty frightening, it, it turned out
as I found out later that
that movie was one of things that influenced Ronald Reagan to
put pressure on or negotiate with the Soviets depending on how
you look at it
and so
well then you know 5 years later
the Soviet union collapsed, no one saw that coming
and it really didn’t collapse in 1989 in some sense, you know, like
a huge machine like that
doesn’t fall apart all at once, it falls apart over time and then at some point it just
becomes unsustainable and topples
and you know, it’s like they lost faith in their doctrine
and for good reason
you know that
the system in Russia
the Soviet Union, which was a collection of states,
an empire
and the system that Mao establish in China and
the system that still exists in Korea
as a remnant of the cold war
and systems in South East Asia and in Africa
were all predicated on
Marxist presuppositions
presuppositions that were Utopian in nature
and that
and that posited a Utopian future where
property was held in common and everyone had
enough
and everyone was called upon to do what they could
ight, from each according
to his ability, to each according to his need
which is a lovely sentiment and you can imagine
how it would be attractive
even intellectually, because of course
other systems, all other systems
produce vast disparities in income
it’s like a natural law, that’s actually
governed by, you can model it
with a distribution called the Pareto distribution, and the Pareto distribution looks like this
it doesn’t look like a normal distribution, a lot of you guys have been told about, not, normal distributions and how
many things
many things follow on normal distribution, most things, but that’s really
a limited case
you can understand a Pareto distribution if you
you’ve all played Monopoly I presume
at the beginning
everyone has the same amount of money
we will include property, the same amount of wealth
and then what happens as the game progresses, and really as a function of chance
I mean, I know that you have to use a head a little bit in Monopoly but
the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on
and then trade meanly, something like that
so at the beginning everybody has the same amount
and then as you begin to play
if you had enough players you would develop a normal distribution
because some people would win
relatively consistently and some players lose relatively consistently
and so the money starts to be distributed
in a normal distribution, but
the thing about money, and the thing about lots of things
is that zero is involved
and zero is a weird place
because if you are playing a trading game and you hit zero
then you’re done
and so, and it is very hard to recover from zero, and you know
it’s really hard to recover, you know when you are doomed in Monopoly
you know, you, you can tell, you’ve got some resources but
there is going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel
and you are going to get wiped out, you know it, so
there is a point at which you’re headed for zero even if you have
something
you know and you might be rescued by,
luck,
but you know when you are doomed
So what happens as you continue to play Monopoly,
more and more people stack up at zero
and fewer and fewer people
have more and more money
and when the game is over
every person has no money and one person has all of it,
now the funny thing about that is
in some sense that is how trading games work,
you know, you got, you might wonder why there is inequality in a society
and it is easy to consider that it’s because the society is corrupt
and perhaps,
you know, society is somewhat or horribly corrupt,
that is the variation, there is no
society that is not without its criminal
element, its fixed element
anyways
trading games tend to produce a Pareto distribution so that very many have very little
and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount
that’s the 1% that you hear about, right,
and the thing about the 1% is that
it has happened in every society that has ever been studied,
it doesn’t really matter what the governmental system is, it certainly
happened under the Soviets, that’s for sure
and there was enough people that had enough zero that they just died,
so,
you know, the,
the Utopian dream
was completely un-implementable
for a variety of very complex reasons, one
is that it is very hard to fight against that distribution pattern
when people are trading because
mere statistics will do that, and then there are other things, and
I should tell you as well that the Pareto distribution governs a lot of things, so,
if you look at books, if I remember properly
last year there was something like a million English language books published
and I think that 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies
which is none, right, that is none, and of that 500 you can be sure
that one of them was by Stephen King
and he took half the money
because like there is 5 authors in the English language who are
on every airport
paperback stand occupying the top
rung and that’s massive real estate, right, because it is replicated everywhere,
and because they are so
prominent and because they are no names
when people are in a hurry and want something to read,
they just grab that, and more money goes to those people, so you know,
success breeds success
and failure breeds failure, and it not necessarily linear
and that is a really difficult thing to deal with,
and it is hard on societies, because,
one of the things we do know is that,
you know, as you stretch out the inequality,
you make men, particularly, on the lower end of the distribution,
more and more likely to be aggressive,
it’s sort of like, you imagine every man has a threshold for violence,
um, and status is important to men,
not that it isn’t important to women but,
it’s different,
it’s a different kind of status, it’s status that is important to
men because it’s one of the things that makes them
marketable as partners to women so it actually turns out to be quite important to men
men tend to compete
with one another for status, hierarchy position, and
in a really unequal society,
if you are like a low
rung guy,
then, and you don’t have any opportunity to rise because
the society isn’t structured
so that there’s mobility, then
the more aggressive guys,
tend to turn to criminality, and you know and so you could say
there is a threshold for
criminality,
and the more inequality pressure you put on
a particular area, geographic or political area,
the more inequality pressure you put on it,
the more men slip past that threshold and
into criminality, and you know there have been some pretty good studies done of
drug gangs
in Chicago, that was the best one, a sociologist actually went out and hung out with a drug gang
he got into it, I guess the drug gang leader was,
you know,
I wouldn’t say necessarily narcissistic, that might be a reasonable
way of thinking about it,
and he was kind of
happy with the idea of maybe being the subject of a book
and, so this guy was able
to associate with them, got to know them quite well,
and then the housing project in which the
gang was housed
was slated for demolition and the gang broke up
and he got the books
because they kept books
and what he found was the average street drug dealer, first of all was employed
in another job, as well,
and was making far less than minimum wage
now, but guys further up the chain of course
followed the Pareto distribution so there was a tiny minority of them that were raking in a tremendous amount of loot,
and the guys at the bottom
were just waiting around for the possibility that they could rise
up the hierarchy and you know it’s a pretty violent game, so,
the chances that someone’s going to be,
taken out
it pretty high and so then a slot opens up for some opportunistic
second rater and perhaps he can move up the hierarchy.
So the Pareto distribution governs all sorts of other things too, I mentioned
it governs the popularity of books
the sales of books
but it also, it also
characterizes the distribution of everything that people produce,
so if you think of creative production of any sort, artistic production, industrial production
it doesn’t matter,
almost everything fails
and a few things succeed
beyond anyone’s wildest imagination
Apples’ a good example of that, you know I mean, the iPhone,
they have their competitors but
it is an extraordinarily dominant product, and they rake in billions of dollars
don’t know if Apple is valued at a trillion dollars but
it’s close to that,
and that is a lot of money, and I think if I remember correctly,
it something like this, I probably have the figures wrong but the top 40 people,
the richest 40 people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2 billion
right, now, you know it not like they are stuffing their mattresses with that money
or they have a skyscraper full of cash, that money is out in the
economy doing whatever money does, so
you can’t spend 28 billion dollars
so, and sometimes you can even do some good with it, you know, Bill Gates seems to be
doing something reasonable with his money,
but the reason I am telling you this is because one of the things you should know
is that
this proclivity for inequality
is pervasive among the products of human beings
it is the case with
the goals scored in hockey, my son told me
and he is a reliable source on hockey statistics, that
if Wayne Gretzky, if you don’t count any of the points that Wayne Gretzky managed with scoring,
he still had enough points just with assists to have more points than any hockey player that ever played,
so,
you know, even at the upper end
of the distribution
there is some person whose, aahh, that is so good at what they do,
and then there is another person that is so much better than them that it is not even comparable
and so,
and the benefits flow to people who are in that position, and you can understand why ,I would say because
you know, say you start writing, and you get a book
and
rare things, very rare things to have happen, and some people read it and they like it and then of course
it is much more likely that you’ll get a next book
and if people like that then it is even more likely that you will get a third book and then people start to know who you are
and then because they know who you are, they phone you up and offer you opportunities and your network grows,
it’s like this exponential
increase in your reach and your capacity for production, and
more and more flows to you, and
then on the other hand
if you start to fail, and you know, why would someone fail, well God,
one idea that is very common in our culture is that poverty is caused by lack of money and that’s a very stupid idea,
because money is very difficult to handle, I had clients who were drug addicts,
and the worst possible thing that could happen to them is that they got some money
they’re just done, first of all, they were hanging around with people who were
a little on the sociopathic side and so,
especially if they weren’t that bright and couldn’t defend themselves very well
as soon as they got money, well it was off to the bar with all the friends, and, you know,
one guy I remember in particular, you know every time he got his,
his disability cheque,
he was gone for 5 days, you would find him in a ditch, you know, because he would go to the bar,
spend every cent he had on alcohol and cocaine, and,
wake up in a ditch ¾’s dead,
well, eventually completely dead, and,
you know then he was ashamed and horrified and repentant and
he would straighten himself out again and then that was all well and good, until, as long he was broke
until the next cheque showed up, and then, bang the same thing, so, you know,
it’s not like money is necessarily a good for everyone
it’s hard to manage money, it’s really easy for it to disappear, I mean elderly people have a hell of a time now because
you know, crooks are contacting them on the Internet non-stop, and so
just giving people money
money it’s like, it’s like pouring water in their hands
it’s not that helpful, not necessarily that helpful, and then of course,
contributors to poverty are , well, it’s not that helpful to have a low IQ
you know, people don’t like the idea of IQ
because it seems so arbitrary, you know, have a high IQ
well it’s not like you deserve it exactly,
you are set up that way pretty much right from the beginning, it’s a very, very, very, very stable.
You can make a high IQ person stupider
by not educating them up to the level of their possibility, but
taking someone who has a low IQ trying to raise that, it’s like if you can figure out how to do that
well, you know, it’s Nobel Prize time for you because people have tried that a lot,
and most recently with those you know Luminosity, Lumosity games and that sort of thing, the evidence that those produce
anything other than brilliant performances on the Lumosity game itself
is basically zero. We haven’t been able to figure out how to,
see, ‘cause, intelligence is a cross domain phenomena
and you can get really good in a single domain by practising like mad
and what you want is to practise like mad in a single domain and hope that it generalizes to other domains
that’s the holy grail of intelligence increase, no,
no one has done it, people claim it, but the claims never hold up, and people have been trying for a long time
to do it, and then haven’t been able to do it, and,
difference in IQ really make a difference, you know, I mean,
you guys average IQ’s is probably 125, 130,
at 115 you are at the 85th percentile
and 115 would barely get you going for a hard university,
130, you are probably graduate school material, you know, 145
you are up there
at the range probably where you can pretty much do whatever you want
but as you get smarter, the scatter between your abilities increases
so you might have a very high verbal IQ, but not be so good at mathematics, or the other way around,
but it’s a massive contributor to lifetime success,
and, I don’t know what to do about that.
Why do smart people make more money?
Well, they get to where the edge of production is faster
so if you have a 1000 people and you rank order them by IQ the smart people are going to come up with the new ideas first
and they are going to have more ideas, and they are going to strategize better, and,
you know, with an IQ of 90, which is,
15% of the population, think about that, 15% of the population
that is pretty much the threshold for reading instructions and being able to follow them
so you know, and our society is increasing sophisticated so
it is by no means obvious
you know the liberals think, well
that society is unfair because there is unemployment and conservatives think
that, well there is a job for everyone
but none of them think well there are massive, massive, massive differences in people’s ability
far greater than anyone realizes,
and that poses a structural problem.
I had a client
and I got him a volunteer job which is way harder than you think
you need a police check, for example
Like it's harder to get a volunteer job than a real job
But I, We got him in a volunteer job and
he had to fold
pieces of paper, letters, it was, he worked at a charity
he had to fold pieces of paper, in three so that he could put them inside envelopes
and
and the the letters, which were in a pile had to matched with the proper envelopes
which were also in a pile, some of them were French and some of them were English
so the French ones had to be carefully matched to the French
envelopes and, and then if, you know, if there was one envelope out of
order, well then he had to figure out whether it was the papers
that were out of order or the letters that were out of order
and then,
Some of the letters had photographs attached to them
and you weren't supposed to bend the photographs, but
they weren't all in the same place, so that meant you had to figure out how to fold
the paper in three, a bunch of different ways without creasing the photograph
and then, the other thing is,
and I never realized how difficult it is to put a piece of paper in an envelope
until I watched someone that couldn't do it
and he probably had an IQ of about 80
you know if you met him on the street you wouldn't think anything different of him,
he was a normal looking guy
had some other problems
I trained to fold those damn papers for like 30 hours
and he got reasonably good at it, but
you know, if you are good at it
and you probably all are
you fold it, and the edges line up exactly
like really exactly, the tolerance is probably 1/2 a millimeter or something like that
and then you do the second fold
and, the tolerance is the same
but let's imagine the first fold that you
you are out by an 1/8th of an inch and the second fold you are out by an 1/8th of an inch
so it's a little crooked, and that means in total you are out by a 1/4 of an inch
then it won't fit in the damn envelope
so then you kind of crumple the envelope when you put it there and then it gets stuck in the sorting machine
and so
he sweated blood trying to do that job and eventually they
eventually planned to fire him
so imagine what that's like, eh, you know
you can't get a job
and then so you get a job at a charity as a volunteer
and a charity decides to fire you
you know I mean, really
that's just, so I talked to the women who was running it and
suggested that
that might be a little on the devastating side, I mean she had her reasaons
you know,
he, he,. he was always asking people questions about how to do his job
and you know so that meant he was interfering with the productivity of other people
and it was genuine interference, I mean, she wasn't being mean
and it was her job to make sure that the place did what it was supposed to, so
and, you know, she was between a rock and a hard place
he eventually decided that the job wasn't for him
relatively soon after that, I think it was too stressful
and uh,
he quit, so that solved that problem, except then, he didn't have a job
which of course is a problem
it has a happy ending this story, as far as I know
um, he
he got a dog because he was very lonesome, and that dog, man,
having that guy train that dog, that was something else, that dog just
I think he lost thirty pounds while he was training that dog
because dogs, you know, they are dominant
he had to have a tussle with the dog to figure out who was in charge, and it's a lot of responsibility to have a dog
but he was pretty damn committed to that dog
and he managed it, the things he went through
to keep that dog you cannot possibly imagine, it's like a, like a
it was surreal, just like the nuclear missile silo, I mean, he had people following him around informing
on him because they thought he was abusing the dog
when in fact, because I watched the dog was clearly abusing him
so,
he got a job helping a women who trained dogs
and then he had a job
so hurray, you know, but
it was like a miracle fundamentally, so
Anyways, the reason I am telling you all this is because
there was a reason for the Cold War
and the reason was that
there is inequality
and there are different theories how to address that
inequality and different theories as to why it exists
and there was a Marxist theory
about why it exists which was roughly something like property equal theft
and those who have more have taken it from those who have less
which
seems to me to eliminate any conceptualization that there isn't a fixed pot of money
you know money expands actually, as we become more technologically proficient
and,
lots of people who have money have it because generated a lot of wealth
Bill Gates is a great example of that right he popularized computing he made it possible for everybody to
to have access to computing, it's like, it seems like a good, good for him you know
and you could say the same thing about Steve Jobs
and maybe you will be able to say the same thing about Elon Musk, and
you know, these guys have tremendous resources at their diposal
but
you know, they're not like
bathing in bank notes, you know, they're
trying to continue to do things, they use their money to do things
anyways
The Russians set themselves up under Marxist presuppositions
and tried to
equalize the distribution of property
and
to call that catastrophic barely scratches the surface, I know that
you guys probably don't learn much about this because for some reason
people aren't taught about it, but
good estimates are that the Russians killed about 30 million of their own people between 1919 and 1959
you know and it's
brutal
brutal, a lot of that was through starvation
you know I saw a photograph the other day, which I tweeted
which is the worst photograph I have ever seen in my life and that is actually saying a lot because,
I have seen a lot of really terrible photographs because I've
done so much investigation into totalitarianism
this was a photograph taken during one of the early
starvation... periods in the Soviet Union where about three million peasants died
was a picture of a peasant couple
standing behind a table at a market selling human body parts for food
and you know, I have this weird quirk
which I don't think does me much good, but
maybe
helps me understand things better
when I see that someone has dome something
extreme,
I learned to this a long time ago when I worked briefly in a maximum security prison
I try to imagine, what I would have to like
what kind of situation what sort of situation would I have to find myself in
to do that
and believe me, man,
that's a horrifying enterprise because
it is actually possible
no matter what you read about someone doing
and no matter how unlikely you think that you would do that
It's possible,
to imagine yourself in that situation, and that
well that's enlightening, that's what I would say, that's enlightening
you know because one of the things about enlightenment
is that
you get enlightened by doing
things that necessary that you really, really, really do not want to know
don't want to do
and imagine, imagining yourself as a perpetrator of that sort
is
that tells you something about the world, and it tells you something about human beings, but
it's a hell of thing to swallow, you know, in a very
well structured society such as ours
where we are so peaceful
well because we have the heat
and it always works, and we have electricity, and it always works
and we have plumbing, which a bloody miracle, and it always works
you know, it's just
One of the things that this imagination process has done for me is keep me alert
to the absolute miracle that my life is everyday
It's horrbly cold out there
You can't grow any food
You'd die if you were out there for 24 hours
If any of the infrastructure was unreliable for any length of time we would be in serious trouble
and it's never unreliable
It's so unlikely
and so we are, with all this reliable
infrastructure
and because of that we don;t have to compete with each other much
I mean, some
You don't compete for food
You don't compete for shelter, or some people do but not many
So, it really easy to think of yourself as good, because
You're not
doing anything nasty to anyone
but, you know, a cynic might say well that, that's just because you don't have any reason to
but, those reasons
have arisen many times in the past, and
in fact they're the norm, not the exception, we're the exception, this
insanely
functional society that
we have somehow managed to generate is
it is incomprehensible to me that it exists
so,
Anyways
back in the industrial, the end of the industrial revolution
The conditions of the worker were pretty brutal
I mean George Orwell wrote a book called "Road to Wigan Pier" which I highly recommend, it's a great book
and he went up in the 30's
I think it was the 30's
To work, to live with the coal miners up in Northern U.K.
and, those poor guys
your know they had to crawl to work for two miles down a tunnel that they couldn't stand up in
just to start their shift
and after their 8 hours of hacking away at the coal walls
which is rather difficult, dirty and dangerous
and of course you get black lung from it fatal and of course they didn't get paid very much
so after doing that for 8 hours
then you , crawled back, your 2 miles
and you didn't get paid for that, that was just the commute
and the housing for those people
was not good, the food wasn''t good, most of them had not teeth by the time they were 30
you know, I mean
being poor was no joke even in a place like the U.K. which was relatively well off
and so there was every reason to be
concerned between the disparity between rich andpoor
and poor is the natural state, you know
In the Western world, in 1895 the typical person lived on a dollar a day in today's dollars
and, you know, that's not
uncommon in many places in the world now
so
there are reasons to be concerned with inequality
and, you know, the Russians took one pathway inspired by Marx and we took another pathway
inspired by
John Stuart Mill and John Locke
the English tradition I would so, democracy
and, competed for
70 years
and, things seem to have worked out better here
but, with a hell of a competition
and there were real differences of opinion at the bottom of it
and those two systems turned into armed camps, and that's not over exactly, you know, I mean
there are Chinese, although they're a hybrid now between Communism and capitalism
and hopefully they are more interested in getting rich than they are, in, you know
having a war
greed is a good motivator
surprisingly enough it is kind of reliable
but, anyways, by 1989, the jig was up
it was obvious that the Soviet system, could not
was not functional, there, was no
consumer goods, that's for sure, even in the main department stores in Moscow
people just kind of lost faith in the whole project
you know, it became
huh!
for a while, I don't know if you know about the show Dallas
Dallas was a soap opera that ran at night
a serial, and uh, it was about these rich
Texans, who lived, you know, a 1% lifestyle
and it was the most popular show in East Germany
the streets would empty so people could watch Dallas
well,
when you are sitting in you horrible Soviet architecture flat
that, you know you had to struggle to get with your informing
relatives, because 1 out of 3 people in East Germany was an informer, a government informer
and you watch Dallas, you know, there is a little cognitive dissonance occurring
and so,
it fell apart
and
quite peacefully actually, you know, there was a war in
there was a bit of a war in Eastern Europe
but
it fell apart remarkably peacefully, and so here we are
and we don't know what do with the pesky Russians, but
at least
there is no evidence that they are our mortal enemies for fundamental reasons of
axiomatic presupposition
and things are a lot better
in the world
despite what everyone tells you
than they were 40 years ago, and they are so much better than they
were 50 years ago that is absolutely staggering
We have lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years
that have been lifted out of poverty in the entire history of the world before then
people are, gathering economic resources
at a rate that even the wildest optimist really couldn't dream of speeding up
so,
It's not like we are not without our problems, but,
So during that period of time
I was obsessed, would be a good word
with
a question, and the question was
Why,
would human beings
produce two camps
and then
produce a massive arsenal of hydrogen bombs
and I don't know what you know about hydrogen bombs, but they have atom bombs for triggers
and, you know, that's worth thing because an atom bomb, you know, hey, that's
that's something, but a hydrogen bomb
that's the sun, that's really something
so, and you know, at the peak of the cold war, and this is still true to some degree
there were literally tens of thousands of these weapons aimed
at the Soviet Union and at the West, and
that was enough
pretty much put and end to everything
and, that's a dangerous game, man, you know and
not only because of intent, but also because of the possibility of accidental
just an accident, you know
just a mistake, or just someone whose a little crazier than you might want them to be
you know, and you might think, well no one would want to bring about the destruction of the world but
that just means you don't know very much about Stalin
because
of all the people who lived in the 20th century who had power
Stalin was
the most motivated to bring everything to an end
There is some evidence that he was murdered, by
Khrushchev, and his crew, and Khrushchev was the next leader
and
if he was not murdered, he was at least not provided with medical attention when he was dying
and uh, there is reasonable evidence that he was gearing to invade Western Europe
and he really didn't care how much destruction would go along with that,
I mean, he had already killed tens of millions of people
he had a lot of practice, he was good at it, it didn't really bother him, maybe even enjoyed it
so,
what the hell, that's what I thought, how can it be that you are doing this, it's so insane
so then I started to think about belief systems, you know
because you could say that each camp had it's own belief system, the one in the West was derived
and had a very lengthy history
derived from the Greeks and the Romans, and the Jews and the Christians
and from various schools of philosophy and from the Enlightenment and all that, and then
the Soviet Union was basically predicated on a rational philosophy
that, that opposed the axioms that the West had evolved
and each group organized their societies around that, and
Now I took political science for quite a long time
and the political scientists and the economists
they basically thought that people competed over resources
but that wasn't a very good answer as far as I was concerned, because it wasn't obvious to me why people valued the resources they valued
The economists just assumed that there are resources that you valued, but
but, you know, people can value a lot of different things, it's
it's not exactly fixed, I mean, you tend to value food very highly if you are hungry, obviously, but
but there are lots of thing that we value and that we want that
seem somewhat arbitrary, somewhat like a decision
so I got more interested in why people valued things, and, what it meant to value something
and then what it meant to believe something
and then
how it could be that someone could believe something, so deeply
that they would risk their own death, to
protect it, or at least risk the death of other people
and maybe on a massive scale, like, man, people are committeda to their system
now, you know, a system of belief is not just a system of belief, that's one of the things I came to understand is that it's not
appropriate, to make this too psychological
people defend their belief systems, but that's not exactly right, you know
we have a shared belief system
well it's sufficiently shared so, that, here we are
we don't know each other, we are a bunch of primates
we are in this room and it's peaceful, and no one's scared
and that's pretty amazing and that means we are all acting out our roles
so, we acting out our roles and we have an expectation with regard to those roles
and those two things match
and that's the important thing, and we will talk about that a lot
it isn't the belief system, or the integrity of the belief system even
it's the match between the belief system and the actions of the other people within the belief system
what you want to maintain is that match
you want to act out your beliefs
in the world, and you want what you want to happen
that's a good thing, you get what you want and you validate your belief system, great
perfect, security
but a lot of that is, we are interacting, even right now
there is a whole set of expectations that are governing what we are doing, like you don't want me to take your
little tablet there and smash it, that would be
shocking, right, you wouldn't know what the hell to do
right, you would be somewhere different it I did that
and you wouldn't know where you were
and that is another thing to know, because
that is a fundamental difference, there is a fundamental difference
between knowing where you are
and not knowing where you are
I think that it's, in some sense, the fundamental difference, you can think about it as the distinction between
explored and unexplored territory, but you have to
I don't know if you have taken a cat to a new house, cats hate that
and, because in their old house, and maybe in their old neighborhood, they've slunk around
you know, at the edges, checking everything out
they start out afraid
they check everything out, they know where to hide, they now what's safe
and they know that because they go somewehere
and nothing happens, so then they assume that it is safe
and they slowly, build up a neighborhood that they are comfortable with
My dad used to take the dog for a walk, and the cat got lonesome and it started to follow him, and
First of all, it would go along the buildings, the houses on their route
hiding, really from predators, and
after a while it got kind off comfortable with that then it follow right behind the dog
but, it had a border, and if
my dad took the dog over one street to many for the cat
the cat would just sit on the corner and
you know, cry, like a cat cries, it was like
that's it for me man, I am not going any further out into the unknown
and so,
the distinction
between the territory that you have mastered
and the territory that you haven't mastered, is a fundamental distinction
it is the distinction between home and the strange land
and the thing about familiar territory for people, is that most of the familiar territory that we inhabit
is other people
because we are so social, you can't really think
it's a weird way of thinking about territory, it's not exactly geographical, objective territory, it's
territory with a dominance hierarchy in it
and the dominance hierarchy has a predictable structure
and you know where you fit in it most of the time
and so when you act out in that territory surrounded by your people
then often you get what you want
and, you are so thrilled about that, because
you just don't want someone acting erratically around you
like, and you know that, so you walk down Bloor
and there are people there that really should be institutionalized, but
we de-institutionalized them all so that they could be free, and free to be, you know
suffering and malfunctioning, and out on the street, that's what the freedom ended up being
but you know, you'll walk by someone like that whose
muttering away to the voices in his head and, you know, maybe
striking out against what ever it is that's plaguing him and
you'll make eye contact
you might even go across the street, you are certainly give him a wide berth, you are going to keep
a distance between him and you.
and you are going to hope that you don't attract his attention
because, he's not in the dominance hierarchy
and you don't know what the hell he might do
and that's unexplored territory too
and that's another way of thinking about it
We inhabit time and space, not just space, and not just time, we inhabit time and space
and out territories are spatio-temporal, we are here - now
and this is safe, now
and it's safe, partly because of the physical structure and it's working
but it's also because none of you are manifesting peculiar behaviour
but if you started to manifest peculiar behaviour
if you stood up and started muttering or yelling
or maybe attacking someone next to you
all the rest of you freeze first
because all of a sudden this would be unexplored territory
the match between what you want, which is a peaceful lecture that you hope has some content
the match between what you want and what is happening, has vanished
and so then, you're not, you don't know where you are
and so what do you do when you don't know where you are
what do you do when you don't know what to do
well, if you are a computer then you just crash
but
you know, what good is that to you, you are just going to die, that isn't helpful
you freeze, first
and then you maybe cautiously attend, or maybe you don't, maybe you just keep you're damn eyes averted
and you sit there and you hope that no one notices you
that's a prey response, right that's like a rabbit frozen when it thinks a fox is looking at it
and we were prey animals for a long time
there was a cat
that they recently discovered, a prehistoric cat that had this bottom single tooth
and they found out that it
a human skull fit right inside it's mouth and so it could grab you here and pierce the back of your skull with it's
single tooth, and that is what it was evolved for, so, you know
It's under such conditions we evolved and we are predators obviously
but we are tasty predators, and so other things were perfectly happy to eat us
and so where you are don't know what to do you act like a prey animal
and that is probably what you should do because maybe if you keep your head down
and shut the hell up
there won't be any attention attracted to you
and maybe you will get through it
you might decide, unlikely, to intervene
and take the guy down
but
but you would be the exception rather than the norm, and it's unsurprising
OK, so
What is came to understand is that belief systems regulated emotions
but not exactly psychologically, like, it isn't exactly
it isn't exactly, and this is sort of like the terror management theories, it's not exactly like you have a theory
in your head, and because the theory explains the world, and because the theory explains the world
the theory is what is making you secure
it's kind of like that
it's like you have a theory in you head
and the theory makes you feel secure because it explains the world
but the reason it explains the world is because other people have the theory in their head
and when you both act out the theory
you both get what you want, and it's the coming together of the theory
and the outcome that makes you
it's life
not only does it
stop you from being anxious and often make you happy because you get what you want, but
it's not just psychological you know the fact that we do this, that we cooperate
within our societies, we match our belief systems and then act them out
that's the predicate a productive society
so, it's actually, it isn't that just that it saves you from death anxiety like the terror management
theorists have it, it saves you from death
and, that's good, I mean, being protected from death anxiety, yay, well, good
that's great too man, but actually not dying, that sort of the fundamental thing that you are after
and so, people have reason to defend their territory
if you think of territory that way, if you think about it as a domain where the fundamental presuppositions
of each citizen are matched by the behavior of their co-citizens
They have every reason to defend that
and if it falls apart, it can have mortally
serious consequences, it's chaos, you know that chaos just doesn't destabilize everybody psychologically
it destabilizes everything, it can destabilize the currency
it can destabilize the industrial economy, the lights can go off it's like
it's not good,
so
hey, no wonder people protect it
so then I started thinking about what a belief system was
and
I realized that a belief system was actually a set of moral guidelines
and moral guidelines are guidelines about how you should, behave
also how you should perceive
and the reason that a moral guideline
is necessary for you to perceive is that
you can't look at anything without a hierarchy of value
right, think about it, how may things in this room could you look at
there is an innumerable in this room to look at
there are just all the squares, the little tiny squares in this fabric
you could look at those things, for, until the end of time, one at a time, but you don't do that
in fact, if I took most of you out of this room
there is a very low probability that you would be able to tell me what color the walls were, or
even if those things were on the walls
and the reason for that, is that, who cares
as long as the walls don't move
color is irrelavant, and there is no reason for you to remember it
it has no emotional significance
it has no value
and so what you do instead is
well, this is what you're doing, so, why are you here
I don't mean in, the broad metaphysical sense, I mean specifically why are you here right now
and I would say that you are students, obviously
and you are trying to get a degree, and
you know you believe that will have some functional utility
maybe you will be a little wiser, and a little more literate
and be able to think a little better, and be able to write a little better and so you will actually be more functional in the world
that would be good
you know, and, maybe you are interested, but anyways it's
You're in this particular lecture, so that you can take this particular class
so that you can get a particular kind of degree
so that you can launch your life, and then in your life you are probably going to meet someone that you
have a long term relationship with, and you are going to have children, and you are going to partake in the society, and
that's why you are here, all of those reasons, simultaneously is why you are here
and so then
that helps you decide what to look at
and so what you look at is
at the moment or listen to is me because, in principle
I am the gateway to that set of accomplishments, at this moment
and so
you focus on me
and that's because you value that
and so what that means is that you can't even look at the world without a value structure
you know it's chaos, if everything is equally unimportant or if everything is equally important
it's chaos, so a value system, structures
the very way that you perceive the world, and I don't mean that metaphysically
there is plenty of experiments that have demonstrated that
like the invisible gorilla experiment, how many of you know about the invisible gorilla experiment. How many don't?
Well,
Roughly speaking, what happens is that there are two teams
a white team dressed in white and a team dressed in black
and there is a video of them and the black team is passing a basketball ball back and forth
and the white team passing basketball back and forth
and you are supposed to count the times the basketball gets passed back and forth
there is only one basketball
and so, you know, you're diligent
for whatever reason
you do what the experimenter asks you
and you count the basketball tosses and you think
well that's not so hard, it's like 16
so you tell them 16, and they say,
Did you see the gorilla?
and half of you say, what are you talking about
and the experimenter says, let's watch again but this time, don't count
Well, sure enough, like 30 seconds into the video
and, you know, the players fill the video screen, it's not like they are 300 yards in the distance, you know, like little ants playing basketball, they're right
filling the screen, you can see their faces
Sure enough,
minute into the video this guy in a gorilla suit, and he is not little, and neither is the gorilla suit, and he comes out
bangs his chest right in the middle of the screen for five seconds and then disappears
and half, more than half actually of people don't see that, and it is even worse, Dan Simon did another experiment, where
you are at a counter, you know at a store, and there is a clerk there
you are talking to the clerk, and the clerk, goes down
hypothetically to get something, and then a different clerk pops up
and you think, Hey! I would notice that!
but you don't
and you can even vary the clerk quite a bit,
and,
people don't notice
So,
We focus on very particular things and the reason we don't notice is because it doesn't actually matter
in terms of the ongoing,
our ongoing action at that point,
the clerk is interchangeable
as long as the entity there acts like a clerk
that's sufficient
So,
belief systems structure your perceptions, value systems, we are going to call them value systems
they structure you perceptions
and they also guide you actions because
you act, in accordance with your values
conscious, or unconscious, you have values that you don't know about because you don't know yourself very well
You can tell that, that you have values that you don't know, very well, because
sometimes you get attracted to people that you know perfectly well that's a mistake
or, you are trying to tell yourself to study and you don't, and, you know so there's
You are not in control of yourself to any great degree,
some, and the more integrated you are the more control you have but, you are kind of a loose collection
arguing sub-personalities, and they are more or less directed towards a single goal,
but it depends on how committed you are to that goal, how much you have thought it through, much you buy into it,
how many of the contradictions in your world representation you have managed to iron out, and all of that
So,
but in any case, it's value systems that
govern action and perception, and so, we are going to take an existential
perspective, a phenomenological and an existential perspective in this course, and
phenomenological means that we are going to
we are going to base our presuppositions on
the idea that what you experience is real, all of it
we are not really dividing the world into object and subject, that isn't how this particular approach works, it's more like
you have a field of experience, it includes things like pain,
which is not really something objective, I mean
but it's real, I mean, one of the things I've come to understand is...don't....
You are not required to believe what I am telling you, by the way
If you have an argument
about, why some of this doesn't make sense
then, you know, follow that sucker, because I am trying to tell you what I have reached with regards to bedrock presuppositions, and I haven't been able to
put prybars underneath them, but that doesn't mean you won't
and, you know, you should try, anyways
Moral system,
tells you how to act what to see,
and a shared moral system keeps your emotions under control, and fulfills your motivational needs
Now there is this old idea,
of David Hume's
and David Hume
famously,
posited, that you cannot derive and ought from and is
and what he meant by that was that
merely knowing the objective facts about something
does not tell you how to implement those facts in your life
and that's actually a gap, now, you could say, and I think that this is the case
that is a necessary consequence of the scientific endeavour, because
one of the things you are trying to do as a scientist is to strip away the value of the object, right, because
I don't care what your idiosyncratic notion of the object is
I want to know how you perceive the object
such that everyone else will perceive it at least that way
and so that takes the subjectivity completely out of it, and so it might just be a
necessary consequence of the scientific method
that it doesn't have a morality implicit in it
people argue about that, Sam Harris, for example, argues, he believes that we can come up with a scientific morality
I don't believe that, because I don't think that you can make rational judgments about value, it's too complicated
it's far to complicated, it's something that has to emerge, it can't be
I mean Marxism was supposed to be a scientific Utopia predicated on scientific principles, and all of that, and you know, it just didn't work
Anyways,
so I kind of buy Hume's argument
that you cannot derive an ought from an is, now
that's a problem
first of all it's a problem because you have factual knowledge but you don't know how to implement it, you know, it's like
should you spend money on AIDS or should you spend money on cancer or should spend money on higher education
how the hell are you going to calculate that rationally
you can't because you just don't have the information at hand
It's not possible to
you know, I worked for a U.N. committee at one point and, the U.N. committee had like a hundred
proposals for how the world could be improved, but there was no order to them, it's like it wasn't, this is more important than this, it's like, well
that's the end of that, you know, you have got to start with something and so that means you have to make something
more important that other things, obviously in your life
if everything is of equal importance then you are paralyzed
Now you know, it's a truism
and probably an oversimplfied one that
since the dawn of the scientific revolution
a wedge has been
driven through the heart of our societies, such that the moral systems that we
use to unite us
so those would be religious systems, fundementally
have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists, and
you know it's a pretty effective critique
even if you have maintained a traditional faith, it's like
the scientific onslaught is no joke
and
that's a problem as far as I can tell because
and the problem is that you are still left with the problem of how you should act
and Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche he would say that
we are running on the fumes of Christianity in the West
because over it's thousand years of domination, let's say 1500 years of absolute domination
it produced a consensus of morality that was predicated on metaphysical presuppositions
and that organized societies
and those societies are predicated on certain beliefs, like the belief in
really I would say in something divine inhabits each individual
you know, that sort of the presumption that is embedded in law, sort of the idea that underlies
the idea of natural rights, right
there is something about you that is so valuable that even the law
has to bow to it even if you are reprehensible, even if you are convicted and reprehensible
Now that's, man
the idea that people came up with that idea, that's a bloody miracle, you know because
generally speaking
your proclivity is that if someone is being even accused of doing something , the general human proclivity
is that if someone is just been accused of doing something terrible that's enough so that you can
stone them to death or do whatever you are going to do with them
presumption of innocence before guilt, good God
of all the things that aren't automatic, that's got to top the list
you know, it's unbelievable that occurs and it is interesting to me because
it seems to me that
that presupposition that there is something valuable, transcendent about each individual
I wouldn't call that a scientific presupposition, but
it seems to be a highly functional presupposition, right
I think, in that
it isn't unreasonable to notice that societies that have valued the individual
and made the law, subject to the individual even with regard to voting
because that's basically what voting does, it puts sovereignty the hands of the people
those societies actually seem to work
Now, whether they will work for the next 300 years
who the hell knows, but they work pretty well for the last 500 years, let's say
We've got it pretty good right now, and, you know, I suspect most of you
are rather pleased that the law recognizes you value as individuals
and you take that for granted, right, you think you have rights
and of course the rights you have, natural rights, are
logical consequences of your
transcendent value, and that is nested in, this is Nietzche's observation
that is nested in a set of metaphysical beliefs
and his idea was that if you wipe out,
wipe out the metaphysical beliefs
eventually you wipe out the whole system because you have knocked out the cornerstone
and it might take a long time for the thing to shake
and fall, but, it will
now, whether he was right or not is hard to say
it looks to me like what has happened since Nietzsche announced the death of God in say
the late 1800's is that
Western society has oscillated between extremes
you know, extremes on the right
Germany
extremes on the left
and you know, with
the democracies, at least the other democracies
the democracies managing to stay the course somewhere down the middle
but
but it is not obvious to me that that can be maintained
without the underlying metaphysics
and that is a problem because
whatever you might say about the underlying metaphysics
it is not true the way that science is true
and that could be OK because there might be more than one form of truth, in fact, I think there is
I think that there is pragmatic truth, and
I think that pragmatic truth is actually deeper than scientific truth
and pragmatic truth is the truths that enable you to act in a manner that best
that improves the probability, roughly speaking, of your existence and reproduction maximally
that is a Darwinian idea, one of the things about the Darwinian theory
this kind off puts it in opposition to scientific materialism I would say, is that
the Darwinian theory is that you do not have privileged knowledge of the world
and you can actually tell that because, you die
if you knew enough about the world, you would not die, and you do die
and so you are embodied theory of sorts
and that theory is good enough to get you along about 80 years and
produce some reasonable probability that you'll have children and that they will survive, that's it, man, that's what you have managed after
3 billion years of evolution
it's a good enough solution
it's a good enough way of acting, and we don't know a better way of acting, and
our world conceptions are actually nested inside the Darwinian system
and , they might be predicated on pragmatic truths
rather than objective truths, pragmatic truths are truths that have functional utility
and we are alive, we care about being alive
we tend to use our theories as tools
it's possible that our theories are tools
and that they are tools to help us stay alive
Now, I was reading a bit about Camille Paglia, the other day
and ah,
I have noticed some similarities between, she's a famous
gadfly, I would say of feminists
classic modern feminists, although she would regard herself as a feminist
Unbelievably smart, like if you want to watch someone whose
verbally
Who has verbal mastery beyond belief
You could watch Camille Paglia, she seems a little manic to me, she can
rap off an argument at a rate that's just mind-boggling and is very coherent, and
she tends to shred her opponents in arguments, she is so brilliant
She said something interesting, and she has been influenced by some of the same people I have been influenced by, she liked this book
by Erich Neumann called " The Origins and History of Consciousness" which
I would recommend if you are interested in Jungian theory, Carl Jung
It's a good introduction to Jungian theory and it's about the development of consciousness
and,
It's predicated like Jung's work, and Joseph Campbell's work
and Mircea Eliade's work, all which has been criticized or ignored by the post-modernists
Predicated on the idea that human beings have a central narrative
and that,
that central narrative is
the
dramatic expression of
the necessary human system of values
and that is built into us
it's part of our nature, we have a nature as human beings
we're not, infinitely malleable by culture
which is a post-modernist claim and a dangerous one
It's dangerous if we have a nature
Paglia has this idea, that
the reason that you come to university and you study the humanities, or the proper reason if you do that
is not to
engage in premature and destructive critisism
of something that you don't even yet understand
but to,
learn, as much as you can about
art and literature and poetry
and drama
and fiction
and religious thinking
and this all kind of a, you can think about it as a
What is that?
What is all that? It's art,
it's culture, music belongs in that category
and like, what the hell, what about music, it's like everyone loves it, or almost everyone
It's a mystery,
you listen to music and it is very meaningful
I mean music gets people through some pretty dark times, why?
It's not obvious, that for sure
you know, and in most cultures music plays a very central role in identity formation,and
you guys, I think you will probably find as you age that your favorite music
will be the music that you listened to between the ages of 16 and 20
It's kind of like it imprints on you
and it defines a, maybe it defines a generation
and maybe, in our tribal past, and this is highly likely
When you were being inculcated into the tribal culture,
That was inculcated with dance, and with masks
and with music, all at the same time, so you are invited to participate in this drama
and to take your place in this drama
and to think of that as a representation of the objective world is just not right, that isn't what it is
It's an invitation to a drama
now then the question might be, well, is the drama real?
and the answer to that is,
It depends on what you mean by real.
I think that great dramas are more real than real, they're hyperreal
They're
They're hyper real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract
and even perhaps generic, but applicable across an extraordinary broad range of situations
So, imagine this
you know, you get up in the morning
you do a bunch of things
and someone asks you what you are doing, what you did and you
you know, you tell them, well the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes
the second thing was think about whether or not I wanted to go back to sleep, and then
you know, I took off my blankets and then I put my feet on the floor
and I stood up, and I was blinking while I was doing all this, and I was also breathing
and then,
you know I looked for my clothes, and do you really want to listen to that guy?
You don't want to listen to that guy. It's like, why are you telling me that ?
I want you to tell me something interesting.
Well, what is it that is interesting? And why isn't that interesting?
It's not obvious.
So, so then imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty good story, a little adventure.
Probably,
he was doing something normal, something unexpected happened
he had to conjure up some new responses
he either settled the problem, or he didn't settle the problem, yeah, you're interested in that.
Especially if he settled the problem because if he can tell you how
when he encountered some unexplored territory
he was able to sew it back together
then, maybe you can do that thing happens and
that's pretty cheap wisdom for you, he had to go through all the aggravation of
figuring it out and all you have to do is listen
you know, and that's kind of a classic story, the classic story roughly speaking is
There is a guy, women, doesn't matter
going about their life
relatively normally, something blindsides them and they are in a state of
chaos
chaos is a place
chaos is the place that you end up when what you are doing
and the world stop matching, and the chaos can be of different degrees , you know you could wake up and find that
your house was burgled, you could wake up and find that a parent has
Alzheimer's, or some fatal disease or that you do
or that your whole family was murdered, or that there is a war starting, you know
there are different degrees of chaos and
I think that you can
Quantify the chaos by calculating
how much of
what you do and expect is likely to be disrupted by the event
now, because that, the more disruption, the more destabilized you are going to be, which is why
if someone tells you that you are going to perish painfully in 3 months, it's like
That's a bad one
you're really in an unexpected territory there, nothing that you assumed that was real,
roughly speaking, in the world is real anymore
We like to watch people, in their normal life
blindsided by something
experiencing this interregnum of chaos where they explore
and gather new information
and retool their character, or retool the world because either of those would work as a solution
and then, come out the other side
and things are better than they were to begin with
or at least as good, but, better is better, that's a happy ending, right?
That's a happy ending, that's a comedy. technically speaking, and so
what you want, you want your life to be a comedy
not that it's supposed to be funny because
comedy doesn't have to be funny, technically speaking
it's just the opposite of tragedy
tragedy is when you are going along pretty well and you get blindsided, and that's that
and, you know, that can certainly happen, it happens to people all the time. It's a comedy that you want.
Now,
what I hope to provide you with
is a magic code
You know, there was a book published a while back
Tom Hanks was in the movie
he was a Harvard professor who went around solving symbolic mysteries
Do you remember what is was called?
The Da Vinci Code, every one liked that, it sold a lot
and it was full of little mysteries, it was full of hints that there was more to the world than
you think, and, which is definitely true
and that, you know, there is a way of getting access to that knowledge and it would be really worthwhile
and people like that idea, and the reason for that is because it is actually, it's true.
It's true
it's true like
like fiction is true, so OK let's go back to the guy who is telling you about his morning
well he tells you something exciting
well then imagine that 10 people tell you exciting,
and then, you extract out the pattern of them dealing with this problem
from that, and do then you have a, that's what you do when you are an author
Right, because in a book you don't want the book exactly to be about
what ordinary people do in ordinary times in thier life
You already know hoe to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life, what, that's not useful
you know, you wouldn't watch a video tape of yourself
Imagine you videotaped yourself during a day, and then the next day you watched that
It's like, God, who would want to do that
So what seem to happen in stories is that they distill
They distill
so they, they watch people, people watch people
and then they tell stories about what they see, but they leave a lot out of those stories
Everything that is boring, hopefully, and then
more and more stories about exciting things get
sort of aggregated, and then maybe a great writer comes along and writes something really, really interesting
profound character transformations
and then, well you say "That's fiction"
and then you say, "That's not true"
because it's fiction
but then, then maybe that's not right
maybe it's more than true
because who wants the truth, the truth is mundane reality and you have already got that mastered
What you want is the distillation of
interesting experience
and you might think, well why is it interesting, well that a really good question, because you don't actually know
and believe me, you really don't know because you will be interested in things that just don't make any sense at all
I am going to walk a bit today through Pinocchio, and we will do that more the next time too
You know, but I want to tell you a little bit about that movie to begin with just so you know how crazy you are
so, you know the plot, how many people have seen the Disney movie Pinocchio?
so lot's of people, so
that's strange enough
in itself that so many people have seen it
and it's worth thinking about, you know, you tend to show your kids that movie
and, but if you think about the movie it's
you are doing some pretty weird things when you are sitting there watching that movie, man. First of all,
it's drawings, right and they are low resolution drawings
You don't care, and you watch the Simpsons or maybe, what's that called
the one that's been concentrating on political correctness so much [Students]: South Park
South Park! God that animation man, it's just awful
Right, it is just horrible, it couldn't be worse
you don't care, like,
Round heads, smile
little bit of shuffling, that's a person as far as you're concerned
it's just irrelevant and if it was higher resolution, it wouldn't help
You just need the bare bones, right
to hang your perceptions on
So,
so you watch this drawing, that's Pinocchio, beautiful drawings,
animated in a sequence
You are not watching something real, you are watching a pure construction
and then you think about the plot, it's like
It's completely absurd, everything about it is absurd, it's like
Well, one of the characters is a bug
and he turns out to be like the conscience, and so, what the hell is with that?
and then, another character is this puppet, marionette, and,
you know, somehow he gets free of his strings and then goes on this adventure and then
and then you know he gets enticed into
various nefarious
places by a fox and a cat
and then, he rescues his father from a whale
and you don't even know how his father got in the whale, it's like the last time you see his father
he was in a rainstorm and the next thing that happens is, he is in a whale
and you are sitting there thinking, "Hey, no problem, this all makes sense."
It's like, what? really?
Why?
How does that make sense?
Well the answer is you don't know
That's the thing that is so cool
you don't know, you don't even know what you are watching
but it doesn't matter
You watch it, and you are interested in it, you want to see what the hell happens to this puppet
You want to see if he ends up becoming a real boy.
because there's, it seems important
Well, you say, "Is Pinocchio true?"
Well that's a stupid question.
It's partly a stupid question because the answer is it depends on you mean by true
and,
it isn't obvious to me
what you should mean
when you
say that something is true
and the reason it is not obvious is because,
We have this idea in our society, and it's a very profound idea and that idea is that the ultimate truth is scientific truth
That that tells us about the nature of the world, and it does that
in a final way in some sense, there is no brooking any arguments about it
The physicists have got it right, and that's why they can make hydrogen bombs, and that's a pretty good demonstration of their being right
but you don't act as if that's true
and you don't
and you watch things and pay attention to things and are captivated by things
that aren't predicated on those assumptions
and, it seems, to me, that
There is a problem of what the world is made out of, but there is a bigger problem
and that is the problem of how you should conduct yourself in the world
And that is what you really want to know, people want to know that more than anything
Because you need to know, it's like, here you guys are in university, you don't know what you are doing
I mean, some of you know more than others
but you are at the beginning of your life and
life is very complex and chaotic and
It isn't exactly obvious, you know, what kind of relationship you should
form, or what sort of character you should develop
or what you are going to do for a job, or
what's the meaning of life, that's a good one, what's the meaning of life
Well, and you know, people come to university, at least many of them, and that's kind of what they want to find out
Now Paglia, her notion is that
you could think about it this way, is that articulated knowledge
is embedded in inarticulate knowledge
and inarticulate knowledge is,
a domain of literature and art
high culture let's say
and it's, we sort of know what it means
but we don't know exactly know what it means, it means more than we know
and then outside of that is what we don't know at all
and that's an idea that Jung developed as well and maybe Paglia picked it up from Jung
because Jung believed that
you know, there was this domain that we had mastered
in every domain, and then
there was domain outside of that you could think of as unexplored
territory and what we met unexplored territory with was our creative imagination
and what we were trying to do with our creative imagination is to
figure out how to deal with that unexplored territory, we are producing dramas
that we could act out that would help us deal with what we still hadn't mastered
and outside of that there is just what we don't know at all
and Paglia's idea, and this was Jung's idea was that
without understanding that surround
you are too atomized
you are not part of your historical tradition
you haven't incorporated the spirit of your ancestors
who built all this
you're just here now
and,
and you don't know what to do either, you don't know how to maintain your culture and you don't know how to serve it
and,
you know you might say why should you serve your culture and,
well I have a hypothesis about that, you know
You can think about this, I don't know if it's true but
People ask what the meaning of life is, and it seems to me that
Meaning is proportionate to the adoption of responsibility
You know, like let's say have
a little sister who's like three
you are going to take care of her
Questioning whether that is a good idea seems stupid
You know what I mean, it just doesn't seem like the right kind of question
It's like, well obviously
self evidently, let's say, that's what you do
and, do you find it meaningful, it's like probably
you know, interacting with a little kid
when I had little kids, you know when they were like two and under
we took them out to seetheir
relatives and they were older people
you know, they watched that two year old like it was a fire
you know, every second that that little kid was in the room
every single adult was
focused on, focused on , on him or her
That is something that people attend to , and
that's a source of meaning and, what else is meaningful, well your family relationships are meaningful to you and
maybe the responsibility that you adopt as a friend, that seems meaningful
maybe your decision to pursue a particular career and be of some utility
in society, you know, part of that's
governed by your desire to establish some security and get ahead, it's fine but
You are also
playing an integral role in the maintenance of the structure that supports you and, my observation has been that
in my clinical practices people just have a hell of a time if they don't have
if they don't slot in somewhere, you know
You know, I got to go to work at 9:00 in the morning and you know I have got this rigid schedule, it's like
It's probably a good idea to be grateful for that, because what I have noticed is that if people pull out from those externally
scaffolded systems
they drift
they get depressed, they get anxious, they don't know what to do with themselves you know they are kind of like sled dogs with no sled
and we are kind of like sled dogs as far as I can tell, beasts of burden, we need a load, man, we need a load
and
the question is what sort of load do you need
and here is why I think we need, we need that
You know, there is
I've been thinking about how to figure out what is real for a long time, and,
because I am an existentialist
I'm operating under the presupposition that you can tell what people believe by watching how they act
I don't care what they say,
I don't care what their statements are about their view of reality
because the correlation, the relationship between that and their actual actions is, not
certainly not perfect and sometimes doesn't even exist
One thing that I've noticed is that people
no one argues with their own pain
Everyone who hurts
acts as if they believe that pain is real
So we could say
the ultimate reality is pain
That's how people act
it's in keeping with the claims of many religious tradiations, you know
The Jews are always
recollecting past pain
I mean the Christian God is a crucified person, I mean there is a fair bit of pain there, for the Buddhists the fundamental maxim is that life is suffering
and it seems to me that there is a metaphysical claim there
the metaphysical claim is that
pain is real
now of course it depends on what you mean by real
but people act as if their pain is real, so that's a good place to start
Now, that poses a problem
Life is a pain
Life is suffering, let's say, and why is that?
Well, it's because you can be broken
hurt and destroyed
So,
that seems pretty self evident and worse you know it
and that makes people unique, like, that's our self conciousness, right?
That's really what separates us in some sense from other creatures
I mean, other creatures have some self conciousness, like a chimp
can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, and so can a dolphin, but
You know that's pretty bare bones self conciousness, you know
real self consciousness is the knowledge of your borders
and not only in space, but in time
and as far as I can tell human beings are the only creatures that discovered the future
and that's really good because we can plan for the future, but it's really bad because, you know
the future is finite and that a big shock to the old system
and it's the existential burden that everybody bears and it is associated integrally with suffering
and so then you think, well life is suffering and it's finite and that is part of the suffering
that's part of what makes you question the value of
existing and maybe the value of existance itself
So then what do you have to use as a weapon against that
Well, you know we talked a little bit about responsibility, that seems to work, you know
The amount of responsibility that you adopt
in relationship to things seems to
increase your meaningful engagement, and you might say, well what's the most meaningfully engaged activity, and you might say, well
How about a little reduction in the old suffering?
You know, so you live your life so that
you are not causing undue pain, especially pointless pain
that would be good, and maybe you could even be more useful than that and you could figure out some ways that some suffering
yours, other peoples, both if you are really
hitting a home run, maybe you can figure out some way that some of that could be rectified, and that seems to be
meaningful in and of itself, I mean if it's pain that makes you doubt the meaning of life, which is perfectly reasonable
then this cessation of pain
the cessation of suffering, the minimization of suffering
as a logical corollary should be the proper medication
and so I would say that means that
there is some mode
that you can conduct yourself in that makes you a good person
and,
part of being a good person is
to alleviate suffering
and
I don't get think you get to question that actually if
if the suffering itself is what is making you question the validity of your life then
you can't also say that the cessation of that is not useful
I mean you can but it's completely incoherent, you can claim incoherent things if you want
So then I would say,
these distilled stories that I am talking about
the stories that are written, say, by great authors
I am particularly fond of Dosytoevsky,
whose works are
he is head and shoulder above anyone I have ever read in terms of
writers of fiction, he deals with the hardest questions that human beings face
and,
he,
he has characters on both sides of the argument, and they're, they really lay out the arguments
it's not like Dostoevsky, has a belief so
he has a character and that character has his beliefs and that character always wins the arguments
that doesn't happen is a Dostoevsky novel at all
he sets up a character and then he sets up 3 or 4 antagonists
and those antagonists they are not straw men, they're like iron giants
they just stomp his protagonist, and the whole thing is a war between these
different conceptions of being, it's amazing to see, it's amazing to read.
so you distill these stories, great authors distill stories
great storytellers distill stories
and we have stories that are very, very, very old
those are usually religious stories of one form or another, but they can be fairy tales
because fairy tales, some people have traced fairy tales back more than 10,000 years
and so they are a part of an oral tradition
and, oral traditions can last for tens of thousands of years and
You know, a story that has been told for 10,000 years is a funny kind of story, it's like, people have remembered it
and, obviously modified it, it's like the game of telephone where I tell you something and you whisper it to the person next to you and so on
It's like a game of telephone that has gone on for a thousand generations and
all that's left is what people remember and maybe they remember what is important, because you tend to remember what is important
It isn't necessarily the case you know what the hell it means, you don't know what music means
but you know
it doesn't stop you from listening to it
You don't know generally speaking what a movie that you see or a book that you read means
not if it is profound, it means more than you can understand
because otherwise, why read it
Well, so the idea is this, that
we are necessarily nested inside moral systems, the moral systems are predicated on
narratives, narrative dramas of sorts
and,
the moral systems are what orients us in life
and the reason to understand them, to the degree that you can
is because you need to know how to live
Nietzsche said that if you had a why, you could bear any how.
and
that's good, one of the things that the Auschwitz guards used to do to the prisoners
and this is very telling, so at Auschwitz there was a sign that said
"Work will make you free"
it was a little joke
not really a very funny joke
It's the kind of joke that you have to be
satanic, is the appropriate term, to conceptualize
and to dare to
to state
so when the Auschwitz prisoners came to Auschwitz, they were already pretty
pretty rough shape, they were in cattle cars
they had been separated from their families, everything had been taken from them
they were transported for a long time, they were standing up
the kids suffocating because there was no room, it was so packed in there
they didn't have anything to eat, there weren't any toilet facilities of any sorts, it was like
You got rid of 20% of the people just transporting them, the one on the outside of the cars they froze to death because of course it was cold
and
pretty nasty
and when they got to Auschwitz, the guards use to have this game that they would play
this is part of the work will set you free thing
They would get a prisoner, take a prisoner
who is already in pretty rough shape
and then have them carry a sack of wet salt, a 100 pounds
from one side of the camp
to the other
and, when you think of a camp you think of something like a football field, maybe something that big, fences around it, like no way man
these were cities, there were tens of thousands of people in these places
so from one side of the camp compound to the other, that was a good hike
and that wasn't bad enough, they had to get them to , carry it back and put it the same place
Now,
that's poetic in it's malevolence, you know what you are doing is you're harnessing the human
compulsion to engage in useful activity
and demonstrating how absolutely futile that is despite it's difficulty
seems like a bad thing to do
people need
it's a parody of meaninglessness, that's what that is
and you know, people need meaning in their lives because their lives are difficult
and so , the question is
to what end should you devote your life
and another question might be does it matter
matter is an interesting word, because matter is matter, but matter is also what matters
and I would say that what matters is more than real than matter
at least that's how you act, and then the question is, well, is there something that you should be aiming at
It's a good question, that's the question of the meaning of life
and when one of the things that is supposed to happen when you come to university
is that the sort of question that should be addressed
and as far as I can tell
and this just might be my more cynical side, what I see happening to university students, generally speaking is that they come in
clinging to the wreckage of their culture
and,
floating, with the pieces and,
those pieces are taken away by
professors who tell them that
everything can be deconstructed and no, nothing has any real meaning, it's like
when you are finally educated it's when floating out on the ocean and you've got nothing to
stay afloat with, then, you are done and you can graduate, and it's like
I don't see that as useful
quite the contrary
So let me tell you a story
The first thing I am going to propose to you, and we are going to talk a lot, is that,
you inhabit a story, that the framework
through which you look at the world is actually a story, and here is the story
The story is you are somewhere
and you are going somewhere
and that can be conceptual or whatever, it's that
there is a gradient between where you are and where you are aiming at, which means
no more really than you are doing something while you are sitting there
and hypothetically you are aiming for something better
and so, you are in a state of insufficiency
always
the insufficiencies change
and then you are trying to rectify the insufficiency and
and you presume that your current state is less preferable to the state that you are aiming at
and then, the way that you
bring those two together is, sometimes you can do that through thinking
but fundamentally you do it through action
you do it through acting in the world and so that's sort of
that's sort of the answer in some sense to the mind body problem
you have a conceptual structure, but when you implement it, you're implementing,
it not abstractly, you are implementing through action, so
that's the basic story, it's not a very interesting story
but it's the framework through which you view the world, so it's a value laden framework
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to act and you wouldn't know what to look at
so, it's a value laden framework
you look at the world through a value laden framework so then we might say so what if the optimal value laden framework
That's what we are going to try and figure out.
now, I told you about the war that went on between
the Communists and the West and how that obsessed me and
so one of the things that
I really wondered about was, well was this just an arbitrary thing
You know, like, did the Communists, they had some axioms, and we had some axioms
so if you are a moral relativist you might say, well
whose to say which set of axioms are better,
or even, whose to claim that you could say that a set of axioms, one set is better than another
That's a moral relativist claim and you know fair enough!
So I thought that maybe this is just an arbitrary thing and it is going to be settled by force
Because that is how you settle an arbitrary claim between two competing systems
where there is no room for negotiation
So I thought about that for a long time, I wanted to know
what the roots were of the Marxist system and what the roots were of the Western system, and
what I surmised was that the Western system was actually something that evolved
whereas the Communist system was a rationalist construction that was imposed
and they weren't the same thing, and so then I wondered, well
what's Western culture grounded in and is there any reason to assume that that's real in any sense
and so,
that's what took me into the study of the underlying stories
fundemental stories upon which our culture, I believe, is based and some of those are very old
I am going to tell you a Mesopotamian story, it's one of the oldest stories we know, I am going to tell you and Egyptian story
Those are sources of our culture,
and I think that those stories are grounded in much older traditions
and I think that they refer to something real
actually real, now
I already told you that,
there are different ways of conceptualizing real
and that, my initial hypothesis, presumption, axiom you might say is that
pain is the most real, and the reason I believe that is because that is how people act
Now, you can criticize that
You can certainly come up with an alternate conceptual framework which the scientists have
because they believe that the most real thing is matter
maybe we need more than one set of tools to operate in the world
it's possible
So now I want to tell you what I think is the fundamental
constituent elements are of
stories
and, one of the things that I hope is that
this, knowing this will make you
immunize you against ideology
and the reason I'm, because I believe that ideologies are fragmentary
meta-narratives and they have their power because
they're grounded in the meta-narrative but they only tell part of the story
but they have power, because they are grounded in the fundemental narrative
and so, here is the fundamental narrative, the characters let's say
we are going to say that
people are prone to characterize the world, we are social primates
we are social cognitive primates and we tend to see the world through the lens of a social creature
and so, and partly because we're concerned with acting in the world and the world the world is mostly other people
then we conceptualize the ground of that
structure for action in characterological terms
so the, the must fundamental reality is, chaos
and chaos is what you don't understand at all
You can't even conceptualize it
you come into contact with it
in bits and pieces
when the towers fell, when the Twin Towers fell
chaos reigned for a few days, everyone was shell shocked
and that was chaos, and, chaos is what you experience when
your story falls apart
and that is a descent into the underworld
that's chaos, and basically you live in order and chaos, and order is where, when you do
what you think you should do, what you want to have have happen, happens
that is order, that is explored territory
and chaos is when, you do what you are supposed to do
to get what you want and it doesn't happen
and then that place that you are magically in when that happens, that's chaos
and it has different depths, you could say
it reaches all the way to Hell and that usually happens when
your life falls apart very badly
and you are down in that chaos and you realize that it was your fault
and that you did something wrong
and that you knew it, and you ignored it
That's the worst form of chaos
So there is chaos itself and then
then the next thing is fairly straightforward, you could think
there is the individual
the individual exists in culture
and culture is embedded in nature
pretty straightforward, nature is Mother Nature for reasons we will get into
and culture is "Father Culture"
and I think that's because the fundamental dominance hierarchies
in human primates are masculine
and that Nature is assimilated to the feminine because it's
well for two reasons, first of all females do the sexual selection among human beings
so that they are actually are nature from the Darwinian perspective
and second, nature is the productive biological force
and so we have always conceptualized males and females and we used that conceptualization
to sort out the world
at large
it's a metaphor
but it's not just a metaphor, it's reasonable to consider
culture as a judgmental father, it's really reasonable because
you know
you have a group of people around you, some friends some people that watch you work, some judges
and that stretches across a very long expanse of time , and
those people as an aggregate, make an entity that
is judging your reputation constantly
and it is perfectly reasonable to personify that because
it's like a metaperson that is watching you
and so,
it's a useful metaphor, there is a metaperson that is watching you
Well, yeah there is, obviously
so, now, you could say well that's not real, it's like,
it's not real the way a scientific truth is real, it is a different kind of real
Well nature has two elements, destructive and creative, obviously
there is the beauty of nature in it's bountiful
element and there is
Anopheles mosquitoes and elephantiasis and cancer and
starvation and all the terrible elements of nature
and then there is culture, and culture is tyrannical, because
you have to shape yourself, involuntarily even to get along with other people, you sacrifice
a lot of yourself, and develop yourself, but you sacrifice a lot of yourself
in that endeavor, right we have to kind of average ourselves out in order to
to live together, and some societies are more tyrannical that others
but there is always a tyrannical element, you see that in university, you know, you guys know,
that to some degree, this is such a big place
it's easy to feel like a number here, and that, whether you are here or not doesn't matter
the institution doesn't care, well that's the tyrannical element of it
now it does care, because here you are and you are getting educated and all that
and so maybe that's positive
but it's got both, these characters always have two sides
you know, there's negative side and the positive side of nature
and there is the negative side and the positive side of culture and then there is the individual
so the individual is like standing on an island in the midst of an ocean
that's a good
imagistic conceptualization of your position
there is solid ground, it has a limited expanse and outside of that is everything you don't understand
and you as an individual have a positive and a negative element as well
and that's the hero and the villain
and of course what good is a story without a hero and a villain
and the villain is the person who isn't acting like a person should act and the hero is acting like a person should act
and so when you go to movies and you read books and there are heroes and there is villians
and to some degree what you are doing is fleshing out your notion of a villain
you know you read about 30 villains and you think well there is something villainous about the villains
that is the central element of villainy
whatever that is
and, you can imagine you construct out a metavillain
and a metahero, and those are the characters in
religious stories, generally speaking
you know, and in the Marvel movies
there is Odin, and Odin has two sons
right, Thor and Loki, and Thor is like
Thor is the world redeeming hero and Loki is the trickster who wants to bring everything down, and
you have to recognize that in yourself
or it's useful to because otherwise you underestimate
[student entering] Is this positive psyche?
No, it's Maps of Meaning
Positive psyche...[laughter]
It's definitely not that...[laughter]
Why might you be villainous?
Well first of all because you can be,
that 's a big deal
you can be, it's actually an offshoot of empathy
this is something that took me decades to figure out
I figured it out when I was studying the book of Genesis
because in the book of Genesis
people become self conscious, and they immediately have the knowledge of good and evil
I just couldn't figure that out, it's like what the hell is the relationship between that
and then really, I tell you I thought about that for like 30 years
trying to puzzle that out, and then I realized what it was
If you are self conscious
you can conceptualize yourself as a being
you know that you are
and you know what you're like
and you know what hurts you and what doesn't
and soon as you know what hurts you
you know what hurts her
and so that is the knowledge of good and evil that comes along with being self conscious
this is something that distinguishes human beings from every other animal
you know, a lion will eat you
but it doesn't really want to tear you apart slowly
just for the fun of it
well, it eats you, it just wants to eat you
you know, you could call that evil, it sucks that for sure
but, animals are beyond good and evil in that sense, but human beings, man
we can aim our malevolence and we are really good at it
because we can imagine, God this would hurt, and if it hurts me, man, it's really going to hurt you
so, and you need to know that you are like that, because you are like that
and it you don't know that you are like that, or if you don't think that you are like that
you are more even like that than you think
because the people who are most like that are people who don't think that they are like that at all
and you have to contend with that
and that's why in many systems of thinking the world is conceptualized as a battle between good and evil
and it's an appropriate conceptualization
it's a meta-conceptualization, and
the culture is the wise king and the tyrant and that's always the case
and you are always stuck with that because as an individual, with your negative and your positive side
your negative side is the resentful side that is
irritated and the limited conditions of being
and the suffering that entails and it's arbitrary and unfair nature
and no wonder, like, you got, that side has a case to make
and it is not trivial
In the Brothers Karamazov, that argument is laid out
beautifully, there is a character, Alyosha, who is a monastery novitiate and not really a sparkling intellect
but a very good person, and he has a brother Ivan, and Ivan is, a vicious genius
and Ivan just takes Alyosha apart, and partly does that by telling a story about
Dostoyevsky took this from a news story
the news story was that this mother and father had taken their young daughter and
locked her in the outhouse overnight
when it was 30 below, and she stayed out there crying and screaming and froze to death
and Ivan basically said to Alyosha, you know,
A world in which that could happen should not be
It's a good argument, you know and you can multiply that by millions of examples
so the part of us that is opposed to being and resentful
it's got a point man,
the problem as far as I can tell is that, if you act that out
then it makes what you are objecting to worse
now you might be happy about that and
you might think, well people couldn't be consciously
pursuing that, but, yes they can
I would recommend a book called Panzram if you are interested in that sort of thing
it's a book written by a man who raped 1200 men and killed dozens
and burned things down to the ground every chance that he got
and tried to start a war between England and the U.S. and
who was aimed at nothing but mayhem
and he wrote an autobiography at the request of a doctor
who had befriended him, and he tells you exactly what he did and why
this story
hero and adversary
order and tyranny, destruction and creation
that's the basic landscape, and outside of that chaos, and so let's take a break
Here is another way of
looking at this, idea
the individual is the person who pays attention
and explores, and masters, or who looks away
and the
the person who inhabits an explored territory
and this is unexplored territory
and so, wherever you go there is you and the half, the two halves of you
that you have to contend with, and
wherever you are with people there is the society with it's tyrannical and beneficial nature
and the society in some sense is that match between what you are doing and what's happening
it's really important to get that right, and unexplored territory, that where ever
and whenever, what you are doing stops working
and so, it's not exactly a geographical idea, you know, because when you think of explored territory
you think of geographic landscape, like the domain of an animal, like your house
and, you know, that's
that's definitely and element of it , but you know,
if you're in your house and a snake comes into your living room and you are in there it's like, well
that's an important difference between your house 1 second ago and your house now
and so your house can turn into unexplored territory at the drop of a hat, and that is because we live in space and time
and so the unexplored territory is conceptual, it's a conceptual
territory and it's just wherever you are when things aren't working
for you the way they are supposed to be
and so, and these are permanent parts of the human experience
which is why I think that they are fundamental characters in our narratives
there is always you,
there is some subject of the story
and that subject is an ambivalent person with many different potentials and
you are always somewhere,
with other people, because that's our territory, right, I mean
we are social beyond comprehension
and you know even our primate ancestors, most of their territory
was other primates, and their brains, and our brains, are specialized to view the world as an aggregation of personalities
It's really important to us, and so we tend to view the whole world that way
and, then, unexplored territory, well
that's where, you don't know what to do
and, but, you know you do know what to do when you don't know what to do
peculiarly enough, it's rather non-specific, it's this generalized stress response and so what happens is
you freeze, roughly speaking, if the threat is enough, then
you produce a lot of cortisol and a lot of adrenaline so that you're
bloody well ready to move quick in whatever direction you have to
and then, maybe you pay more attention
and that's what you do when you don't know what to do, and the problem with that is that you can stay in that state forever, man
that is kind of what post traumatic stress disorder is, it's like
you are just like that all the time
and the problem with that is, it's very uncomfortable, I mean
You stay like that for any length of time you are going to get depressed
you are going to develop an anxiety disorder, you are going to get old
because, you're burning up resources like mad, you know,
your system is shunting everything to maintain that
state of emergency preparation and
it's exhausting
it's not where you want to be
so, that's partly why people are so prone to
defend their territories, their familiar territories because
if their familiar territory is invaded or disrupted
then they default back to this state of emergency preparation and that's like
that can unglue you, if it's profound enough
you know and you guys know this already, I mean
I think that people experience this most particularly
when they are betrayed by someone they have an intimate relationship with
you know, when they are lied to
there are other ways
the collapse of a dream or a vision that you've been pursuing or
an illness or the death in a family, there are lots of other ways, but betrayal is a really good one
because, if you are with someone for a long time, you trust them
you have a representation of your past, you have a representation of you in the relationship
you have a representation of them, you have a representation of relationships
you have a representation of the future
you get betrayed, it's like, poof, even the past isn't what you thought it was
you know, and what about you
How clueless are you ?
and maybe not at all, or ultimately gullible, you don't know, is it your fault?
are you so clueless that just can't protect yourself or
was the person malevolent in some subtle way that you failed to detect
everything is up in the air
not good, and this idea that human beings
travel to the underworld and come back it's a really useful thing to understand because
we do that all the time
whenever we fail, it's like, whoop, down into the underworld for a while
where everything is in chaos
and then maybe we sort ourselves out and, bang, we are back up
and so, one way of conceptualizing yourself is not
as order, and not as chaos
but as the thing that traverses between the two domains
and that I would say is mythological hero
so,
I am going to start talking to you about Pinocchio a little bit
weirdly enough
I hope you enjoy this
and the reason I want to do it is because I want to put some
I want to bring what I told you abstractly
down to earth
and then you can start thinking,
well, do the conceptions that I have introduced to you, are they good for anything
do they help?
that's the, order
descent into chaos, reestablishment of order
that's paradise lost, profane history
paradise regained, it's the classic comedy
and that's the story of life
and so,
the question is how do you manage it?
and so,
that's a question you really want to know the answer to so you will go
you will pay money, weirdly
you'll line up and pay money
to see a story about that, even if you don't even know what that stories about
and the reason
for that actually part of you does know what the story is about
you know, you have, your cognition has multiple layers
you understand things
that you don't know that you understand
in ways that you don't understand, and you can tell that because, you know
we talked about Pinocchio a little bit, how absurd it is
and that it doesn't matter, well
[Student] I have a question, so we have been talking, chaos is when people don't do what they
expect you to do in a negative sense, something bad happens to you.
what if the reaction is extremely positive, like something that...like winning the lottery
Do you also go into the stress response, or?
So it would be the same thing...
[JBP] No it's not quite the same thing, it's a good question and we will address that
we will address that
I mean, winning the lottery is generally not a good idea for people
you know, because it's just too much
it's too much for them
flips their lives upside down
so,
and they tend, at best, to return to their original baseline level of emotion
but yes, something remarkably good
I mean, it's a lot better that something remarkably bad, obviously, but it
still can have that destabilizing effect
so, depends on what elements of your life it disrupts
like, in some sense you have a map that you are operating
within, in the world
and that map is predicated on assumptions of different sorts
some shallow, some profound
when the profound assumptions are devastated
huge chunks of the map are invalidated
and that can happen
sometimes when dramatically positive things happen as well
so, but the fundamental rule is, the more of your
axiomatic presuppositions
are disrupted, the harder it is on you
you know, like maybe you quit your job because you won the lottery
Hey, I am off to the beach, I am going to drink margaritas
it's like that will work for about four days
you know, you do that for three months you are a beach alcoholic, it's like that's a real improvement
you know, so it's not that easy, often too if you take people out of their routine
you know, they just flounder
their circadian rhythms go, they don't eat properly, they don't know what the hell to do
you know, so
this is often why people have such a hard time when they retire
I am going to retire and relax, it's like
if I relaxed for two weeks I would die
you know, I need something to do
I need to be engaged in something
so, OK
Pinocchio, Disney movie, an early one, a masterpiece
so I am going to walk you through it
and I am going to tell you
what I think it means, and
and you can tell me if you think that that is useful,
and I am only going to do that for about ten minutes today because I do want to cover some of the details
of the class and then next class we will continue with this, so
So the movie opens, with
the opening credits
which are carved wooden signs, which is like a hint you know
because Geppetto is a carver, and it starts with this song
which was actually quite a popular song
and it's a bit of a
what would you call it
I don't think that it's,
the poetry is particularly profound
but it was a song that people liked and people still listen to, and
It's sets the tone for the movie, which is what music does
one of the things that is really interesting about movies, that's really mysterious is that
you know,
if you go to a movie, there is almost always a soundtrack
right, if you go to movie and there isn't a soundtrack
it kind of feels empty, it feels like there is something missing, and
you know, it's as if the music
You know, when you go to a movie there is lots of things you can't
see, the characters are only partial, and
you don't know anything about there background, so it's like a low resolution thing
and what seems to happen with the music is that it's provides the emotional background
the complex context, let's say, it's like a substitute
for the context and it guides you in your, in your perceptions of the movie
it gives you hints about what is going to happen and,
and, the funny thing about that is that we just don't have any problem with that
you know, it's like , yeah of course a movie has a soundtrack
and of course when there is a dramatic scene the music gets dramatic and
but that doesn't happen in real life
so you would wonder why we would accept it in a movie, and
I think it is partly because we are willing to accept the amplification of reality
that constitutes a movie
and in fact we find that compelling and music is one of the things that does that amplification
the dramatization, and that's, that's acceptable to us
This song I find quite interesting so I am going to take it apart quite a bit,
in some sense I feel foolish doing it because it's, you know, it's a childish
it's a childish song in some ways
but,
but that's OK, "When you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are"
well, OK, there's some mysteries there
people wish upon stars, that's like a little ritual, right
Why,
do they do that?
well,
and what is exactly is a star
that's another question because
there are stars that shine in the heavens
and there are people who are stars
and so,
Why are people stars?
Well they are usually famous people, right, they are people that
who attract a lot of attention
and maybe they are people who, who have a lot of talent , that's a possibility
Maybe they are models, I don't mean clothing models although sometimes they are, they are models for emulation
that's what being a star means, that's why People magazine is full of stars
it's like they're heroes brought to earth
and of course you know nothing about them, all you know is their public persona
and of course they are usually very attractive and so
that allows you to project upon them all the things that go along with ideal humanity
and so they are stars
and, but still, why stars? well stars beckon in the darkness, right?
and they are other worldly
that's the thing that's cool, they are not of this earth
and I mean that
technically, because obviously they are not of this earth, but I also mean it
I mean it,
phenomenologically, I mean it as an element of human experiance, so
most of you are urban
and so, you have not had the experience of
perhaps of the full night sky, and you know that is really to bad because
the full night sky is one of those experiences that actually induces awe
naturally, you know, and no wonder
you look up there and there are just stars everywhere
right, you are looking at the edge of the galaxy, that's actually
that's the Milky Way, right, it's the edge of the galaxy, it's like wrah!
Wow! There is the edge of the galaxy
and there is just so many of them, and it's such an expanse, you are looking into infinity
you are looking into the unknown, you are looking beyond yourself
that's for sure
and, you know, that produces a sense of awe in people, like looking at the Grand Canyon or something like that
and, it's, you are looking at something that transcends yourself, but that feeling of awe, that seems to be something that's
that's a natural part of our response
and, you know, you might feel awe when you meet someone that you regard as particularly admirable as well
because you feel that there is something transcendent about them
Here is an interesting thing to think about
There are people you admire
and there are people you don't admire
and that's a clue right, that's a clue as to your value system, and
it might be not something that you can really put your finger on, it's like, you find this person captivating, you find this person
admirable
and it's as if there is something inside of you that is looking for what is admirable
you know, assuming that you are
and that person who is admirable has a faculty, some faculty
that you would like to have for yourself
and so they are a model for emulation
and that's part of how people develop, you know, like little kids often develop little hero
crushes on older kids
you know, not that much older but sort of the person that is just within their grasp
and then they follow them around and imitate them and
So they are imitating what they find admirable, well
The fact that you find something admirable is a hint as to the structure of your unconscious value system
and so, you could think even as an exercise, you could think
what qualities of a human being do I find admirable, you have to ask yourself that, in a sense,
you can't really think about it, there is a difference between asking yourself a question and thinking about it
You know, because, it's more like when you are asking yourself a question, it's contemplative
Well, what do I find admirable?
It's a question, you don't know, and
if you are fortunate, and this happens quite regularly, an answer will float up from wherever the hell answers float up
and, Oh yeah that's one, and you can write that down
you get some idea of what your ideal is, you know and, and you have one likely
and what your counter-ideal is
Star
Well, to wish upon a star is to raise your eyes above the horizon
and to focus on something transcendent that is beyond you
to focus on the absolute we could say, to focus on the light that shines in the darkness
Now, a star is
People wear diamonds because they are like stars
or they are like the sun
and they are pure and perfect and they glitter, so there is something about the light too
there is something about a source of light
It's a source of illumination and enlightenment
and the light that shines in the darkness is a deep metaphor, right, it's
it's what you want, you want a light to shine in the darkness
and so, the star has all of that, and so, people wish upon a star
because they have some intuition that aiming above the mundane
has the potential to transform themselves, they make a wish, well
If you are going to
make a wish you should aim at something high!
and even just aiming at that is more likely to make the wish come true, and this is not
metaphor,
you know I have this program which you guys are going to do
called the future authoring program
it's one of two assignments, one is that you write an autobiography
that's the past authoring, the other is that you write
a plan for the future, that's the future authoring, I would recommend that you get started
on those right now, like, not right now, but really soon because, they are harder than you think
and some of you are going to write like 15,000 words
you are going to get sucked right in, this happens all the time, you are going to get sucked right into it
and so,
you write an autobiography because you need to know where you are
and who you are, right now, because how the hell are you going to plot a pathway to the future unless you know where you are
and then you need to write about the future because
you aren't going to hit something unless you aim at it
that's for sure
and lot's of times people won't aim at what they want because they are afraid
the reason they are afraid is because if you specify what you want you have specified your conditions of failure
you know when you fail
and it is better to just keep foggy, it's like, well I don't know if I am succeeding or failing but
you know, I can't really tell. Well great! Except you can't hit anything you don't aim at
and so, the future authoring program is like a
it's an attempt to have your articulate you character
and so is the past authoring program. Who are you?
and, you know, the past authoring program asks you to break your life into
epochs and then to write about the emotional, you know the things that you regard as important
Important events that have shaped who you are, and
you know, you may find that some of those, some of that writing makes you emotional, and I would say
if you have a memory that is more than 18 months old, roughly speaking
and when you bring it to mind, it has an emotional impact
especially a negative emotional impact
it's like part of you soul is stuck back there
and, I know that that's a metaphorical way of thinking about, but what I mean is that
The reason that you still experience the emotion is because you have not solved the problem that that situation
faced you with, and it might be a real problem like maybe you got tangled up with someone
who was really bad, and that's rough, man, because you have got to come up with a theory of malevolence to deal with
something like that, and that's no joke
but, if its still producing emotion, that means you have not solved the problem, and
your brain is still tagging it as threat, it's a part of you territory that you did not master
threat, threat, threat, threat
and until you take it apart, and articulation really helps that, writing really helps that
then, you are not going to free yourself from it's grip
and that, what might not be that pleasant, I mean this one of those situations where doing it
tends to produce a decrement in peoples mood
in the short term, but quite radical improvements 3 to 6 months down the road
you know it is often the case that you unfortunately have to do something you don't want to do in order to progress
it's very, very common
so, and the future authoring program asks you about different dimensions of your life
Like, because you're, you can think of yourself as a personality inside your head but,
you are nested in systems that transcend you, and they are just as real as whatever is in your head, its like
Well, what do you need for life?
Well, that's pretty easy actually, some friends
that's a good thing, intimate relationship, that's a good thing,
a family, you know, either the one you are going to produce or the one that you come from where people
to some degree, love and care for one another, that's a good thing to work on,
You need, you need some plan for your career, you have got to fit in somewhere that people regard as
important and that they will trade with you so that you can live
you need something worthwhile to do with the time that you are not at work
and you need to, pay attention to you mental and physical health
and you need to regulate your use of substances
which is a strange one, but alcohol does lots of people in, so it's worth thinking about so that's why we put it in there
So then it's like, what the hell do you want?
What do want from your friends?
What do you want from your family?
What do want from your career?
If you could have what you wanted, and that's what the program asks you
3 to 5 years down the road, you get to have what you want
Now I am assuming that you are going to approach this like
reasonable adults and not like 13 year old dreamers, I think, I want the most expensive yacht in the world
It's like, fine but, you know
that isn't really what, it's supposed to be more concentrating on your character
and so, then it asks you to write for 15 minutes without thinking too much about grammer
or sentence structure or any of that
about what your life could be like in 3 to 5 years down the road if,
if you were treating yourself like someone you cared for
and, you were helping them figure out what they wanted
and then, it asks you to do the same thing in reverse
which is to think about
the ways that you're radically insufficient and your faults
and everyone knows this I think, you know, maybe not
but everyone has a sense of
if they were going to degenerate how they would do it
you know, some people would be an alcoholic, some people would be a street person, and it's like
there is some doom thing out there that is
got your name on it if you are particularly incautious and
you know, don't
and let things fall apart, so, want you to write about that
what do you not want to have happen in 3 to 5 years
and there is psychological for this, one is
If you have something to aim for, that's a source of positive emotion
because your positive emotion is mostly generated by evidence that you are moving towards something that you value
it's not generated so much by accomplishing something
because when you accomplish something, you are just left with the problem of whatever you are going to do next
so you graduate from university, it's like
you know, hurray!
one day you're at the peak of undergraduate university career, the next day
you are unemployed and looking for a bad job at Starbucks
so, you know
well you see what I mean, you know, it's that
you know, one problem that you solve is replaced by another problem
and so the idea that you are gong to be happy when you solve all your problems, is like
Hahaha! Good luck with that theory
but, but
you know if you are aiming at something worthwhile, and you really believe that it is worthwhile
and you have thought it through, you know, so that you are not weak, you are not weak, you've got your damn arguments mustered
then when you make progress, even a little bit, you think, hey, that's alright, and you get a little kick
a little dopamine kick
and that's what you want, because that's where your positive emotion comes from
you can use cocaine if you want, but
ha, but that tends to have relatively
detrimental medium to long term consequences
but it activates the same system, so you have to aiming at something
and you should be aiming at something that's
realistic
that you want
that you could get, you know, like not easily
because if it's easy, in some sense you have already got it
it's got to push you , and that's part of the pleasure actually because
there is two things that want to do when you are pursuing something that is important
and one of them is to get the thing that is important
but the other is make yourself better at pursuing things
right, so
so you can get both of those at the same time
you're aiming at something and increasing your competence at the same time
it's like, that's a good deal, that's a good deal and
there is a lot of intrinsic meaning to be felt in that, and second half of the program
you,
you write out a plan
for how you are going to do it and how you are going to keep yourself on track
and you are going to write about why it would be good for you if you did this
and why it would be good for your family
and what possible benefits it would have to the comminuty
and. you know, because you want to nail this thing down and then you want to
figure out what kind of obstacles are going to come up and how you might overcome them
and how you might keep yourself on track and all of that
We know, because we have actually done a lot research on this particular program
that
if university students do this, and this is more true if they're not
to well oriented to begin with
if university students do this they are
about 25% less likely to drop out, which is a lot
and about, their grade point average increases about 20%
so,
Hurray for that, because you never know when you develop an intervention if it's going to work
there is also evidence, but not from my lab
that doing such things improves your physical health
and I think the reason for that is, is that when you go over your autobiography
and you scour out those negative places that you are sort of dragging along with you
it lowers your overall stress load
because your brain is kind of, I think it is calculating how dangerous the world is
by attending to the ratio of
successes to failures that you have had in your life, something like that and so
you know if there are holes in your map that you could still fall through
then your brain regards the territory still as a bit on the dangerous side
and then, you are more prepared for emergency action and that hard on you, so
you want to go back there and fix up those
experiences to the degree that you can
Now,
those are going to be peer rated
now that's complicated but here's how you do it
write the thing so that you
have written it for you
and then take everything out that you are not
comfortable sharing with other people
and so, there is a couple of reasons that I do it that was
one is just, there is just no other way to do it
because
if I want to do this with you
the grading load is too high to do it
so, I thought well it is still worth doing, and because this is a class about narrative and about self narrative it's the right thing to do
and most of you are graduating soon, and it's like
it's helpful, I think that you will find it very helpful, that is what students report
and so,
You'll each read
Three people will read each of your
offerings and give you a grade and then you get the average of the best two grades
and they are supposed to provide you with constructive feedback
constructive feedback is sort of mostly what did you do right
and maybe some hints about where you could flesh it out, and all that
but, so that's that and you need to write an essay
this is all detailed on the website
and, that's the website, if you go to jordonbpeterson.com, on the left there is classes
if you click classes you get a bunch of tabs and one of the tabs is Psych 434, and that's obviously this class
there is some extra readings on there
and a list of how we are going to go through the course
the dates aren't right, I have got to update it and I haven't finished that yet, but
the rest of it is pretty much the way it is,
This writing program is an online program and it guides you through the process of doing it but really
I would really recommend that you start
like this week
because
it also works better if you do it over time, and it seems
like in bursts of writing, you know
and to sleep between episodes because that's when your brain consolidates its new information
and, I would say do it meditatively
you know, ask yourself
ask yourself, it's a different way of
it's really funny when you ask yourself questions because part of you will answer
and you don't know what the answer will be
but, and answer comes almost always and
you know, like you think well what happened to me when I was six, around six that was important
and,
through some mysterious process perhaps a memory will come to mind
so,
there is a test
so there is these two
assignments plus the essay
the essay
can be on anything you want
that's related to the class
you have to make the case that's related to the class
so,
it's an opportunity to
write about something that you want to write about
and there is a final exam and the final exam
if you read the book and come to the classes you will not have any problem with the final exam because it's not
it's not tricky, it's just
a survey of what we have gone through
and so, I did that, I didn't have that to begin with but
you know, you need a carrot and a stick, because you guys are busy and
you know you are going to triage
and do the things that are crucial and perhaps not the things that aren't and no wonder so
I had to make this crucial because otherwise you won't read it
and that's partly because it is hard
and so, hopefully the course lectures will help guide you through it, and
and that's about that
So I am going to tell you about a bunch of stories, and I am going to try and explain what they mean
and what I hope will happen is that
the world of narrative will open up for you, and that
and like I found that incredibly useful, it's incredibly useful
to understand
these things, it situates you better and
it also helps you, see what people tell me about this course frequently is that
it's something like
that they already knew what I am telling them
but they didn't know that they knew it
so it makes sense, it clicks, it clicks
and you know to me what that means is that you have the information
represented in you, in action
in your procedures, in your habits
and in your perceptual structures, it's implicit, it's the implicit you
and then,
I can articulate in part what that
implicit you is and it fits, click, oh yeah that's what I am like, that's what people are like, that's what people are like
and so,
well, if any of that happened today during this lecture to you, well, then that's a good sign that, you might
benefit from the course
if it didn't, well you could try one more lecture and see what happens
but, you know this sort of what the course is like, and
if that's what you want then, this is where you get it
Good to see all of you and I guess we are done, right?