I see that in resentful men all the time, they're very antipathetic towards women,
and they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won't have anything
to do with them while the women are making themselves conscious for not being all
they should be because the women think, why should I bother with you if you're not
the embodiment of the spirit that will move into the unknown
and face the Leviathan, which is exactly what you should be saying.
And you're thinking, well, I don't want to have anything to do
with that, but I'd like women to like me anyways.
It's like, well, good luck with that!
And that's exactly what happens when God
finds out that Adam and Eve have become self conscious.
One of the first things he says is jig's up, now, man.
You're going to be working. Forever. Toiling forever.
It's your destiny.
There's no escaping from it.
Well, human beings work.
What does that mean?
They sacrifice the present for the future.
And that's partly... As soon as this happens.
Like the next story,
which is Cain and Abel, you see the motif of sacrifice emerge, right?
That story circulates around the motif of sacrifice.
Sacrifice the present for the future.
Well, what's the price you pay?
You don't get the present.
That's a big price, right?
Because what you do is what you're doing,
essentially, is you're taking all the potential suffering of the future
and putting it into the present all the time...
Who's more self conscious, women are men?
And answer to that is, women are more self conscious than men.
And even further, you might say that women taught men to be self conscious.
And I believe that to be the case.
Maybe babies taught women to be self conscious.
But women taught men to be self conscious, and they still teach them that all
the time because there's nothing that makes a man more self conscious
than to be rejected by a woman that he desires.
So the woman is always offering self consciousness to men.
And it isn't necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate.
And that motif, of course,
runs through the Adam and Eve story centrally, because Eve is damned forever
in some sense, for making Adam self conscious.
He didn't want to be self conscious.
Things were pretty good when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around
not worrying about whether he was naked or not.
Well, the women became self conscious. Why?
Because of snakes.
Well, maybe, right?
Maybe that's exactly what happened.
So imagine we're being preyed upon
for millions of years by predatory reptiles, and we become more and more
alert to threat and more and more alert to threat.
And then one day we get so alert to threat
that we can see threat lurking in the future.
And then all of a sudden we become aware of the future.
And then we become aware of death.
And then we're really self conscious.
But it's pretty good if you want to keep
the snakes down, which we've been doing quite successfully ever since then.
But it's a big price to pay.
We got so damn sensitive to threat
that we were finally able to conceive the ultimate threat,
not proximal threats, but the fact of threat itself and the fact
of mortality itself and the fact of finitude itself.
And maybe women learn that because
they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants, first.
Right? This small thing could die. Could end.
And it'll certainly as an object of predation.
And the problem again,
for men with being allied with women and infants is that it also heightens
their self consciousness because you're a lot tougher and more indomitable.
Say, if there's just you.
But as soon as you have a wife say, and then you also have an infant.
Well, all the burden of their self
consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you.
Well, it's a hell of a bargain.
Well, why did men accept the bargain?
Well, it's partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit.
Right? Well, part of the price that the men paid
for that was to wake the hell up. Well, who the hell wants that?
It's a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden
of mortality that you would bear if you became self conscious.
So fine. So now they're done with it.
The snake and the fruit woke them up
and they can see and the scales drop from their eyes.
And so we can really see.
Well, so what does that mean?
Half our brain is visual is devoted to visual processing.
So as long as our eyes got better,
our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
What happens when it gets big enough?
Well, not only can you see,
you can meta-see that you can start to see into the future.
Well, that's exactly what happened to us.
Not only could we see with our eyes, we could see with our imagination.
And our imagination is...
You can see with your eyes closed.
Right. Close your eyes.
Bring up a vision.
You can imagine the future.
Well, what are you seeing?
You're seeing a potential future with your eyes closed, the circuitry is there.
Once it's developed, you can use it to imagine.
You can...
Project your vision into places that don't even exist.
And you can start to conceptualize the future.
What happens when you conceptualize the future?
Well, this is... I'm spoiling the punchline.
You have to work.
Because you can see the future coming.
You think: Oh, oh, the future is coming.
It isn't just the present anymore.
I don't have to just worry about whether or not I'm hungry right now.
I'm going to have to worry about whether
I'm hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and for me
and for my wife and for my child and for the community.
It's like you can forget about your day to day existence in paradise at that point.
There's no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier
than people in non industrialized societies.
In fact, quite the contrary.
We're less happy.
Why?
Well, because we fully and constantly bear the burden of the future.
Well, that's good, because we don't die and we live maybe 30
years longer and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of that.
But that doesn't mean it's any picnic.
You have to carry that along with you wherever you go.
That's the burden of self consciousness.
But what would you want to be King?
You could say King of the world or King of your own soul?
What do you want to subordinate yourself to? How about your heroic willingness
to encounter the unknown and articulate it, and share that with people?
There's no nobler vision than that.
And I don't see that it's merely arbitrary.
And it's not merely arbitrary, too,
because if you do that to the degree that you do that,
assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt, you will be successful.
It will actually aid you, practically.
You'll rise up above men.
You'll be selected by women.
You'll be admirable, you'll be valued.
And you know that because if you look at the people that you admire and value
again, unless you've taken a detour into dark places and
are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes
and for destruction, you just have to watch the people that you
admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions.
And you can ask yourself, too, when you're torturing yourself with your
conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it.
What is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to?
You have a vision of your own ideal,
and you torment yourself if you're not matching it.
What's the ideal?
Well, you don't know, right?
It's kind of incoherent and poorly articulated, but that doesn't mean it
isn't trying to manifest itself and make itself known to you.
Every social animal and even many animals
who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy.
The dominance hierarchy has a structure. We couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy.
Dominance hierarchy. A-B-C-D-E.
Thousands of them across thousands of years. You extract out from all of them,
what's central to all of them.
That's the pyramid of value.
What questions do you need answered about the pyramid of value?
What's at the top?
Because that's the ideal. That's the eye
at the top of the pyramid, or the Golden Buddha in the Lotus.
It's the same thing. It's the same thing as the Crucifix.
Paradoxically enough, and that has to do...
It has to do with something like
the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering.
It's something like that.
These are not arbitrary ideas.
That's my case anyways.
They're deeply,
deeply rooted in biology and culture.
They're as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted
in biology, and we already know the answer to that.
The dominance hierarchy has been around for 350,000,000 years.
It's a long time you don't get to just brush that off and say, well,
morality is some sort of second order cognitive problem.
It's like, no, it's not.
I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system.
You have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps
track of where you are in terms of your status,
and it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions.
So if you're at the bottom
of the hierarchy, barely clinging onto the world, everything overwhelms you.
And that's because you're damn near dead.
And so everything should overwhelm you.
You've got no extra resources. Any more threat?
You're sunk.
So you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also
impulsive, so that you grab while the grabbing is good.
And if you're near the top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter
tells you that, then your serotonin levels go up.
You're less sensitive to negative emotion.
You're less impulsive.
You live longer, like everything works in your favor.
Your immune system functions better, and you're oriented,
at least to some degree, towards the medium and long term future.
And you can afford that, because
all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time.
And so then the question is, is there a way of being
that increases the probability that you're going to move up
dominance hierarchies?
Well, that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition
unless you think that it's completely
arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want.
But I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever.
I mean, we certainly have, even for sexual selection, we impose criteria.
They're not random and arbitrary.
This is the dominance hierarchy idea.
Dominance hierarchy set themselves up as a matter of course.
They're the standard
way that animals organize themselves in a territory.
Well, okay. Human beings are watching those dominance
hierarchies since we became self aware, thinking, what the hell are we up to?
What the hell are we up to?
And there's a question that lurks in there.
What constitutes
acceptable power? What constitutes acceptable sovereignty? Who should lead?
Who should rule? What should be at the top?
Well, we talked about that. The Mesopotamians figured that out.
Speech and vision.
Speech, vision, and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown.
That's what should rule.
What is that, an arbitrary idea, or is that a great idea?
How could it be any other way?
Well, that's what human beings are like.
And I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamian story
and understand the reference,
which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion.
Marduk has eyes all the way around his head.
He speaks magic words.
He goes off to fight, Tiamat, the Dragon of chaos.
Well, what's that?
That's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown.
Well,
is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you
would presume if you were just analyzing our situation
from a purely biological perspective, we're prey animals.
We're predators. We'd be threatened by reptiles forever.
Why wouldn't we use the predator
that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown?
Why wouldn't we harness that circuitry?
We already have it at hand.
And even more to the point, how could we do anything else?
It makes perfect sense.
There's very little difference between self consciousness and shame.
In fact, if you do psychometric analysis
of the state of self consciousness, it loads with neuroticism.
So it loads with anxiety and emotional pain.
So to become self conscious,
what does it mean to become self conscious?
It means you become aware.
One way of thinking about it is you become aware of your vulnerability
or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency.
Okay, so let's say that you're standing up
in front of a crowd talking and you become self conscious.
What happens?
Well, first of all, you can't talk anymore.
The second is you kind of fall inside.
The third is you feel ashamed,
and the fourth is that you retreat and you look down.
So it's a low status
operation, and it's associated with heightened anxiety.
Then you might say, why would you become self conscious before a crowd?
Well, the answer is they can see you.
And they can judge you, and you can make an error in front of them.
And you can make a fool of yourself.
So...
You can display yourself in a manner
that ratchets you down the dominance hierarchy.
That's to become selfconscious. And so,
well, at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd.
But let's say, all of a sudden, you're stripped of your clothes.
So what's the problem with that?
Well, all of your
insufficiencies, let's say, are on painful display.
You can be evaluated by everyone.
But even more importantly than that,
if possible, is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you.
Human beings are upright animals, right?
We're very strange animals.
You take a cat or a dog.
They're basically armored.
The part of them that you see
their back is heavily armored, heavily protected human beings stretched upright.
And so the softest parts of us are there for display.