hello and welcome it is my privilege to present you with the following video
given to me spontaneously in late march of 2021 by the talented and prolific animation team
after school the lecture selected by the after school team provides a good brief introduction
to the ideas i've been striving to formulate and communicate over several decades while working as
a clinical psychologist professor and researcher at harvard and the university of toronto
author and public lecturer the micro movies created so carefully by after school transform
each of the individual ideas i'm presenting into a compelling story helping the viewer and listener
deeply engage and understand i hope you find the video interesting meaningful and worthwhile
the conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence
now it's an important thing to understand it's also a viewpoint shared by the bulk
of the great religious systems of the world life is suffering why well
one reason is because of society's arbitrary judgment right every single one of us has
traits and features and and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are
far from ideal and that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient and so
you suffer because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others and you can certainly make
the claim that fairly frequently that's arbitrary and so that's the claim that society is tyrannical
and judgmental and needs to be constantly re constituted so that the tyrannical element doesn't
take full control and fair enough you have to stay awake so that that doesn't happen but the thing is
it doesn't matter what society it is although they vary in the degree of their tyranny the mere fact
that you're grouped together with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in
order to live together means that many of the things that characterize you are going to be
sub-optimal and so the price you pay for social being is that much of you is deemed insufficient
now hopefully there are various ways that you can be within a society that's sufficiently diverse
so that you can find a place where what's good about you in the eyes of others and perhaps in
your own eyes can flourish of its own accord because you don't have to be good at everything
if you can be good at at one thing well enough that might allow you your niche and hopefully
a healthy society allows for that certainly societies can become so tyrannical that they don't
so you can lay one source of human suffering at the feet of tyrannical social structures but
the other element of it clearly is the mere fact of the arbitrariness of the natural world you
have a lifespan that's going to be counted in the number of decades that you can count on two hands
and that has nothing to do technically with the tyranny of the social structure now you could say
if we got our act together more completely perhaps you could live longer and fair enough but
the fact of the limits of your lifespan and the suffering that's necessarily a
consequence of that the death of your parents and the death of most people that you will know
before you means that that part of suffering is an integral part of existence itself and so
that can't be laid at the feet of an insufficient social structure except insofar as it's tyrannical
and blind it's a condition of existence and then by the same token you have your own responsibility
for some of your unnecessary suffering because there's things you could be doing to make your
life better and to make life better for other people that you know perfectly well that you're
not doing and so if you stopped doing all the unnecessary things that make your life bad then
it would improve to some degree that is not really computable because you don't know how
far you could push that so there's three reasons why you suffer and one is well look at you and the
way you're built it's inevitable there's not very much of you and there's a lot of everything else
and so you just don't last that long and you're fragile across multiple domains and then you're
harshly treated by society and there's no doubt about that and then there's responsibility that
can be laid at your own feet well the existential take on that and the thing that all these diverse
people that we've been talking about including victor franklin including alexander solzhenitsyn
as well as um uh kierkegaard nietzsche and dostoevsky and the people that i've
already talked to you about is that the proper pathway through that is to adopt the mode of
authentic being and that is something like refusing to participate in the lie in deception
in the lie to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility
for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people and there's something about that
that's meaningful and responsible and noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that
produces say the nihilism or the flea into the arms of flea or or the or the escape into the arms
of totalitarians to begin with you need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability
and you can adopt a comprehensive description of reality that's formulated for you by someone else
that neatly divides the world into those who are innocent and perhaps innocent victims and those
who are guilty and perhaps the perpetrators of the suffering but none of that has anything to
do with you and in addition it's simply not it's not a reasonable way of assessing the world that
the suffering is built in so that's why the there's an existentialist insistence upon that
so that for the freudians the psychoanalysts and even for people like carl rogers to some degree
if you're in a situation that's characterized by psychopathology if there's something wrong with
you mentally that's a consequence of something gone wrong but that's not the existentialist
take the existentialist take is no that's just how it is that's just how it is you don't have
to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control it's a terrifying
doctrine but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward there's
a pathway forward and the pathway forward is to adopt a motive being that has some nobility
so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone
who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the
pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by well certainly by the avoidance of
deceit particularly in language but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions
of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them and the thing that's so
interesting about that is that well two as far as i'm concerned and some of this is from clinical
experience you know if you take people and i've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to
things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in
order to meet their goals their self-defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in
the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper
limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing
what you knew you needed to do by the deaf by your own definitions right within the value
structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like
well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are
people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were
if they said if they spoke their being forward and they get stronger and stronger and stronger
and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well
in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're
not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and
it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that
perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and the number another way that you
could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it
reflects back to you now and then the second part of that is well imagine that many people did that
because we've done a lot as human beings we've done a lot of remarkable things and i've told
you already i think before that today for example about 250 000 people will be lifted out of abject
poverty and about 300 000 people attached to the electrical power grid we're making people we're
lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of
humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000
the un had planned to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013. so
there's inequality developing in many places and you hear lots of political agitation about that
but overall the the tide is lifting everyone up and that's a great thing and we have no
idea how fast we could multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it
because you know my my experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51 percent
of our capacity something i mean you can think about this yourselves i often ask
undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and
the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day you know inefficient studying
uh watching things on youtube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care
about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours
right there you know you think well that's 20 25 hours a week it's 100 hours a month that's
two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth
20 an hour which is a radical underestimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about
it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting 50 000 a year
and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting 50 000 a year is a way bigger
catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because i'm not going to last nearly as long
and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if
you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you'd be who knows how much
more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient that's the pareto distribution
you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts
well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because
that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make
things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or
arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an
absolutely pathological package if people stopped really really trying just to make things worse
we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird
dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment
both of which are are are are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt
the responsibility that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting
too is that it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to
what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate
it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's 9
billion seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by the way
and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just
one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't
do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network
you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll
you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand
people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and
so that's how you're connected and the things you do they're like dropping a stone in a pond
the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means
that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if
you act that way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what
you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it
to matter but i mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice
i can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price i pay is that nothing matters
or i can reverse it and everything matters but i have to take the responsibility that's
associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path
you know when you say well nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their
life and they still suffer yeah but the advantage is they have no responsibility
so that's the payoff and i actually think that's the motivation say well i can't help
being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've
just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out
and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that
and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so
that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when the when the alternative is to
bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well if you live a pathological life
you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really
i hope you found this animated lecture selection engaging and useful
and would like to thank the after-school team for their work and their generosity
i would also like to extend to all of those watching and listening a sincere invitation
to further explore what my team and i are offering on this youtube channel my podcast and in my books
your engagement is most welcome and your attention and interest most genuinely appreciated
you