And then with regards to your partner...
Here's something to think about with regards to roles.
So my wife and I have had this discussion many times.
And one of the discussions is, well, how are we to treat each other in public?
And it isn't... Her name is Tammy.
The discussion isn't: how should Jordan treat Tammy in public?
Or how should Tammy treat Jordan?
That's not the discussion.
This isn't personal.
It's how should a wife treat her husband?
And how should a husband treat his wife?
It's impersonal.
And it's partly you don't put your partner down in public.
Why?
Well, it's not because you're hurting that person's feelings.
That's not why.
It's that you're denigrating the relationship that you are in, voluntarily.
Some of the most painful days I've ever spent,
one in particular, I spent with a group of men who had been
in therapy for their marriage
and who bloody well needed it, I can tell you that.
And they spent their whole day complaining about their wives.
It just made me sweat the whole day.
I thought, I can't believe I'm here with you guys.
And I thought, how can you be so damn dumb?
It's like, it's certainly possible that you married barbarian witches.
Fine!
But you don't have... You're so lacking in sense that you would
discuss that in public, not noticing that you picked them.
So basically, all you're doing is holding
up a sign and waving it constantly that says, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, right?
And so you have a responsibility to those
whom you love and are obligated to to ensure that they manifest themselves
in a manner that's most beneficial to them over the long run.
Now you have the same responsibility,
I would say to yourself, but you'll have blind spots.
Other people have to help you with that.
But so the rule is,
you help your wife figure out how not to make a fool of herself in public.
And she extends to you the same courtesy.
And it's partly maintenance of the sacred nature of the relationship.
It has nothing to do with you or her, precisely.
It's broader and wider than that.
Okay, so then that's two levels of responsibility, child, partner.
Next level of responsibility:
you're asked at your workplace to undergo unconscious bias retraining.
You say, yes. It's like, okay.
You've just admitted that you're a bigot, right?
Because you're acting it out.
It's like I'm a racist bigot.
Obviously, I need to be retrained.
And so you might say, well, I'm not going to make a fuss about it, right?
Or I've been told to do it.
Or maybe you agree with it.
Fine.
If you agree with it. No problem.
You can make a case for it.
I think it's a weak and appalling case
personally, but you can make a case for it.
You could say, well, I am interested in my biases and how to rectify them.
And, like, fair enough, people are biased.
But if you object to it and you don't say anything,
then you're complicit, and then it's on you.
And, you know, like A causes B and C and B causes C and D and so forth.
The thing does noise,
but it has this tendency to expand, and you'll come home angry and upset,
and you'll go to the training program and you'll think this is ridiculous,
because that is what you'll think in all likelihood.
And you won't say anything, but it eats at you.
Well, you've abrogated your responsibility.
And then you might say, well, then that's how the community becomes corrupt.
That's how the community starts to be corrupt is that people turn a blind eye
to emergent pathology when they know it's pathological.
That's exactly what the Egyptian story says.
Osiris is overcome by Seth because he's willfully blind, willfully blind...
Which means he knows but refuses to...
He knows, quote, his predator detection systems have gone off. Monster.
Well, then you're supposed to look, okay, exactly what sort of monster is this?
Well, it doesn't have wings. It doesn't have a tail.
You cut it from the monster that it could be into the monster that it is.
That's the first step.
And then you take the appropriate steps, and then you also notice the other
monsters, because here's something to think about.
You're going to pay a price for speaking
up, but you're going to pay a price for not speaking up.
So it's like monsters on the right, monsters on the left.
Pick the ones you want to battle with.
If you decide not to make your stand, you weaken yourself.
If you do it 100 times,
then even if the monster was only this big, now you're this big.
It's going to eat you.
When it was this big, you probably could have kicked it across the room.
It's too late for that.
You've capitulated and capitulated.
And so what you've done.
And this is a way to think about it from a Jungian perspective.
This is what Jung was trying to get at when he was talking about Alchemy.
It's like the thing that pops up to object to you is this incredibly complex entity.
It's the entire world encapsulated in the event.
If you interact with it, you unpack it.
You differentiate your sense of the world and you gather new skills.
Let's say we're having a conversation, and it's flowing, melodically,
and all of a sudden I say something and there's a disjunction, right?
You're offended by it.
There's some negative emotion that comes up.
Or maybe I've said something to impress
you or to be arrogant and you respond badly.
It's like you've got this melodic thing going on.
It's a consensual frame and something
pokes itself up to put a disjunction in the conversation.
It's like, well, that's where the information is.
It's like something went wrong.
Something didn't work out.
I'm not looking at the world properly, or I don't know you well enough
or as well as I thought.
There's something there and if I have any sense,
I'm going to focus my attention on that, not obsessively or anything like that.
But that's where all the information is,
because as long as what we're doing is working, then we both know enough already.
As soon as what we're doing together isn't working, then that's instant evidence
that there's something about us that needs to be updated.
And you might think, well, that's a terrible thing.
And the answer is yes, of course it is.
It's a terrible thing, But it's also the thing...
And this is the next stage of the development of this.
Let's call it universal morality.
It's like, the universal morality might be found in the answer to the question,
what should you do when you make a mistake now?
One answer is catastrophic dissolution.
That's a collapse into chaos.
Well, no one is going to pick that voluntarily.
Let's put it that way.
Unbelievably, unpleasant,
terribly anxietyprovoking, shameful and painful all at the same time.
Worse, it can mean the absence of positive
emotion, because if you really collapse into chaos, not only are you overwhelmed
by negative emotion, but the positive emotion system shut off.
And that's what happens to someone who's
extraordinarily depressed and also hyper anxious at the same time.
Not only are they suffering from an excess of negative emotion,
but they've got no incentive movement forward whatsoever.
Okay, so that's not an optimal solution because it takes you out.
The other possible...
And so I would call that a nihilistic solution or a chaotic solution.
It's not a solution.
It's a dissolution.
And you could think about it as a precursor to a potential solution.
But it's very easy to get stuck there.
And that's why Jonah could have stayed in the belly of the whale along with all
the other people that were eaten by the whale and never got back out.
And you see people like that all the time.
Their error has come along, blown out their frames of reference.
They've collapsed into the underworld,
into the chaotic underworld, and they don't know how to get out.
They have post-traumatic stress disorder, or they're depressed or they're hyper
anxious, or they're resentful, and aggressive, and destructive,
like, there's any number of states of being that can overwhelm you
when the bottom has fallen out of your life.
It's not an optimal solution, let's put it that way.
Well, the other... That's a nihilistic solution.
A collapse.
The other solution is: we're talking and I don't get what I want from you.
And so I say, you better not do that again.
I don't want to see that from you again.
And that's a tyrannical attitude, right?
What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my universe of order and its predictions,
and I'm going to say, you go along with this or I'm going to punish you.
Now, there is an element in society...
like, society is made up of threats like that, to some degree.
It's an ineradicable part of society.
That would be the tyrannical aspect of the great King, let's say.
We've organized a set of punishments
and threats that keep each of us in alignment.
However, generally speaking,
in a society that's functional, we've decided to adopt agreement
with that set of principles more or less voluntarily.
We say, well, you have rights and responsibilities,
and I have rights and responsibilities, and I'm willing to pay a price for yours,
including the acceptance of punishment if I transgress.
But you're going to do the same for me.
So there are intelligent ways
that punishment and threat can be used and bounded,
but that can easily degenerate into tyranny.
And one of the methods that I can choose to use if I don't want to encounter error
is just to enforce my will on everyone else.
And I think when that happens
personally and in the family and in the community and in the state,
all at the same time, then you get the emergence of a tyranny.