Making Sense with Sam Harris - #67 — Meaning and Chaos

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson discuss science, religion, archetypes, mythology, and the perennial problem of finding meaning in life. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today, back by popular demand, I have Jordan Peterson. Jordan is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He formerly taught at Harvard University, and he has published articles on drug abuse and alcoholism and aggression, but he has made a special focus on tyranny, and of late he has been fighting a pitched battle against political correctness up in Canada, and he's attracted a lot of support and criticism on that front.

As I said last time around, he is far and away the most requested guest I've ever had. last time around, he is far and away the most requested guest I've ever had. And we did a podcast about four or so episodes back, entitled What is True, podcast number 62. And that, to the disappointment of everyone, was a fairly brutal slog through differing conceptions of epistemology. If ever the phrase bogged down applied to a podcast, it applied there. Some people enjoyed it, but most of you didn't. But as I say in the conversation today with Jordan, I did a poll online and 30,000 of you responded. And 81% wanted us to try again, because there was much more to talk about. And as it turns out, there was. We had a much better conversation this time around. It was very collegial. And if you have anything to say about

it, feel free to reach out to Jordan and me on Twitter or make noise wherever you want. And now I bring you Jordan Peterson. I am back here with Jordan Peterson. Jordan, thanks for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. Let's just take a moment to bring people up to speed. While we can assume many have heard our previous effort at this, all won't have. So we did a podcast a little over a month ago. It was podcast 62, I believe, on my list. And it went fairly haywire. We intended to speak about many things, but got bogged down on the question of what it means to say that a proposition is true.

And I consider this actually a very interesting problem in philosophy, but it seemed to me that we got stuck at a point that wasn't very interesting, and many of our listeners felt the same. And at the time, I didn't let the conversation proceed to other topics because I felt that it would just be pointless. I knew you wanted to talk about things like the validity of religious faith and Jungian archetypes and many other controversial things. And I felt if we couldn't agree on what separates fact from fantasy, we would just be doomed to talk past one another. I think it's still possible we are doomed to talk past one another, but we ran a Twitter

poll after our first podcast, and despite all the complaints I received about our conversation, 81% of people wanted us to make a second attempt. I think 30,000 people answered that poll, so it was a considerable number of people. I decided we should give our people what most of them claim to want, and we'll just see how it goes, because I don't want us to fight the same battle all over again. I think listeners who are curious about how that last conversation went can listen to it, and I'm sure the topic of truth and falsity will come up. But if it does, I think the best thing to do is kind of flag it on the fly and move on. And I think this will be an exercise in seeing just how much can profitably be said

across differing epistemologies. With that warning about the various road hazards, I think we should just see where we wind up. And I think it could be someplace interesting because you and I appear to share many of the same concerns. I think we both find the question of how to live in this world to be the most important one. And I think we're equally concerned about some of the very well-subscribed answers to that question that are obviously wrong. And so I think we're equally concerned about some of the very well-subscribed answers to that question that are obviously wrong. And so I think we should just do our best to make sense and see where it goes. Well, I hope so, too. That seems right.

I mean, you place a tremendous emphasis on the moral necessity of the spoken truth, and that's certainly something that I'm in accord with. And that's certainly something that I'm in accord with. And you're also concerned with ethics in relationship to the alleviation of suffering, from what I've been able to understand from what I've read of your writings. And you're also very much concerned with the relationship between scientific fact and value. And so we do share this intense concern about the same domain. And I think for many of the same reasons. And I think that you're an outstanding exponent of your particular position. And that makes you an excellent person to talk about these things with. I was actually going to start with a bit of an apology because I listened to our talk twice trying to figure out where it went off the rails.

It actually went okay for the first hour. And then we got bogged down in the truth issue. And I think I made a couple of strategic errors, which I hope not to repeat. The first one was that I started the conversation by more or less accusing you of being insufficiently Darwinian. And that was designed to be, I thought, playful and provocative. But when I listened to our conversation again, I thought that that wasn't a very wise strategic move. So that was one mistake I made. And the second mistake I made was that I had just read a number of things that you had written,

and I told you a lot about what you thought instead of letting you say it. And I was you a lot about what you thought instead of letting you say it. And I was doing that partly, well, partly because there is an argument to be had here. And I suppose partly because I was nervous, but also partly to demonstrate that I had actually familiarized myself with what you had read and I wanted to indicate or what you had written. And I wanted to indicate to you that I was taking it seriously. But I'm going to try to not be the least bit provocative in that manner during this conversation, because I really do think that we have something important to talk

about. And I think that that's why so many people actually want to listen to us talk. So anyways, hopefully we get bogged down. Yeah, yeah. Just in the interest of completing that bit of housekeeping, I don't think the first was an error at all. I mean, to say that I'm Anyways, hopefully we get bogged down. we could converge on. As far as the second point, telling me what I think in advance of our actually hitting that topic, I think that's almost certainly a mistake with me or anyone, and that's fine that you did that post-mortem, and I agree with that bit. So let's just start with a clean slate here, and I think kind of a natural starting point would be to ask you, and again, I've heard a few of the things you've said on this topic, but I'll just let you invent yourself anew, however it strikes you. What is the relationship, in your view, between science and religion? Well, I think that religious systems are descriptions of how people ought to act.

systems are descriptions of how people ought to act. And I think that those arose in a quasi evolutionary manner. And so imagine the dominance hierarchy structure of a chimpanzee troop or a wolf pack. Okay, so we'll use the wolf idea first and then switch, if it's okay, to the chimpanzee idea. So as a consequence of the behavioral actions and interactions among social animals, you could think of something that might be described as a procedural covenant arising, and that would be the animal's knowledge of the structure of the dominance hierarchy, which is kind of ill-named, but we'll use that for now. So that there's a hierarchy of rank, and every animal in the social community understands that hierarchy of rank. That's essentially the culture of the troop or the

pack. And there's an implicit recognition of the value of each individual within that troop or pack, such that, for example, if two wolves square off in a dominance dispute, of course, they puff themselves up to make themselves look large, and they growl at each other, and they engage in ferociously threatening displays. And generally speaking, the wolf that has the lowest threshold for anxiety activation will capitulate first, generally without much more than the pose of a fight, and roll over and expose his neck. And then the dominant wolf will not deign to tear it out, basically. And you could think of the wolves acting out what you would describe propositionally as respect for each individual's value.

And then in the chimp troops, Franz de Waal's research has indicated, for example, that if the dominance hierarchy is only based on brute force and the chimp at the top, who's generally male, is there because he's a barbarian dictator, let's say, generally male, is there because he's a barbarian dictator, let's say, then he's very likely to be taken out by two male chimps, three quarters his power, who are much better at social bonding, and who made a very tight compact between one another. And so that the chimp troop that's based on a tyranny is unstable. What DeWall indicated was that the chimp troop that's based on a tyranny is unstable. What DeWall indicated was that the chimp troops that tend to be more stable are run by dominant males who actually are very good at social bonding and reciprocity and who pay a fair bit of attention to the females and infants in the troop. So the dominance isn't power so much as you might think of as good politics.

the nature of the social contract, let's say, but also is structured as if the individuals within the social contract have some implicit value. So imagine that as human beings diverged away from their chimpanzee progenitors, the common ancestor we have with chimpanzees, We already started to act out this ethic. It was coded in our procedures to speak technically because we have a procedural memory. And then as we developed cortically, we watched each other and ourselves very, very intently. And once we developed language,

we were able to start encapsulating that procedural ethic first in stories. And those stories were partly about what a very well-structured procedural ethic might be and how it might go wrong, but also about how an individual within that procedural ethic should be treated and should act. And the storytelling, which was the mapping of that procedure, was the birthplace of the image and story basis of religious ideation, as far as I can tell. So that's the basic thesis. It's like Piaget's notion that children, when they first come together to learn a game, if they're young enough, they can play the game when they're together.

But if you take them out of the game and ask them individually about the rules, they give widely disparate accounts. So they've got the procedure in place, but they haven't got the episodic representation, technically speaking. episodic representation, technically speaking. It's only once they become more linguistically sophisticated that they can actually come up with a coherent representation of the rules. And then it's only later when they start to construe themselves not merely as followers of the rules, but also as originators of the rules. And that's akin to the recognition of, I would say, constructive individuality in relationship of the rules. And that's akin to the recognition of, I would say, constructive individuality in relationship to the state. And so I see these things as very, very, very deeply biologically predicated. Where's the concept of an archetype come into this picture? Well, okay. Imagine this, Sam, you tell me what you think about this.

So you know how if you have a, can I tell you just a two minute story? So, okay. So one time I was at the hockey rink with my son and he was playing, he was young, he was about 12 and they were playing his championship game in this little league that they had. And, uh, my son was a pretty good hockey player, but there was a kid on the team who was better than him, who was kind of the star, but he was a diva, you know. And even though he would score goals and all of that, he wouldn't pass and he wasn't facilitating the development of any of the other team members. And so anyways, we watched this game and it was very close. It was a very exciting game. And in the final few minutes of the last period,

the other team scored and my son's team and the Stars team lost. And so then the kids went off the ice and the Diva kid smashed his hockey stick on the cement and started to complain bitterly about how unfair the game is. And then his idiot father came running up to him and told him how unfair the reffing had been and how it was stolen from them and how catastrophic all of that was. And I thought it was one of the most heinous displays of poor parenting that I'd ever seen. Now, so there's a moral of that story. So his kid was very good at playing hockey, but he wasn't very good at being a good player. And so, you know, you always tell your kids, doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game.

And of course, you don't know what that means, and neither does the kid. And it's often a mystery to the kid what that means, because obviously you're trying to win. But imagine it this way. what that means, because obviously you're trying to win. But imagine it this way. Imagine that human beings, that the goal of human life isn't to win the game. The goal of human life in some sense is to win the set of all possible games. And in order to win the set of all possible games, you don't need to win any particular game. You have to play in a manner that ensures that you will be invited to play more and more games. And so when you tell your children to be good sports, to play properly, what you mean is play to win, but play to win in such a

way that people on your team are happy to play with you and people on the other teams are happy to play with you and so that you keep getting invited to games. Now, if you think of each game as a small hierarchy of value or dominance, then obviously the appropriate thing is to move up the hierarchy. And that's what animals do, is they move up in their specific hierarchy. But because human beings are capable of abstraction, we've been able to conceptualize the hierarchy as such, rather than any specific one, and then also to characterize a mode of being that is most likely to move you up the hierarchy,

no matter what that hierarchy is. And as far as I can tell, that's the archetype of the hero. The hero is the person who's most likely to move up any given dominance hierarchy at any time in any place. And the hero is also, and then so that the nature of that archetypal hero first was acted out, it was laid out in procedure, and then it was acted out, and then it was described. But it's also, it's multidimensional. It's not only he who plays to be invited to play again, but also he who goes out into the great unknown to face chaos and the dangers there, but to gather what's valuable as a consequence and to bring it back to the community. And that's the basis of the dragon myth archetype, which is, of course, plays out in art and literature throughout, well, throughout recorded history. The oldest story we have, which is the Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia, is a story about Marduk, who's the culture hero and also the highest god in the Mesopotamian pantheon. He confronts the dragon of chaos,

cuts her into pieces, and makes the world. In fact, one of his names was Nam, I can't remember the name, unfortunately, but it meant he who creates ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat, who's the dragon of chaos. So he cuts off he cuts up the unknown into pieces and makes ingenious things out of them. the human archetype, the fact that we are hyper exploratory and that we use our capacity to explore the dangerous, unknown to gather the treasure that lies there and then to distribute it to the community. So, and that in terms of the evolution of that archetype, Sam, think about it this way, okay? And again, you can tell me what you think about this.

So we know that roughly speaking speaking, that human females mate across and up dominance hierarchies, whereas chimpanzee females are non-selective maters. The dominant chimps, males, will chase away the subordinate chimps from the females in estrus, and so they're more likely to have offspring, but the females will mate with anyone. Whereas human females are very selective and they have hidden ovulation and they mate across and up dominance hierarchy. So imagine the woman wants the man who's most capable of rising up the set of all dominance hierarchies. So what happens is she outsources that problem to the computational capacity of the male hierarchy, and she lets the men fight it out among themselves, compete and cooperate to determine who the best man is.

He's provided with the majority of the mating opportunities. And so that's how the extended religious phenotype manifests itself in evolutionary space, which was something that you and Richard Dawkins were wondering about the last time that you talked. Like, it's not psychopathy, which was, in some sense, you know, you were thinking about the charismatic liar. But really, what's being selected for is the consciousness, because that's the right way of thinking about it, that's best able to rise across the set of all dominance hierarchies. And females are selecting very hard for that, which is at least in part why we've had this tremendously expanded cortical capacity.

Well, let me see if I can wade into this picture and find places of agreement and disagreement. and find places of agreement and disagreement. For clarity's sake, I think it's useful to distinguish between two different intellectual projects here with respect to values and morality and the question of just how to live in this world, which is our least nominal starting point. First, there's the description of how we got here, right? And this captures all of evolutionary psychology

and much of what you just began to say about selection pressures with respect to dominance hierarchies and the kind of heroic male mate that female apes will find attractive and all that. Then you can add religion to that as perhaps an extended phenotype or the possibility of group selection pressure. More religious tribes have a way of organizing themselves in a more durable way than less religious tribes and therefore we have there's something in

our evolutionary history that has selected for religiosity, say, an overarching story that unites non-kin in a way that is more energizing than some other story. You know, I don't really have much of a dog in that fight. I think some of that is plausible, some of it isn't. I think group selection, though you haven't mentioned it, is working to some degree in the background of this way of talking about religion in evolutionary terms. And at the moment, I happen to be convinced that group selection is implausible and based on some bad analogies. But again, this doesn't strike me as important for this conversation or for anything that I've written about the relationship between morality and science or facts and values, because I view this problem of describing how we got here.

How is it that apes like ourselves have the moral attitudes and concerns that we have? That's a distinct project which is quite separate from the question of deciding how we should live now, given what we are and given the opportunities available to us and given the way in which we're continually flying the perch that has been prepared for us by evolution with our technology and with our institutions and with our new moral norms that have absolutely nothing to do with ancient selection pressures. And this is even true in a religious context. So you have, in many religions, perhaps even most, you have certain ideals that could never have been selected for because they are the antithesis of anything that would offer an adaptive advantage. Celibacy, for instance. Anyone who was committed to celibacy in our ancient past, by definition, didn't breed.

You could say that they might have helped their kin, but still, celibacy is not an ideal that you can make much Darwinian sense of, and yet you can have the most committed adherence of any faith tending toward a life of celibacy. At the very least, promiscuity is taboo in most religious traditions. Now, I'm not taking a position that that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying this is where evolution is no longer relevant to a discussion of how people should live. And as I think I said in a blog response to some of the things you said after our first podcast, if you wanted to just take a gene's eye

view of how human beings should live, especially how men should live, well then you would conclude that given current opportunities, every man should be passionately committed to doing more or less nothing but donate his sperm to a sperm bank, because then he could father possibly tens of thousands of offspring for whom he would have no financial or emotional responsibility. From a Darwinian perspective, that should be every guy's deepest dream. You should just get up in the morning with just a commitment to that project unlike any other that could be discovered in life. So we have motives and norms and concerns that don't narrowly track a gene level analysis of what we should be doing. So I just put that out there. I think the more

interesting conversation is not to talk about how apes like ourselves could have gotten religion, but to talk about what we should do given the way the world is now and what we seem to know about it through science. Well, that's fine. I just want to make a couple of comments about that. I mean, the hypotheses that I'm proposing is certainly not dependent on group selection. So Hypotheses that I'm proposing is certainly not dependent on group selection. So we can leave that one aside as far as I know. I think the jury's out on the ultimate validity of the idea of group selection, but I'm not interested in going down that rabbit hole because it doesn't matter to me the present day, I think that's more complicated. So the first thing I would say is that I believe there has been a central march forward with a set of very productive ideas as human beings have evolved their morality, but those have spun off counterproductive evolutionary dead ends like everything does and it's possible for example that celibacy is one of those with regards to the donation to

sperm bank idea I mean that's essentially the mosquito way of propagation right and that's it's R versus K is that the tremendous that the correct terminology I don't remember it correctly but there's two fundamentally different strategies, extreme strategies for propagating yourself in the world. And one is to disseminate yourself as widely as possible and let the offspring live or die as they may, which would be the sperm bank approach. And then there's the other one, which is high investment in children, which is maybe taken to its extreme in human beings. And so we're tilted a lot more towards that. And so you can't really imagine a human being being motivated

to take the mosquito approach, because that's really not built into us. But that isn't to say that the sexual morality that's part and parcel of our being, which seems to tend relatively strongly towards monogamy, for example, as marriage is a human universal, although there are variations of it, we're still very much tilted towards the high investment in single offspring pattern. Let me just clarify one point. I certainly am not saying that you can't see the thumbprint of evolution in more or less everything we do. You obviously can, and as you point out, our sexual morality and our commitment to monogamy, all of that is amenable to being interpreted in evolutionary terms. No doubt those stories are valid and interesting to

understand. My point is that we are in the process of repudiating and struggling to outgrow most of what evolution has prepared us to want and care about and fear. Tribalism, xenophobia, the list is long, but we want to get out of our tribal violence program and all the rest. Let me address that because, you see, most of the evolutionary psychologists that I've encountered have what I consider the misbegotten notion that our primary period of evolutionary determination was on the African veldt. And my viewpoint, I would say, spans broader time spans than that. So I'm starting from the presupposition that the most permanent things are the most real, which I think is a reasonable starting point.

But I have a reason for saying that, because what I've been able to understand by delving deeply into the grammatical structure underneath mythology is that the religious landscape actually describes that which is most permanent in what shaped human evolutionary history. And I mean way back. I mean 350 million years back, before trees, before flowers, back when we shared common ancestor with crustaceans. And so one of the most permanent features of the biological landscape is the existence of the dominance hierarchy. And that's roughly portrayed in religious mythology as culture or explored territory or the known. And it's usually given the characterological representation of the great father. And there's a positive one and a negative one as the dominance hierarchy can support you in your development or crush you completely

so the dominance hierarchy is one major selection mechanism and it's it's known territory there's another major selection mechanism which is roughly speaking mother nature and that's that which exists outside of explored territory and it's generally being kept conceptualized as feminine, which, and I think the reason for that is because the unknown, it's the unknown, cognitively speaking or territorial speaking, that gives rise to new forms. But it's also more importantly that female human beings, so the feminine, plays a very vicious role in the selection process. You may know and probably do that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. So as far as human beings are concerned, the feminine is a bottleneck through which genes must pass, so to speak. And it's a very narrow and picky and choosy bottleneck. So it has a positive element and a negative element. So roughly, it's the same thing, Sam, that's represented in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, because that yin-yang symbol

basically is predicated on the idea that being is partly the known or the interpretive structure that's brought to bear on the situation. And so that's the white paisley, it's a serpent actually, and the unknown, which is the black paisley or serpent, and the two are interchangeable and out of them arises meaning. So the idea behind the Taoist symbol is that you should have one foot in what you know, and one foot in what you don't know. And that's the place where information flow is maximized. And that's the same thing as occupying the position of the hero who confronts the unknown and generates new information. And those evolutionary realities

remain absolutely unchanged. The idea that every place you go, there's something you know, and an interpretive framework that you bring to bear. So there's a cultural element, and everywhere you go or are, there's something that transcends that knowledge that you have to deal with. And everywhere you go, you're there. And so that's the, so the three basic archetypal characters of mythology are the individual, positive and negative, culture, positive and negative, and nature, positive and negative. And we haven't outgrown that in the least. It's exactly the same problem it's always been. And as far as I can tell, it's exactly the same set of problems that always will be. always will be. And that's partly why these archetypal stories cannot be transcended, and they cannot be ignored. They pop up of their own accord. I mean, look, I'll give you an example.

One question, Jordan. How is any of that religious, though? I understand how, you know, thinking of the individual versus the cosmos gives us a kind of narrative structure, right? You have your protagonist and you have all of the things that can happen to him or not, and all the things that he can want or not. And it's very easy to conceive of any human life or the life of a whole civilization in terms of stories like that, but how does this bring religion into the picture? Okay, well, I'm going to approach that from two perspectives. The first perspective, I presume, is one that you might find interesting given your interest in spirituality.

So it's certainly capable for people to experience deeply a sense of meaning. You know, Csikszentmihalyi talked about that as flow, which I think is a rather trivial way of dealing with it, but at least it's one that people can directly understand. But I would say you can understand when you're doing something meaningful because you're deeply engaged in it and you also have a sense, in some sense, of standing outside of time because you're deeply engaged in it and you also have a sense in some sense of standing outside of time because you don't notice time's flow and it also feels worthwhile and that the sacrifices that you have made to enable yourself to do that were justified and so i would say because the ultimate domains of reality are in fact chaos and order or known and unknown, that when you

straddle those two properly and maximize information flow, you feel a deep sense of intrinsic meaning. And that's the output of the entire structure of your consciousness telling you that you're in the right place at the right time with regards to furthering your capacity to thrive and move forward. A question here, Jordan. Wouldn't you grant that there are pathological experiences of meaning, meaning that is actually based on a misconception or divorced from the truth, which can be no less intoxicating to the person who's finding something meaningful?

Sam, I think that's a great question. I mean, one of the things that really, really disturbed me when I was first working out these ideas was exactly that question, because I've read an awful lot about extraordinarily pathological people, you know, serial killers and people who were malevolent right to their core. And that's exactly the question I asked, because, you know, with serial killers, for example, especially the sexual predator types, they seem to have to live on the edge of their pathology in order to continue to be rewarded by it. You know, they have to keep extending their pathology into the unknown to keep getting that rush. And then, of course, there's the situation with

schizophrenics, where the underlying mechanisms that produce the sense of meaning actually go astray. And that's especially the case, say, with paranoid schizophrenia. But you see, that's partly why I think I developed a viewpoint that's similar to yours with regards to the necessity of stating the truth, or at least attempting very hard not to say what you believe to be false. Because as far as I can tell, at least under most circumstances, that meaning-orienting system, which is actually the extended orienting reflex, technically speaking, neuropsychologically speaking, I think that you pathologize the underlying mechanisms if you speak deceitfully, because

you build pathological micro-machines, so to speak, into the architecture of your physiology, and then the underlying systems, much more fundamental, say limbic systems, for lack of a better term, they start producing pathological output and take you down extraordinarily dangerous roads. as a guide through life, then you have to ally yourself with the commitment to speak the truth, or at least not to engage in deceit, because otherwise you will do exactly what you said and pathologize yourself, and then, well, and then all hell will break loose in your life and in the life of others. And you could be rigorously honest, but still mistaken, right? I mean, you could have a belief system or be raised in a culture that has a belief system that is completely illogical or out of touch with reality, and you could not know it. The dishonesty doesn't have to be local to your own brain. You could just be confused, right?

Well, I think this is partly why I was more insistent than I should have been in our last discussion about a particular idea about truth. I mean, because I would say there's the truth that's associated with being in possession of a set of accurate facts, but there's a more enacted truth or embodied truth which is the consistent attempt to go beyond what you know and so that would be the the necessity of living in humility or in ignorance and so that what you're doing when you're discussing with someone or when you're acting in the world is not so much attempting to prove that what you already know is completely right and correct, but attempting to understand very carefully where you're in error and learning everything you can

to correct that. And you see, that idea is also deeply rooted in religious mythology. So, for example, the figure of Horus, who's the Egyptian eye, and who's also a falcon. Now, Horus is an eye and a falcon because falcons can see better than any other animal, including human beings, even though we can see very well. And he's an eye because the eye with the open iris signifies paying attention. And Horus, who's a messianic figure in some sense for the ancient Egyptians, had his eyes open to the corruption of the state, which was symbolized by a deity named Seth, who later became Satan in the developmental pathway of this set of ideas. And Horus, who lived in truth, so to speak, was able to keep his eyes open and understand the corrupt nature of his society and his uncle, his uncle was Seth, and that might be moral or factual. If you're a scientist and operating in a truthful

manner, you update archaic empirical representations. If you're a, what would you call, more culture hero type of person, then what you're doing is updating archaic and blind representations of the proper moral pathway forward, which can never be encapsulated completely in a set of rules. See, that's partly why, for example, in the line of Christian thought, Moses couldn't reach the promised land because his morality was bounded by rules, and it's not possible to reach the proper mode of being by only acting out rules, because the same rules aren't applicable in every situation. I mean, I could tell you the Christian story in a way that you might find interesting in about 10 minutes, if you would like me to do that. Let's hold off on Christianity. I want to get there, because I know that's the system of

thinking you find most interesting in this area, And so I would like to talk about that. Okay. My issue is that it seems to me that this kind of language game of talking about ancient stories and the way in which they seem to cash out some of the pre-scientific intuitions and moral norms of any group of people as though there's a validity to the whole picture when you talk that way. I just see that that's kind of unconstrained by anything. I think you can do that with anything, with any system of beliefs. You can find a people which, from my point of view, are living in some form of radical error, which is to say that virtually everything they think is true almost certainly isn't. And the way they're treating one another is terrible on the basis of those misconceptions,

and they're never going to get anywhere worth going, right? So a modern example of that is something like ISIS or the Taliban, but there's some ancient examples or older examples that are, in some cases, even easier to understand because we have no affinity for them. So do you know the Dobu people? The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote about them. I wrote about them for a few pages in my book, The Moral Landscape. Yeah, I read about them in your book, actually. Yeah, so for listeners who didn't read the book or can't remember, I mean, the Dobu get my vote for perhaps the most tragically confused people who have ever lived. And this is just kind of a hothouse version of

radical confusion, which you wouldn't believe would be possible, but for the fact that some anthropologists wrote about it. But so this was a culture that was completely obsessed with malicious sorcery. And their primary interest, every person's primary interest, was to cast spells on other members of the tribe in an attempt to sicken or kill them in the hopes of magically stealing their possessions and especially their crops. stealing their possessions and especially their crops. It was like a continuous magical war of all against all in this way. And they believed that magic had to be consciously applied to everything. They literally thought that gravity had to be supplemented by magic so that if you didn't cast the right spells, your vegetables would just rise out of the ground and disappear.

And they thought every interaction of this sort and every outcome for people was zero-sum, so that if one man succeeded in growing more vegetables than his neighbor, his success, his surplus of vegetables, must have been stolen from one of his neighbors through sorcery. Even the farmer who got lucky in this way with a surplus would have believed that he succeeded for this reason, that he actually magically stole his neighbor's crop. So to have a good harvest was a crime by everyone's estimation, even the person who was a lucky harvester. And it seems to me that you could play this same game with the Dobu. I mean, you could talk about archetypes.

with the dobu. I mean, you could talk about archetypes, you could talk about whatever stories, ancient or otherwise, that they were using to justify this view of life. You could find some evolutionary way of kind of threading the needle of how what they were doing was a response to the ancient imperative of dominance hierarchies. You know, you could give some sympathetic construal of the whole enterprise in terms of myth and archetype and meaning. But clearly, this was like a kind of strange basin of attraction that you'd be very lucky never to have found as a tribe or as a culture. And we're very lucky not to be stuck in some similar place there. There's another detail here, which is especially horrible, because the Dobu felt that magic became more powerful

the closer you were to somebody, so that the people who were closest to them in life, their spouses or their children, were the people who were most likely to destroy them with their magical powers. Well, that's actually true, Sam.

If you've ever had family, you know that. But yeah, so again, you could connect it to some kind of story that makes sense. You could go to Greek mythology Well, that's actually true, Sam. If you've ever had family, you know that. two, it was creating a truly toxic moral environment for these people. And so, again, I just put that out there as an example of something that one would never want to spend a lot of time trying to justify this worldview by reference to stories, ancient or otherwise. Yeah, well, I mean, there's actually a technical solution to the problem that you're posing. actually a technical solution to the problem that you're posing. I mean, part of the problem is,

how do you know if what you're looking at is a genuine thing or an artifact of your imagination? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org. Thank you.