The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 129. Maps of Meaning 1: Context and Background

Episode Date: July 26, 2020

Here is the first episode in a 12 part series that could only be found on youtube until now! In this lecture, I discuss the context within which the theory I am delineating through this course emerge: that of the cold war. What is belief? Why is it so important to people? Why will they fight to protect it? I propose that belief unites a culture's expectations and desires with the actions of its people, and that the match between those two allows for cooperative action and maintains emotional stability. I su

Welcome to season 3, episode 16 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Westwood One Podcast Networks, Joey Salvia, and we thank you for listening to our most recent series on Jordan's Biblical lectures. While we eagerly await the return of Dr. Peterson, we've planned a special 12-part series that until now could only be found on YouTube. Westwood One Podcast Network is proud to present the audio version of Jordan B. Peterson's 2017 lectures based on his book, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief. We begin with the title Jordan calls, context and background.

But first, a word from Michaela Peterson. It's fantastic to have my dad returning to health and you guys know how long of a journey it's been. Part of that journey is involved taking NAD supplements, which meant we had to be hooked up to machines for hours at a time. It was worth it because NAD improves your long-term health by working at the cellular level, but it was definitely a sacrifice in the short-term. That's why I'm glad to have found a supplement called Basis made by the company Elysium. Basis is the first and only NAD dietary supplement based on 25 years of research in the science of aging.

It works by activating what scientists call our longevity genes and changing the way you age. Many of the benefits have increased NAD or things you won't feel right away, like enhanced mitochondrial function, active longevity genes, and improved DNA repair, but many people also report increased energy levels, better sleep, and more satisfying workouts. Plus it's easy, just take two capsules a day to improve the way you age. Lists can get 10% off of a monthly subscription to basis by visiting tribasis.com slash Jordan and using the promo code Jordan10.

That's tribasis.com slash Jordan and the promo code Jordan10. That's a great deal, a Jordan B. Peterson Lecture, Episode 16, Context and Background. 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, and I was back in the early 80s for their abouts. And this was particularly true around 1984, but it was true before that too. Every generation has its worries, real or imagined, and the primary worry for people of

my generation was the nuclear war. And 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 the ICBM's intercontinental ballistic missiles were very large rockets, right?

They flew it. They could fly halfway around the world. And it was deep underground and behind very, very thick steel doors. It was light green. You know that pastel green that everyone seemed to like in the 1950s. It was like pastel green Star Trek console.

That's what it looked like. And 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 three quarters of an inch thick, plastic, you know, kind of a resin.

And it was designed to melt on reentry. 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 Reagan, by the way. In the front of it, there was a museum

with artifacts from the 1980s featuring Reagan and Gorbachev meeting multiple times. And it was staffed by these southern Americans from the south who were grandparent age. And they were just super friendly. And they were happy to be in the museum. It was like going to visit your grandma's nuclear missile silo. And so it was jarring, because it's obviously a portansious

place. And yet, it was conjoined with hospitality and welcoming. It was surreal in that manner. Anyways, we went 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, 1950s technology but updated.

And then imagine that 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 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. It had to be two of you. You put the key in the lock and hold it for 10 seconds,

and then away the missile goes, and the missile wasn't as big as the rockets that went to the moon, but it was plenty big. The silo itself would have easily been as wide as this room is, and perhaps larger, and many, many stories tall, 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 and they said, 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. There seemed to be another peak of conflict in 1984 when there was a movie show 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 who were left.

And it was pretty realistic and pretty frightening. And it turned out, as I found out later, that that movie actually was one of the things that influenced Ronald Reagan to put pressure on or negotiate with the Soviets, depending on how you look at it. And so, well, and then, you know, five 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 established in China, and the system that still exists in Korea, as a remnant of the Cold War, and systems in Southeast Asia and in Africa were all

predicated on Marxist presuppositions, presuppositions that were utopian in nature 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, right, 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. It'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 normal distributions and how many things follow on normal distribution, most things. But that's really a limited case. You can understand that Pareto distribution, if you've all played monopoly, I presume. At the beginning, everyone has the same amount of money. Will include property, the same amount of wealth. Then what happens as the game progresses and really as a function of chance. I mean, I know you have to use your head a little bit monopoly, but the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on.

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 people would 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're playing a trading game and you hit zero, then you're done. And so it's very hard to recover from zero. And it's really hard to recover. a trading game and you hit zero, then you're done. And so, and it's very hard to recover from zero. And, you know, it's really hard to recover.

You know when you're doomed in monopoly. You know, you can tell. You've got some resources, but there's going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel. And you're going to get wiped out. You know it. So, there's 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're doomed.

So what happens is that as you continue to play monopoly, more and more people stack up as zero. monopoly. More and more people stack up is zero, and fewer and fewer people have more and more money. And when the game is over, everyone has nothing except one person, they have it all of it. Now, the funny thing about that is that in some sense, that's how trading games work, you know. You might wonder why there is inequality in a society. And it's easy to consider that it's because the society is corrupt, and perhaps, you know, societies are somewhat or horribly corrupt. That's the variation. There's no society that's without its criminal element and fixed element. Anyways, trading games tend to produce a pre-dodistribution so that very many people have very little, and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount.

That's the 1% that you hear about, right? And, you know, the thing about that 1% is that that's happened in every society that's ever been studied. It doesn't really matter what the governmental system is, and it certainly happened under the Soviets. That's for sure. And there was a lot of people who had enough zero, so they just died.

So, you know, the utopian dream was completely unimplementable for a variety of very complex reasons. One is that it's very hard to fight against that distribution pattern when people are trading because mere statistics will do that. And then there's other things that can, I should tell you as well, that the pre-dodistribution 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 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies, which is none, right? That's none. And of that 500 you can be sure that one of them was by Stephen King, and he took half the money because there's like five 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's replicated everywhere. And because they're so prominent, and because there are no names when people are in a hurry and they just want something to read, they just grab that and then more money goes to those people. So success breeds success and failure

breeds failure and it's not necessarily linear. That's a really difficult thing to deal with and it's hard on societies because one of the things we do know is that 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. And status is important to men, not that it's not important to women, but it's a different kind of status. It's status 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, to men, to compete with one another for status, in a hierarchy position. In a really unequal society, if you're like a low-run 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 so you could say, there's 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 there's been pretty good studies done of drug gang in Chicago. That was the best one. A sociologist actually went and hung out with a drug gang for, he got into it. I guess the drug gang leader was, you know, I wouldn't say necessarily narcissistic, but 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 him, 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 the guys further up the chain, of course,

followed the pre-dodestribution, and so there was a tiny minority of them who 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 it's pretty violent game, so the chances that someone is going to be taken out is pretty high, and then a little 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 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. Apple's a good example of that. You know what I mean? The iPhone, they have their competitors, but it's an extraordinarily dominant product.

And they rake in billions of dollars. I think I don't know if Apple is valued at a trillion dollars, but it's close to that. And that's a lot of money. And I think if I remember correctly, it's something like this. I probably have the figures wrong, but like the top 40 people, the richest 40 people in the world have as much money as the bottom two billion. Right? Now, you know, it's not like they're 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 know, you can't spend $28 billion. 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'm telling you this is because it's one of the things you should know is that this proclivity for inequality is pervasive among the creative products of human beings.

It's the case with goals scored in hockey. My son told me, and he's 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 even at the upper end of the distribution, there's some person who's, ah, they're so good at what they do.

And then there's another person that's so much better than them that it's 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, let's say you start writing and you get a book and rare things, very rare things to have happen. And then some people read it and they like it. And then, of course, it's much more likely that you'll get a next book. And if people like that then of course it's much more likely that you'll get a next book and if people like that, well it's even more likely that you'll 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 and 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 why would someone fail? Well, God, one idea that's very common in our culture is that poverty is caused by lack of money, and that's a really 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 was that they got some money. They're just done.

First of all, they were hanging around with people who were 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 while 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 check he was gone for five days he usually found him in a ditch you know because he just go to the bar, spent

every sand he had on alcohol and cocaine and wake up in a ditch, three quarters dead, eventually, completely dead. And you know, then he was ashamed and horrified and repentant, and he'd straighten himself out again, and then that was all well and good until as long as he was broke until the next check 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 manage money it's really easy for it to disappear I mean elderly people have a hell of a time now because, you know, cruxers contacting them all on the internet, non-stop.

And so just giving people money, money'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 so good to have a low IQ. You know, people don't like the idea of IQ, because it seems so arbitrary, you know, have a low IQ, people don't like the idea of IQ because it seems so arbitrary, you have a high IQ. Well, it's not like you deserve it exactly. You set up that way pretty much

right from the beginning. It's 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 and trying to raise that, it's like if you can figure out how to do that, well, it's no bell prize time for you because people have tried that a lot. And most recently with those luminosity games and that sort of thing, the evidence that those produce anything other than brilliant performances on the lumiocity game itself is basically zero. We haven't been able to figure out how to see because intelligence is across domain phenomena. And you can get really good

in a single domain by practicing like mad. And what you want is to practice like mad in a single domain and hope that it generalized to other domains That's the holy grail of intelligence increase. It's like no No one's done it people claim it, but the claims never hold up and people have been trying for a long time to do it and they haven't been able to do it and Difference is an IQ really make a difference. You guys average IQ is probably 125, 130. At 115 you're at the 85th percentile. And 115 would barely get you going for a hard university. 130, you're probably graduate school material.

145, you're up there at the range where you can probably do pretty much whatever you want, although 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. I mean, why do smart people make more money? Well, they get to where the edge of production is faster.

So if you have a thousand people and you rank or to them by IQ, the smart people are going to come up with the new ideas first, and they're going to have more ideas, and they're going to strategize better. And you know what, with an IQ of 90, which is 15% of the population, you think about that, 15% of the population. That's pretty much the threshold for reading instructions

and being able to follow them. So our society is increasingly sophisticated, so it's by no means obvious. The liberals think, well, society is unfair because there's unemployment and the conservatives think, well, this society is unfair because there's unemployment and the conservatives think, well, there's 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. It's harder to get a volunteer job than a real job. But we got him in a volunteer job and he had to fold pieces of paper, letters. He worked at a charity.

He had to fold pieces of paper in three so that he could put them inside envelopes. And then the letters, which were in a pile, had to be matched with the proper envelopes, which were also in a pile, but some of them were French and some of them were English, so the French ones had to be matched carefully to the French envelopes. And then 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 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 always 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 till I watched someone who couldn't do it. And he probably had an IQ of about 80.

If you met him on the street, you wouldn't think anything different of him. He was normal normal looking guy, had some other problems. I trained him to fold those damn papers for like 30 hours. And he got reasonably good at it. But, you know, if you're good at it and you probably all are, you fold it and the edges line up exactly, like really exactly, the tolerance is probably half a millimeter, something like that. Then you do the second fold and the tolerance is the same.

But let's imagine that the first fold you're out by an eighth of an inch and the second fold you're out by an eighth of an inch. So it's a little crooked. That means in total you're out by a quarter of an inch. Then it won't fit in the damn envelope. So then you kind of crumpled the envelope when you put it in there and then it gets stuck in the sorting machine. And so he sweated blood trying to do that job.

And he eventually, they eventually planned to fire him. So imagine what that's like, hey, 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 woman who was running it and suggested that That might be a little on the devastating side. I mean, she had her reasons.

You know, 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 the place did what it was supposed to. So she was between a rock and a hard place.

He eventually decided that the job wasn't for him. And relatively soon after that, I think it was too stressful. And 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. 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 30 pounds while he was training that dog because dogs, they're, you know, dominant and 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 just cannot possibly imagine, it's like a, it's like a, it was surreal just like the nuclear missile silo. I mean, he had people following him around and forming 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 woman who trained dogs, and then he had a job. So hooray, you know, but it was like a miracle,

fundamentally. So anyway, as the reason I'm telling you all this is because there was a reason for the Cold War. And the reason was that there's inequality. And there's different theories about how to address that inequality and different theories about why it exists. And there was a Marxist theory about why it exists, which was roughly something like property equals 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 part of money, you know, money expands actually as we become more technologically proficient. And lots of people who have money have it because they've generated a lot of wealth. I mean Bill Gates is a great example of that, right? He popularized computing.

He made it possible for everybody to have access to computing. It seems like a good for him, you know? And you could say the same thing about Steve Jobs. And maybe you'll be able to say the same thing about Elon Musk. And, you know, these guys have tremendous resources out their disposal. But, you know, they're not bathing in banknotes. You know, they're trying to continue to do things, and they use their money to do things. And 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. And I know that you guys probably don't learn much about this because for some reason people aren't taught about it. But the good estimates are that the Russians killed about 30 million of their own people between 1919 and 1959. You know, and it's brutal. It's 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've ever seen in my life, and that's actually saying a lot, because I've seen a lot of really terrible photographs, because I've done so much investigation into totalitarianism. This was a photograph that was taken during one of the early starvation periods in the Soviet Union where about 3 million peasants died. It was a picture of a peasant couple standing behind the table at a market selling human body parts for food. It's like, 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 done something extreme, I learned to do this a long time ago

when I work briefly in a maximum security prison. I try to imagine what I would have to be like, what kind of situation I would 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 it is that you read about someone doing and no matter how unlikely it is that you think 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 are necessary that you really, really, really do not want to know, don't want to do. And imagining yourself as a perpetrator of that sort is, I tell you something about the world and I tell you something about human beings, but it's a hell of a thing to swallow, you know, in a very well-structured society like ours, where we're 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

is 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 every day. It's horribly cold out there. You can't grow any food. You die if you're out there for 24 hours. If any of this 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 here we are with all this reliable infrastructure. And because of that, we don't really 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 very many. So, it's really easy to think of yourself as good, because, well, you're not doing anything nasty to anyone. But, you know, a cynic might say, well, that's just because you don't have any reason to. But those reasons have arisen many times in the past. In fact, they're the norm, not the exception. We're the exception.

This insanely functional society that we've somehow managed to generate is, it's incomprehensible to me that it exists. So anyways, back in the industrial, at the end of the Industrial Revolution, you know, the conditions of the worker were pretty brutal. I mean, George Orwell wrote a book called Road to Wig in Peer, which I would highly recommend. It's a great book. And he went up in the 30s, I think it was the 30s, to live with the coal miners up in northern UK. And those poor guys, 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 then after the eight hours of hacking away at the coal walls, which is rather difficult and dirty and dangerous. And of course, you get black lung from it. So it's also fatal. And of course, they didn't get paid very much. So after doing that for eight hours, then you crawl back your two-mile. 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 no teeth by the time they were 30. I mean, being poor was no joke, even in a place like the UK, which was relatively well off. And so there was every reason to be concerned about the disparity between rich and poor. And poor is the natural state, you know, that 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 were 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, and the English tradition, I would say, of democracy, and competed for 70 years, and things seemed to have worked out better here. But it was a hell of a competition, and there were real differences in opinion at the bottom of it, and those two systems turned into armed camps, and that's not over exactly. You know what I mean? There's the Chinese, although there are hybrid now between communism and capitalism and hopefully they're more interested in getting rich than they are in, you know, having

a war. Greed is a good motivator, surprisingly not, it's kind of reliable. But anyways, by 1989, the jig was up. It was obvious that this OV-Yet system could not, was not functional. There was no consumer goods, not for sure, even in the main department stores in Moscow. People just kind of lost faith in the whole project. You know, it became, for a while, I don't know if you know about the show Delus. Delus was a soap opera that ran at night, a serial, and 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 that people could watch Dallas. Well, when you're sitting in your horrible Soviet architecture flat, that you had to struggle to get with your informing relatives because one out of three people in East Germany was an informer, a government informer. And you watch Dallas, there's a little cognitive dissonance occurring. And so,

fell apart, and quite peacefully actually, you know, there was a war, there was a bit of war in Eastern Europe, but it fell apart remarkably peacefully. And so here we are. And we don't know what to do with the pesky Russians. But at least there's no evidence that there are 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 there's so much better than they were 50 years ago that it's absolutely staggering. We've 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're without our problems.

So during that period of time, I was obsessed, it's 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 what we're thinking about because an atom bomb, you know, hey, that's something. But a hydrogen bomb, that's the sun. that's really something. And you know, there's 20, they're 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 to pretty much put an end to everything. And that's a dangerous game, man. Not only because of intent, but also because

of the possibility of accidental, just an accident, just a mistake or just someone who's a little crazier than you might want them to be. 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's some evidence that he was murdered by Khrushchev, and his crew at Khrushchev was the next leader. And if he wasn't murdered, he was at least not provided with medical attention when he was dying. And there is reasonable evidence that he was gearing up to invade Western Europe, and

he didn't really care how much destruction would go along with that. I mean, he'd already killed tens of millions of people. He had a lot of practice. He was good at it. He didn't really bother him. Maybe even enjoyed it. So, what the hell?

That's what I thought. How can it be that we are doing this? It's so insane. And so then I started to think about belief systems, you know. How can it be that we 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 its own belief system. The one in the West was derived. It had a very lengthy history derived from the Greeks and the Romans and Jews and the Christians and from various schools of philosophy and from the enlightenment and

all of that. And then the Soviet Union was basically predicated on a rational philosophy that opposed the axioms that the West had evolved and each group organized their societies around that. And you know, 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's resources that you value, but people can value a lot of different things. It's not exactly fixed. I mean, you tend to value food very highly if you're hungry, obviously. But there's lots of things 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,

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 committed to their system. Now, you know, a system of belief is not just a system of belief. That's one of the things that 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. We have a shared belief system.

Well, it's sufficiently shared so that here we are. We don't know each other. We're a bunch of primates. We're in this room, and it's peaceful, and no one's scared, and that's pretty amazing, and that means that we're all acting out our roles. So we're acting out our roles. And we have an expectation with regards to those roles.

And those two things match. And that's the important thing. And we'll 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 good thing, you get what you want and you validate your belief system. Great, perfect security. But a lot of that is if we're interacting even right now, there's a whole set of expectations that are governing what we're 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'd be somewhere different if I did that. And you wouldn't know where you were. And that's another thing to know because that's a fundamental difference. There's a fundamental difference between knowing where you are and not knowing where you are. I think 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've ever taken a cat to a new house. Cats hate that. And because in the old house, and maybe in the 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 know what's safe. They know that because they go somewhere and nothing happens. So then they assume that it's safe. They slowly build up a neighborhood that they're comfortable with. My dad used to take the dog for a walk and then the cat got lo and so it started to follow him. First of all, it would just go along the buildings, the houses on their route, you know, hiding really from predators. And after a while, I got kind of comfortable with that, and then it would follow right behind the dog.

But it had a border, and if my dad took the dog over one street too many for the cat, the cat would just sit on the corner and, like a cat cries. That's it for me, man. I'm not going any farther out into the unknown. So the distinction between the territory that you have mastered and the territory that you haven't mastered is a fundamental distinction. It's 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're so social.

So 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 that when you act out in that territory surrounded by your people, then often you get what you want.

And you're so thrilled about that, because you just don't want someone acting erratically around you. And you and you know that, so you walk down the bluer and there's people there that should really be institutionalized, but we de-institutionalized them all so they could be free and free to be, you know, suffering and malfunctioning out on the street. That's what the freedom ended up being. But you know, you'll walk by someone like that who's muttering away to the voices in his head and maybe striking out against whatever it is that's plaguing him. And you'll make eye contact. You might even go across the street, you're certainly going to give him a wide birth. you're going to keep a distance between him and you, and you're going to hope that you don't attract his attention, because he's not in the dominant hierarchy, and you don't know

what the hell he might do. And that's unexplored territory too. That's another way of thinking about it, like we inhabit time and space, not just space, not just time. We inhabit time and space. And our territories are spatial temporal. We're 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 safe because none of you are manifesting peculiar behavior. But if you started to manifest peculiar behavior, if you stood up and started muttering or yelling or maybe attacking someone next to you, all the rest of you would freeze first because then 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's happening has vanished. And so then you're not, you don't know where you are. And so then 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're a computer, you just crash.

But, you know, what good is that to you? You're just going to die? That isn't helpful. You freeze first, and then maybe you cautiously, cautiously attend or maybe you don't. Maybe you just keep your damn eyes averted, and you sit there and you hope that no one notices you. That's a pred- that's a prey response, right?

That's like a rabbit frozen when it thinks that 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 its mouth and so it could grab you here and pierce the back of your skull with its, with its single tooth, and that's what it was evolved for. So, you know, it's under such conditions we evolved, and we're predators, obviously, but we're tasty predators, and so other things were perfectly happy to eat us.

And so other things were perfectly happy to eat us. And so when you're aware you don't know what to do, you act like a prey animal. And that's 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'll get through it. You might decide unlikely to intervene and take the guy down, but you would be the exception rather than the norm. And it's unsurprising. OK, so what I came to understand was that belief systems regulated emotions, but not exactly

psychologically. 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 the theory explains the world, and because the theory explains the world, the theory is what's making you secure. It's kind of like that. It's like you have a theory in your 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 same theory in their head. And then 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 for a productive society. So it's actually, it isn't 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, yeah, good. That's great too, man.

But actually not dying, that's sort of the fundamental thing that you're after. And so people have reason to defend their territory. If you think of territory that way, 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.

And that chaos doesn't just destabilize everybody psychologically. It destabilizes everything. It can destabilize the currency. It can destabilize the industrial economy. It can, the lights can go off. It's like, it's not good. So, hey, no wonder people protected.

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. Like how many things in this room could you look at? There's innumerable things in this room to look at. All this squares, the little tiny squares in this fabric, you could look at those things for till 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's a very low probability that you'd 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, colors irrelevant, and there's 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? Don't mean in the broad metaphysical sense. I mean, specifically, why are you here right now? And I would say, well, you're students, obviously. And you're trying to get a degree. And you believe that that will have some functional utility. Maybe you'll 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'll actually be more functional in the world. That would be good. And maybe you're 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're probably going to meet someone that you have a long-term relationship with, and you're going to have children, and you're going to partake in this society, and that's why

you're here. All of those reasons simultaneously is why you're 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'm 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 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. And so a value system structures the very way that you perceive the world. And I don't mean that metaphysically. There's plenty of experiments that have demonstrated that, like the invisible guerrilla experiment,

which how many of you know about the invisible guerrilla 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's a video of them and the black team is Paschibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bacchibal, Bac 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, well let's watch again, but this time don't count. I'll sure enough, like, 30 seconds into the video.

And, you know, the players fill the video screen. It's not like there 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, a minute into the video, this guy in a gorilla suit, and he's not little, and either is the gorilla suit, 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's even worse, Dan Simon did another experiment where you're at a counter, you know, at a store, and there's a clerk there, and you're talking to the clerk,

and the clerk goes down hypothetically to get something and the different clerk pops up, and you'd think, hey, I'd notice that, but you don't. 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 actually doesn't matter.

In terms of the ongoing action at that point, the clerk is interchangeable. As long as the entity there acts like a clerk, that's sufficient. So, believe systems, structure your perceptions, value systems, we're going to call them value systems, they structure your perceptions, and they also guide your actions because you act

in accordance with your values. Conscious or unconscious, you have values that you don't know about because you just don't know yourself very well. You can tell that that you have values that you don't know about because you just 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're trying to tell yourself to study and you don't. So you're not really in control of yourself to any great degree. Some, and the more integrated you are, the more control you have, but, you know, you're kind of a loose collection of arguing subpersonalities,

and they're more or less directed towards a single goal, but it depends on how committed you are to that goal, how much you've thought it through, how much you buy into it, how many of the contradictions in your world representation you've managed to iron out and all of that. But in any case, it's value systems that govern action and perception. So we're going to take an existential perspective, a phenomenological and an existential perspective in this course. Phenomenological means that we're going to base our presuppositions on the idea that what you experience is real, all of it.

We're 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. But it's real. I mean, one of the things I've come to understand is you and don't you are not required to believe what I'm telling you by the way. If you have an argument about why some of this doesn't make sense, then follow that sucker because I'm trying to tell you what I've reached with regards to bedrock, presuppositions, and I haven't been able to put pry bars underneath them,

but that doesn't mean you won't. And you should try. Anyways, moral system tells you how to act and what to see. And a shared moral system keeps your emotions under control and fulfills your motivation needs. Now, there's this old idea of David Hume's and David Hume famously posited that you cannot derive an ought from an 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 that's actually a gap. Now, you could say, and I think this is the case, that that's actually a necessary consequence of the scientific endeavor, because one of the things that you're trying to do as a scientist is to strip away the value of the object, right? Because I don't care what your ideal synchronic 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 too 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. It just didn't work. Anyways, so I kind of buy Hume's argument. You can't derive an art 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 you 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 work for a UN committee at one point, and the UN committee had like 100 proposals for how the world could be improved, but there was no order to them.

It's like, wasn't, you know, this was more important than this. It's like, well, that's the end of that. You know, you got to start with something, and so that means you have to make something more important than other things, obviously, in your life. If everything's of equal importance, then you're paralyzed. Now, you know, it's a truism,

and probably an oversimplified one that, since the dawn of the scientific revolution, a wedge has been driven through the heart of our society such that the moral systems that we use to unite us, so those would be religious systems, fundamentally, have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists, and it's a pretty effective critique, even if you've maintained a traditional faith that's like, you know, the scientific onslaught is no joke.

And that's a problem as far as I can tell, because, and the problem is, is that you're still left with the problem of how you should act, and Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche, he would say that we're running on the fumes of Christianity in the West, because over its 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 that something divine inhabits each individual, that's sort of the presumption that's embedded in law. It's sort of the idea that underlies the idea of natural right, right? There's something about you that's so valuable that even the law has to bow to it, even if you're reprehensible,

even if you're convicted and reprehensible. Now, that's man. The idea that people came up with that idea, that's a bloody miracle, it's, you know, because generally speaking, your proclivity is, if someone's been even accused of doing something, the general human proclivity is that, even if someone's just been accused

of doing something terrible, that's enough so that you can stone them to death or do whatever you're going to do with them. Presumption of innocence before guilt, good God, of all the things that aren't automatic, that's God atop the list. You know, it's unbelievable that that occurs. And it's interesting to me because it seems to me that that presupposition, that there's

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 regards to voting, because that's basically what voting does, it puts sovereignty in the hands of the people. Those societies actually seem to work. Now, whether they'll work for the next 300 years, who the hell knows. I don't

know, but they've worked pretty well for the last 500 years, let's say. And we've got it pretty good right now. And, you. And I suspect most of you are rather pleased that the law recognizes your value as individuals. And you take that for granted. You think you have rights. And of course, the rights that you have, natural rights, are logical consequence of your transcendent value. And that's nested in this as Nietzsche's observation

That's nested in a set of metaphysical beliefs and his idea was that if you wipe out sorry If you wipe out the metaphysical beliefs Eventually you wipe out the whole system because you've knocked out the cornerstone and it might take a long time for the thing to shake and fall but but it will a long time for the thing to shake and fall, but it will. Now, whether he was right or not, as hard to say, it looks to me like what's happened since Nietzsche announced the death of God in, say, the late 1800s, is that Western society is oscillated between extremes. is oscillated between extremes, extremes on the right, Germany, extremes on the left, and with the democracies, at least the other democracies, the democracies,

managing to stay the course somewhere down the middle. But it's not obvious to me that that can be maintained without the underlying metaphysics. And that's a problem because whatever you might say about the underlying metaphysics, it's not true the way science is true. And that could be okay because there might be more than one form of truth. In fact, I think there is, I think there is pragmatic truth. And I think pragmatic truth is actually deeper than scientific truth. And pragmatic truth is the truth that enable you to act in a manner that improves the

probability, roughly speaking, of your existence and your reproduction maximally. That's a Darwinian idea. One of the things about the Darwinian theory, this kind of puts it in opposition to scientific materialism, I would say, is that the Darwinian theory is that you don't have privileged knowledge of the world. And you can actually tell that because you die. If you knew enough about the world, you wouldn't die. And you do die. And so you're an 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 in that they'll survive. That's it, man. That's what you've managed after. Three 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're 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're tools to help us stay alive. tools and that their tools to help us stay alive. Now, I was reading a bit about Camille Paglia the other day. And I've noticed some similarities between,

she's a famous, gadfly, I would say, of feminists, of classic modern feminists, although she would regard herself as a feminist. She unbelievably smart. Like if you want to watch someone who's verbally, who has verbal mastery beyond belief, you could watch Camille Peglia. She seems a little manic to me. She can wrap off an argument at a rate that's just mind-boggling and it's very coherent. She tends to shred her opponents in arguments.

She's so brilliant. She said something interesting. And she's been influenced by some of the same people that I've been influenced by. She liked this book by Eric Neumann called The Origins in History of Consciousness, which I would recommend if you're interested in Jungian theory, Carl Jung. It's a good introduction to Jungian theory, and it's about the development of consciousness. It's predicated like Jung's work, and Joseph Campbell's work, and Merchè Elliott's work, all of which has been criticized or ignored

by the postmodernists, predicated on the idea that human beings have a central narrative. And that central narrative is the dramatic expression of the necessary human system of values, and that that's 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 postmodernist 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 criticism 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, and religious thinking. And this is all kind of a, you think about it as a,

what is that? What is all that? It's art, you know, 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's very meaningful.

I mean, music gets people through some pretty dark times. Why? It's not obvious. That's for sure. And in most cultures, music plays a very central role in identity formation. And you guys, I think you'll probably find, as you age, that your favorite music will be the music

that you listen to between the ages of 16 and 20. It's kind of like an imprint on you, and it defines a, maybe that defines a generation. And maybe, you know, 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're 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 hyper real. 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 you imagine this, you know, you get up in the morning, you do a bunch of things, and someone asks you what you're doing, what you did, and you tell them, well, the first thing

I did this morning was open my eyes and the second thing was think about whether I wanted to go back to sleep and then I took off my blankets and then I put my feet on the floor and then I stood up and I was blinking while I was doing all this and I was also breathing and then I looked for my claw and 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's interesting and why isn't that interesting? It's not obvious.

So then imagine that guy actually tells you a pretty good story and a little adventure. Probably, he was doing something normal, something unexpected happened. He had to conjure up some new responses and either settled the problem or 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 when that thing happens. And that's pretty cheap wisdom for you.

It's 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. Classic story, roughly speaking, is there's a guy, a woman, doesn't matter, going about their life relatively normally, something blind sides them. And they're in a state of chaos. Chaos is a place.

Chaos is the place that you end up when what you're doing and the world stop matching. And the chaos can be of different degrees. You could wake up and find that your house was burbled. You could wake up and find that a parent has, your parent has Alzheimer's or some fatal disease or that you do or that your whole family was murdered or that there's a war starting or, you know, there's different degrees of chaos, and I think 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're going to be, which is why if someone tells you that you're going to perish painfully in three months, it's like, that's a bad one.

You're really in an unexpected territory. There are 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 you either 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 is 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're going long pretty well and you get blindsided and that's that. And you know, that can certainly happen. It happens to people all the time. But it's a comedy 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 was it called? The Da Vinci code. Everyone liked that. It sold a lot. And you know, it was full of little mysteries. And 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 was a way

of getting access to that knowledge and that it would really be worthwhile. And people like that, would really be worthwhile. And people like that idea. And the reason for that is because it's actually, it's true. It's true. It's true like fiction is true. So OK, let's go back to the guy who's telling you about his morning.

Well, he tells you something exciting. Well, then imagine that 10 people tell you something exciting. And then you extract out the pattern of them dealing with this problem from that. And so then you have a, that's what you do if you're 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 their life That's like you already know how to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life what that's not useful You know you wouldn't watch a videotape of yourself

Imagine you videotape yourself during a day and then next day you watched that it's like God who would want to do that? So what seems to happen in stories is that they distill, they distill, so 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's 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 you say, well that's fiction. And then you say, well that's not true because it's fiction.

But then maybe that's not right. Maybe it's more than true. Because who wants the truth? The truth is mundane reality, and you've already got that mastered. What you want is the distillation of interesting experience, and you might think, well, why is it interesting? Well, that's a really good question, because you don't actually know. And believe me, you really don't know, because you'll be interested in things that just

don't make any sense at all. I'm going to walk you a bit today through Pinocchio and we'll 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? Okay, so lots 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 do you think about the movie? It's, you're doing some pretty weird things when you're sitting there watching that movie, man. First of all, it's drawings, right? And they're low resolution drawings. You don't care.

And you watch the senses or maybe fit, or what's that called? The one that's been concentrating on political correctness so much. South Park, God, that animation, man. It's just awful, right? It's just horrible. It couldn't be worse.

You don't care. Like round heads, smile, a 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? Dang, your perception's on. So you watch this drawing, that's Pinocchio,

beautiful drawings, animated in a sequence. You're not watching something real, you're watching a pure construction. And then you think about the plot, 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, Mary Annette. And you know, somehow he gets free of his strings and then goes on this adventure. And then which is, 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's in a whale, and you're 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's so cool. You don't know, you don't even know what you're watching, but it doesn't matter. You watch it and you're 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 this, it seems important. Well you say, it's Pinocchio true. Well, that's a stupid question. It's partly a stupid question because the answer is,

it depends on what you mean by true. And it isn't obvious to me what you should mean when you say that something's true. And the reason it's 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 that about the nature of the world and it does that in a final way in some sense. There's no brooking any arguments about it and 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's a bigger problem, and that's the problem of how you should conduct yourself in the world. And that's really what you 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. It's like, you don't know what you're doing. I mean, some of you know more than others, but you're 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're 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'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.

And inarticulate knowledge is the domain of literature and art and high culture, let's say. And it's, we sort of know what it means, but we don't 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. It may be Peglia picked it up from Jung because Jung believed that there was this domain that we had mastered in every domain. And then there was a domain outside of that which you could think of as unexplored territory. And what we met

unexplored territory with was our creative imagination. And that what we were trying to do with our creative imagination is to figure out how to deal with that unexplored territory. We were producing dramas that we could act out that would help us deal with what we still hadn't mastered. And then outside of that, there's 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're too atomized. You're not part of your historical tradition.

You haven't incorporated the spirit of your ancestors. And who built all this, you're just here now. And you don't know what to do either. And you don't know how to maintain your culture. And you don't know how to serve it. And you know, you might say, well, why should you serve your culture? And while 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 you have a little sister who's like three. You're going to take care of her. Like, questioning whether that's a good idea just 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 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 or under, we took them out to see their relatives and

they were older people. And, 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 him or her. That's something that people attend to. And that's the 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're also playing an integral role in the maintenance of the structure that supports you. And my observation has been that in my clinical practice is that people just have a hell of a time if they don't have, if they don't slot in somewhere, you know, you think I gotta go to work at nine in the morning and you know I've got this rigid schedule, it's like, it's probably a good idea to be grateful for that because what I've 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're kind of like sled dogs with no sled. And we're kind of like sled dogs as far as I can tell, beasts of burden, like we need a load, man. We need a load. And the question is, what sort of load do you need? And here's why I think we need that. You know, there's, I've been thinking about how to figure out

what's real for a long time. And because I'm 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 they say. I don't care what their statements are about their view of reality. Because the correlation between that and their actual actions is not, certainly not perfect

and sometimes doesn't even exist. One thing 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 traditions. The Jews are always recollecting past pain. I mean, the Christian God is a crucified person. I mean, there's a fair bit of pain there.

For the Buddhists, the fundamental maxim is that life is suffering. And it seems to me that there's 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.

And so that seems pretty self-evident, and worse, you know it. And that makes people unique. Like, that's our self-consciousness, right? That's really what separates us in some sense from other creatures. I mean, other creatures have some self-consciousness like a chimp can learn to recognize itself in a mirror and so can a dolphin, but you know, that's pretty bare-bone self-consciousness. 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 have 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's like a big shock to the old system. And it's the existential burden that everyone bears, and it's associated integrally with suffering. And so then you think, well, life is suffering, and it's finite, and that's part of the suffering. It's part of what you make, you question the value of existing, and maybe the value of existence 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

with 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 little reduction in the old suffering? So you live your life so that you're 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 people's both if you're really, you know, 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 the 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's 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 think you get to question that actually if if the suffering itself is what's 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 you can claim incoherent things if you want. So then I would say these distilled stories that I'm talking about, the stories that are written say by great authors. I'm particularly fond of Dostoevsky, whose works are.

These head and shoulders above anyone I've ever read, in terms of writers of fiction. He deals with the hardest questions that human beings face. And he has characters on both sides of the argument, and they really lay out the arguments. It's not like Dostoevsky. He's got a belief. And so he has a character, and that character has his beliefs, and that character always wins the arguments. That doesn't happen. And then Dostoevsky knows it all.

He sets up a character, and then he sets up three or four antagonists. And those antagonists, they're 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. And 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, in fact, more than 10,000 years.

And so they're part of an oral tradition. And oral traditions can last for tens of thousands of years. And it's a story that's 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, you know, where I tell you something in the whisper to the person next to you and so on. It's like a game of telephone that's gone on for, you know, a thousand generations. And all that's left is what people remember.

And maybe they remember what's important, because you tend to remember what's important. And then necessarily the case that you know what the hell it means, you don't know what music means. But you know, that's a 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's profound, it means more than you can understand, because otherwise why read it? Well, so the idea is this, is that we're necessarily nested inside moral systems.

The moral systems are predicated on narratives, narrative dramas of sorts, and the moral systems are what orient 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 Y, 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. You know, it's the kind of joke that you have to be satanic is the appropriate term to conceptualize and to dare to state. So when the Auschwitz prisoners came to Auschwitz, they were already pretty rough shape. They were in cattle cars.

They'd been separated from their families, everything had been taken from them. They were transported for a long time, they were standing up, the kids were suffocating because there was no room in the, you know, it was so packed in there, they didn't have anything to eat, there weren't any toilet facilities of any sort, it was like, you got right at 20% of the people just transporting them, you know, the ones on the outside of the cars, they froze to death because of course it was cold and pretty nasty. And then when they got to Auschwitz, the guards used to have this game that they would play. This is part of the work

will set you free thing. They would get a prisoner, they'd take a prisoner who's already in pretty, you know, a pretty rough shape and then have them carry a sack of wet salt, 100 pounds from one side of the camp to the other. And you think of a camp, you think of something like a football field, maybe something that big fences around. It's 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 in the same place. Now, that's poetic in its malevolence. And what you're doing is you're harnessing the human compulsion to engage in useful activity and demonstrating how absolutely futile that is, despite its difficulty.

Seems like a bad thing to do. It 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 well doesn't matter Matters an interesting word a because matter is matter But matter is also what matters? And I would say that what matters is more real than matter

At least that's how you act and then the question is well, is there something you should be aiming at? It's a good question. That's the question is, well, is there something you should be aiming at? It's a good question. That's the question of the meaning of life. And you know, one of the things that's supposed to happen when you come to university is that that's the sort of question that should be addressed. And as far as I can tell, and this might just 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're finally educated, it's when you're floating out on the ocean and you've got nothing to stay afloat with. It's like, well, then you're 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'm going to propose to you and we'll talk about this a lot is that you inhabit a story that the framework Through which you look at the world is actually a story and here's the story The story is you're somewhere and You're going somewhere and you know that can be conceptual or whatever It's that But there's a gradient between where you are and where you're aiming at, which means no more really than you're doing something while you're sitting there. And hypothetically, you're aiming for something better. And so, you're in a state of insufficiency, always, the de-insufficiency is change, and then you're trying to rectify the

insufficiency, and you presume that your current state is less preferable to the state that you're aiming at. And then the way that you bring those two together is sometimes you can do it through thinking, but fundamentally you do it through action. You do it through acting in the world. And so 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're implementing it through action. And 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. 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, well, what is the optimal value,

laden framework? That's what we're going to try to figure out. Now, I told you about the war that went on between the communists and the West and how that obsessed me. So one of the things that I really wondered about was what was this just an arbitrary thing? You know, like did the communists,

they had some axioms and we had some axioms, and if you're a moral relativist, you might say, well, who's to say which set of axioms are better? Or even who's to claim that you could say that a set of axioms actions one set is better than another. That's a moral relative, this claim, and you know, fair enough. So I thought, well, maybe this is just an arbitrary thing and it's going to be settled by force. Because that's how you settle an arbitrary claim between two competing systems, where

there's 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, the fundamental stories upon which our culture, I believe, is based. And some of those are very old. I'm going to tell you a Mesopotamian story. It's one of the oldest stories we know. I'm going to tell you an Egyptian story.

Those are sources of our culture. And I think those stories are grounded in much older traditions. And I think 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's how people act.

Now, you can criticize that. You can certainly come up with an alternative 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 the fundamental constituent elements are of stories. And one of the things that I hope is that this, knowing this will make you immunize, immunize you against ideology. And the reason, 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're grounded in the fundamental narrative. And so here's the fundamental narrative, as far as the characters, let's say. We're going to say that people are prone to characterise the world, or social primates. We're social cognitive primates, so 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 is mostly other people, then we conceptualize

the ground of that structure for action in characterological terms. So the most 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 rained 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's a dissent to the underworld. That's chaos. And basically you live in order and chaos in order is where when you do what you think you should do, what you want to have happen happens. That's order. That's explored territory. And chaos is when you do what you're supposed to do to get what you want. And it doesn't happen. And in that place that you're 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're 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's chaos itself, and then the next thing is fairly straightforward. You can think there's the individual. The individual exists in culture, and culture is embedded in nature. Pretty straightforward. Nature is mother nature for reasons we'll 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 they actually are nature from the Darwinian perspective, and second nature is the productive biological force. And so we've always conceptualized males and females and we've 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 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. Those people, as an aggregate, make an entity that is judging your reputation constantly. And it's perfectly reasonable to personify that because it's like a meta-person that's watching you and so it's a useful metaphor. There's a meta person that's watching you. Well yeah there is obviously so now you can say well that's not real it's like it's not real the way a scientific truth is real.

It's a different kind of real. While nature has two elements, it's destructive and creative, obviously. There's the beauty of nature, and it's a bountiful element, and then there's, you know, an awful East mosquitoes and elephant tiasisasis, and cancer, and starvation, and all the terrible elements of nature. And then there's 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 live together. And some societies are more tyrannical than others, but there's always a tyrannical element. Do you see that at university?

You guys know that to some degree, this is such a big place. It's easy to feel like a number here and whether or not your 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're 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 the negative side and the positive side of nature. And there's the negative side and the positive side of culture. And then there's 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's 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 negative element as well. And that's the hero in the villain. And of course, what good is this story without a hero in a villain? And the villain is the person who isn't acting like a person should act. And the hero is the person who's acting like a person should act.

And so you go to movies and you read books and there's heroes and there's villains. And to some degree, what you're doing is you're fleshing out your notion of a villain. You know, you read about 30 villains and you think, well, there's something villainous about the villains. That's the central element of villainy, whatever that is. And you could imagine you construct out a meta villain and a meta hero. And those are the characters in religious stories, generally speaking. And in Marvel movies, there's Odin and Odin has two sons,

right? Thor and Loki. 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 too, because otherwise you underestimate... Is this positive meaning? No, it's maps of meaning.

Positive psych. It's definitely not that. 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 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's the relationship between that? And then really, I tell you, I thought about that like for 30 years, trying to puzzle that out, and then I realized what it was. If you're 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. As soon as you know what hurts you, you know what hurts her. And so that's 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. And you know, you couldn't call that evil, it sucks, that's for sure.

But animals are beyond good and evil in that sense. But human beings, man, we can aim our malevolence and we're 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're like that because you are like that. And if you don't know you're like that or if you don't think you're like that, you're even more like that than you think. Because the people who are most like that are people who don't think they're 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're always stuck with that because as an individual with your negative side and your positive side, your negative side is the resentful side that is irritated at 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 it's not trivial in the Brothers Karamazov that argument is laid out beautifully there's a character Aliyosha who's a monastery novitiate and not really a sparkling intellect, but a very good person. And he has a brother Ivan, and Ivan's a vicious genius. And Ivan just takes Siliocia apart, and partly he does that by telling a story about that Dostoevsky 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 like 30 below, and you know, she stayed

out there crying and screaming and froze to death. And Ivan basically said to Eliosa, you know, a world in which that could happen should not be. It's 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're 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't. I would recommend a book called Pan's Ram, if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's a book written by a man who raped 1,200 men and killed dozens and burned things down to the ground. Every chance 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. The story. Heroin adversary, 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's 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 person is in habit, said, explored territory. And this is unexplored territory. And so wherever you go, there's you, and to have two halves of you that you have to contend with and wherever you are with people there's the society with its

tyrannical and beneficial nature and the society in some senses that match between what you're doing and what's happening it's really important to get that right and then unexplored territory, that's wherever, and whenever, what you're doing, stops working. And so, it's not exactly a geographical idea, because when you think of explored territory, you think of geographic landscape, like the domain of an animal, or like your house.

And that's definitely an element of it. But you know, if you're in your house and a snake comes into your living room and you're in there, it's like, well, that's an important difference between your house one second to go in your house now. And so your house can turn into unexplored territory at the drop of a hat, and that's 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're supposed to be. And so, and these are permanent parts of you, the human experience, which is why I think they are fundamental characters in our narratives.

There's always you, there's some subject of the story, and that subject is an ambivalent person with many different potentials. And you're always somewhere, and with other people, because that's our territory, right? I mean, we're social beyond comprehension. And 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. 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, is you can stay in that state forever, man. That's kind of what post-traumatic stress disorder is. It's like, you're just like that all the time and The problem with that is it's a very uncomfortable I mean you stay like that for any length of time you're gonna get depressed you're gonna develop an anxiety disorder

You're gonna get old because Your burn-in-up resource is like mad, you know your system is Shunting everything to maintain that state of emergency preparation and It's exhausting. It's it's not where you want to be So that's partly why people are so prone to defend their territories their familiar territory Because if their familiar territory is invaded or disrupted then they default back to the state of emergency preparation and that's like That can unglue you if it's if it's profound enough. You know, and you guys know this already. I mean, I think people experience this most particularly when they're betrayed by someone they have

an intimate relationship with, you know, when they're lied to. There's 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's lots of other ways, but betrayals are a really good one because if you're 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. And what about you? How clueless are you?

And maybe not at all, or maybe ultimately gullible, you don't know. Is it your fault? Or are you so clueless that you just can't protect yourself? or was the person malevolent in some subtle way that you failed to detect everything's up in the air, not good. And this idea that human beings travel to the underworld and come back is like 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's in chaos. And then maybe we sort ourselves out, bang, we're back up. And so one way of conceptualizing yourself is not as order and as not as chaos, but as the thing that traverses between the two domains. And that I would say is the mythological hero.

So I'm 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've introduced to you, are they good for anything? Do they help? That's the order, descent into chaos, re-establishment of order. That's paradise lost, profane history, paradise regained. It's the classic comedy, and that's the story 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'll go, you'll pay money weirdly, you'll line up and pay money to see a story about that, even if you don't even know that that's what the story is about. And the reason for that is that actually part of you does know what the story is about. You know, your cognition has multiple layers. You understand things that you don't know you understand in ways that you don't understand. And you can tell that because we talked about Pinocchio a little bit, how absurd it is, and that it 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, that's all right, another question. So we've been talking chaos is when people don't do what they expect to do in the negative sense. It's something bad happens to you. What if the reaction is extremely positive, like something that you don't think, like winning a lottery? Does that do you also go into the stress response line?

So it'll be the same thing. No, it's not quite the same thing. It's a good question. We will address that. We will address that. I mean, winning the lottery is generally not a good idea for people. Because it's just too much,

it's too much for them. It 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 than something remarkably bad, obviously, but it still can have that destabilizing effect. So it depends on what elements of your life it disrupts.

Like in some sense, you have a map that you're operating within 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 mapper 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 win the lottery. It's like, hey, I'm off to the beach. I'm going to drink Margaritas. It's like that'll work for about four days. You know, you do that for three months. You're a beach alcoholic. It's like that's a real improvement. You know, so it's not that easy. And often, too, if you take people out of their routine, they just flounder.

Their circadian rhythms go. They don't eat properly. They don't know what the hell to do. So this is often why people have such a hard time when they retire. I'm 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, okay. Penelope, Disney movie, an early one, a masterpiece. And so I'm going to walk you through it. And I'm going to tell you what I think it means. And you can tell me if you think that that's useful. And I'm only going to do that for about 10 minutes today because I do want to cover some of the details of the class.

And then next class will continue with this. So the movie opens with the opening credits, which are carved wooden signs, which is like a hint, you know, because jupettos are 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 it's... The poetry is particularly profound,

but it was a song that people liked and people still listen to, and... It sets the tone for the movie, which is what music does. One of the things that's really interesting about movies, that's really mysterious, is that, you know, if you go to the movie, there's almost always a soundtrack, right? If you go to a movie and there isn't a soundtrack, it kind of feels empty. It feels like there's something missing. And, you know, it's as if the music, you know, when you go to a movie, there's lots of things you can't see. The characters are only partial and you don't know anything about their background. So it's like

a low resolution thing. And what seems to happen with the music is that it provides the emotional background, the complex context, let's say. It's like a substitute for the context, and it guides you in your perceptions of the movie. It gives you hints about what's going to happen. And the funny thing about that is that we just don't have any problem with that. It's like, yeah, of course, movie has a soundtrack. And of course, when there's a dramatic scene, the music gets dramatic. And that doesn't happen in real life. So you'd wonder why we accept it in a movie. And I think it's partly because we're 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 acceptable to us. This song I find quite interesting, so I'm going to take it apart quite a bit. In some sense, I feel foolish doing it because it's a childish song in some ways. But that's okay. When you wish upon a star makes no difference who you are. Well, okay, there's some mysteries there.

People wish upon stars, that's like a little ritual, right? Why? Do they do that? Well, and what 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're usually famous people, right? They're people who attract a lot of attention, and maybe they're people who have a lot of talent. That's another possibility.

Maybe they're models. I don't mean clothing models, although sometimes they are, but they're models for emulation. That's what being a star means. That's why people magazine is full of stars. It's like they're like heroes brought to earth. And of course, you know nothing about them.

All you know is their public persona. And of course, they're usually very attractive. And so that allows you to project upon them all the things that would go along with ideal humanity. And so they're stars. And but still, why stars? Well, stars beckon in the darkness. And so there are stars. But still, why stars? Well, stars back in the darkness.

And they're otherworldly. That's the thing that's cool. They're not of this earth. And I mean that technically, because obviously, they're not of this earth. But I also mean it phenomenologically. I mean it as an element of human experience. So most of you are urban and so you've not had the experience of perhaps of the full night sky. You know, and that's

really too 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's just stars everywhere, right? You're 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, wow, there's the edge of the galaxy, and there's just so many of them, and it's such an expense, you're looking into infinity, you're looking into the unknown, you're 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 you're looking at something that transcends yourself, but that feeling of awe, that seems to be something that's a natural part of our response. You know, you might feel awe when you meet someone that you regard as particularly admirable as well Because you feel that there's something transcendent about them. So here's an interesting thing to think about There are people you admire

And there are people that you don't admire and that's a clue, right? That's a clue as to your value system And it might be not really something you can even put your finger on It's like you find this person captivating, you find this person admirable. And it's as if there's something inside of you that's looking for what's admirable, you know, assuming that you are. And that person who's admirable has a faculty, some faculty, that you would like to have for yourself. And so there 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's sort of just within their grasp

and then they follow them around and imitate them. And, you know, so they're 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, well, 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. Because it's more like when you're asking yourself a question and thinking about it. You know, because it's more like when you're asking yourself a question, it's contemplative. It's like, well, what do I find admirable? It's question. You don't know.

And if you're fortunate, and this happens quite regularly, an answer will float up from wherever the hell answers float up. And you know, oh yeah, that's one. And you can write that down. You get some idea of what your ideal is. You know, 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's 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're like stars, or they're like the sun, and they're pure and perfect, and they glitter.

And so there's something about the light, too. There's 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 what you want. You want a light to shine in the darkness. And so the star has all 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're 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. 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 a not a biography. That's 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 like really soon, because they're harder than you think. And some of you are gonna write like 15,000 words. You're gonna get sucked right in. This happens all the time. You're gonna get sucked right in. This happens all the time. You're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna hit something unless you aim at it. That's for sure. And lots of times people won't aim at what something unless you aim at it. That's for sure.

And lots of times people won't aim at what they want because they're afraid. The reason they're afraid is because if you specify what you want, you've specified your conditions of failure. You know when you fail. And it's better just to keep it foggy. It's like, well, I don't know if I'm 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 an attempt to have you articulate your character. And so is the past authoring program. Who are you? And the past authoring program now 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's more than 18 months old roughly speaking and when you bring it to mind

It it hasn't an emotional impact, especially a negative emotional impact. It's like part of your soul is stuck back there. I know that's a metaphorical way of thinking about it, 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 might be a real problem. Like maybe you got tangled up with someone who is really bad and that's rough, man, because you've got to come up with a theory of malevolence to deal with something like that and that's no joke. But if it still produces emotion, it

means you haven't solved the problem and your brain is still tagging it as threat. It's a part of your territory that you did not master. Threat, threat, threat, threat, threat. And until you take it apart, and articulation really helps that, writing really helps that, then you're not going to free yourself from its grip. And that might not be that pleasant. I mean, this is one of those situations

where doing it tends to produce a decrement in people's mood in the short term, but quite radical improvements three to six months down the road. You know, and it's 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 know, you can take yourself as a personality inside your head, your authoring program asks you about different dimensions of your life. Like, because you're, you know, you can take to yourself as a personality inside your head,

but you're nested in systems that transcend you, and they're just as real as whatever's in your head. It's like, well, what do you need for life? Well, that's pretty easy, actually. Some friends, that's a good thing. Intimate friends, that's a good thing. Intimate relationship, that's a good thing. A family, you know, either the one you're 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 some plan for your career. You've got to fit in somewhere that people regard as important and that they'll trade with you so that you can live. You need something worthwhile to do with the time that you're not at work and you need to pay attention to your 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 it's worth thinking about. That's why we put it in there. So then it's like, okay, what the hell do you want? What do you

want from your friends? What do you want from your family? What do you want from your career? If you could have what you wanted, that's what the program asks you. Three to five years down the road. You get to have what you want. Now, I'm assuming that you're going to approach this like, you know, reasonable adults and not like 13-year-old dreamers, I'm assuming that you're going to approach this like, you know, 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 grammar or

sentence structure, any of that, about what your life could be like three to five years down the road. If you were treating yourself like someone you cared for and you were helping them figure out what they wanted. And then it asked 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, maybe not. But everyone has a sense of if they were going to degenerate how they would do it.

Some people would be an alcoholic, some people would be a street person. It's like there's some doom thing out there that's got your name on it if you're particularly unconscious and you know, don't, and let things fall apart. So won't you write about that? What do you not want to have happen in three to five years? And there's psychological reasons for this, say 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're moving towards something

that you value. It's not generated so much by accomplishing something, because when you accomplish something, you're just left with the problem of whatever you're gonna do next, so you graduate from university, it's like, you know, hooray, one day you're at the peak of your undergraduate university career the next day, you're unemployed and looking for a bad job at Starbucks.

So, you know, well, you see what I mean. It's that one problem that you solve is replaced by another problem. And so the idea that you're going to be happy when you solve all your problems is like, good luck with that theory. But, but, you know, if you're aiming at something worthwhile and you really believe it's worthwhile and you've thought it through, you know, so that you're not weak, you're not weak, you've got your damn arguments mustard, then when you make progress, even a little bit, you think, hey, that's all right. 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 that tends to have relatively detrimental medium to long-term consequences. But it activates the same system. So you have to be aiming at something. And you should be aiming at something that's realistic that you want that you want, that you could

get, you know, like not easily because if it's easy in some sense you've already got it. It's got to push you and that's part of the pleasure actually because there's two things that you want to do when you're pursuing something that's important and one of them is to get the thing that's important. But the other is is to make yourself better at pursuing things. So you can get both of those at the same time. You're aiming at something and you're increasing your competence. It's like, that's a good deal.

That's a good deal. And there's a lot of intrinsic meaning to be felt in that. And then the second half of the program, you write out a plan for how you're going to do it and how you're going to keep yourself on track and you're 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 community. 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. And we know, because we've actually done a lot of research on this particular program, that if university students do this, and this is more true if they're not too well-oriented to begin with, if university students do this, they're about 25% less likely to drop out, which is a lot. And about their grade point average increases about 20%. So hooray for that, because you never know when you develop an intervention if it's going to work.

There's also evidence, but not from my lab, that doing such things improves your physical health. And I think the reason for that is that, you know, when you go over your autobiography and you scour out those negative places that you're sort of dragging along with you, it lowers your overall stress load. Because your brain is kind of, I think it's calculating how dangerous the world is by attending to the ratio of successes to failures that you've 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're more prepared for emergency action, and that's hard on you. So you want to go back there and fix up those experiences to the degree that you can't. 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're not comfortable sharing with other people. And so, there's a couple of reasons I do it that way. One is just that there's 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's 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 a helpful. I think you'll find it very helpful. That's 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're supposed to provide you with constructive feedback. And constructive feedback is sort of, mostly what did you do right? You know, and maybe some hints about where you can 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 JordanBeePeterson.com on the left, there's classes. If you click classes, you get a bunch of tabs. And one of the tabs is Psych434. And that's obviously this class. And so there's some extra readings on there. And a list of how we're going to go through the course. The dates aren't right. I got to update it, and I haven't finished that yet.

But the rest of it's pretty much the way it is. This writing program is an online program in 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 in 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 what happens when you ask yourself questions because part of you will answer. And you don't know what the answer will be, but an answer comes almost always. And, you know, like you think, well, what happened to me when I was six, round six, that was important. And through some mysterious process, perhaps a memory will come to mind. So there's a test, so there's these two assignments plus the essay. The essay can be, and anything you want that's related to the class,

you have to make the case that it's related to the class. So it's an opportunity to write about something you want to write about. And there's a final exam. And the final exam, if you read the book and you want to write about. And there's a final exam. And the final exam, if you read the book and you come to the classes, you won't have any problem with the final exam because it's not tricky. It's just a survey of what we've gone through. And so I did that.

I didn't have that to begin with. But you need a carrot and a stick because you guys are busy and you know you're gonna 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's hard and so but hopefully the course lectures will help guide you through it. And that's about that. So I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories and I'm going to try to 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. 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'm telling them, but they didn't know that they knew it. So it makes sense, it clicks, it clicks. And 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 U. And then I can articulate in part what that implicit U is, and it fits.

Click. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm 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 this is 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're done, right? We appreciate you listening to this lecture. Next week, we continue with Marriots and Individuals, part one, Michaela. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for life, and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast.

See JordanB Peterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanB Peterson.com's last personality for information on his new course. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B. Peterson. Details on

this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanB Peterson.com. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their past, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com. From the Westwood One Podcast Network.