The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 137. Maps of Meaning 09: Patterns of Symbolic Representation

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

In this lecture, Dr. Peterson discusses the manner in which the fundamental symbolic archetypes (particularly those dealing with the Wise King and Tyrant) are hijacked for the purposes of propaganda. Ideologies are parasites. Their hosts are archetypes. Knowledge of the underlying archetypes can produce immunity against ideological possession. For Advertising Inquiries, visit https://www.advertisecast.com/TheJordanBPetersonPodcast

So today we're going to delve a little bit more deeply into the realm of symbolic representation. And I'll tell you what I think I'm doing. And then I'll show you a bunch of examples of it. Then I want to tell you a couple more stories. And so I'll tell you the stories in the second half of the class. So it was Carl Jung who popularized and differentiated the idea of archetypes. They weren't his idea.

Platonic forms are archetypes, essentially. Ideals are an archetypes. They weren't his idea. Platonic forms are archetypes, essentially. Ideals are an archetype. But Jung, the thing that I think he did that hadn't been done before, was to suggest that, as well as suggesting, as Freud did, that human beings are composed of subpersonalities. Jung pointed out, as Freud did to some degree, that some of those personalities have a universal character and so that they can be thought about as transcendent entities. And you could think about those while they have been thought about and even put forward

as gods of one form or another. Now, when Jung talked about archetypes, it was never clear what he meant. And I think the reason for that was because the archetype is a very complicated idea and a very complicated phenomena. And you can think about it biologically and you can think about it socially and you can think about it as something that the individual participates in creating. So it's not that easy to localize it. And as well, it's not that easy to localize it. And as well, Jung was never clear about what the universe of archetypes look like. At some times, he spoke as if they were a relatively small number.

And then at other times, he spoke as if they were innumerable. And I think the reason for that is, in part, it depends on the level of analysis, right? The more transcendent the archetype, the fewer they are, but they differentiate, because you might say, well, how many hero archetypes are there? And one answer could be one, but they differentiate all the way out into the diverse range of works

of fiction that we have. So you could say there is as many variants of the hero archetype, roughly speaking, as there are works of fiction. So you think about it as a hierarchy with the ultimate archetype at the top. So then another question might be, what does the landscape of ultimate archetypes look like? And I think that that's, well, that's what I tried to lay out, and that's what I'm trying to lay out in this diagram.

So now, why do you want to know that? There's a practical reason, or the way there's a number of practical reasons as well as intellectual reasons. One of the most relevant practical reasons, as far as I'm concerned, is that integrating narratives, and so those would include political narratives, integrating narratives, have their force because they draw on universal archetypes, otherwise they wouldn't have any power, right, because they're basically stories, an integrating archetype, like the story that people that Hitler sold the Germans or that the Germans in Hitler co-created, which is a much more accurate way of thinking about it, that had a motive force because it had an archetypal essence. And so political stories derive their

power from the underlying archetypal representations. Obviously, because they have to be concerned with the things that people find important, right? How can you sell a political message to someone if it isn't about something they find important? And if it's important to them, it's going to be grounded at least to some degree in their biological in their biological substructure. I mean, if you're talking to hungry people about food, it's a story that you can tell, right? Because it hooks them deeply. It hooks them, it hooks deep into their motivational systems to talk, to use a narrative of utopia, which is the land of milk and honey, roughly speaking, a very, very old idea. You're also tapping deeply into intrinsic human longings.

And so the idea that political narratives incorporate archetypal themes is not really, it's not an idea that I would consider particularly controversial, putting it that way might be. Okay, so the problem with political narratives in my estimation is that they can rapidly transform themselves into ideologies. And ideologies are dangerous for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason for their danger, I think this is a hypothesis, is because of their one-sided nature. What happens is that they capitalize, parasitize, I think, is even a better way of thinking about it. A profound underlying narrative, but they don't tell the entire story.

And so then, if you're looking for orientation in the world because you're fragmented and chaotic, and somebody provides you with a partial story, that's going to serve an integrating function. And it's very, one of the things you see in psychotherapy is that if you're chaotic and confused and you go see a therapist who has a particular kind of practice for Indian behavioral, cognitive, Rogerian, whatever,

there's a high probability that undergoing that course of therapy is going to be good for you and that you might even come to view your life in the terms of that therapeutic practice. You might say, well, why is that therapeutic practice right for you? Maybe it could have been Rogerian instead of Freudian. And the answer to that is, yeah, well, it probably could have been because roughly speaking

any coherent ordering principle is better than none. And so that's also a good way to think about human development from an intellectual perspective, is that partly what has to be provided to individuals as they mature into an adult is some kind of ordering structure. And this is one of the facts that people who criticize the dogmatic element of religious belief don't really understand.

They don't understand that you can't, you have to provide people with a determinant structure of some type, even if it's constricting and restricting and crushing for that matter. You have to pass through a disciplinary structure before, and even in principle, you could be free. Before you're disciplined, you're not free, you're just chaotic. And so you have to practice some set of routines and rituals. Now, you could say, well, they don't necessarily have to be religious,

and they could be secular. You could become a lawyer, you could become a plumber, you could become a carpenter. And I would say, yes, that's far better than not becoming anything. But the problem with an identity that isn't rooted into the archetypes is it leaves you incomplete. Because the archetypal rooting of the identity is what helps you grapple with the fundamental existential problems of life. And whether you're a carpenter, or a plumber, or a lawyer, your soul is still going to hunger for some deeper form of identity.

And you're not going to get that without having your practical identity encapsulated in something that's greater from a philosophical perspective, and perhaps even deeper than philosophy, which I think the archetypal stories are there the structure within which philosophy itself is embedded. And outside of that is a behavioral structure. We've talked about how those evolve.

There's a behavior or evolution of something approximating a consensual morality, and then stories about that consensual morality emerge. And then inside that, the structure is a philosophy nest. And all of those things have to be addressed by your identity to some degree or your weak. That's the problem. You're beset by doubts, you're beset by anxiety, you're easy to stop, and you don't have much motivation.

And none of that's good. It's not good at all, because life presents you with enough real obstacles in the face of genuine suffering, so that unless you're strongly grounded and have a real reason for moving forward, you're going to get stopped, and as soon as you're stopped, you are one miserable thing. Because it's almost like the definition of human misery is to be paralyzed by anxiety and emotional pain and also have no motive force forward.

It's a terrible state. And so you don't want to be in that state, and you have to have an identity that's powerful enough, and deeply rooted enough. So the most profound doubts that might emerge about your life are met by something of equivalent force. Okay, so we're going to review the symbolic domain, and briefly, and then I'm going to show you a bunch of different examples of how it plays itself out, partly archetyply and symbolically, but also partly politically, because I want to show you how both of those things, how those things parallel one another. And partly, what I'm hoping is that understanding the full domain of archetypal symbolic representation

will also inoculate you against ideological possession, because you'll know when you're told a half-sided, one-sided ideological story, you'll know that there's something missing in the story. There's pieces that aren't being told, or there's part of the story that isn't being revealed. So if it's a story about how tyrannical modern culture is and how oppressive you think, well, yes, obviously,

but what about the beneficial aspect of it? And how is that being represented in dealt with? And so, and it's the same story about the negative element of the human being, which you hear stories like that all the time, because I think perhaps more intensely since the 1960s, but because I wasn't around before then, I don't know what it was like previous to that.

There is this idea that people hold, and that's promoted, that there's something fundamentally cancerous about human beings. That was the club of Rome, I think, when they pronounce that everyone on the planet was going to die of starvation by the year 2000, that human beings were no better than a cancer on the planet. It's like, well, yeah, you know, there's lots of things about us that could be improved,

but when you portray the human only as negative, the question should arise. It's like fair enough, but what about the positive part? Why aren't you telling that story? And it doesn't take you, you know, all you have to do is be sick once and go to a hospital where you get competent care to understand that, and you can get incompetent care too. But sometimes you get really competent care. You think, yes, it's really good that there's some people

out there who have their act together and are trying to put things together. And you can't forget that in your story. And you don't want to forget that in your story about yourself either. So what is the fundamental landscape? Well, the basic idea is that it's predicated. You can look at it multiple different ways. It's predicated on the contrast between explored and unexplored territory, or the contrast between the interpretive structure that philosophers like Kant talked about and the real

world manifestation that underlies, whose existence underlies the validity of empirical thinking, right? There's you in your structure, you interpret the world, but there's also the world informing you. And so that's the explored territory, versus unexplored territory, something like that, or its order versus chaos, or it's another variant of that, would be it's the hero going out into the unknown to encounter the dragon of chaos and to gather the information that's out there in the unknown. And I try to make the case to you, because I'm often accused, most recently, on Sam Harris' podcast, of making up post-hoc stories.

You have a set of stories. You can interpret them any way you want. Of course, that is a danger, because you bring an interpretive structure to bear on every set of facts. How do I know that this isn't just an arbitrary post-hoc analysis? And my answer to that, it's a technical answer, is it manifests itself at multiple layers of analysis simultaneously

and the probability that it's merely an imposition of an a priori interpretive structure is decreased by the number of different levels of manifestation that you can detect the phenomena. It's axiomatic, that's why you have five senses. That's why, because they each report a different level, that's why in science use multiple methods to detect the same thing. So one of the things I tried to point out is that you can map this archetypal structure onto brain structure quite nicely, even onto hemispheric structure and the function of the sub-cortical systems, but even more particularly, you can map it onto the function of specific neuropsychological systems within the biological neurology.

We do have an interpretive structure, right? That's your map, so to speak, of expectation and desire in the world. That's your model. There's a brain area, roughly the hippocampus, although this is an oversimplification. It compares that with incoming sense data, which is also a model, but we won't get into that for the sake of argument. So that's explored territory, unexplored territory, and the thing in the center doing the comparison, that's

the knower. And so it strikes me as highly unlikely, although you're welcome to criticize a way, that you'll see that kind of stacking of evidence across multiple domains of inquiry without there actually being a pattern there. So it's not merely post-Hawk analysis. And even the people who derive these patterns, like Jung, to begin with, let's say, looked cross culturally, at least to say, well, here's a manifestation of a pattern. And here's a separate culture, and you can see the same pattern. So there's some attempt there to be methodologically rigorous. He did the same thing with people's fantasies and dreams. And then again, by mapping those on to people's behavior in therapy, also had

them test out the ideas in the world. So these aren't as trivial methodologically as people make them out to be, and especially that's the case when you can put a biological underpinning underneath them. So the proposition is, explored territory, unexplored territory, and the explorer, roughly speaking, and then a differentiation of those two things into positive and negative. Why? Because everything complex has a positive and negative element. And so explored territory can become stultifying and crushing. That's tyranny, but it also provides the structure that informs and protects you. And unexplored territory, well, that can kill you, obviously. But it's also the place that you need to go when you're static and dead, and you need new water, and you need new life, and you need new information.

So it's a constant movement out into the unknown and back, and out into the unknown and back. And that's what human beings are like, right? We're information foragers. And then the individual is both positive and negative. And you know that because you know yourself and you know other people and you know yourself, you can be, there's parts of you that are good,

classically speaking or good even by your own definition, and other parts that really could use to say the minimum, a tremendous amount of work, and you also know that about other people, and if you get truly unlucky with yourself or other people, it won't merely be that you're not trying hard enough, you'll encounter something in you or someone who's absolutely malevolent and bent on destruction. And that's also not a hypothesis. The literature on post-traumatic stress disorder reveals quite clearly that people typically develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they encounter some form of malevolence.

And if it's ever happened to you, you know that it's no joke. It's not some figment of your imagination, quite the contrary. So, and then that entire world that's sort of the world that can be comprehended is nested inside a broader symbolic network, and that seems to be the symbolic network that's made up of the Dragon of Chaos, which is something like our representation of the set of all currently unknowable things. It's a very strange category, right?

It's like the category of zero or the category of infinity. And the reason that we formulated that category is because we don't only want to know how to solve a problem. Just like we don't only want to know how to win a game, we want to know how to win the set of all possible games, and we want to solve the set of all possible problems. And so what the human beings have been trying to do for the last forever is trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the set of all problems. And we actually have some ideas.

One is play to win the meta game and not the game. That's one solution. Another solution is, go out into the unknown voluntarily and gather the information at lies there because that continually updates you. The other one is to make sacrifices. And that was discovered in an articulate form not very long ago, and the idea of sacrifice is something like well You don't just have to solve the problem of how do you survive in the present? Which is roughly the problem that animals are always trying to solve. You have to solve the problem of how you Survive in the present given that you also have to survive next week, next month, next year, and among other people

And answer that in part is the answer of sacrifice, which is to give up something that you desperately want now that would even be useful right now, so that you accrue more benefit across a broader span of time, a very, very difficult lesson for animals to learn. Animals have a terrible time learning that. But even human beings have a terrible time doing it, because there's some real intelligence

in getting, well, the getting is good. But it's a suboptimal strategy. If you can stabilize the environment and spread out your adaptive capability over wider spans of time, well, so much the better, you get what you need now and you get what you need later and you get what you want. And so does your family and other people. It's a much better solution, but that requires precisely sacrifice because it requires sacrificing the present for the future. And that idea of sacrifice emerged, like all of our ideas, first in action, in acting these things out and then conceptualizing them with our bodies, like in drama, just the way that Piaget described children first assimilating the structure of their parents

actions by imitating them, rather than by breaking them down into systems of rules, understanding the rules and incorporating the rules. That isn't how we work. We act and figure things out in action, then we imitate our own actions. And to imitate your own actions is to act yourself out or to act other people out. You can do that without having explicit, articulated knowledge.

And that's, it's so crucial to understand that because it explains a great mystery, which is how can we tell stories that have meanings that are deeper than we know? And the answer to that is, we have information encoded on our behavior that transcends our understanding. Well, how? Well, we're constantly modifying each other, constantly, and the world's constantly modifying

us, and there's no reason that, well, being modified, we should also be able to track how it is that we're being modified. We have to figure that out afterwards, And it's extraordinarily difficult to look at a whole culture or even a single individual and to say, well, what is that person or what is that societal structure? It supersedes our conscious capacity for representations who are always playing catch-up. That doesn't mean that we don't act out things we think sometimes, you know, that the causal pathway can't go the other way, because it can. But more frequently, it's bottom-up rather than top-down, which is how everything works in the biological world. Animals do and have wisdom, but they don't know what they do, and they can't articulate their wisdom.

So it's self-evident that a process like this must have occurred. I mean, I was talking about wolf dominance behaviors online the other day. And somebody tweeted and said, that it's only captive wolves that dominate each other through aggression. It isn't necessarily the most aggressive males that are dominant in the wild. And I thought, well, yes, I know that. That's what DeWal has already documented among chimpanzees. The thing that emerges as appropriate to lead, and then to be imitated as leader, isn't untrammeled aggression.

It's some process that is akin to my interests and your interests matching over some period of time with all of us considered simultaneously, right? That's some equilibrated state of social behavior embodied even in the behavior of wolves, the behavior of rats who know how to play fairly, the behavior of chimpanzees, and certainly in our own behavior, much more complexly, in no small part because our social structures are much bigger than those of animals. So therefore, much more complex, Robin Dunbar has indicated, for example, that one of the best predictors of brain size predictors or correlates more likely.

One of the highest correlates of brain size, especially, I think he only looked within primates, is group size. And that makes sense, right? Because the complexity of the social organization increases dramatically as the number of individuals involve increases. And I wouldn't say it's group size, brain size that determines group size, it's brain size, determines group size, determines brain size, determines group size in a loop. And many other factors are involved

in expanding cortical representation as well. So, as far as I can tell, there isn't anything contentious in those claims. And it gives us a basis out of which the archetypal stories can emerge, and it explains why we can see revealed truth in them, so to speak, because the truth was instantiated in the behavioral realm, not in the conceptual realm. And through the, you know, you see this in your own life, you watch yourself, and one day you go, aha, that's what I've been up to this whole time.

That happens to people in therapy all the time. Or you're dealing with some other person, and they tell you something, it's like, it's like the last piece fell into place. Oh, I had you completely wrong. Now I get what you're up to. And what's happened is my representation has become more complete, but also matches your behavior better. There's a concordance between what I've observed and what actually manifests itself.

And so, well, so for the derivation of wisdom from the observation of behavior. You do the same thing when you analyze a Shakespeare play. You know, Shakespeare play never happened, but Shakespeare extracted out patterns that happen all the time. And if he hadn't extracted them out, no one would watch the plays, right? The plays are interesting precisely to the degree that the play is about something that's about you and something that's about you and something that's about you. It has to be something that's common to everyone. And you watch the play and you partake in it through imitation, even though you're sitting down, you partake in it through imitation.

And then maybe later you go for coffee with your friends and say, well, what was that all about? And that's your attempt to take the behavior wisdom that's coded in the story and make it articulate. And we're doing that all the time. Whenever you discuss a movie, you do that. And that's how educated people actually interact with literature, right?

Because if you're uneducated, roughly speaking, you go see a movie and you just go see it. You never think about it as something that was produced. You never think about it as a cultural entity. And you never do that higher order analysis. And when you're first in counter the idea of even doing that, you might be resistant to it because it seems in some sense to destroy some of the magic of that pure immersion in the form. So, but that doesn't mean that people who go to movies and don't talk about them afterwards aren't learning anything. Quite the contrary, they're just learning,

they're learning using a very abstracted form of imitation. And then you might imagine, you don't go to a movie, go to 100 movies, and you imitate something that's in common across all the movies. Well, what's that? Well, that's an archetype. The archetype is what's common across stories. And so we're trying to get to the bottom of what's

common across stories. And this is the best I've been able to do. It also maps quite nicely onto Heidegger's representation of the world, which is something I only found out later. He has three domains of reality that correspond to this very, very precisely. And then Freud's conception is also very similar.

Ed Ego, super ego, right? The Ed is the natural force within you, positive and negative, because Freud was smart. He knew there was always that dichotomy. And then the ego, that's you, the individual, positive element and negative element. And the super ego, which controls you, represses you, inhibits you and civilizes you,

but is also, can also be a complete tyrant. And so part of the reason Freud's theory obtained such purchase so rapidly was because it filled a hole, an archetypal hole, that needed to be filled for psychotherapeutic practitioners who in some sense had taken the place of priests and ministers and that sort of, then rabbis and that sort of then rabbis and that sort of person. So, okay, so that's the representation. And then while we've talked about the representation of chaos and I would think about that, and this is a radical thing to think, I'd sort of predicate it on the idea that what you confront in your experiences, not so much the material world, but potential.

As such, it's the potential that you're constantly contending with that can destroy you and bring you down, but also has as part of its nature that which you can extract and use to build and grow. And we don't think of ourselves as interacting with potential. We think of ourselves as determined by a material substrate. But I don't think the idea that we're determined by a material substrate is as powerful an idea as the idea that we interact with potential. And I also don't think that the idea that we're determined by a material substrate is a more scientific idea than the idea that we're interacting with potential.

Because I think that, and I do this with hesitancy, because any time you delve into the quantum realm, the hypothetical quantum realm to ground your arguments, you're doing something very dangerous. But the quantum view of the world seems to be something like being is a field of potential from which forms emerge. It's something like being is a field of potential from which forms emerge. It's something like that.

And some of the physicists like Wheeler, for example, believe that consciousness plays a key determining role in that, whatever that role might be. So it's not reasonable to think of these ideas as somehow outside of the realm of scientific conjecture, not in the least, especially because they can also be given a deep evolutionary grounding. That is, why do we represent potential with a symbol like this? Well, it's because that's a great symbol for what lies outside our field of competence.

What is that? Predators, dangerous predators, snakes, raptors, carnivores, all emalgamated together in a monster. And it's the monster that, well, it's also the monster that even offers fruit. That's the story in the story of Good and Evil, well, or in the story of Adam and Eve, well, obviously, because you always hunt for nourishment in the face of predation, obviously, always. And that's a paradox. But it's a paradox that's embedded in everything that you do.

The strange thing about these categories is they're not exactly logical categories. They're paradoxical categories. And those sorts of things aren't supposed to exist because generally the rule for a category is it can't contain itself and its opposite at the same time. But if you've ever dealt with a person on an intimate basis, you know perfectly well that the category indicated by their name contains many paradoxical elements. And they might be paradoxical enough so you can't even live with the person. They're not homogenous enough so that you can plot a path forward with that entity.

Too many things pulling both you and them apart. So some things are A and only A and not B, but some things are A and B at the same time. And complex categories have that nature. I showed you some of the representations of Osiris and Isis emerging from the conjoined serpent. And that's what this diagram represents to some degree. It's, well, what does the chaos of potential first differentiate itself into? You could say, well, it differentiates itself into yin and yang.

That's the right way of thinking about differentiates itself into chaos in order. And those are the father and the mother of everything that comes after them. That's one way of thinking about it. And they each have their symbolic realms. And so I've listed some of the common symbols that are associated with these two realms. Now, it's a difficult thing to pin down because what one of the symbols mean has to be defined in relationship to the other. So, for example, if you think about the sky, the earth in relationship to the sky,

it's easy to make the earth feminine and the sky masculine. That's a common symbolic representation. But if you contrast the earth with the water, then the water tends to be represented as feminine and the earth as masculine. And so the symbolic representations can shift depending on the literary context, let's say the broader literary context. And that means you can't just do a one-to-one mapping of the symbolic entity onto the underlying entity onto the underlying archetypal structure. You have to be attentive to context and nuance, of course,

because we're talking about literature. It's not like you can use a dictionary of symbols to get your way through something as complex as Shakespeare. But you can see the underlying patterns and use them, especially, I think, if you know the fundamental map. But anyway, so here are the more common symbolic representations. Chaos transforms itself into the great mother. That's the queen.

Can be the evil queen or the good queen. It can be the fairy godmother or the queen that provides the poisoned apple to snow white or the queen that locks the poisoned apple to snow white or the queen that locks the prince. What's his name? I don't remember. The prince in sleeping beauty and the dungeon and tries to destroy him. The queen, Kaya Mout, we've talked about, Taya Mout. The material world, material, matter, mother, right? So the material world is the mother of all things, and matter is mother. The land of the dead, dark water, unexplored territory, nature, mother nature, obviously the night sky contrasted against the day sky, ISIS, queen of the underworld, the womb, the forest,

barbarian lands, anomalous occurrences in the grave, and the great father, the king, in lands, anomalous occurrences in the grave. And the great father, the king, the emperor, Abzu, and Tyramat, locked together as we discussed in the Mesopotamian creation, myth, the ancestral spirits, the family, the city, explored territory, culture, the day sky, Osiris, God the father, the village, the nation, the predictable, the monument,

stone, anything that's built in stone to last is a representation of the great father. That's why there were monolithic religions spread across northern hemisphere for thousands and thousands of years. Those people were building things and carving things in stone to make memories. That's what their monuments were for, to bring the past into the present and future on a permanent basis and to try to instantiate something solid that everyone could stand upon. Well, sometimes solid isn't what you need. Sometimes what you need is fluid and liquid,

but the solidity is there to give you something to stand on, even though it can become something arid and dry. You see in the story of Exodus, Moses is a master of water, and the Pharaoh is the king of desert stone, roughly speaking. And the egypt, phyronic egypt, is portrayed as a tyranny because it's nothing but dry stone. And Moses brings water to that. That's chaos.

That's partly the Red Sea story, and partly Moses' ability to get water out of rocks. And that's necessary and part of the reason that he's found to begin with floating on water when he's an infant, which is also something that almost killed him, right? Because, well, you don't want to put your infant in the basket of rushes and put him to float on the water. So, that's a brief overview of the manner in which images and stories can be used to represent

the first division of this underlying reality. You know nothing. What do you do? You establish a center. You explore from the center. It's a domain of safety and that's surrounded by the unknown. So and that's what children do. We already know this.

If you watch how children explore, it's more evident if you look at children who are somewhat inhibited, because really extroverted and emotionally stable children, they'll just explore, they won't recede. But children that are sort of balanced in their emotional response, imagine you bring a 18-month-old

to a new playground. A mother standing there, she's the pillar at the center of the world. Around her is explored territory. And the reason it's explored is because the child knows how to interact with the mother. And so one thing you want to know about kids is you can have multiple caregivers for your kids. You can have an Annie. You can put them in daycare. But they do not like having their primary caregiver switched. It's like everything transforms when that happens, and it destabilizes

them badly. So if you're going to have other people take care of your kids, it's better that it's the same other person. Well, obviously, I mean, they're going to form an intimate and loving relationship with them with any luck, and if that disappears, it's like a death. But it's worse than that in some sense, or the reason that the death is bad because the child's conceptual world, their familiar world, familiar family, their familiar world, collapses. So children hate that. Now they can bond to multiple people.

That's not a problem. But they do not like having their caregiver shifted. Does that define it their territory? So the child is adapted to the mother's presence and has been ever since birth if everything's gone well. So it's a place of security and stability, partly because the child knows how to act around the mother, but also partly because if the child encounters anything

that he or she doesn't understand, well in the presence of mother, the mother will instantly intervene to provide the knowledge necessary to encapsulate the unexpected occurrence. Okay, so the child's by the mother and maybe he's holding on and that gives him ventral contact. It's comforting. It's comforting.

It produces opiates. It decreases pain. It's directly comforting. So then the child is maybe their shy, they're going to take a few looks at what's around first and start to, they're frozen, clinging to something secure, and then if nothing negative happens, they start to relax, just like a rat that's been put into a new cage, they start to relax, and they'll start to look, That's the first manifestations of voluntary exploratory behavior. And maybe if there's other people around, they'll look and smile, and then they'll hide.

Right? And the smile is an invitation to play or interact. But so it's a foray out into the world. Smile, eye contact, and hide. Maybe they'll do that multiple times and get a game going. Now, it establishes something stable going on between them and the stranger. Does the stranger know how to play? And then maybe they'll loosen up and they'll start to explore. And then they go out away from the mother and start interacting with the world until something happens that overwhelms them. Then they'll run back, get a hug, maybe have a sleep because maybe

they processed enough. And then you can encourage them to go back. And so what they're doing is they have the flag planted on unknown territory. That's mum, the flag, right? They circulate around there because it's secure. Make forays outwards where the dragons are, gather what's of interest. And if it's too much, they run back. And then the mum says, it's okay, no problem. Or it gives them a little rock or maybe feeds them something

or lets them have a little rest. And then off you go, play again, out they go again. And so what the child is doing is continually moving out, extending its explored territory into the unknown, just like the Star Trek Voyagers, and then moving back to security, and then moving Voyagers, and then moving back to security, and then moving out farther, and then moving back to security. And hopefully, at some point, they carry with them their own security,

once they become competent, once you've incorporated all the competence of your parents, you don't need to go back, well, and even if you do, it isn't going to help. You've transcended this security, and that's what makes you an adult. Hopefully that happens. That's why the hero archetype is the central human story. It's because that's how we learn.

It's an imagistic representation of the process by which we make sense out of the world. Of course, it's redemptive, because by definition, that's the pattern we use to expand our competence in the world. So of course it's redemptive because by definition that's the pattern we use to expand our competence in the world. How could it be anything other than redemptive? And it's tied in with the, here's how it's tied in with the idea of sacrifice. Every time you learn something, especially painfully, which really means you learned it, there's a bunch of things that you already knew that you had to let go of because they're wrong. And so there's no learning without sacrifice. And now that means there's no learning without the retooling of structures

that you've already been using. And that's because you actually have a complete map of the world, always. But it's low resolution. It's low resolution. And then if you go out there and into a particular area that you've only mapped in a low resolution way, you'll learn details that force you to update the low resolution

representation. And sometimes that can mean abandoning whole pieces of it because they're just wrong. You think this is like this. You think your girlfriend is like your mother. Well, you may find out that that's absolutely wrong and the degree to which you use this low-resolution map to map her, you're going to experience nothing but trouble. So in fact, in all likelihood, that's what you'll experience. Because your girlfriend is not your mother. Or at least she shouldn't be. So when you go out and you encounter something new, it always means the demolition of parts

of you that are still unformed and incomplete. And so, there's a sacrificial element to exploration. That's partly why people don't like to talk to people. They have ideas that are different than theirs. Because you might think, well, sure, we differ. Why can't we just talk? If you know things, I don't, all the better. But no, if you know something, I really don't know.

It's going to challenge something I already presume. And if it really challenges, it will disintegrate, and I'll do a little trip into the underworld before I can restructure myself. And if you really challenge me, it might be a almost complete dissolution. So who wants that? Well, here is how you want that. The only circumstance under which you will want that is if you know that the alternative

is worse. Continual, small updates, differentiate you and make you strong. You shy away from that, your map stays low resolution, and you make yourself weak because you're not practicing that process of letting go and transforming and letting go and transforming because you want to become a master at that. You don't want to be a master at guarding your territory, even though that's extraordinarily useful. You want to become a master of taking the walls apart and extending them and building them

up and taking the walls apart and extending them and building them up and taking the walls apart and extending them and building them up. And that, because you'll never run out of utility for that. And that may mean that unknown becomes something that's your friend instead of your enemy. And that would be a wonderful thing, because, of course, people respond to the unknown as if it's their terrible enemy. It's like, don't be so sure about that. What you know might be your enemy. What you don't yet know might be the best friend you have. And it's highly probable, because what do you know might be your enemy. What you don't yet know might be the best friend you have,

and it's highly probable because what do you know? And there's an infinite number of things you don't know. You might as well make friends with them. And then you also start to understand that you are precisely the thing that can move into the unknown as if it's welcoming and grow and develop as a consequence, and that makes you a much different thing than the thing that has to be terrified of everything it doesn't understand. You're just in a permanent state of existential horror under those conditions, and you're dangerous to other people,

too, especially if they don't agree with you. There's another way of representing it. The dragon of chaos stands for the potential that surrounds us inside of that. There's the unknown, the unknown that you actually come into contact with, right? That's the unknown as it actually manifests itself in your world as something you don't understand, instead of just the potential for that. Because we say, look, you know perfectly well that as you're sitting here, there's all sorts of things you don't know everywhere. But where are they? Well, they're not manifesting themselves at the moment. They're only in potential, but you could we could have a discussion that that became argumentative. And then all of a sudden,

there would be as if emissaries of that unknown had entered the space. And that's the unknown that's defined in relationship to what you know. That's what you actually experience instead of it only being potential. It's a tough thing to get because they're both unknown, right? You think, well, how can there be two different categories of unknown? Well, latent and manifest, that's a good way of thinking about it. No, you, in a relationship, it's going stably, but you know that sooner or later something will come up. Okay, up, from where? Why up?

Well, from beneath. Well, what do you mean beneath? Well, it's from your complex, the person in your relationship with it, in with, is complicated and complex. That's implicit in you. It's inside your conceptual structure. That's a way of looking at it.

Now and then, when there's a disagreement, it will manifest itself, and you know that, you know that there's still trouble brewing ahead in a relationship always, and that's part of what keeps them alive. There's an interesting piece of empirical work done on this a while back, so you might think, well, what does the optimal relationship look like in terms of positive and negative emotion? You might say, well, utopia, nothing but positive interactions. It's like, no. Imagine you get people to code the interactions they have with their partner during the day. You know, you sample it.

You say, was that interaction positive or negative? And then what you're trying to do is protect the longevity of the relationship. Okay. So here's the data. If it falls under five positive interactions to one negative interaction, the relationship doesn't continue. Fair enough, too much negative. That's easy to understand. If it exceeds 11 positive to one negative the relationship doesn't last, why? No challenge. Right? What do you want from your partner? Bliss? No. No, no. You don't. You want periods of peace punctuated by a good fight. And that because that means you respect them, means you have something to offer each other, and it means that you're both growing. And so you

don't want the fight to be too dramatic because, well, then you retreat. You can't settle it. But the person that you can completely map and who only does positive things for you, it's like, A, you don't know that person. B, they're not communicating with you, nor you with them. Maybe they're just subordinating themselves to you or you to them. And you're not growing.

You want someone who can, it's a real relationship is a wrestling match, it's a grappling, it's a grappling phenomenon that you both emerge transformed from, and that's what people want. I don't want to push over. Not unless there's something wrong with them. A narcissistic person who never wants to be challenged will want a partner who does nothing but deliver exactly what they're told to deliver, but they will mistreat them beyond belief

and perhaps deservedly so. All right, so here's some symbolic representations. The two on the left are Jonah. Jonah and the whale. So the story of Jonah is an interesting one. I'll just go over it very briefly. There's a city and the city is full of people who are sinful. What does that mean? Well, to sin is an archery term. It means to miss the mark. So these aren't people who aren't oriented properly. And so the city is in a chaotic state. And God tells Jonah that he's going to go to that city and tell them just exactly what's up with them. And Jonah thinks, no, I'm not going to do that. And why? Well, that doesn't require much explanation.

It's like, how popular are you going to be if you go to a city full of chaotic people and tell them why they're stupid and wrong? It's Jonah thinks, no, I'm not going to do that. I don't care if God's telling me to do it. So his conscience is telling him to do it or his destiny is telling him to do it, or his orientation with higher morality is telling him to do it. So his conscience is telling him to do it or his destiny is telling him to do it or his orientation with higher morality is telling him to do it. You can read it any

way you want. And so he thinks, no, I'm hopping on this boat and I'm getting as far away from that city as I possibly can. And so he does that and then the storm comes up because God thinks, no, you're not getting away. If I told you to do something, you're not getting away from it. A storm comes up. Well, what does that mean? Well, it's easy. Betray your destiny and see how long it takes you to be drowning in a storm. It'll happen immediately. And of course it will, because what's calling you to be your best is exactly the thing that's

pushing you forward to manifest yourself most fully in the world. It's what you need. You run away from that. The boat's going to start to rock very, very quickly. Well, you all know that. You know that perfectly well. It's all you have to do is not study for an exam that you know that's coming up to see everything start to, the storm water start to rise and everything start to rock. It's pretty bloody obvious. So anyways, he's on this boat and there's a storm and all of the people on the boat who can't quite discriminate chaos from weather because they haven't differentiated the world to that degree. Think, oh, the boat wouldn't be a boat to be swamped

if we hadn't, some of us hadn't done something stupid and wrong. And there's logic in that, you know, you might think, well, God has nothing personal against you because of the storm, so you're confusing levels of analysis, but you've got to give these people some credit. It's like, maybe they did do something stupid.

Maybe they didn't cock the damn boat properly. Maybe the ropes aren't in as good a shape as they might be. Maybe they weren't paying attention to the weather when they went out on the ocean. You know? Or maybe they haven't made peace with their brother and so their hearts are twisted out of shape so they don't make particularly good sailors.

It's like the idea that you encounter a storm because you're stupid and wrong. Is it really good idea? Even though it's not of infinite applicability? Anyways, they draw lots. It's a primitive thing to do. It's like, well, it's someone's fault. We don't know who.

We're going to throw someone overboard, the worst sinner. Obviously, that's what God wants. Some kind of sacrifice, so they all draw lots and someone loses. And then Jonas stands up and says, well, sorry guys, like I know that I've got a problem with God at the moment, so it's probably me, you better throw me over. And they don't really want to, but he finally convinces them. Over he goes. And the storm settles. Well, you know, sometimes if you're in a group of people and an organization, there is someone in the organization whose head isn't screwed on exactly straight. And they know exactly why it is and what they've done wrong and what puts them in that position.

And they are poisoning the entire enterprise. And if you throw them overboard or better, if they agree voluntarily to leave, then this storm will abate and everything will be okay. So anyways, they throw Joe overboard and a whale comes up and swallow them and takes them down to the bottom of the ocean. Well, we already know what that means because we watched Pinocchio. It's like when God abandons you,

because you've abandoned your destiny, and the storms come up, the probability that you're gonna be taken down to the depths is extraordinarily high, and that happens in people's lives all the time. Well, so down there, Jonah repents. Well, what do you do when you're in the underworld? You've been there before, when things fall apart,

on your friends of a band and you, you're not as popular as you could be, you can't stand to look at yourself in the mirror, into the underworld you go and you think, geez, I've done a lot of things wrong, you know? Maybe I should reconcile myself with the world and I could get out of this. Well, so that's what Jonah does. He thinks, all right, I've done a lot of things wrong, you know? Maybe I should reconcile myself with the world and I could get out of this. Well, so that's what Jonah does.

He thinks, all right, I've got this destiny. I better go do what God says so the whale spits them out onto the beach and off he goes to the city to tell them what's wrong. Well, that's what that represents. That's these symbols, you know? It's so cool. This second one, I really like it. It's so interesting because you see Jonah reemerging from the way

and he's got a halo around his head. You say, well what's a halo? Have you ever looked at a quarter? Well think about a quarter. A quarter is the moon. And who's on the quarter? The queen. The queen is surrounded by the halo of the moon, the queen's queen of the queen of the night, gold coin. That's the king's head on the sun. That's the halo. Well, what comes out of the belly of the fish? It's the illuminated human being. It's the spirit of the illuminated human being. That's what that means. Well, what does that mean? Well, what else would come out of chaos? If you fall apart and then you put yourself back together, what is it that comes back out?

Or at least you're in better shape than you were before. And then maybe you do that 20 times in your life or 50 times and you do it voluntarily. Every time you do it, you're more like the thing with the halo and less like the thing that's being thrown overboard by your friends. And then you see this representation on the right. This is a very complicated representation. So in this one, you see Christ who's carrying his cross with the sun behind him.

That's the halo that I was talking about. He's the person who's voluntarily accepted the necessity of death and renewal. That's what the cross represents. And so it's a, it's a, what would you call it? An abstracted representation of this, a further developed idea of this. And then you see in the back, this is a feminine symbol, right?

It's a symbol of birth. And you'll see, you'll understand more when I show you the symbols later. This is the eternal opening in the world from which new forms emerge. It's the place from which babies emerge. And you can tell that if you look carefully because you see all these little heads there

with wings on them, those are all spirits waiting to be born. And so the hero emerges from the eternal feminine, willing to die and suffer. And in doing so, just defeating the snake, the snakes down there, and the adversary at the same time. Well, it's no wonder we don't understand those images. I mean, they're so unbelievably rich that how could you possibly articulate them? That's why they emerged in the Images to form to begin with.

The artists get there before the philosophers, long before the philosophers. The dramatists get there way before the artists see it. And so we figured it out. We represented it in art, in literature, in music, and drama, and then we're on the cusp, so to speak, of understanding it in a fully articulated manner. And not a moment too soon. So what does it mean for this symbol to emerge from the feminine symbol? Let's say to emerge from chaos. Well, this picture, this is a picture of Venus, the goddess of love, right? And so I cut this picture out of a larger picture and it's Venus manifesting yourself in a transcendent space in the sky, in the same way that Christ did, in the previous representation. And she has rays coming off her, and there's all these man who are knights kneeling in front of the image. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means that man

used the image of female perfection to motivate themselves. And that's exactly right. That's precisely what they do. You see that in the Tom Sawyer's story. So Tom Sawyer is about 12 years old, and he's still hanging around with his friends like Huck Finn. And this girl moves across the street Becky, and she comes out, and he's struck by her for the first time in his life. Something's changed. And the first thing he does is hop up on a picket fence,

and show off and balance in front of her, and he's saying, well, look at me. Look at me. He's like the male Bauer bird building something beautiful, so the female will approve of it. And it's motivation. And that's something that I think modern women don't really understand about men.

They don't understand that at least to the degree that males are uncorrupted and not better because of being rejected. They're doing everything they can to kneel before the eternal image of the feminine and try to make themselves worthy. That's the chivalry story, right? That's what you should encourage in your partner. So out of chaos, he merges this first form. It's the feminine form. It's partly the form that represents novelty as such. So, and on one hand, it's promise on the other hand,

it's threat that you wouldn't believe. And I don't know, because I don't know, I don't understand the situation with women as well as I understand the situation with men, obviously being a man. But I, I don't know if women have any idea how paralyzing they are to, especially young men. A very large number of my clinical clients, but also young men I've talked to in general,

are absolutely terrified of women because they're terrified of being rejected, and the terror exists in precise proportion to the retraction to the woman, which is a horrible paradoxical situation to be, and it's often why men make such fools of themselves in front of women that they're attracted to. It's because, first of all, they don't see the woman that they're attracted to, is what the hell do they know about her? They don't see her as an individual. They see her as the manifestation of a judgmental ideal, and then it's only in establishing the relationship with the actual woman that they can start differentiating between the judgmental ideal. And then it's only in establishing the relationship with the actual woman that they can start differentiating between the judgmental ideal and the actual individual woman.

And that also requires a sacrifice. And the sacrifice is, you never can have an ideal woman. So to have a relationship with any woman, you have to sacrifice the relationship with the ideal woman. And you have to see the individual woman and separate her from the ideal. And that's the same thing that happens to the hero in sleeping beauty, right?

He sees the evil queen who actually turns into the dragon of chaos, and it's not until he can defeat her that he can establish a relationship with the actual princess, and that's exactly the case. I had one of my clients who ran this men's group, which was quite interesting. One of the things they had the initiates do, which was very intelligent, was to go out and ask 50 women in one day for their phone numbers.

Why? Plightly, properly. It wasn't a game, but it wasn't a stupid game. And the idea was, get over your fear of rejection. And how do you do that? By encountering it continually and continually and continually so that you're no longer paralyzed by this. Here's, I love this cartoon.

This is from an underground comic for people who smoke way too much marijuana. That's called, these people are the fabulous furry freak brothers, and they were created by Gilbert Shelton, who was one of the first underground cartoonists, and one of the least pathological ones with the best sense of humor. And he writes these stories about these stupid hippies,

three of them, the fabulous furry freak brothers. You see two of them there. And all they do is smoke pot and avoid responsibility and run away from the police. And but it's a nice satire. And so, and they have this cat. And the fat one, fat Freddy, has the cat, and they're too lazy to even give the cat a name.

So it's Fat Freddy's cat, and it has its own adventures, mostly with like the, an army of cockroaches that lives inside their like horrible slummy hellhole of a living place. And so anyways, it's quite comical. And so, the hippies have stumbled across a small fortune and stoned out of their minds on cocaine. They go out to set up utopia in the countryside.

They buy this terrible piece of property, but they're so deluded that they think it's like a mansion. And they bring their cat. And I don't know if you've ever had a cat, but cats don't like to move. It really bugs them. And so they're not comfortable when you bring them to a new place. They're like the rat that's been taken out of its comfortable cage and put into a new cage in the cat.

You put a cat in a new room and it, depending on the cat, obviously, but generally they'll retreat into a corner and be, and meow, piteously, and be very unhappy for quite a substantial amount of time. And so the cartoonist actually mapped this out quite nicely. So the hippie takes the cat out of the box and says, our new home. It's there out in the forest. This is an urban cat. It's never been in the forest. It doesn't know what the hell is up in the forest. And the cat's looking rather dubiously in things. So this is the country. And then it's put on the ground and it starts to slink, as he says, slink, slink out into the forest. And that's actually what animals do. It's a predatory vision crouch.

And so if they're put in a new territory, they'll hunker down and freeze first. And then they'll slowly unfreeze and start to explore. They sniff first and then they'll start to move it. But they do it with trepidation and slowly and try to hide. And so that's what the cat's doing. And the cat goes out into the unknown far enough, sniffing, and all of a sudden, pow! It goes underneath the house. It's like the toddler running back to the mother. And the other hippie there, I think that's Phineas,

says, where did the cat disappear to now? And the fat Freddy character says under the house. And then the cat's under there in the dark with big eyes looking terrified, saying, you'd hide too if you'd smelled what I did. And so what it smelled was this thing that has like the head of a wolf and antlers like a deer in the tail of a skunk and the feet of a chicken and horrible claws. It's like, well, what is that?

Well, it's a monstrous amalgam of that which lurks in the unknown. And so the cartoonist, the comedian, got it perfect. He said, well, what is there? What is out in the unknown? Well, you need one representation, not a thousand. And so you take pieces of what's out there that are relevant, and you create a single image out of that, and you say, well, this is what's out there.

And you might say, well, no such animal as that exists, and that's actually incorrect. An animal, very much like that exists. It's just a superordinate low-resolution category. It includes all those weird animals that might hurt you that are out in the forest. That's a useful category, weird animals that might hurt you. And that's a real category. You might say, well, there's differentiated things within that category. It's like, yeah, every category has that nature.

Can still be further differentiated, maybe not protons. They can even be differentiated with regards to location, at least. So every They can even be differentiated with regards to location at least. So every category can be further differentiated. The question is whether the category has some functional utility, or at least that's one of its questions, it's like, that's the thing to be afraid of.

Okay, good, now you got it. This is the category of all things to be afraid of. What do you do in response to that category? All right, so then we go to the next representation. This is Kali, A-A-L-I, Hindu goddess of destruction. She's the thing that you encounter. She's the thing that makes things go bump in the night. What is that thing? Well, let's take it apart a little bit because you can't see this image until you understand it. You would be able to, if you were Hindu, because you'd be in the culture and you'd know what the image represented,

but some people in here might be Hindu, but not very many people. So, okay, so let's talk about this image. It's horrifying image. And so, here's how this image emerged. It emerged in the imagination of people who were tormented for millennia about just what the hell lurked out there in the unknown. And some artist was seized by a revelation, a horrifying revelation of just what that was. Okay, so what is it?

Well, first of all, she's in a container of fire. Why fire? Well, fire is useful and destructive, right? And you also cannot look away from fire. And so it's a really good symbol of that which you cannot look away from. It's eternally meaningful. Fire is eternally meaningful.

Why? We can't keep our hands off fire, right? We're descendants of the first insane ape who was so obsessed by fire that he couldn't stay away from, from a burning landscape and learned how to master it. And he's our forefather, that person. We're obsessed by fire, it's magical to us,

and it transforms, it burns and transforms. So from a symbolic perspective, it's a very useful source of, of imagistic representation. Okay, the fire is there, and then inside the fire, these are skulls. You see them all lined up there. So it's not just fire. It's the fire of death that consumes. So that's where Kelly lives.

So that's fun to start with. And then there she is with her hair on fire, because her hair is on fire, in case she isn't frightening enough, just because of where she lives, her hair is on fire, and her head dress is made out of skulls. So that's nice, and then she's like an insect, like a spider, see, she has all these legs,

and why is that? Because we don't really like insects, and they set off our rebug detectors, and they can bite us, and they're quite horrifying, and many people have spider phobias particularly and no wonder. And then she's got a weapon in one hand here and then her, you see, she's eating something and you see here her belly is concave. Well why?

Well, she's in a birth position. She's just given birth to this unfortunate character who happens to be She happens to be standing upon and he's disemboweled and she's eating a mintestine's first and that's Kelly. It's like that's horror. It's a representation of horror and death and destruction and transformation. It's feminine as well. What do you do in the face of his mother nature? That's another negative element of mother nature. What do you do in the face of mother nature? That's a negative element of mother nature. What do you do with something like this?

Well, that's the eternal question, and the answer is quite straightforward. You make sacrifices to her. And if you make the proper sacrifices, then she turns into her beneficial counterpart. And that's exactly what you do in light, if in the face of horror and death, you make sacrifices, so you transform the terrible destructive element of nature into that thing that continually offers you what you need.

And so, it's of that discovery is one of unparalleled brilliance. And you know, we don't get it. We think it's primitive. It's, and no wonder, you know you you can understand human sacrifice that sounds pretty primitive man it's terrified but the idea of sacrifice it's an act of the idea itself is a conceptualization of utter genius and why do you expect it to come forward first in its perfect form it's not gonna do that it's gonna come forward imperfectly and roughly and brutally.

And then hopefully we'll be refined across time, which is exactly what has happened. You see even in the biblical stories the transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. And then with us now, it's the transition from animal sacrifice to psychological sacrifice, because we're sophisticated enough to do that. We can let go of concepts and abstractions and things that we're holding on to

that we should no longer hold on to and progress in that manner. It's increasing articulated psychological sophistication but we still make sacrifices and we hope that they'll be accepted and we hope that they're of high enough quality so that they work. Well, that's a representation of Diana.

You could think of Diana. There's an opposite, Durga, in Hinduism, and she comes forth if you make the proper sacrifices to Kelly. But I wanted to show you alternative representations from different cultures of these archetypal forums. This is Diana, positive feminine. What multi-breasted, right? She's the thing that nourishes the world.

And so that would be on one hand your mother, who obviously protects you from the terrible aspects of fire and danger, but also nature conceptualized as the positive feminine in general. The source of all fertility and all food and all beings and all good things, something that you want to have on your side, that's for sure. And you might say, if you acted heroically properly and you played the metagame and not the game and you made the proper sacrifices, then you'd never encounter Kelly, you'd only

encounter her benevolent counterpart. And so then you might say, well, does she even exist then? That's something that's very interesting, is because the degree to which the terrible part of the world manifests itself in your life is proportionate to how insufficient you are. And we don't know the full extent of that. If you got your act together completely, maybe all the suffering would disappear from your life, or at least maybe all the unbearable suffering, and maybe all the suffering, or the your life, or at least maybe all the unbearable suffering. And maybe all the suffering or the unbearable suffering from the lives of people around

you too. And you already know that because there are people that you'll go to in a crisis that you can rely on and you know they'll help you. And you wonder what would the world be like if you were like that and everyone else was like that too. We'd have a lot fewer crises and the ones that we do have would be a lot more manageable. And so when people say, well, why is the world so ripe with suffering? One answer to that is because we're not yet what we could be. And at least that's an

answer that we have some control over, right? You're not going to talk God out of making the world suffer. That's for sure. And you're not going to negotiate directly with mother nature, but you might be able to put yourself together a little bit and see if that works, at least it's under your control. And God only knows what the upper limit of that might be. Well, here's the decomposition of the fundamental archetype. The dragon of chaos differentiates on the one hand into the feminine. That's the unknown, and the feminine differentiates further into the negative feminine than the positive feminine.

The negative feminine is the reason for witch hunts. It's the reason for, you know, there's a whole group online called men going their own way, M-G-T-O-W. That's a very interesting group to go study. There's lots of them. I don't know how many of them there are. And most of them are older. Many of them are men who've been through a particularly horrifying divorce for one reason or another.

And they've had enough of women. So they tell the young men that they're teaching never have a permanent relationship. Never share your territory with the woman. never share your possessions, make sure you never live together and don't stay with one long enough to enter a common law relationship because you'll be stripped of everything that you have. Well, that's a hell of a thing to be telling people, but what's happened is that the female has been manifested in their life only as the negative archetype, and

they've got that confused with all women. And that's partly, you know, you've got to ask yourself, if you know the mythological story, is maybe if you made the right sacrifices, you wouldn't have so much trouble with women. It's a good question to ask yourself first. And I would also say, you know, if you're a woman who has trouble with man, or you're a man

who has trouble with women, it's not the women, and it's not the women and it's not the men. It's you, because the women are telling you what's wrong with you and the men are telling you what's wrong with you. And if you don't listen, then it's you, it's either you or all men. Well, that's easy, it's all men. Well, that's certainly how it's played out

in the world right now. It's like, no, it's not all men. You can be, by definition, by definition, and it's not all men. You can be sure. By definition, by definition, and it's not all women. That's for sure. I don't want to have anything to do with women. It's like you're a pathetic weasel. That's the same statement. Here's some lovely representations. This is Mary from represented in very different eras. This is a very old one. This is about 12th century.

I absolutely love this image. It's so profound. So what you see here is Mary as eternal mother of the infant, okay. She's sitting on the crescent moon here, she's tween of the night. And underneath you can't see this very well, but underneath the moon there's a reptile

and she's got it crunched nicely underneath her feet. And that's Satan in part, which means protect your children from malevolence and it's got it crunched nicely underneath her feet, and that's satan in part, which means protect your children from malevolence, and it's the predator. And so, what's the proper orientation for a mother? Protect your infant from malevolent predators. Obviously, right? That's the holy image of the mother. So she's holding the infant safely in her arms.

She's queen of the universe, and she's coming out of this strange tunnel. It's the same, these are called a mandorla, by the way, this tunnel. And it's actually, this is going to be very strange, but I'm going to tell you what it is anyways. It's like a hole into the fabric of time and space and it's revealing in an image that's eternal that's outside of time and space. And it's outside of time and space because it recurs all the time. It never ages. It's an image that transcends temporality. Now you might say, well, is it real? And the answer to that is, well, it depends on what you mean by real. Something that transcends temporality is

pretty damn real. And so that's what that hole in the sky represents. It also represents the place from which all forms emerged. So there's what that hole in the sky represents. It also represents the place from which all forms emerge. So there's a biological component to it too. So it's as if these divine figures are standing in front. Well, I'll show you a minute of what they're standing in front of. And you see here the same thing with these little puti. That's what they're called. Sort of embedded in the flesh-like folds around here.

And you see Mary here holding the infant again away from the terrible predator. That's the serpent of chaos down there in the ocean. And that's again, what does that mean? Why would the serpent of chaos be in the ocean? Well, how many of our ancestral infants do you suppose were eaten by crocodiles at the waterhole? Plenty, plenty of them. And so that's something to be terrified of and to take precautions against. And so, and then this image here, the older one, see all these weird little figures in the background here.

You can't see them, but they're musical instruments. They're all sorts of archaic musical instruments. And so here's what the image means. It means the potential from which this figure is emerging is like a musical construction. So it's like a symphony. It's this patterned layer, it's patterns layer upon layers of harmonious patterns that make up being and out of that emerges this image. And that's what that image represents. And that's what music represents. It represents this patterned potential that we're constantly interacting with. It's deeply, deeply meaningful.

That's why we love music so much. I thought that's an absolute work of genius to put those two things together. It's remarkable, remarkable image. So... So, well, let's stop there and we'll meet again in 15 minutes. And then this, so that's the positive feminine on the left. And then on the right, that's the Gorgon. And that's the thing that fills you with terror when you look at it. There's another representation of the positive feminine. It's another representation of Mary. There are representations very much like this

of ISIS with Horus on her lap and people often consider those precursors their Egyptian Egyptian statues precursors to the Christian iconography and Well, I suppose in some sense they are in so far as they predated them in time, but the fundamental issue is that well that this image has to be held up as transcendent. And by that, I mean, it's an image that's got to be at the basis of a value structure that actually works in so far as there's going to be human beings, because there aren't any human beings without the infant and the mother. And so if that's not held up as an image of ultimate value then everything falls apart.

And it's something our culture does extraordinarily badly. I had a client recently admit to me in ashamed tones that she wanted to have children. I thought, I said, well, you don't have to be ashamed of that, especially not if you're talking to me. And she said, oh, that's such a relief because I can't talk to anyone about it at work. They seem to think that it's degrading.

That you can hardly diagnose a culture as more pathological than that, that's so appalling. And it's so hard, it's one of the things I really feel badly for young women because they're not guided through this with any sense whatsoever. And I'll tell you what my experience has been working with women. And you can take this for what it's worth.

And I've worked with women who've achieved the highest levels of their profession. I don't mean just an academia, but in a number of different fields. This is what happens. We'll take the typical woman, conservative woman, because they're more typical, conscientious,

not particularly open. So they're beautiful people. You know, they're existing within the structures of their society. So I'll take female lawyers as a classic example. So they're very good at high school, very hardworking, very intelligent, but very, but very beautiful, and often rather agreeable.

And that's important because it means to some degree that they want to please and they'll do what they're told. And so part of the reason I think that women are outperforming men in elementary junior high school, high school, and universities, because they're more likely to be obedient. And I know that to some degree, because we did analysis of students in Quebec and found out that one thing that predicted grades over and above

intelligence and conscientiousness was agreeableness and agreeable people got better grades than their IQ and conscientiousness would predict. And that's particularly negative for men. So imagine this is what's happening. So you're a borderline happening. So you're a borderline student and you're also a bit rebellious and anti-social. I'm going to fail you. Like you write on the cusp. Don't like you much. You fail. You have exactly the same grade profile,

but I like you. Tick. You move ahead. You don't. And so one of the things that's dividing men from women as they progress through school is the degree to which they're agreeable. Now that works out to some degree for women in so far as the agreeableness moves them forward, but they encounter the negative elements of being agreeable later in their careers. Anyways, they're women are very good in high school, then they go to college, they're very good in college, they nail their damn grades. They do their studying. They get their A's and they ace their LSATs, so they're smart too.

Then they go off to do their articling and they're really, really good at it. And then they get offered an associate position and they're really, really good at it. And then by the time they're 30, they make partner and let's say they're in high pressure, high paying jobs. $250,000 a year, $300,000 a year, $500 an hour. Okay, what's your life like?

You work all the time, period, 70 hours a week, 75 hours a week, flat out, and you don't get to make any mistakes. And if your client calls you at 3 in the morning on Sunday, you say, I'm really glad to hear you hear from you because if you don't, there's some hot law firm in New York that will take And if your client calls you at three in the morning on Sunday, you say, I'm really glad to hear you. Hear from you because if you don't, there's some hot law firm in New York that will take your client from you at a moment's notice. And the client is paying you whatever, the firm, $750 an hour of which maybe you get $350 and what they want is an answer about something really complicated, right,

bloody now. And you can say all you want about the fact that women have a difficult time with that because it's a male-dominated patriarchy, any female lawyer who's hit 30 and is a partner that has any sense at all, knows that's complete bloody rubbish. It's market determined right to the core. What happens to the women when they're in their 30s? They all leave the high end law firms. Why? Because who in their right mind would want to live like that? That's the issue, right? Once you make about $60,000 a year for your family, but let's say for you personally, additional income makes zero has zero impact on your quality of life. Zero. So why work 80 hours a week?

Well, men will do it. Some men, very few. A handful of hyper competitive men who are obsessed with hitting the pinnacle of the given dominance hierarchy therein will happily work 80 hours a week, and they'll forgo everything else. Relationships, family, children, way in the second category. And so those men are often very difficult to live with, too,

because they're so obsessed with their career. It's hard to have a relationship with them. And maybe they don't have much of a relationship with their kids, but they're damn good at what they do. And part of that is, is they're smart and disciplined and they'll work nonstop all the time. It's like an obsession. And that's the sort of people who run things.

Those are the people who run things. Well, they're often also disagreeable, too, because you want to be, you want to manage people, really? They're not going to like you. You know, and it's not an easy thing to not be liked. And actually, if you're an agreeable person and women are more agreeable than men,

it's quite painful to be disliked. But if you're in a managerial and executive position, the probability that people are going to like you is quite low. Now, if you're a real son of a bitch, then they're going to dislike you more. But those positions are very stressful, partly because of the interpersonal dynamics, and they're also incredibly, incredibly competitive.

So the women hit that at 30, and they're completely qualified, and the law firms are bloody desperate to keep them, because it's really hard to find highly qualified people, especially once you've put all that time into training them, especially if they're also good at bringing in business, the law firms trip over themselves to try to keep them. They can't. The women think, why in the world am I doing this? Why in the world would anyone in their right mind do this? Especially because they're often married by that point too, and generally they've married a husband who makes as much money or more than them, so they don't need the damn money. And so they think, well, there's more to life than this,

which is exactly the right thing to think. And so they go and find a job that's 9 to 5 and controllable so that they can hire an Annie and have some kids and have a life. And it's like, yes, that's the intelligent thing to do. So we've got things backwards in our culture. We're thinking, at least in part, why aren't there more women in positions of power? Wrong question. The right question is, why are there any men at all who want those positions of power?

Because it's not just positions of power. You have to be such a nought head to think that. Oh, it's a position of power. It's like, sure, but it's a position of overwhelming responsibility. And if you make mistakes, you're done, right? It's not like you occupy that position of power and everyone does what they're told all the time

and your life is easy. It's like, forget about that. People are on your case to do exactly the right thing all the time, 100% of the time. And maybe you want that and maybe you don't. So what I don't know what people think is these people are all sitting in their offices with their like feet up on the desk,

smoking cigars and oppressing the world. It's like, that isn't how it works. Those people, they work flat out all the time. So, and it's fine if that's what you want. And some people are like that. They're hyper industrious people, right? From a trade perspective, no matter where you put them. You put them in a forest with an axe, they just wander around chopping down trees non-stop, right? Because it's built into them. But if you want to have a

balanced life and you should want that, you know, because the other thing you'll find, and this is God's gospel truth is that the older you get, if you have any sense at all, the more important your family is to you. Like that the utility of your career, maybe that peaks around 35 or 40 and it starts to decline pretty rapidly after that. And what happens if you're fortunate, you have someone in your life that you love that you've woven yourself together with and you have some kids so that you have something to do from the time you're 50 till the time you're 80. And so it's a real mistake, it's a barren future without children, man, I can tell you that, it's a real mistake. And so we do a terrible job of, say,

putting that image forward and saying, well, yeah. Now, you know, because women have access to the birth control pill now and can compete in the same domains as men, roughly speaking, there is a real practical problem here. It's partly an economic problem now because when I was roughly your age, it was still possible for a one-income family to exist. Well, you know that wages have been flat except in the upper 1% since 1973. Why?

Well, it's easy. What happens when you double the labor force? What happens? You have the value of labor. So now we're in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before. So we went from a situation where women's career opportunities were relatively limited, to where they were relatively unlimited,

and there were two incomes, to where, and so women could work, to a situation where women have to work, and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise. And now we're going to go into a situation. This is the next step, whereas women will work because men won't. And that's what's coming now. So there is an economics economist article showing that 50% now of boys in school are having trouble with their basic subjects. And you look around you in universities. You can see this happening. I've watched it over decades.

I would say 90% of the people in my personality class are now women. There won't be a damn man left in university in 10 years except in the STEM fields. And it's a complete bloody catastrophe. And it's a catastrophe for women, because I don't know where the hell you're gonna find someone to marry and have a family with if this keeps happening. And you think, when you're 19, because you're so clueless when you're 19,

you don't know a bloody thing. You think, well, I'm not really sure I want children anyway. It's like, oh, yeah, you tell how well you've been educated. Jesus, dismal. Dismal. Without fail, I got to tell you, without fail, I've watched women go through their professional careers. Many, many of them. It's a very rare woman who at the age of 30 doesn't consider having a child, her primary desire. And the ones that don't consider that generally, in my observation, there's something that isn't quite right in the way that they're constituted or looking at the world.

Sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal, you know, by temperament. They have a masculine temper, disagreeable. They're not particularly compassionate. They're not maternal. They're not that interested in kids, fair enough, man, but there aren't that many of them. And there's plenty who will not admit to themselves that that's what they most desperately want. Do you think women would be better off

if they had kids earlier, folks thought for your say of the 30s? Huh, who knows? Like it really is a problem. I don't think the more rational it is, it's a really tough one. I don't think anybody knows the answer to that. Because-

If you're 35, it's say really tough one. I don't think anybody knows the answer to that because Yeah, well Yeah, I can't answer that because I've seen women do a good job of it both both ways And you do get the odd woman who manages a high-powered career and kids, but Jesus, those women, man. Like, they buy more powerful microwaves because it'll take 45 seconds to cook the food instead of a minute. And I'm not kidding. It's like they're up at five.

They exercise for half an hour. They make breakfast. They get their kids ready to work. They go to work. They work 14 hours, 14 hour days. Flat bloody out, they come home and work for another two hours to get their kids organized. They have a nanny to help them out and then they work for two out more hours before they go to bed at like one and then they're up at five and they do that again and I'll tell

you, you better be tough if you're going to do that physically too because you'll just burn yourself to a crisp. I've seen some women manage it, you know, but they're like, they're tough and they're rare, because that's a hell of a regiment. And then if anything goes wrong, you have a sick kid or something like that, or there's any sort of crisis in your family, it's just, you know, then it becomes too much.

And I don't know the answer to that. I mean, the advantage women have is they live about eight years longer than men. It's testosterone kills men. So, well, that's right. They pay up front and gain on the long run. But how, it isn't clear how our society should sort this out. We don't know, and it's partly, we don't know what to do now, that women have control over the reproductive function. It's a big mystery, yep? I'm trying to answer to that, but I think from a practical aspect of this goes with the mental health in. Even a woman were to enter the workforce later on. They had a

confrontation with people for another, and that's always a conflict in the workforce. And people are always hiring youngers, talent, because they're how lots of things are being in the workforce. Yeah. Yes. Well, and the thing is, young stupid people have the advantage of being young.

Middle-aged stupid people have the disadvantage of being middle-aged. And so if you're going to hire a young stupid person or a middle-aged stupid person, you'll go for the young stupid person. And I'm by stupid. I mean, you know, not, I'm being sarcastic, obviously, but I mean without without experience and just getting started in the world.

You're much more likely to favor someone young because there's an instant explanation for their relative cluelessness and it's a problem, you know. So, so I don't know what the answer is, but one answer certainly, at least at part, is to start letting young women know what being 30 and being female is like, and also to disbuse them of the notion that there's something magical about a career. First of all, most people don't have careers, man. They have jobs. And the reason you get paid for a job is because you're being asked to do things you wouldn't do unless you were being paid. And so it's not some utopia of cigar smoking with your boots up on your desk.

That's for sure. Not that that would be such a utopia to begin with. But all right. So anyways. So this is more differentiation of the archetype fundamentally. So you see the dragon of chaos here, the potential manifesting itself into this ambivalent feminine figure, both promise and threat. And then I've mapped this one out so the ambivalent feminine figure, so sort of multivailant

gives rise to the positive mother, and then the positive mother gives birth to the hero. And that's Hercules there. And this, I like this image a lot. So Hercules is in this container. So you can interpret that both as something feminine, a container, but also as a representative of culture, because it's a boat that's floating on the chaotic ocean here. So that's Hercules.

He has to be in a container that sustains him in the murky water of chaos. And you see, he's going out into the unknown and he's got a lion skin on. And that's partly because one of the initiation rituals for young men when they were lions say in the Middle East, and that wasn't very long ago, is that you had to go out and kill a lion with a spear

or with a bone arrow or something like that. It's like, that's, you know, impressive. All things considered. I mean, you really think about that for a minute. You really want to go out and try to kill a lion with a stick. It's like, it probably, you probably wouldn't be quite the same after you did that. That would be my guess. And so, anyways, so there's Hercules.

He's got his lion skin on, and that shows that he's assimilated to the lion, the dominant sort of animal, and that he's also mastered it. And he's got his bow and arrow. So he's going to hit the target properly. He's not, he's someone who doesn't sin because he can hit the center of the target. And he's got this club which I really like because it's covered with eyes, just like Marduk, the Mississippi Indian hero. Well, what do you want to do when you go out into the unknown?

It's like arm yourself and pay attention. And so that's what you're trying to produce if you're a good mother is this figure that can go out into the unknown armed Accurate and able to pay attention and that's a hell of a thing to participate in. It's really fun I found having children incredibly entertaining. It's ridiculously entertaining thing to do because for a bunch of reasons one is that It's the only relationship you'll ever have in your life where you actually have a chance of establishing something that's close to perfect is with your kids, because when they're delivered to you, so to speak, they're in some sense they're perfect.

And your job is to maintain that perfection, if you can, and you do that by being a good parent, by being encouraging, by being on their side, by taking care of them, and you can have an absolutely pristine relationship with the child. That doesn't mean it's not full of trouble, because it is. But it can easily be the best relationship you'll ever have in your life. And in fact, I think that's, it can be the worst too. And you know, sometimes you get unlucky in your child as sick mentally or physically, and things fall fall apart and it's not your fault. But and sometimes it is your fault, but it's a real gift and you have to play this game of protection and encouragement, right?

Protection and encouragement and get that dynamic right and then you build, you help someone develop into something that's well exactly this that can take on the trouble of the world, forthrightly. And man, that's what you want. That'll make it worthwhile. That's for sure. Now, let's see, I'm going to figure out where I want to go next. Well, I've talked about the dragon fight, so I won't do that. Oh, yes, we might as well look at some of the...

We'll look at the same thing on the patriarchal side of the equation. So, it's the great father and the great mother that emerged out of chaos, let's say that. You can think about that over the evolutionary times bound to because it's the fundamental differentiation of life into two sexes, you know, the fundamental differentiation of being into two sexes that interact creatively to produce new being. It's very, very deep motif. And so the dragon of chaos differentiates itself

into the great father. And that's God the Father, that's an image there. And you see he's sitting in front of the sun. And the sun is behind him. And the sun is the thing that comes up out of the darkness in the morning. And then shines the light on everything with which we can see and then collapses again into the darkness at night.

Right? And so at night, it fights its battle with the forces of darkness and chaos and emerges triumphant in the morning. And that's why we have solar gods because the highest deity is assimilated to the dominant, the dominant phenomena in the sky. And well, and no wonder, because the sun is also what gives life and that provides light and that does send the darkness away. And to notice that there's something symbolically useful in that, that you can also apply to the ideal person is another act of conceptual, metaphor, genius. And so behind God the Father is the son of S.O.N. son. And you see, he's ruling over a walled city here,

and you can think about God the Father here as the spirit of the walled city. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so, and why, what does that spirit mean? Well, forget about the supernatural element of this, or the transcendent element of it even. How do you represent society? of this or the transcendent element of it even. How do you represent society? Okay, you've got your walled city. Okay, why is it walled?

That's the fundamental structure of a city. Why is it walled? Well, because you have to have a border between what's yours and what isn't yours? Or a border between your territory and outside world, right? Otherwise, it's not delineated and defined. So the first thing is it's something that's walled off. It's a it's a defined space. Inside that, there's a dominance hierarchy. It's a masculine dominance hierarchy because like chimps, our fundamental dominance hierarchy is masculine. Okay, so the dominance hierarchy is what's the same across all the men? And then it's more than that. It's what's the same across all men.

Insofar as they found their position in the dominance hierarchy. Insofar as they're supporting it. Insofar as they're expanding it. And insofar as they're trying to strive up it. So it's averaged across that. But then it's more than that, because it's not just the man that lived now.

It's also the man that used to live and the man that will live. And you think, what are you relating to when you relate to other people? Well, in part, you're relating to the spirit of the man that will soon live, and that's what a contract is, right? You make a contract with the potential society of the future. It's embodied as a spirit. And so you act appropriately in relationship to the patriarchal spirit, because if you act in accordance with that structure, then you can extend your contractual relationship with other people across time.

It's brilliant, it's a brilliant conceptualization. That's independent of any supernatural or transcendent reality. I'm not saying it exists in necessary opposition to such things. I'm just saying that you don't have to introduce the idea of such things into the conceptualization in order to understand the symbolism. Now, I think it's more complicated than that because if you think about this thing as a spirit, a spirit is an essential pattern of personality. Let's call it that to the degree that you're a well-civilized,

representative of the social world. You are actually inhabited by that spirit. And so what should happen as you mature is that as you become older, you should become God the Father. That's what you're aiming at. You want to embody that central spirit that characterizes the civilization and that spirit's very complex and that's why you often see it in relationship with the representation of God the Sun because the masculine spirit isn't the spirit in general, the spirit of civilization isn't

exhausted by its patriarchal representation. That's the dogmatic form, like Osiris, right? It's only the structure. That has to be allied with the thing that keeps the structure alive. So you want to be both of those things at the same time. The embodiment of the civilization and the force that transforms it and moves it forward. And that's what you're supposed to be taught. That's what university is for, well, that's what it used to be for.

Now it's mostly there to produce politically obsessed idiots. Oh, anyways, sorry about that, but it gets very frustrating. So all right, so that you get the picture, that's what that represents. That's an idea that's been trying to emerge in the human imagination since the beginning of time. And it's not a trivial idea. It's an unbelievably profound idea, and it differentiates, too. And this is what makes it complicated.

What kind of relationship do you have with your father? Your real father. It's often ambivalent, right? Because there's an element of him that encouraged you, hopefully, because without the encouragement of your father, man, the world is a dismal place. It's very difficult to be a courageous person, unless you have your father in body and spirit behind you. It's very de-moralizing.

Like, it really kills people not to have their mother. They just don't recover from that. But, and I think people can recover from a fragmented father relationship, but it's the next worst thing, you know, because if your father rejects you or doesn't form a relationship with you, it's as if the spirit of civilization has left you outside the walls as of little work.

It's very difficult for people to recover from that. So the father should be an encouraging force, but can be a tyrannical and crushing force. And so that's very, that's a very difficult thing to get right. Partly because if you're my son, then I should impose the highest standards of behavior on you. And I should always be judging what you're doing. I should be judging it with the aim of making the best in you come forward, but getting that balance exactly right is very difficult. And so it's easy for a father to swing too much into judgment, let's say. And then of course, mothers can play this role too, to swing too far into the domain of judgment,

and to be too harsh, and to the degree that the father has his own pathologies, he's gonna do that imperfectly. He might be someone who's the father who devours his son because he's jealous of the new possibility, the new potential, the struggle for attention and love from the mother or from the other children and the family, there's all sorts of things that can go terribly wrong.

So that's the father as wise king. And that's another symbol that's been lost, I would say, to a massive degree in modern universities because all we're taught is to tear that down and to not even notice that it manifests itself everywhere, especially in the universities, which are like there is close to an ideal environment as human beings have ever been able to create. It's as simple as that. And if you can't be grateful for the structure of the university with all its imperfections, then you're completely blind to this element of the archetype. And that's the opposite of it. That's the sun that devours the king that devours his own son.

That's satirate. You know, that's like the mother who is too overprotective. It's the male version of that. And the mother that's too overprotective says, all never let anything happen to you. It's like, well, maybe you actually want to have something happen to you. You know, it's a bit of an all-inclusive statement. It's like, no, I'm going to make you strong. So any number of things can happen to you. And when you're, when you need some care, I'll be there. But otherwise, like out into the world with you, that's the right attitude. And for the father, it's like, get your bloody act together. But I'm on your side. It's because not because I want to destroy you or demean you or push you down in the dominance hierarchy, because I want the best in you to

emerge. And so you need standards. It's like, what are you doing waste in your life? There's way more than that to you. Get your act together and bring it out. And that's a message that people really want to hear if they have any sense at all. And generally they do want to hear it. So, you know, I was talking, I've been talking to a lot of people recently as perhaps you know., I was talking, I've been talking to a lot of people recently, as perhaps you know, and I was talking to one of the leaders of the conservatives this morning, and they're asking me about, the person was asking me about Bill C-16, but more specifically about talking to young people, because the conservative leadership struggle is going on right now.

I've been talking to a bunch of them, and I said, well, look, one of the things you could do for young people that no one's doing is to talk to them about responsibility because everyone talks to young people about rights. It's like, we need our rights. It's like, oh God, how many rights do you need? You know, really? Like, you have more privileges than any people who've ever lived anywhere. Well, it's so dull to hear. It's so dull. It's so pathetic. And what would you call it? It's so demeaning that you have to be protected and have your rights. It's like I said, there's a huge marketplace for responsibility. That's what you want to talk to

young people about. It's like, get your act together and do something worthwhile with your life. For the first time in my entire adult life, the conservatives actually have something to sell young people, right? They could sell them responsibility. It's like, well, why? Because that's where life has meaning with responsibility. The more responsibility you take on, the more meaning your life has. And the higher degree of responsibility that you agree voluntarily to try to bear the richer your life will be. And no one's ever told that. And it's the case. You know, it's like you have four kids say, well, that's plenty of responsibility. You're going to have meaning. It's going to be rough, you know,

because it's complicated. You have a complicated job and you try to help the careers of the people around you. You try to solve tough problems and aid suffering and do all of that. It's like it's weight, it's responsibility, but it's there's glory in it. There's real glory in it. There's deep meaning in it. And young people are starving for that because no one ever tells them that. It's like, you're way more than you think. Man, stand up.

Do something difficult. do something difficult, do something difficult in heroic, right? Burst out of your bonds. It's like that's a good message. It's a necessary message because we have to be more than we are because if we, if we aren't, we're not going to survive. Well, that's the sun devouring father. That's a painting by Medina of Satan. Pretty horrifying one. And that's Captain Hook. I really like the figure of Captain Hook. Some of these popular mythological stories, myth-based fairy tales, modern fairy tales. I've got things really right. Captain Hook, well, he's a pirate. So I think I told you that in the Google engineers investigations of female sexual

fantasies, the pirate played a large role, werewolf, vampire pirate, surgeon billionaire, credibly comical, or pirate, you know,pped into the high seas and someone willing to break rules. There's a romance in that figure. Well, so the idea of the great father as the pirate is a good one. Well, hook is kind of a pathetic pirate, and of course pirates are precisely that because they're also crooked. And so what makes him pathetic? Well, it isn't because he's got a hook precisely, because maybe that's just a sign of adventure. It's because he's being chased by a crocodile with a clock in its stomach.

Well, that's the dragon of chaos, right? That's time. Tick, tick, tick. Your life is gonna end. It's already got a piece of you, and it's coming for the rest. And so, hook is terrified of that. He's terrified into resentment and evil, roughly speaking,

is why he can pray on other people. And so that's the father in the Peter Pan story, out in Neverland, which is the archetypal domain. Captain Hook's the father. Well, why would Peter Pan want to grow up to be Captain Hook? Well, he doesn't. And so he stays pan. Pan means everything, right?

Like pantheism. He stays everything. He's this divine child. He never wants to grow up. Well, why would you sacrifice the potential of youth to become nothing but a death-obsessed tyrant? Well, that's the story in Peter Pan. And of course, Wendy's in this story.

And so is Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell is the imagined feminine. She's just, she doesn't even exist. She's just this perfect little thing that's always around whenever Peter Pan needs her. But the problem with Tinkerbell is that she's a fairy and fairies don't exist. He has Wendy there.

She's a real girl. She grows up and actually marry someone. Peter Pan stays king of the lost boys forever. And you know, maybe it's better to be king of the lost boys, but not to be king at all, but maybe not too. King of the damned is not exactly something to, it's not a dominant hierarchy to strive for dominating. So that's the Peter Pan's story, and it's a right, it's the right story for the modern age. That's for sure. So that's a negative element of the great father.

Here's a positive element of the great father. Here's a positive element of the great father. This is a representation of Moses receiving the rules for living from God on high what we talked about that already. I see that story of the revelation of structure. That's the story of mankind. We're acting out a moral structure. Well, what is it? Now, and then we get a glimpse

of what the moral structure isn't. It hits people with the force of a revelation, then it can be articulated, and that's partly what the story of Moses lays out. And you see here, this picture, I really like this one too. This is a supplicant, basically, someone who's hit hard by a divine vision. It's God in heaven. Again, very similar to this, with the cross in the background. And it's something like to transcend your littleness, because look, he's looking up. That's what's at the top of the dominant hierarchy. It's what's at the top of all possible dominant hierarchies.

Look up. That's the father who supports the son that's transcending his own vulnerability, right? Willing to bear it voluntarily, and not to, and not to shirk from that. It's exactly right. And it is what you admire in people. You know, you admire people who are courageous, and they were strong.

And when you decompose that, it means that they're able to act appropriately, and in a helpful, compassionate, wise, and tough manner, despite the fact that they're able to act appropriately and in a helpful, compassionate, wise, and tough manner, despite the fact that they're beset with all of the problems of mortality that beset everyone else. Well, how does it go wrong? Well, that's all propaganda for Hitler. You look at the imagery, you know, he's a knight, that's on the right. He's the knight of nationalism. Well, that's God the Father too. It's a little bit one-sided, because there's more to the Father than the state.

That's the thing, and that's the problem with nationalism and its totalitarian variance. And we're moving in that direction fast. You see Europe right now fragmenting again, because the European Union is too amorphous and maybe not well enough bordered and everyone is getting nervous and they're saying back to the state, back to the state, it's fair enough, fair enough. You need to be around people who are like you, so to speak, that you have built a consensus with, but to subordinate yourself to the state and to make its head the bearer of the archetype of the night without having that element of individuality, and it is absolutely pathological. We've already been down that road, right? Because the national socialists were hyper-national,

just like both in Germany and in Italy, and it's attractive again. It's interesting here. You see Hitler as a knight, and up here there's a bird you know and that bird should be the dove because that should be the Holy Ghost if the iconography was proper but it's not it's an eagle and an eagle is a bird of Carian Eater right it feeds on corpses while it's worth thinking about so that's the woman worshipping the strong father another representation of Hitler as a knight, and then there's Hitler as wise father, and you see, surrounded by people there who focused in on him, as if he's of archetypal import.

And then this is a poster from the Allies, the anti-Nazi poster from the Allies, and you see right there that Hitler and the Nazis are assimilated to a mess of predatory snakes. It's like, well, why? Well, if you want to appeal to someone's determination to destroy, you say, well, here you are, and you're already to go. Let's go kill some snakes, and everyone can say yes, and then you say, well, there's the snakes right there. And the thing is, it's true to some degree, because you have plenty of snakes just like

everyone else. And so it's easy. That's the first step towards demonization. And you can do it just like that. It's no problem. The archetype will map perfectly, especially if there's already tension between the groups. Or if the other group is identifiable in some manner,

or you can make it identifiable, disgust is the best way to do that. Not fear, disgust, fear. To fear someone, you have to respect them. You don't want to burn everything that the person that you fear owns. You want to burn everything that the person who disgusts you owns. And so you'll see people who are pushing the nationalist agenda hard and Hitler did this beautifully. Everything that was outside of the area and domain of purity wasn't to be feared. It was disgusting. It was contemptuous, and it should be destroyed and purified

by fire. And that was his message. The Nazis were unbelievably great at using fire of purification as a symbolic message. Well, it has an archetypal power. And Then you see here, this is an English poster from the World War II, asking people to buy bonds to fund the American or the British war effort. Can you see these talon-like claws, Japan and Nazi Germany reaching out to the Virgin mother and her infant child, right? Deep use of deep subordination of archetypal imagery for the purposes, well, I hesitate to say propaganda

because World War II in some sense was a pretty clear cut, but you get the point. And there's the uniformity of the state, right? So the go step, everybody moves exactly the same way. Everybody's put, everybody's turned into exactly the same carbon copy of everyone else. All the diversity is pushed out of the state. It's subordinated to the supreme leader and the hierarchy becomes incredibly rigid and homogenous. So like, well, that's great for fast action, but it's terrible if you don't know where you're going. You need some diversity.

You need some flaws in the clist crystalline structure in case you're on the wrong path. And that's why you can't have everyone being the supreme leader's acolytes. The whole bloody thing wanders off in one direction. And because we don't know the right direction to go, wandering off in a single direction is extraordinarily dangerous. You will eventually fall over a cliff. So there's the Nazis use of light at night. They're unbelievably good at there.

There's one of the things that made fascism so difficult to fight because with communism, because it was a fully articulated philosophy. You could attack it rationally. But fascism never really did that. What they did instead was use ritual, right? Huge mass rallies and highly emotionally supercharged meetings, and then the use of light and fire. And so Hitler built the biggest parade grounds

in human history to host the Nuremberg rallies. And he would get in front of them on this huge stage with Greek columns, very impressive looking, and have blocks of thousands of people organized perfectly, orderly. The Germans are good at order, and order is associated with disgust sensitivity, incredibly organized, orderly displays, complete, and then at night with fire. And behind him, he would have all of the search lights from the Luftwaffe lined

up dozens of them, shooting their lights straight up, miles into the sky. So he'd stand in front of these incredibly impressive displays of light long before there were rock shows and so forth doing that. You know, it was unparalleled in history and addressed the crowd. And it was very good at addressing the crowd. He'd say something. And if people were listening, he'd'd say more of it and if they were listening, he'd say more of it. And because he was addressing the mob, the mob got exactly from Hitler what they wanted. And we saw what that was like, right? 120 million people dead in no time flat. And the worst horrors that were ever perpetrated on people, maybe. Because there's no shortage of perpetrated horrors. Stalin, same thing, Stalin the great father, right?

Wise man at the helm of the ship of the state. This is after the wall came down, some old man kissing a gilded statue of Stalin before it's going to be torn down. There he is with happy children, and not the children that his policies starve to death, as you might well imagine. There he is in his military uniform sitting on what's all crawl intensive purposes of throne. And this is really an uncanny one.

It's very positive, right? That's Hitler, or still in his head of state. He's in this hellish mandola of fire, perfect with God the Father at his head. That's Lenin, you know, who people still, who people still revere. You may know, and perhaps you don't, that I was nominated to be rector of the University of Glasgow, and so which is an honorary position. And today, yesterday, the different candidates put up their manifestos, and the student newspaper put them up, and then wrote analysis of the manifestos, which were biased, and they were

appallingly biased in one sided. And I wrote and told them that, and they said, well, we have a perfect right to our political opinion, and I thought, yeah, well, for sure. But, you know, you are journalists after all, and maybe you could be just trying to tell what's happening. It's like, no, no, no, there's none of that. And they said that one of the candidates that they, that they clearly recommended, who seems to be a person who's perfectly heroic in his own right, I mean, he's taken on very many difficult legal cases and worked for the oppressed and downtrodden

who clearly exist. It was either him or another candidate doesn't really matter that they described as bolshe and unspoken bolshe meaning bolshevik like. It's like, well, you know, he's appropriately bolshe. It's like, it's no different than saying, well, he's appropriately not see like. Like, what the hell is that?

I mean, there were 50 million people that were killed in the Soviet Union by the bullshies. And maybe twice that many in China. And that does, it says nothing about Cambodia. And all the other places, there were radical left bloodbaths. You think it's cute to call someone bullshy? Jesus, it's appalling. It's appalling.

It's not some fashionable thing that you do. It's the participation in some of the deepest intellectual morasses of evil that human beings have ever managed to create, and yet it's fashionable. It shows you what the universities are worth. Well, there's the downside of Stellin. Yeah. As Stellin is hang, man.

That sort of cartoon would have gotten you killed in the Soviet Union. There's Stellin as St. himself in a stained glass representation. There's a statue of Stellin covered with red paint for the blood after the wall came down. There's Stellin as what, it's very much like Modena's St. and Hike, look at that. And it's exactly the same marketable idea. There's the Americans going, it had a cap in hand to get a little large s from Papa marketable idea. There's the Americans going hat, cap and hand, to get a little largest from pop a salad. That's a painting of the communists forcibly collectivizing

the productive farmers in the Soviet Union. In the early 1920s, the Kulaks, right? Everything from whom they stole and raped them, and murdered them, and shipped them off to Siberia, and killed them, and wiped out the productive farmers of the Soviet Union and then starved six million Ukrainians to death and there's some poor kid in the 1930s whose ribs are showing, you know, taking a bath in this pot with his eyes wide and, you know, he's one of the fortunate ones because he's still alive. It's like Bolshee. Yeah, cute, pretty, fun, fashionable, lovely. Well, that's the decomposition

of chaos into God the Father, half providing security, an order and half providing tyranny. That's the archetype. You have to put up with it. That's what your society is like. You try to interact with it in a way that enables the positive part of it to come forth, and then it does the same thing. Chaos gives rise to the father who's nurturing and encouraging, and that gives rise, that produces the sun. It was very hard to find that image, I can tell you. And then that gives rise to the proper balance of the proper attitude from the father produces the same thing, the son who's the hero, the individual who's the hero, the

consciousness, the consciousness of the child that's willing to go forth, eyes open, and voluntarily confront chaos and turn it into order, and that's the proper pathway for human beings. So here's a way of thinking about it. I showed you that diagram, you know, of how you decompose the value structure and you can do it right down to the level of detail. You also want to make dinner. You go below that higher resolution.

You cut up vegetables, you move your arm, it decomposes all the way, differentiates down all the way to skill. You put these skills together and you represent them with abstract concepts. I can take care of my family, can undertake this job at work. That makes me a decent father. That's part of being a good person. Question is, what's at the pinnacle of that? At the upper end of the abstraction hierarchy, because these things should be organized all the way up into a complete hierarchy.

What does it mean to be a good person? Well, it means we've walked through it. It means you win the set of games, you go out into the world and explore and you bring back what you've found, and you build yourself out of it, and you share it with other people. That's an old, old story.

That's no different than the story of the collective hunt. It's exactly the same thing, right? You build yourself into someone that can have a long-term relationship with someone of the opposite sex, generally speaking, so that you can bring children into the world world and turn them into exploratory heroes and stabilize the state. That's what should be at the top, and that thing that's at the top, it's the same thing. It's the integration of all of those things into the same thing, and that's the same as the sun, that's the same as the halo, it's the same as the thing that emerges from the belly of the whale. It's all of those things. And you also know that because you know that you have the capacity for admiration. It's

in you. It's in you. It's locked into your biology. And it's locked into your sociology. You see what you admire. And that's a partial representation of the ultimate ideal. It's as simple as that. So I kind of nested this, hey, so I should just explain this diagram briefly. So it was a map I tried to make in some sense of my own identity. I mean, just using myself as an example of someone typically situated in society. So, you know, I have this role, which is kind of a high resolution role. I'm a father and a husband, and I also run a business. And so the father and husband thing is sort of nest high resolution role. I'm a father and a husband, and I also run a business. And so the father and husband thing is sort of nested inside of that

because it's dependent on my economic success to some degree. And then that's nested inside a capitalist structure. And then that's nested inside, well, I said American personality, but it's sort of, that's good enough. And then that's nested inside the humanistic Western personality. And inside the Judeo-Christian personality. And that's all nested inside this thing that's best conceptualized as something approximating the exploratory hero. And so that's a that's a value structure that's and you know you can

differentiate that to much higher level than farther and husband. We did that when we decomposed things right down to, you know, their motor actions. And you want what you want. And this is, I think, there's something that's transcendent about this. You want all those things stacked up. So they're all operating properly at the same time, all the way up and all the way down. And I don't even know how far down means. Like, if you get all those things together, your physiology would be organized and oriented properly too. Oh, you know, and that means your organs work properly and the microelements of the board properly and all the way down.

And then if everything is organized like that too, the society starts to work. Everything starts to organize itself along a horizontal axis where each level of the structure supports every other level. And you can feel that, I believe. That's what you feel when you're engaged in doing something meaningful.

You can feel those things coming together. And you can also feel like that as a kind of strength. It pushes you forward instead of pulling you backwards. So, and I think that your, our nervous systems are very sophisticated. And they orient us in time and space. And they can tell us when they're in the right place at the right time. And people love that.

And I think you experienced that when you're deeply engaged in music as well. It puts you there momentarily, right? So you're in a cathedral and you're listening to some remarkable music. If the light pouring in, you're in trees. Because that's what a cathedral is. That's what the arch is. It's light coming through the trees. That's what's represented in the stones.

You're in there, you're looking at the light. It's pouring down at you. You're at the center of the world and there's a great piece of music playing. And it's an indication that everything is stacking up along this one pole. That's what it's supposed to produce. That produces a religious experience

if it works properly. You know that, you go to rock concerts, you go listen to music. It's what the hell do you think you're doing there? If you're not having a quasi religious experience, you think you'd go otherwise? And just because you don't know that that's what happening doesn't mean it isn't what's happening.

People have been gathering together in groups and transcending the limits of their pathological individuality through music and ritual since the beginning of time. Why would it be any different for us? And the lights there, that's what the light show is for. It's the same thing. It's just that the religious element of it

is stripped away partly because we've criticized that to death so carelessly that we can't integrate it anymore into ceremonies like that. And I mean fair enough, but but it's not like that comes without a loss. People hunger for that more deeply than anything else. Questions? Yes? You touched on this one week. Today, but also in your conversation with Sam Harris. One is to ask, is there a relationship between a mythological idea of sacrifice and human sacrifice or whatever type of sacrifice and a psychological idea of the late gratification?

And if so, could it be a factor in the correlation between conscientiousness and... It's exactly, the question is, is there a relationship between the idea of sacrifice and delay of gratification, and is that related to conscientiousness? Under the... Yes, well, the conscientiousness relationship is a tough one. You know, we tested to see if conscientious people were more likely to delay gratification, in classic delay of gratification tasks, and we found no effect. We found IQ effect, and we found a reverse effect for extroversion and positive mood.

And so what happens is that happier people are more impulsive, they're more likely to grasp what's right in front of them in the present. But conscientiousness is an extraordinarily tough nut to crack. And I do think it's associated to some degree with the proclivity for sacrifice of the present to the future, but finding ways of testing that has proved very, very difficult. So, but the relationship between sacrifice and delay of gratification, those are the same words, right?

Delayed gratification is a sacrifice. And you know, there's famous experiments, you know, you may know the marshmallow experiment. And that is, basically, you take kids for or so, and you say, you sit them in a room and add a little table, and you say, here's a marshmallow. If you don't eat that for 10 minutes, we'll come in and give you another marshmallow, right?

And so the kids, and they videotape the kids, and the tapes are actually pretty funny, because the poor kids do everything they can, not to look at that candy or marshmallow. It's like they sit on their hands, they hum, they look at the ceiling, it's like they try to distract themselves, and some of them just, it's like, oh, tell with it,

and they eat it. And then others can manage it. And those, the data showed, you know, and I wouldn't say this study has been replicated many times, but the data showed quite clearly that the kids who could delay gratification at an early stage were doing quite a bit better later in life. Now, I don't know to what degree that was controlled for IQ because such things matter. But the point is, is that, well, the point is the point that you're making is that you can delay, you can only delay gratification intelligently, though, if the social structure is stable, right?

Because basically, what if you delay gratification, you're making a bargain with the potential future, and the bargaining is everybody's going to keep acting the same way, so that the future is the same as the present. Because otherwise, you'll delay gratification, and then everything will fall apart, and you won't get your cake and you won't get to eat it. And so society has to be quite stable. It has to be stabilized by the contractual relationship between people before delaying gratification

is a useful strategy. This is also why you see in chaotic circumstances where the future becomes uncertain, people forego delay of gratification very very rapidly and And perhaps appropriately so although you can get a spiral going in the other direction there must be the behavior of precursor of psychological state classification, or the same change. How you usually say to do something to become part of it, you have to have the doubt first, and then understand the truth. I would say it's a chicken and egg problem,

because what happens as you stabilize society's being conscientious becomes more useful. And so then you're going to be selected for as a consequence of being conscientious and that's going to stabilize the society even more. These are roughly known as Baldwin effects. So that's where let's call it a genetic transformation, produces a behavioral transformation that transforms the environment so the genetic transformation is more likely to propagate.

You can get unbelievably rapid evolutionary movements when you get a loop like that developing. And they happen frequently. And that's also how in some sense a meme can be turned into a genetic can manifest itself genetically. So if you have an idea that spreads through the culture and it tilts the culture in a certain way such that those who hold that idea are likely to be more successful, then the

meme and the biology will align themselves across time. And, well, I think you see that happening. That's that to some degree, that's what's happened, as religious stories have propagated themselves as well. Because as the idea of the hero becomes clearer, so to speak, and then it manifests itself more clearly in the society, then there's more rewards for doing it, then the selection pressures get more positively related

to that kind of behavior and the whole thing loops upwards. So it's something like that. In terms of treating mental health disorders, we're doing we should draw the line or how should we draw the line in pharmaceutical interventions and various other psychothertomites. I mean to what at what point is depression and anxiety should be treated with medicine and at what point is depression and anxiety should be treated with medicine, and at what point should it be? Is it a... Okay, that's a good question. So the question is, how do you differentiate the utility of behavioral slash psychotherapeutic treatments for conditions like depression versus medical treatments?

Okay, so the first thing I would say is, don't underestimate the utility of medical treatments. Okay, so the first thing I would say is don't underestimate the utility of medical interventions. Depression is a catacetastrophe. It carries with it a very high suicide rate, and it also levels people out, and it's really hard on their families. And so, and it's physiologically extraordinarily damaging. And so, if you're in a depressive state state and it's severe, you can try an antidepressant. You'll know in a month if it works. If it works, well, maybe it'll help you get your life together. Like we could say, well, maybe you're depressed because your life isn't very well together. Could be.

Sometimes people are depressed. Their life is just, it isn't fine because no one's life is fine. Everyone's life is a tragedy. But sometimes people have their lives in order as much as you could expect anyone to have. They have friends, they have an intimate relationship, they have a career that they like. You know, they're qualified, industrious people,

working hard on what they're doing and really playing a minimum number of games with themselves. And they're terribly depressed. Anti-depressant, man, that's sometimes that will just fix it. And so, hooray, like you are biological entity, if there's something out there that can help you strengthen yourself so that you can prevail great. And you know, people, you hear, everyone takes anti-depressants, you know, everyone's taking them. It's like no one takes those bloody things without serious consideration. Half the time I spend with my clients who are depressed is often the two years long attempt

to get them to tentatively try an antidepressant because they're so guilty that they're relying on an external crutch to sort out their lives that they can't even tolerate it. But you know, I say, well, look, man, what if you had diabetes? You know, I'm gonna take your insulin. It's like, you got stressed,

you blew out at your weakest point. That's what happens when you get stressed. If there's something out there that might help you, it's like, try it for God's sake. You'll know in a month, and you just stop if it doesn't work. Now, having said that, you want to do a multi-dimensional analysis. It's like, well, do you have any friends?

Do you have an intimate relationship or are you pursuing one? Do you have a reasonable career? Are you as educated as you are intelligent? Do you have something useful to do with your time outside of work? Do you have a drug or alcohol problem? Are there other behavioral issues like sleep dysregulation and lack of eating that

are contributing to the pathology? You want to differentiate all of that and wherever you can make a behavioral intervention so much the better. But sometimes too, you're dealing with people whose lives are so wrecked that they don't even know where to start. They're different than the ones who have everything in order to say, and you say, well, try this, man, maybe you won't cut your throat in the next month, because if you're dead, it's going to be hard to work with you. And so, so medical interventions, anything, if you're sick, you do what it's necessary to get better, and you leave your pride behind if you, if you have to. And that, that says nothing about the utility of the behavioral interventions. You want to hit the problem with everything you have at your disposal. But some antiidepressants, especially for people

whose lives are together and who are depressed, antidepressants could be absolutely miraculous. So, you know, when you hear about the clinical evidence in their favor being iffy, and that's partly because the diagnosis of depression isn't very well formulated, it's very different to have a terrible life than to be depressed. And antidepressants can only help you so much different to have a terrible life than to be depressed. An

antidepressants can only help you so much if you have a terrible life. So, yeah. Yes. You've spoken about the musical activities that are meaningful and how our consciousness might be very good at identifying those. I mean mean, I'm sure the flavors are light. You know what I'm talking about, right? And I feel like some things can hijack and some things that are not actually new for what are useful to your life can make themselves...

Sure. That's what does some personalities? Video games, for example, or ones... Video games are for example, video games. Video games are, okay, so the question is, can that sense of meaning be hijacked? And the answer to that is absolutely. Absolutely.

Because you could say that the ultimate sense of meaning is composed of the union of fragmentary senses of meaning. And the fragmentary senses of meaning can be overwhelmingly powerful. Anger, sexual lust. And the sorts of things that you experience when you're playing a video game, which are very carefully calibrated to keep you on the edge of exploration, let's say. Now, I'm not a foe of video games because games are complicated, and it isn't clear what

people are doing when they're playing them. They may be expanding their cognitive skills. They may be learning to cooperate. They may be learning to engage in complex problems solving. And so, but part of it's also a matter of balance, you know, 50 hours a week, probably not, unless you're going to go pro, right? Because there's other things you need to be attending to, it's not a stable solution for you, your family, your society. It's two, one-sided. Yeah, and you can get pulled down rabbit holes of all sorts that are one-sided pursuits of meaning.

So, and it's something we're actually going to talk about as the later class is unfold. The question is, how do you stop yourself from falling prey to a pathologized sense of meaning? And I think one of the answers to that is don't lie. Because what you're hoping is that your nervous system is sufficiently healthy and well programmed so that what it reads out to you is reliable. And if you pathologize your psyche by either through sins of omission,

let's say, or outright deception. You're going to warp that internal structure, and it's not going to read out properly to you. And then your sense of meaning will lead you astray. So, like, one of the reasons for speaking the truth, I shouldn't say that, because you don't know how to speak the truth, but you do know how not to lie. And it's a game you're playing with yourself. You can define the damn lies. No one else has to do that for you. You try not to utter falsehoods because you warp your neurological structure by doing so, and then it will read

out pathologically. And then if you rely on it to guide you, it will run you right off a cliff. So that's why there's a moral element to this. Is if you're going to rely on your sense of meaning, make sure that you don't pollute the mechanism. See, this is partly why people go to confession, right, which is like I said, psychotherapeutic technique. It's like, okay, what stupid, miserable, wretched things did I do this week?

That's a good thing to make conscious, right? Because maybe you cannot do them the next week. And you think, well, why would you bother? It's like, well, you're in a ship. It's sailing across the stormy seas. If you're hacking holes in it with a pickaxe, you should probably pay attention to that before you sink.

So it's a good idea to keep what you're doing that's stupid in mind, so that you can stop doing it. And so, then you can more and more rely on yourself and your own, you know, your own conscience, let's say, as a guide to proper action. You know in the Pinocchio story is that the conscience was not an unhearing guide for Pinocchio. It had to learn. And so, it's also partly pushing yourself into new situations and differentiating yourself so that you get wiser.

And so it's courage as well as truth. Those might be the two. There's more, beauty, courage, truth, you know, the fundamental virtues. Why be virtuous, that's the question. And so that you can bear the suffering of life without becoming corrupt. Right? It's a practical, it's a practical,

and there's nothing more practical than that. So, let's see what misery and people do, you know? It's exciting, misery. So, let's see what misery and people do, you know. It's exciting, misery. So, other questions. All right then. See you next Wednesday. … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … you