The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Maps of Meaning 10, 11, 12, & 13

Episode Date: March 27, 2017

Part 1: Maps of Meaning 10 Figuring Evil – Starting at 0:32 Part 2: Maps of Meaning 11 Losing Religion – Starting at 27:57 Part 3: Maps of Meaning 12 Truths that Matter – Starting at 55:22 Part 4: Maps of Meaning 13 The Force Within – Starting at 1:22:45 Links YouTube Video playlist Self-Authoring Programs Dr Peterson's Patreon Support Page One Time Donation to Dr. Peterson

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This episode is an amalgamation of episodes 10-13 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVO. You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon, or by finding a link in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, Self-Authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. As I've mentioned to you before, each of the three aspects of experience, so the things you know, the things you don't know, and the fact of yourself have a very ambivalent underlying structure, both positive and negative, so that the things you don't know

are interesting and compelling in the sources of new information, but also the source of the things that undermine you both physically and mentally. And the things you know, of course, your culture disciplines you and shapes you into a full person, but also at exactly the same time, molds you and crushes you in a particular direction, rather than any of the other directions you might have gone in. And then finally, with regards to the individual, we spent a substantial amount of time discussing the individual's capability, capacity to make order out of chaos, and sometimes to make chaos out of order in the service of a higher order,

and that's all to the good, but just like culture and nature have their negative aspects, so do the individual. And I think, personally, this is where Christian mythology, in particular, comes into its own. I think of all the major religions. Christianity has the most thoroughly developed what you might describe as formal model of evil. And that model isn't part of the canonical writings of Christianity, say,

encapsulated in the Bible, but part of the cloud of sort of natural mythology and storytelling that surrounds the canonical writings. So you could say that although Christianity and Buddhism have spent a substantial amount of time developing up a representation of the hero. Christianity in particular has also spent a substantial amount of time developing a formal portrait of the figure that stands in opposition to the hero. And I think the most appropriate term for that figure who takes multiple forms in mythology is the adversary because the adversarial spirit is a spirit that stands in opposition to everything, stands in opposition to nature, stands in opposition to culture, and most specifically stands in opposition

to that aspect of the human being that's both exploratory and creative. Now the last time we talked, I had a chance to describe to you how the figures of the adversarial brothers emerged naturally at the end of Genesis as a coded to the story, right? Adam and Eve developed self-consciousness, they developed knowledge of their own mortality and death, and as the primordial parents of humanity, their first children take the form of the hostile brothers, which is to say that if you're the child of nature and the child of culture, the sort of ultimate parents, then as an individual, you take two forms,

a positive form and a negative form, and the negative form is characterized in many ways by a kind of absolute hatred of the good, hatred of the positive form. And I think that you can't understand the full human propensity for evil without considering more than the territoriality, more than the innate territoriality of human beings. So if you look at animals, well animals are territorial, and they fight to preserve their territory,

and it's a rational struggle. They're fighting for resources and for a place that they can, that they can operate and live in and reproduce in efficiently, but human beings are substantively different from that in that they're agonistic conflict, they're aggression. Often seems to be motivated by something more akin to the pure desire for destruction rather than for any rational and whatsoever.

And so from that perspective, I would say, as an example, the fact that Hitler ended up committing suicide in a bunker beneath Germany's capital at the end of the Second World War when Berlin was in flames, when all of Germany was in flames and when his country was completely defeated. After tens of millions of people had died in the conflict, including, of course, the seven million or so people that were killed in the Holocaust, the normal mode of interpretation of that would be what a terrible defeat for Hitler but an equally valid and

I think an equally valid primafacey argument, one I think that's actually more valid is that it wasn't a defeat for Hitler at all. It was precisely what he was aiming at right from the beginning because his mode of being was intensely adversarial. And I would also say that it's certainly possible that the full nature of his motivations weren't even necessarily clear to him as they unfolded across time during the Second World War, no more than the full motivations of any human being are necessarily accessible to them as they act out whatever it is that they act out. So Carl Jung says, for example, that we act out great mythological stories. That doesn't necessarily mean you know the story, it just means you act it out.

So for example, you see people whose lives are repetitive bouts of tragedy and what they're acting out is a tragic story. And they know it in so far as they're actually acting it out, but they don't necessarily have an explicit model of the relationship between their patterns of behavior and the constantly tragic outcomes they produce. Well, that doesn't even necessarily mean that what they're doing isn't voluntary, because things can be voluntary, even if you don't understand them fully. There's an aspect to the human psyche that's a nest of vipers, so to speak, because you can't necessarily trust what you see. And that means not only when you're looking at someone else's say,

but even when you're looking in the mirror. You can't be sure that what you say you're doing is exactly what you're doing. Your motivations aren't transparent, and they may not even be clear. So I suppose the idea that lurks behind this formalization is that freedom of choice is such a good that one of its subsidiary necessities, which is that there has to be a polar distinction

between good and evil, is worth having. Freedom is so important that it justifies the distinction between good and evil. And I think that's a reasonable way to presume it's reasonable to presume that that's the manner in which experience is actually structured. And there's complex reasons for that. One would be that under the most optimal circumstances, which is something we'll talk about as this proceeds to a close, that means in a sense you can have your cake and eat it too, which means the potential existence of good and evil allows for freedom of choice. And then if the choice is always towards the good, then you have the benefits of freedom of choice,

plus the benefits of the good, the only price you have to pay is the constant possibility of evil. It's very much like the structure of Christianity. So you have the highest God whose son is Christ, but you have the figure of Satan lurking in the background who's also got a filial relationship with the highest God. It makes for a confusing kind of theology because in many situations, of course, Christ is identified specifically with God the Father, but Satan always lurks in the background and his existential status is indeterminate because since God is everything, then it's very difficult to make the case that the evil spirit isn't a derivative of God. It's not easy thing to get straightened out rationally.

And I think Milton in Paradise Lost, as a very good attempt, makes a very good attempt to explain exactly what this might mean, how there could be an overarching transcendent power, and there could be two subordinate elements to that, one evil and one good, without destroying the idea that God as such is good, and without eradicating the reality of evil, a very, very complex argument to make. Now, the notion of evil is also a very, very complex argument to make. Now, the notion of evil is also very, very complex idea. So if you look at arguments that support atheism and I mentioned some of these like Ivan's argument

in the brother's Karamazov, where Ivan says, well, the world in as such, experiences such, must be evil because it's predicated on the blood of innocence, the suffering of children, the fact that there's vast injustices in the world, the fact that there's vast injustices in the world, is indicative that there's no such thing as a good God, or to speak in less personified terms, is evidence that the structure of experience as such is untenable morally.

It shouldn't be, because it's predicated on suffering. Jeffrey Burton Russell, who's written a whole series of books on the nature of evil, makes a very clear distinction between different categories of terrible events that I think help bring this into clarity. So imagine this, imagine first that it's useful to make a distinction between tragedy and evil. Okay, now tragedy is when the bad befalls the good. An earthquake is tragic, so or disease is tragic. Now it's easy to regard a disease or an earthquake as evil as well,

but the problem with that is that it doesn't seem to be any motivation to it. And so it's more likely, it's more reasonable to think something like, well, people are vulnerable. They have to be vulnerable in order to give existence a viewpoint. One of the consequences of their vulnerability is that they're susceptible to tragedy. If their vulnerability is a precondition for being, then the fact that they're susceptible to tragedy isn't necessarily an evil, it's just a consequence of their limitation. Then you say, well, what constitutes evil if you can't put earthquakes and diseases and so forth into that category?

Well, then it seems to be something more dependent on choice, which is the argument that Iliata is making. Say, the world does all sorts of terrible things to people, but they're frequent. It's frequently the case that people act in such a way to make things worse rather than better, right? So if you look at the consequences of the rise to power of the Nazis, for example, doesn't seem reasonable to put the Nazi concentration camp

in the same category from an ethical perspective as the earthquake. Because the earthquake is an emergent consequence of the rules that govern physical existence. Whereas the Nazi death camp is something that was planned. It didn't have to be. It seems to be an aspect of choice. And this seems to be the idea that's lurking underneath both this mythology and aliyah

is comment on it. The mere fact that the world is terrible does not mean that it's evil. But then when you look at specifically human actions, there's this aspect of twisted choice that Frey also makes much of. He says, if you look at the structure of human history and you try to explain why it has such a bloody and terrible course, it doesn't seem sufficient just to attribute it, say, to the conditions

of existence or to ignorance. It seems more like there's a force behind it, so to speak, manifest, say, in every individual that's actually aiming at the suffering, instead of just allowing it to happen, or instead of not stepping in to stop it, but actually aiming at it. Now, so let's take a look at the stories. And let's take a look at the leading figures. So we know, for example, that the figure of Satan in Christianity is associated with a number of strange forms, right? The first association we know of is that he's associated with the dragon in the Garden

of Eden, right? And so that there's a profound ambivalence in Christianity about the meaning of the opening act of Genesis. Because on the one hand you have, when Adam and Eve are still profoundly unconscious, they don't suffer. But they're profoundly unconscious, they're not self-conscious, they're not aware of themselves. So in many ways they're still animals. So there's a gnaustic line of speculation. The gnaustics were a Christian sect that believed that redemption could at least partly be attained by understanding rather than just faith.

The monastics believed that the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve towards self-consciousness was a more developed aspect of God than the God that had created Adam and Eve to begin with because the unconsciousness that characterized Adam and Eve was too underdeveloped to be perfect. And so they had to be tempted forward into a more fully developed consciousness. And so, although classical Christianity associated the serpent in the tree with Lucifer, who's the bringer of light, who's Satan, the nostic thread of reasoning said, well, wait a minute, it's not that simple, because, yes, self-consciousness makes you aware of death and vulnerability and gnarx you out into the profane world, but there's an aspect of it that kind of looks like enlightenment.

And you know this already in your own lives because often when you believe something and you're unconsciously convinced of the adequacy of that model, and then you find that it's not sufficient, right? And so you crumble in disappointment. You put your trust in someone and you find out say they're not worthy of that trust. And that, that the evidence that enlightens you breaks that frame of reference and makes you collapse, you think that's a terrible thing. You can't help but feel that as a real betrayal and as an act even of evil. But then a year later or two years later you might look back and think God you know I really needed that. I really needed

that lesson because as a consequence of learning that I'm much more mature and much more likely to establish stable relationships and so it's easy to see that from one perspective something can be terrible then from another it might not be terrible at all and even even in classic Christianity, you get this strange ambivalence about the events in Genesis that run something like this. Well, yes, it was an act of the most evil spirit, the spirit of enlightenment, the spirit of rationality, or the bringer of light, Lucifer, to knock Adam and Eve out of their transcendental unconsciousness and to start history.

It was an evil act. But on the other hand, it was also the precondition for the later emergence of Christ. And as far as the Christians are concerned, that's the greatest event in history. So without this initial opening act, this tragic opening act, there'd be no reason for the whole redemptive story. And therefore, considered from the perspective

of the total story, the opening tragedy cannot purely be considered evil, very, very complicated line of reasoning. Now the other thing you see here, and I think this relates back to our initial map, and this also helps you understand the way people think. Now I said already that it's real easy to confuse tragedy and evil. Right? Okay. So what that means is that it's real easy to confuse the negative aspect of the unknown with evil.

And likewise, it's very easy to confuse the negative aspect of culture with evil, your own culture, the tyrannical aspect of it, or the culture of other people. So it's very easy for example for us to demonize the foreigner. And that's basically because there's a part of our mind that presumes that all things that strike us negatively, all things that produce negative emotion on our part. Like fear are the same thing. So there's a blurry category of evil that's all terrible natural things,

all terrible social things, and then whatever nastiness the individual can generate among themselves. It's much more useful to draw a clear distinction between these different categories, because that clarity of thought can help you focus in, most most specifically on those things that the individual is responsible for in terms of turning the world to waste. So Milton says this figure of Satan, Lucifer, the light-bringer, always associated with rationality. Milton presents him as a remarkable creature, right? He's the

highest angel in God's heavenly hierarchy. He's Christ's elder brother in a similar mythological vein. He's the most powerful angel that ever lived. So at least in the opening stages of this act, Satan is presented as something absolutely remarkable. Now, the problem is here, his very remarkableness starts to work against him. And what happens is that

as he grows in power and strength in this heavenly hierarchy, he starts to become convinced that the omniscient himself, whatever that transcendent figure is, is unnecessary. So the idea is that whatever Satan represents decides because of his own pride, his own belief and his own sufficiency that the transcendent can be eradicated from consideration. And the way Milton presents that is as a revolution in heaven, fundamentally. So imagine that the story is something like this. Well, George Kelly way back in like 1955 noted that what human beings like more than anything else

really when you get right down to it is to be right. Why? Well, it's a pain to be wrong, right? Because if you're wrong, then the little structure that you're using to conjure up the world has to dissolve and then you have to do a lot of really aggravating work, exploratory work, and creative work,

to put it back together. And during the time before you put it back together, then you're flooded with negative motivational states, right? You don't know which way is up. Metaphorically speaking. So we don't like to be right. And so what does that mean? Well, psychologists know that people have a very strong

confirmatory bias, which basically means that if you bring a frame of reference to bear on the world, the probability is very high that you will look for confirming evidence, and you will discount disconfirming evidence. Now, the other thing that is characteristic of great figures of evil like Satan is their tendency to lie, right? So Satan is Prince of the Lie. Now what does that mean exactly? So,

T.S. Eliot wrote this poem called the cocktail hour. He talks, this woman who goes in for psychiatric treatment, the woman says to the psychiatrist, I'm telling you, I really, really hope there's something wrong with me because I'm having a miserable time of it. And as far as I can tell there's only two options here. Either I'm okay and I'm having a miserable time because the world is terrible, in which case there's nothing I can do about it, or there's something wrong with me at some level of analysis that I don't really comprehend. And although that's a painful option, I'm really about it. Or is something wrong with me at some level of analysis that I don't really comprehend. And although that's a painful option, I'm really hoping it's true because if there's something wrong with me, possibly I can fix it. And if there's something wrong with the structure, the world will, what's there to do about that? Often what you see in psychotherapy is a battle

between those two perspectives going on in the minds of the client. The client is in a situation where they're repetitively facing tragedy. They have a specific viewpoint about the world, like their viewpoint might be, well, when it comes right down to it, you really can't trust other people. And they have all sorts of reasons for believing that. They were abused as children, or they've had a bad developmental history. A number of relationships that haven't gone well. They have all the facts at their disposal to justify that particular perspective. But the truth of the matter is, as long as they hold on to that belief and won't let it

go and no wonder they won't, they're going to continue to suffer. And part of what you're always doing to someone in therapy saying, you know, yeah, you've got a pretty coherent view of the world and all that. And I can understand why you'd like to cram the whole world into that coherent perspective. But the truth of the matter is, as long as you hold on to that, it won't sacrifice it, right? It won't go through this terrible period of disillusion. It's always going to produce the same tragic consequences.

So as long as you hold on to your belief rigidly, everything around you is going to your belief rigidly, everything around you is going to go from bad to worse. Fry says with regards to states, he says a demonic fall as Milton presents it involves defiance of and rivalry with God rather than simple disobedience, and hence the demonic society is a sustained and systematic parody of the divine one. Associated with devils or fallen angels because it seems far beyond normal, normal human capacity in its powers. We read of ascending and descending angels on Jacobs and Plato's ladders, and similar, there seem to be demonic reinforcements in heathen life that account for the almost superhuman grandeur of heathen empires,

especially just before they fall. Two particular notable passages in the Old Testament profits linked to this theme are the denunciation of Babylon in Isaiah 14 and of Tyre in Ezekiel 28. Babylon is associated with Lucifer, the morning star, who said to himself, I will be like the most high. Okay, so let's translate that into modern language. And forget about Babylon.

Let's take the Soviet Union, for example. Instead, and let's say something like this, I will be like the most high. Well, first of all, it's not difficult to read. Stalin into that from a personal perspective. But then it's more complicated than that, because you can't blame the Soviet Union on Stalin. When the wall fell down, we know that one third of East Germans

were KGB informers. You can't blame that on Stalin. You have to blame that on the one third of the East Germans who were KGB informers, right? It's this totalitarian presupposition. Presumption is distributed through the whole society. There's a leader in a hierarchy and all that, but they're not the people to be identified

with the fact of the totalitarian state. It's distributed through the whole society, and it's precisely this. It's what I don't know, I don't need. I don't need what I don't know. One of the things I really like about this sort of Christian metaphysical take on the problem of evil is that it it it adopts strange first principles like if you're an empirical scientist it's very difficult to come to terms with the notion of free choice right because we don't have deterministic models of free choice we don't we don't know how that might occur although

it seems to be a reasonable phenomenological observation that if there's anything true about existence, about the facts of existence, as it's subjectively construed, the fact that you seem to have the faculty of choice seems paramount or primary. Now, one might say, well, that's just a delusion, and we know that because our deterministic models have been so powerful. Or one might say, well, alternatively, we're going to presume the subjective experience to be true and say, well, our deterministic models just aren't sophisticated enough.

And there's no real reason to choose between either of those on an a priori basis, right? They're perhaps equally plausible. And we also might note from the deterministic perspective, of course, that if you go down far enough in your analysis of physical structures down to the quantum level, say say then deterministic models don't hold at all. So determinism has its limits at the lower end or high resolution end of physical inquiry. I have no idea what that might mean for free choice. It just means that there are

levels of analysis that deterministic models do not describe. Christianity takes the stance that the subjective sense of freedom is accurate and then tries to build the world from that point. It presumes that's the enachio-matic principle and so you have God in Milton's Paradise Lost saying with regards both to Lucifer and to human beings who are fallen, he says, so will fall. He and his faithless progeny, speaking of human beings, whose fault, whose but his own, in grade. He had of me, all he could have. I made him just and right.

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. And I like that. I think that makes a fair bit of sense to me. I started to understand this most particularly as a consequence of reading Carl Jung, because Jung has this really interesting notion. And I think it's tied to the idea in Genesis that as soon as Adam becomes self-conscious,

he hides from God. So what if it was this? And we can take an evolutionary tack on this too. What if it was this? What if it was the case that if you never turned away from any phenomenological evidence, then you build a personality that would be strong enough to withstand tragedy. What if that was the case? So the idea here being, let's say you are the person who notes that his or her friends don't exactly trust, trust him. What do you do? Well, to hide away, you just walk away, and then of course you never learn anything.

But let's say by contrast, you say, well, no, no. The first time you get any evidence that you're not 100% trusted, you say, look, I got this pang in my heart, saying the communication between you and I is not exactly straight. Now, sometimes going on here, either you haven't got your frame of reference with regards to me, right? Or there's something wrong with the way I'm looking at the world. Those are the options. So let's have it out. You've got this attitude, and it's doing, it's hurting me. Tell me what you have to say, and I'll tell you what I have to say,

and we'll exchange this patterned information. And as a consequence, we're both going to walk away a little bit more well put together. So God says, yeah, yeah, you know, people get distorted and twisted and bent and warped, but that's their own problem, fundamental, because they have this capacity just to turn away. And as they turn away, they get weaker. And as they get weaker, the world gets worse around them because they can't deal with it and they keep making mistakes.

And well, that's a terrible consequence and all that, but if they just wouldn't turn away to begin with, then there'd be no problem. And there would be no problem, because the world would stop being tragic, because the world's tragic, right? I mean, there you are, little and vulnerable, and things can roll right over you. The world would never lose its tragedy,

but the idea would be instead that you could handle it without becoming corrupted. And that would be sufficient. So the idea would be, it's a tough situation, all things considered, but it's also an interesting and compelling and beautiful one. And it may be that if you didn't turn away the interesting and beautiful and compelling aspect,

would overwhelm the tragic aspect aspect and that would be fine. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful.

I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. We're in this terrible situation, right? God is dead. We've killed him. What does that mean? Well, we've taken our evolved metaphysics, which structures our moral viewpoint and undermined it by rational criticism. A peculiar move philosophically because it was never established on rational grounds. Anyways, we've undermined it rationally and replaced it with well nothing, nothing.

What's the consequence of that? Well, he outlines that here. Of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness. And you can think about this as a prophecy on the events of World War I and World War II, and the Goulog archipelago and the 60 million people dead in the Soviet Union and the whole unfolding of 20th century history and the great ideological battles that characterize that unfolding. So this is something Nietzsche sees coming.

And knows why. He says, of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness. For that means cynically and with innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently. The advent of nihilism, right, to belief in nothing. Our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured

tension that's growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects. It's afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside. Why is the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we've had, hitherto, thus draw their final consequence,

because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals, because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really have. We require at some time new values. Nileism stands at the door, whence comes this uncannyest of all guests. Nile is, right? Your beliefs are undermined once? What's the consequence of that?

Well, one consequence is the belief is undermined. The other consequence is more metaphysical, which is fooled once. You no longer have the belief, but maybe it's even worse than that because human beings can generalize. Fould once, you no longer have any belief in beliefs, which mean you say something like this. I don't care what you think. It doesn't matter what you think. The world is such a terrible place that no interpretation whatsoever can possibly suffice. That's nihilism. No meaning system whatsoever can possibly suffice.

Well, what's the flaw? Well, the flaw is, well, of course, no system of coherent belief can suffice. Because most of the world's transcendent. You can't encapsulate everything that is in your sphere of belief. And what you might say then is that if you ever believe that what you believe is what should support you, the facts you know say, or the interpretation you place in the world, then your faith is badly misplaced. You don't believe in what you believe.

You believe in something that's deeper than that. And so then you see what's wrong with Tolstoy, right? And Tolstoy's story and Tolstoy says, accounting for his collapse in the stability of Christian belief, he said, this all happened, this collapse of my belief, when I was not yet 50 years old. I should have been considered a completely happy man. I had a good loving and beloved wife, fine children,

and a large estate, growing and expanding without any effort on my part. I was respected by friends and acquaintances, praised by strangers, and could claim a certain renown. I was not physically, nor mentally unhealthy. On the contrary, I enjoyed a physical and mental vigor I had rarely encountered among others my age. I could keep up with the peasants working in the fields and work eight and ten hours at

a stretch without suffering any after effects from the strain. And in such a state of affairs I came to a point where I could not live, and even though I feared death, I had to employ ruses against myself to keep from committing suicide. It was as though I had lived a little, wandered a little, until I came to a precipice, and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except rune, and there was no stopping or turning back. No closing my eyes so that I would not see

that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and of the reality of suffering and death, of complete annihilation. I grew sick of life. Some irresistible force was leading me to somehow get rid of it. This thought was such a temptation that I had to use cunning against myself in order not to go through with it. And there I was, a fortunate man carrying a rope from my room where I was alone every

night as I had dressed so that I would not hang myself from the beam between the closets. And I quit going hunting with a gun so that I would not be too easily tempted to rid myself of life. I myself did not know what I wanted. It was a parade of life. I struggled to get rid of it. Yet I hope for something from it. My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life, and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason. And for me this was even more impossible than a denial of life. I myself, according to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil. And people know it. I describe my spiritual condition in myself in this way. My life is some kind of stupid and evil practical joke that someone is playing on me.

In spite of the fact that I did not acknowledge the existence of any someone who might have created me, the notion that someone brought me into the world as a stupid and evil joke seemed to be the most natural way to describe my condition. I could not be deceived. All is vanity. Happy as he who has never been born, death is better than life. We must rid ourselves of life. Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us,

and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living, and that it's better not to exist, the strong act and put an end to this stupid joke, and they use any means of doing it, a rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, or a train. Now the interesting thing about this, I think, is first of all a Russian rodent, and second of all it was written in the late 1900s. And even more particularly is that you note that when the strong act using a rope around

the neck, water, a knife in the heart, and a train, well, Tolstoy is talking about suicide, but there's no necessary reason to presume that this should only be violence and gendered against the self, right? If life is a stupid and evil joke, then what's stopping you from benevolently putting an end to the suffering of others, right? Benevolently, in theory, at least. Well, you know, that's one perspective, right? But then there's always the perspective of the lady who went to see the psychiatrist in T.S. Eliot's poem, which is, well, if when your eyes are open, life appears as nothing but suffering and pain to you. It could be that that is how life is. But it can also be that there's something wrong with the way that you're looking at the world. And in some ways, that's a much more humble perspective, right?

Because the alternative is, well, I know what's going on, and I just look out there, and there's the world, and I pretty much got it. Like, I know what it means, and what it means is pointless suffering and pain, and that's my model. And I don't see any reason to question it, but then the alternative is, well, wait a second. There's always the possibility that I don't know absolutely everything. And this final and horrible judgment that I'm placing on the conditions of existence could conceivably be misplaced. Given the sort of presumptuousness of the claim, right, I'm in a position to render final judgment on the moral value of existence as such.

It seems to me reasonable to presume that that's not the kind of statement that you should easily make. And I remember when George Bush launched his most recent war, the initial terminology, I think this was for the Afghanistan, that was Operation Infinite Justice. But he retracted that phrase after a number of religious leaders objected to its kind of presumptuousness, which I thought was quite reasonable, because Infinite Justice is something

that most people should probably not hope for, right? Because you never know precisely what Infinite Justice means, because it might just mean that every bloody mistake you've ever made, you're going to pay for. And I suppose that would be just as applicable to George W. Bush as it would to anybody else. And then Milton again describes the development of this adversarial spirit. He says, first pride, pride and worse ambition through me down. That's Satan's lament when he's in hell. And Milton's description of hell is extremely interesting. He said, the reason that hell is characterized by its structure is not so much because of its nature precisely.

It's because of its distance from the good. So the farther you are away, say, from what constitutes the good, the more suffering is endemic to that state. So it's the distance away from something that constitutes the good. The more suffering is, the more suffering is in damage to that state. So it's the distance away from something that constitutes the suffering. And then Milton says, it's very interesting to do an analysis of Satan's character. And the notion of hell per se, because how in the world can

you reconcile the idea of a good God with the notion of this continual suffering? And so Milton says, well, Satan can step out of hell in one moment. All he has to do is to admit that he was wrong. And that's the one thing that he will not do under any circumstances whatsoever. So then we put one more twist on the story, and we say something like this. Okay, we already know that part of the reason that people have belief systems is so that

they can structure their interactions with the world. It's a toolbox, say. We're playing a game, we share the rules, that's fine, we can cooperate with one another. It could be other than it is, but it's the way it is and it works for us, that's fine. There's nothing absolute about it except that a structure like that's necessary. Now whenever there's a threat to that shared view of the world, well then we're afraid and for good reason. And it's not surprising, under those circumstances, that we fight to defend what we've made ours.

But then you say, let's say you adopt this perspective, right? And it's this vengeful desire to wreak havoc that extends beyond other individuals and beyond society, even to the structure of experience as such. And then you think, well, what's the best mask for that? And how do these two processes sort of interact? And you think, well, the most efficient way to do terrible things is to mask them with

the highest order morality. And that's precisely what the totalitarian does. So that way he gets to have his cake and eat it too. He's perfectly well protected from apprehension of the world because his belief system is complete. Plus his underground motivations, which is this constant desire for revenge, confined their expression within the totalitarian structure

and remain invisible even to himself. So he can say to himself, well, the reason I threw all those farmers out of their house in 1920 and stole their soup and their food and their grandmother's blankets and everything they'd worked to own was because I was building the socialist paradise, right? And it was a good thing for me to go into that house and not a bad thing. And as long as he believes that or acts as if he believes that, then he can look in the mirror without screaming.

And there's no recognition whatsoever of precisely the sort of game that he's involved in, so he has it both ways. He can do everything terrible that he always dreams of doing, and consider himself not only good, but good, even at a higher level than the people that he was actually afflicting. And of course, that's just standard description of what happened in the Soviet Union.

Nietzsche says, I love this, definition of morality. This is the most cynical thing Nietzsche ever said, I think. The idiosyncrasy of decadence with the ulterior motive of revinging one's self against life, successfully, I attach value to this definition. Said, well, why be an idialog? Well, it's a good way to simplify the world, right? It's a pro-crusty and bad. You just chop off everything that doesn't fit. Then you don't have to think, right?

So that's good because thinking is difficult, and it's troublesome, and that takes courage and so forth to transform chaos into orders, no trivial matter. And if it's all ordered for you, well, then there's really nothing left for you to do. But then Nichy goes even below that. He says, yeah, well, there's more to the story than that, isn't there?

Once you got this little pro crusty and bed all arranged for your enemies, then you can allow your most base, vengeful instincts full flow by just continually chopping people so they fit. And you do it all the while, but well, saying, well, it's obviously the best thing that could possibly be done. And so then you look at Stelon's say, because not everybody who's adopted a vengeful tack on existence is sort of like the archetype of vengefulness or adversarial spirit, but you

get now and then the people like Stelon who are good counter examples say to the people like Gandhi, and so Stelon's very instructive, and so we could start by looking at what he did in Ukraine. So at the end of 1929, the Kremlin decreed that millions of peasants from individually-owned farms would be forced into agricultural collectives or coal cozes, seen in the eyes of the Politburo as client providers of Soviet agricultural needs. In defiance of the facts, Soviet ideologists hammered out an appropriate Marxist terminology

to explain what was going on. Throughout grain producing areas, it was said, resistance to this scientific scheme was being organized by so-called rich peasants or kulaks. With his customary brutality, therefore, Stalin decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. Well, Stalin liked this idea of, like, group guilt. That was a major theme for Stalin. That man I really didn't have to ever pay attention to you

as an individual. I could just decide if you were a doctor, engineer, or a Kulak, or a German, or whatever, ethnic, racial, or educational division happened to characterize my particular target at the time. And it didn't matter if you were guilty as an individual. That whole notion never even obtained. It was class guilt that mattered.

And if you were in one of those classes, well, we were better without you. And of course, the nature of the class just changed constantly. But it was perfectly logical thing to think if you believed in historical determinism. If your parents were rich, bourgeois, what was the probability that you were going to be a useful part of the workers collective? Be easier just to get rid of you ahead of time so you didn't cause too much trouble. So then you think about these cool acts, rich peasants. Well, who are these people? Like when we get down to the individual level?

So you go on a village. Village was full of serfs, like not 40 years before. So these are people just struggling out of the feudal society, right? And you've got some people in there who've managed to be successful enough as farmers, which is no easy thing to have a house and maybe hire one person. And you know, maybe have a little extra food in the larger and a few kind of material possessions. So these are successful people.

And so you could say, well, they're the ones that actually knew how to farm. It's one theory, or you could say the reason they had all this stuff was because they stole it from all the other people, right? And then you think, okay, so I march into town, I'm a Soviet revolutionary, and I say, hey, guys, you know those rich people? They stole everything they have from you. And then you think, okay, which of you guys is going to listen to that? Well, it's not going to be the sort of struggling people just underneath them who are really trying to get ahead, right? Because that's where they're hoping to get. It's going to be the resentful and revengeful few who think, well, the world's fundamentally

unfair. And it's obvious that those sons of bitches got what they want by stealing it from me. And here it turns out that if I just go down the street and steal it back, well, not only, not only am I allowed to do that, but according to this new and emergent ideology, man, that's the best thing I could possibly do. So then multiply that story by several million participants, and you have like the first five years of the Soviet empire, and so what do we have there? The result was a catastrophic onslaught on millions of peasant households.

At first, party activists and local officials read bullies, right? Brutalized peasants, forcing them to surrender their homesteads and their possessions. Deportations, arrests, and killing soon followed as terror generalized. The violence mounted to full scale rebellion in various places, with regular troops engaged for months.

For example, suppressing peasant uprisings. Resistance took various forms, usually reflecting the hopeless desperate anguish of a doomed population. In the Ukraine, there were even women's rebellions, spontaneous uprisings of peasant women who attacked the local cocosis to demand the return of confiscated farm products. With a colossal impact on the Soviet economy, peasants slaughtered their animals

by the millions rather than see them seized for two years the fighting raged. As the dreadful process of deculacization continued, Stela ordered a further assault on the recalcitrant peasantry. What conquest calls the terror famine of 1932? Moscow writes conquest. It's from a book called The Harvest of Sorrel. Knowingly decreed grain procurements from the Ukraine and elsewhere, exceeding by far with the local population

could produce, which meant that everyone who lived there was forced and ordered to deliver more grain than they had ever grown. Communists pergades roamed the countryside, forcing agricultureless to discourage the little they had been able to produce under conditions of severe dislocation. Grane sat unused in state reserves while the local population This is from wisdom, pocryphal, biblical writings. For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades.

Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, because the breath in our nostrils is smoke and reason a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works. Our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud and be scoured like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow and there's no return from our death because it is sealed up and no one turns back. So

a piece of writing thousands of years old and so Nietzsche says at the end of the 1900s, well rationality undermines our faith and religion but you have a piece of writing from more than 2,000 years ago that says, look, what is it about being alive? It's short, and there's nothing to it. Our thoughts are biologically produced, and when we die, there's nothing left. Well, that's a very modern thought. Yep, it was expressed thousands of years ago.

So you know, I think, merely from observing that, that the crisis of faith that characterizes modern society is a reflection of the permanent crisis of faith that characterizes human beings. What's happening with the totalitarian? Well, the totalitarian is afraid of the unknown, for good reason, I mean. And he's very interested in sustaining his own belief structure. And

the combination of those two things, it can start off trivially, is that the more you're convinced that you have to maintain the stability of your current belief structure, the more afraid you are of going of anything that's unknown. And the more afraid you are of anything that's unknown, the less likely you are to go out and explore it. And then the less likely you are to go out and explore it, the weaker you get, because you start gathering information. And then the weaker you get, the more necessary it is that you have to have this frame of reference, and it has to remain intact. And this sort of thing starts to cycle. And cycle. So you undermine your own sense of your own autonomy and ability, and you make yourself more and more a rigid tool of the propagandistic system, and you're more and more

adopt the stance of enmity towards anything you don't understand. And that's a spiral that goes rapidly downhill, right? Rapidly into a state that's characterized by complete internal chaos. And I think that's a good definition of what is meant in metaphysical language by hell. Hell is a bottomless pit. Why? Well, I don't care how bad things are for you or around you. There's always some bloody thing you can do to make it worse, right? There's

always some suffering you can extend others. There's always some bit of stubbornness or rejection that you can pull off that'll make your already terrible situation worse, right? So there's no bottom. And that seems to me to be right. If you do just a cursory historical analysis, no matter what terrible account you can come across with regards to, say, concentration camp brutality. In some other book, there's some worse story, limited only by the absolute ends of the most brutal form of imagination.

All a consequence, I think, of this process. And you can't really say what causes it, because on the one hand, there's cowardice and lack of faith. Anything I don't understand, cowardice pride in lack of faith. Anything I don't understand doesn't exist. Plus, I'm not the person to confront it anyways. That's the lack of faith.

Each of those things feeds into the other. And it's very difficult to say where it starts. The thing that's kind of interesting about the self-referential processes is that they don't have to start dramatically. Like the loop can start very, very small, and it picks up speed very, very rapidly. So you imagine you're speaking into a tape recorder, and the speaker's on, you get too close to the speaker

with the microphone, and you get some feedback. And if you bring the microphone a little closer, the feedback develops more and more intensely. It can blow up the whole system. It doesn't have to start dramatically to move forward very, very rapidly. And what that means, at least in principle, is that even small mistakes anywhere along this circle

can start the development of precisely this kind of spiral. And so you say, well, do people need to be abused to become totalitarian? Well, the answer to that is known because everyone's being abused sufficiently by some occurrences in their life to justify taking a negative tack on the nature of experience. They say, well, how cowardly do you have to be in order to run away from things? And you think, well, not that cowardly because under most circumstances, your life is characterized

by sins of omission, right? It's there are things you left undone. And like just exactly how rigid do you want your belief systems to be? And you say, well, I like them to be stable, because without that stability, then I'm terrified. And then you can say, well, fair enough. But that's all sign of a kind of existential weakness.

And then if social circumstances come around and give your life a good tweak, say, like they did with the Germans prior to World War II, you just never know what side you're gonna end up on. And so all these little tiny mistakes, you know, mistakes that I think are marked by your own conscious are precisely that leads you down this terrible path. And if you think, well, no, that can't be right, well, then you have to remember that in these processes, say, of de-coolocization and that immense wave of deaths that characterized the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany, most people were involved. And if they weren't involved in direct acts of commission, they were absolutely involved in direct acts of omission, right?

They knew, but they didn't say anything. Well, classically, sins of commission are regarded as much more evil, say, than sins of omission. But I actually think that's backwards. The sins of omission are worse, because every time you walk away, and what do you do when you walk away from a Nazi? What are you walking away from? Well, we know what you're walking away from. Right? If you're walking away from a domain that's likely to expand into something that's completely undifferentiable from hell, and it's no wonder you walk away from that,

but the fact that you walk away from it makes it much more likely that it's going to happen. So then I think to end this, something like this. We look for economic reasons to explain great, terrible acts, right? We look for social reasons, we look for political reasons, but we have Nietzsche's observation, which is something like this. I don't care whether or not your life's been characterized by suffering in deprivation. The mere fact of suffering in deprivation does not allow you to draw a particular conclusion.

You can't say that there's a causal path between economic deprivation, say, and the rise of a totalitarian state, because any event susceptible to multiple interpretations. Well, how do these states come about? Well, I think, well, we look for political and economic and social reasons, because that's the easiest place to look, right?

If you ratchet up the level of description to social forces that are beyond your control, then you never have to worry about what it is that you're doing or not doing that's actually causing this sort of thing. But I think if you look at the historical record, especially if you look at it from a mythological perspective, the story is basically clear. And it goes something like this. Every time you make a mistake, that you know is a mistake, and you don't fix it, the world moves more towards that. And it

might be trivial, maybe, but it might not be. So you look at Adolf Eichmann, for example, who is the little bierocrout who planned the final solution, and you find out he's just your little ratty guy, right? You see him in a bar? You don't even notice him. He's a negligible nobody. But he's the guy who planned the final solution. He was a normal person. I mean, maybe even slightly less than normal, right? He was no monster.

He wasn't the sort of person you'd remark on if you saw him. Precisely the opposite. Invisible, quiet, unassuming, presuming no doubt that at least until he was arrested, that he was just doing what he Grail, and the Holy Grail is a myth that was constructed in England, and the myth goes something like this. There's a cup, the grail, used to hold Christ's blood, and that cup has a, has redemptive significance, and it's been lost.

And the Knights, King Arthur's Knights, who go off to look for the Holy Grail, are after this cup. So it's a redemption story, right? It means the world's damned, unredeemed. There's some object that can serve as the source of redemption, the source of nourishment, say, thinking about it from a symbolic perspective, and it's worthwhile to go on a quest of that sort. And the king Arthur's story is set up in an interesting way because there's a king, Arthur, but he has all these knights, these nobles, and they all sit at a round

table. And they're at a round table because they're equals. So, although it's a hierarchical story, there's a motif in it that transcends the hierarchy. It says, well, yeah, under normal circumstances, everyone's enraged in a hierarchy. But when you're out to seek whatever you need, then everyone's in equal. And so fine. So they sit at the round table. And then they go off to search for the Holy Grail. And the story opens with a very interesting motif, which

is the night's look at the forest. And then they try to find the part that looks the darkest to them. And then they go that way. That's the marker for their mission, to go to the darkest place. And of course, each night goes off in a different direction, because the world looks slightly different to each night.

So objectively speaking, they're going to a different place, but psychologically speaking, they're going to the same place, right? And that place, I suppose, has been represented in mythology and literature as the heart of darkness. And if you're ever curious about why people aren't enlightened since it seems to be a possibility, you can always think about the story of King Arthur

and the Knights of the Holy Grail and think, well, do you really want to enter the forest at the darkest place? And answer to that is, of course, no. Because the darkest place means precisely that place you least want to go, and it's the same for everyone So then I have this little nephew although he's almost 15 now he had this dream when he was four years old and the Background to the dream is this he was waking up in the middle of the night for months

screaming he had night terrors. And this went on for like six months. And what was happening in his life was twofold. There was some instability in his family, because his parents got divorced about a year after that. And also, he was at the transition point from staying at home to going to kindergarten. So not only was he making a big move out there

into the terrible world, but the stable point from which he might like to have moved was shaky. So, you know, he wasn't having that great a time. So anyways, he's screaming away at night, and this is pretty unsettling, right? Because night terrors are no joke, and so he's upset about it, his mom's upset about it, and so I'm watching him, and he's run around the house.

He's only about this high, very verbal kid, and he's got this night hat on, and this sword, and this shield, and he's run around the house. He's only about this high, very verbal kid. And he's got this night hat on and this sword and this shield. And he's run around the house being a night. And at night he takes his night hat and his shield and his sword to bed. I think, oh, that's pretty cool. And you can see how that makes sense, right? And you can see how it's an enacted reality.

Because children enact or act out their reality before they can explicitly understand it just like we do. And so, I'm staying there, one night he wakes up and he has one of these fits. And then the next morning he comes to breakfast and I said, hey did you have any dreams last night? And he goes, yeah, I had a dream. I said, well, tell us the dream. And there's six adults sitting around the table. And then he says, okay, I was out in this field and I was surrounded by beaked dwarves and they came up to my knees and so these dwarves they had no arms they just had shoulders and

powerful legs and they're all covered with hair and they had a cross-shaved on the top of their head and they're all covered with grease and everywhere I went these dwarves would jump up with their beaks and bite me. And we're looking at them like that accounts for the night terrors, right? And so then he says, yeah, and there's more to it too. If you looked in the background behind all the dwarves, there was a dragon way in the background.

And it was puffing out fire and smoke. And every time it puffed out fire and smoke, a whole bunch more of these dwarves would get made. And you think, that's pretty cool. That's a hydra story, right? Remember the story of the hydra cut off one head, two more grows, it's one of Hercules' trials. And that's an observation about the world,

which is you solve one problem, and like two more problems pop up, and then you solve those. And anyways, he says, OK, well, I've got this dragon back there. And so this is his problem, right? He's eaten by beaked dwarves, and that's not good, and there's not much sense fighting them off because there's just more of them made every time this thing lurking in the background breeze. So I said, what could you do about that?

It's like, his brain was working all these ideas around. And he'd heard lots of Disney stories and had lots of books, read to him and had abstracted out a lot of information. But he hadn't quite got it right. And it was all seething around in his head. And I just said, well, what could you do? Tap. And he went, oh, I know what I could do.

I could take my sword and I'd get my dad, which is a good notion, because he's small. And then I jump up on the dragon and I'd pop out both of its eyes with the sword. So it couldn't see me. And then I jump up on the dragon, and I'd pop out both of its eyes with the sword, so it couldn't see me. And then I'd go down its throat to the box where the fire came out, and then I'd carve a piece out of the box, and I'd use that as a shield. And I thought, great!

You really got the story. I'm the story, something like this, right? If you're being plagued by midget dwarfs, and you wipe them out, and they keep multiplying, while you're obviously aiming at the wrong target, right? You should be going to their source. So he went after the dragon, but not only after the dragon, he went right down the throat of the dragon, which is, you know, a fairly brave thing to do, and then right to the place where the fire, the transforming element was being produced.

And he took a piece of the device that made the transforming element and he used it as a shield. Okay, well that's really cool of the device that made the transforming element and he used it as a shield. Okay, well that's really cool, and the story is better than that, I think, and it's true even, so it's not one of those fake he was dreaming and then woke up sort of stories. This actually happened. He didn't have any more nightmares. So when I checked with his mother repeatedly after that, because I thought, well, this is

too good to be true, right? It's got this terrible night-tarot thing. He does one little mythological dream thing and bang, he's better, but that's the case. He didn't have any more nightmares after that. And I think that's because he'd almost already got it, right? He's running around like a knight. He knew almost, just had to be made a little more explicit.

And not even not explicit, because it was still a story. He didn't know you should go to the source of your anxieties, right, to the thing that plagues you the most, and you should explore that in detail until you find the information that it contains that will protect you against it. He couldn't say that, but he could tell the story, and he could act it out and not look like it was good enough. So that's pretty cool. So he basically, you know, he managed this. Essentially, he fought the Dragon of Chaos and popped back up as what?

As he who can obtain victory over the Dragon of Chaos. And that's a pretty good story because it says, well, if your frame of reference gets blown away by something you don't understand, some new challenge, and you face the challenge at least courageously, and humbly, which means you're not going to run away, and you still have something to learn, then you can extract something out of the battle

that will enable you to withstand it. And you think, well, why should I believe that, right? And the answer that would be, well, don't knock it till you try it. And the second answer would be, that's exactly what we do in clinical psychotherapy all the time. And there's endless amounts, I think, of empirical evidence saying that you bring someone in, they've got an anxiety disorder, maybe they're even depressed, whatever, they're running away. You say, you actually whatever, they're running away.

You say, you actually don't have to run away. Here's what you have to do. You have to break the problem down into little pieces, digestible pieces, and then you have to hit it one by one. And what you'll discover is not that you habituate to the anxiety because that's a silly theory. Instead, what you discover is that you thought you were the person who had to run away, but it turns out you're not the person who asked to run away. You're the person that can stand there while you're anxious and learn something. And what you most particularly learn is that you're

the person who can stand there when they're anxious and learn. And if you've learned that, you don't have to be anxious anymore, or even more importantly, if you're anxious, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean your life's over. It just means that there you are on the threshold, between what you know and what you don't know, and you have something to learn. And you can learn it. And I think that's what the empirical evidence suggests, too, because you've got Edna Fowas' work with post-traumatic stress disorder victims, primarily women who were violently raped, and Fowas says, well, I know you don't like to think about

the event, and it's no bloody wonder. Look what it did to you and how terrible it was, but if you relive it over and over and over again in your imagination, in as much detail as possible, including all the motivational and emotional details, which she measures psychophysiologically, you will get better faster, and you'll stay better longer, and her work's well documented, and then there's endless cases of exposure in psychotherapy, you can certainly eliminate simple phobias within an hour and even complex phobias like agro phobia which is more like fear of everything is not an intractable disorder. Imagine that throughout your whole life you never turned away from a mistake not even once, never,

so that whenever you made a mistake that you could rectify, you did rectify it, then the question would be, well, what exactly would you be like? Would you be suffering from all your existential trouble? Would you be vulnerable to anxiety? What would you be like? And then I think, well, I only know a couple of stories like that, and the one that I've told you is the story of Solzhenetsyn, because Solzhenetsyn, the Russian novelist, sitting in the concentration camps in the Gulaigarca Pallagot, thinking, starving, this isn't so

good. How in the world did I get here? And the simple story is, well, Stelen put you there, and he was bad, right? End of story. It's not your problem. Stellen's problem. But Solzhenitizen said, well, that doesn't really leave me anything to do, right? To construe myself as a simple victim of fate. And I do have a lot of time on my hand since I'm not really doing anything that requires a tremendous amount of intellectual effort.

Let's try a game. Let's do this. Let's pretend that the reason that things happen to me that I don't like even terrible things say, or that I can't tolerate, is not because I'm a victim of fate, evil, cruel fate, but because there's something I didn't do, and so solution is and said, well, I'm going to go back over my whole life, step by step, detail by detail, and I'm going to try to over my whole life, right? Step by step, detail by detail. And I'm going to try to remember every time I let something go,

or I didn't do something I was supposed to, not because of some adherence to some, you know, arbitrary moral code because we don't believe in those anyways, right? But just because I noted that, I can tell when I owe a debt to existence. So then you look at Solzhenetssen and he says, okay, well, so I spent 15 years trying to untie all the knots that I tied up in my brain.

And the consequence was, of that was first, I started to notice there were some people out there I really admired. Man, they were so tough, it was unbelievable. You put them in the worst circumstances, they didn't bend an inch. They were tough. And even the nastiest prison guards and administrators, well, they could kill them, not for sure, but they couldn't bend them and they didn't bend an inch. They were tough. And even the nastiest prison guards in the administrators well, they could kill them, not for sure. But they couldn't bend them, and they couldn't break them.

And I really learned something from that. And it's a good story, because he's in the worst possible circumstance. So there's kind of no bottom pass that. You don't get much worse than the Goulag prison camp. It's cold. You don't get anything to eat, and you're being worked to death. For something pointless, and to serve Stalin, that's the bottom.

And he said, even under those circumstances, there are still people who could thrive, who could manifest admirable qualities. He said, once I figured out I was wrong, I could actually find them and learn from them. Nanny wrote this book, which you know about, the Gulagar Capelago, which was released in the West, and then circulated all through the Soviet Union, and was undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. And so then you think, well, that's pretty interesting,

isn't it? You got this one Waco Zeck, right? Russian prisoner, starving to death, tattooed. He says, maybe I had something to do with this, but he didn't mean it in some casual sort of, maybe I had something to do with this way. He meant, geez, this is really awful. It doesn't get much worse, maybe it's my fault. I don't know how it could be, but after all, I'm the one that's suffering, so maybe it was me. Maybe I could fix it. What would happen if I did? And so his conclusion was,

at the end, and it's not a conclusion that he reached alone was. One person who stops lying can bring down a tyranny. And you think that's a metaphorical statement, right? Because you're the victim of your own tyranny, just as you are the victim of someone else's tyranny. And maybe if you stop lying, construed in this manner of sin of omission, right? Don't avoid anomalies anymore, but confront them head on.

Maybe if you quit lying, well, then you wouldn't be victim of tyranny. Maybe no one else would be either. The GRE say, the bad exam. That's bad thing. But it's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the sort of thing that knocks existentialists for a loop, right? The worst thing is more like Ivan Kramazov's

suffering of innocent children, right? The fact that children are tortured or the worst thing is the fact that perfectly good people get sick and die and sometimes painfully. Or the worst thing is there are tyrants all over the world and they Torture people for no cause or maybe even just because they like torturing people and that's an anomaly of a different order Right, it's not just that you're going from point A to B and something you don't like happens. It's more like There are some aspects of existence that look so terrible in and of themselves

Associated with our vulnerability that just apprehending them might be enough to knock the bottom out of your faith in any frame of reference, and that's a kind of Nietzschean theme. Nietzsche says, look, when you're going from point A to B and something bad happens, something you don't expect, you don't get to where you wanted to go. That's bad. But what's even worse is you can't have any faith in the frame of reference that you were using, because it's been invalidated.

But what's even worse is you plow your way through two or three frames of reference. And then you start to develop some skepticism about frames of reference in general, right? So I was a socialist, say, and then I was a Catholic. And then I developed some new age philosophy. And none of those really worked. And what that made me think was, well, you can't trust socialism,

you can't trust Christianity, and those new age people are certainly out to lunch. Maybe you can't trust any frames of reference. And that's a really devastating discovery, and Nietzsche associated that with the death of God. No frames of reference work. And then you have the problem that, well, without a frame of reference, life is chaos, and chaos is intolerable.

And therefore, logically, life is intolerable. And I tried to make a case for you then, this kind of a side case, which was, people protect their ideologies, because they don't want to lose their frames of reference. They don't want to fall into chaos. But then there's this additional problem, which is that you can develop a kind of deep cynicism

about life in a secondary manner, which is like constant loss of faith. Maybe what you conclude under those conditions, like the aggressive child concludes, is that fundamentally, I'm not to be trusted. You're not to be trusted. Society's not to be trusted, and maybe the structure of the world has a hole isn't to be trusted, and therefore, logically, you're more or less obligated to work against it. And so then you have a nice sub story

for the propagation of evil, which is, well, we like to have our ideological frames of reference retained. And that gives us ample reason to squash anyone that's different. But then there's this additional reason, which is, when you get right down to it, things are pretty bloody awful. And maybe the sensible thing to do is to just work for the annihilation of things.

And I think we've had endless examples of people who did precisely that in the 20th century, and almost got away with it. In case you're tempted not to take this sufficiently seriously, right, we know that Stalin, in all likelihood, who I think you could make a case for being, if not the most evil man that ever lived, certainly the most evil man that lived this century. And that's really a high honor, right? Because he was up against some really top contenders. We know, as a consequence of recently released KGB documents

that he was probably gearing up to start the Third World War, and not one of these little half-rate, little local Third World War. We were talking about the whole H-bomb exchange thing designed to eradicate, you know, the US for sure, but also the Soviet Union. And, well, mere territoriality isn't enough to account for that. But then maybe you can see Stalin's point, right, like Tolstoy could see it, you know, if life is really so awful at bottom, which there are perspectives from which that certainly

seems to be the case, then why bother having it around at all? Well, you know, that's a pretty dismal perspective. So that's a real anomaly, right? That's not one of these little second rate. You'll get over it in a month or two anomalies. This is the sort of anomaly that's laid out in Genesis where Adam and Eve discover that they're mortal, vulnerable, they're gonna die.

That really takes the shine off existence out of paradise they go. They wander around the planet for the rest of history, you know, working themselves to death and being miserable and killing each other. And that's basically the story that's laid out in the Old Testament and viewed from that perspective. Well, it's not precisely an empirical description of the big bang, say, but it's not a bad description of the nature of human existence.

And it's pretty dismal. There's an essential symbolic relationship between the ingestion of food and its transformative capacities and the ingestion of ideas and their transformative capacity. What happens when Adam and Eve eat this fruit, which they're not supposed to eat, is that they learn that they're going to die. And that screws up paradise. And in case you just think I'm making this up, which would be kind of annoying, then you want to look at this picture, which is from the 14th

century. And it's really a remarkable picture. So what you've got in the middle here is the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And you've got evil over here. And you've got the church here. Now what you see happening, you ought to look really carefully out this tree, because the first thing you see is it's got the snake wrapped around it, this agent of transformation, right? Who's associated with Satan? And then up in the branches you have apples, and you have skulls. And then if you look at Eve here, she's got grapes here, and a skull in her hand.

And what this artist is trying to indicate is that there's this tight relationship between Eve tempting Adam towards higher knowledge and delivering him death. So that's pretty dismal story. And all the people over here on the left side, all these unhappy people, are the people who are living in chaos and misery as a consequence of having their vulnerability revealed to them. And that's the negative side of the story. But then there's the positive side of the story over here, and it's just as complicated, and that's partly why it's expressed in the majestic form.

So you've got the church here, symbolized at least in part as Mary, and she's handing out something too. And if you look at those, there are little round circles with crosses on them, and what those are, are hosts, hosts. They're the symbols of transformation, particularly in Catholicism. Now that's a very complicated idea,

and this is the idea, something like this. At Christ's last supper, before he was crucified, he told his disciples that they were going to have to ingest him. So they gave them wine and bread, and the wine was blood, and the bread was flesh. And what's the idea? What does it mean to incorporate somewhat? It means to embody them.

That's what it means. And this, this imagistic, ritualistic process is the notion that in order to attain redemption, it's necessary to embody the hero. And that's kind of what this picture is trying to portray. It says, OK, well, you've got this death apple over on the left hand side, and that's not so good. And you need an antidote to it. and the antidote is whatever this represents.

Whatever this represents and you see up in the tree here there's all these hosts hanging. Now the hosts are representative of Christ and for complicated reasons they're made out of wheat say and partly the reason they're made out of wheat is because if you look at hero gods prior to Christianity, you see that wheat was often conceptualized as a dying and redeemed god, right, because it would die in the winter and then be reborn in the spring,

just like all plants are. And the notion of the dying and redeeming, the dying and resurrecting hero was kind of, what would you say, layered on top of that, older agrarian idea and all mixed together and sort of popped out in this idea of the host. And so the idea here is that whatever ails human beings, which is their knowledge of vulnerability and death, can be rectified by their incorporation of whatever this symbol represents. And so then you might

ask, well, what exactly does that symbol represent? And of course, the standard Christian answers to that, and the extended Christian answers are, well, it represents your faith in Christ, say. But that's not a very useful answer. All things considered. So let's look at it in a little bit more complicated way. It's not a useful answer, I think, because it's too sectarian, right? It excludes many, many people this notion, and there's a whole formalism that you have to buy into

to even get access to what that story means. And it's an unfortunate formalism, because, first of all, I think it's more appropriate to an earlier time in place. And second of all, because I think we're actually sophisticated enough now, intellectually, psychologically. To actually start to understand what some of these stories mean, and since we have reasonably well-developed brains, and we might as well use them, it would be better

if they were on our side, so to speak, than constantly conspiring to undermine our faith. Let's look at what a person is like. And a person is sort of just as complicated as an object, which is not that surprising, because there's an aspect of us that is object-like, right? Our objective being. And we know people are unbelievably complicated. They have nervous systems that have more connections in them

than there are subatomic particles in the universe just for starters. And so that means that when you're looking at another person, you're looking at something that's more complicated than anything else that exists anywhere, including the sum total of everything that exists everywhere except other people. More complex than everything. the sum total of everything that exists everywhere except other people. More complex than everything. And then you have to understand too that just because you don't think of yourself that way doesn't mean you're not that way, it just means that your conscious mind, your rational

mind, say isn't sophisticated enough to actually completely model who or what you are. And that's obvious because that's why we study ourselves. We don't know who we are, we're trying to figure it out. We've been trying to figure it out ever since we woke up. Some thousands of years ago, we don't know when. And you think, well, if you look at people, well, there's the kind of obvious level, you see people out, the self-level, which is the privileged level of analysis for the West,

but you're a member of a family. And if I said, well, are you more yourself or your family, you might say, well, most of the time I think I'm more myself, but I might be willing to sacrifice my life for my child's, in which case I would say, well, then you're just as much your child as you are you, or maybe you're even more your child. And what about your family? Well, that's a tough question, too. And then what about your cultural group?

Well, you say, no, it's me, not my cultural group. But then I'd say, well, what if there's a war? Is it you or your cultural group? And then you'll say, well, it's my cultural group. And then you see as well, well, at this level of analysis, are you your biological group? Is that what you identify with? The biosphere say? You say, well, no, not generally. At this level of analysis, are you your biological group? Is that what you identify with? The biosphere say, well, no, not generally, but there's a lot

of environmentalists out there. And they say, well, what we should primarily be concerned with is the global health of the planet, because our survival depends on that. We're as much that as we are the self. And you might not agree with that. And I suspect that most of the time there's scruely reasons for proposing such a thing. But on the other hand, a case can be made. I mean, we know that you can undermine your ecosystems. If it happened in Spain, they let 400 years ago.

They let sheep eat everything. And so Spain turned into a desert. It doesn't seem like a particularly wise move. And then you think, well, below the phenomenological level, there's all these sub-elements of you, your physiological structure, your cellular structure, your atomic structure. A manable to infinite investigation, absolutely complex.

You'll never exhaust it if you investigate it, and it's perfectly reasonable to presuppose that you're all these things. How does it change the world if you stop thinking about it as made of objects? investigated and it's perfectly reasonable to presuppose that you're all these things. How does it change the world if you stop thinking about it as made of objects, but instead made of your own experience? And how does it change the world if you think you have a ethical relationship to that experience that's a primary fact, not some secondary derivative?

So primary a fact that you can't even look at the world except through an ethical lens. Primary of fact. How does that change the way you conceptualize yourself in relationship to the world? I don't know. You really can't tell the meaning of someone's life till the very end. It's for the same reason, right? It's that how all the pieces fit together in the story or in the life is not necessarily determined until the final moment. And I think that's part of the reason too, why among Catholics, for example, and Christians in general, there's an idea that salvation can always be attained, right?

Right up to the last moment, no matter what your life was like. And you think, well, that's a pretty cheap trick, because you can run around doing terrible things your whole life, but as long as you get it together the last second, then you're scot-free. But if you think about it in terms of a story, then you can understand how that could conceivably be the case. And it's for this reason, of course, that this lecture in particular makes me nervous

more than any of the other ones I do because I've been telling you a story that's basically 40 hours long, right, in its spoken form and then who knows how long in its written form and it's complicated to pull it together properly. And that's partly because as far as I've been concerned, we've been talking about issues in psychology that are more difficult than any other, first of all, conceptually, even from a neuropsychological perspective, because I've been offering you a model of the way the brain process is the environment that I think is really novel.

And I think it reflects the current state of neuroscience. But more than that, there's the problem that we've been dealing with issues all the way along of life and death and of war and destruction and of the possibility for clear-headed optimism, a possibility which, as we've discussed, more or less escaped Tolstoy's save for most of his life. Because when Tolstoy woke up from his delusions, he looked at the world and he said, well, clearly, it's such a terrible place that, if you're not looking at it through the veils of illusion,

there's no way that you can do anything, but stand in opposition to it once you understand its basic structure, right? Suffering and innocent suffering and complete vulnerability and the whole existential mass that makes up life. Now it turns out that Tolstoy overcame his rationally induced cynicism in a kind of mystical way.

He had a dream that he was suspended from some transcendent space by a belt around the middle of his waist, which hung him over a pit of chaos. In that image, he found comfort, and fair enough, it's a powerful image, but it's not well delineated, right? And it worked well for Tolstoy, and you can see that the image has power, but you can't grab it with your rational mind. You can't take it into pieces and analyze it as an argument.

And that's what we do if we're intellectuals. We try to understand the detailed structure of something. And I think the detailed structure of what Tolstoy apprehended as optimistic is actually comprehensible. And we've been working towards that and circling around the entire course of this lecture series. But I found with this material that with each circling around the target

it gets clearer and clearer. It's a funny thing. It's like you're looking at something that's too complicated to see all at once. So you have to look at it from multiple different perspectives and again and again. And each time you look at it, it becomes clear and clear. And that's still the case for me when I go through this material. Every time I go through it, I think, oh, yeah, that piece fits there and that piece fits there. And that's how that makes sense.

And oh, that's a lot more remarkable than I thought it was to begin with and so on. And it seems fundamentally inexhaustible. And of course, that's what you'd expect from deep, deep stories, right? Stories that have been around for thousands and thousands of years wouldn't have been around for thousands and thousands of years unless they were in some sense inexhaustible.

And we've talked about some of the processes that might contribute to that inexhaustibility. So at the beginning of the lecture series, I told you to consider the assumption that there was more than one way of looking at the world. There was the standard materialist sort se wasn't included in that account. And then I said, well, wait, there's another way of looking at the world that we spent just as much time developing that we utilize even more, and that's the narrative way of looking at the world to consider the nature of experience rather than the nature of objects as real, to consider your experience as real,

even though it includes things that can't be easily and tangibly identified, things like emotions, which of course you find compelling, sometimes even beyond your will, things like motivational states, fantasies, ideals, all the things that compel your behavior and give you some sense that there's a direction to life. And people who study emotion and perception have come to understand that

the act of transforming the world into something simply made out of objects is incredibly difficult. It's so difficult that we haven't been able to design machines that can do it. At all. It turns out also that when we look at the world, we're not just looking at it with our visual systems, but we're looking at it with our visual systems, but we're looking at it with our motor output systems and our emotions, so that when you look at something like a chair, which just stands there for you like an object, it turns out that the mechanical systems, the motor systems, that you would use to use the chair to sit on it, are activated during the active perception.

It also turns out sometimes that when you look at something, especially if it's something you don't understand and that it's and that scares you, you actually react to it, conceptualize it with your body and with your emotions before you have any idea what it is from the perspective of an object. When you look at the world and when you think about the world, you have to do it from a motivated perspective and an emotionally ridden perspective. You can't even see the world without being gripped by your motivation and emotional states. And so the idea that rationality or perception is somehow separate from or superordinate

to perception and emotion is just wrong. We understand now that you can't even think without being motivated. You can't see the world without being motivated. And that means you always look at the world through a kind of lens. And the lens is a narrowing lens. And it has to be because the world is so complicated. You can't see it all at once. You're only seeing tiny slices of it in time and tiny slices of it in space.

And even then you have to narrow it to only those things that are relevant to you at that moment. And we don't know exactly how you do that. We know that it takes years and years of perceptual work in infancy, say, so that you manage to build up an object conception of the world. That's probably all you're doing in the first two or three years of life. And you're doing it constantly. And it's just as complicated as learning language say, or even more complicated. Most of it's invisible, and we don't know how children do that. And by the time they can talk, they've

already done it, so they can't even tell us what they're doing. It takes a long time to build up an object world. And when you look at the world, when you go from point A to point B, even when you're doing something as simple as looking for food in the kitchen, you ignore everything about the world that isn't relevant to making yourself a peanut butter sandwich, and you focus in on those few things that are, the refrigerator, the food, the knives, the cutlery, and so on, and everything else is screened out. And you can't help but look at the world through that kind of lens. And the lens has changed. You can be in different motivational states, and they can change

because of internal transformations. You're not hungry, you're thirsty, or you're not thirsty, you're interested in someone, or somebody's telling you a story, and then you adopt their motivational framework, and you can see the world through their eyes. And now we know the neural machinery for that, and we already talked about that. So we can toss back and forth these motivational frames of reference, and that gives us insight into someone else's world. You can look at the world endless numbers of ways. And what you're trying to do is out of its infinite richness, so to speak, is to pull out parts of it that are useful for you while you're moving from point A to point B.

And this can be a chair if you want to sit down, but if you want to take the light ball ball to the ceiling, then it's a stool or a table. And whether or not it's a chair or a stool or a table, depends just as much on what you're doing as it does on what it is. And I think that's part of the reason why human beings can be so infinitely creative, right? For us, the world isn't fixed. We never know what it's going to bring forth. So, a hundred years ago, if someone would have said, well, you could build a machine on a wafer, a centimeter square out of sand.

And if you have enough of those machines, then everyone in the world can be connected, and everyone in the world can have an infinite library of verbal material. That's impossible, but it's not impossible. It turns out that Silica has those properties, and we can build unbelievably powerful machines out of nothing. And so then that kind of makes you think about just what this nothing that we're building things out of is, right? Because it seems to be able to reveal a constant array of properties, properties that are essentially unlimited, and its capacity to reveal those properties seems to depend as much

on our ability to interact with it, whatever that is, as it does on whatever the stuff is. And we know, even from a strict object perception of the world, that the stuff that things are made of is a lot more complicated than we had originally presumed even as materialists, because materialists, realists, their philosophy only holds down to about the subatomic level of analysis, a deterministic worldview below the subatomic level of analysis. There's

nothing deterministic at all and the stuff that things are made of is so mysterious that we can't even grasp it, we can't comprehend it. So it turns out that rather than the story world being dependent on the object world, it might be the other way around. The object world is dependent on the story world. And that implies, at least, to some degree that the story world is actually more real, whatever that means. And then I told you that, well, the real problem of life

isn't so much what do you do when you're around things that you understand. The real problem of life is what do you do when you encounter something you can't conceptualize? And I think a good recent example of that was the bombing of the World Trade Towers, which people were compelled to watch over and over and over and over. And if you ask someone, well, what is it that you're watching they would say, well, I'm watching the World Trade Towers fall down,

but then you might say, well, why are you watching it over and over and they would say something like, well, I can't believe it. I can't believe it's happening. And what does that mean? It means something like, whatever it is that's happening here, whatever's being blown apart, exceeds my ability to model. And as a consequence, I have to expose myself to it again and again and again and again to try to understand what's falling exactly. Is it just the towers?

Is it 20,000 people? Is it the financial system of the US? Is it the stability of the Western world? Is it the beginning of World War III? Or as the former CIA director just mentioned in the US, the beginning of World War III or as the former CIA director just mentioned in the US, the beginning of World War IV? What is it exactly that you're looking at when something happens that you don't understand? And then you say, well, how do you react to that?

And it turns out that you react mostly with your body, not with your mind, not with your perceptual systems, not with your mind, not with your perceptual systems, not with your thoughts, but with your emotions and your body. And that means you sweat and you panic and you feel depressed and you feel hurt and you feel ashamed and you're prepared for a catastrophe which is stress. And all that's basically non-cognitive. What that kind of means is that when you encounter something you don't understand the first manner in which you conceive of it is embodied emotional

physical way before you develop up an object representation or cognitive representation You may not ever get it like an event like that or a worse event can throw someone into a tailspin that's so Extreme that they never get out of it. So you see for for example, sometimes, and this is more true among elderly people, if their spouse dies, the probability that they'll die in the next year, say, from a heart attack or something like that, increases substantially. Why is that? It's because their conceptual frame was so dependent on the existence of their spouse, say, someone they'd lived with for 25 years, that the anxiety and uncertainty caused by their anomalous disappearance, their

death, is so extreme that it sends their body into a physiological state that's basically unbearable and that does them in. And when you start to understand what having your preconceptions rattled really means then you also start to understand why people are so motivated to protect their ideological territory, right? Because ideological territory, that's how you see the world, that's your story. And you can't have your fundaments rattled all the time because it throws everything into chaos and that puts you in this terrible panicky cortisol-ridden stressful state that's really hard on you physically.

So we know, for example, that if you're in a state where you're chronically exposed to threat or punishment, which is the case in depression, say, you produce a lot of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and cortisol is toxic. So the more of it you produce, the more you kill off your hippocampal cells, and you really need them because they're a key to memory. You do in your immunological system, there's all sorts of negative side effects of cortisol poisoning, increased incidence of cardiovascular disease, heightened rate of cancer. Plus, it's just no fun, right? It's the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, essentially. If something unknown happens

to you and blows your frame of reference, knocks you for a loop sends you to the underworld, however you want to construe it, that's really going to upset your bandwagon and throw you into a state that you do virtually anything to avoid. But by the same token, there is a possibility that inside that chaotic mess, there's something you really need. And what's the logic there? Well, the logic something you really need. And what's the logic there? Well, the logic is something like this. When you look at the world, you only see a

fragment of it, and that's good because it's pretty overwhelming, and a fragment's generally more than enough. But all the information that you've ever gathered in your entire life to build yourself out of and to make your life stable has come as a consequence of your ability to explore what you don't understand. And that's an unlimited capacity, right? No matter how much you explore and how much information you gather, there's always the possibility that there's way more information out there. And that means if you have a problem and you see that it's a problem, even though that's frightening, it's also a gateway into a domain of possibility, and

the possibility is this richly informative background that could in principle provide you with any answer you need. And then you can take one more thing. The old gods, Mars say, the God of war, Venus, the God of love. They're all internalized for us, right? We know that anger is the psychological state and that love is the psychological state. But if we look at our great religious traditions, Christianity say, or Buddhism, just to take two as an example, we still have this notion that

what these figures represent is something external. Well, you might say, how primitive? Right? Just as primitive as the idea that the God of War is something external is the idea that this sort of figure is supposed to be something external. It's supposed to be something embodied. Right? It's a story about the nature of individual moral responsibility. So the idea is something like this. Well, reality itself, the existence of things, seems to depend on the existence of a finite observer, so that we can see things from a perspective. If you don't see things from a perspective, everything is the same. There's nothing delineated.

But if there's going to be delineated things, small things, insufficient things, and they're going to be aware if there's going to be delineated things, small things, insufficient things, and they're going to be aware, they're going to be vulnerable as a part of their limitation. So you say, well, limitation is a precondition for being, and that means suffering is part and parcel of being. I think Dostoevsky said clearly, look, I'll give you all the cake you want. You got a big house, you got nothing to do but watch TV, right, and propagate the species. Are you happy?

And Dostoevsky says, well, no, why? Well, because human beings are really fundamentally, you know, ungrateful and insane. So if you give them some little comfortable niche to occupy themselves with, so they don't have anything to worry about, the first thing they're gonna do, just like Adam and Eve, basically, or just like Gautama Buddha,

they're gonna run around looking for the apple, looking for the snake, looking for the trouble, to smash the frame into bits, no matter how comfortable it is, just so they can get access to little chaos and have some fun. And so then you think, well, maybe it's more like the purpose can get access to a little chaos and have some fun. And so then you think, well, maybe it's more like the purpose of life isn't to avoid chaos

because we like chaos. It's entertaining, right? It keeps us alert and awake, and it gives us something to do that really has no end. And so maybe the answer is something more like, well, forget the frame of reference. Forget the chaos, but hit the balance, right, between the two, right so that you've got one foot where it's reasonably comfortable. And you've got one foot out there where it's kind of exciting and dangerous, and that's perfect. And then you think the state you want to attain that makes you resistant to even the greatest anomalies, anomalies of death, say, or vulnerability, or mortality,

is exactly that position, right? Balance right between the forces of chaos and the forces of order, or between Yin and Yang. And how do you know you're there? Because that's what it really boils down to. How do you know that you're there? And then you think, okay, it's pretty simple. You watch with your eyes open, just like Solzhenetsyn watched,

you think, I don't know everything. So let's see what I do know. No preconceptions. I'm not going to shield myself from the truth with some second rate frame of reference. We don't believe in those anyways because they're always fragmented. I'm just going to watch. So when am I not miserable? And then you think, well, I'm not miserable when I'm interested in things, something. I get interested in something. I don't, something. I get interested in something. I don't exactly know why I get interested in it.

It catches me. What's the phenomenology of being caught? I'm not self-conscious when I'm engaged in something. I'm more like a child, which is why children have intimations of immortality. I'm engaged in this process. I don't think about myself, so I'm not self-conscious. I lose my sense of temporality, because it seems like I can do whatever it is

that I'm doing. Thing that I enjoy for hours, and the time flies by, and I'm not even really aware of the surrounding world. And none of my existential concerns are paramount at that time. Every need is suppressed by my engagement in the activity. And then you say to yourself, well, yeah, if I only have them, like, you know, 10 minutes every three days or something when I'm being particularly miserable.

But you might say, well, the fact that it happens at all is probably worth paying attention to. I mean, if you believe that your experience is real, like real, the fact that you can get into a state like that at all is worth paying attention to. And so then you might say, well, that's where your sense of ethics really starts to arise. Is what makes you interested?

Well, it might be just as cracked and peculiar as something you could possibly imagine, right? Your parents are against it, your friends are against it, even you're against it when you're thinking clearly. But there's still this reality that something compels you. And then you think, well, can you trust it? And I think, well, that's a tough question, because I read a long time, for a long time, I read the accounts of serial killers, because I was really interested in what motivated them, right?

And they're an interesting breed in many ways, which is why there's such a popular fascination with them. And so then you think about a story like that and you think, geez, maybe you can't trust your interest, right? Maybe it'll take you somewhere you don't want to go, like seriously, where you don't want to go. How do you know that if you really let yourself be who you could be, that you'd end up somewhere good? And so then you come to the second part of the story, which is something like this. Let's say that you're a very, very, very finely tuned biological machine, right? Let a kin to a computer. And then you say, OK, you take a computer

and you feed it false information. What do you get out? False information, right? Well, you've stuck with this computer. It's very complicated. You kind of reside in it in some manner. You don't understand. And yet, your prone pawn occasions,

either to deny it information altogether, when you walk away from something you know you shouldn't walk away from, or to feed it, bad information. And so then, what if this was the case? What if it was the case that the systems that orient you with regards to your interest can become pathologized by any relationship you have with yourself that's predicated on bad faith? And so then you think, well, that's why there's an ethical aspect to this redemptive process,

like a real strenuous and strict ethical aspect that goes something like this. There are things that you can do, find yourself engaged with the world at such a level that your existential concerns could disappear. And we can even understand that biochemically, to some degree, because if you're really interested in something, you get a dopamine release, an exploratory dopamine release, that's great. I mean, that's associated with positive affect, with confidence, with increased immunological functioning, with better memory functioning, with learning, everything you want.

It's also, potently anti-anxiolidic and analgesic, which means that if you're really pursuing something that's compelling to you, you're much more resistant biochemically to punishment, disappointment, depression, pain, threat, etc. And it's not because you're blind. It's not because you're blind. It's because your nervous system is optimally tuned to make you maximally resistant. And so then you might think, if you were optimally tuned, how resistant would you be?

You don't know, right? Because it's a spiral that never stops moving uphill. We don't know what the upper end is. I mean, we have examplars that might indicate what that upper end could be. But we don't actually know. So then you think, okay, well, here's the, here's the rule, say, it's something like this. If you look at the world from this perspective, say, something like this.

If you look at the world from this perspective, which is something you have to decide if you're you find compelling and reasonable, the rule is this. You're always going to run into anomaly, right? And anomaly is always going to look to you like this. And it's still bloody wonder, you want to run away from that. I mean, in some ways, your whole body is telling you, watch out, and for good reason, because it's no joke. But then there's more to the story, because the anomalous thing,

that's everything you don't know. And you might say, well, you're going out with someone, you want to have a long-term relationship, they betray you. How could there be any good in that? And if that's certainly what you're going to ask when you first encounter the unexpected information. But then you might think, could be that I'm a little too naive for my own good, right?

People pull me in a little more than they should. Or I'm not sufficiently careful when I enter into intimate relationships with people. Or I don't treat people right. Or I don't have a good conceptualization of myself, or I'm chasing after the wrong person. Well, that's all going to be very annoying to learn, but if you don't learn it, you're going to be in big trouble. So maybe the best thing to do, and then normally of that sort, hits you, is to think,

okay, yeah, it's a dragon, no doubt it will eat me, but if I don't let it eat me, then there'll just be another one waiting around the corner, and it'll probably be a little bit bigger. And if I get eaten by enough of them, I'm not really going to want to be around much. And maybe I'm not going to be willing to help other people be around much either.

It doesn't seem like a very good alternative to me. Music Back in 1957, some new, noostic writings were discovered in a cave. They were discovered by these two Arab guys who went out to kill the man who killed their father. They took him out into this cave and they killed him and when they were burying him, they found these amphora full of papers and

paparus and they took them, and their mother used a bunch of them to, like, cooking fires with. And one day, one of their friends who was an antiquities dealer showed up. And he said, you know, you shouldn't be burning those. Those are about 1,500 years old. And they look like very early Gospels. And the Gospels were this branch of Christianity

that was pretty violently suppressed by the emergence of Orthodox Christianity. And the Gostics believed that faith was a good thing, but knowledge was all right too. And they wrote gospel accounts, say, of Christ's life, that were knowledge predicated as much as revelation predicated, and this is one of the quotes from one of those gospels, the gospel of Thomas, which is actually one that the only one that got out Carl Jung got a hold of interestingly enough and this is one of the quotes and I really like this This is a non-canonical saying of Christ and the saying is if you bring forth what is within you? What you bring forth will save you If you do not bring forth what is within you? What you do not bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you,

what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I think that's a pretty good line to close off the class. So, thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This was an amalgamation of episodes 10-13 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVO. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com. Thank you.