The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Psychology of the Flood

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

Lecture 6 in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series The story of Noah and the Ark is next in the Genesis sequence. This is a more elaborated tale than the initial creation account, or the story of Adam and Eve or Cain and Abel. However, it cannot be understood in its true depth without some investigation into what the motif of the flood means, psychologically, and an analysis of how that motif is informed by the order/chaos dichotomy.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. This is episode 24. This podcast episode is the sixth installment of Dr. Jordan Repeaterson's psychological significance of the biblical story's lecture series. This episode focuses on Noah and the Ark and is entitled The Psychology of the Flood.

Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. Tickets can be found at jordanbe Petersonerson.com slash Bible-Haven series, or by finding the link in the description. So I'm going to launch right into it. I like this story as well. This is the story of Noah and the flood and then the Tower of Babel, which I think are juxtaposed very interestingly. The Tower of Babel is one of those stories like Canaanable that's only a few lines long.

It's like a fragment in some sense, although the story of Noah is quite a well-developed narrative. like a fragment in some sense, although the story of Noah is quite a well-developed narrative, but like the other stories that we've covered, it is relevant at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. And so what I'm going to do to begin with is to start with some background information, so some psychological background information so that the story makes sense. And the first thing that I'd like to make a case for is that you bring to bear on the world an a priori perceptual structure. And that's really an embodied structure and it's a consequence of the three and a half billion years that you've

spent putting your body together, which is a tremendous amount of time. Not only your body, but your mind, of course, because your mind is part of your body and very much embedded within it. You tend to think that you have your brain in your head and it's sort of floating separate from the rest of your body, but it's not really true. You're a tremendous massive system of neurons running through your entire body, autonomic, there's more neurons in the autonomic nervous system than they're on the central nervous system, so that's a lot of neurons. And then your central nervous system, of course, enables you to exercise

voluntary control over your musculature and also to receive information from it. Your brain is really distributed through your body. One of the things you may not know is that people who are paraplegic can walk if you suspend them above a treadmill. Their legs will walk by themselves with no voluntary control. So your spine is capable of quite complex activity.

In fact, when you walk mostly, it's a controlled fall and mostly your spine is doing it. So anyways, the point of all that is that you don't have a blank slate consciousness that's interpreting a world that manifests itself as segregated objects in some straightforward sense. You have a built-in interpretive system that's extraordinarily deeply embedded and invisible because you might think about it as the implicit structure of your unconscious. It's what gives rise to your conscious experience and it presents you with the world. That's one way of thinking about it.

And it's a good way of thinking about it. It's the psychoanalytic way of thinking about it, as well as the neuroscientific way of thinking about it, because one of the things that's pretty interesting about modern neuroscientists, especially the top-rate ones, and those are usually the ones that are working on emotions as far as I've been able to tell, are often quite enamored of the psychoanalyst, Yacht Panks, that was a good example of that, because they came to understand that the psychoanalyst's insistence on underlying unconscious, personified motivations was actually an accurate reflection of how the brain worked. And so to think of yourself as a loose collection of autonomous spirits that's governed by some overarching identity is a reasonable way of thinking about it. The question arises from that is, what is the nature of this a priori structure that you use to interpret the world?

And I think the clearest answer to that is that it's a story that you live inside a story. And that's very, very interesting to me, because I believe, and I have a couple of videos that lay this out. I believe that Darwinian presuppositions are at least as fundamental as Newtonian presuppositions. I actually think they're more fundamental and that the fact that we've evolved story-like structures through which to interpret the world

Indicates to me that there's something deeply true about story-like structures. They're true at least in so far Is the fact that we've developed them means that here we are living and that it's taken three and a half billion years to develop them. They're highly functional. And so we don't have much better definition of truth than highly functional. That's about as good as it gets partly because we're limited creatures and we don't have omniscient knowledge. And so the best we can do with our knowledge, generally speaking, is to note its functionality and improve it

when it fails to work properly. I think the scientific method actually does that. And so the fact that we've evolved a story like structure through which to interpret the world, that's pretty damn interesting. It says something fundamental about stories. And it's strange in the same way that the fact that we have hemispheric specialization

for the known and the unknown or for chaos in order, order in chaos, sorry, respectively, also says something fundamental about the nature of the world, if you assume that, you know, we've evolved to reflect the structure of the world broadly speaking. And that's obviously not just the physical structure, the atoms and the molecules, but all of the patterned manifestations of the physical molecules as they build structures of increasing complexity across time.

That would include human interactions and all of political interactions, economic interactions, familiar interactions, all of those things that are a very important part of our reality, but perhaps in some sense, not as fundamental as the physical attributes that the physicist concentrate on. So we live in stories.

And so I wanna talk to you a little bit about stories and about their structure, because when you understand a little bit about the structure of stories, then a whole array of things about mythology, all of a sudden make overwhelming sense. And it's so useful because what you see is that many of the things that are standard occurrences in your life,

everyone's life, are portrayed universally in mythology. And it's very helpful because, first of all, it de-isolates you. One of the things you learn as a clinical psychologist, Contra, the anti-sychiatrists, let's say, is that diagnosis is often a relief to people. You know, there's a problem with being diagnosed because then you might be labeled, and then the label can follow you for the rest of your life.

And once you're labeled as something, then strange things happen around you that often reinforce that label. Maybe you start acting it out more, or you adopt it as an identity. But there's a flip side of that, which is that the last thing that you ever want to hear when you go see a physician or psychologist. You know, I've never seen a case like yours before.

Right, that is not a relief, man, because if the message is, I've never heard anything like what you're telling me, the outcome is either going to be not so good for you, or you're not going to get listened to at all, right, because you're such an anomaly that you're actually, your existence is annoying to the integrated knowledge structure of the medical professional that you're attempting to receive advice from. Well, it's definitely the case because if you can be put in a box, then the box tells the

doctor what to do with you. And that's actually a relief to the doctor, but also a relief to you, right? Because you want to know, so you come and you say, look, I can't go to my house much anymore. I'm afraid on elevators, I have heart palpitations and I sometimes end up in the emergency room, increasingly my interactions in the world are restricted. I find myself staying at home. I'm afraid I'm going to die of a heart attack.

And the psychologist says, well, you have agrophobia. It's like lots of people have that. And here's usually how it develops, and here's the treatment course. And we can probably do something about that. And it's like, well, you're not going to die of a heart attack now, probably. That's a real relief.

You're not crazy in a completely unique way. And you're crazy in a way that might be treatable. And it's such a relief, because people come in there with a pile of snakes, of indeterminate magnitude, and they walk out with one manageable snake, and it's still a snake, but you know, one manageable snake beats a hydra, right? So, all right, so back to stories. So, the stories that we tell and that we live in are fundamentally ways that we deal with the complexity of the world. And the fundamental problem with the world, as far as I can tell, is that not only is it complex beyond your comprehension, but the complexity shifts in unpredictable ways.

So that's the Darwinian conundrum, actually. That's why Darwinism seems to be a practical necessity with regards to the continuation of life. Because the complexity changes unpredictably you can't necessarily tell what's going to work in the future and so the Darwinian process solves that by generating quasi-random variations and letting whichever one by happen stands happens to work in that environment survive. Now, it's not random precisely because the underlying structure is conserved. It's very rare that a child would be born with an extra arm or something like that.

And like the skeletal structure that you inhabit is shared by animals going way, way back in evolutionary history. There's a lot of conservation in the evolutionary process, but so there's variation within conservation. Like music, it's a good way of thinking about it. So the stories that we tell have exactly the same structure. They have this core element with variations. And so I'll turn to the stories. And so the first problem, as I mentioned, is complexity problem.

Things are just too complicated to get a handle on. And that actually has serious consequences because what happens to everyone eventually is that their lives become so complicated that they die. So, and many terrible things can happen. On the way to dying as well, that are complex, complexity related. You can develop a serious illness that you can't get a handle on. You can hit a, what would you call an impasse in your relationship that you cannot get past

and see no way out of that happens to people quite frequently. People who are suicidal, for example, they often feel like they've been back into a corner, that they have no options. They have no good options. No matter which way they turn, there's something terrible to face, and they can't see any way out of it.

And sometimes that's more true than you'd like to think, because we also tend to like to think that people's problems are primarily psychological, but they're not. That's one thing you learn quite rapidly as a clinician is that most of the time people don't come to you because they have mental illness, they come to you because they have a complexity management problem. Their lives have got out of hand on them, and they don't know how to get them back under control. And so all sorts of things can do that. And then of course, that can make you anxious or depressed to contrigger all sorts of illnesses. But the fundamental problem is still that things have got beyond you.

And that actually has a psychophysiological cost that isn't merely psychological. You have a limited amount of capacity from a resource perspective to deal with the emergent complexity. It's just not enough of you. You'll exhaust your psychophysiological resources if you get into a situation that's too complex. Well, that's what the idea of chaos represents. It represents that underlying complexity that can manifest itself at any time.

And it can manifest itself, for example, if you wake up in the morning and you feel an ache of some sort and perhaps it's nothing and you ignore it, but it gets worse and you end up going to the hospital and you find out perhaps, for example, that you have pancreatic cancer and you're going to live for six months and that's the end of that. And so it's at that moment that you have pancreatic cancer, and you're going to live for six months, and that's the end of that.

And so it's at that moment that you break through the thin ice that everyone walks on, and you see what's underneath, and what's underneath is the ineradicable complexity of life. And that's chaos. Now, it's taken people a long, long time to get a grip on this conceptual, what would you call it, conceptual schema. And human beings have done it mostly with image and story before they've been able to do it in any articulated manner. And so, there are a set of images that represent this underlying chaos. And one of them is the dragon of chaos, that precisely that. And that's the dragon that the hero goes out to confront. That's the symbol of the unknown. It's the thing that lurks underneath. It's the thing that also guards treasure

because in the unknown there's possibility. Also the water that was there that we talked about in the Mesopotamian creation myth, the water that's there at the beginning, both the salt and the freshwater is often a symbol of pre-cosmogonic chaos. Often people have dreams, for example. Some of you have had this dream, I suspect you'll dream that you're in a house that you know well, and all of a sudden you discover a new room or a set of new rooms or maybe a set of rooms in the basement. And often the rooms are not well organized and they're full of water. Those are very common things. And what that means is that you've broken through the constraints of your conscious self-understanding to a new domain of possibility, but a new domain

that needs a tremendous amount of work. It says, well, here's a new part of you, but it's not well developed. It's flooded. It's flooded with chaos, essentially. And it's water, I think, partly, because chaos is not only what you fall into when you're not expecting it, but it's also the unknown that you confront forthrightly and generate new things out of, and water is a symbol of life, especially in the desert. And of course, water life is dependent on water, and so water is a natural symbol to utilize when you're talking about something that's life-giving but also potentially deadly, because a little bit of water, well, that's a drink, but a lot of water, that's a shipwreck, right? And so, and those are the extremes.

Now, there are accounts that are sort of subtexts in Genesis, and elsewhere in the Old Testament of God, conquering a great monster, Leviathan, or a Bayamoth, that has these sort of serpentile elements and making the world as a consequence of that conflict. So there's this idea that the world creating force which we've talked about as the logos is the thing that continually confronts chaos

and that one way of thinking about chaos is as a predatory reptilian monster and often one that lives in the depths or perhaps underwater. And part of that, I think, is because we actually use our predatory detection circuit to do this sort of pre-cognitive process. And so the notion fundamentally is anything that threatens

you instantaneously is something that your predatory detection circuit should be working with. It's fast. It's fast. It's fast. It's low resolution. It doesn't have a lot of ideas, but it's really, really fast. And that also accounts for capability and tendency to very rapidly treat people who upset our conceptual structures

as enemies of the predatory variety. We can fall into that in No-time flat because it's it's the archetype if something comes along to knock you for a loop It's a shark. It's something that lurks under the water. It's something that'll pull you down. It's an enemy and And you should get prepared and that's a defensive strategy, even though it also has its dangers and can sometimes be wrong. So the landscape within which we have to erect our stories is fundamentally one of an overarching chaos,

a chaos that exceeds our capacity to comprehend. In any sense, individually, familial, socially, economically. We're always threatened by the collapse of the structures that we inhabit constantly. We have to work. Well, it's like you want a house. How much time do you spend maintaining a house? Well, a lot. And why is that?

It's because the house falls apart because you're stupid and the house falls apart. Well, because you do repairs wrong or you ignore things, right? And I'm saying this actually for technical reasons. The house falls apart because you're incompetent. But even if you're competent, the house falls apart. It's just entropy and so things have a proclivity to fall apart on their own.

So you just have to run like mad just to keep them doing what they're supposed to be doing. And then of course that is complicated by your own willful blindness and inadequacy as a repair person and refusal to attend and all those other things. So, and that's a very classic idea which we'll return to. One of the ideas that Mercedes-Elliata, famous history of religions,

extracted from a very large corpus of flood myths, was the idea that the earth is periodically flooded for two reasons. One is, things fall apart. Just entropy. It's straight entropy. I don't remember which law of thermodynamics that is, but it's one of the big laws of thermodynamics. So it's one of the top three, man. Things fall apart of their own accord, and that's one of the top three, man. Things fall apart of their own accord.

And that's one of the things that we have to contend with. And then the rate at which things fall apart is sped by the sins of men. That's the other idea. And you know that. Everyone knows that because you know, your car breaks down in the highway. And you think, God, that's so inconvenient.

And then you shake your fist at the sky. And then there's part of you in the back of your mind that goes, God, I knew that rattle that I wasn't paying attention to actually signified something. I knew I should have paid attention to it and I didn't and now I'm in the situation that I'm in now. I know, I bet you this happens to people two or three times a week, because they do something stupid that they know they shouldn't have done, that they told themselves not to do mere seconds before.

And they know the voice says, don't do that. Yeah, you do it. You can get nailed for it exactly the way that you knew you would get nailed for it. And then you're hurt doubly because not only did it fall apart, but you're the idiot that made it fall apart, knowing full well the idiot that made it fall apart, knowing full well that it was going to fall apart and ignoring it. And so that's the idea behind the notion that there are two reasons that things fall apart. Thermodynamic entropy and the proclivity of people not to attend to things they know they should attend to. And partly,

we do that because if a problem emerges, it always announces itself, unless it's a really, really tiny problem, and you're approaching it, voluntarily, it always announces itself with negative emotion. And that's part of the predator detection circuit. It announces itself in frustration or disappointment or emotional pain or grief or the paramount one anxiety and no wonder because it's a problem,

right? And the logical one, the logical response is it's just sort of freeze in the face of the problem. But of course, if it's a problem that has to be addressed and solved, freezing it and turning away from it is not a good solution because since things tend to fall apart on their own accord, if you just leave the thing alone that's problematic, it's just going to get worse, not better, which is one of the things that's very annoying about life. So for example, if you get a warning message from the tax department, the probability

that ignoring that will make it go away is zero. What will happen instead is that the more you ignore it, the larger it will grow. And if you ignore it long enough, then it will turn into something large enough to eat you. And that will be the end of you. And I read in Harper's magazine at one point that people would rather be mugged than audited. And so I believe that because the mugging man, that's over, right? It's like a couple of minutes, a sheer terror, loss your wallet, the way you walk. The audit, that's like a semi-fatal disease.

So that's chaos. Now it's the idea here too, is that that's the chaos. That's the psychological idea, is that that's also the chaos that whatever is being represented in Genesis as the spirit of God Extracts order out of at the beginning of time And it's also that which we're constantly contending with as we struggle in the same manner to construct and maintain habitable worlds So it's brilliant. It's brilliant. You know when I first put together the relationship between

When I first put together the relationship between what Iliatti called the pre-cosmogonic chaos and the predatory landscape that surrounded our ancestors and the manner in which we're structured neurologically to respond to all of that, I thought it was an amazing epiphany because it's self-evidently the case that the world is too complicated for us to deal with. And that's one of the problems that we face on an ongoing basis. And then the question is, well, what do you do about that? And if you ignore it, it gets worse, so ignoring it doesn't work. And so we know what doesn't work. And so if ignoring it doesn't work, then attending to it might work.

And then I found out with the Egyptians, for example, that Horus was the god of attention. And the same thing happened among the mess of Damians with Marduk and his ring of eyes. It's like, what's the way to forestall the catastrophe of things falling apart? And the answer to that is by attending to them, voluntarily attending to them, and that slots very nicely into the hero mythology that promotes the idea that if there's a dragon in the whereabouts in the near, in the neighborhood, let's say, that hiding in the basement just makes it grow larger. It's time to go out and confront the damn thing. And the general stories are as well. You might get killed because it's a dragon. But it's only might, as opposed to definitely,

we'll get killed if it happens to attack you at three in the morning at home when you're hungover, and it's been a bad day, and you don't have your, you know, your sword and your shield at the ready, which is generally what happens to people who avoid things. So it's not something that should be recommended. You're screwed both ways. That's one of the things that's so nice about being deeply pessimistic. It's so freeing because one of the things, well, it's very frequent.

It's such a relief. And it's really a useful habit to develop. It's sometimes no matter what you do, you're in trouble. And that's a relief because then you can stop scrambling around for the way out. There's no way out, man. It's like you can pick, you know, wretched death air, slightly less wretched death B, something like that. And I know that's a terrible way of looking at things, but it is extraordinarily useful to understand that many times you get your

choice boils down to picking the least bad option. And if that's all you can do, if that's how life is revealing itself to you, it's like, well, more power to you, the least bad option, that's the best you can do. And it's good enough, especially compared to the alternative, which is the most bad option. So, all right, now. So, the fundamental reality of things is complexity beyond comprehension. And then the question is, well, how is it that you manage that? And partly you manage that. And this is where the image of the patriarchal order comes in in the positive manner.

I might point out, because in the absence of patriarchal structure for lack of a better lexicon, there's nothing but chaos. And I wouldn't recommend chaos because there's a lot of it and there isn't that much of you. And if you think you can handle it without an a priori structure and without a sociological structure surrounding you, then you don't know anything at all about human beings. Because one of the things I've noticed for example is that it's unbelievable the degree to which our sanity depends on a functioning sociological structure. And here's why. Well, first of all, you kind of need to know what to do every day.

You have to have a routine because you're an animal, you know. And you know, if you have a dog or a cat, dogs are a really good example. This dogs like routine, they like to be walked the number of times a day that they're supposed to be walked. And they get quite sick very rapidly if you don't, if you don't root andize their, their days. Children are exactly the same way. Now you can overdo it, right? But still, you know, you need to know approximately when you should get up, should be approximately the same every day. You need to know approximately when you should get up, should be approximately the same every day.

You need to know approximately when you're going to eat. You need to know what you're going to eat. You need to know who you're going to eat with. You need to know where to buy your food. It's like 80% of your life, 70% of your life, something like that, consists of those things that you do every single day that you repeat. And those are often the things that people think about as the trivial elements of their life, but one of the things I would like to point out to you if you do the mathematics,

I did this with a client of mine who was having a hard time putting his child to bed. They were having a fight every night. And I knew by that time the studies indicate that most parents only spend 20 minutes per day of one-on-one time with their child. who, by that time, the studies indicate that most parents only spend 20 minutes per day of one-on-one time with their child. Now the reason for that is that people are busy, and it's actually not that easy to parse out 20 minutes of one-on-one time. It's a lot bloody more time than you think, but that's all there is, 20 minutes.

He's spending like 40 minutes a day fighting with this kid trying to get the kid to go to bed, and that's not very entertaining, you know, you think why it's just having a scrap with the kid about going to bed, but it's no, no, no, no, no. If it happens every day, it's a catastrophe. So you do the math. So we'll say five hours a week for the sake of argument just to keep it simple. It's 20 hours a month. It's 240 hours a year.

That's six,40 hour work weeks. So that guy was basically spending a month and a half of work weeks doing absolutely nothing but having a wretched time, fighting with his son, trying to get him to go to bed. Horrible, right? That's just way too much time to spend doing something like that. If you want to actually have a positive relationship

with someone because it's just too punishing. And so, well, so you need structure, you need predictability, and you need more of it than you think, just to keep you sane. Now, if you're lucky and maybe a bit odd, you can deviate 5% from the norm or 10% from the norm or something like that, carefully and cautiously, as long as the rest of you is all well-ordered in a normative manner. You might be able to get away with that and you might be able to sustain it across time and people might be able to tolerate you if you do it, or maybe you'll get really lucky and you happen to be creative but reasonably well put together.

And people will actually be happy that there's something idiosyncratic and unique about you. But even under those circumstances, mostly what you want is to have a routine, it's disciplined, it's predictable, and bloody well stick to it. You're going to be way healthier and happier and saner if you do that. And then the other thing that you need because this is one of the things the psychoanalysts got wrong, I think, is that they overestimated the degree to which sanity was a consequence of being properly structured internally. Because from the psychoanalystic point of view, you're sort of an ego, and that ego is inside you.

And of course it rests on an unconscious structure, but the purpose of psychoanalysts is to sort out that unconscious structure, and the ego of psychoanalysis is to sort out that unconscious structure and the ego on top of it and to make you a fully functioning and autonomous individual. But there's a problem with that because the reason that you're sane as a fully functional and autonomous human being isn't because you've organized your psyche, even though that's important. The reason that you're sane if you're a wet,

if you have a well-organized unconscious and ego, is because other people can tolerate having you around for reasonably extensive periods of time and will cuff you across the back of the head every time you do something so stupid that people will dislike you permanently if you continue. And so what people are doing to each other all the time, just non-stop is broadcasting sanity signals

back and forth, right? It's like you smile at people if they're, well, if they're not not only behaving properly, but behaving in a way that you would like to see them continue to behave, you frown at them if they're not, you ignore them if they're not, you shun them, you roll your eyes at them, you manifest a disgust face, you don't listen to them, you interrupt them, you won't cooperate with them, you won't compete with them, it's like you're blasting signals at other people

about how to regulate their behavior. So frequently, it just makes up all of your social interaction. That's why we face each other and we have emotional displays on our face and we're looking at each other's eyes and we know exactly, we know as much as we can about what's going on with each other given that we don't have immediate access to the contents of their consciousness. And so partly what you're doing with your routine

is establishing yourself as a credible, reliable, trustworthy, potentially interesting human being who isn't going to do anything too erratic at any moment. And everyone else is around there tapping you into shape, making sure that that's exactly what you are. And that's how you stay sane. And so what happens to people too, if they don't have a routine and they get isolated, is they start to drift. And they drift badly because the world is too complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself. You just cannot do it. So a lot of our, so we outsource the problem of sanity. And it's very intelligent that we outsource the problem

of sanity because sanity isn't impossibly complex problem. And so the way that we manage the incredibly complex problem is we have a very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time. incredibly complex problem is we have a very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time. It's like a stock market for sanity. And it's partly, and I use that definition with purpose because the stock market does the same kind of impossible thing, right, because it tries to price things, which is impossible. There's so how many things are there? Like a billion. How

the world do you decide what the price is? You can't decide what the price is. That's why you have a stock market. That's, well, in a free market, I mean for consumer goods, is everyone's voting on what the price of everything is all the time, and that's the way we figured out, because it's actually, it's technically impossible. That's partly why the stock market explodes now,

and then there's bubbles and all that sort of thing. But anyways, the point is things are chaotic. In Ellison Wonderland, when Ellison goes down the rabbit hole, that's the underworld, right? So now she's gone into the substructure of being. And she meets the red queen, and the red queen is Mother Nature. And Mother Nature is running around yelling off with her heads, off with her heads, which is, of course, what Mother Nature does. And she tells Ellis, in my kingdom, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. And that's exactly right. And that's a description of, in fact, evolutionary biologists. Psychologists have picked up on that phrase. They call it the red queen problem.

And the red queen problem is everything's after you all the time, and you're not smart enough to do anything about it, or to not about it. And so that's a permanent existential problem. So how do you deal with that? You've got a biological structure. So your embodiment is part of the solution to the problem, and then you're inculturated. And because you're inculturated, you're taught a lot of things that you need to know, but

mostly what you're taught is how to communicate with other people in an acceptable manner. And then once you can communicate with people in an acceptable manner, then you can outsource your problems constantly, which you're doing constantly. And so we're in this continual, dynamic exchange of problem solving. So if you're a socialized person, that's what you get access to. And that's something to know if you're going to have kids. And I mentioned this, I think, in a previous lecture, the purpose of being a parent for very young children is to make your children exceptionally socially desirable by the age of four.

Because if you can do that, they're set. Because everyone wants them around. And as soon as everybody wants them around, they want to play with them, they want to cooperate with them, they want to compete with them. It's like the doors open, the doors open, and they stay sane because they've got all sorts of people who actually like them that are helping them out. And so that's your goal is to make them as socially acceptable as you possibly can, socially desirable as you possibly can.

And that doesn't mean you render them obedient without spirit, right? That's a tyrant mode of enforcing social acceptability. It's like never do anything wrong. Well, that's not any way to, I mean, that's a good piece of advice, you know, like, but it's missing the other half, which is do a bunch of things that are right so that so that people are thrilled to have you around and to and encourage that. That's what you want to do as a parent as well as inculcating the order. And so, you know, when in this little diagram I indicated that there's God, the father,

with the son behind him, and he's ruling over this walled city. So he's like the meta-spirit of the walled city. It's very, very nice, very nice image, brilliant image. So it's, it's the collective spirit of the city. That's another way of thinking about it, or the collective spirit of the city across time, or the collective spirit of the city. That's another way of thinking about it, or the collective spirit of the city across time, or the collective spirit of the force that built and maintained the city across time.

Even better. And that's associated with the sun because it's associated with enlightenment and illumination and all of those things that we associate with higher consciousness and vision. It's a brilliant image. And then I overlay this, you know. Now, of course, the patriarchal aspect of existence can become tyrannical. It does that quite regularly. It's one of the existential dangers of human civilization. It's that civilization is a medication for chaos,

but it can spin out of control in and of itself and become its own sort of problem, which is like a hyper-order problem generally, which then produces a chaos problem. So every solution carries within it certain problems, because no solution is perfect. And so you have to keep things in balance. But it's one of the reasons that I'm really

let's call it irritated about the postmodernists because they keep yammering about the patriarchy and it's very very annoying because it's self- evident that social structures are tyrannical. It's like that's not news folks that's obvious but that's not all they are. And it's the reduction of the entire complex solution, let's say, to a unidimensional problem. It's just tyranny. It's like, no, actually, it's not just tyranny. If you spent six months somewhere that was just tyranny,

you'd know the difference very, very rapidly. And that doesn't mean that everyone doesn't give up a pound or two or 10 or 20 a flash to participate, even in a society that's as free as a Western society is. We all get crushed and molded by the tyrannical force of social convention. But at least in principle, the benefit is worth the cost. And then it's also up to you to make sure

that you don't sacrifice more to the group than you should. And you can start to tell if you're sacrificing more to the group than you should because you start to become resentful of other people. That's part of the psychological mechanism that's informing you of that. So it's up to you to fight against the overarching pressure for conformity to retain your individual

logos, let's say, but that's sort of your problem. It's like the group wants you to behave. Now, if you could behave and be creatively productive, so much the better, but that's pretty damn rare. So, the group generally tends to settle just for behave, and there's a tyrannical element of that, but what the hell is the alternative? Our society is based on consensus, and the consensus is based on a certain sacrifice of individuality. Even though individuality is absolutely necessary as a revitalizing force for the society. It's a very tough thing to manage properly.

So anyways, you have the, your physiological structure as your first line of ordering in relationship to chaos because your body presents you with the world in a certain way. And then the second line of defense is something like the sociological structure that you inhabit. We could call those the competency hierarchies

or something like that. And thank God for them because, you know, maybe you're going to be able to specialize in one or two things in your life, or five things, but there's 300 things you need to know. And if it's just you, you know, you'll be doing your genius level mathematics, while your bathtub is leaking all over your bathroom floor. And that's not so good, so you can call a plumber and hooray for that. So, you know, we tend to cooperate to keep chaos under control, and we tend to cooperate to keep order under control, and that's the political dialogue, right? We maintain the culture to keep chaos under control, and we balance the culture out properly to keep the culture under control,

and that way we get to live reasonably peacefully, reasonably, productively for a reasonable amount of time. And that's the best that we can do. And we should have some gratitude when that's working, because the default condition of things is that not only do they not work very well, they work worse and worse over time all by themselves.

So anytime anything is working you should just be amazed by it. Alright, so what does the frame look like? Well, I think it looks something like this and this is as far as I can tell, this is the bare bones, this is the bare bones of a variety of things. It's a bare bone story, it's a bare bone conceptual framework, It's a bare-bone conceptual framework. It's a bare-bone design to speak in Hightigarian terms. It's like it's the bare-bones world that you live in. You're always in one of these worlds. There's no getting out of them. You can move from one to another, but you're always in a world like this. And so this is the world that you're in. You're somewhere, because you have to be somewhere. Now you might not know where that is,

which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic, in which case you need to go over your past in great detail and figure out where you are. It's like you're lost, right? You're lost and the problem with being lost is when you're lost, you don't know where to go and the problem with not knowing where to go is there's a million places that you could go

and a million places is too many places for you to go without dying. So being lost is not good. So you need to know where you are. One of the things that we built online, my partners and I, is this program called Past Authoring that helps people lay out the narrative of their past to identify, to break their life down into six stages, epochs, we call them, and then to identify the emotionally significant moments in each epoch and to write them out, what happened negatively, what happened positively, what the consequences were, what you derived from it, perhaps what you could have done differently, perhaps what you learned from it, all of that, so that you can narrow in, zero in, on determining precisely where it is that you are right now.

And people are often lost to do that because they actually don't want to know, because they'd rather be spread out in a sort of half-blind manner in the fog, hoping that the place that they're at is better than it really is, and deluding themselves by remaining vague, then to figure out, I'm right here right now with these specific problems. But it's actually better to do that, because if you have a set of specific problems, and you really narrowed them down and really specified them, then you can probably start fixing them, and you can start fixing them in microways bit by bit but there's no way you can do that without knowing where you are. It's impossible.

And you can kind of tell if you don't know where you are. It's quite straightforward. If you are haunted by reveries of the past for events that are older than approximately 18 months, if they continue to come up in your mind over and over and your dreams over and over. You haven't extracted the world out from your past experiences. The potential is still trapped in the past. And to confront the potential means to confront

the dragon of the past. And of course that's terrifying. And it can seriously be terrifying. So for example, maybe your vague and ill-formed and ill-defined because you were abused very badly when you were a child, four years old, something like that. And maybe you're abused by a family member because that's generally who does the abusing.

And so that just makes it worse. And then what that means is that you've got an implicit, you've had an implicit encounter with malevolent evil that no, you've had an implicit encounter with malevolent evil. That, no, you've had a direct encounter with malevolent evil, but you have an implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil that's plaguing you. It's still there. It's trapped in the memories, right?

It's trapped in the representational structure. And as an adult, you're now faced with the necessity of articulating that fully before you have any chance, whatsoever of freeing yourself from it. So that's no joke. Lots of times people have to go into the past. That's what the psychoanalysts do and say, look, here is something came along and just bloody well knocked me over.

And it isn't even that I repressed it, which I think was, well, we won't talk about Freud's errors because Freud was a genius, so we'll just leave him alone. But sometimes it's not repression, it's just the terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn't a bloody chance in hell that they can figure out why they happen or what to do with them or what they mean. And then you can carry that with you and you carry it with you. It's like your body encounters the world in stages and it happens very rapidly. Well, it can extend over years, but, and it happens very rapidly. Well, it can extend over years,

but the initial stages happen very rapidly. So for example, if you're walking down the road and you hear a loud noise behind you, it'll go like this. That's a predator defense response, by the way, you crouch down, and that's to stop something from jumping on your back and getting at your neck too easily.

That's like a few hundred milliseconds. It's really fast, or even faster than that. And it better be because something like a snake, let's say, can nail you just right now. So you better be fast. But it's low resolution. It's like danger snake, something like that, or danger predatory cat.

It's that fast. And then you can unravel that and categorize it, but that takes time. You do that with emotion, and then you do unravel that and categorize it, but that takes time. You do that with emotion and then you do it with cognition. You can do that with long-term thinking, because maybe you've encountered someone specifically malevolent and predatory at work. That happens to people a lot who's operating

as a destructive bully and who seems to have no positive function whatsoever and is only living that out. And then you don't know what to do about it. So you're in prey mode. I don't mean this kind of mode, although that would help too. But I mean, you're acting like a prey animal. And then you have this terribly complex thing

to decompose, which is what the hell's up with this person? Why are they making my life miserable? What is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable? That's a nasty little road to walk down. And you're stuck with having to, you're stuck with having to decompose it. Maybe you can't, maybe formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil to deal with something malevolent

in your environment actually just happens to be beyond you. And that could easily be. It's certainly the case for people who are young. And it's the case for plenty of adults as well. It's no simple thing to match. It's something too that often soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder have to do because they've encountered terrible things. They've either done them or ran into them and they need to update their moral model of the world or if they end up in something close enough closely approximating hell Anyway, so you need to know where you are That's this what is where are you?

So you're navigating you're navigator you're a sailor on an ocean, and that's what that's what you are You're a mobile creature you're going from point a to point b all the time You know it's sitting there glued to a rock like some brainless, you know, sea creature. There's a funny little creature called a hydra. Very simple little creature. In its juvenile stage, it has a brain because it swims around. But then when it turns into an adult,

it latches itself to a rock and promptly digests its brain. Because if you're just sitting on a rock and you're not moving, you don't need a brain. So, but that's not our issue, right? We're zipping around in the world and so we're navigating agents. And so, to navigate, there's two things you need to know. And the first is, where the hell are you? Exactly, precisely, right?

Razor sharp. What's good about you and what's bad about you? By your own reckoning, you don't have to, you can ask other people, but this is a game you play yourself. It's like, as far as I'm concerned, I'm taking stock. What is it that's okay about me and what needs some work? And you've got to watch to not be too self-critical when you're doing that too, because that can just be

another kind of flaw. And then the next is, okay, well, where are you going? What's your destination? Well, and that's what the frame is. Now, you know where are you going? What's your destination? Well, and that's what the frame is. Now, you know, you could do that in a very sophisticated way. And you do that by thinking consciously about who it is that you are in an articulated manner,

and where you wanna go, and why, and how you're going to get there. And people hardly ever do that. That is, that's come as such an absolute shock to me as an educator. come as such an absolute shock to me as an educator. I just, because one of the other programs, I use this in my classes. What are the other programs in this suite of programs is called the Future Authoring Program.

And I started developing it in my maps of Meaning Class, which is where some of this material is from. And I got students to write about their past. It's like, OK, we're talking about stories. So let's tell your story. Who are you, how do you get here, and what are you now? That usually helps people put things to rest, although it's quite stressful while you're doing it. Stress goes up, when you're doing it, and

maybe you feel miserable for a couple of weeks, and then stress goes down, and it stays down. So that's, and that's also why people don't do it because who the hell wants to have their stress go up. But if it's temporary, it's a sacrifice. So then the next issue is well where are you going? And one of the things that, and this, I just still, I cannot understand the students that had been in education system for 15 years, 14 years. High-end students most of them, not once in their whole bloody life. Did anyone ever get them to sit down for like a day and say, all right, justify your existence? Like, well, seriously, it's like here you are in university,

you're taking a bunch of courses, you've got some sort of vague career plan. It's like, defend the damn thing a bit. Since you're going to go live it and everything, you're staking everything on it. It's like, what's your damn plan? And why are you so convinced that it's not the plan of a babbling fool? Because if you haven't thought about it, then it is.

And if you really want to go out there and live that out, you know, one of the things Carl Jung said was that you're in a story, whether you know it or not. And then he made two nice comments about that. If it's someone else's story, you're probably going to get a bit part. And it might not be the one you want. And if it's a story that you don't know, it might be one with a really bad ending. Or maybe it's just bad period with a worse ending. And if you don't know what the story that you're living out is, maybe that's the one. Maybe you got that from your mother. You got it from your grandmother.

You got it from your aunt or God only knows where you picked it up because you pick up things like mad because that's what human beings are like. So maybe you're living a malevolent tragedy unconsciously. And then one thing you might ask yourself is, well, how wretched and miserable is your life? Let's add futile to that. How wretched, miserable and futile is your life?

And you might say, well, 70% on each count. It's like then you're probably unconsciously living out a malevolent tragedy. And maybe that's not for the best. Let's either that or the whole universe hates you, right? Or 70% hates you, you know? So anyways, you know, we got students to start writing in detail about not what they wanted. It's not a career thing, because that's the closest people

usually get is they have a career plan. It's like, no, no, it's not a career plan. That's peripheral, important, but peripheral. It's like, all right, you got three years a career plan. That's peripheral, important, but peripheral. It's like, all right, you've got three years, man. You're going to live them anyways. Devote those three years to setting the world up around you so that it's the best it can possibly be for you, as if you were taking care of yourself,

as if you cared for yourself. But what would that look like? Let's say, just for the sake of argument, if you figured out where you were, that you could have what would be best for you. Well, what is that? I bet you never asked. People don't ask and so life comes at them like random snakes and they sort of fend them off and life goes by and things don't work out the way people expected them to but a huge part of that is they didn't know where they were because they wouldn't look or didn't know that they should

look ignorance and willful blindness right to great catastrophes and they never figured out where they wanted to go or why now there's a problem with figure out where you want to go. And the problem is is that you make your conditions for failure clear to yourself and people don't like that. So if you keep yourself in the fog, then you can't tell when you screwed up. Now that isn't so good because you're still screwing up. You're just to blind, self blind to notice, although in the short term, that's less painful. If you make your criteria for success of razor sharp, then you know every time you screw

up. But that's great because then you could fix it. You could either repair the behavioral inadequacy or the conceptual inadequacy that you're using as a tool in that situation, or maybe you could adjust your damn plan. Either way, you can fix it. And so, okay, so you're living in one of these bloody things, and you might as well, it seems to me, you might as well make it the best one you could live in

because you don't have anything better to do. Now, if you don't do that, if you don't do it consciously, and this is what the psychoanalysts pointed out is that you have innumerable quasi-autonomous subsystems that make you up, that will generate stories impulsively, and you'll just act them out. And you know that because you watch yourself over two weeks and you think, Jesus, I did a lot of stupid things

in the last two weeks. And you think, why? And it's because you're a random, you're a collection of somewhat random, quasi-autonomous personality units. And lacking a leader, they're just going to fire off whenever they want. First, you're hungry, then you're thirsty, then you want to go to bed with your wife, then you want to sleep in, then you want to tell your boss off, then you want to curse at the guy that cuts you off in traffic.

It's like you're kind of like a two-year-old, you know, just it's one emotional frame after another, vying for dominance. There's no overarching hierarchy, and there's no king at the top. And so, you know, we already talked about pyramids of competence and what's supposed to be at the top, is you want to bring all those things together. We understand this neurologically. I'll show you some thing that pays attention and learns. Every thing else in the hierarchy should be subordinate to the thing that pays attention and learns. And you could think, well, that's the message of the idea of logos. That's for sure, because logos is partly attention and partly communication.

And you learn a lot by communicating with others. Okay, so you need to know where you are, just like your GPS, which is both the closest thing we have to an intelligent cybernetic system. Those GPSs in your cars, those bloody things are pretty smart, because they know where you are, they know where you're going,

and if you go off course, they recalculate your route. It's like those things are damn near alive. That's so close to intelligence. And you can tell that, because they act intelligent, they solve problems continually. So you need, and this is a cybernetic model, by the way, and cybernetic models were the models on which the GPS systems were based. So it's not accidental. So you need to know where you are and you need to know where you're going. And then the next thing

you need to know is how it is that you're going to act, move your body, how you're going to propel yourself through time and space to transform this into that. And so, okay, and then we can make that a little bit more complex because it's a bit too simple. So we'll do this. So it isn't exactly that you live in one of these. It's that you live in a nested hierarchy of these. And you could think of this as your own internal patriarchy.

That's a good way of thinking about it. And maybe it could be a tyrant, or maybe it could be something that gives you security and functional autonomy. And hopefully that's the one you go for. But it's a battle, you know, because a little bit of tyranny exists in everyone. And so, well, so at the very highest level of analysis, that would be the overarching story.

Maybe you think I'd like to be a good person, or a successful person, a famous person. I think goods probably better, because you can come up with the definition of good if you want, as long as it doesn't annoy other people too badly, because they'll just get in your way and that won't be helpful. So you have to negotiate it. But let's say you're a good person. That's sort of the story at the top of the hierarchy and then you could decompose that into your

primary roles. Maybe you're a good parent, maybe you're a good employer, or maybe you're good employee, maybe you're good sibling, maybe you're a good child. You know those are major roles that you have in your life. And so you'd say that what good person is, is what's good about you across all those roles. So it's a higher order abstraction from something more concrete. And then you can take the, you know,

with a role good parent. And you can say, well, what is it that constitutes a good parent? And you might say, well, good parent, this isn't exhaustive, obviously. A good parent has a good job and takes care of his or her family. And then you might say, well, what does it mean to take care of your family? And then you might say, well, you can cook the odd meal, not too odd, hopefully. You can cook the odd meal, and you can play with the baby. And then you might say, well, how do you play with a baby?

And then you might say, well, you play peekaboo with the baby or you tickle the baby, okay? Well, what's cool? There's a cool shift there because this is all articulated and conceptual, right? Right down to this level and then all of a sudden, it's your body. Because how do you play peekaboo with a baby?

You don't like how to chat about how you play peekaboo with a baby, right? You go like this. It's quite fun. You can even do it with older people. They even smile about it, right? It's, dad's gone and the baby's all shocked. Death about that. Where'd he go?

Oh, look, he's back. It's, the baby is playing with the reliability of the world. So it's real intense game for a baby. It's like, oh no, dad's gone. Oh look, he showed up again. Oh no, he's gone. And then dad's smiling to indicate that those brief flashes into non-existence aren't existentially terrifying

beyond capacity, right? And so, but the point is, is that if you're playing peekaboo with a baby, you're not thinking anymore. It's not in the realm of articulation or abstraction. It's actually something that you're doing with your body. And so to me, this is a nice multi-stage solution to the mind-body problem, because what happens is of the higher order of abstraction,

it's articulated and conceptual. But if you decompose it sufficiently, you end up with an actual action. And the action involves the movement of musculature. It's not something conceptual. And one of the things that's really cool about this hierarchy is that it has educational lessons. So one of the things you want to do,

if you're trying to teach someone something even yourself, is you want to specify the thing that needs to be doing at the highest resolution possible level. So I'll give you just a brief example. So let's say I may be repeating this, but it doesn't matter. Say you've got a three-year-old kid and their room is chaos, right? The monsters are going to be coming out under the bed and no time flat unless that thing room gets some order in it. And so you tell the kid, clean up the room. It's a mess. And you leave and you come back and the kid's like throwing legos everywhere. They're not cleaning up. And then you think, that's a bad kid. That's a bad theory, because you're going right from

here to here. If you want to have a good fight with someone and destroy them, then that's what you do. You don't bother with the subtleties down here. You just go right for the jugular. It's like you're a bad, stupid kid. You've always been that way. You're hopeless. There's not a chance of teaching you anything, right? And that way you can nail the past, the present and the future, all of the same insult.

You've always been a terrible person. There's no teaching you and your future's going to be exactly the same way. Then the only thing the person can do if you do that to them is hit you. Because that's it. There's no coming back from that. You've boxed them completely in. So if you want to have a really unproductive argument, you go right for this past, present, and future. You're not a good person.

Demolish their entire conceptual structure and expose them completely naked to chaos. past, present, and future, that you're not a good person, demolish their entire conceptual structure, and expose them completely naked to chaos. It's like, great, you won the argument. It's not a good thing to do to your long-term partner, let's say, unless you want them terrified out of their skull and characterized, and their attitude towards you characterized

by non-stop extreme resentment. It's probably not going to do your love life, a hell of a lot of good, for example. So with the three-year-old, maybe what you do is you say, you pick the level of analysis at which they're actually functioning and you say, and this is something you can do if you pay attention to a kid and lots of people won't pay attention to children because they're terrified of them. They're terrified that they'll do something wrong with them or that the kid won't like them or some damn thing. It's like, all you have to do to get a kid to like you

is pay attention to the kid for like two seconds and the kid will instantly like you because attention is so, it's such a, it's the ultimate currency for children, right? They need adult attention because adults know way more than kids and so they love attention. All you have to do is pay attention to them and they will like you instantly. So you tell the kid, you see that teddy bear? The kid goes, yes. Then you've established that the child has mastered the art of perceiving a teddy bear because they can say yes. It's a complicated

thing, man. It's like a six-month-old isn't going to do that. Three-month-old has got the whole teddy bear identification subroutine automatized. So teddy bear, yes, can you pick it up? Yes. Pat, pat, pat. Good work. Do you see the hole in that shelf?

Yes. Can you put the teddy bear in that hole? Yes. Go over, do that. Pat, pat, pat. Great, okay, now we'll do thing number two, thing number three. So you're building up the micro routines of cleaning up the room from the bottom up, right?

You're building it into their body because you're starting with the things they've already automatized and building upwards towards abstraction. And so once the kid has all the micro routines down, and maybe there's a, I don't know, how many micro routines are there to clean up your room? 200?

Like a lot, but not an infinite number. So you teach them all the micro routines, and then you can say, run, set of micro routines, which means clean up room, and then they can do it. They know what it means. So, but you do the building from the bottom up. And lots of times when you're arguing with someone that you live with and hypothetically love,

although those two things are hard to get together in the same relationship. What you want to do is assume stupidity before you assume total malevolence. That's a good rule of thumb for establishing peace. So maybe if your partner won't do something, well, maybe there's something going on up here, but you might want to assume to begin with, they actually just don't know how to do it, and you need to decompose it. So maybe there's a way you want to be greeted when you come home, because you're going to come home every day, probably, and maybe that's a five minute interaction or a 10 minute interaction. So that's an hour a week, or four hours a month, or 50 hours a year, or one solid work week of coming home interactions. All you have to do is get 50 interactions like that right, and you've got your relationship sorted out.

That's something that's really worth thinking about, because that's it. You just don't have that much time, right? Get the meals sorted out. That's about five's really worth thinking about, because that's it. You just don't have that much time, right? Get the meals sorted out. That's about five hours a day. Get your sleeping time arrangements sorted out. Get the fundamental interactions that you repeat with your partner worked out voluntarily and negotiated. You're gonna cover 80% of your life that way,

and then it can just run as a routine. And that's really helpful. And if you don't do that, consciously, especially because our roles have fragmented and most of the traditional roles have disappeared. And so nobody knows who the hell is supposed to do what in the kitchen, for example. So nobody does anything except bitch and fight

and make wretched meals or buy fast food or something like that. So the alternative to that catastrophic failure or continual resentment and fighting is to rebuild the structures from the bottom up using consensus and negotiation and you can do that. So that's, you can think of that as the patriarchal structure. That's a good one. And I mean it's partly psychological because these are things you do as a person, but it's also partly political and economic and sociological

because while you're doing each of these things, you're also doing them in a way that's socially, hopefully not just socially acceptable, but actually socially desirable. And so that's the decomposition. And the reason that this keeps chaos at Bay is because, it isn't because your belief systems keep chaos at bay. It's not that abstract. It's that if you do things right, do these things right, then terrible things

happen to you with less frequency. And that's not like, it's partly psychological, because maybe you don't fight as much, maybe you're not anxious, as much, maybe you're not as depressed, but a lot of it's just practical. If your kid doesn't leave his skateboard on the stairs, then you don't break your neck as often. And that's not just psychological. That's actually a good thing not to break your neck so often. And so this structure isn't merely something that keeps things at bay psychologically.

OK, so here's another look at a hierarchy of narrative. The structure that keeps chaos at bay, and this is maybe the hierarchy that I engage in when I'm writing, and I'm doing all these things at the same time. That's what's cool. Like when I ask a student, what are you doing when you write at essay? It's like, well, that's a hard question, right? It's like, well, you're fast and important question. That's the first thing you should do if you're writing an essay. Then you're paying attention to the words and the phrases

and the sentences and the sentence relationship between the sentences within the paragraphs and the paragraph relationships to one another within the essay. And then the essay is relevance to the class and the class is relevance to your life. And like the essay bleeds out across your entire life. And so if I'm writing something, well, obviously at the most highest resolution level of analysis, I'm actually moving my fingers on the keyboard and moving my eyes back and forth on the screen.

That's where the mind meets the body. But then I'm trying to formulate a sentence. So I try to think up a good sentence that's nailing what I am trying to formulate. And then I try to pick it apart. And I do that a bunch of ways. I take the sentence and I put it on another page. And then I write like 10 different variants of the sentence

and see if I can get a better variant. And then I try to think of ways that it's a stupid sentence to see if I can, you know, put a pry bar underneath it and loosen it up. And if I can't do anything, if I can't manage that, then I keep the sentence that I've got. And then I do that with 10 sentences in a paragraph and I make sure the sentences are all arranged properly in the paragraph the same way by rewriting a bunch of different variants of it and trying to get the word right and the phrase right and the sentence right

and the sentence order right and the paragraph order right. And I can tell what it's right enough because I can't make it any better. That doesn't mean it's right. It just means I can't improve it. And so I get to the point where if I'm writing a paragraph and I write a variant and I can't tell if the variant is any better and it might be worse than I'm done. I've hit the limit of my intellectual capacity, and it's time to move on. But it isn't like the essay that I'm writing, let's say, has a boundary that's tightly

drawn around the essay, because there's a reason I'm writing the damn essay, and that would be, well, I'm trying to write a whole manuscript. Hopefully I'm trying to address an important problem because why would I be doing it otherwise? I mean, that would be kind of pointless. And maybe that's part of my role as a scientist. And that's a subset of my role as a professor. And then that's a subset of my role as a productive citizen. And then that's a subset of my role of someone who confronts the unknown.

You see, and that's why the logos is the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy. That's how the hierarchy should be structured. Is that everything else should be, you see, because you have a structure and you think, well, what should the structure be subordinate to? And then the answer should be something like, the structure should be subordinate to the process that generates the structure. Or the structure should be subordinate to the process that generates and maintains the structure.

Well, obviously, how could it be any other way, unless the structure's perfect? In which case, you dispense with the thing that generates it and improves it, but then you're a totalitarian. It's like, hey, we got the answer. It's like, no, you don't. People are still suffering, and they're still dying.

You don't have the damn answer. And so maybe you have an answer that means that there isn't quite as much suffering and dying as there could be, but there's plenty of road to be traveled yet. And so it makes perfect sense that all of this should be nested within this highest, I think of it sort of as the highest order of moral striving.

And then that also gives you moral hierarchy. That's the most important thing. You do that with honest speech. You do that with attention and honest speech. That's how you do that. And you don't sacrifice that to any of this because if you do, then you're hurting your soul. There's this idea in the New Testament that the sin against the Holy Ghost is the one sin that can't be forgiven.

No one knows what the hell that means. Maybe it doesn't mean anything. But I think this is what it means, is that because this process generates all this, if you violate that process, then there's no hope for you. Because that's the process by which you improve yourself and everyone else too, everything else. So if you decide you're not going to engage in that, it's like, well, there's no fixing

that because you've blown apart your relationship with the thing that does the fixing. And so, okay, and so that's how you keep chaos at bay. And so part of that is structural, right? Because you know how to do these things. More or less, it's part of your skill set, if you happen to be a writer, you could build one of these for a plumber. It doesn't make any difference, really. Although the outside thing should be the same, which is, I think, partly why in the Judeo-Christian tradition,

there is the assumption that people are fundamentally equal before God. And what that means is that, well, they should be nested, everyone, regardless of their particularities, particularities as individuals. Their highest order function is that, and they do it in whatever manner they can manage, and that's an extraordinarily valuable, or maybe the most extraordinarily valuable sociological, political, and economic function. And so that's why people are valuable. It's like we have this faculty to continually generate improvements to the structure that we jointly inhabit. Great. That gives us, it's so cool, because that gives us a fundamental unity, with at the highest

order of analysis, with the room for as much diversity as you can possibly manage, right? Because it actually turns out that the more the substructures differ the better, because then you can be doing something different than me. And that would be good because if we were doing the same thing, then it's just duplication of labor. If we could agree on the higher order principle and then specialize at the lower order levels, it's like you get to have your cake and eat it too.

And that doesn't happen very often. And so then another rule of thumb is if you're trying to solve a problem, solve it at this level, highest resolution level possible. Before you dare move up, dare move up the hierarchy, because as you move up the abstraction hierarchy, the probability that you'll make a catastrophic error while attempting to fix the problem radically increases, because abstraction is very, very powerful. And so you want to be very careful. I mean, we saw that when the mortgage market crashed, the reason it crashed was because of strange use of derivatives.

And derivatives are like higher order abstractions in the financial world. And derivatives give you tremendous financial leverage and power with huge risk. And so the upside is massive, absolutely massive because you can multiply your earnings. But the downside is complete bloody catastrophe. And so part of what I would say, an intelligent conservative ethos is, is solve the problem at the highest level of resolution, highest level, most local level of resolution. It's safer. And it's more likely to actually produce a solution. Okay, now. So, now you're in your plan.

Now we're simplified it again just to one little map, right? But all those other things are nested in there. And so, what happens to you as you stroll merrily on your way through life, well what happens is that as you're moving from point A to point B, you encounter things and people think that what they encounter are objects, but that's not the case. First of all, most of the things that you encounter, many of the things are actually other people and they're not objects, they're too damn complex. And even apart from the social world, the things that you encounter aren't objects, they seem to be something more like tools or obstacles.

And I don't mean that we see objects and turn them into tools or obstacles. I mean that we see tools and obstacles, because what happens is that when you array yourself towards a goal, then the world transforms itself into things that get in the way of that goal and things that's three things. Things that get in the way of the goal, those are things you don't like. Things that facilitate your movement towards the goal, those are things that you like, and irrelevant things.

And mostly you want irrelevant things because there's just too damn many things. So the category of irrelevant is one you really like. So most of everything, most of everything is irrelevant. If you have a good plan, a few things are good, because they move you forward, and some other things are not so good. You want to go around the not so good things if you can manage them, unless you like to run head-forth into brick walls, which is not particularly a learning experience, but I wouldn't repeat it too many times. You want the world to array itself as a set of, we could say, tools.

Now, what happens is that you have this perceptual system that's mediated by dopamine. It's the same system that cocaine activates or methamphetamine or the drugs that people really like to take. And it's the dopamine-energy system that responds with positive emotion to indications that you've encountered something that will facilitate your movement towards a goal. the dopaminergic system that responds with positive emotion to indications that you've encountered something that will facilitate your movement towards a goal. And that's really important to note, because people tend to think that they're happy because they achieve goals, and that's not true.

What's true, because as soon as you achieve a goal, then you have a problem, which is what's the next goal. And that's actually a big problem. You encounter that as soon as you graduate from university, for example. That's right. I made this joke before. The graduation day is like King of the University hierarchy undergraduate hierarchy. Day after your unemployed potential Starbucks employee.

So obviously, the accomplishment per se, as a source of reward, is problematic. Because when you accomplish you run the frame to its end and then you have the problem of needing a new frame. So that's a problem. But if what you're encountering instead are things that will move you along your way, it's like, hey, that's great. And that's where you get your positive motivation.

So that's really thinking, that's so much we're thinking about. You can think about that for a year and that wouldn't even be enough to think about it, because here's what it means. It means in some sense that the Buddhists are right with their claim about Maya, M-A-Y-A, which means that people live in an illusion. And what they mean by that is, well, you have goal, whatever your goal is, and that goal gives relevance to the world. And you could change the relevance of the world in the snap just by changing your goal.

You can do that. And so then you think, well, it's sort of an illusion because you can just change it. Now, you don't want to push that line of argumentation too far because even if the specific point can be changed, the fact that you're in one of these frames cannot be changed. And so you have to be in a frame, although you're in one of these frames cannot be changed. And so you have to be in a frame, although you get to pick the frame. So there's still an absolute there, which is that you have to be in a frame, and that is not a trivial absolute. It's a very, it's a very major absolute. So then you think, okay, all of your positive emotion is going to be experienced in relationship to the goal. Well, then we think, well, you could use some positive emotion. It's a good thing.

Positive emotion inhibits anxiety and disappointment and frustration and pain. It does all that. Technically it does that. That's why a football player with a broken thumb who wants to score a touchdown can go out there and play the football game even though it's kind of an arbitrary goal, right? It's like, really, you're going to go out there and like, risk your hand to fire a pig's skin through some poles. It's like, well, you can say the same sort of cynical thing about most of the things that people do, but you can't say the cynical thing about the fact that they have to do things.

So you have a point, you have your aim, you have your ambition, and then that's what turns the world into a potentially positive place. And here's the kicker. This is so cool. The higher the aim, the more the positive emotion. So that's, that's you think, well why should I bother? You know, why should I bother doing something lofty and difficult? It's like, because it's worth it. That's why. Because the alternative is stupid suffering.

Because really, really, because what happens is, like, you don't need a framework in order to suffer. You can just lay there day after day. And suffer, right? That's easy. So that's the default condition. If you don't have a lofty ambition, then you suffer miserably. And the reason for that is life is really complex, short, finite, full of suffering, and beyond you. And so you can just lay there and think about that, and it's horrible. And so that's not helpful. It's just not useful. And so, can just lay there and think about that, and it's horrible. And so that's not helpful.

It's just not useful. And so people often say, life is meaningless. It's like, no, it's not. That's wrong. Because if it was meaningless, that'd be easy. You could just sit there and do nothing. And it wouldn't matter. It'd be like you were like a lot, lobotomized sheep.

It's just irrelevant. But that isn't what happens. When people say that life has no meaning, that isn't what they mean. What they mean is, I'm suffering stupidly and intensely, and I don't know what to do about it. Well, the suffering is meaningful. It's just not the kind of meaning you want. So how do you get out of that?

You adopt, you note the baseline of suffering, which is very, very, very, very high. And then you say to yourself, okay, I need to do something that justifies that. And that's not so easy, because the baseline for suffering is high. If you're going to make something of yourself, let's say, so that it's worthwhile to exist in the world, then you have to do, you have to aim at something that's so well structured, that you can say, yeah, earthquakes, cancer, death of my family, dissolution of my goals, ultimate futility of life,

and the heat death of the universe, hey, it doesn't matter, it's worth it. All right. So, now, it's worth it. All right. Now, here's another complicating factor. So I said, well, there's three things that you can run into when you're going about your goal. And I would say, if you're going to form a goal, if you're going to form a plan,

you look about three to five years out in the future. Because beyond that, you get something called combinatorial explosion. And it means that there's so many variables that you just can't predict. So there's not that much point looking out 20 years, because like, what the hell do you know what's going to happen in 20 years? Nothing. Three years, maybe you've got, maybe you can chart a course to three years, five years, something like that.

So that's not a bad segment of time to consider. And then consider what your life would have to be like in order for it to be worthwhile for you. Knowing also what you're going to be like if it isn't worthwhile for you. And what you're going to be like if it isn't worthwhile for you is Cain. That's what you're like, because that's what that story is about, because he's able to

the guy who has a goal in this making the proper sacrifices, and Cain is the person for whom by his own faults, at least in part, things aren't working out for. And so the default for not doing this is something like building resentment, bitterness, with an underlying, what would you call it, flavor enhancer of murderous resentment, something like that, which you will act out in the world, which people act out in the world all the time. And it's no wonder, because without this, without something lofty, pulling you along, then the baseline is stupid suffering. And you know, if you take an anode dog and you just chain it in the, pulling you along, then the baseline is stupid suffering.

And if you take an ant a dog and you just chain it in the backyard, and we put a collar on it, there's two tights, so it chafes all the time. And it can't even bark, and there's just dirt around it. And it's too goddamn hot out in the sun, and maybe you don't give it enough water. It's not going to be very happy dog. Its basic condition is misery.

Well, the same applies to people. So, all right, so you're on your way to see, you remember that you've all probably watched Pinocchio or know about it. One of the things that happens that's really cool in Pinocchio is that when Jepetto decides that he wants his puppet to be a genuine autonomous being, he wishes upon a star.

It's a very strange thing, but everybody just swallows it because we don't notice when we're swallowing things that are completely preposterous. It's this animated puppet here, wishes on a star that his puppet is going to become real and everybody nods their head and goes, oh, yeah, that makes sense. It's like, no, it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense at all, but it doesn't matter.

It doesn't make the sort of sense that we normally associate with sense. It makes a kind of meta sense and everybody understands it. So this is what Jepetto is doing. Is he's elevating his eyes above the horizon. So out of the realm of the worldly, let's say, to the transcendent, and the transcendent will say, for all intents and purposes, you can see the transcendent, spread above you in heaven that arches over us. It's close enough for our purposes. And there's a star there, and a star is something that's eternal, that shines in the darkness.

And so, Jepetto makes an agreement with the transcendent. He says, look, I'm willing to do whatever it takes that my creation becomes autonomous. Well, that's exactly this situation that you want to set up for yourself. It's like, okay, you got to figure out what star you're going to orient yourself by. And you have to ask yourself, like no one's ever asked you,

okay, if you had the choice to make your life worth living, what's your price? What do you need? Just find out. First of all, you just ask, you'll tell yourself, like you'll be afraid because you thought I'll never get that. It's like, well lower your sights a little bit then, you know? Don't ask for a 80-foot super yacht in like six months. That just means you're stupid. You know, it doesn't mean, you're not, you know, first of all, it's not gonna make you happy anyways. You know, it's just not, it's not,

it's not wise. You're asking, you're supposed to be asking yourself this question like you're someone you care about. So you imagine you're talking to some 12-year-old kid that you kind of like. Think, I it wouldn't be so bad if this 12-year-old kid had a decent life. So you too, it's like, it wouldn't be so bad. The if this 12 year old get out of decent life. So you too, it's like it wouldn't be so bad.

The universe wouldn't mind if you had a decent life. If there was little less suffering on your part, especially if you didn't, you know, voice to the awful and other people, if there's little less suffering on your part and you made things a little better everywhere you went, it's like the universe would probably be okay with that. So you could, I think you could get away with it if you're sort of quiet about it. And so ask yourself, okay, so then once you've established your target and you know where you are,

then you know what's good for you, because that moves you along. And that happens at a perceptual level. You don't have to think about it anymore. And the experimental literature on that's already quite clear. So for example, if I specify that podium as the target for my action, then I'm happy when I'm walking towards it because there it is in everything cooperating really nicely. But if I specify going to the exit sign that you guys can't see that this is an obstacle

in the front of, then as soon as I specify that, then that's an annoying obstacle. And that's pre-cognitive. It happens immediately. It happens instantaneously. And so it really is the case that you're being manifests itself inside these frames. And so what's so cool about that is you can change the frame. It doesn't mean you can like juggle planets or anything like that.

But it does give you quite a scope of what? I'm trampled action within the world. And if the frame isn't working out, then you can tweak it. Or sometimes you have to make a major adjustment in it. Whatever. You don't have to stick to the damn thing like it's the ideology that you're going to die for. It's a tentative plan. It's a work in progress. And that's with the future authoring program,

one of the things I recommend for people is that they should do it badly, because you're not gonna get it right anyways, but a reasonable plan is way better than no plan, plus a reasonable plan is a plan that has built into it, the process is that will enable the plan to get better as you implement it. So you just start with a reasonable plan.

So you don't have to worry about whether it's correct. It's not correct. It doesn't matter. It's better than nothing. That's the issue. So, okay, so you've got the world parsed up into things that are making you happy when you look at them, things that get in the way that produce negative emotion, and then a whole host of irrelevant things, because almost everything's irrelevant. And that's where all the chaos is hiding.

The chaos is hiding in what's irrelevant. And so, and that's very interesting observation, because since the chaos is virtually infinite, it's a real question. Where the hell do you put it? Well, you put it in what you ignore. And you can ignore it as long as it isn't actively interfering with your movement forward, you can assume that it doesn't matter. That it isn't matter, that it doesn't matter.

Same thing. All right, so here's the kicker. There's one more class of things that you can run into along the way. And this is where the chaos breaks through. So let's say you're moving from point A to point B, and something that you don't expect occurs. And it gets in the way.

So let's say that you're living with someone, and maybe you kind of like them. You're not married. So you don't like them that much, because otherwise you'd ask them to marry you. But anyways. And so quarter of youth is looking for something better, and three quarters of you is half satisfied,

something like that. And then a person, because we're ambivalent about such things, and then the person you discover or're ambivalent about such things, and then the person you discover or the person announces that they've been having an affair. Okay, so then how are you supposed to respond emotionally to that? Well, the part of you that wasn't all that committed to the relationship is kind of exhilarated by that, and then the three quarters of you

that's half satisfied is hurt, and you're going to exploit that part for sure in the ensuing discussions. And not mention the, oh, that's kind of exciting that you've betrayed me that way. So, but the point is, is that you, that's a hole. Now, what's happened is a hole has, you have this structure that you're walking on, like ice, like the thin ice that you're skating on. And now there's a hole in it. And the hole, we don't even know how deep the hole is, but you know there's a hole there. And so now you're anxious about it. Oh, there may be also a little bit excited because God only knows what's down there.

But, but you don't know what to do with that hole because it could spread very badly on you. It could be that, you know, the whole relationship was a facade. And that all your relationships have been facades, and that the reason that is is because you're so damn shallow that it's impossible for you to have a relationship that isn't just a facade, and that's partly because you don't pay any attention to other people, and it's also partly because you're malevolent and selfish. So that's a nasty thing to discover, or maybe that's the sort of person that you're attracting, which would make sense, actually, if that's the sort of person that you are.

And so there are certain things that you can encounter that basically unglued you. And what happens is that those moments of being unglued travel up that entire heart, or archaeopresuppositions. It's like because one of the logical conclusions to being betrayed in a relationship is that you are truly a bad person. Now another equally logical conclusion is that the person that you're with is really a bad person and another logical conclusion is all people are truly bad people. I mean, in macro ways that, in micro ways, you can't trust anyone.

You can't trust women, you can't trust men, you can't trust human beings, you can't trust yourself. The whole place is a catastrophe. It's a nightmare. Well, then you can fall through into chaos. Now, the way your body responds to that, or maybe you're supposed to be getting a promotion at work. That's good. You're all chipper about the promotion at work and you walk into your boss's office because he or she wants to see you and they say, well, you know, we've reviewed your performance over the last few years and your performance has been somewhere between mediocre and decent and we're downsizing and see you later. That's not a raise or a promotion, that's for sure. That's a whole that you fall into.

And the question is, well, what do you make of that? Right? How do you frame that? How do you take that emergent chaos and make habitable order out of it? You don't know. Is the whole capitalist system rotten to the core? I mean, that's a convenient explanation under those circumstances. That's for sure. Were you working for a psychopathic son of a bitch? Did you make the wrong choice in

university and was that your father's fault because you never did what you want or was it your fault for not standing up to him? Or is it a dying industry or maybe this a wake-up call that you should go do something else that you've been waiting to do, you know, that you've actually wanted to do your whole life and that's why you're doing such a miserable job at your current occupation because you're bitter and resentful about the fact that you never did what you want. You don't know, it's all of those things at once and that's very stressful because all of those things at once is too many things and that's the re-emergence of chaos. That's the flood.

That's the return to the beginning of the cosmos. That's another way that it's been represented mythologically. It's that you voyage all the way back to the beginning of the cosmos when there's nothing but undifferentiated chaos. And that's what you're confronting. And maybe it's too much for you.

And often it is. I mean, that can really traumatize it. And it can hurt your brain. It's just too much for you to bear. But it doesn't matter. You're stuck with it. And so how do you respond to that? Well, some of it is catastrophic negative emotion.

You freeze, and that's protective. And maybe you don't even want to move. You don't want to bloody well get out of bed for a week. And that's because your body is reacting as if the bedroom floor is covered with snakes. And the best thing for you to do is just not move. Just freeze, not a pleasant situation to be in, because it's your hyperaroused, very, very physiologically demanding. And there's zero about it that's productive, except maybe the snakes won't see you.

But they've already seen you, so that isn't helping very well. So you've got all this undifferentiated negative emotion, anxiety, fear, hurt, anger, guilt, shame, emotional pain, the whole plethora of catastrophes, and then maybe on the other side lurking down there is, thank God I'm done with that job, I just bloody well hated, I drag myself off to work every day, and there's a little part of my soul that's so goddamn happy. I finally got fired that I can hardly stand it. You know, maybe you don't even admit that to yourself because well, that would mean that all that time you spent at the job was just some cost for you deluding yourself the whole time.

It is an interesting thing to consider, though, sometimes if you're in the unpleasant circumstance of having to fire someone, you know, sometimes firing someone is the best thing that can happen to them, which doesn't mean that you should go out and like, enjoy it. Although I have met very disagreeable people who actually enjoyed firing people, and I'll tell you a story about that at some point, because it's quite interesting. But, you know, sometimes if someone's just limping along in their job and doing it as miserably and wretchedly as they possibly can imagine the best thing you can do to them for them

is to say, you know, you're failing at this. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to be failing at absolutely everything else in the entire world. So maybe you should just accept the damn failure and go off and try something new. And I mean, that's terrifying for people. And I know they hate it and all that.

But sometimes it's better than the alternative, which is just slow, torturous death. Here's a funny way of looking at it. So, let's say you fall right into that hole that's underneath everything and you've hidden anomaly that you don't understand. You say, what's that anomaly made out of? Exactly. I know that's a strange way of thinking about it. Because it's not, well, you could say, we'll just go along with that.

It's a metaphor. What's that anomaly made out of? Well, here's a way of thinking about it. It's made out of spirited matter. And here's why. This is something I learned in part from Piaget. He said, well, it's made out of matter, because of course, that's the world matter. And the world is also what matters.

And so that's kind of a nice duality there. But it's made out of spirit, because when you encounter something anomalous and go down the rabbit hole, when you go into the underworld, it's underneath everything that you've relied on. You learn things down there. So what's down there is information. And that's now, it's maybe way more information than you want, but it is information. It's information.

And what can you do with the information? You can inform yourself with the information, right? You can put yourself information with the information. That's helpful, too. And so, and you think, well, you're a psyche, maybe you're not a spirit, it depends on whether you're a materialist or not, but at least we can say that you're a psyche. The question is, what's your psyche made of? Well, it's obviously got a material substrate,

but the matter happens to be a raid in a particular order, and that's an information order. And so when you fall into the underworld that's underneath everything, and you encounter that latent information, then what you can do is enhance your psyche. You can grow your spirit, because what you do is you take the new information and you incorporate it. That's like eating the apple that Adam and Eve ate. You incorporate that and that makes more of you. And that's not a metaphorical or metaphysical proposition.

It's to say nothing other than, well, that's what happens when children learn. You think of what happens. Charles III has a pretty low resolution representation of the world and is a fairly low resolution human being. Got all the constituent elements there but isn't differentiated in any tremendous manner. That's all still to come in the future. And so what does the child do? Explore. What do they explore?

Things they don't understand. That's where the information is because you already understand what you understand. There's no information there. You go where you don't understand. That's where the information is. And out of that information, you generate a higher resolution world, and you generate a higher resolution self.

And so out of the combat with the underlying dragon of chaos, you generate spirit and matter. And that's what you do when you go down into the underworld. So if it doesn't kill you, or if it doesn't make you wish you were dead, which you probably will. But there's a bunch of you that has to die down there anyway. So maybe that's not such a bad thing, because if you had this relationship that ended in betrayal,

then there's something that's just not exactly right. There's something that went, and the reason I'm saying that, you think, well, that's kind of moralistic. It's like, actually, I don't mind being moralistic in case you haven't noticed. But that's not a fair comment because you're playing the stupid game. It's like, you live with someone in fidelity.

That's the game, right? You've decided the rules with the game comes a morality. The morality are the rules of the game. Well, then the thing collapses into infidelity. It's like, well, you played the game wrong, or it was the wrong game. One of those two, it's one of those two. You pick the damn game.

And having picked the game, you can't all of a sudden say, well, no, those aren't the rules. It's like, yeah, yeah. If you pick the game, you pick the rules. And if you fail at complying with the rules, then you fail. Now, you could say, well, I can pick a different game. It's like, I don't care how you solve the problem. You're still stuck with the problem. It's a moral problem, fundamentally. And it might take some major league retooling to fix it. So you're at point A, trying to get to point B, that's not working out.

You hit an anomaly. You're not getting to point B, that's for sure. Your medical school student, you write your MCATs, which is a test you have to write, you go to medical school, you get 25th percentile. I don't know who you are, but you're not a pre-med student. And maybe you never were, right? And that's the rub, man.

And so who the hell are you? You don't know. Collapse down here into this motivational conflict, this place of motivational and emotional uncertainty, and tremendous information, right? It's a place of transformation. It's the phoenix that burns. It's transformation. It's the phoenix that burns. It's the burning part of the phoenix that burns.

It's the journey to the underworld. It's the journey to hell. It can really be a journey to hell because you may find out that the reason that your partner betrayed you or that you didn't get your damn promotion is because there is seriously something wrong with you. And you know it.

And I don't just mean that you don't know what you're doing. I mean that there is 25% of you that is seriously aiming at things, not being good. And so you fall into the underworld and you find out that, oh, God, I just got exactly what I was aiming for. Or I got exactly what the worst part of me was aiming for. And that worst part, that's something to clean up, and that's not going to be easy, because it's got its hooks in me, like something ferocious, something seriously ferocious. And I've been toying with it for a very long time,

and maybe I can't even detach it anymore. And so that's not so fun. And you see people like that in psychotherapy, very frequently, where you see them wandering around on the streets like absolute catastrophic former shells of themselves, you know, because they've hit the underworld and they ended up in hell and there's no getting out of it. And so those are the people you tend to give a wide birth to when you walk down the street.

So there you are, down in the underworld, right, back where the latent information exists and just too much of it. And that's this, it's the same thing. It's the same thing, and that's why the Adam and Eve story is archetypal, right? Because we're always ingesting something new that knocks us into a new state of self-consciousness. And it's always a catastrophic demolition of our previous paradise, insufficient as that paradise was. Something comes along to destroy it and knocks the slats

out of our life. And that's a voyage to the underworld out of the world, garden into chaos. into chaos. And so what is all of that? Well, there's lots of ways of construing it. It's a frame transformation. There's a walled city, it's got a hole in it because all walled cities have holes in them, right, because everything's imperfect and that's where the chaos comes up. And then maybe you go out there like a hero to fight the chaos and to reestablish the frame. That's what you're supposed to do, and maybe you free some information while you're doing that.

Or maybe you establish a relationship. And so that's the journey, frame, damage, chaos, voluntary confrontation, reconstitution of the world. And that's human existence, and hopefully it's not just linear. It's stepwise, right? Is that the you that emerges as a consequence of your latest catastrophe is everything that you were before plus something more. And that actually constitutes what you might describe as measurable progress. And that's another argument against moral relativism because if you can do everything that you could do before and you can do some more things, we could just define that as better. It's not a bad definition. And then we have an op, it's like what you're trying to do is to differentiate the world

and differentiate yourself. And every time you undergo one of these revolutions, then hopefully both of those things happen. And then there's a moral to that story too, which is do it voluntarily and maybe do it. Don't wait for it to happen catastrophically. Keep your eyes open. And when something goes a little bit wrong, that you could fix it. Don't say, no, that doesn't matter. Maybe it does matter. Maybe it is matter.

Maybe it's exactly the matter out of which you should be built. Maybe it's the matter out of which the world should be built. And if part of you is telling you it matters, what it means is that that part is telling you that there's something there that you need to engage with. That's what it means for something to matter. I really get out of the kick out of the word matter because it's got these two weird meanings, right?

There's the matter that everything is made out of the kick out of the word matter because it's got these two weird meanings, right? There's the matter that everything is made out of, that materialists think everything is made out of and that's just dead matter. And then there's the matter that life is made out of, which is what matters. And now and then you're moving through life and something matters, it's calling to you. And that's the unrevealed world trying to reveal itself to you.

And all you have to do is allow it to reveal itself to you. And then maybe what happens is that a minor shift in shape is all that has to happen to you. You don't have to burn right down to the bloody egg and hatch out, you know, as a newborn. Maybe you can just repair a little bit of something that's gone wrong with you. And so you can undergo a sequence of continual micro deaths

instead of waiting for the bloody catastrophe that might send you so far down that you'll never recover. And all you have to do is attend to what matters. And your whole nervous system is doing this for you. You've got a goal. Something happens. It matters. So what are you supposed to do with that?

You're supposed to fix it. You're supposed to engage with it. That's why it's calling out to you as if it matters. So what are you supposed to do with that? You're supposed to fix it, you're supposed to engage with it. That's why it's calling out to you as if it matters. It's saying there's an indeterminate part of the world here that wants to manifest itself into fully articulated being. And it's calling to you to do that. And if you ignore it, then it accumulates. And it accumulates. It turns into the dragon of chaos, and then it waits until you're not at your best, and then it eats you, and that's the alternative. So that seems like a bad plan, unless you like being lunch meat. So that's a long introduction to Noah. But you need it, you know, because you can't understand the story otherwise. And so, because that's what the story is about.

And now we can go through the story relatively rapidly, although it doesn't look like we'll go through all of it tonight. Okay, so we'll start with the next section of Genesis. This is immediately after Canaanable, and there's a short story to begin with, just a fragment. I called it Giants of the Earth. And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the Earth, so this is after Canaanable. And daughters were born unto them. men began to multiply on the face of the earth, so this is after Cain and Abel, and daughters

were born unto them. That the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair and took the wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, my spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he is also flesh, yet his days will be 120 years. There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men, which were of old men of renown. Now, there's been all sorts of attempts to interpret those few rather

jumbled lines, but I see it as a reflection of a classic development of hero mythology, and this is sort of nostalgia for the past. One of the things, Marcia Eliada pointed out was that what happens to human memory in pre-literate cultures, because nothing is written down, is that what needs to be preserved gets amalgamated, and so imagine that you have a culture that's based on fishing, we'll

say. So you have to be a good fisherman, and human beings who use simple tools to fish are unbelievably good fishermen. They know every bloody thing you can possibly imagine about fish, because otherwise they die. So it's really important that they learn everything about fish, and maybe they've been fishing for like 13,000 years or something like that. So there's a lot of accumulated knowledge. And so then the question is, well, who taught mankind how to fish? And the answer is fragments of individuals across history. But that's, you know, you're not going to remember the damn fragments. You put them all together into the amalgam of the heroic fishermen, you know, the guy

who established the pattern for proper fishing, whatever that pattern happens to be. One of the patterns might be, don't take all the damn fish because there won't be any further next year or something like that. But all those fragments of discovery get amalgamated into heroes of the past. And then what you do if you're a fisherman is you act out the heroic fisherman of the past. So the idea that the remen of renown or heroes in the past is just a fragmentary, what would you call?

It's just a fragment of that sequence of ideas. The back in the past, there were mighty human beings who established the proper patterns of being, and they were the sons of God who took the daughters of men to wife. Now, and it's interesting too, because we do know that the more competent men are disproportionately likely to leave offspring. So it's a perfectly reasonable way of formulating the circumstance. Onto the flood. This is from Merchie Elietta, who wrote a book called A History of Religious

Ideas, which I would strongly recommend. It's a three volume set. It's quite readable and it's brilliant. It's brilliant. I really like it. And this is what Machialeliates had to say about flood myths. Has it been well known since the compilations made by our Andre H. Eusner and J. G. Fraser who wrote the Golden Bough, the deluge myth, the flood myth, is almost universally disseminated. It is documented on all the continents, although very rarely in Africa, particularly in the desert, unspricingly, although, and on various cultural levels, a certain number of variants seem to be the result

of dissemination rather than spontaneous regeneration. Let's say, first from Mesopotamia and then from India. It is equally possible that one or several diluvial catastrophes gave rise to fabulous narratives, but it would be risky to explain so widespread ameth by phenomena of which no geological traces has been found. Well, Elyah de Routes quite a while ago.

I think he wrote that book in perhaps in the 80s, maybe in the 70s. But since then, there actually has been quite a bit of evidence advanced in various circles for the existence of catastrophic floods that occurred within the relative memory of human civilization memory, let's say. So the West Coast Indians, for example,

I suppose that's the wrong word, the West Coast, I don't know what to say. I know Quakwaqa Carver, who told me a flood story, and they have a story that's almost identical to the story of Noah, except of course it involves giant canoes but it's the same story. They release, if I remember correctly, a raven but Noah releases a raven first and then adove once the flood comes to an end and it has a tower of babble issue to the same story. So the canoes are all put together.

It's not one giant canoe, it's a bunch of canoes all together. They write out the flood. The problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that the problem is that So there are floods. You can look up the Missoula floods 15,000 to 13,000 years ago. And the Quarco-Acoa people have probably been on the West Coast for something like 13 to 14,000 years. And you can maintain an oral tradition for a very, very long time. You think, no, but traditional societies don't change. That's where they're traditional. And so they have the same stories over generations.

They remember the same stories. So when the Missoula floods, which were a consequence of melting glacial ice, just charged up to, they figured there were 55 of them between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, discharged volumes up to 15 times the volume of the Amazon River. So these are major league floods.

And then sears that all published a paper in 2008 called Climate Change in Post-Glacial Human Disperses in Southeast Asia claiming that there were multiple floods particularly affecting Southeast Asia between 15,000 and 7,000 years ago. So there might, early at it might be a bit wrong about the notion that there were no geological traces of such catastrophic flooding.

But anyways, it doesn't matter because we're still looking at this from a psychological perspective and that's fine. The majority of the flood myths seem in some sense to form part of the cosmic rhythm, the old world, people by a fallen humanity, is submerged under the waters. And sometime later a new world emerges from the aquatic chaos. In large number of variants, the flood is the result of the sins or ritual faults of human beings. Sometimes it's a result simply from the wish of a divine being

to put an end to mankind. The chief causes light once in the sins of men and the decrepitute of the world. It's a brilliant analysis partly because it puts, it draws this lovely parallel between, which I mentioned a bit earlier, between the fact that things go wrong all by themselves, but that you can speed that along by not paying any attention. So if you're in a relationship, you know, relationship takes an awful lot of maintenance. And you know when it needs to be maintained because you start developing some distance from

the person that you have the relationship with, and then that starts to become tinged with a little bit of dislike and hopefully not contempt, but a little bit of dislike and maybe some emotional distance. And you feel that and you think, well, it's hard to tell what you think, but you feel that, anyways, you know that that's emerged. And so then you have a chance at that point to repair whatever's gone wrong. And that would require some retooling on both of your parts, maybe one more person, more than the other, but whatever, we would require a serious discussion like, look,

I've noticed that this has been happening. And maybe it's you, and maybe it's you and maybe it's me and we should probably figure it out because if it was you, that'd be convenient and everything, but if it was me, then I'd like to fix it because then it would be fixed. And so that's why you listen to your partner because they might tell you that there's something stupid about you that you don't know. And then if you could fix that, then you wouldn't have to be stupid in that way anymore. And it's actually one of the real useful, it's one of the genuinely useful features of

having a partner because you really want to be stupid and then continue to repeat your mistakes, add nauseam for the rest of your life. I know it's more convenient to do that than to have a, you know, knock down, drag them out argument about just exactly why you're stupid and how you could fix it. But still, it's better to have the argument. So the chief causes lie at once in the sins of men and the decrept to the world. And the sins there are generally either acts of commission

where people do things that they know to be wrong or they fail to do things that they know would be right. Doesn't really matter. Sins of commission are usually judged more harshly, say within the Judeo-Christian tradition, but I think there might be a bit of an error in that, because sins of a mission can be a real catastrophe. So here's a flood idea. Tell me what you think about this.

So there's this idea that a judgmental being will flood you out if you continue on your wayward ways. And that seems like a little bit of, you know, it's one of the examples of Jehovah being a little on the harsh side in the Old Testament, not something that modern people really prove of so much because we like our gods sort of domesticated. Let's put it that way.

And unfortunately, that isn't how it tends to work. But I've often thought about the reaction in North America to the hurricane in New Orleans. Because there's two ways of reading that. One is mother nature, has a little fit, and sends a hurricane into New Orleans and wipes everyone out. And isn't that a catastrophe? Isn't that an example of our fragility in the force in the face of natural power? But there's

another way of reading it. Maybe this is unfair, but it'll do for the purpose of illustration. It's like, you know, the Dutch build dicks, right, to keep the ocean back. And they're actually pretty effective at that because their country is mostly underwater. And it turns out that if you go to Holland, it's actually not underwater. And so their dicks are working. And so the Dutch were very organized people.

And they better be because their country is supposed to be underwater, right? So you better be organized if your country is supposed to be underwater. And so they are very organized. And they have a rule for their dikes, which is they try to estimate the worst possible oceanic storm that will come in 10,000 years and make sure that the dikes will withstand that. Well, from my reading, the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans built the dikes for a storm every 100 years.

And that's not so good because we live about 80 years, let's say. So that means the probability that one of those storms is going to come whipping by in a lifespan is pretty damn high. And then so that perhaps wasn't the wisest of planning, especially because some of New Orleans is actually supposed to be underwater. And then worse, you know, Mississippi is a state that's quite well known for its corruption.

And so you might also say that tremendous amount of the money and time and resources that could have and should have and was planned to go towards fixing the problem didn't. And so the hurricane came along and, oh my God, wasn't it a natural disaster? And the question is, what bloody well makes you so sure that it was a natural disaster? Because if the infrastructure would have been maintained and built to the specifications that were certainly

technically possible, and would have actually been less expensive in the long run to build, and everyone knew it. And the hurricane came along and wiped out the city. Why do you think that's a natural disaster? To me, that's a natural example, if you think about it from a metaphorical perspective, of a judgmental God deciding to use a flood to teach a moral lesson. And you might say, well, that's pretty harsh. What about all those flood survivors?

It's like, yeah, well, the whole flood thing was kind of harsh. And so pointing out that there were steps that could have been taken. And also that I doubt in the aftermath have been taken, even though everyone knows now exactly what had happened, is you might consider it a diagnosis, but it's irrelevant, because what I'm really trying to tell you is how the mythological stories would line up on this, because you can tell a story about Mother Nature manifesting her catastrophe and potential for tragedy, or you could tell another story of an absolute failure of the human social structure and the human individual level

because of the corruption to address a problem that everyone knew was there. And so that's a good example of how things, how the flood comes when you're not behaving properly. You know, and one of the things that's quite interesting about the Old Testament and the people who wrote it is that they always assume that if the flood comes, that meant you weren't prepared. If that's the rule, right? It's like the A priori axiom.

I think you got flooded out? Hey, you weren't prepared enough. How can you tell? Well, you got flooded out, right? That's the evidence. And you might say, well, that's not very fair. It's like, fair isn't the point. The point is, do you want to get flooded out again or not?

Because fair would be, well, you better figure out why you got flooded out and fix it, so it doesn't happen again. And that's the moral thing to do when you're thinking about morality as walking the path that's most appropriate to get to the destination that you think would be the best possible destination. By the mere fact that it exists, that is, it lives and produces, the cosmos gradually deteriorates and ends by falling into decay. That is the reason why it has to be recreated. In other words, the flood realizes on the macrocosmic scale what is symbolically affected

during the New Year festival, the end of the world and the end of a sinful humanity in order to make a new creation possible. Well, that's an interesting. There's a lot of information packed into those few lines that Dilli added wrote, because he also, in the Mesopotamian rituals, the Mesopotamians would act out the collapse of the kingdom into chaos, essentially, at the New Year's festival. It's kind of what you do when you make resolutions, because like it's a degenerate, what you'd say, is our proclivity to make New Year's resolutions sort of a degenerate ritual.

And I don't mean that it's bad. I mean, it's the remnants of something much grander. So the idea was, well, the Mesopotamians would take their emperor outside the city, the walled city, and once a year, and they would make him kneel, and they'd take off all his king clothes, and then they'd whack him with a glove, if I remember correctly, the priest would do that, and then they'd whack him with a glove, if I remember correctly, the priest would do that,

and then they'd make him recount all the ways that he wasn't being a good emperor that year. He wasn't being a good marduck, because that was who he was supposed to be on earth, and that's the guy with eyes all the way around his head. He speaks magic words and transforms chaos into order. That's what the emperor is supposed to do. And so the question would be, okay, your emperor,

it's like, have a little humility here, because you're not God incarnate. You probably made some mistakes. Can you think of any ways in the last year that you didn't take every advantage of every opportunity you possibly could have to take some spare chaos and transform it into habitable order? That's a good thing to think about.

Well, that's what you're thinking about when you make a New Years resolution, even though you don't know it. It's like, well, could you be a better person in the upcoming year? Well, you can imagine the flood, and then you can set yourself straight, and then you can prepare for it. And that means maybe you can stave it off, but it also means that maybe even if you don't stave it off, you can ride it out. And that's actually the story of Noah, because what happens with Noah is that he can see that things are not good and that there's a flood coming.

And God is maybe letting him know. And it says in the story that Noah walked with God, remember, and that's what Adam did before he got all self-conscious about the whole thing. He walked with God. We'll talk about that more next time. But what that would mean maybe is because Noah was straight, and he put himself together, and his familial relationships were good because it also says that that his antenna were working. And he could see a little farther into the future than someone whose vision was completely obscured by fog and chaos.

And he could tell that things were not going to go well. And so he prepared for it. And because he prepared for it, well, then things actually went pretty well for Noah, even though the flood came. And so that's an interesting thing, because that's an indeterminate issue in human existence. How big a hurricane would it take to wipe out new Orleans if everyone was prepared? Well, you're not going to wipe out the Dutch.

I mean, that's going to be a tough one, man. You're going to have to conjure up a pretty damn big storm to take out their dikes. Well, how thoroughly defended could New Orleans be if nobody in the municipal and state governments was corrupt? Well, end of the hurricane problem, because that's something that we could clearly deal with.

We know how to do it. And the same applies in your own life is that there are floods coming. You can bloody well be sure of that. That's absolutely 100% certain. Some of them are going to be personal. Some of them are going to be familial.

Some of them are going to be social and political and economic. It's like, are they going to be catastrophes for you? Or are you going to ride them out? Are you going to prepare? Well, the first issue might be, well, do you have your act together, well enough to see them coming with enough advanced warning so that you can take proper measures? Maybe just to sidestep it. Maybe just don't go where the flood is going to be. That's a simple thing, but maybe you don't have that luxury, right? And so it is going

to be a catastrophe. Maybe someone in your family is going to get really, really sick. Right? And maybe there's just a tiny pathway through that that everything doesn't fall apart. It doesn't end in divorce. It doesn't end in death. It doesn't end in sorrow. It doesn't end in catastrophe. But the margin of error is like slimmed down to virtually zero. And every imperfection that you bring to that situation is going to increase the probability that that tragedy is going to turn into something

indistinguishable from hell. And that's coming. It's coming your way. Absolutely certainly. And so then you might think, well, since it's coming your way, maybe the best thing to do is to put yourself together so that when it comes, it can be the least amount of awful possible. So I'll close with the story. This was a very affecting story for me.

My mother-in-law had frontal temporal dimension. She developed it quite young. She was about 55, something like that. And her husband, who was very extroverted man about town guy, I grew up in a small town, and everybody knew him. He was charismatic, drank too much, charismatic, good businessmen, quite a remarkable person, a real character. But not exactly a family man, even though he provided for his

family very well. But when his wife got sick, he really took care of her, man. It was something to see, because that's no joke dealing with someone who has Alzheimer's for all intents and purposes, because they get taken away from you piece by piece. And that is not pretty. And then it's also hard, right? Not only is it catastrophic, but it's hard. And Jesus, he just stepped into that like perfectly. And it was way less awful than it could have been. Way, it was just a tragedy. It wasn't hell.

And then I was there when she died. And my wife's family are actually pretty good at dealing with death. As it turns out, my wife's sister is a palliative caranerce, and you have to be pretty tough cookie to be a palliative caranerce. But you can do it, which is pretty interesting, because that means that you can go make relationships with people at the last stages of their life, that are genuine relationships, and people just die on you non-stop. And yet, you know, she's a competent, alive, alert, fun person. It's like two thumbs up for her, man. That's

someone you can rely on in a tragedy, and her other sister is a pharmacist, and my wife has volunteered in palliative care awards and is also very good at taking care of people who are genuinely not in good health. And so we were there when my mother-in-law died and of course you can imagine here's a deathbed situation for you. Your mother-in-law is dying and everyone's at each other's throats. It's like you think that's uncommon, then your eyes aren't open because it's plenty bloody

common. And then it's not just a tragedy, it's hell. And like maybe you can stand the tragedy, but you can't stand the hell. And in this situation, that isn't what happened, is everybody pulled together? And what happened was, well, she died. But what was so interesting was the family actually came together more tightly as a consequence. And so although there was something taken away on the one hand, there was something gained on the other that wasn't trivial. And I'm not trying to be all optimistic. And you know,

isn't the universe a wonderful place about all this? Like someone died in a nugly way and it was harsh, but God, it was a hell of a lot better than it could have been, and maybe it was good enough. That's the thing, you know, is that this is something that I constantly wonder, is that if people did what they could to speak the truth and pay attention, then maybe the tragedy that's part of life wouldn't have to deteriorate into the unbearable hell that doesn't have to be part of life. And maybe we

could actually tolerate the tragedy, or maybe we could even rise above it, or maybe we could even mitigate it, you know, because we can, we do that sort of thing all the time. And so it's always an open question. And the aliada put it very well. Are the floods the consequence of the fact that things fall apart? Or are the floods the consequence of the fact that people make mistakes that they know they shouldn't make and make anyways? They sin, right? And that's to miss the mark, right? Because that's an archery term to sin. And that means maybe they don't even specify the damn target, which is really, you're not

going to hit it unless you're specified. Or having specified it, they just say, oh, to hell with it, it's not that important. It's like, you got to be careful when you say something like to hell with it. It's not that important. Because one of the things that might happen to you, if you say to hell with it, It's not that important. Because one of the things that might happen to you, if you say to hell with it, it's not that important,

is that you might actually end up in hell for a pretty prolonged period of time, or maybe for the remainder of your miserable existence, because it's certainly the case that people do exist there. And I've seen them exist there. And once you're there, it's no trick, it's no simple matter to get the hell out. And so it might matter that the things that matter get addressed.

It might matter that you do what you can to walk with God. Like I said, we'll talk more about that next time. And it might be that that is how you build an ark and are protected from the flood, even if the damn thing comes and the thing is it will. And this is a funny thing too that I've noticed about our education system and the way we teach students and their trigger warnings and all of that absolute rubbish. I think in most of my lectures I'd have to have a trigger warning every 15 seconds. So I was like, tell my students when they're young.

It's like, look, don't fool yourself. You know, you're going to develop a serious illness, at least one, maybe two or three, and one of them is likely to be chronic. And if it isn't you, it's going to be someone you love. It's going to be your husband, it's going to be your parent, it's going to be your kids. That's coming. And so is a lot of death and pain. And so like just exactly what sort of person are you going to be when that shows up. And that's the right question. It isn't how are you going

to be happy in your life. It's like good luck with that. It's a stupid ambition anyways as far as I'm concerned because it's too shallow. You know, happiness, you're lucky. That comes and goes like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. If you're happy, man, more power to you. Enjoy it. Enjoy it. It's a gift from the cosmos to be happy. But at pursuit, no, no.

The pursuit is, when the damn flood comes, you want to be the person who built Ark. And that's what the story of Noah is about. And the thing is the flood is always coming. And that's another thing that's worth commenting on with regards to this story is, you know, there's an apocalyptic element to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

There's an idea that the end of the world is always at hand and that you should prepare to be judged. And the thing about that is it's true. And the reason it's true is because the end of your world is at hand and it will certainly come. And when it comes, you will be judged because it will be up to you to figure out what to do with the fact that your world just collapsed. And that'll be a moral problem of ultimate severity, because it'll push you right to your limits, and you'll find out exactly where your unaddressed weaknesses lie. Because that's what happens in a crisis. And so the reason that that's an archetypal reality, and it lurks underneath the entire Judeo-Christian structure,

the apocalypse, the impending apocalypse, is because we always live in apocalyptic times, and your world is always, in small ways and large ways, coming to an end. And so what do you do? You prepare for it, you prepare for your world to come to an end. And then maybe when the end comes you get another world that'd be a good deal So we're ready for this next week My question was regarding the online university plan to create and the plans you have for that. We spoke briefly last week and I wanted to ask you how can a student such as myself get involved with this process?

Yeah, well, in online university, that's a perhaps a grandiose ambition, right? But one of the things that, so here's my rationale. You know, lots of things have dramatically transformed in the last 20 years and whole swaths of enterprises being wiped out, and that's happening in a more and more rapid rate as our technology progresses. Right now, newspapers are in the process of dying. I actually think they're in the process of committing suicide, but they're in the process of dying.

And that's going to happen very rapidly. I think the Globe and Mail lost 10% of its readership in the last three months, something like that. And so what happens is that new technologies come along to supplant the old technologies. And I've watched a number of businesses fail, some large businesses. I knew some people who worked at digital equipment corporation was failing. And I've had some inside track into failing businesses. And I see when they start to fail, the failure process tends to tip and then accelerate.

It can happen unbelievably quickly. And this is what it looks to me, this is how it looks to me in relationship to the universities, especially in the US, although not only, especially in the humanities, although not only. So, number one. So I've recorded three years of my personality lecture say, so let's have three years of lectures on Freud. Now what I should do with those I think is edit them into one really good lecture on Freud. And then stop giving that lecture because why would I give that lecture again? Because I've already given it and then it's edited and it's in good shape. And if it's a really good lecture then why does someone else have to give that lecture again because I've already given it, and then it's headed to dense and good shape. And if it's a really good lecture,

then why does someone else have to give the lecture? Why does 300 other people have to give a lecture on Freud? You know what I mean? What's gonna happen is there's gonna be some really good lectures on subjects, and that's all that people are going to need or want, because the internet tends to move things towards winner-take-all very, very rapidly.

And so it seems to me that we're already at a point, technologically, where we could identify 100 things that people really need to know and do a sequence of lectures on those things that we're outstanding. And then they could be updated and added to. But then it's like it's a done game. And it's free.

So I started thinking about this last year when I noticed that my psychology lectures had a million views and that was last April and I thought that's amazing, a million views, it's like what the hell, I don't know what to make of that, that's the kind of best-selling book that you never write, because no one ever writes a best-selling book. So a million views, that's something to pay attention to, and now it's way more than that. But there's videos and podcasts, and that means

that people can listen when they're doing other things, too. And so that's really cool. And maybe people can listen better than they can read. That's a real possibility, because we've only been reading silently for about, well, most of humanity for less than 100 years. And virtually no one could read silently 500 years ago. It's a really new skill,

and so maybe we're better at listening. And so all of a sudden, there's the possibility of disseminating high quality educational material, highly produced, highly vetted to millions of people for nothing. Well, how are you gonna compete with that? Then, then it's worse because the humanities, which have become completely degenerate,

and almost completely degenerate in my estimation, have abandoned their valuable intellectual property, which is the collective wisdom, at least for the West, of Western civilization. It's just sitting there, some might as well steal it back. And then there's the student loan debacle in the United States.

That's pronounced properly. Debacle? Debacle. Debacle? OK. Obviously, I've read that word more than said it. And so I'd a guy write me today, and he asked if he should go to a private college for $22,000 a year to produce, to pursue an undergraduate in psychology so that he could

get into clinical graduate school or go to another university, the State University for far less. I told him to go to the State University because it's the wise economic decision, but, you know, it doesn't seem to me that it's reasonable at all to load people up when they're $22 with $100, dollars of student debt. That they cannot declare bankruptcy for. It's indentured servitude. And to load up people when they're 22 or 23

with debt of that magnitude, it's like, how the hell are they gonna be entrepreneurs? How are you gonna take a risk with a hundred thousand dollar debt load? And who's gonna marry you? Well, really, Jesus, because know, because another story I heard recently was, well, I just got married to my partner. She brought into the marriage $120,000 in student debt.

It's like, oh my god, it's like, that's crippling, man. Like, once you're making a substantial amount of money, if you're fortunate, maybe you're in your 40s, you could handle a debt load like that, but in your 20s, it's just crippling. So, you know, the tuition fees have ratcheted up like mad in the last 30 years. The colleges and universities have become unbelievably administratively top-heavy. They're regulated to death by the legislative system, so there's ethics committees which

are so counterproductive that it's just unbelievable. There's this entire whole new monstrous hyper accommodation movement that borders on, I don't know, well, I'll make a video about that soon enough. That's absolutely pathological. And there's this whole postmodern neo-Marxist idiocy that's going on in the universities. And so like, well, how many mistakes does an institute plus students aren't being taught how to speak, they're not being taught how to debate, they're not

being taught how to write, and they don't read difficult things. They read French intellectual postmodernists, right? And they probably don't read those either. They read secondarily derived, they skim secondarily derived papers about French intellectual post-Marx's from, post-modernists from the 1970s. And the standards have been lower because there's too many people pursuing higher education. And so I think, okay, there's eight dimensions of success. And on every single dimension, there's failure. The system's done.

And so the vision would be, why not provide everybody in the world with high quality education in the humanities for like one-fiftyth the cost? You can charge for accreditation. That's a whole separate issue, right, accreditation. But the resources, like why not make them available to everyone? So, that's the plan. I mean, I don't know if I can do it or not, but that's partly what I'm doing with this biblical lecture series. It's sort of putting my toe in the water, but I have a plan, and I have some good programmers

who are willing to help, and there's lots of people out there that would help God. I'm being flooded with offers of help. I'd love to take people up on the offers, but it's not that easy to get someone to help you do something. So that'd be the plan. It's like, so what would the plan be? Give people a high quality education in the class of humanities, teach them how to speak and write, accredit them for one-tenth the current cost, and do it with millions of people instead of tens of thousands. So if I'm asking, what plans do you have for the accreditation side where people can show something for what the time they spend watching?

Well, one of the things that I would do for example is imagine that you're in a course and so you have taken exam. Let's say it's a multiple choice exam just for the sake of argument because they're simpler. The writing issue is a separate problem. Well, so one of the things that you would do if you enrolled in the course is generate multiple choice questions. That would be one of your assignments. Here's a lecture. Generate 10 multiple choice questions. Now you got 1,000 people generating 10 multiple choice questions. Well, then you can do, there are statistical procedures that help you figure out what valid multiple choice questions are.

You could have people vote on them for that matter if you put them on a website. Signed at number two. Here's a hundred multiple choice questions. Pick the ten that you think are most representative of the knowledge that you've acquired. Get a hundred people to do that. So you get crowd source the test construction. And then you can keep making the test better and better as well, because I'd like to build a system so that it was self-improving with a minimum of administrative interference.

And so then what would happen is that as you got accredited, so you start writing exams and maybe you write more and more of them, then you'd start to buy voting power with regards to the content of the courses, and maybe even the right to produce courses to put them up online. So it's something like that, but our strategy would be to build, we want to build a system that's basically autonomous and self-improving right from the beginning. So minimum administrative overhead, extremely low cost, widespread availability, crowdsourced in its structure, and autonomously

self-improving. I think we can do that. I don't know if I can do it, but I think we have the technology to do that. And then you think, well, so here's the plan, you know, because you're always thinking of the point B, what's a good thing to do with life? Well, the good thing to do with your life is the most difficult god damn thing you can think of that would do the most possible good. That'll get you up in the morning. And so, because you think,

why should I get up in the morning? It's like, well, you know, I've got 50 million people to educate. Hey, that'll do it. Huh, really? You know, that'll overcome a lot of angst, that sort of thinking. So, well, so, it seems to me that it seems to me that it's inevitable.

Now, whether or not I can do it, that's a whole different story, but I can certainly start it. And I'm going to start it, my partner, my business partner, the guy who helped me develop the self-authoring program, which thousands of people are using that now. And we've helped thousands, tens of thousands of students now stay in university. So that's really cool. Well, maybe not given the state of the university's plan. I'm contributing to the problem.

But they're sticking out their plans. That's the point. They're actually making plans and sticking them out. So I think that we can can, and we know how to start small, because the way to build a big system is to build a small system that works and then scale it. And so, that's, I've been talking with my partner, his name is Daniel Higgins, I have another partner, Bob Peel, who used to be my graduate supervisor at McGill, and we've been working on this sort of thing for about 25 years, and our goal has been right from the beginning to build low cost, high quality, psycho-educational interventions, and bring them to as wide a market as possible.

So, and my, and Daniel in particular, has devoted most of his life to doing that. It's been about 20 years now. So, well, that's a sketch of it. I'll outline more of it on the web at some point, but that's kind of what we've been deciding, what we've been planning to do. All right, thank you very much. Yep.

Applause. Hello. When you were on the Ruben report not too long ago, in that discussion, you mentioned how use of psilocybin straightens people out and can produce these transcendent experiences which is jarring for a person who may have a Christian. I should have never mentioned that on the Ruben before.

For someone who became a Christian as a result of their only time doing magic mushrooms, I was just jarring piece of information. I was just wondering if you could expand on what you find intriguing about religious experience and what we can know about the transcendent from them if anything. That's a tough one, man. The relationship between in theogenic use, let's say, which is sometimes what those chemicals are described and religious experience is unspecified, but it looks like it's profound. There is a man named Gordon Westson who wrote a book, I remember correctly, called Soma.

He was investigating the potential use of emanated a muscaria mushrooms among the people who wrote the Hindu holy scriptures thousands of years ago. And he felt that he identified the chemical that they were using, the sacred drink, the use of ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms and so forth. There's well-documented, particularly in North America and the evidence, the empirical evidence that under certain conditions those chemicals can produce religious experiences

is absolutely overwhelming. There's been good research done recently at Johns Hopkins looking at psilocybin. The first research that's been done on hallucinogens really in 30 years, because people were so terrified of them in the 60s, and for good reason. Indicated that the people that they dozed with psilocybin, about 75% of them had a mystical experience, which they regarded as one of the three to five most important experiences of their life. And a year later, we're characterized by permanent personality transformation, which was an increase in trade openness of one standard deviation,

which is a lot, by the way. It moves you from 50th percentile to 85th percentile. For example, it's a huge move, and that look permanent now, whether or not that's a good thing, that's a whole different issue. But they're very, very powerful. And they also did some recent research showing that psilocybin mushrooms were an unbelievably effective smoking cessation intervention. So if I remember correctly, and I may have this wrong,

because it's been a while since I read it, they had an 80% success rate in stopping people from using tobacco with one psilocybin experience. And so, well, so those things are very, all of that's very interesting to me. And I don't exactly know what to make of it. I don't know what to make of it at all, not even a little bit.

But the evidence for the relationship between met mystical experiences and hallucinogen use of certain types is incontrovertible. And I don't think anybody else knows what to derive from that. I mean, one conclusion is something like religious experiences are a common concomitant of going temporarily insane. And that, it's not a bad hypothesis because you see, for example, in the pro-droma of illnesses like schizophrenia and sometimes manic depressive disorder too, on the mannequin, you do see the emergence often of religious type delusions.

It's not that common, but it's not uncommon. So it's definitely the case that if your brain function has been detrimentally affected, one of the consequences can be experiences that are subjectively experienced as indistinguishable from the religious. You also see the same thing in cases of epilepsy, especially in the pro-droma. So if you have an epileptic condition, sometimes you know that you're going to have a seizure. You can feel it mounting. And often, or at least occasionally, those experiences are associated with an elevation of religious sensation, deepening meaning that increases in its depth and complexity until it's overwhelming and that's what subjectively brings on the seizure.

Now, God only knows how to disentangle causality in a circumstance like that. Dostoevsky had seizures like that, by the way. So the pessimistic viewpoint is religious phenomenology is a consequence of brain disorder. The positive side, more positive side, is, no, religious experience is a category of experience that's within the realm of human possibility and there are different modes of eliciting it.

And we know that there are many modes of eliciting it, fasting can elicited. That's the dancing under some circumstances. Music can elicited. Music elicits it regularly. I mean, basically, as far as I'm concerned, rock concerts are indistinguishable from religious rituals. They're rituals, not like they don't come with a dogmatic overlay, let's say, but the ritualistic structure is there, and maybe it's there just listening to music. What that means for the investigation of hallucinogens, I have no idea, and I would also certainly use the caution that Carl Jung developed when he was talking about hallucinogens. And he did that, I think, only a very brief number of times.

And I think in relationship to Elvis Huxley's original work on masculine experiences, he said, beware of wisdom that you didn't earn. And that's very, very smart. So I would say there's something to be learned about. There's something, there's a lot to be learned about hallucinogens. There may be something to be learned from them,

but having said that, if you play with fire, you end up burnt generally speaking. So all due caution is in effect. So one more. I know you're now the Huxley fan, so I thought I'd ask you this question. After reading his book Doors of Perception in which he gives an account of his experience taking the psychedelic drug mescaline, he stated that in the final stages of egolessness there is an obscene knowledge that all is in

all, that all is actually each. He then went on to say that this is as near I take it as a finite mind can ever get to perceiving everything that is happening in the universe. I was wondering if maybe you could explain what that means because I've been trying to understand it for a month. I understand. I understand. I understand. There is a neuroscientist a while back whose name I don't remember who had a stroke, and she being a neuroscientist was analyzing the neurological consequences of the stroke

as it occurred. If I remember correctly, the stroke, either temporarily or more permanently, took out the function of large portions of her left hemisphere. And she had exactly that experience. It was an experience of ego disillusion, something like that, the felt sense of identity shifting from that sort of narrow boundary, maybe that you would define by the boundary of your physical being into something that was much broader and much, it gets hard to describe this without degenerating into hippie poetry from 1967 very, very rapidly.

But it's something like a sense of the underlying unity of consciousness that might be one way of thinking about. We don't know much about consciousness. In fact, I don't think we know anything about consciousness. And obviously, consciousness is something that we all share. But it's also something that we seem to also experience individually. But maybe our individual consciousness is something like the manifestations of something that's a more unified consciousness underneath.

I mean, that's hardly an original idea. But it does seem to be the case that under some circumstances, there are neurological transformations that make that link more apparent, assuming that the link exists. Now you could say, well no, they're just producing a delusion. But the funny thing about delusions is that you've got to think, well how do you know something's a delusion? And the answer that has to be like something like, well hardly anyone else thinks it, that would be criteria number one. But criteria number two would be, if you act on the delusion, does your ship sink?

Because if your ship sinks, then it was a delusion. It's something like that. But if you act on your delusion and things get better, well, then maybe it wasn't a delusion. And there's no evidence from the psilocybin studies that have been conducted at John's Hopkins that there was detrimental effects for the participants, and the participants certainly don't think that they effects were detrimental. So, and I've been hesitant to talk about any of this for obvious reasons. I'll tell you something really funny. I think it's funny anyways. I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard. So, you know, and so Leary is a good object lesson in being very careful about this sort of thing because it's certainly,

it isn't obvious that his net effect was good. And I say that with some caution, because Leary was a very smart person and he was very creative, but he got tangled up in that hallucinogenic madhouse, you know, that characterized the, say, the period from 1965 to about 1970. And it didn't seem to me that that was altogether a good thing. Thing is we have these chemicals now in our culture. And people are experimenting with them like mad.

And making them illegal doesn't seem to be working in large part because there are, I think there were seven known, seven to twenty known psychoactive substances that were illegal in the year 2000. There's something like 400 now because labs all over the world keep tweaking the molecules, right? Because molecule A is illegal, so chemists just shifted a little bit. And then they have a new hallucinogen, and which might be fine, it might not be because now and then you can produce a chemical that's unbelievably dangerous, fentanyl, sort of like that. There was a drug a while back that I, I can't remember the name, it was an acronym. It was a fun drug.

If you took it once, it gave you permanent irreversible, total Parkinson's disease. So people would take it, and they were frozen, and that was it. So MPTP, I think it was called. So because it destroyed the same area of the brain that Parkinson's destroys, except it did it right away. So designer drugs, right?

A little caution is in order. How we might approach the issue of hallucinogen use in a mature manner, well that's a topic for an entirely other discussion. I'm not even necessarily sure that it can be approached that way, although I would say at minimum, determining what it is that you're up to if you're going to experiment would be a good thing. Like what is it exactly that you're serving?

They're not party drugs. They're not for fun, right? Whatever they are, that's not what they're for. And so maybe they could be used By people who are carefully orienting themselves towards the good although I wouldn't say that that should be Red as a recommendation Thank you Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

That was episode 24, The Psychology of the Flood. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-developed programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening.