2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower

[Music] so last week I told you I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories right or more than two but roughly speaking to the creation stories because there's two of them in Genesis and then also the story of the Buddha and I was presenting you with a proposition and it's a multi-layered proposition the first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories and the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state where things are roughly functional so that you might think of that as the state of things going well and that's the state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you act them out in the world not only do you get what you desire but the story itself validates itself through your actions right because what happens when you act something out and you get what you intend just like when you use a map and get where you're going not only does that get you to where you're going but it also validates the plan or the map and so that's that's that's a definition of truth that's a pragmatic definition of truth this is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always insufficient we never know everything about anything and so the question then is how can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct and the answer to that is something like well you lay out a plan and you can think about it this way if this is actually an answer to the postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of the world is we won't say correct because that's not exactly right but you know the postmodernist subjects say with regards to the interpretation of the text that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted and that's actually true and it's the same it's a it's actually reflection of a deeper claim which they always off and sometimes also make which is well if that's true for a text which isn't as complex as everything although it's complex then it's even more true for everything which is to say the world lays itself out in a very complex manner and you can interpret that in a very large number of ways so who's to say which interpretation is correct okay fair enough it's a reasonable objection and it's it's tied in with even a deeper problem which is the problem of perception itself because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex then how is it that you can even perceive it well that's that's partly the question that we're trying to answer and the answer to that is well you have evolved perceptual structures and they're actually oriented towards specific goals and your embodied so the your embodiment as a goal-directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception but it's more complicated than that so we could say well you come equipped and this was Kant's objection to Pure Reason essentially that the problem is if the facts don't speak for themselves there's too many facts for them to speak for themselves so you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework well where does the interpretive framework come from well the right answer to that is something like it evolves right it's taken three and a half billion years for your perceptual structure your embodied perceptual structure to evolve and it's done that roughly in a trial and error process I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being so so there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival in reproduction but there's other constraints imposed to that you might regard two subsets of that one is that because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape the perceptual structures and plans that you layout will say the maps that you layout have to be negotiated with other people and so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to to apply so you can think about this in a piagetian sense that is if there are children in a playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play they have to agree on a game and the game is of course a sexual structure and a goal-directed structure and a structure that the delimits action and interactions and so they at least have to settle on a game and so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment to those that are deemed socially acceptable and then you say well what are there further constraints and the constraints might be well let's play the game and see if it's any fun and that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually and then lay it out in the actual world and see if when you lay it out in the world it does what it's supposed to do in some sense what you're doing is testing a tool so the idea that the the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained turns out to be incorrect and now it's that that is that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained but the technical suggestion that well there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations is just not correct it's not correct and it's not correct on biological evolutionary ground and it's not it's also not correct on socio-cultural grounds because it has to be negotiated and then you know Piaget put a further constraint on that essentially by saying well not only does it have to be a game and a game that attains its end but it has to be a game that people want to play so it also has to satisfy some element of subjective desire as well so that's three levels of constraint right it has to be a game you want to play it has to be a game that you can play with other people and it has to be a game that if you play with other people actually works in the world okay well so much for an infinite array of options it's a very constrained array of auctions now and I think and that the idea that I've been proposing to you is that what evolved mythology does these representations that we've been dealing with these archetypal representations is sketch out that landscape what what is the landscape of playable games that's a good way of thinking about it and so it's it sets out a landscape it's it sets out a description of the landscape in which the game is going to be played as well as the description of the lens of the game itself and so the landscape is roughly the core the core archetype seems to be something like it's it's something like the interplay between chaos and order and chaos is represented by hidden the serpent Isle predator because we use our predator detection circuits to conceptualize the unknown because what else would we do it that seems given that we're prey animals and given our evolutionary history it's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die or perhaps a slight variant of that is something might kill you but whatever those are close enough to the same thing so chaos is what causes your deterioration and death and there's lots of ways to conceptualize that but but reptilian predator fire-breathing reptilian predator isn't a bad way to start and so the question is well what do you do in the face of that and one answer is you build circumscribed enclosures that's order and then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosures so that's partly the hero now the hero is also though that's not good enough because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable it can be invaded it will inevitably be invaded either from the outside or from within right and so we've been conceptualizing the the predator the malevolent predator at multiple levels of analysis throughout our evolutionary history say but also in our symbolic history trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure right and we can say well it's partly external threat it's partly social threat but it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure because of our let's say our intrinsic malevolence and so that would be the snakes within and so that accounts for the analogy that the Christian analogy between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan which is a very very strange analogy it's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another especially given that when the creation story originally emerged in the in the form I talked to you about last week the story of Adam and Eve the idea that the serpent in the garden was also something that was associated with the adversary wasn't an implicit part of the story that got laid on afterwards like well what's the worst possible snake well that's a reasonable question and then a better question is what do you do about the worst possible snake and one answer is you face it but there's other answers too like you make sacrifices right and that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos roughly speaking is that you learn to conceptualize the future you see the future as a realm of potential threat and then you learn to give things up in the present and somehow that satisfies the future now so maybe you're offering sacrifices to God and you think well why is that well think you're going to think about that psychologically why does that work well you can think about the Spirit of God the Father as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group we'll call it the patriarchy if you want doesn't matter it's the thing that's common across the group as a spirit as a psychological force across time why do you make sacrifices to that that is what you do all the time you're right now you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the great Father because your assumption is is that if you do what's diligent so you're not chasing impulsive pleasure at the moment unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like that you're not chasing impulsive interest you're sacrificing your impulsive interests to satisfy the spirit of social requirement and so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you can make a bargain with it so that it will reward you in the future and that reward will be part of it partly the staving off of insecurities which is ever no more than to say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree is because you believe that you laid you in finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of chaos so now those things were as we've been at pains to to to point out as those things were acted out and then represented an image and story long before they could be fully articulated because we're building our knowledge of ourselves and also our social structures and also the world from the bottom up as well as from the top down there's an interplay between the two levels of analysis okay and so so that's partly that's part of the archetypal underpinning and then with regards to the stories themselves you're you're in a map so to speak you're using a map and with any luck its detailed enough so that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go and sometimes you don't and that means that you have to recalibrate your your journey along the map which by the way is exactly what GPS systems do when you go off the pathway right they stop that's an anxiety response from the GPS system they stop they recalibrate and they readjust the map now and then if you're unfortunate this very rarely happens anymore you'll be on a road that isn't mapped and then the GPS system doesn't know what to do well that happens in real life too I mean those are I'm using GPS for a very specific reason those are intelligent systems as far as I'm concerned those are the closest things we ever designed to intelligent systems because they can actually orient right they orient in real time and they're unbelievably sophisticated systems right because they rely on a huge satellite network and so on and they're cybernetic systems technically speaking they respond very much like the way that we respond so so anyways you know you're in un habit a map you try to adjust the resolution of the map so that it's mono more complex than it needs to be to get you from point A to point B that's it you want minimal resolution because that enables efficient cognitive processing it doesn't overload you too much like when I'm looking at this room if I look say I want to walk down this pathway basically what my mind does my perceptual field and you can detect this if I look straight ahead I can barely see you people on the periphery you're more like you're kind of like blurs you - I can tell that you have heads but that's about it when you move I can see your hand I can probably see your eyes but barely so you're all very low resolution and even though I can't detect it at the very periphery of my vision you guys are black and white so my color vision disappears at the periphery even though I can't I can't actually perceive that so what happens is if I want to walk down here this pathway becomes high-resolution it becomes marked with positive emotion all of this turns into low resolution back here it's not even represented and then I find out well am i doing properly and the answer is while I walk forward and if I get to the goal then I've done it properly enough and if you know what have you stand up and get in my way then I'm going to focus on you and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly right I put you in the category of irrelevant entity when in fact you have to be in the category of strange object the thing that objects and so well so then we inhabit those structures all the time we're in a structure like that a perceptual structure and if it's working then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise so to speak because it's axioms are correct and it's functional and then now and then something comes along and that's what the snake is the eternal snake in the garden that pops up inside a structure and it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to are the most important things rather than the least important things and that what does I do it blows the map into pieces and that can happen at different levels of severity but at the ultimate level of severity its apocalyptic right everything goes and that's it that's a traumatic intrusion and essentially the story of the Garden of Eden is the story of a traumatic intrusion that's exactly what it is and so what happens is that Adam and Eve are living in unconscious bliss roughly speaking everything's fine they're in their walled garden they're in a paradisal state they're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness so they're not suffering from negative emotion something pops up that radically expands their vision and all of a sudden now they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats so that's their own nakedness and vulnerability and temporality itself because they become aware of the future and bang that state of being in that paradise is forever gone that's the strange thing about human beings this is what what happened to us I think is that our perceptions developed to such a degree that we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant we couldn't do it because we discovered roughly speaking once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space we discovered that we were surrounded by infinite threat always and maybe that's why people are so hyper awake because threat wakes you up well we're in a constant state of existential threat now the advantage to that is that we take we take arms up against a sea of troubles constantly that's the advantage right and we build enclosures and we take precautions for the future and we live a very long time and we generally live quite safe lives compared to the lives we could live and so we've traded pain for anxiety that's another way of thinking about it now it's still a pretty rough trade right because who wants to be nervous all the time but you're alive and awake when you're nervous and it is a form of consciousness elevating activation that's another way of thinking about it so the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall that that's what it is it says look you exist in these walled enclosures but there's something that lurks that will always knock you off your feet and then the question is what is that and and the answer to that is being formulated over very long periods of time partly it's the probability of predation itself that's the snake the thing that can come in subtly and undermine you okay but then that's that's it what would you call it expand it upward to include the abstract snake which is that thing that can undermine your conceptual schemes right so you have your actual territory and then you have your abstract to our territory and in your actual territory there are actual snakes and in your abstract territory there are abstract snakes right and then the worst snake of all is malevolence and that's I think that's technically correct because one of the things that you view for example when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder is that it's almost always the case that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which you might think of as a real real life reincarnation of the fall is that people encounter something malevolent and it breaks them because it's the worst thing to understand it's like suffering is one thing man that's that's bad now vulnerability and suffering that's bad enough but to encounter some who wishes that upon you and will work to bring it about that's a whole different category of horrible especially what it also reflects something back to you about yourself because if someone else can do that to you and they're human that means that you partake of the same essence strangely enough that's actually the cure to some degree to post-traumatic stress disorder is like if you've been victimized you're naive and you've been victimized the way out of that is to no longer be naive and to no longer be victimized and that means that you you see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea for example that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because you've got a piece of a party's being touched by it and the way that you the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopath so that you know when when you see what right and then but that's a voluntary thing it's it's so it's like a it's like a a set of tools that you have at your disposal which is full knowledge of evil and that does Nietzsche said if you look into an abyss for too long you risk having the abyss gaze back into you right the idea is that if you look at something monstrous you have a tendency to turn into a monster and people are often very afraid of looking at monsters things exactly for that reason and then the question is well should you turn into a monster and the answer to that is yes you should but you should do it voluntarily and not accidentally and you should do it with the good in mind rather than falling prey to it by possession essentially because that's the alternative how does it possess you that's easy you're suffering makes you better you're better this makes you resentful you're resentful means meat makes you vengeful and once you're on that road you go down that a little bit farther man well you end up it fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school and then killing yourself right because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil and I'm exactly the person to do it and I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth just to hammer the point home right and if I can garner a little post post posthumous fame along the way well that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominant tired the imaginings - at least in fantasy so you know it's the full package if you want to go down that route and of course people don't like to think about that sort of thing and it's no bloody wonder but without the capability for mayhem Europe you're you're you're a potential victim - may have so you need your sword it should be sheath but you need to have it and it's very frequently the case if you treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder there's two things you have to do you have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil because otherwise their brain bothers them over and over and over what why were you so dealing with naive how did you become victimized why were you such a sucker these are good questions you don't want to have that happen to you again you don't want to be exploited twice okay so your eyes have to open up we know the price of that from the Egyptian myth right you come into contact with Seth what happens even if you're a god you lose an eye it's no joke man it's no joke and then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and with the revitalization of the Father that's the identification with the force that created culture right and that then there's you and that together then you can withstand malevolence maybe you can withstand tragedy and malevolence and then that's the whole secret right because that's what you want in life you need to be able to whisk down tragedy and you need to be able to withstand malevolence because those are the forces they're always working against you and so it's just this is associated with the Union idea of incorporation of the shadow right you have to be we know this God we know how predators work with regards to children even if you're a pedophilic predator and you're looking at a landscape of children the child that you're going to go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back you pick your victim and predatory people in general or exactly like that man they're because they're predators they're not going to attack someone who's who's going to fight back in fact the issue is likely not to even come up they're going to be looking for someone one way or another that cannot conceptualize what they are and then perfect it's it's open season and it's open season and so if you're treating someone with post-traumatic trustus order first they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolent and second they have to learn to become dangerous because that's the only way out what's the alternative to get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naivety because by definition if someone psychopathic has exploited you you're too naive it's a definitional issue you can say well that's no fault of mine how the hell could I be prepared fair enough man perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem because it's an it's an eternal problem right the internal problem is how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence and you can say well I'm not prepared it's like yeah fair enough unsurprising especially if you were over protected as a child it's not a good idea to over protect your kids because the snakes are going to come into the garden no matter what you do and so then you instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away what you do is you arm your child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them so that the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and malevolence is strength not protection it's a completely different idea we also know this clinically we know for example that if you treat people with exposure therapy for Agra phobia which is roughly speaking the fear of chaos I would say the fear of everything you don't make them less afraid you make the braver it's not the same thing because with an agri-food they see what happens to them is is the fault they never conceptualize death and suffering they're naive right it never enters their theater of their imaginations because they're protected from it but then something happens this often happens to women in their 40s because they're the people most likely to develop Agra phobia something happens there they've been protected from chaos by Authority their entire life so maybe they had an overprotective father and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend and then they went to an overprotective husband and maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the project protection right so so that's the bargain they stay weak and dependent and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyper protective but the they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent and then something happens in their life often in their 40s they develop heart palpitations maybe as a consequence of menopause their heart starts to beat erratically and they think oh no death it's like well who are you going to talk to about that right there's no protection from authority for that or maybe their friend gets divorced or maybe their sister dies or something like that it brings up the specter of mortality and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality and it brings it up in a way that authority recourse to Authority cannot solve and so then they have panic attacks what happens they go out they get afraid they feel their heart beating then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think oh no I'm going to die and they think oh no I'm going to die and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention so the two big fears come up mortality and social judgment then they have a panic attack it's like fighter flights going out of control very very unpleasant then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack then they end up not being able to go anywhere so then Kyah math has come back right a huge monster a little victim and so what do you do with them well there's no saying note there's no time app that's done right there naivety is over they've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment they've met the terrible mother and they met the terrible father and there's no going back there's no saying oh the world is safe it's not safe not at all it's not safe the fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture it's a gift and now that's been shattered and so now what do you do well the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go you're the ultimate frozen rabbit right and your life is hell because you can't function the alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of let's expose you to them you know carefully and programmatically and then you'll learn that you can you're actually tougher than you think you never knew that and maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because you know people play role in their own demise so to speak when you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid you chose to withdraw because you were afraid so it's not only that you were over protected often it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were over protected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity you know so maybe you're a kid in the playground right and you're having some trouble with other kids and you know in the back of your mind I should deal this with deal with this myself but you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene and you know that that's not right you know that you're breaking the social contract but it's easier and so that's what you do you run off to an authority figure and hide behind the Great Father right roughly speaking well the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself so then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40 so then you take people out you say well what are you afraid of ranked it from 1 to 10 so 10 is make a list of 10 things you're afraid of the least the thing you're least afraid of will call number 10 so we'll start with that okay well I'm afraid of elevators okay well let's let's look at a picture of an elevator let's have you imagine being in an elevator let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're responding to it symbolically right and you're going to do that at it at the the closest proximity you can manage you find out you go do that it works you're nervous as hell especially a permit an anticipatory perspective shaking you go out you stop you watch it happen and you actually calm down you do that 10 times it no longer bothers you well what you've learned that you didn't die but more importantly than that you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death that's what you've learned and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective it's a tomb right it's it's it's a place of enclosure and isolation and you learn hmm turns out I can withstand that and then you're met much more together much more confident and that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that I've seen this multiple times is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before because they weren't willing to undermine the protection see if you're protecting me I can't bother you because I can't afford to forsake your protection so if I'm going to play that game I'm going to be high hide behind you then I can't challenge you so that's no good because that's sometimes why people you see this with guys very frequently they're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s it's like well why not because they still want to believe that there's someone out there that knows and so they're willing to accept the subjugation because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge right because he knows well what if he doesn't what if no one knows any better than you well that's a rough thing you don't until you realize that you're not an adult right that's really technically the point of realization of adulthood is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do I mean it's a horrible realization because what the hell do you know it's a terrible realization and people will often pick slavery permanent slavery to the spirit of the Great Father let's say over that realization and it's completely understandable but the problem with it is is that there's more to you than you think and so if you continue to hide behind that figure then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think far more to you than you think maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of mortality without collapsing maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing who knows it's certainly possible and it's not an abstract question it's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process it's it's always the question that you address and the answer is often in the affirmative because people can get unbelievably tough and you know that because people work in emergency wards and hospitals right or they work in in palliative care Awards or they work as March very assistants I mean these people have bloody rough jobs you know or they're on the front line of police investigation into you know highness child abuse crimes and so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis and you know those are very stressful jobs but people do them and some people do them without even being damaged by them although that's a harder thing because you can see horrible things you know things you'll never forget so so I would say the the story in the story of Adam and Eve is a meta story and it's a meta story for two reasons one is it's about how stories transform because Adam and Eve are in this unconscious paradise and then it collapses and that happens to every potential story right that's Nietzsche's realization he said look imagine that you live within a belief system and then something arises to challenge the belief system not only does the belief system collapse but something worse happens your belief in belief systems collapses and that's the road tonight now it doesn't have to because you can jump from one belief system to another but sometimes that doesn't work is that you do a meta critique and you say oh I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed okay one alternative is jumped to another protective structure fine another alternative is protective structures themselves are not to be trusted bang you're in chaos how the hell are you going to get out of that that's the pathway to nihilism well you can you can you can work your way through that that's difficult or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul damaging move and you can sacrifice your new knowledge Andrey identify with something rigid and restricted which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in your Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to to the current state of chaos it's like I know that people need to identify with local groups I understand that but that they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate God and that's order but that's not a good replacement for chaos it's just another kind of catastrophe right too much order too much chaos both catastrophes you want to stand in the middle somehow and mediate between the two and that's where you have your real strengths because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place to be even the bloody right-wingers are after a safe place right they just want it to be the state yeah exactly well there's no safe places and the next issue is do you really want a safe place is that what you want you want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat what the hell kind of life is that you're a paralyzed rabbit in a hole that's no life for a human being you should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence because and the reason for that too is this is the weird paradox this is and I believe this is the paradox first of all that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy in malevolence is the willingness to face them now who the hell would ever guess that it's completely paradoxical it's a completely paradoxical suggestion is that well why does it work well because the more you confront the two of them the more you grow and maybe you can grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself and you think well what's the evidence for that and that's easy that's what people do that is how we learn like every time you expose your child to something new a playground what are they exposed to chaos and malevolence now there's more to it than that obviously because kids play and they you know they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that but in the playground itself there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully it's right there and that you throw your kid in there and you say adapt and they do okay so they can do it at a small scale it's not trivial the playground is a complicated place the kid can adapt well how much can you scale that up can you scale that up to from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself well that's the question well I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative so because we don't know the full extent of the human being and it is the problem that's worked out so in the Buddhist story for example what happens after so buddha's world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses it's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death what happens to Buddhas he realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him the walled garden it's exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story is is it's it's what it's fatally flawed that kind of protection cannot exist and he discovers that in pieces right which is exactly what happens to children is that they go out they discover a limit they run back and the parents can help them with the limit they run out they discover limit they run back but some at some point they run out they discover a limit they run back and the parents have nothing to say to them because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit which is like well what are you going to do with your life how are you going to how are you going to operate in this archetypal universe while your parents can only say well they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures they do that they at least act that out for you but at some point it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker that's the thing you know so it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is how do you not take your clients problems home with you it's a very common existential problem that beginning therapists face because they're afraid it's like while you're dealing with people all the time you have serious problems sometimes it's mental illness although less frequently than you'd think and sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe right there their parents have cancer or something like that or the father has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed they have a drug problem or they have a schizophrenic son or like these aren't mental illness problems right those are just catastrophes and so people are discussing those with you all the time how do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking at home and the answer to that is you don't steal the problem that that's the answer it's like you have some problems if you come and talk to me I'll help you figure out how to solve them I will not tell you how to solve I won't steal your problems because what we're trying to do in therapy is number one solve your problem number to turn you into a great solver of problems and the second one is way more important than the first one and so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem that's theft that's the eatable situation that's the eatable situation that's the overprotective mother now farther can play that rule too we're talking about archetypal representations like I'll protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself no wrong that's that's a sin that's a good way of thinking about that is not what you do with people not with your children not with your partner not with yourself you don't do that that destroys people's adaptive competence and it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence and that's a terrible unisen someone oh darn armed in the world like that it's a terrible thing to do so and if people aren't strong enough to manage it then they get resentful and then you know when you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that okay so the meta story is partly you're in a mat you're you have a map but it's insufficient and things will come up to disrupt it and sometimes the disruption is catastrophic everything falls apart that's what happens to the Buddha and that's what happens to Adam and Eve and the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together now that's being assembled as I said it's been assembled over centuries right okay we've got the problem the problem is the apocalypse the ever-present reality of the apocalyptic fall that's the problem and so you could say well what is that it's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes right your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world it's a permanent problem so what do you do you stop relying on your conceptual schemes that's part of the answer you start relying on your instead on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence and so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity your creative courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown rather than some formulaic approach to the territory and that it not and that the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt and that provides a permanent solution to the problem well then you might say cynically what's your evidence that that's a permanent solution an answer that is while the evidence isn't all in yet first of all because people only live that way partially and so we haven't put the hypothesis to the full test and second we don't know what our limitations are we have no idea what our limitations are and they're they're both greater and lesser than we imagined because you you know you have to ask yourself like if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight what would happen and the answer to that is well there'd be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world so that might not be a bad place to start but apart from that there's very little that we can say could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality why not you think that's beyond our capacity could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist well possibly because we don't know the limitations of our capacity we're only running at 40 percent if that I would say we don't make full use of all the people that are in the world we don't have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized we haven't set the systems up for that yet so we waste people like mad and then we waste ourselves like mad and so I would say this is something also that's it one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament Jews this is I think one of the reasons that their book has become so central is because what happens in the Old Testament after the fall is that Israel produces a series of states right rise of state and then a fall and then a rise of another state and then a fall so it's the same thing except it's happening at a political level the political state rises it gets corrupt it falls it rises out of the ashes again gets corrupt and Falls I think that happen times in the Old Testament and one of the things that's very interesting is the reaction of the Jews they always say it was our fault instead of taking the Cain and Abel roots oh and I'm going to tell you the Cain and Abel story right away instead of taking the Cain and Abel route they always say if the state collapsed it was because we did something wrong that's very different than saying you know it's arbitrary fate it's the nature of arbitrary fate or the structure of reality that we're doomed to collapse into chaos and that's an indication of the corruption of being well you can take that route if you want it's the corruption of being well good luck with that so what are you going to do about that that's easy start you'll start to work for the destruction of being that's what you will do the alternative is to say this terrible thing happened and somehow it's my fault well at least that ly opens you up the pathway to doing something about it and maybe it's actually the case maybe terrible things happen because you're just not who you should be at least it's a night you know that's true to some degree right you know it because things happen to you all the time and you think well you know if I just would have played that game straight if I would have put this thing in order that wouldn't have happened it's like okay fine what's the ultimate extent of that das esq said at one point that every human being was not only responsible for everything that happened to him or her but also simultaneously responsible for everything that happened to everyone else it's a very it's a I would say it's almost a hallucinogenic idea right it's a it's a transcendent idea and it can go very wrong sometimes depressed people for example get hyper responsible for what's happened and just crushes them and so it's a it's a mode of thinking that can produce its attendant pathologies but there's something about it that's there's something about it that's metaphysically true so all right so I'm going to tell you the story of Cain and Abel now I really like this story it's it's very short it's only about a paragraph long which is very interesting because it it's one of these examples where there's a it's like a genie that the story there's so much condensed into it that it's almost unbelievable and there's even ambiguity condensed into it which is which is very very interesting because it actually makes the story more complex and sophisticated so let me tell you the story now the first thing I want to tell you some things about the story first so we've got the original paradisal state and then the collapse and so now metaphysically speaking we're in the collapse we're in the we're in the post fall condition we're still occupying a mythological landscape right this isn't history as we normally understand it it's meta history so when we talk about Cain and Abel Cain and Abel we're actually talking about the first two real human beings because Adam and Eve a were created by God and being were in Paradise and so that's not the normative condition of human beings right that's a that's a special time that's outside of normal time and space Cain and Abel by contrast they're in history because in some sense history actually starts a couple of times in the Old Testament it starts with the creation of being it starts with the formation of the garden it starts with the fall it starts with Cain and Abel it starts it over again with Noah and then it starts with Abraham which is really where what we would recognize more as conventional history begins so there's a number of starts of history but this is one of them Cain and Abel are the first two human beings who are they they're the adversarial brothers hero and adversary there are types of Christ and Satan the well-known supposition you see that hostile brother motif well it's an archetypal motif and the hostile brothers are the part of you that's striving for the light that's one-half and the part of you that's embracing the darkness and so that's part of you it's part of the social structure that's Seth and Osiris it's part of the natural order in some sense that's the benevolent and destructive elements of nature right you see that negativity running through all the archetypal representations but Cain and Abel are the hostile brothers and the KE Cain is roughly that part of you that says Oh to hell with it and means it right and that means you'll work for your own pain and destruction at the same time that you're working for the pain and destruction not only of your brother but but more particularly of the brother that you admire because that's actually a lot more entertaining right if you're going to become destructive and you go destroy something bad that hardly qualifies as destruction what you want to do is find something great and destroy that that's destruction that's revenge none of this coding punishment where it deserves to be what you want to do and this is partly why the story of Christ is archetypal and the archetypal story is when you cannot push beyond what's the worst possible punishment what's the worst possible punishment meted out for the least the least the most innocent person you hit an archetypal end there so you define most innocent person you can do that any way you want define most innocent person define worst possible punishment can join the two things you get an archetypal story and the reason for that is you can't push beyond it and so if you want to destroy something you want to destroy an ideal not something that's flawed and so Kate and Abel are set up exactly that way so I'll read you the story and I'll interleave some interpretations along with it so an atom anew Eve his wife and she conceived and bore Cain and said I have got the man from the Lord and she again bare his brother Abel and Abel with the keeper of sheep but Cain was a tiller of the ground okay so Abel's a shepherd and Cain is a farmer the Shepherd is a archetypal symbol because the Shepherd is the leader of a flock and the Shepherd is the heroic leader of a flock and the reasons this is Middle Eastern mythology let's say well if you were a shepherd what did you do you took your slingshot in your stick and you defended your nice juicy plump delicious sheep against lions right so it was no joke man you you were a tough cookie if you were a shepherd because while you were acting as the guardian of that you're acting as the Guardian against predation roughly speaking and you weren't armed very well I mean well you can just think about it for a minute it's to think about fighting off a lion with a with a slingshot or with a bow and arrow with a spear I mean you have to have a lot of courage to manage that especially successfully so Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain was a tiller of the ground which isn't as heroic to roll and so right off the bat you get this dichotomy between the two roles it's also a great interest that Cain is the older brother and Abel is the younger brother and you see that very frequently in mythology because the older brother is the one that's privileged by status right so he's got he's got privilege Cain because he's the elder brother that also means that if there are possessions to be handed down the generations the older brother gets them now interestingly enough Cain has privileged but he's not the one that's favored by God that's and I think that's absolutely absolutely brilliant that it's set up that way because it's actually Abel who doesn't have the right that the first Lord has who actually turns into the person who's the proper manifestation of the ideal it's because Cain has things given to him you might think well that that's great he's privileged what a wonderful thing for Cain it's like don't be so sure about that and partly because one of the things that you'll find because many of you will be well off when you have children is one of the problems with being reasonably wealthy when you have children is that you deprive them of privation because the law of what makes people mature is necessity and if you have for example if you have more money than you know what to do with roughly speaking it's very difficult to say no to your children when they want something because why are you going to say no you can just provide it well what makes you think that that's what you should do well you can have anything you want well what happens you devalue what you want and your desires continue to grow well that's not very helpful so it's not obvious at all that providing people with an excess let's say a privilege is something that's good for them from a psychological perspective they need to hit the proper limitations and if you're fortunate it becomes very difficult to deprive your children properly so you'll you'll fight with that it's a big problem that's what happens when you get spoiled children roughly speaking right they get every they get everything by doing nothing well that's not a good lesson because that won't work in the world it worked very counterproductive leigh-anne in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof and the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering but unto Cain and his offering he had no respect and Cain was very wroth angry and his countenance fell okay so again there's a tremendous amount packed into that this is the first time that we see the motif of sacrifice right and so I mentioned to you before how these archaic people conceptualized the world right it's a dome with a disc of land and underneath that a disc of water fresh and underneath that a disc of salt water so that's the world and then up in the heavens that's where God is and so God's up in the sky and we talked about why that might be and part of that is well when you look at the night sky you look at what transcends your current reality and you look at what inspires awe so there's a God exists where awe is experienced fine that's a perfectly reasonable that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis when you think that what you're trying to do is formulate what constitutes the transcendent because if you exist within a conceptual structure and you encounter that which is outside the conceptual structure you will feel off that's a combination of fear paralysis right and the combination of overwhelming possibility and you can experience that for example if you listen to a great piece of music what happens the hair on the back of your neck stands up why because you're a prey animal and you just puffed up to look bigger that's why you have that experiences pile of erection and it's part of awe so when you see a cat pop up because a big dog is in front of it that's what the cats feeling it's like oh my god pop right so you when you encounter that which transcends your your limited sphere of apprehension then you experience aw you look at the night sky that's what happens music can do that and all sorts of things that we do can evoke that sense and so they located the transcendent value in that which inspired awe fight reasonable now you can argue about the utility of the personification right because God the Father was personified in human form but that's a very sophisticated idea too because as we already found in the Old Testament there's an there's an association between whatever God is yahwah or Elohim and and creating order out of chaos and something about each individual human being and so I don't believe that the personification of God the Father in the Old Testament is archaic and and primitive at all I think it's one of the most sophisticated things that people ever developed the idea is that the ultimate transcendent value is the capacity to generate order out of chaos using linguistic ability let's say and that each person has that as an essential element of their being like argue with that see how far you get that is one hell of a vicious conceptualization and I would also say it's the bedrock upon which our legal system rests so you don't move that easily you move that and many things fall and there are things that you may say you don't believe but you ask them out all the time in fact if you didn't act them out people would set you straight very very rapidly because basically what other people want from you even though they don't conceptualize it in this terms is that you Accord them the respect due the the incarnation of the logos that's exactly what it means to interact with someone properly so it's you can say what you want about what you believe it doesn't matter what matters is what you act out all right so also now we have this conceptualization of what's transcendent that's emerged as a part partially perhaps as emotional contagion that which inspires awe is that which is transcendent and it's associated with these underlying ideas about the creation of order out of chaos and the instantiation of that spirit in human beings that's all lurking in the background and then we have this other idea which we already talked about which is that there's a patriarchal or paternal spirit that represents the community at large stretched across time you can think about that as the spirit of the ancestors so it's the past it's the present but that's also projected into the future that's the thing you bargain with for your life in the future I'm going to sacrifice myself to get a degree why is that because the spirit of my culture will reward me in the future that's the sacrifice okay well took people we were chimpanzees for God's sake it took us a long time to figure this out chimpanzees don't sacrifice the present for the future you know you got to ask yourself how long did it take human beings to figure out that there was a future and then what to do about it I mean this isn't some we didn't go from chimpanzee to fully articulated human being in one in one step it was created knowledge and that was extraordinarily painful what did we learn from observation something like storing up goods for the future helps us live imagine how difficult that is you know imagine that you're you're a farmer back wouldn't but that was an extraordinarily you were barely scraping out a living doing that it was hand to mouth at best all right so now it's winter and you've got your damn seeds in your cellar right what are you going to do you're starving you're going to eat them or are you going to wait and plant them again in the spring because that's your damn choice and so the people who decided to eat them well some of the people who decided to save them died well let's say more of the people who decided to eat them died and so this sort of knowledge was was gathered with an unbelievable agony you don't get what what you have what you want right now for you that's nothing because you're very much accustomed to getting what you want all the time right now roughly speaking you know compared to people who live from hand to mouth but back when things were much rougher the idea that you had to sacrifice something of value now to be paid off in the future man that was a rough thing to accept okay so what happened so people figured this out somehow they figured out that you could make an offering of something you valued and that might help set the world straight how did they conceptualize that well they conceptualize it ritually they were acting it out to begin with it's like the PIA jetty an idea you know when I would when I look at that cup part of the looking is this right it's the adjustment of my body to the shape of the cup as part of my understanding well Piaget is here one of these days great observations that we use our bodies to represent things long before we understand what it is that we're representing which is to say no more than we act things out we're dramatic creatures right we use drama and the sacrificial ritual is a drama that points to a higher psychological truth and the higher psychological truth is let go of what's in let go of what you value now and perhaps that will pay off Multi manifold in the future you're making a bargain and then you might say well who are you making a bargain with and you could say well nature but that's not exactly right it's not exactly right because let's say I have something of value in a social in the social organization and I'm going to I'm going to let it go because I'm relying on a corresponding reward or a greater reward in the future it's a contractual relationship with other people it's not a relationship with nature it's that we've organized ourselves into a social structure and we're willing to maintain the integrity of the social structure across time so that if I give up something now I can be paid for it in the future and the rules that the deal is that we're going to try to keep the future the same as the present so that those contracts can be can be met in the future that's money that's what money is right here's some money you made of sacrifice that's why you get the money what is the money signify it's a promise from the community that the labor that you invested can be stored and then brought forward for your own purposes in the future so it's actually part of the social contract so the thing you're sacrificing to is the spirit of society that produces the social contract and so that's conceptualized as God the Father well how else would you conceptualize it it's it's the spirit of the dominance hierarchy that's the right way to think about it so it's the it's what's common across all the members of the dominant hierarchy across time well it's something you can negotiate with true or not what the hell do you think you're doing when you make a contract what's the law it's all of this it's the manifest mission of that patriarchal spirit across time and space and what do you do you sacrifice to it well so back 4,000 years ago 5,000 years ago however old this story as it's probably older than that this is the best people could do with regards to realization and they got it quite right because they also noted that God was happier if you actually sacrificed something of value and so there's a tremendous complexity and that idea because one of the things I could say and this is something you can pointed out let's say you're miserable and unhappy okay here's a cure find what's valuable and let it go so we could say well maybe it's a relationship that you have maybe its relationship with your parents right and the relationship is pathological but you're locked into it you value it and no wonder because it's a relationship with your parents and you're suffering terribly because of it or what do you do maybe you let it go it's a sacrifice and the idea is that well that will clear the future for you well very frequently when people are suffering terribly not always - sometimes you just suffer stupidly blindly and without recourse you know you get cancer and then you die so we have no idea how to deal with that but sometimes the reason that you're suffering is because you just won't let go of the thing that's biting you you think well I can't let go of and I've had clients like this I can't stop communicating with my mother who phones me three times a day every day of my life and never says anything that isn't unbelievably critical and demeaning I can't let that go like well that's not such a good idea the funny thing too often when people let something like that go it goes away sorts itself out and then comes back so they don't even end up losing it but unless they're willing to let it go to sacrifice it they make no headway whatsoever and so one of the rules is if people are impeding your development you sacrifice your relationship with them right it's a very very rough rule so in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof now that's interesting this is this is where a close reading matters so we don't know what Cain's offering is it's not much described but we do know something about Abel's offering and what we know is that by the standards of the time it's a high quality offerings so it's the firstborn and it's the fat that high-calorie right I mean you know we think of fat as a dietary danger but if you're hungry that's really wrong right because fat is unbelievably high-calorie and so what's happening is the story points out quite clearly that what Abel decides to offer to God is of high quality so it's the real thing it's the real thing he's paying a price okay and so then it's burned well why is it burned well you know this is back again thinking from an archaic perspective well gods in the sky you can't throw your lamb up into the sky it'll just fall back down and so the people knew because they've mastered fire that smoke and savour rose and so you could detect the quality of an offering as a consequence of burning and then that would go up in the spirit of the fire would go up to the sky and God could detect whether or not your offering was of a reasonable quality you know it's concretize obviously but you don't want to make the assumption that the people who were our forebears were stupid just because they thought using metaphors that aren't the same as our metaphors they were still mapping out the damn territory in Owens and and you'd look you can read a book like you're above the authors of the book or you can read a book as if it might have something to teach you and I would say well sometimes the book isn't worth reading but if a book has been around for a very long period of time and a very large number of people have thought that perhaps there's something in it sometimes they're right so and it's a tricky thing and it might also depend on how you read it but I found that this sort of investigation was a lot more useful if I started from the presupposition that maybe there was something I didn't know instead of you know so funny for example I taught a first year course about ten years ago on the psychology of religion it was so interesting dealing with the eighteen-year-old students because they're completely dismissive of religious ideas and I thought God you guys you don't know anything and you have this specific kind of blindness that a set of very intelligent social psychologists also identified which was blindness blindness because it actually turns out that the least the less you know about a topic the more you overestimate the quality of your knowledge so I thought we're in this situation where kids who don't even know how to act in the world they don't know anything will come to university and start up with the proposition that there is stood critics of judeo-christian culture which of which they know nothing they know nothing about it they knew nothing about history they know nothing about philosophy nothing about literature but they're absolutely certain that they're correct in their in the criticisms that they're bringing forth it's absolutely unbelievable so anyways and it's not helpful because then you don't you don't get to learn and you aren't well see you know what happens if you don't learn okay so anyway so it looks like Abel's doing a good job that's the implication the story doesn't say Abel is doing a really good job with his sacrifices it just hints at it and I like that because because it leaves that ambiguity it's like maybe you're working really hard and your brother's working really hard and you really can't tell the difference between your quality of work and his quality of work but for some reason he's succeeding like mad that happens right because there's an arbitrary element to life and so the story says well the Lord has respect unto Abel and his offering and there's an implication that maybe the reason for that is that you know Cain's offerings are a little second-rate but the story doesn't come over to Club you over the head with that idea it just leaves it as a as an ambiguous possibility and the reason for that is sometimes you make sacrifices and maybe they're even real ones and they don't pay off or they pay off for someone better and so there is this arbitrary nature of the the transcendent that you're attempting to deal with it rewards and doesn't reward more or less of its own accord or there's an element of that and so it's ambiguous in the text even though there's a hint that you know perhaps Abel is doing a better job than Cain so I like that I think it's very sophisticated so what happens well Cain makes his offerings and God isn't happy with them now we don't know how Cain figures out that God isn't happy with his offerings we get some hints of that too but the story does tell us that's what happens and so then we get the psychological response on the part of pain now one response could be Jesus I must be doing something wrong I better straighten myself out you know I better come up with a better quality offering and try that again that isn't what happens what happens instead is that Cain becomes angry Roth and his countenance falls and so what does that mean it means this right it means he is not happy he's angry and out for revenge and so one of the I've been thinking about this a lot lately with regards to the literature on inequality because there's a very good literature that shows for example that there's there's a as a measure called the Gini coefficient and the Gini coefficient is a numerical index of the relative inequality of a geographical locale so for example if you went to Newfoundland where everyone is roughly not very rich or North Dakota say almost everyone there is say lower middle class something like that or upper working class something like that very little variability low Gini coefficient okay if you go to Miami Beach say where everyone's rich low Gini coefficient because it isn't an index of absolute wealth or absolute poverty it's an index of relative poverty and so if everyone's rich the relative poverty is low and if everyone's poor the relative poverty is low now one question is where is the crime and you might think while the crime is where the absolute poverty is high right or the absolute wealth is low that's where the crime is that's wrong if it's if things are relatively distributed in an egalitarian manner the male-on-male crime especially homicide is low and it's also the case where everyone is rich but if you go into places where there's some rich people but not very many and there's a lot of people who are comparatively poor than the male homicide rapes rates and violent crime rate up substantially it's a consequence of male-on-male competition and so what you could derive from that and maybe even reasonably is that you should flatten out today I'm income into its distribution because you're destabilizing the society by facilitating male criminal aggression you can make a good case for that you know in places like Colombia where the Gini coefficient got unbelievably extreme society got so violent that it could barely hold itself together so so you can make a conservative argument for redistribution of income using the observation that if the income distribution gets too extreme the whole bloody thing starts to destabilize it might fall but but then you also might say wait a minute is it inequality that's driving the violence or is it resentment of the inequality that's driving the violence now that's a tough question because you might say well what if the game is rigged and there's no way of moving up the power hierarchy well then maybe anger and the desire for revolution is the appropriate response but that doesn't really mean to me that the response should be the sort of thing that you see in high Gini coefficient neighborhoods which is interracial intra-racial violence between men so for example in neighborhoods where there's high murder rates the the murders are always between young men and they're always within race and so that doesn't seem to me to be exactly a politically revolutionary move right it's more like it's more like violent competition for the sake of attaining status and you might say well that's reasonable but because the inequality is there and then need to find status because it's part of what drives them forward it's part of what makes them attractive to women it's a necessity well the question is do you attain status through destruction or do you start making your offerings put in your offerings in order and that's something we really need to figure out because that's a fundamental political question it's a fundamental political question anyways what happens in this story is that khane decides that the fact that god isn't accepting his offerings means that he's entitled to become angry and and and negative it's good those two things are both put together right he's Roth he's angry and he's also depressed and so he's in a state of mind that well I think the best characterization for that is hostile resentment because it's unfair it's like yeah it's unfair so what are going to do about it can you get destructive about it you're going to change your approach well Cain he does the ultimate thing and this is what people do when they do the ultimate thing because that kind of hostile resentment has an archetypal endpoint and the archetypal end point is the point that you get when you're hostile and resentful because you haven't been successful and then you go sit in your mother's basement for about 10 years and then you start imagining just how nice it would be if you shot up the local high school so that everybody knew your name and what happens is you go from I'm irritated because things aren't working out for me very well - I'm irritated I and I hate those people for whom things are working out well - I'm irritated and I hate the fact that the world is set up so that this has happened to me and then you go - well because I'm irritated and hate the world I'm going to do whatever I can that will destroy it most rapidly and with the with the highest possible amount of pain and suffering conceivable and at that point then you don't just go shoot up the high school you go up and shoot up the elementary school and so if you're wondering what kind of pathway people walk down to get to that point that's the pathway and the ultimate cap of that is well I'll kill the kids because well we already know that killing the innocent is a lot more effective than killing the guilty and then just to cap it off I'll blow my head off at the end just to show you just how goddamn pointless it all is and so that's the logical extension of Kane's attitude and you might think well that's a bit of an over-reading and I would say it's not an over-reading at all it's exactly what happens in the text so it's exactly what follows it so fine so Cain is not happy and so who is he not happy with well he's not happy with God so what does that mean well we've already unpacked this he's not happy with the social contract because that's part of the spirit the patriarchal spirit let's say man there's more to it than that because we already we've already analyzed what God the idea of God might represent in the background of this story he's not happy with the transcendent he's not happy with the idea of the logos all of that no faith in the transcendent nothing but he does nothing but despise the social contract and he's got no faith whatsoever in the the logos let's say the word that brings chaos are the border he's all got nothing but contempt for all of that and you know certainly you know people like that and if you don't know them you just go on YouTube and read the comments and you'll see all sorts of people like that so so anyway so God has a little child with him and he says well what why are you angry and and why why are you upset and Cain says then God says if you do well won't you be accepted and if you don't do well sin lies at your door and unto thee shall be his desire and thou shalt rule over him okay that's a very mangled translation I would say so I'm going to take it apart so what God says is while you're angry and you're upset it's like well what's your problem and then God tells Cain if you did things properly they would work out for you was the last thing he wants to hear because what Cain wants to believe is that the reason he's not doing very well is because there's no sense having any faith in the logos the transcendent is is evil and aimed exactly against him and the entire social contract is faulty that's what he wants to hear but that is what God says God says wait a minute maybe you're doing something wrong well that's maybe a worse message then everything else is corrupt it's like you're having a problem because you're just not everything you could be well and then God says something really nasty and you can't help from this lines I read a bunch of translations to try to figure out exactly what it bent so this is what God tells Caden he says you're in a room in a house and there's something at the door and he uses a metaphor God uses metaphor it's a sexually a lot aroused predatory cat and you invited in you've invited in you know that it has evil intent you invited in to mate with you right and you it's it's union with you it's this malevolent force this it's sexual union with you has produced an offspring and that offspring is what possesses you and so not only have you done something wrong you've you've invited the Spirit wrongdoing into your life and you creatively intermingled it with it voluntarily to bring forth a monster of your own creation so that's what God tells Cain it's like look it's bad enough that God says you know you should get your act together because maybe that's why things aren't going so well for you before you criticize the transcendent and the world and the structure of being maybe you're doing something wrong but it's worse than that he says not only are you doing something wrong you bloody well know you're doing something wrong and you and you're doing it creatively and with intent so not only are things not going well for you but you've played a creative role in producing that situation and so God basically says I am taking zero responsibility for rejecting your sacrifice it's all on you and so Cain leaves and he's like seriously not happy with that response because he wanted to hear pat pat you're a victim of circumstance and everything is conspiring against you and really being god I should get my act together and just give you what you want because obviously being God I'm wrong and you're right well that is what happens it's exactly the opposite that it's completely on you that's the that's the judgment and so Cain leaves and believe me he's he was Roth before his countenance had fallen before but it's nothing like it is now and so he hits the next stage and he thinks okay I'm going to take my revenge what am I going to do I'm going to find the most innocent and worthwhile thing that's favorite of God and I'm going to kill it and that's what he does so it doesn't matter that his brother and Abel you know we're drawing the inference Abel's done the right things everyone likes him everything's flourishing for Abel he's a good guys one of those people that you meet that has everything and then you meet them and you wish you could hate them but you can't because they're really good people and then you really hate them because not only do they have everything but it appears that they deserve it and there's nothing that sort of sits in your soul and rots it more than that realization and so that's the situation with Cain and so Cain thinks Cain talked with Abel his brother and it came to pass when they were in the field but Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him so that's so interesting because look look what happens to here so he's not doing well he's separated from the transcendent and from society he's bitterly resentful and now he goes out and kills the very thing that he most wants to be so he destroys his own ideal right he demolishes his own ideal that's how far his resentment has pushed him and so he's he's done right but he doesn't matter because it enables him to take revenge so he doesn't care it's like it's like the the suicidal school shooter that blows off his head at the end of his mayhem it's like he doesn't matter to him it's part of the same art form and the Lord says unto Cain where is Abel thy brother and Cain said I know I don't know am I my brother's keeper well that's a good question that's why it's posed in the story because the answer that it's supposed to be yes and God says what have you done the voice of your brother's blood cries unto me from the ground that's actually the motif that Dostoyevsky explores I would say in crime and punishment because what happens is that the Skolnick Cobb is Cain for all intents and purposes and he commits a murder but he gets away with it well so he thinks so he thinks no one suspects him he buries the money he can't stand to touch the body he buries it in a in a abandoned lot and he's drawn there now and then to look at where it is but he can't touch it because the money it's so funny because the money before he kills the pawnbroker is not the same as the money after he kills the pawnbroker and the Restonic off before he kills the pawnbroker is not the same as the risk Olenick off after he kills the Paulding broker in fact they're not the same at all and so the Skolnick have is tormented by God you could say but not from the external world he sets the crime up quite nicely it's that this the spirit against which he transgressed tortures him from within and there's no escape from and so eventually what happens in crime and punishment is the Skolnick ov continues to manifest himself as guilty in every possible way until he receives the punishment that he desires because it's the only way that he can set things right he actually he actually he essentially turns himself in eventually because he can't tolerate what he's done so well so that's the idea the voice of thy brother's blood cries unto me from the ground it's guilt and now you're cursed from the earth which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand when you till the ground it will not henceforth yield unto you it strength a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth you know and you might say well why does God not just strike Kain dead and the answer to that perhaps is that wouldn't be sufficient punishment that's what it looks like to me it's like what's the punishment you live with what you did right and I don't want anybody taking out either because then you won't have to live with what you did so that's the punishment and Cain says unto the Lord my punishment is greater than I can bear like yea behold you have driven me out this day from the face of the earth and from thy face shall I be hid that's the same as what happens to Adam in the Garden of Eden remember Adam hides from God and he has his reasons and now Cain is alienated from God there's no Reid there's no reconstructing that relationship he's put himself by violating his contract let's say with the transcendent and also with society and also with his own spirit he's put himself outside the possibility of redemption and that's why he says the punishment is greater than I could bear there's no hope left right so he's in hell for all intents and purposes behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth and from thy face shall I be hid and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth and it shall come to pass that everyone who finds me will will kill me and God says therefore whoever slayeth Cain vengeance shall be taken on him Sevenfold and the Lord set a mark onto Cain lest any finding him should kill him now that's interesting you think why in the world would God protect Cain well the next part of the story actually tells you that you have a family I have a family your brother kills my son so what you I come and I kill your father and your cousin and then you think well I killed your father and your cousin I'm going to come back and I'm going to kill four of your people and then I come back and say yeah no problem it's sixteen to you this time and then you come back and you say sixteen a let's try for thirty-two and so this is what happens this is actually why justice systems are set up by the way you go there's a bunch of reasons justice systems are set up and one is to punish the guilty that's one the other is to have the guilty repent that's two to maintain social order that's three here's another one that no one ever thinks about back thirty years ago the governor of Massachusetts whose name I forget was running for president and while he was governor of Massachusetts he had released a number of prisoners one of whom his name was I think Willie maybe Hortense doesn't really matter and when Willie was released on this program he went out and raped someone and perhaps killed them I can't remember but it doesn't matter that the rape is good enough and the governor was asked during a debate what he would do if a relief prisoner had raped his daughter or his wife and he gave a very weak answer what was his name he did a very weak answer of something about you know letting the law take its due course and that's the wrong answer right the right answer is I would be compelled with every fiber of my being to hunt that person down and to tear them into bits but I won't do it now what so what's the purpose of the justice system it's to alleviate you from the responsibility of revenge that's what it's for because otherwise what happens you kill one I kill two you kill four I kill eight you kill sixteen and soon everyone's at war and so God protects Cain to stop that from happening to stop the feud from emerging because those things can go forever and then from transforming the entire society into a state of war and so what's also so I'll tell you the rest of the story and Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and well in the Land of Nod on the East of Eden and Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bare Enoch etc so now you have a genealogy right so Cain starts to have a family you have a genealogy and so a number of people are named in the lineage and so and it tells you what this is sort of an attempt to describe how things came about so this is like the naming of the heroes of old and so you have Enoch who builds the city you have jebel who is the father of those who dwell in tents and of those who have cattle you have Jubal who is the father of musicians and Zillah who bore tubal Cain now tubal Cain is a very interesting person by tradition tubal Cain is the first artificer of weapons of war so Cain's descendent after multiple generations is the person who produces weapons of war alright and so so there's another bit of the story within which that needs to be placed in context and Lamech who's one of the grandchildren of Cain says unto his wife that wives Adah and Zillah hear my voice ye wives of Lamech hearken unto my speech for I have slain a man to my wounding and a young man to my hurt okay so what he's saying is he he's been involved in a murder if can be a vote Avenged Sevenfold truly Lamech seventy and Sevenfold and so there's the implication there that the tit for tat process has begun Cain kills Abel Abel Cain's children kill seven Cain's grandchildren kill seventy fold and then tubal Cain pops up on the horizon and he's the person who makes artifices of war and so the story in its fragmentary manner ties the individual psychopathology that's resentful and revenge seeking to the proclivity for broad scale warfare and this really hit me because I was interested particularly in what was happening in the Nazi camps with the guards because the guards were gratuitously cruel and I was very curious about that and so here's an interesting story this was in a book called ordinary Germans Hitler's willing executioner's and it was a book that was written about 30 years ago that challenged the idea that the Nazi phenomena was top-down order following which I don't believe by the way I think that's a very weak weak hypothesis fascistic societies are fascistic at every single level of organization spiritually within the family within the local community it's like a holograph it's the same absolutely everywhere it's not top-down I mean there are leaders who get produced and maybe they catalyze it but to blame it on the leaders is to forget about the process by which the leaders come to be so no you don't get a past that way so here's one of the things that happened as the Nazis started to lose the war so here's what you should have done if you were a Nazi and you wanted to win the war you should have enslaved the Jews and the gypsies and had them work right you have the head should have had them work for the benefit of the victory and then if you wanted to liquidate them afterwards that's the logical thing to do if you want to win and we assume that Hitler wanted to win but that's not a very intelligent assumption why would you assume that he wasn't exactly a good guy so why should we assume that he was aiming at the good that he was promoting even in his own terms right the glorious everlasting fourth Third Reich right let a rule for a thousand years and be a bastion of civilization in music because that's the sort of thing he purported to be interested in well so what do you do with the Jews and the gypsies well round them up fine it slave them fine you don't kill them you certainly don't devote a substantial proportion of your war resources while you're losing to accelerate the rate at which the extermination is taking place because that's a bit counterproductive unless what you're aiming at is the maximum possible mayhem in the shortest period of time well so what happened as the Germans started to lose the war did Hitler lose faith in his own ability no he believed that the Germans had betrayed him with weakness and so he was perfectly willing to accelerate the rate at which Germany was losing the war and so when Hitler and his minions have the choice here's the choice you can suspend your unnecessary demolition of people win the damn war and then pick it up afterwards or while you're losing you can just accelerate the mayhem even though it's counterproductive it's like what they pick well they pick to accelerate demand and so to me there's an old psychoanalytic idea I think this was derived by you you can't figure out what someone is doing or why look at the outcome and infer the motivation if it produces mayhem perhaps it was aiming at mayhem now you know you have to use that dictum carefully if someone's irritating you you know maybe it's because you're irritable that you should sort yourself out but maybe it's because they're actually aiming at irritating you and that's the actual motivation so perhaps not but it's another tool in your analytical armament so and so you see well this is the thing about warfare that's so interesting about about because you can you can attribute it to territoriality you can attribute it to a war for resources that's what the I would say wretchedly simple-minded economists presume people fight over scarce resources it's like hey we're a little bit more sophisticated than that and first of all what resources are you talking about the bloody idiot had nothing they live perfectly well what did they have snow and seal blubber you know people can live and unbelievably deprived conditions and so the idea that there are natural resources that we fight over because there's a shortage of them is a pretty oversimplified view of human beings it's like well why do people fight well maybe they fight sometimes for good reasons but very very frequently they fight for bad reasons and those bad reasons are our personal as well as socio-cultural and economic you know if you are a Nazi prison guard for example whatever pathologies you were carrying around in your destructive little soul whatever element of Kane was deeply embedded in you had the opportunity to be manifest fully at every moment of your waking existence right you have these people who are completely beholden to you with no rights whatsoever to you could do whatever your evil little heart determined think well maybe that was a motivation for putting them there to begin with and all the cover story about well we're trying to build the Third Reich and we're trying to stabilize the state and we're trying to do all these good things maybe that's just a cover story for the real motivation which is nothing but but what the construction of death camps that killed 6 million people how about that and the obliteration of 120 million people on the planet and the end oh and the and the leaving of European runes maybe that was the motivation or are we going to attribute to Hitler the highest possible motives say no it's an archetypal manifestation of Cain now he's going to put up a front it says I'm your savior it's like well destructive people think that Cain is their Savior let's take a break for 15 minutes so ok so the next thing that happens these stories were sewed together right to make something that resembles a coherent text and there's this literary athletic no there's a literary technique known as metonymy and metonymy is the juxtaposition of two things beside one another with the implication that because they're juxtaposed they are causally they're related in some important matter to one another and so the stories are sequenced and the there's an implicit the stories are sequenced in a particular manner and you might operate under the assumption that that sequencing occurred because the sequencer who was an editor or a group of editors they called that person to read actor but they have no idea if it was one person or many people who organized these texts into something resembling a coherent story so imagine the stories evolved somewhat independently and then they were organized so that they produced what approximated the coherent narrative it's not entirely coherent because there are paradoxical claims say at the level of the sentence so for example the creation order in the first story in Genesis isn't exactly the same as the creation order in the second story and you know people who insist upon the literal truth of the Bible whatever that means is are bothered by those contradictions and turn themselves into knots trying to iron them out and fair enough right because you want the story to be coherent but you know that's sort of it's important but it's also beside the point you don't want to focus on one level of analysis at the exclusion of all the other levels of analysis that's probably the right way to think about it now the fact that these stories are sequence in a particular manner and that that kind of makes sense implies that there's some sort of narrative coherence underneath driving forward otherwise they would be nothing but a random assemblage of stories and they're by no means random that's for sure they're selected and edited and put together in a particular manner by and then stored that way and dealt with in a particular manner by thousands of people over many many years what happens after Cain and Abel is while there's an interlude which is this interlude and it's kind of a bridge and and there's a lot packed into it too although I'm not going to take it apart very much says so this is after after the Cain and Abel story and it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them but the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and then took them wives of all which they chose and there were giants in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bare children to them the same became mighty men which are of old men of renown okay so I already pointed out that if you go back just a little bit you see that the descendants of Cain are represented as founders of institutions right there are Enoch who builds the city and an adder or jabal who is the father of those who dwell in tents and of those who own cattle and then there's Jubal who's the father of all that are musicians and so on so one of the things that you see in in myths very frequently is that if there's a pattern of behavior that's characteristic of the culture that pattern of behavior is attributed to a hero who was in the past who was the first person who did that and so you might say well what does that mean well it means in Parkton there was the first person who did that although more likely there was an assemblage of people who aggregated that particular ability say the ability to play music across a very large amount of time but these are pre literate people right and they're trying to remember the past and so what happens Mircea Eliade documented this quite well is that that aggregation of people gets collapsed into a single meta person and that's the hero of old and so and I already talked about how this works is that you know there are admirable people and then you can tell a story about an admirable person and then you can extract a story out of the set of admirable people and you keep building higher and higher order admirable people until you extract out at the top what's ultimately admirable and this is actually an indication of that process occurring the Giants that are referred to in this particular phrase are the heroes of the past who established the traditions on which the society exists and so that's all compacted into this little paragraph so this little paragraph here there were giants in the earth in those days and after that when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bare children to them the same became mighty men which were of old men of renown well you could hardly say I think there's very little difference between what I just told you and what this story says I mean it says it as if it was something that literally occurred but in some sense it doesn't exactly say that it says well the ancient landscape was a landscape of heroic adventurers it's like well we do that to our own history right I mean even when we consider it literal history we don't pick people at random to historic I sweep ick people who had some substantive impact and tell stories about them and and they're emblematic in some sense of the spirit of striving that characterizes humanity and and so you can't have history without some mythologies ation because the mythologies ation occurs at the level of the selection of the entities about which you're going to weave the historical tale so okay so anyway so there's little there's a little interlude there that it talks about the appearance of heroes in the past but then it's just that's just done with very very rapidly and then we move into another story this is the story of Noah so the way it looks to me is that the the part of Genesis that I'm going to talk to you about ends with the flood myth and also with the Tower of Babel and so the flood myth is the demolition of everything that came before and the Tower of Babel in some sense is exactly the same thing so there's two chaotic I mean it's like the fall occurs in stages there's paradise and then Adam and Eve fall into culture and then Cain and Abel Cain falls into chaos and then the entire society falls into chaos and the flood comes and the Tower of Babel is produced and then that's the end of the truly archaic parts of the Bible and so what that seems to me what's happening it's very sophisticated is that there's a implicit causal narrative being warrant woven about the manner in which Cain responds and the probability that human beings are going to deteriorate and the flood is going to come so and God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually and it repented the Lord that he had made man on earth and it grieved him at his heart well we already encountered a story like that once already right that happened in the martyr story where time out and absolute give rise to the elder gods and they kill absolute which was not very smart idea right they demolish the sub structure of their stable society and of course chaos comes flooding back well what does it mean to say that human beings let's see to say that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the hearts of his own thoughts of his heart was only evil continually is not much different than to say that people are acting in a manner that demolishes the cultural structure now we've already even pointed out that the cultural structure that happens in this story was produced by the heroic Giants of the past right and we've also noted that what Kane is objecting to in his Kane like manner is the social structure which isn't rewarding properly and the transcendence that's above that and the spirit of logos itself he's rejecting all that okay so the issue here is that when that sort of evil is produced exactly as when AB sue is Slade Slade I guess that's right by the by the Elder Gods then all hell breaks loose all chaos comes back now time at if you remember correctly is the god of the salt water goddess of the salt water and so the return of time at and the flood are mythologically similar ideas now Elia has taken apart flood myths from all over the world and he made two brilliant comments about them and there are also akin to some degree to what you can see the Egyptian story about Seth and the corruption of the state so because the Egyptians figured out that there's always a power working within the state let's say that corrupted it now that was set and that was always working for its overthrow it's an idea like Satan and I said that the the word Seth becomes the word Satan through Coptic Christianity so so the le adds I deal with this that things fall apart of their own accord merely because they aged that that's the first motif in the flood story and that's only to say that if you build something it decays if you build something and you just leave it the hell alone it will soon not work right and that's entropy so one of the reasons that the flood always threatens is merely because of entropy and you see that reflected in the Egyptian story because one of the reasons that Osiris falls prey to Seth is because he's old you know he was a great hero when he was young and created the Egyptian state like the men of renown but now he's old and it's worse he's be willfully blind but that's the next thing but the fact that he's all is just to start things fall apart of their own accord so once something is given to you you have to maintain it just to ensure its continued existence and so you actually you actually have a contract with most of the things that you own it's it's like a it's like a moral contract let's say you have a car well you've decided that you're going to sacrifice to have the car and so you you performed an ethical calculation but the car was only worth the sacrifice as long as it functions as a car and so what that means is that to justify the sacrifice you've made to have the car you have to maintain the car because otherwise you're acting out the proposition that the thing you sacrificed for actually didn't have any value and so you're obliterating that as a useful contract and you run into the situation where the car will just deteriorate of its own accord and then you won't have a car at all well so let's say how do you speed the process by which your car deteriorates well that's easy you're driving it along the road and it starts to make a ticking noise tick tick tick tick and you think I should go have that ticking noise checked because you've heard it and then you think nah it won't matter it's like yeah probably it'll matter and what does matter mean well matter is mother that's chaos to you no matter but what it means is that that little ticking noise is the birthplace of time at in your car that's a good way of thinking about it is that it's your first indication that the dragon of chaos is going to manifest itself in your car that happens when you I've got a funny story about that so I had a friend in in in graduate school someone I really liked but I wouldn't call her mikela mechanically inclined let's put it that way and she had an old Honda and those things were notorious for rusting out this is thirty years ago when they were first produced they weren't adapted well to Canadian winters and we used to go in her car in her Honda and it got a little on the scary side because it was so rusty underneath that you can actually see through the floorboards and that actually made me nervous because if you can see through the floorboards that means that they're not really floorboards what they are is like rust and so I mentioned the fact that that might be a problem to her a couple of times but she was sort of blithe about it and one day she was driving down st. Lawrence Street in Montreal which is the main street running roughly north and south and her hood popped up it bent and popped up spontaneously and so she was pretty curious about that and so she was with this friend of hers who was just as clueless mechanically as she was which is really quite remarkably clueless and so they pulled off into a service station and had the guy come out look at it and well he he opened the hood obviously and what had happened was the body had fallen off the frame so and what had happened was the shock which is like supposed to be attached to the car had pushed up through the through the hood so literally that car body had like fallen onto the ground and but she was she managed to drive the car okay so look that's I wouldn't exactly call that willful blindness because perhaps there was an element of willful blindness she didn't know anything about mechanics but you get the point right it's like let's say she would have been in a fatal accident you might say well you can shake your fist at God for producing the circumstances but you know the fact that you could see through the floorboards that's probably something that you might have paid attention to and so always the question is if things fall apart around you to what degree is it the mere tendency of things to degenerate entropically because they do that of their own accord or have you sped the probability of decay by failing to pay attention when with our little snake manifests itself inside your paradise and it's always it's always a question so when here's a here's an example an interesting example I think so I've thought about the actual floods like the New Orleans flood okay so New Orleans is built where there are floods everyone knows that and it's a major port in the United States a huge part of American trade goes down the rivers to New Orleans so there was a reason it was built where it was even though it was a dangerous place to build it and in order to maintain New Orleans they had to build these levees that kept the water back now the American what is it American Army Corps of Engineers if I remember correctly was responsible for building and maintaining the levees and the dikes okay Holland is also built underwater as you may or may not know and they build huge dikes to keep the ocean back so they could reclaim the land and that's basically Holland Holland is an unbelievably organized society and part of the reason is is it isn't land it's underwater and so if you're not bloody well awake in Holland then the ocean comes in and you all drown and so the Dutch are very very careful about such things and they build their dikes so that they calculate storm intensity and then they calculate the intensity of the worst storm in 10,000 years and then they build the dikes to withstand that storm the Army Corps of Engineers built the dikes in New Orleans to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years and they knew that was insufficient and New Orleans Louisiana is an unbelievably corrupt state and you can't dump money in there to fix things because people just steal all the money so and then nothing gets fixed and so then what happens there's a hurricane and then what happens there's a flood and everybody says why would God send the flood and answer that is well was there a flood or where the dikes not high enough and that's what's so interesting is that it's always this is a great father versus great mother conundrum if a system failed is it because of the surround overwhelming the system or is it because the system was insufficiently awake and doomed itself okay so Eliot its take on the flood myth is this God comes along and floods the world periodically why and that that's the catastrophic influx of chaos right so chaos will wipe you out from time to time why well entropy does in your conceptual schemes and your willful blindness speeds the process and remember that's what the Egyptians said about Osiris right they said he was old he was a great king a man of renown but he was old but he was also willfully blind and it was the combination of his age and his willful blindness that allowed Seth to chop them up into pieces and and depose them and so that would that ferret out it's brilliant right it's like why the states fall apart because the structures get old and no one's taking care of them and people have their eyes closed and so it's the same situation it's the same situation in the flood myths it's like well yeah things fall apart they're going to flood but if you were awake enough and you were on top of it then you could continually stave that off and actually partly what you're doing because you're alive is staving off entropy like you're an anti em tropic process it's a really good definition of life there's a great physicist named Erland Schrodinger who wrote a book called what is life and that's the fundamental thesis of the book you're always trying to stave off entropy what's the best way to stave off entropy decay chaos keep your eyes open that's the rule shut your eyes especially two things you know you should see the flood comes and that's the evil of man that's laid out in this story because that's the worst sort of perhaps it's not the worst it's one of the primary sins so to speak that will bring about the flood we already talked about the other things that characterized Cain's attitude so here we go so gods upset because he made man on earth and it grieved him at his heart and God says I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air for I repent that I've made them but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord okay so that's an interesting thing so here what we have is the question is the whole worlds in chaos at this point right in this point the story and the chaos is of multiple sorts it arose from the fall it rose from the emergence of self-consciousness it emerged safe arose from the sins of Cain like things are not going well it's multiple levels of collapse and it's got to the point where God saying this is a mess like it's such a mess that the whole thing has to be washed away the first fall wasn't enough even Cain's collapse wasn't enough we're going to just scrub the whole bloody thing clean so it's it's the ultimate in traumatic collapses the question is well what do you do in the face of the ultimate in traumatic collapses and the answers in the story so know as someone who finds fate who finds favor in the eyes of God so he's like Abel there's something that Noah's doing right it's going to enable him to ride out the storm and so the question hits the same question do you want to have a life where there's no storms or do you want to have a life where you can ride out the storms that's the issue right are you behind the dikes or do you build a boat do you tap them the boat that's the same idea and so the idea here is that the thing that rides out the chaos is the thing that builds and captain's the boat it's another dominance hierarchy idea what should be at the top well it's the top of something that doesn't get flooded out as well what should be at the top well it's to be the boat builder and to be the captain of the boat it's not to be hidden from the flood precisely and so I mean here's a here's here's something to think about identity identity politics because that's what we're up to our neck it okay are you who you are can I box you in will you accept that as an identity so I could do that lots of ways you're male you're Asia you're you right there's things about you that I can derive because of your putative membership in a set of different groups the problem with doing that is that the number of groups that I can assign you to is without end so I have to pick arbitrary groups to assign you to and you can accept that if you want but there's no evidence that those are the proper canonical groups but maybe you're happy about that because now you've been assigned membership in a group and that's your identity okay so the question is well fine what happens when that identity is flown into pieces then what well here's here's the answer to some degree and this is the answer that's embedded in the story of Noah if you want to withstand chaos do you want to be who you are or do you want to be the thing that changes who you are constantly that's the question and that's the difference that's the difference there's a categorical difference in identity are you who you are or are you the thing that could continually be more than you are and that's the thing that isn't the stable identity it's not the initial state it's also not the state of being in chaos that nihilistic state let's say and it's not even the state of reformulations that occurs after you've gone through the process it's the state of continually going through the process so you can identify with the thing that trends you can identify identify with the thing that you are or you can identify with the thing that transforms who you are right and that's the same as the state subjugating itself to the individual because the individual is the thing that transforms the state and what the state should do the states necessary because obviously it organizes all of us into peaceful cooperation and competition the states necessary then the question is is the state the highest good an answer that is well it can't be because it's old and dead and blind and so if the state becomes the highest good then you're occupied by the spirit of something that's old and dead and blind well that's not only not good for you because then you're old and dead and blind but it's also bad for the state because as soon as the state gets old in dead and blind God gets unhappy with it and the chaos comes in and washes it away so it seems like a bad solution so what's the proper solution you subordinate your group identity to the identity that transforms your identity right and the state subordinates its power to the vision and articulation of the individual because that's what revives the state and so that's what these stories are trying to stumble towards roughly speaking so Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord why well Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations and Noah walked with God now remember in the Adam and Eve story Adam was walking with God to begin with but then he got all self-conscious and hid behind a bush and when God came to walk with him he blamed his wife for his insufficiencies which I still think that's such an unbelievably comic story I just can't believe it it's so absolutely ridiculous but that's exactly what happened while you have Noah here and Noah Noah's like a counter another counterpart to some degree to Cain no as a just man and he walks with God and so he's oriented properly and because he's oriented properly when the flood comes not only does he manage to get through it as an individual he manages to get through it with his family and he saves and while he saves he roughly saves the world that's how the story puts it forward I mean it's an ark and it's full of animals you know it's it's got a child story element to it fact I suspect it probably was a story that was primarily told to children you know it's like a fable but it's a fable with Punch like the Pinocchio story is a fable with Punch it's like well yeah there's going to be a flood there's always a flood there's always a flood so who are you if you want to get through the flood well then you're Noah you're the thing that builds the boat you're the thing that acts justly you're the thing that walks with God we already know what that means you identify with the transcendent that's like Geppetto pointing to the star before the transformation process that occurs with Pinocchio it's you're identifying with the benevolent spirit of the state so you have a relationship with the transcendent and the benevolent spirit of the state and you're also identified with the capacity to generate chaos of order and the reverse that's what it means to walk with God roughly speaking it's across all of those dimensions so what does that do it gives you the power to withstand the flood and to bring people and and and being itself and civilization along with you and that's the story of Noah so it's a precursor it's another Abel as a precursor to the idea of the redeeming Messiah right Noah is a precursor to the idea of the redeeming Messiah you could think about the mask proto messiahs or proto meta Heroes something like that and they manifest themselves they're part of the Giants that walked in the past and they're embodied their attempts embodied in story to elucidate the the triangle that's at the top of the pyramid right the eye that's at the top of the pyramid so so I won't tell you the rest of the Noah story because I don't think it's necessary for us to to - to delve into the - the more narrative details but I do want - so it's a pretty rough I can point out it's a pretty rough story every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground both Man and cattle and creeping things in the fall of the heaven and they were destroyed from the earth and Noah only remained alive and they that were with him in the Ark it's a very terrifying story you know and and it's worth attending to because we are currently in a period of extreme chaos so okay so anyway this works out God's had enough he's killed is enough he's killed enough of everything it's a it's a traumatic occurrence we can put it that way the waters recede and God God is done for the time being and so then this is what happens at the end so the ark settle down there unloading it and creation is reborn and so then you think well what sets things right again between man and God and the story says that Noah built in our altar unto the Lord and took of every clean beast and of every clean fowl and offered burnt offerings on the altar so it's the same idea here it's that the same idea that you started to see emerging in the Cain Abell story what is it that sets things right between man and God sacrifice so the flood comes then Noah makes the proper sacrifices right it's part of reestablishing the proper order he makes the proper sacrifices and so God is happy with the sacrifices which is a good thing given that he's pretty ordinary and-and-and the Lord smelled a sweet savour so remember I told you before that the reason people thought that this would work was because the smoke would rise up and God would be able to detect whether or not the the sacrifice was of high quality well you have it written right there you know it's very concrete eyes dim egde of the archetypal spirit right the Lord smelled a sweet savour and said in his heart I will not curse the ground any more for man's sake for the imagination of man's heart is evil from this youth neither will i again smite any more every living thing as I have done that's pretty nice as Noah's sacrifice actually calms down God down to the point where he says well I'm not going to wipe everything out again it's like well fair enough you know but it I would consider it somewhat of a tenuous contract because we've seen more than one example in the recent century where we came bloody close to wiping everything out again while the earth remains seedtime and harvest and cold in heat in summer and winter and day and night shall not cease neither again will i smite any more every living thing as I have done so all right so that's that he basically tells Noah the same thing again that he told Adam at the beginning of the Genesis story so fine and then he tells them a bunch of rules which I could go into but at the moment I won't but I want to show you that basically what God I guess I should do this to some degree God lays out a bunch of rules so you could think about it as a precursor to what happens in the story of Exodus where the Ten Commandments are revealed so this is like a foreshadowing of that story no one makes the proper sacrifices and God says okay fine here's the rules follow these rules and then they're laid out and things will go okay with you that's the covenant that's the agreement between the end you could say that's the agreement between the individual and the spirit of the state that's one way of looking at but it's not enough because it isn't merely the spirit of the state that's being negotiated with it's the spirit of the state it's the spirit of that which transcends the state and it's the spirit of the moral order that's within the individual all three of those things are being negotiated simultaneously the proper sacrifices are made the proper rules are laid out and the idea is that there'll be a good balance between order and chaos as a consequence as long as people continue to play by the rules so that's the offerin fundamentally so part that seems to work out and then this one I think is extremely interesting it's also very short it took me a very very long time to to understand this all right so this is after the story of Noah so what happens is you get this situation where things descend into chaos and there's a great flood so that's sort of like the ultimate chaos story and I think of it as it there so you imagine when things fall apart one possibility is that they fall into chaos the other possibility is something like they become hyper conceptualized in hyper orderly and so then the state itself which would be the antidote to chaos actually becomes a source of pathology and I think that that's what's being hinted at in the story of the Tower of Babel so here's what happens is that human beings I'll read it to you this is this has to do with Noah's descendants it's a flip into another story and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east oh yes and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died news story and the whole earth was of one language and one speech everybody's getting along fine in their tribal organization let's say it's homogenous they can all speak to one another and they all speak the same language and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there and they said to one another go to let us make brick and burn them thoroughly and they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar and they said go to go to let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven and let us make a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth okay so what's happening here only the bear this is this what this story means is very deeply implicit in the story it's hinting at it and I think it's because it was really beyond the power of the conceptualization of the people who generated this story to elaborate it to any great detail but I think what it means is this is that there's a guy named Robin I think it's Robin Dunbar and one of the things that Dunbar has done is do a very in detail correlation analysis of cortical expansion and group size and what he showed is that if you if you plot primates by cortical size let's say you corrected for body size you plot primates by cortical size and then you plot the size of their social groups you see a very tight relationship between the size of the social group and the size of the cortex the optimal human social group is like two hundred individuals is something like that which is maybe roughly the number of people that you can reasonably track on Facebook after that it's like well there's names but you don't know those people you're not capable of tracking social dynamics there any more complex than that particles you have other problems to solve and so one of the things that has been observed is that human groups tend to fractionate if they start to exceed 200 and maybe that's partly because you can't keep track of the complexity but there's another constraint which is you want your group to be big enough so that it protects you but you want it to be small enough so that you can climb to the top because so when the group gets really really really really big well maybe it can protect you although it also doesn't give a damn about you like once you're 160 thousandth of the group like you are at the University of Toronto we're 130 millionth of the country or maybe 1 300 millionth of Europe which is partly why Europe is going to fragment because that's just not enough right you're just not enough there that this the group is too big what happens you keep aggregating the group it gets more and more powerful and you can think of that as something that has the capacity to replace the transcendent right will make a society that's perfect it's like a utopian vision that's what I see happening in this story it's like we'll make something so great on the part of human beings that it will reach up to heaven itself which means it will take the place of God that's what it means that's exactly what the Communists did in Soviet Russia that's what they tried to do in China too and so that's why you ended up with people like Stalin as the God so you talk about getting what you deserve so anyways so you build these monolithic enterprises that will let's call them state enterprises and the idea there is that the state the hyper organized and all-inclusive state can bring about Utopia that's what it means to reach to heaven so what happens so god gets wind of that and he says blood says the Lord came down see the city in the tower which the children of men built and the Lord said Behold the people is one and now they all have one language and this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do go to let us go down and therefore confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech what's interesting because it's sort of the story kind of portrays it as jealousy on God's part right it's like oh these these human beings they're they're building so magnificently that they're starting to challenge my Dominion well I'm going to go down there and play a trick or two law on them and that'll that'll take care of that so what happens the people within the so the group gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and what happens it starts to fragment that is what happens that's exactly what happens that's part of the reason why the totalitarian state enterprise to replace the transcendent with structure that's one of the reasons it's doomed as you pull more and more people in what happens is you start to pull in chaos itself and that starts to fragment the order here is an interesting thing I think that's happening with the soul the LGBT power groups are exclusion excluded groups right and so it started out with gay rights and then one of the things that's happened it's so interesting so you could think of there was a normative group and there was excluded people okay and so one section of the excluded people stood up and said hey you know enough of this explosion so we're going to categorize ourselves and we're going to fight for recognition as the excluded we're going to fight to be included but what happens is well it's L and then it's lb and then it's lb G and then it's LGBT and the last thing I saw which was actually handed to the medical students in at the University of Toronto there's 20 letters why well because you can't this is tangentially related to this story only you can't come up with a category of the things that don't fit inside categories because there's an infinite number of things that don't fit inside categories and so when you try to build a category out of all uncatted oracle entities all that happens is defragment because there's actually no unity there and one of the things you are starting to see is that there's power battles emerging on the part of the excluded on the left and it's inevitable because and I think that's what this story is trying to represent is that you can't build the state up beyond a certain size if you Delia will fragment and fall apart the people within it will no longer speak the same language and they'll they'll they'll disperse themselves to different corners of the earth and so I think we're actually in real danger of forgetting this and one of the things that I saw read a couple of ominous things so if you plot the size of economic catastrophes over the last thirty years they're getting bigger each time so that's scary now part of that is because the world economy is getting bigger and so maybe you have to control for that but the magnitude of the chaos has been increasing with each collapse okay one of the things that came out of the last collapse 2008 was the government rescuing collapsed companies like AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland which by the way was the biggest company in the world no one knows that but Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed it was the biggest company in the world and AIG was the insurer of insurers and so it collapsed too they were rescued by the government and maybe fair enough but one of the motifs that came out of that was the idea of too big to fail well this story says wait a second it says too big means definite failure it means inevitable failure and that strikes me as highly probable is that there's a warning in this story although it's it's just it's a bear story right it's only four or five lines it's just the outlines but it's placed in a very particular place it's placed right after the flood right it's like well there's the nihilistic chaos of the flood and then there's the temp totalitarian temptation to build hyper structures that can theoretically replace the transcendent well what happens you build a hyper structure net fragments from within and then people don't speak the same language and they and they you know distribute themselves sort of chaotically on the surface of the earth so therefore is the name of it called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth and from thence did the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all the earth I think the other issue too is is that what's the problem with the homogenize a ssin of a group it's like you bring everyone into the group and then they're all the same uniformity well the advantages you can understand everyone the disadvantages there's no variability left right there's no variability everyone is a clone of everyone else and that's great if you know where you're going and you know how to get there but it's really really bad if the underlying structure shifts on you because the fact that you're adapted to one situation hyper adapted to one situation might mean that you're content completely not adapted to the next situation you build groups that are too big and too homogenous they're effective but only within the limited range of their map and it's the map no longer functions then the whole thing sinks and that's I think what happens in this particular story and then okay at the end of that then what happens is that soon afterwards and I think perhaps immediately afterwards the story of Abraham emerges and that's really I would say that's when the the prime myths the primal myths take on a more historical element and history you know roughly speaking history as we know it begins something like 6,000 years ago so and then then you know the rest of the biblical stories proceed apace from there what basically happens is that this is something that was well mapped out by Northrop Frye and you'd think at the University of Toronto that you all would have been encouraged to read Northrop Frye because he was perhaps the greatest literary scholar that the University of Toronto ever produced and what he he outlined the Old Testament very interestingly he said that what happens after these initial stories is that the state arises so it's like the Tower of Babel is continually rebuilt over and over it's the state of Israel's Israelis Israelite to get their act together build a state what happens they get corrupt the Prophet comes up and says you better watch out because what you're doing is not making God happy and the prophets are very brave because they come forward that the case are authoritarian they could kill them at an instant but the profits are moved by walking with God let's say for lack of a better argument they come to the king and say look you're not caring for the widows and the children right you think that's okay because they're weak it's not okay you're breaking the Covenant you're breaking the rules and the price for that is what we're Esau the price for that is the flood it's like get your act together or you're going to be sorry now sometimes the Kings to whom the prophets speak listen but often they don't and then the whole bloody state is demolished and then the Israelites are back like they're enslaved or they get wiped out by their enemies or like it's a complete bloody catastrophe that lasts for centuries then they kind of struggle back up and make another state and then they get arrogant and then it gets corrupt and then a prophet comes along and says you know what happened last time like well that was 600 years ago right and I know everything now so I don't have to pay any attention to you it's they ignore it and then because and the prophets say you are violating a fundamental moral order you're supposed to as king you're supposed to be subject to something higher than yourself right it's like the idea that the Mesopotamians had that the emperor was supposed to be an emissary of Marduk that's why he was the Emperor because he was a good Marduk he could confront chaos and make order that was what gave him his sovereignty or the Egyptian pharaoh was a combination of Osiris and Horus that's what gave him sovereignty and so the idea was you get to be king but you have to act out the spirit of being King and if you don't do that then well King or not all hell's going to break loose for you and that's what the prophets continued to say but the Israelites you know they don't pay enough attention and they continue to get absolutely demolished and so the Old Testament can be read at least in part as the description of a sequence of the rise and fall of States and their descent into corruption and chaos and so we'll leave it at that because I want to tell you the next part of the story the last part of the story roughly speaking in our next lecture which is also the last lecture so we've got about 12 minutes if we want it so if anybody has any questions you can ask them or we can and if you don't then we could call it a day so does any well it's a lot of information so and it's a lot of strange information so I'm curious you know it's if it what do you make of it you're talking about Europe around eternity so why is why the group war side which is America is related fate you think the right and left can talk to each other sure you think they speak the same language right so you see of that fragmenting occurring and they really are not only are they speaking different languages they're they really are speaking different languages it's the right way of thinking about it yes it's very very dangerous you know I think the u.s. worked for a long time first of all because it didn't always have 300 million people it's a lot of people to put under one umbrella now the utility of the American system is that it is a hierarchy right there's individuals families towns States underneath a somewhat loose federal structure and that's sort of so it's not a it's not a monolith where everyone has to speak precisely the same language it's got some flexibility built into its structure because it's it's come it's it's formulated into components which have a certain amount of autonomy and so far that's worked sufficiently well whether it will and it will probably continue to work I mean the Americans are very very robust people and they've gone through things that are analogous to what they're going through now many times god only knows right but but it's very dangerous thing to presume that the Americans are down for the count because they have an uncanny ability to rise out from mash is even stronger than they were before but you can certainly see the danger lurking in Europe that's that's a different thing like I think the European state is doomed because I think it grew too fast and it severed the connection between like there's not the proper hierarchy of identification so and people are saying wait Brussels like who the hell are you guys why are you making decisions for us and we don't agree with your decision and like are you sure that Greece and Germany can be in the same place because that's by no means self-evident right the Germans aren't very happy about it and the Greeks aren't very happy about it and one of the rules for making an organization is that it's a lot easier to make a functional organization worse than it is to make a dysfunctional organization better and so you might say well you've got Germany and France and England well let's say Germany and France powerhouses especially Germany they can afford to bring Greece in well maybe but there's no evidence that they can afford it so I mean Greece is unbelievably corrupt no one pays their income tax that's a big problem right and bringing them in to a union at a high order has no effect whatsoever on the micro behaviors and the thing is the micro behaviors have to be rectified and no one really knows how to do that how do you stop a country where people don't pay their taxes from how do you stop people from not paying their taxes why do we pay our taxes who knows we could just all of a sudden decide not to you know and the government wouldn't have the resources to run around gathering them all up for one reason or another it's become customary for people in functional Western democracies to pay their taxes but why who knows it would've been way easier for us just to do what the Greeks did and pretend to pay them you know so they're too big I think and so the people on the right is saying back to the nation like I understand why they're doing that but but the danger is the nation will subordinate the individual and I do see it as another example of safe spaces it's just scales different so and that's why I think that the proper antidote to that to both the chaos on the left and the order on the right roughly speaking is to walk the proper line in the middle and when we better do that because things are not things are too chaotic at the moment so it's not good maybe it's really good that's possible but we're in a state where I really believe we're in a state where things could go any number of ways and there's no there's no predicting it so and I've never felt that you know I mean I lived in the 80s and you know political correctness rose up in the 90s as well and I can remember a lot of what happened in the early 70s with the oil crisis and all that so there were times when things were shaky but they weren't shaky the way they are now they're in internal shakiness rather than something that was a threat that would seem to be imposed from the outside and that's different and and it's it's it's it is associated with with this intellectual war that's going on with post-modernism in the you Marxism and all of that as well so the ether of the program music on the GPS will be especially ideal in rest future and you mentioned that the program probably exogamous or pronounced and then it's picked lean on the Western assessment what is asked for imagery a goal-directed and with special ability related and they are so given that Madrid has made a real little piece of doing it could this account for the jungle that's a lot of questions they're good questions well I'll tell you a couple of strange things that that things that I don't really understand the first is when we've done the analysis of the effects of the future altering program it has had a difference its differential impact on men and it had a particularly differential impact on what I would call excluded men and so that would be non-western ethnic minority men or or what majority men who are doing very well so for example at Mohawk College the theater authoring program had a particularly robust effect on Mohawk College students who were men who haven't done very well in high school and who hadn't picked a major that had a destination a career destination at its end so you can imagine those people are they have an ambiguous relationship with the idea of education and they're not oriented specifically towards a goal they're not very motivated now why does it have a differential effect on man that's a good question well first of all the women are doing better so it might just be a matter of the fact that it does better for people who aren't doing as well and at the moment most of them are men I don't believe I think that might be part of it but I don't believe that's all of it I think that part of the reason that women are doing better is because they're agreeable and so if a system sets out a structure and says here's a pathway to attainment the women won't rebel against that they'll go along with it and that's working very well for them at the moment the men especially the men on the disagreeable end of the distribution and there's way more men on the district disagreeable end of the distribution then there are women right that's what you get from if you look at overlapping normal distributions so there's the male just female distribution for agreeableness male distribution for agreeableness tremendous overlap okay women are higher all the really agreeable people are women all the really disagreeable people are men and maybe the real differences occur at the extremes right so so and it's a very interesting side effect of overlapping distributions so they people can be mostly the same but that can still produce radical differences disagreeable men won't do anything they don't want to do they just say up yours I'll go home and play video games with you no I'm not listening to your stupid classes and why should I work for you I'll just go have fun I'll do my own thing I don't think they're motivated and so then if you take the men who are like that and you say okay what do you want you can have what you want but you have to figure out what it is so then they write down what they want they think oh hey well that might be worth having so maybe I'll put some effort into it that's what it looks like to me now you know that's weak evidence and this is a weak argument but I'm trying to stretch out my understanding to account for this but I'll tell you something else that's really weird I don't understand this either so more than 90% of the people who watch my videos on YouTube are men now that's weird because not about 80% of psychology students are women so that is not what you would expect right you'd expect that the majority of them would be women and you might say well it's because of the political stance I've taken and I thought well that's possible so I went and looked at the demographic data because I have that well before I did any of the political videos eighty-five percent of my viewers were men so it's actually increased a bit it's increased by six percent and that's not trivial but it was still overwhelmingly men so that was interesting I thought what the hell why is that exactly and then now I've been watching crowds when I've been talking to them and the crowds that have come to see me in person this happened at the University of Toronto free speech debate and I actually noticed it and commented on it before the debate took place because I was talking about intrinsic differences between men and women and I looked around the room and I thought hmm hey 80% of the people in this room are men so I had all the men stat women and women stand up and then all the men stand up it said look like here's a natural experiment for some reason 80% of the people who showed up to this or men now everybody thought I was kind of cracked to to do that and it was a risk you know and I but I thought no there's something going on here and then what's interesting now is that every public appearance that I've made that's related to the sort of topics that we're discussing is overwhelmingly men it's like it's like 85 to 90 percent and so I thought wow that's weird like what the hell's going on here exactly and then the other thing I've noticed is that I've been talking a lot to the crowds that I've been talking to not about rights but about responsibility right because he can't have the bloody converse what do you do it you can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility because your rights are my responsibility that's what they are technically so you just can't have only half of that discussion and we're only having half that discussion the question is well what the hell are you leaving out if you only have that half of the discussion and the answer is while you're leaving out responsibility and then the question is well what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility and the answer might be well maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life that's what it looks like to me it's like here you are suffering away what makes it worthwhile right you know you're completely out you're completely you have no idea what you're you it's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is responsibility that's what gives life meaning it's like lift a load then you can tolerate yourself right because look at your useless easily hurt easily killed why should you have any self-respect that's the story of the fall pick something up and carry it pick make it heavy enough so that you can think yeah well useless as I am at least I could move that from there to there well what's really cool about that is that when I talk to these crowds about this the man's eyes light up and that's very like I've seen that phenomena because I've been talking about this mythological material for a long time and I can see when I'm watching crowds people you know their eyebrows lifter I let light up because I put something together for them that's what mythological stories do so I'm not taking responsibility for that that's what the stories do so I save the story people go click click click you know in their eyes light up but this responsibility thing that's a whole new order of this is that young men are so hungry for that it is unbelievable and one of the things I've been talking to some of the people who've been running for the conservative leadership in Canada and I've been talking to them about well the difficulties they have communicating with young people because conservatives what the hell are they going to sell to young people right because being conservative is something that happened when you're older they can sell responsibility no one's selling it and the thing is for men there's nothing but responsibility you know I was watching The Simpsons the other day I watched the first Simpsons episode and I deconstructed it and so it's really interesting so what happens in the first Simpson episode is that it's Christmas and Homer and Marge are going to buy some Christmas presents but Homer doesn't get his Christmas bonus and so he's absolutely crushed by that and that actually is a recurring theme in The Simpsons where Homer loses his job or something like that or can tonight make enough money he's completely crushed even though he's kind of useless bumbling laughing fool of a guy you know the thing that gives that show its soul is that he's still oriented towards his family that's what makes him honorable is that foolish as he is he's decided to adopt responsibility for his family and to try to bear that and so he's not he's a holy fool he's not a complete fool and it's so interesting watching the story because he suffers dreadfully as a consequence of not being able to fulfill his responsibilities well that's for men women have their sets of responsibilities they're not the same right because they're complicated because women of course have to take primary responsibility for for having infants at least but then also for caring for them there they're structured differently than men for biological necessity even if it's not a psychological issue and it's also partly a psychological issue women know what they have to do men have to figure out what they have to do and if they have nothing worth living for then they stay Peter Pan and why the hell not because the alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive low-class pleasure and you saw that in the Pinocchio story right that's Pleasure Island it's like well why lift the load if there's nothing in it for you that's another thing that we're doing to men that's a very bad idea and to boys it's like you're pathological and oppressive it's like fine then why the hell am I going to play that's if that's the situation if I get no credit for bearing responsibility it could bloody well be sure I'm not going to barity but then you know your life is useless and meaningless and you have you're not full of self-contempt and nihilism and and that's not good and so that's why I think that's what I think's going on at a deeper level with regards to men needing this direction a man has to decide that he's going to do something he has to decide that and the different sort of animal things were some more yeah well you know importantly what you're trying to do in the future authoring process is say okay well what's your highest value right it's the star it's like okay what are you aiming for you can decide man but you know there's some criteria it should be good for you it should be good for you in a way that facilitates your moving forward maybe it should be good for you in a way that's also good for the family in the community it should cover the the domain of life I mean there's constraints on what you should regard as a value but you but within those constraints you have the choice you have choice well the thing is is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the goddamn load so and they think well I won't carry any load it's like okay fine but then you're like the sled dog that doesn't have a sled to pull you're just gonna you're going to tear pieces out of your own legs because you're bored you know you need people are pack animals they need they need to pull against awake and and that's not true for everyone it's not true particularly say for low conscientious people I mean maybe they're open and creative or extroverted and some other things but for the for the typical person they they'll eat themselves they'll eat themselves up unless they have a load this is why there's such an opiate epidemic among dispossessed white middle-aged guys who are unemployed in the u.s. it's like they lose their job they're done right they despise themselves they develop chronic pain syndromes and depression and the chronic pain is treated with opiates it's like that's what we're doing so yeah that's what it looks like to me is you you have to and it's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility there's a god damn thrilled about it it just blows me away it's like really that's what that's the counterculture grow the hell up and do something useful really I could do that oh I'm so excited by that idea no one ever mentioned that before like rights rights rights rights Jesus it's it's appalling it's a bit and I feel that that's deeply felt by the people who are who are coming out to to listen to these sorts of things too they've had enough of that so and they better have because it's it's a non-productive mode of being responsibility man that's where the meeting in life is so all right good one more class thanks we'll see you next week

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 929,175

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, jordan peterson, myth, Tower of Babel, Noah, Cain and Abel, Genesis, Bible, psychoanalysis, maps of meaning, archetype, story, The Word, Creation, God, Logos, Paradise, Eden, psy434, university of Toronto, lecture, existentialism, personality, mythology, archetypes, carl jung, free speech, psychology

Id: T4fjSrVCDvA

Length: 152min 24sec (9144 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2017