2017 Personality 02/03: Historical & Mythological Context

[Music] now you know I used this picture to represent my class and you might not know anything about this picture it's it's a picture of Jonah being thrown up out of whales belly after spending three days inside it it's an old biblical story it's a myth it's a fairy tale that's that's one way of looking at it and and I don't mean that derogative manner we know for example that some of the Grimm's brothers fairy tales are perhaps fifteen thousand years old they've been traced way back they're really really old and old stories are strange and they're strange because well they've been told generation after generation after generation and so you could imagine that something retold over such an expand of expansive time has been reduced to its gist many many times and nothing that's in the story anymore is superfluous it's all meaningful in some sense it's sort of like a meta story that's one way of thinking about imagine that you took a hundred books hundred adventure books and you had to extract out the central features of an adventure book now it's hard to do that it's like you're averaging across them or something like that distilling them in some manner then you get a meta adventure and it would be like a myth upon which all adventures are based and this story is actually one of those stories and I'm going to tell you what I think the story means and I'm not saying that this is all it means because most stories of this sort are in some sense inexhaustible just like great works of art are inexhaustible there there's more information in them than you can possibly articulate that's what makes them profound that's why you go look at them otherwise someone could just tell you about the painting and that would be the end of that but that doesn't work so so that Jonah is being spit up by this whale and of course on the face of it that's an impossibility because well you can't live inside a whale that's why it's impossible now you may remember and likely do that you all know a story about someone who is inside a whale that's Pinocchio right and you know you go to that movie maybe even as an adult you watch that movie and Geppetto is down there in the whale in his little boat you know it's big cavernous inside you don't really care that that's there's a bunch of things you don't care about you don't care that those are drawings and not real people you don't care about that and you don't care that the inside of a whale isn't a cavern and you don't care that Pinocchio is a puppet for that matter none of that matters to you at all and that's because you're really strange creatures and you don't even notice when you're doing something absolutely absurd and that's one of those times when you are but if someone taps you on the shoulder and says you know you're just watching drawings of a puppet puppets can't really move autonomously and now he's at the bottom of the ocean you have no idea why he's going to rescue his father and you're just sitting there annoyed and you're okay with that and you'll say shut up because I want to finish watching a movie and so that's interesting you see that tells you something about your unconscious if you're psychoanalytically minded because you're doing something that you cannot account for now you might say well it's it it's enjoyable well that's deep man you're really really going a long ways with that the question is a why is it comprehensible B why is it enjoyable see just exactly what are you doing there and you think that whatever you are doing there is so valuable that you'll actually pay to do it weird very very weird and you know when you read about let's say the archaic rituals of tribal people and you ask yourself just what are they up to you might think well they're up to the same thing that you're up to when you go see a movie so and then you might also notice that the most expensive artifacts or among the most expensive artifacts that human beings create our movies they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on them and we consider that a good deal and you know it drives our technology to because the high-tech movies like the Marvel movies that require so much computer animation they actually drive the demand for high-end graphics chips so our technological advance forward is actually motivated in part by our desire to represent things fictional II in ever more spectacular manner so Jonah well let me tell you the story of Jonah and I'll tell you why I'm gonna tell you it this is from Camille Paglia who's a critic of the modern University and a very brilliant woman I would say very controversial incredibly rapid speaker and she can think so fast it's just unbelievable she's really fun to watch if you like that sort of thing vicious adversary in an argument she says the number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors who have substituted narrow expertise and theoretical sophistication a preposterous term for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought art is a vast interconnected web work a fabricated tradition and over concentration on any one point is a distortion here's here's a problem I had I wrestled with this when I was trying to understand some of the things that I'm going to teach you about there's some things that you kind of have to grasp as a whole you know sometimes you have a flash of insight and a bunch of things that you didn't know we're related fall together that that's supposed to happen in psychotherapy when you link different disparate patterns of behavior together because you've linked them say with a single cause and you get this like excited feeling of illumination and possibility and there are forms of communication that require the simultaneously the simultaneous realization of a multitude of disparate phenomena like a movie can be like that you know you you listen to a movie you watch movie and then you don't know what the hell is going on and then something happens near the end and bed everything clicks together and it's cuz you've sort of seen the thing as a whole and a lot of the things that we a lot of the ways that we interact with the world that are mysterious are like that there and this is what peg lay is referring to is that and this is a psychoanalytic proposition I would say or a romantic proposition now the idea roughly is that way out in the periphery of reality are all those things that not only do you not know but you don't even know you don't know right there you're completely blind to their existence and then there's unknown things that you have some suspicions about and then there's unknown things that you can start to imagine and and act out and dramatize and so all of that is on the periphery of our knowledge that's a psychoanalytic dictum where the thoughts come from well partly they're nested in dreams dreams are the birthplace of thoughts fantasy it's not that surprising fantasy is the birthplace of ideas you know if you're thinking about what you're gonna do in the future you enter into a reverie a dream state and you contemplate multiple possibilities and then you start thinking them through use your imagination to search beyond where you are and the collective human attempt to do that is our mysterious humanistic artistic tradition which is very difficult to justify from a formal articulate point of view what good is dance like what is it that you're doing when you're dancing well you don't care because you like to dance why well you don't know what you do it's built into you music musics a human universal cultures use music to organize themselves right they use music to catalyze their identities they use music to unite around you know in in more archaic societies less differentiated societies let's say no a mask that represents part of the family tradition will have a particular design and there'll be a particular song written for it and there'll be a particular dance about it and the song and the dance or something like the symbolic representation of a mode of being in the world like maybe the mask is a wolf mask and so you act out the wolf and there's music that goes along with that and you think well what are you doing when you're acting out the wolf and part of that is what you're trying you're trying to understand wolves you know it's an image it's imitation in part and you know if you live in the natural world and if you hunt and if you're preyed upon then understanding the things that you're hunting and preying upon is useful and there's also pull out perhaps useful things to learn from them and so we play this strange symbolic game with the world like children pretending that's another way of thinking about it and we do that to act out and to begin to understand things we don't understand like how to act that's now for me the most important question in life is not what the world is made of and in fact I would say that's a relatively new preoccupation of humankind you know we didn't really formalize you could say that the ancient Greeks originated laid the groundwork for the emergence of an empirical science and then it emerged more formally with bacon and Descartes and Newton five six hundred years ago not very long like a blink blink to the eye in human terms before that people were engineers they could build things and so forth but they didn't know how to they weren't scientists they didn't really conceptualize the world as an objective place we do that automatically because science has seeped so far into our set of presuppositions that doesn't make us good scientists by the way but it does make us believe that the fundamental reality of the world is an objective reality and I'm not going to dispute that particularly but leaves one set of questions unanswered probably by its nature because it wasn't designed to answer the question then that question is how should one conduct oneself in the world and that's an important thing since you're alive and hypothetically you'd rather stay alive and well you're alive you probably don't want to suffer any more than you have to and no more stupidly than you have to and it might also be good if some of the things that you want it actually happened and so you know you're motivated to know how to act and and people are always telling each other how to act we're sending each other information all the time about how to act we do that with our the expressions on our face and of course when we talk to people we always look at their face and that's because their face tells you what they're up to you know if they're smiling and paying attention to you well then you can assume that you're doing something right and if they're looking annoyed or disgusted that's a particularly bad one then you might think you might take a hint from that especially if you know three or four people are doing it at the same time and so we're reflecting we're reflecting some ideal to one another constantly and the more attentive you are the more likely you are to act in accordance with that ideal and the more like you likely you are to move towards it you may not even know what the ideal is in an articulated sense in fact you probably don't you know you could come up with a well you know a good person is nice and friendly and you know cooperative and yeah yeah you know that's all just cliche but you don't you know your conception might be very Hollow it's very likely that it's very Hollow even though you may be able to act in a very sophisticated manner alright so anyways this is a story I'd say oh it's a meta story it's it's what would happen if you collected a bunch of stories and then you extract it out a story from them and it's sort of a story about destiny and it's couched in a religious language but that's okay because most of these distilled stories are form the foundation of religious texts and religious texts and myth and myths and stories are as I said part of the outer perimeter of our society they have a they have a coherent nature and it's all and they form a foundation and it's on that foundation that everything that you take for granted rests even if you don't understand the foundation so I can give you an example there's a metaphysical idea that underlies Western civilization and that metaphysical idea is that the individual has transcendent worth that's that's the idea from which the notion of natural rights is derived and of course our legal system is predicated on the idea that you have certain natural rights they're enshrined in the Bill of Rights for example and in the in the states when the bills Bill of Rights was being formulated when the legislation Ridge the legislation that found that the state was being formulated the formulators said we hold these truths to be self-evident what does that mean they're axioms of faith right there they're propositions and there's no proof for them there they're a mode of operation in the world and so the hypothesis is something like well if I treat you like there's something about you that has transcendent value implicit intrinsic value whatever that might be and there are stories about that and we'll talk about that and you do the same to me and then we set up a body of laws that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual so that the law itself has to act with respect towards every individual even if that individual has done something reprehensible which is very weird if you think about it then our society will work better and well perhaps that's true but for better or worse that is what this society is predicated on and that's a very very very very very very old idea and it's an idea that people came to with great difficulty because it was over thousands of years that people learned how to take their little tribal groups which are always squabbling with one another right because there's human beings they're very violent and tribal groups are by no means civilized it's there's no noble savage like the Europeans thought if you study tribal groups in the world today the murder the death rate by violence is unbelievably high so something unites a tribe within a tribe it's often kinship but then tribes come together to form larger civilizations and they have to determine some sort of meta principle that guides them so that they can cooperate and come together without destroying one another and they have to extract out a principle by which the society might function and that has to work and then as societies get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger they have to bring more and more of these diverse traditions together and extract out something from them that has power and functional utility and that allows people to unite and so this is one of the stories that talks about that it's a story about individual responsibility and what happens when it's not heated so you know because we could say you are a social creature right to the core and most of your environment is other people and those other people want something from you and you want something from them so you're gonna play games with them you're either gonna be good at it you're gonna be bad at it but you're gonna play games with them and so the game might have rules really sophisticated rules in fact and you'd expect that because as your behavior more and more approximates an ideal assuming such a thing exists then you're more and more sophisticated and the nature of the ideal is perhaps more and more complex and and difficult to understand you get a hint of this though you can get a hint of this because you will see if you pay attention to your own soul your psyche your unconscious you'll see that there are people that you admire and that there are people that you have contempt for and that's and it isn't necessarily that you're a hundred percent accurate in your judgment you know it's not such a bad idea to criticize your first impressions but those states exist and so there's a reason you admire someone and there's a reason you have contempt for someone there may be multiple reasons and that's a hint to your intrinsic value structure it's a hint about your intrinsic value structure right you wouldn't admire someone unless there was something about them that you valued and perhaps that you would also like to be able to do and he wouldn't despise someone or have contempt for them if you didn't feel that something they were doing was wrong and that it would be wrong if you did it too and so you're bringing to bear on the situation an implicit morality and you have to do that because as I said you can't act without a morality because if you're gonna act you're gonna try to make things better that otherwise why bother and if you're acting to make things better than some things have to be better and some things have to be worse and that's a value structure so you have one all right so Jonah he gets a call from God and God tells them that there's a city Nineveh that's falling into moral disarray now what does that mean well it's a universal story it's like all cultures are always falling into disarray it's their nature just entropy does that right things change the world changes the environment changes and the culture doesn't keep up very well and then of course it has corrupt elements and so it's an interior eternal story the individual is always placed in relationship to a culture that's somewhat corrupt and then the question is well what do you do about it and if the answer is nothing well then it'll just get more corrupt and if the answer is be corrupt - then it will just get more corrupt so the answer has to be to oppose the corruption because that's the only way it's going to stop now god threatens to destroy this city because of its corruption and I don't think you need to presume anything particularly metaphysical about that to understand it it's very straight forward that the more corrupt the culture is and the less Trust is possible between individuals the less productive of the culture is going to be because why do anything if some corrupt person is just gonna come and take it you know it might even be that the culture is so corrupt that if you are good for something and you produce resources you're actually more likely to get killed because you have something of value so like this just you're just not going anywhere with that and why would you work if you didn't have any sense that you know you store up the value of your work for some reasonable time in the future so if the society is corrupt and there's no trust its degenerating and you know it might live for a while but isn't it last very long and so that's the idea corrupt societies collapse that leaves open what corruption means anyways Jonah thanks no no bloody way I'm not going to that City they can go to hell as far as I'm concerned and that's really what he thinks and why in the world should I do anything about it anyways and these are good objections it's like why would you do that and you'll face this believe me in your life you will face this in fact you already do always constantly continually in small ways perhaps when you're interacting with people who aren't treating you properly and when you're acting and those might be your parents they might be your friends they might be people at your workplace they might be professors they're playing a crooked game and you don't like it and you know it's crooked and so then the question is well what should you do about it well if you know you're correct know it's crooked it's not so good to play along with it I mean we'll say that you know it's crooked by your own standard of values it D degrades you to play along with it you're gonna stand up and oppose it well no probably not you're probably gonna do what Jonah did jump on a ship and get the hell out of there and you know that's a logical thing to do but it doesn't solve the problem and I think this has something to do with human ethical responsibility because there are other old stories and I'll tell you one likely where the son of the king the Lion King the son of the king he goes off and he's some pathetic adolescent and then he's shamed by the reappearance of his old girlfriend into turning into something vaguely useful and he opens his eyes and he goes back and he fights scar and you know it's a scene of hell right because there's fire everywhere and he fights scar finds skaar killed his father he casts him into the pit roughly speaking and then the rain comes and then you know the movie returns to its beginning fundamentally it's a paradise paradise lost' Paradise Regained that's the movie and and I mean that's the story of human beings you know you're in a place that's working out pretty well something happens to knock you off your perch you're down in the chaos for a good amount of time and maybe you never get out but maybe you learn something down there maybe a strength in your character then you pop up to a new place and maybe it's better better aim better you now I'm not being overly optimistic about this I know perfectly well that people encounter impediments during their life that they find almost impossible to recover from but it's the best shot you have so anyways Jonah runs away but God isn't very happy about that because it's actually Jonah's destiny it's necessary for Jonah to repair the city so God sends a storm and you know the waves are high and and and I think what that means is because the water is often a symbol for the unconscious and that's because things lurk down there in the water and that you could pull up that that are useful monstrous things that you can pull up they're useful you can fish for them you can go fishing in your own being for answers which is what you do when you try to think right you ask yourself a question and you wait maybe an answer appears it's like where did that come from you didn't know what the answer was before it appeared but it just popped into being out of nowhere who knows so you fish so anyways the waves come and the boats gonna be knocked over it and that's what happens I think when you know when you know you should do something I mean everyone has the this experience I believe perhaps you would be willing to put up your hands if this experience is foreign to you okay just part of your telling you you should do something and it's hard to do it effortful and maybe you're afraid of it and so you don't do it you just procrastinate right and so how do you feel about that good I mean so what do you feel that you're betraying yourself your anxiety actually gets worse not better even though you know you can put it off moment to moment but that doesn't help because every time you put it off the anxiety just grows a little bit you're not proud of yourself you have a sense that you're making things more chaotic than they should be you know and if you do that long enough and I'm sure many of you have had that experience if you do that long enough if that becomes habitual things will get so stormy around you that you'll fall right into the into the chaos into the watery chaos and maybe you'll drown so it's not a very good idea to run from your destiny let's say whatever that might be and you need a destiny you need a place to aim at because that's what gives your life meaning and you need meaning in your life because life is hard so you know you need something to buttress yourself against that so anyways they wake joan up and jonah says that's probably my fault because like i'm running away from something i'm supposed to do and you know god isn't very happy about that so why don't you just throw me over to overboard and the crew isn't very happy about that but the waves are really starting to come up and joan is pretty insistent that he's the cause of the problem and so they draw they draw a lot and and jonah is chosen and so they decided to toss him into the ocean and immediately everything's calm so he's a center of chaos because he's not doing what he's supposed to do fine well then that whale comes up and swallows him and then he's in the whale for three days now that's a weird thing the whale that's the way all that Gepetto's ian that's a dragon it's the thing that you have to go out there and conquer to get something of value now when you've made an error when you've fallen off the pathway when you deviated from what you know you should do it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern you're you're thrust into the unknown you're thrust into unknown territory and chaos you don't know what to do and that's often symbolized by the encounter with a with a monster like a dragon something that lives under the water that's and I think the reason for that is as far as I've been able to tell is that human beings because we've been prey animals for forever in our battle with carnivorous lizards for example and alligators and even dinosaurs because there were dinosaurs around at the time of our most distant ancestors there was even a cat at one point that was that was adapted with teeth to pierce human skulls so it had a head that was exactly shaped to grab you here and put a tooth through the back of your skull so like we've come through some rough times man and we have a system in our mind that's a threat predator detection system that's the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark right because well there is monsters in the dark parents always say well there's no monsters in the dark it's like that's not true the dark is full of monsters there might not be any in your room right at that moment but that doesn't mean there aren't monsters in the dark and crimes take place like criminals don't get up at 6:00 in the morning and like you know have breakfast and go rob a bank they do it they do that sort of thing at night people do the things that are fit for the night in the night and lots of predators are nocturnal and you can't see very well in the dark and kids aren't stupid you know they've evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire because the kids that wandered away from the fire got picked off by hyenas and lions and you know crocodiles and whatever else the hell was out there to eat the unwary so the circuit that we use to to defend ourselves against predators as we've evolved cortically that circuit has has come to represent what we don't know in general because the Predators of course inhabit where we don't know and so evolution is a conservative force and we use the circuits that we've evolved to represent new things and so the unknown the chaos is often represented by a monster that swallows you up and pulls you down and you know when you're feeling terrible you don't say well I'm feeling up you say I'm feeling down well why is that well down is worse I guess you're flat on the ground when you're down or you're in a hole or something like that you're hiding in a hole you know it's down and you're threatened by something you know maybe you're threatened by your own inadequacy that might be part of it maybe that's partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because you know your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld and that's the underworld the mythological underworld that's where you go when things fall apart and if you understand that if you know that that's what that means then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you and you understand things you could live can be an organized going very well and then something comes up and poof everything changes some axiom that you were living by and it might be the existence of a partner might be a job it might be your health any of those things go on and you go somewhere when that happens you go somewhere it's a state of being you're still in the same world but it's not the same at all anymore everything about it is different it's all negative and dark and you don't know what to do you're confused and so what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart especially if oh if it's the worst possible case scenario and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise that's really annoying you know when something bad happens to you and then you know you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened and then you realize that well you were playing a causal role now sometimes you're so depressed you assume you're playing a causal role and you work it's not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination and it isn't that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it but sometimes you find that you are off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and they didn't attend to it and that's why all of this hit the fan and so then down there in that chaos you decide that you're going to do what you're supposed to do instead and then maybe you get to rise up again renewed if you're lucky and then you can go fix the city and that's what this story's about and that's why I picked the image to represent the course because really what happens you see with the psychoanalysts the road due to health if you're not doing well which means that as you act in the world you're not getting what you want there's something wrong with your the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual and the way the world is responding to you and so it's not turning out for you and the question is well what can you do about that and one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well and to find out what they are and what to do about them and maybe some of that is maybe you're not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you've never been able to understand and maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them and that's what psychotherapy is about in large part psychoanalytic behavioral doesn't matter what are you afraid of what are you avoiding what are you failing to develop maybe from fear maybe from avoidance god only knows maybe from disgust how can you get over it how can you reclaim those parts of your self now I said in the first lecture that I was going to try to provide you with a schema into which you could place the theorists that we're going to discuss and it requires going down deep to do that and there are presuppositions in my presupposition and this is a psychoanalytic presupposition it's predicated on a poetic tradition I would say don't an ancient tradition I learned most of it from reading Jung it was Carl Jung that helped me understand that we're nested inside a dream that we have to be because we don't know everything we have to take things as Givens and the things that we take it as Givens are nested inside stories and we accept the stories as valid and then outside the stories is the absolute unknown you know and that's partly the stories are tricky you know that one of the classic stories it's a variant of the the Jonas story I would say is st. George and the dragon and that that story was represented in during the Renaissance and during medieval times thousands and thousands of ways it's like the story of st. Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland same idea and that the typical st. George story is the Hobbit or Harry Potter so in the second volume of Harry Potter correct me if I have any of these details wrong you remember there's that snake the basilisk so this is Magic Castle right you guys have no problem without Magic Castle no problem there's an or if he's an orphan he goes to the Magic Castle to learn how to be more than normal right the muggles he has a muggle family we're not too happy with the muggle family like as representatives of normal people they they have some blacks now of course the reason for that is that well that's what teenagers often feel about their parents right they fail Jesus these couldn't really be my parents I must have some other parents who are like together those are like magical parents right parents that live in the sky and of course Harry Potter has earthly parents that's the muggles and Dursley I think is the kid he's at one he's a wonderful piece of work and you know ill-formed a spoiled ill-formed selfish very far from the ideal he's a foil for Harry and of course he's appreciated and doted on and Harry is actually punished for his virtues that's a classic story right to to be punished for your virtues I mean if you look at the story the central story in Christianity the central story and Christianity is about someone who is precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues that's what it makes it an archetypal story because there isn't anything more unfair than that and so it's a limit in a sense you it can't be worse than that being punished for being you know unworthy it's like yeah yeah well at least makes sense but to be punished because you have your act together and you're a good person that's real punishment and that's what happens to Harry so luckily he finds out that he's magical which is quite convenient and off he goes to Wizarding school and you know that's actually like taking that's actually like going and studying the humanities I mean it was when they still were you know because you it's through the humanities that you that you make contact with the magic of your culture and that makes you more than merely the child of your parents because you are more than merely the child of your parents you're the child of nature and you're the child of culture and until you understand what that means understand that you have two sets of parents like the divine hero always has two sets of parents you you can't construe yourself properly as an individual you're not situated properly in the world you don't know what your responsibilities are you can't orient your values properly and you will suffer for that because as far as I can tell because life is so difficult you have to do something that's truly worthwhile in order to justify it and so well that's what all these stories tell you that's what the story of Jonah is telling you it's like you have an ethical duty to straighten things up and if you don't do it you're gonna be sorry and that stories echoed everywhere while now st. George well let's go to Harry Potter well that's what we were talking about so he goes off to the Magic Castle and he's learning to be a wizard and he's kind of an interesting character a because he's not really good and we find out I think that's because does he have a piece of gold amarti in him he's not what happens yeah and that's what that means is that to be good truly good you can't just follow rules that's that's very clear in the Harry Potter story and you also have to be able to understand and malevolence and in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it you have to understand that part of you that's malevolent because if you don't you're naive and if you're naive you're easy pickings and so that's a union idea too and the Union idea is that part of personality development is to understand your shadow and the shadow is those things about you that you do not want to admit to and you can learn about your shadow by reading history you know you can read about Auschwitz you can read about the concentration camps in Russia and you can imagine yourself as a guard instead of as a heroic rescuer of unfortunate victims which would be very very unlikely and once you can imagine yourself as a guard which is a terrifying thing to do then you understand something about yourself and I actually think and I think this is also from students studying young that you cannot have proper respect for yourself until you know that you're a monster because you won't act carefully enough you know if you think well I'm a nice person I'd never do anyone any harm it's like you're no saint you can be sure of that and the harm that you do people can come in many many ways and so if you regard yourself as harmless inoffensive nice well why do you have any reason to be careful you're like a teddy bear sitting on a shelf even if you throw it at someone no one's gonna get hurt but that isn't what you're like because you're a human being and human beings are some vicious creatures and there's utility in knowing that because it's also the case you know in the Harry Potter series Harry could stand up against full-dome art and understand them and speak his language because he was infected by him to some degree a very very interesting idea anyways in the second 10 the reason I'm telling you this and this is worth thinking about it's like how long were each of those books like 500 pages they're long eh and there was how many of them seven and how many of them were sold I mean how many of you read every Harry Potter book right that's how many of you read at least one okay how many you saw the movies it's like you're all in a cult you are I'm telling you really that's the truth it's really the truth so in the second volume there's this snake that's zip it around there the basilisk right and it lives in the underground that's chaos that's chaos and that's because wherever you are you're on thin ice and underneath you're thin ice is chaos and here we are in this unbelievably civilized environment and everyone's getting along so perfectly but you know we've got hot guard lights with electricity the sewage system is working no one's hungry it's like we can be peaceful but if any of that fell apart and it could easily fall apart because it's a bloody miracle it ever works at all then the chaos that's just underneath the surface is going to come up right now and it's useful to know that because it makes you properly grateful if you really understand it it makes you proper be grateful for the bloody miracle that it is that you can be here in peace so anyways there's this snake that's underneath the surface and it's you know no joke that thing it's big and it's ancient it's always been there and what happens if you look at it it turns you to stone right it paralyzes you well that's the more that's the Gorgon that's Medusa the woman with the head of snakes and if you look at her it paralyzes you what does that mean well you're walking through the jungle and big snake appears what do you do you freeze and no bloody wonder because you're a prey animal and that's what they do when they see things that are going to eat them and so the snake well lots of people still die from snakebite and our ancestors were and I mean our ancestors like you know tens of millions of years ago when they were living in trees and weren't very big they made a nice snack for a snake and there's a woman named Lynn Isbell who's an anthropologist at UCLA who's correlated the presence of carnivorous snakes with the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more snakes around the better the primates could see so and we're particularly good at picking up patterns like snake camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant you know and people generally don't like snakes you can learn to handle them but no snake fear appears to be an eight to Nate in chimpanzees and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing you can overcome it but well my daughter had snakes and one day her snake bit her it was a fairly big snake and she hadn't paid attention to it for a while so it nailed her and from then on she had very difficult time grabbing the snake it was like bitten once you know shy permanently she also told me years later she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room it's like you know and I think it was probably the smell so anyways so Harry Potter decides he's going to go after the basilisk rake he's gonna go out there and face the thing that he's most afraid of so he does that wait out in the depths so it's like Jonah going down into the depths and he faces the basilisk and it bites him and you know that's a that's right because if you go down into the depths you can get bitten like it's no joke and this is a hero story but the thing about the hero stories it's actually real the thing that you're facing is actually dangerous and even though facing it voluntarily might be your best bet and is likely your best bet because that's the central story of humanity that doesn't mean you're going to succeed it's the real thing so anyways he gets bitten right and he's gonna die now he's rescuing Ginny so that's the st. George story if you go after like dragon dragons like to capture virgins god only knows why I think it's because I think it's because one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is chase the damn predators away and I suspect that the males from god only knows how long ago who were particularly good at that were rewarded with female attention and why the hell not so it's deeply rooted inside of us that idea of facing the unknown and freeing the woman so the idea there is that if you it's a male idea and in large part I can talk about the central female myth and I will as we proceed the idea is that if you're this sort of person who can stand up against the unknown and the frightening then you're also likely if you develop into that sort of person then you're also likely to develop into the sort of person that other people will find attractive so you know and that's why young believed that the inside the shadow was the anima which is like a female figure and so his idea was something like you know if you look watch movies there's always this beta male guy if there romantic movies and he's a nice guy and he's the friend and you know the woman tells him everything but she doesn't like him a bit she likes the guy who's like God an edge and and who's capable of I would say mayhem but at least of aggression now that doesn't mean she wants them to be aggressive but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive that would be good and so he's the romantic target and so he's the person that's incorporated the shadow and he's someone that is respectable and perhaps useful and so well that's a very old story so let's let's think about this for a minute I've already offered you a proposition and I think it's an important proposition and I'm I'm offering you this proposition so that you can make sense of art and literature and mythology and religion and dance and all those strange ritualistic things that human beings do which seem central to us including including not least the in eradicable tendency of us to seek out stories of heroes I should finish the Harry Potter story so Harry Potter goes down there to rescue Virginia no it's that's not her name what is it Ginny yeah but there's a there's a formal name for that it's a variant of Virginia anyways which is a very divergent so um and it gets bitten didn't yes Ginevra that's it he gets bitten and the bite is poison and so there is dying which doesn't seem to be so good and then what happens and again you guys swallow this it's no problem so what's his name the Dumbledore character he's got a bird right so he's the wise old man he's the ruler of the castle he's the ruler of the Magic Castle he's the Magic King you know he's like God the Father as far as Harry Potter is concerned and he has a bird what kind of bird is it it's a Phoenix right and one of the things that's very strange about a Phoenix is that well it's immortal but in a strange way you know it lives and lives I think a hundred years and it gets older and older and then one day poof it bursts into flames and turns into an egg and then you get a new Phoenix so that's a symbol of transformation it's a symbol of transformation the bird is a spirit or psyche and so here's what it means in part you know you know how when you learn a lesson in your life that that's not very pleasant right it's not like when you learn something important it's best day of your life it's often the importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it you know you learn things the hard way you learn things by getting hit because obviously if what you're doing is working you get where you want there's no learning in that and that's happy it's when you're doing something and you hit an obstacle and maybe yeah bloody well hit it hard and then you know you recoil and then you down into the depths you go and you have to sort yourself out and you realize that you're you know this particular kind of idiot and that you should probably fix that and that's really annoying and difficult and you know and maybe you're down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while and then you get it repaired more or less and you know you put yourself back together that's the Phoenix poof into flames bang egg new you and so you know that's the ability to learn now human beings are very strange creatures right because we're very malleable compared to most animals you know like grizzly bears now and grizzly bears a thousand years ago it's like whatever they're the same thing they do the same thing there's no transformation about human beings we have this massive brain and you know it's a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they're 40 and and that's a big burden and so you know we pay a big price for it it also makes childbirth very difficult and and it's costly you have to eat a lot because you have a big brain because it uses up a lot of energy and so you know you pay a price for it but the advantage is your plastic you can learn now learning is a strange thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information but you could also think of it and this is more accurate as finding out something that you're doing wrong so that's sort of built into you like a character a character element of your character a presumption of your perception or a deep habit it's really built into you it's a neural structure right it's a little I've and you have to kill it because it isn't working properly and the pain that you go through in part when you're suffering because you did something stupid is it's something like your your the neurology I can never get this quite right it's the pain of the death of that structure and that could be a huge chunk of you you know if you really have to go through a massive revision it's like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all you know that happens for example if you're trying to combat alcoholism which is just you know a wretched thing to do because well all your friends are alcoholic all your family drinks too much the only thing you know how to do when you're socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much you know and you spend like 20 hours a week on it it's like it's not just that you're addicted to the substance it's like that's how you live and so if you want to stop being an alcoholic not only do you have to stop drinking alcohol but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends and then maybe you've had them for your whole life and you have to have continual battles with your drunk family and then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that's now like hanging around your neck like an albatross and so you have to let that whole part of your personality die and a new part has to spring forth and that's what the Phoenix is and the Phoenix is the capacity of the person to transform and so when Harry gets bit by the snake that freezes him he gets seriously injured the Phoenix comes in Christ some tears in his wound it prepares him bang he's back to life and the strange thing is that that's okay with all of the viewers now why would that be there's nothing about it that's rational nothing right Magic Castle that's not rational giant snake underneath it that's a little more irrational turning you to stone going down there to face it being rejuvenated by a Phoenix it's like yeah yeah that's okay we can we'll watch that clue well swallow it will be completely engaged in it and the reason for that is because it's a myth it's about how people it's a meta story about how to act about how to conduct yourself in the world to face the things that you're afraid of that would otherwise paralyze you to let the death of what is insufficient about you occur and then to wait for the rebirth okay so science is about what the world is and myth and drama and dream and the unconscious all of that let's say the aesthetic and artistic and fantastic side of humanity that's more about how things should be it's more about how to act they're there lessons in how to act and they're abstract lessons people are capable of abstraction right so you say well there's something good about you and there's something good about you and there's something good about you and and there's some bad about you and you and you and so we'll take all the good things and make one good thing out of that we'll take all the bad things and make one bad thing out of that and then we sort understand the difference between good and bad and we get better and better and better and better at that over the centuries as we distill that and then we have a figure of ultimate good and a figure of ultimate evil and that helps us understand what those two things are those are the hostile brothers that's a very common mythological motif and you could say well they're at war inside you and and I think that that's a universal truth it's an existential truth the domain of ethics and morality is how are we in the world and what how should we be what's the good and the reason I'm telling you all this apart from the fact that you should know it because this is what you should know if you go through university is that it bears directly on issues of health you're trying to accomplish something say if you go see a psychotherapist you know you could say well I'm trying to get healthy but you know that's not really right what you're trying to do when you go see your therapist just get your life together and that's not the same thing you know like mostly when I'm acting as a therapist it's not like I'm directly treating mental disorder like mental disorders aren't there just not neat little boxes it's not like someone has a fully functioning life but they have an anxiety disorder and then you bring them and you treat the anxiety disorder and they go back to their fully functioning life it's like it's not like that at all the disorder is tangled out into their life you know if you're depressed well usually your your workplace isn't going very well and your relationships with the people around you are damaged and you know you're connected in the actual world with all of these things and so when you come to see a therapist you have to work on putting your life together in a sustainable manner and that's certainly not just removing the mental illness is very rare now and then you see someone who's depressed whose life is together and they're just depressed something's gone wrong probably biochemically and so with someone like that you can often give them in SSRIs I can't give them to them but I can recommend them recommend they go see a doctor anyways and that sometimes just does the trick because you know their life is actually pretty good they just can't see it but that's bloody rare man it's usually the case that someone comes and sees you and things are in a serious state of chaos and all of that has to be addressed and some of its psychological and a lot of it's just practical its embedded out there in the world that's what the behavior cycle behavioral psychologists are particularly concerned about so anyways psychology especially the clinical end is predicated on it's necessarily predicated on the question how is it that we obtain the good how do we aim at the good and what would that be when my clients for come to see me one of the things I often ask them is okay well let's say you look a year ahead what do you want what are we aiming at what would what wouldn't your life isn't the way you want it to be how would it look if it was the way you wanted it to be or at least partly that way and we aim at that right we look for impediments psychological impediments fears avoidance strategies that sort of thing and we develop strategies and we try to move towards that I would say ideal all right to understand the categories of myth we'll say you we have to understand something about the nature of categorization now categorization is a tricky thing and we're gonna run through some complicated ideas relatively quickly you know you think you put things in the same category because they're similar but the problem is is that first of all that's not an answer it's just a restatement of the initial proposition and second of all you can put things in the same category that are by no means identical and you often do that and third it's things are things that are similar are often also importantly different and so picking which element of similarity you know like let's say oh if you have a group of books well are they the same well obviously no because well unless they're you know all the same book but the category of books is a pretty strange category because the content of the books differs completely well you could still make a group of books and you pick some arbitrary element that unites them and consider that grounds to make a category there's other categories more scientific categories and scientific categories tend to actually contain things that are very very similar in across multiple dimensions like protons are like that as far as I can tell there's nothing that distinguishes one proton from another and the same with electrons and you know the set of triangles is like that because you can define it precisely but most of the categories that human Jews aren't so neat and the problem with that is that unless the categories are neat like scientific categories it's very difficult to investigate them scientifically so for example you might do research on a group of people with anxiety disorders but the problem with that is that the anxiety disorder category is so heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to identify the commonalities across all the people who are in that category and that's partly because the category isn't actually a scientific category it's a hybrid category it's a practical category I can give you an example of that no I can't because I must not have saved it anyways many of the DSM categories so these are categories for psychopathology require if you're part of that category imagine there's seven symptoms that you could have or eight symptoms that you could have that would put you in that category like antisocial personality eight symptoms you steal you kick you hit you bite you you know you're abusive I don't remember the category categories precisely but you can be in the category if you have symptoms two through five and you can be in the category if you have symptoms six through eight they aren't the same symptoms but you're in the same category and you think well how the hell can that be well that's a family resemblance category roughly speaking and lots of the things that we use our family resemblance categories there's a prototype and then if you have enough of the features of that prototype imagine the prototype has ten features and if you have an six of it those pro features you get to be in that category but it means that the categories are actually quite diverse and that's one of the problems that plagues psycho psychiatry as a science in clinical psychology as a science it's a really big problem because if the categories aren't homogeneous then it's very difficult to draw conclusions about the members of the category and the psychologists and the psychiatrist's claim that those are scientific categories but but they're not and they can't be partly because they're aimed at the classification of health or ideal versus non health or non-ideal and partly because they play multiple roles say I mean the category isn't there just to provide neat demarcations for scientific study the categories there to give people a language to talk about certain sets of symptoms to diagnose because you know when you come in and you have a set of symptoms you might want to know what what they are so that you also know what they aren't it's really a relief often to find a diagnosis and then of course the diagnosis has certain implications for treatment and and for billing and for all of that so the category has to play all of those roles so there's multiple types of category and the categories that were talking about in relationship to ecology aren't scientific categories they're categories about the world construed as a place to act so here's a way to think about it you're always looking at the world through a framework of reference and you have to do that because there isn't very much of you you can't see the whole world at once and in fact the amount of the world you actually see is so small you can't believe it the central part of your vision is zipping around producing a pretty high-resolution representation of exactly what you're looking at but outside of that center like if I look at you I can't see her eyes I can see her glasses but barely I can't even tell whether you're male or female the person past that I can't see it all now you don't notice that you know you don't notice that you're that blind because you're your central vision is always popping around illuminating that tiny space but you're so damn blind it's just mind-boggling and I'm sure some of you have seen the invisible gorilla video you know where a gorilla comes into the video and you don't notice which is somewhat shocking because you would think that you would notice a gorilla but what happens is that you actually don't notice something unless it interferes with what you're doing and because what are you gonna do notice everything you can't do that you can hardly notice anything so what you do is you pick something to focus on it's usually something that you value because why else would you focus on it so that means that your value system determines the direction of your perception bloody well think about that for a minute that's a Buddhist idea right people people live in a kind of illusion and sometimes that illusion causes suffering and they can transform the way they look at the world and that can release them from their suffering but the idea that you do live in an illusion well I don't know if it's exactly an illusion but you certainly do live within a framework of perception that's determined by your values now that is so weird you know because we never think of the world as something that reveals itself through our values but of course it of course it because you look at what you want you aim at what you want and once you've aimed the world lays itself out for you and that's exactly how perception works that's why I represented it this way you're always somewhere that's point a that's somewhere in some place and some time and you always have some notion about what you want to have have happened next you know you're gonna go to the next class maybe you've got a plan after this in this class you have a plan you're hoping to learn something I presume and maybe you have a goal with regards to a grade and that's nested inside your desire to get a degree and that's nested inside your desire to be educated and to have a career and and and and have a successful life so attending to me at the moment the reason you're doing that is because all of those values exist within you simultaneously focusing your attention and so you're attending to me and not to something else assuming that all of you with your computers open aren't surfing the web which you might be but assuming that you're focusing whatever you're focusing on is directed by what you value and some of that can be unconscious in fact a lot of it is unconscious because you know it's very difficult for you to get control of what you pay attention to you know what that's like you're trying to study it's kind of a boring paper christ' your attention it's just like everywhere you know maybe you'll vacuum under the bed instead of doing the Pape reading the paper you know you can't get a grip on that thing so your attention has an autonomy and that's another psychoanalytic idea you know because you kind of think well you're in control it's like really you ever try telling yourself what to do does the how does that work for you I'm going to go to the gym three times a week right sure heard you who are ya I'm gonna quit eating sugar for a month it's like how long does that lasts like 15 minutes and you're eating like three chocolate bars so you're this is and this is Freud central insight I would say you're an autonomous group of spiritual agents let's say personalities and they don't really get along very well and you the ego will say is by no means necessarily in charge and that's a very strange thing to realize but you can really realize that by noticing how little control you have over your attentional focus okay so you've got your point a you're going to point B you're always doing that you inhabit a structure of value and it changes what the point a is and what the point B is but the structure itself doesn't change when you're looking at the world what you see is not objects you see tools and they make you happy those are things that facilitate your movement forward and you see obstacles and those are things that make you unhappy and when you encounter in an obstacle one of the problems is as well you don't get to where you're going and that's a problem but the other problem is if you encounter an obstacle the frame might be wrong right because you never know it might be just something that you could Ditu around real easily might be a fatal flaw in your whole plan and so obstacles have this dual nature they get in your way but they can also take your plan down and so they can produce anxiety so my point is and this there's a book called visual an ecological approach to visual perceptions great book by Gibson JJ Gibson if I remember correctly and this is although I thought of this a while back I realized eventually that it was a variant of his theory and when he believed was that when people looked at the world they saw a value first and an inferred object second so for example for Gibson if you're standing by a cliff you don't see a cliff and then think about the fact that you might fall and then feel frightened you see a falling off place and part of the seeing of that part of the act of seeing is being afraid of that because your eyes are connected right to your emotional systems and part of what your eyes do is tell you what the object is but your eyes do all sorts of other things like they prepare you for action they prepare you for gripping they prepare you for emotion and and none of that actually requires the the existence necessarily the existence of your perception of the object so there are people who have blind sight and if you show them so they think they can't see but if you flash them in angry face they'll show a skin conductance response and that's because the visual pathways to the amygdala which does face a most facial emotional processing can still be active these are people who've usually had a stroke so their eyes are okay but they've destroyed the visual cortex so so anyways it's perfectly plausible that at least at one level of analysis when you look at something you see it's utility first so you see a chair and you might say a chair is an object but I wouldn't say that beanbags a chair and a stump is a chair and they don't share much in common except that you can sit on them and so you know the chair is just the chair is basically conceptualized by its functional utility and when you look at a chair what you perceive its is its functional utility and the chair tells you what to do it says sit on me and so that and there are people who have prefrontal damage and they engage in something called utilization behavior and if they're walking down the hallway and there's a door opened they have to walk through it they can't not do what the object tells them to do that's called utilization behavior so that's how the world is laid out and I would say inside that domain you're in the predictable world you're in the world that you understand it that you know and that if you hit an obstacle or if you're outside that domain you're in the unknown you're in unknown territory in the mythological world in the world for action you could conceptualize the world as a stage for action and this is a Shakespearean quote that sort of sums it up quite nicely all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players they have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts and you might say well is that really true and the answer to that is well it depends on what you mean by true and and that really is the answer because there are different ways of defining true so and it isn't self-evident that there's only one way of defining true that's appropriate you know the definition of truth might be more like a tool and you know we are tool using creatures and really what we're trying to do with our conceptions of truth is to work through the world successfully so even science is subordinate should be subordinate to our use of the world as a tool because if it isn't useful tool like what are we doing with it you know just generating technology that might destroy the world that seems like a bad idea so so I think that that the world as tool is actually the fundamental sword of truth and I think that that's a Darwinian idea right that that our notions about the world have evolved through a Darwinian process and that it's appropriate for us to regard as what is most real those things that reliably ensure are the continuation of our life and the probability of our propagation and if you're a true Darwinian I don't think there's a way out of that argument and it isn't self-evident by any stretch of the imagination that seeing the world as all as objects is the way that our brain works in fact I don't think it's the way it works at all and I think that that's why we're so wired for stories right it's a mystery you know like you won't line up for two hours to go see a lecture but you'll line up for two hours maybe you'll even camp overnight if you're mythological imagination has been seized for god only knows what reason by Star Wars and you know that's the source of mythology it's the mythology of the modern person and it fills a gap and that's why people do it so that to me speaks of men the manner in which our psyches are constructed and that's a union idea that's the idea of the archetype essentially that to be human is to participate in a certain pattern of being and that that pattern of being is socially it's acted out individually but it's also part of your structure even your perceptual structure as a as a living organism of your particular type and it would be the case at least in part that the hero myth which is go out where no one has gone before face they terrors of the unknown gather something of value and return is the central story of humankind it's not the only central story but it's it's up there in the top three and many of the dramas that you engage yourself in are variations of that story and you watch it over and over and over because you're trying to learn how to do that because that's what you need to do to live okay here's the here's an idea what's common among people well we're self conscious so we know of our own existence and we know of our own limitations and so that means that we have a certain innate terror and fragility our existence is a problem to us and in some sense what we're trying to do when we search for meaning is to search for a solution to that problem and that can be security but it don't can also be mode of being you know and so for example being engaged in something worthwhile seems to be a good medicine for being fragile you know because you think well I'm doing this it seems worthwhile and the fact that there's a price to be paid for it and that things could befall me that aren't good I'm willing to put up with that because what I'm engaged in seems to be of appropriate of sufficient significance to justify all that we all become self-conscious and we're all trying to do something about that figure out how to deal with it so there's a landscape that we inhabit I would say within which that takes place so there's a human being self conscious doomed to tragedy and doomed to be aware of that the human being has two elements and that's the element that seeks the good and there's the other element that seeks I would say revenge and destruction and we have our reasons you know if something tragic happens to you it's tragic and unfair and it really brings you low the probability that you're going to become resentful and want revenge is extraordinarily high at no wonder and you know the archetypal representation of that is evil itself and the archetypal representation of the good that you could do is is the hero and so those things inhabit us they're they're permanent elements of the human psyche and then what else is universal to us well we live in a society you could say and that's deep that's deep it's not just human society like we've lived in a society forever so you know lobsters live in dominance hierarchies and they use their serotonin system at least in part to keep track of their dominance position and so you can use antidepressants on lobsters when they get defeated and they don't feel so bad from being defeated in a fight and so you just think about that because the antidepressants do the same thing to us we're so bloody social that the circuits that evolved 300 million years ago when the lobsters in us had a shared ancestor are still operating at the base of your brain that's why status is so important to people and reputation I mean that serotonin system governs your emotional regulation how people respond to you and what they think of you man that matters that's why you're on Facebook all the time and checking your texts and and obsessing continually about your online presence and assuming that you're doing that and you know contacting people frantically and seeing what the updates are it's like where where how are you held in the esteem of others very very important and that's because it determines your emotional regulation it's really important so we exist in a society always and the society has two elements the tyrannical element of the society that would be the tyrannical king roughly speaking a very common mythological theme you see that in the Lion King - right because that's scar and of course you see it in the real world with almost continually and then the benevolent king who is the source of all the good things about culture you know and and you can see these things play out as mythologies in political terms so I would say for example the continual harping about the oppressive nature of the patriarchy is part of a myth and the myth is that society is oppressive it's like well yeah obviously you know because you have to be quite a bit like you and you have to be quite a bit like you even if you're not so that you can get along right everybody sacrifices a tremendous amount of their individuality to the common to the common mode of being that's there's a tyrannical element to that but you know by the same token it's the basis of cooperation and the stability of society and the the final element is that's often represented met in a masculine manner by the way society and I think that's because our primary dominance structures given the creatures we are like chimpanzees the primary structures of dominance are masculine and then outside of what's known is the unknown and we always have to contend with that and it's wonderful in that it's the source of all new things and it's terrible in that it's the place where all the things that destabilize you come from and so this is a good representation although not the only one so that's the feminine nature that's the masculine order and that's the individual who's destined to suffer in the grasp of those two things and I'll finish this next time what have we got here yep all right good enough we'll see you next time so today to begin with we're going to finish the last lecture and then with any luck we're gonna start the next one there somatically linked anyways well you know what all the lectures for the next well for the whole course hopefully will be thematically late to some degree given that nominally they're about the same topic but some are more tightly linked than others so I started telling you last week about this idea of the voyage to the underworld and I want to tell you a little bit more about that young in particular conceptualized the voyage to the underworld as a journey into the unconscious and the unconscious for the psychoanalyst is a place of fantasy and dream an implicit presupposition and habit and that's all correct you know we there is an unconscious and it's perfectly reasonable to conceptualize it that way that the big difference I think between the psychoanalysts and the later more empirical scientists is that the psychoanalyst sort of envisioned your psyche as a place of living partial personalities instead of cognitive computational systems you know they took into account the fact that you're alive and that the parts of you are alive and you know there's there's a neuroscientist named gives that Gazza Nick I don't know how to say his name Gazza nigga that's wrong is that Gazzaniga yeah I think that's it anyways he did some of the earliest experiments on split brains and so sometimes if you have intractable epilepsy which I wouldn't recommend by the way one of the surgical procedures for mediating its negative effects is something called a you cut the corpus callosum and it's very large number large structure in the brain that connects the two separate hemispheres and you know it's not obvious why we have two separate hemispheres although I'll tell you a little bit about why I think it is but anyways they do communicate and what Gazzaniga demonstrated was that you could tell one hemisphere something without the other one knowing that both hemispheres were conscious and that the consciousness was somewhat independent it really strange it's very interest makes very interesting readings reading you know because it suggests that fragments of ourselves you could think of you have fragments of yourself within you that are like low resolution representations of you you know and that and the psychoanalysts would think of those more as they're kind of like they're kind of like one-eyed Giants that might be a way of thinking about it if you were thinking about it in a fantastical way so there's the angry you and you know you've all come in contact with the angry you it's a rather rigid that's the first thing you might say about it it's impulsive and short-term it doesn't think much about the past unless it's bad things about whoever you're angry at in which case it thinks about them a lot it's not too concerned with long-term future consequences and mostly it wants to be right and you know when angry you disappears and normal you assuming such a thing exists reappears you can be perfectly shocked about how angry you behaved and in fact sometimes if angry you really gets out of hand like it might in a battle like a war it might do things that you just can't imagine that you would do and under those circumstances you can reveal parts of yourself to yourself that are so foreign and so horrifying that it will leave you with post-traumatic stress disorder because it is the case that many but not all people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder especially if it's battlefield related get it because of something they did rather than something they saw or something that happened to them and that's really we're thinking about you know I mean there's a lot of weird potential nested inside people and you know you don't see it under normal circumstances because the circumstances are normal and part of the reason that we like the circumstances to be normal is precisely so that we don't see those parts of people we don't want to see and that's really worth knowing it's really worth knowing because that's why people are so identified with their culture and why they need a culture you know the terror management theorist types they kind of think of culture as a mechanism that inhibits anxiety and they think about it psychologically like it's it's something inside your your head let's say and it gives meaning to events and stops you from collapsing into chaos and protects you from death anxiety but that isn't that's not right it's sort of right but that isn't what your culture is your culture is a set of value Laden presuppositions that you orient yourself in the world that match the set of value Laden presuppositions that everyone in your culture has and acts out and so what that means is that when you believe something and you're among your own people you believe something implicitly it's the way you look at the world it's the way you act things out you act about everyone expects you to act about they're happy about it in fact so there's a match between what you're doing what you see and what you're doing and what other people expect and it's that match that regulates your emotions it's not the belief system it's the match and so part of the reason that people are so tied to their cultural identity is because their cultural identity regulates their emotions and in a profound way like this is no joke you know I mean one of the things that stabilizes human nervous systems is imagine that you have a domain of competence there's many domains of competence and of course in some of those domains you're completely incompetent but they met me not matter because you don't go into that domain so you have some area of specialization which you might think of as your sub-tribe you know your university students and so some of you are lower status by the rules of the university game and some of you are higher status by the rules of the university game by the tribe and so the higher status people tend to be the ones who fit into the academic environment you know and and find it conducive to their mode of being and all who also do well and their serotonin levels rise and you know the neuro chemicals that moderate mood particularly are serotonergic its serotonin it's lots of other things it's an oversimplification but that'll do for now as you become dominant in a hierarchy your serotonin levels rise and what that means is that happy things make you happier and sad things make you less sad it Tunes your nervous system so if you're down at the bottom of the hierarchy and you're failing it's like hey hardly anything makes you happy and everything makes you nervous and it's no wonder because it's it's not very good down there so the the societal structure which which is an elaborated dominance hierarchy regulates your emotions because of the match between your expectations and the behaviors of the people within that structure and then your position within the hierarchy regulates the rate ratio let's say and the intensity between positive and negative emotion so you mess with people's status at your peril and you disrupt their culture they don't like that and no wonder because when it's disrupted they fall into chaos and chaos isn't just anxiety the anxiety is bad enough but it's not just anxiety because when you fall into chaos when things fall apart for you of course you're uncertain and anxious because you don't know what the hell is going on and you don't know where you are and you don't know what to do Pat's anxiety-provoking and maybe you can't even understand your past properly anymore that as I said that happens when people get betrayed and so you fall into this state where nothing is certain the way you construe the world isn't certain and even the way the world is is no longer certain because you don't know how to act or your actions aren't working and so the world is presenting itself as something that's chaotic it's not just psychological the chaos is a weird intermingling of the chaotic world and the chaotic self I mean that's what happens when you get unemployed it's like it's devastating right it's devastating to people and it you could say well that's psychological it's like well yeah but they're unemployed that makes the world far more incomprehensible and uncertain it's not just psychological it's psychological and that's bad but it's also real and that's even worse and then those two things can spiral which they often do because you know if you don't set your expectations properly for a job search and assume that you're gonna get 49 rejections for every interview which you really need to know because if you get 49 rejections it's not because you're useless it's because the baseline for rejection is 98% and that's okay because the base rate for rejection for everything is 98% no matter what you do but you need to know that so that you don't feel that it's like something wrong with you and of course you only have to get it right once that then you have a job it's a lottery but you have to set yourself up you have to think okay well I'm gonna look for a job I need to how many resumes can I tolerate sending out a day you know it has to be enough so you don't feel like a useless moron and it can't be so many that you're overwhelmed by the burden so and I help people do this sort of thing all the time so maybe you decide well you're gonna send out ten a day and you're gonna work two hours on it and it's gonna take six months and then you know you've got your parameters set properly and you would know what to expect in the world and and your emotions are regulated and so but the state of being unemployed doesn't just produce psychological consequences so the distinction between the psyche in the world in some sense is quite arbitrary and the psychoanalysts I think it air too much on the side of the subject they tend to think that too much of you is inside of you and too little of you is outside of you and part of the reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience I love the psychoanalyst man they're brilliant they're brilliant they're deep they grapple with real problems like with the problems when people have real problems that I mean profound problems there really won't profound moral problems or problems of good and evil really you know there are things going on in their family that are so terrible that well that there are there are sometimes fatal you know lie upon lie upon lie upon lie for decades and decades and decades it's awful and that's not exactly inside them it's out there in the world and lots of the people that I see very famous critic of psychology I can't remember his name but I probably will criticize the practice of psychology quite effectively in the leave in the early 60s the myth of mental illness by Thomas says Szasz it's a classic you should read it if you're interested in psychology read it like it's it's a classic and he basically said most people have problems in living they don't have psychological problems and so I've experienced despite my love for the psychoanalysts very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work you know and you can parameterize that it's like what do you need how about some friends that people kind of like that how about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future that would be good how about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere so at least you've got some possibility of rising some possibility of stabilizing yourself and our schedule in a routine because no one can live without a routine you just forget that if you guys don't have a routine I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine you need to pick a time to get up whatever time you want but pick one and stick to it because otherwise you dis regulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood and eat something in the morning I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders I had one client who was literally starving very smart girl sheet there's very little that she liked she kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day she came to me and said I have no energy I come home all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over what like is that weird and I thought well it depends on how hard you work you know it's a little weird but whatever it's familiar you're looking for comfort so I did an analysis of her diet it's like three quarters of a cup of rice it's like you're starving eat something you know you'll feel better so she modified her diet and her all her anxiety went away and she had some energy it's like yeah you got to eat so schedule that's a good thing man your brain will thank you for it it will stabilize your nervous system with it's a bit of a plan that's a good thing you need a career you need something productive to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol most particularly alcohol because that does even a lot of people you need a family like the family you have your parents and all that be nice if you all got along you could work on that that's a good thing to work on and then you know you probably need children at some point that's life that's what life is and if you're missing you know you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions it's not mandatory but I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably well on four I think I mentioned six if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them there's no way you're going to be psychologically thriving and that's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological right human beings have a nature there's things we need and if we have them well that's good and if we don't have them well then we feel the lack and so behaviorists behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing you know it's practical it's like strategizing make a career plan figure out how to negotiate because that's bloody important figure out how to say what you need figure out how to tell the truth to people figure out how to listen to your partner in particular because if you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they'll return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years well then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want well hooray that would be good and then there's two of you under all circumstances and it's better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly and so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises and it's part of the transformation the psychological transformation that's attendant on an intimate relationship and one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship anyways when that falls apart chaos ensues and that's why chaos is represented so continually in myths and stories and I'm going to walk you through a bit of that more today I talked about the story of Jonah now here's something to think about the internal representations of language meaning evolved partly from our pre linguistic ancestors knowledge of social relations like modern monkeys and apes our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive operative the demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex abstract conceptual and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication although baboons have concepts and acquire propositional information from other animals vocalizations they cannot articulate this information they understand dominance relationships and matrilineal kinship but they have no words for them this suggests that the internal representation of many concept relations and actual action sequences does not require language and that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought well you you know you can think without language well take the case of someone who's deaf and mute they have no language well they can operate in society they learn how to represent other people and they do that with image now with the post modernists who I despise would be a reasonable way of putting it have this proposition that there's no meaning outside language and and it's a powerful argument by the way but it's seriously wrong there is a meaning network outside of language and it's what language is grounded in and that's this pre verbal comprehension of the world it's an embodied comprehension of the world animals have it lobsters have it you know this particular scientist Seyfarth talks about our shared history with you know higher primates that probably goes back 20 million years something like that we split from the common ancestor with chimps about 7 million years ago but you know lobsters have dominance hierarchies they hardly have a nervous system at all which is partly why they're studied quite extensively and so they have a social structure and they understand it like if one lobster thira lobster to be quite a shark to you if it happened and you were fighting with another lobster and you lost you would remember that and the next time you saw that lobster you'd scuttle off somewhere else and you know that and all the lobsters in an area know who's top lobster and who isn't and top lobster gets the best bloody place to be and the best food so this dominance issue this cultural issue you know the fact that we live in a social environment is far deeper than people usually consider and it's also worth considering and that this is what you might think of from an evolutionary perspective you know you think of natural selection as producing evolution right well random mutation with natural selection but here's something to think about and Darwin knew this but Darwin was really smart and the biologists who followed in his footsteps even up to now have only expanded out a fraction of what he had to say you know he was very interested in sexual selection now one of the things about human beings that's unique is that human females are picky majors they're choosy they're also sneaky because you can't tell when they're ovulating and with many other female animals you know so they have hidden ovulation and they're choosy and they tend to choose men who are more successful in the dominant turkey well they're there's a shock I mean if you have a choice why not if you pick someone who's at the bottom of the competence hierarchy well that's probably not going to work out very well for you and since women bear the burden of representation you know when you think of a doorman sorry you might think well it's the powerful guy the aggressive guy say that rises to the top of the doorman it's hurricane that's not true it's not even true among chimps like you can get a chimp tyrunt but then what happens is other chimps gang up on him and tear him to pieces and they don't do it nicely they don't do it nicely and the chimps that tend to maintain their dominance for long periods of time have a pretty wide network of friends roughly speaking with whom they engage in reciprocal interactions like grooming and they actually pay a lot of attention to the female chimps who have their own hierarchy by the way and to the their offspring so they're like baby kissing politicians and so the idea that it's raw power that produces dominance is a it's just wrong it's it's wrong now you know tyrants you know it's pretty damn up unstable business being a tyrant there's lots of people who want to kill you plus you know you tend to rule over something approximating hell so maybe that's bit worse better than being a subject in hell but it's not much better so anyway so this social social now so what this means think about this for a minute so imagine you know imagine what I'm telling you bears some vague resemblance to the truth I think there's quite a lot of evidence for it from from a biological perspective I mean this choosy mating thing occurs with lots of species you know there's this bird called the bower bird you got to look up bowerbirds man those things are you just can't even believe they exist and so the male bowerbird he makes this really complicated nest that's close to the ground he weaves it it's really quite nice you couldn't make one so and then he sweeps this yard in front of the nest and then he runs around the forest or flies cuz he is a bird finding pretty things so maybe he'll find a nice collection of red leaves and so then he'll take the red leaves one by one and fly back to his front yard and make a little square you know he's a bird so it's not a great square but he makes a little patch of red and he takes a look at that and then he goes off and finds something blue and and he decorates it makes a little piece of abstract art in the front of his nest and a lot of male bowerbirds do this all at the same time and so then the females come along they hop on something nearby and they kind of look like this checking it out and if they're happy with it well then things proceed but if they're not they'd fly off to someone else's piece of abstract art and if a male piece of art is rejected by like three females in a row he gets irritated and brushes it all off with his wing and then he makes another one it's like God well they obviously have a sense of where well developed sense of beauty it's so cool you know and I guess the idea is that who knows what the hell the idea is the female birds like artistic males something like that but if you're thinking about it biologically maybe it's an indication of intelligence right it's a marker of intelligence you know and it's certainly the case that female humans prefer creative men so and no wonder of course we wouldn't be creative if that wasn't the case so then imagine that there's two primary forces of evolutionary selection operating on us and they're not really the natural world which is what people always think like the environment you know the animals and the trees and nature but it is nature that selected us it's two other things well partly it's two other things so one is the dominance hierarchy the male dominance hierarchy is one of the primary mechanisms of selection so it's like well women are faced with a hard choice which guy to go after right that's a hard choice well so they do the same thing that people do with the stock market they outsource the cognitive problem the computational problem to the male dominance hierarchy then they just let the male Sirk themselves out however they're going to and then they appeal from the top and so what that means is the dominant male dominance hierarchy itself is a selection mechanism because if you fail at it then you don't leave any offspring and so what that means at least in part is that we have adapted to be better and better at attaining status in dominance hierarchies over god only knows how long a period of time and that doesn't mean just power you know it might mean cognitive flexibility because you could imagine dormant its hierarchy a dominance hierarchy be dormant its hierarchy see okay so if like if you're really successful you climb up dominance hierarchy a right but you'd be and see know if you happen to land it knows you just be a failure so then you could say the ideal human being is someone who can climb to the top of a doorman it's her key no matter what the doorman is hierarchy is right so we've evolved to we've evolved such that success across the set of possible dominance hierarchies is the target and I think that's why we have general intelligence because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism and it's a single factor even like there is intelligence is a single factor it's it's not divisible despite what people like Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner falsely claimed so and then from the female perspective females are the next gatekeeper and that's why they're often Mother Nature took me a long time to figure this out why the hell is nature feminine in mythological representations it's a very very it's extraordinarily common mother nature you don't think a father nature you think of mother nature it's like why well nature brings forth new forms so that's feminine and nature select in fact that's the definition of nature from a Darwinian perspective nature is that which selects women select their nature and that's partly why far more men than you might think like far more are terrified of women because to be rejected as a romantic partner by a woman is to be classified as vaguely acceptable life form huh no value in propagating it though right so it's a major major rejection and you know I've had dozens of clients and many many people write to me whose primary problem is that they're so terrified of women they can't even approach them very very very common so all right I want to show you this little triangle thing this is kind of cool go yet so no no nonverbal right nonverbal so what happened well there's mother triangle I would guess and mutter triangle has circle as a child and triangle is maybe a friend but not one that's very welcome according to mother and child Circle goes out to try to play with triangle child and mother doesn't like that so she goes out there and pecks the hell out of her out of him chases him away pushes child circle back into the home and goes into the home and then child circle isn't very happy about that it's running around causing trouble and it manages to escape and then bad child triangle shows up and they play together and run around and run around and round around and run around with mother chasing them and then they well maybe they elope who knows and then mother triangle has a fit and blows down the house right it's obvious reasonable would you consider that a reasonable story about what happened perhaps you had other interpretations but I suspect they were vaguely along that line well but the point here in this is the point of this experiment is how much information do you need from which to derive a narrative and the answer is like none it just it's just immediate you you can watch some triangles moving around a box and instantly you personalize it and that's because that's what you're like and the reason you're like that is because your environment isn't nature your environment is culture your environment is other people other people and that was even more true for chimpanzees and so forth and especially animals that had a limited diet like like gorillas they pretty much only eat like leaves you know a chimp spends like 12 hours a day chewing and that's where they have a gut like this it's like you can't eat leaves you know have you tried they have no nutrition so if you're gonna eat leaves you have to eat a lot of them and then it takes like three months to digest them and so what we've done and this is pretty cool because we're so smart is that we've traded gut for brain and that's why we're so svelte and the way we manage that it appears is that we learned how to use fire to cook things and that meant that we had high quality nutrition much higher it's easier to digest cooked things especially meat and so because we invented fire we didn't have to have so much intestine and we could spend a little more time on the brain so human beings really are fire users we invented fire or discovered it or whatever man mastered it at least a couple of million years ago a long time so that's all pretty cool as far as I'm concerned so that's partly how you think and that's naturally how you think you think a certain way and so we'll say that your fundamental architecture is social cognitive you tend to view the world as if it's personified and the reason for that is that the world in which you emerged as a being was primarily social and what you needed to know was who's the big primate who's the little primate and who's related to who and you know among chimps if a big chimp is threatened by a small chimp well you know the big chimp could just tear the small chimp apart but the big chimp will back off if it knows that the little chimp is associated with some really big chimps and so the little chimp can bully the big chimp because it's part of a dominant family and that's because the nervous system of the big chimp doesn't respond to the little chimp like a little chimp it responds to the little chimp like it's a little chimp with four great monsters attached to it because it's true so it's nervous system is actually responding to the network around the chimp and so that's exactly what you well it's not exactly what you're like cuz you're not chimps but you know it's that kind of platform that constant it's the evolutionary underpinnings of your psyche so what does that mean well it means this is like perfectly fine to us right can animate things we can hit rabbits are people no problem will go along with that you remember Roger Rabbit I presume most of you've watched that so this is the detective whose name I don't remember he has to go to toontown because there's cartoons and there's people and you know they share the same world and you can go to toontown although it's kind of annoying because cartoon figures are kind of annoying like there's slapstick types and so he's not very happy to be there and this is what it looks like right everything is animated meaning alive anima means soul by the way so everything has a personality and you know when you're reading books to kids the son has a personality train has a personality jet has a personality doesn't matter what it is it has a personality and that's because the child is learning to understand the world using the architecture of social cognitive architecture and so and the thing that's really interesting about that this just blows me away you know evolution is conservative and so once it's produced something it has to build on it it's like dass the operating system it's like really it's still there if I remember correctly under Windows 10 you can't get rid of the damn thing because it's part it's part of the structure now and it's like the keyboards we use which were actually designed to slow typers down because with mechanical typewriters if you type too fast the keys would jam so they divine devise the keyboard to slow you down and we still use it which is stupid you know you want the high frequency letters close to your middle fingers that isn't what it's like at all but we can't change it because everyone uses it so your body plan that thing is been around a long time man if you look at mammals particularly but even lizards there's so much like us in their in their skeletal structure that it's just mind-boggling you know and we're all variants of this same symmetrical four-legged mouth here structure and so you have to build in what you have and if you have a social cognitive architecture then you have to first understand the world through the social cognitive categories and what's so bloody strange about that is it actually seems to work we actually seem to develop a coherent representation of being I would say of being that's not the same as nature it's not the same as the world because when we think of the world we think of the objective world and I'm not talking about the objective world I'm talking about the world of human experience and we see that through social cognitive filter and it makes perfect sense to us and it works that's so strange so anyways everything's got this animated nature and we don't have a problem with that in fact we actually find it quite fun you know people go visit the Disney toontown and participate in it and and have fun with it and so that shows you as well how how natural it is for us to to view things this way you know cars have faces right designers know that they know that people don't want a car with three headlights because like who wants to be associated with a three eyed monster no one it's like two eyes that's something you could be comfortable with and so cars have faces like a BMWs the new ones they really look cat-like you know and they have sexy curves they do they do there's been a more eye studies of that so if you show men photographs of attractive women looking directly at them there's a little part of their brain called a nucleus accumbens that lights up because to have someone look directly at you especially if they have like a smile is is interpreted as an invitation to approach and women they have the same damn problem because with women because if you go into drugstores say and you look at women's magazines they're all the same they've all evolved to the same endpoint they all have an attractive woman on them all of them and they're looking right out and so when women see that they actually see it as something to it approach it's an ideal and you know when people say that those Beauty ideals are to women and all ideals are oppressive but the empirical research some of it done here suggests that interacting with those images helps that it performs the psychological function of helping the woman equate herself with the ideal and in most cases that actually produces a pop and elevation and mood and you know think about it you're really gonna go to the magazines store when you're just looking for something to do and you're gonna buy something that makes you feel depressed and oppressed it's like no you're not going to do that magazines that do that to you they will die because no one will buy them and there's a reason they all turned out the same way it's like they're just responding to demand so faces oh yes with regards to the sexy curves so a woman who looks a woman's picture looking right at a man will produce this activation in the primary reward system cocaine produces the same response and so does sports cars especially curvy red sports cars and so that's why you often see an attractive woman sitting on a curvy red sports car in an ad because it's you know if there's a an ad for beer on the side it's like hey everything's perfect so and you know those are all primary real reward representations and they produce attraction because part of positive emotion that dopamine dopaminergic Li mediated element of positive emotion is an approach emotion it's not a satiation satisfaction emotion it's oh good there's something good here I can move towards it and that that is what happiness is that's directly what happiness is it's not attaining something because that just puts in a whole new problem you got to figure out what to do next alright so I suggested to you that one of the problems that we have the problem I would say is not what the world is made out of but how we should be in the world because we're alive and how we should be well it's fairly straightforward not so much pain would be good that'd be good not too much anxiety hey we're bored for that little pleasure down then some stability not dying that's a big one that's a big one and then let's say from the Darwinian perspective propagating and so that's what rained out and the reason we're aimed at that is you just think about this it's so amazing so every single one of your of the relatives you have in your ancestry every single one of them successfully produced a child who successively successfully produced a child all the way back to three billion years ago it's bloody unbelievable like the probability that you exist well it's a hundred percent because there you are but the probability of predicting that you would exist you know if you tried to predict it it's like you the chance that the chances that you're here are so infinitesimal that it's just absolutely mind-boggling think about that unbroken sequence of success over literally over billions of years god it's amazing and so you have to obviously you have to think that there's a pretty strong proclivity for that to happen I mean some of obviously was necessity but not only that I mean it's necessary that impregnated females have an infant it isn't necessary that they keep it alive so you can't account for that continuity merely from necessity you have to interject least a small amount of consideration that the care that's associated especially with taking care of infants because there you know there are a lot of work that's there to tennis it's actually I think it's manifested in the personality trade agreeable to us as it looks to be like agreeableness is one of the dimensions where men and women very most substantially agreeableness looks to be like the manifestation of the maternal instinct now men can be agreeable to because of course male human beings take care of children you know if you're a grizzly bear female you just chased the damn male away because he'll kill your Cubs that's not so helpful but they're not maternal at all quite the contrary but you know human men are pretty damn maternal they're not as maternal as women on average although some women are less maternal than some men because you know the curves overlap but but on balance how are we in the world well we're aware of our own vulnerability who are aware of our own shortcomings let's say and that's I think that's partly from being a social being because people are always signaling your shortcomings to you to such a degree that you even signal your shortcomings to yourself because well you might as well fix them before someone else points them out that's guilt and shame you know when Freud called out the super ego the super-ego is kind of like the internalized representation of the judgmental father and culture I think is represented as a father figure God the Father let's say because it's actually oh it's actually quite a bit like there is an all-seeing eye that's always watching you it's a really really intelligent way of conceptualizing it because the group which is more or less eternal is watching you all the time all the time and it's judging you all the time and we know that if you put people in a room and you put a big eye on the wall you know that you give them an opportunity to cheat on some little Chiti thing you know nothing too important if they're in the room with the big eye they're less likely to cheat if they're in the room with no eye at all so you know and what do you do you keep an eye on your kids and the reason you do that is so they don't misbehave and we keep an eye on each other and so we have a representation of that and as far as I can tell we represent it as a transcendent figure of judgment and it's like yeah it's hey that's a pretty good metaphor so one of the this is a major intellectual battle the major intellectual battle and it's raging in universities it's basically a battle between post-modernism and traditional and tradition I think that's the right way of thinking about it for the post modernists human beings have no nature we're blank slates everything that we are is enculturated so we're completely malleable and all elements of our identity are valuable on the other side are the traditionalists who are I would say grounded more in biology on the one hand but also in in historical humanities tradition that suggests that people have a nature I explained some of that nature most people want to have threads it's part of your nature you know most people want to find love part of your nature and you suffer without it so and you know you could say those are all social constructs but you can say you can say anything so you know and don't ever trust someone who has one explanation for everything you know how much intelligence does that take you got one explanation you just trot it out for every phenomena this is an alternative now here's what happened in part Nietzsche back in the late 1800s was very interested in the dissolution of traditional faith in the West we fell out of our myth that's a way of thinking about it we start believing in its fundamental axioms we start believing that there was such a thing as a transcendent deity for example it did it didn't mesh well with the emerging scientific viewpoint and so in the late 1800s Nietzsche announced the death of God which sounds fairly presumptuous but it wasn't something he was celebrating the full quote and I haven't got it exactly right is God's dead we've killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the rivers of blood so like that's a lot different than what you see scrawled on bathroom wall you know and echip hypothesized that in the 20th century millions of people would die in the conflicts over what values were going to reign as an alternative to that tradition and he particularly brilliantly pointed to communism he said that's where it's gonna be and Dostoyevsky did the same thing and so and since then there's this being this battle hey and the battle is kind of like this the battle is on the one hand between social construction social constructionist utopians who believe that human nature is infinitely malleable and that with the proper transformations in society you can bring apart about the perfect state and the perfect human being and and traditionalists and young I think is the classic example of this who believe that there is a human nature and it's deeply embedded within us and that the cultures we set up have to manifest themselves in accordance with that nature or they will fail well Jung believed in the existence of a meta-narrative the hero myth roughly speaking and he explained its connections to various religious traditions in a staggeringly brilliant manner Camille Paglia who I would recommend and I think I already told you that you know she she's already concluded after going through a radical feminist period early in her life that the proper way for society orient itself is within a mythological structure and that that's part of what the humanities provides and the alternative is rational arguments over what values are going to dominate and it isn't obvious that rationality can solve that problem I don't think it can that's Humes point David Hume said you can't derive an art from it is right you cannot use science as a guide to behavior so what do you use instinct instinct manifested in imagination and the evolution the evolved structure of your organic cultures something like that do they have a structure that's the question okay so you ask yourself this question what is it that every human being shares regardless of place and time so any universally comprehensive language that would be a meta-narrative a myth a hero myth let's say a myth about what a human being not only is like but should be like has to speak to us about those aspects of experience that we all share because otherwise we wouldn't understand the damn story now we go to how we go to stories that we understand all the time like Star Wars and it really doesn't matter what country you know everybody gets it more or less so obviously there's stories that we can understand and mutually you know we understand love stories we understand stories of conflict we understand stories of betrayal we understand stories of anger and that's because we can feel jealousy we can feel love we can feel anger it's it's part of you it's right there we even know where the circuits are you know and then you're like other animals they feel it too so very similar emotions as far as we can tell so here's here's this is derived in large part from you but not only here's what we share natural world social world and the fact of our existence as an individual and that can be represented different ways it can be represented as you the known the and unknown or it could be you culture and nature all the same representations and the cultural representation tends to be male that's God the Father let's say and the representation the feminine representation tends to be female this is the known the culture Apple Indian control that's associated with the Sun consciousness the king the patriarchy the plow because it pushes up the earth the phallus obviously order and authority and the crushing weight of tradition the wise old man and the tyrant Dogma the day sky the country man the island heights the ancestral spirits the activity of the dead Captain Hook he's a tyrant and that's why Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up to become him and that's why Peter Pan does well because he thinks that adults are all tyrants why is Captain Hook a tyrant because a crocodile ate his hand and the crocodile has a clock in its stomach and the reason for that is that the crocodile is time and times already got a piece of Captain Hook and he's not very happy about it he's bitter and resentful and tyrannical and when Peter Pan looks out adulthood that's what he sees and he thinks why should I sacrifice the potential of childhood for the singularity of tyranny and so he stays immature his entire life and he's king of the Lost Boys Jesus great there's a porn star named Jeremy Christ I can't remember his name it's really an ugly guy he is he is he is an ugly guy he admits it and he said something funny I was watching a documentary about him and he said the funniest thing he said I'm the hero to people who think people like me are heroes I had what a drag a I mean he's just did in this horrible situation he doesn't admire the people that admire him but he gets admired by them all the time well it's sort of like Peter Pan it's like well he's king of the Lost Boys he doesn't get Wendy either right she grows up she has a family he asked to content himself with Tinkerbell and you know what Tinkerbell doesn't exist well that's what happens when you don't grow up that's a representation of culture that's a nasty one eh he'll will kiss us we'll kiss a statue of Stalin who cares that he murdered 30 million people culture well you know in the university you hear a lot about the patriarchy and how impressive it is it's like yeah Yeah right definitely no kidding but you know it's kind of useful as well since it provides light the food and all of that which you know kind of counterbalances it to some degree culture has a pause development and a negative element the individual has a positive the negative element nature has a positive element and a negative element and if people tell you a one-sided story which is the ideological story they leave out that they say all culture is terrible the human being is a Despoiler and nature is perfect it's like no nature kills you culture keeps you alive and there's things about you that are honorable and good as well as things about you that aren't and you need to know both of those and that's what the great stories tell us all right

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,417,893

Rating: 4.8783197 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, mythology, phoenix, Jung, Freud, Eliade, University of Toronto, Free Speech, historical, jordan peterson, political correctness, existentialism, lecture, personality, peterson, jordan, archetypes, archetype, christianity, religion

Id: HbAZ6cFxCeY

Length: 138min 33sec (8313 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/latenerd]

Because how dare these uppity SJW's ever complain about it, that's a slippery slope to the communist gulags, bucko.

[u/Genshed]

Having wealthy white men in charge of everything is natural, therefore good, and every effort to alter that is unnatural, therefore bad. /s

[u/[deleted]]

How can a structure be masculine? Is it because it's dominant? Does that mean dominance=masculinity, and if so, does it just mean hierarchical structures are hierarchical? Why does he like tautologies so much??

I have so many questions