The Significance of Snakes in Human History | Jordan B Peterson

more mythological representations I like these quite a bit so there's their Hitler as you know knight of the faith essentially with I suppose that's a recreation of the Christian Holy Spirit dove you know except it's an eagle which is a bird of prey and and a prayer and uh what do you call those things a scavenger right so that's kind of interesting but that's Hitler as Knight of the of the blood roughly speaking and there this is an allied war poster essentially that assimilates the Nazis to poisonous snakes and you know we don't like poisonous snakes very much and and it's probably because they've been preying on us for approximately 20 million years because snakes and primates humans in particular co-evolved and so the snake is a representation of that which lies outside the comfortable domain and that can be you know a snake obviously or it can be an abstract snake and the abstract snake is your enemy or an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart and this is going to be a bit of a leap for you but there's this ancient idea that developed in what in the West over thousands of years far predating Christianity that at least its origins that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan which is like of what the hell it's a very strange idea but the reason for that as far as I can tell is that you know we have this circuitry that detects predators and a predator a good representation of a predator is a snake or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon or something like that or a dinosaur with lots of teeth or a shark that lives under the water and will pull you down you know because I suspect a lot of our ancestors met a nasty death at the hands of Nile crocodiles while they were in the African veldt going down to get some nice water so you know that's the thing that jumps up and pulls you under and you know that happens in your own life because things jump up and pull you under you know and use the same circuitry we used the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators who were likely to invade our space and so and and human beings are capable of abstraction and so you know you could think about the real predator that might invade your space and maybe that's a snake or a wolf or or some kind of monster you know and that's pretty concrete and biological chimps have that you know chimps don't like snakes and so if you a chimp comes across a snake in the wild then like a big let's say I don't know what live with chimps I don't know if they're pythons but they have constrictors there anyways so you know maybe there's like a 20 foot constrictor and this and the chimp like stays a good distance away from it but it won't leave and then it has this particular cry that it uh ters that's called a snake rat WRA a and so it makes this noise which means something like holy that's a big snake and I actually mean that because the circuits that primates use to utter distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse just so you know that's why people with Tourette's syndrome swear because like what what's up with that how can you have a neurological condition that makes you swear well it turns out that guttural affect Laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit and that's the speech circuit we share with the predator alarms of other primates so that's pretty cool so anyways this chimp stands there and makes this snake noise and then all bunch of other chimps come running and you know some of them stay a fair ways from the snake and some of them get pretty close but they'll stand there and watch that snake for like 24 hours you know so they're fascinated by it and you know if you've handled snakes you can understand that fascination because they're fascinating you know and they're numinous I would say that that's the right way of putting it at numinous is a word that means intrinsically meaningful like a fire you know you can't look away from fire you know if you're sitting in front of a fireplace it's like you're staring at it and that's because you're all descended from the first mad chimpanzee who had some weird genetic mutation that made it impossible for him to stay away from fire it was like the first chimp arsonist you know and and he figured it out and well hey now he was a chimp with a stick with fire on it like that's a mega chimp man and so you know we have that mutation in spades and no wonder so anyways so they make this you know they have this reaction to snakes and chimps that have never seen a snake if they're in a cage and you throw a rubber snake in there it's like bang they hit the roof but then they look at the snake you know it's so it's like it's terrifying and fascinating at the same time and you should look at the snake because you want to know what it does but you should stay away from it because it's a snake so you you're kind of screwed in terms of your motivations right one is get the hell away and the other is well don't don't let that thing do anything that you're not watching and so that's really the reaction we have to the unknown it's terrifying but we watch it and then you know the meta story is that not only do we watch it but we go explore it and so you might think well back in the Garden of Eden so to speak when we were living in trees the snakes used to come and eat us and and our offspring more likely and you know we weren't very happy about that and then we figured out how to maybe maybe by accident drop a stick on a snake and that was a good thing because the snake didn't like that and then maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to like actually take a stick and like whack the snake with it and you can believe that the first primate who figured out that was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire and so we're pretty good at whacking state snakes with sticks which is why Springfield has a snake whacking day it's devoted to nothing but that right I don't know if you know that Simpsons episode but it's quite comical so well so then you think about the snake as a predator and it's the thing that invades the garden always be you just can't keep snakes out of the damn garden no matter how hard you try and then you think of snakes and maybe you think of meta snakes and like a meta snake would be also a predator but maybe that's the predator that represents the the destructive spirit of the other tribe because chimpanzees for example are quite tribal and they definitely go to war with one another and so you think you abstract out the idea of the predator to represent malevolence as such and then you take that one step further and you realize that the worst of all evil predators is the human capacity for evil and then at that point you know you're starting to I would say psychologize or spiritual eyes the idea of danger and making it make it into something that's conceptual and something that's psychological and something that you can you can face sort of on mas I mean one of the things people had to figure out was how do you deal with danger and so you feel figure out how you deal with a specific danger but then because human beings are dance so damn smart they thought well what if we considered the class of all dangerous things and then what if we considered a a mode of being that was the best mode of being in the face of the class of all dangerous things well that's a lot better you get you know you could solve all the dangerous problems all at once instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous thing and that's basically as far as I can tell where the hero's story came from and the hero story is basically you know there's a community it's threatened by the emergence of some old evil often represented by a dragon sort of typical say of the Lord of the Rings stories there's a hero often a humble guy but not always sometimes a knight decides he'll go out there you know and chase down the snake maybe even or the serpent or the dragon maybe even in its lair and he'll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him from you know useless naive Hobbit into you know sword wielding hero and he fronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had enslaved and then comes back transformed to share what he's learned with the community it's like well that's the human story fundamentally and that's that's our basic instinctive pattern and it's represented in narratives constantly and that's partly what this see this has meaning you know what this means why why do you know well you know because it draws on symbolic representations that you already understand you understand that a mess of tooth snakes is not a good thing and that may be the sensible thing to do is stomp them and it's not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what the poster means and so you know that's two different representations of Hitler that's sort of the pro-hitler representation and I would say that's the anti-hitler representation and you know that's the real Hitler who at this point does not look like a very happy clam

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 42,075

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology

Id: Wo4iN7AGbsk

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020