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May 2, 2013 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:47:04

Maps of Meaning 08 (Harvard Lectures)

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	No, exactly.
	That's too bad.
	An alien?
	An alien?
	Yeah, this does.
	Beginning with my reproduction.
	At least from the conceptual level between group identification and whatever stage of moral thinking might come after it.
	And the idea here is, well, you think of this initial stage as childhood, and that undergoes a force, the presumptions of childhood undergo a force of disintegration in adolescence.
	I suppose mostly for biological reasons, which is to say that because of physiological changes, The environment to which someone has to have changes dramatically in adolescence.
	The world is in the same place.
	So whoever you were as a child has to undergo a marked revision in order for you to become an adult.
	But the problem is that at the age of 14 or so, you're not really ready to become an adult, so to speak, whatever that means.
	And the intermediary process there is a group identification line.
	I'm just trying to draw an analogy loudly between that and the notion of an apprenticeship.
	And then the final stage is another accomplished by means of another descent as a consequence of more anomalous information.
	The anomalous information, I guess this time, would be the fact that there are more than That there is more than one group, I guess.
	That might be the simplest way to describe it.
	Now, if you're a traditional Jew, for example, that's not such a problem, unless you have to share a territory with a traditional Christian.
	In which case, the fact of group identification, the mere fact of it, then becomes a form of anomalous information that requires a solution.
	Now the solution can be, obliterate your enemy, Which is, I think, equivalent to denial of anomalous information.
	Because the problem with obliterating your enemy is that you're making the presupposition that all of the things that he had to offer you were worthless.
	And I think that's probably an error of an immense size.
	The other thing is that just because you get rid of someone, you tend not to get rid of the ideas that they represent, right?
	Those ideas pop up again, sometimes in the form of schismatic movements within your own culture.
	If an enemy culture has been successful, that sort of indicates that it's come up with ideas that are good.
	And the chances are that you're not going to get rid of those ideas if you get rid of those people.
	So it's kind of a temporary solution at best.
	It might also be really counterproductive in the long run, because the things that your enemy knows might be things that you need to know, but maybe not right now.
	It's always possible, too, that they know some things you don't.
	So, I think that there's, anyways, I guess what I'm trying to say in a sense is I think there's an analogy on the socio-political level between the repression of enemy groups and the process of repression of anomalous information at the level of the individual.
	So, that's an analogy that I'll make much more of in the last part of this course.
	Well the question is, where do you go from group identification And the answer to that seems to be that, well, the next stage, or at least an ancillary or auxiliary stage, is to note that there's a process that characterizes the construction of groups themselves.
	Which is, I think, if you think your group is valuable, it's very difficult to make the claim that the process that made the group isn't more valuable.
	You see, you're sort of trapped by that presupposition right off the bat, so to speak.
	If your group's valuable, the process that created it is more valuable.
	I think that's a necessary logical conclusion.
	Now, I don't know if I told you this story before, but there's an interesting example of this sort of argument in the New Testament, which I actually quote later in this manuscript, where The Pharisees are attempting to trap Christ into saying something heretical so that they can throw him in prison and kill him and whatever.
	And he says to one of them, essentially, you're the sort of person who would have killed the prophets who constructed the group that you worship, which is really It's an immensely effective insult, and also absolutely true in that particular context.
	I don't remember which book that's in at the moment.
	I kind of read that as the comment that more or less sealed his fate.
	It's such an incredible insult.
	He uses a variant of that as well, which I don't remember about the age, right?
	If you stay in here, which is your group identification, you forfeit this process.
	And the problem is that the process that constructed the group is more valuable than the group.
	So if you identify with your group as an authoritarian structure, then you necessarily sever your connection with the process that constructed the group, and that constitutes a form of spiritual death.
	So in terms of constructing the appropriate hierarchy of values, when you realize that there's something wrong with the answer of group identification to the processes of life, or to the questions of life, the next stage is to recognize that there is the possibility of identifying with the process.
	That's what this diagram is trying to represent.
	Now I would say in primitive, so to speak, in primitive self-cases, the person who occupies this position is the shaman.
	They go through their own individual process of initiation that isn't necessarily group fostered.
	And I was thinking about that this morning.
	It's also the case that the shaman, this is interesting, the Asiatic shamans, for example, the Siberians, Have a working vocabulary that's many times greater than that of their compatriots who aren't shamans.
	Because they're the repository of the entire oral tradition of the tribe.
	Which means they have it memorized, because they can't write.
	So it is the case that the shaman is not only someone who's an individual in the true sense of the word, being outside of the group, although a necessary part of it.
	He's also the master of the group.
	To a much greater degree than any of the people who are normally identified with it.
	Well that's a good lesson, because what it says is that to get here you really have to have been there, which is something that I was trying to point out last week.
	You don't get, like we think, I think we think in the West, and this is one of the pathologies of primitive self-help psychology, that you can get from here To here, this is usually vaguely construed.
	Without this, and of course without any of these intermediary stages.
	And that's a big mistake.
	Because this is literally somewhere beyond this, and that means it has to be everything this is plus something else.
	So, okay, so you said in the class that we can pass on wisdom through generations, right?
	That wisdom can be passed on through conscious abstraction or whatever.
	Yeah, through a lot of different processes.
	So it seems that if it can be passed through the spoken word or through stories, it seems that people don't necessarily have to go through chaos to advance to another identity, if this stuff can be passed on.
	I'll go through mental chaos.
	Well, the fact that the information is there doesn't necessarily, as you're pointing out, doesn't necessarily mean that your contact with it isn't traumatic.
	Okay, hang on.
	I have another diagram that will address that problem.
	That's a good point.
	It depends on the level at which the anomalous occurrence occurs, basically.
	And there are more and less traumatic levels.
	I mean, I tried to tell you a little bit about that before, the notion that, you know, If you're going somewhere and one of your ways of getting there is blocked, well that constitutes an anomalous occurrence.
	But if you're going somewhere and then the place itself disappears, that's a completely different class of events.
	And the events in the first class, well they're anomalous, and the events in the second class are anomalous, but obviously having to switch plans is nowhere near as traumatic as having to switch ideals.
	Right.
	So you might think of that as a qualitative difference.
	It's not that simple and we'll take a look at it.
	It's like a tree.
	It's very much like a tree.
	Okay, so this is what we were discussing last week.
	Now, it's obvious That people can tolerate a certain amount of anomalous information.
	It's equally obvious that there are severities of anomalies, so to speak, that people construe as intolerable.
	And one of the things that we need to do is to construct a conceptual model that will help us to determine under what circumstances anomaly is How to determine the relative affective intensity of an anomalous occurrence?
	Because obviously some forms of anomaly are trivial and some are major, and it would be good to figure out under what circumstances they're trivial and under what circumstances they're major.
	One of the things I want you to keep in the back of your mind, and this is really useful, even for those of you that are interested in psychopathology, say at a scientific level, here's why.
	You know, if you develop a phobia, The theory for the development of the phobia is exposure to the thing that caused the phobia.
	That's right, the mouse, say, if you're afraid of mice.
	But the problem with that theory is that the cure is exposure, too.
	It's been very difficult in the behavioral literature to figure out why exposing yourself to the same thing that causes your problem cures you when it was exposure to that thing to begin with that caused the problem.
	This is a very difficult problem.
	But, you know, there's two types of hero myths.
	Two basic types.
	And one hero myth is where you accidentally encounter the unknown, and then you die.
	Another hero myth is where you encounter it voluntarily, and then you live.
	And that's the difference between the kind of exposure that creates pathology and the kind of exposure that creates healing.
	Because if you're a behavior therapist, for example, what you do is you set up the circumstances so that the person you're trying to treat voluntarily encounters the anomalous experience.
	So basically you cast them, you're a dude playing out a ritual, And in the ritual, you're casting them in the role of the hero who's willing to encounter the anomalous information voluntarily.
	And this isn't just a trite re-reading of the psychopathological literature of exposure.
	We know, we know, that if you take someone who's afraid of an elevator into the elevator, and they avoid, because people will do that.
	So even if you get them in the elevator, they'll look at it.
	If you can convince them to take the risk of really exposing themselves to the thing that they're afraid of, which basically means, obviously means, to explore it and to construct a new behavioral pattern as a consequence, then they get better.
	If you're agoraphobic and you're afraid of a mall, and you go to the mall and your symptoms come up and you run away, that makes your problem worse, not better.
	If you go to the mall and your symptoms come up and you stay there as a consequence of your own choice, your symptoms will hit a plateau Like, an intense plateau.
	It'll deteriorate over time.
	That cures you.
	So, well, this is the lesson from...
	And again, I want to point out, you know, Freud's Oedipal myth, that's a failed hero myth, because Oedipus encounters, he sleeps with his mother, that's created an incest, but I know that's accidental.
	And he blinds himself as a consequence.
	You know, so Freudian...
	I would say that it's reasonable to make the claim that Freudian psychology is a form of religion that's based on a failed hero myth, Which is, as opposed to most religions that have lasted for a length of time, which are always based on successful hero myths, because successful heroism means adaptation.
	If you don't follow that pattern, well, that's the idea of the soul.
	So it's not successful, then, in the end?
	The Unapol myth?
	No, Freudian.
	I don't know what necessary conclusions you can draw from the fact that Freud picked the Oedipal myth, and it's a failed hero myth.
	No, I don't think so.
	No, I don't think so, because Freud thought that the Oedipal mother was the actual mother.
	But that's often the case for someone who's severely neurotic.
	Like, let's say that...
	But Freud was starting from an observation, and then...
	Yeah.
	He didn't start with the biblical complex.
	He didn't start with the biblical myth.
	No, he saw it played out in the periodic patient's lives and then saw the story.
	But he still said, and then saw the mythical story that seemed to map onto the experiences of the patients that he saw.
	But he did say the biblical myth, that's the central problem of life for Freud.
	That's the central problem of life.
	And it's universal for Freud.
	Every culture.
	In every culture, that's the central problem.
	Now that's being criticized on anthropological grounds, which aren't really relevant here.
	But I still think that it's more than just a historical fluke that things arrange themselves that way.
	Because you also have to realize that when Freud and Jung split, the reason that they split, for example, was on the question of whether or not religion served any useful function.
	Freud had taken a myth that was a myth of failure, in a sense, and said, well, that poses the central problem of adaptation.
	But wasn't it primarily the sexual aspect of that, Freud?
	Yeah, it was.
	But you see, the thing about mythology is that it represents sexual union with the mother.
	That's the incest motif.
	And Freud thought of that as something literal.
	He thought, as Freud tended to do, he offered a literal translation of something that was symbolic.
	He said that's actually what it referred to.
	He was using a myth.
	As an analogy, and he was taking the myth at a more concrete level, whereas Jung's approach would be to start with the myth.
	Jung said sexuality in mythology was symbolic.
	Freud said symbolism in mythology was sexual.
	Can you say that again, please?
	Freud said that symbolism in mythology was sexual, and Jung said that sexuality in mythology was symbolic.
	My point is that Freud was tackling sexual problems in the consulting room, not mythical problems.
	Again, though, that's not precisely true, because it was for Freud and the Victorian patients that he encountered.
	Sexuality was problematic because it was contaminated with unknown.
	It wasn't problematic because it was sexuality.
	It was problematic because it was unexplored territory, and unexplored territory for the Victorian neurotics happened to be primarily sexual in origin.
	So he saw sexuality as the presented problem, but it wasn't.
	It was unexplored territory that was the presented problem in the guise of sexual dysfunction.
	Unexplored territory in the consulting room comes in all sorts of forms, and it might come in the form of an unresolved relationship with your mother, who is a form of God, so to speak, when you're a child.
	And you could say that for the struggling neurotic, say that this is a person with a personality disorder, their struggle with the parental situation is an analogue of the process of adaptation in the world.
	So the parents...
	When you're 25 or 30, your parents should no longer be parents.
	They should be other people who you've had an intense relationship with, but who are other people.
	Your parents should be someone else by that point.
	If your parents are still your parents, then the battle you should be playing out in the world is still being played out for you and your family.
	And Freud's neurotic patients were like that.
	They never made it.
	They never made it out of here.
	They never made it to here, much less to here.
	They were still struggling with, well, how do I deal with the childhood environment?
	The thing is that if adaptation, what we're talking about here, as it certainly seems to be based in our most fundamental biological systems, then any concept, any story that you use to talk about it is on some level going to be talking about the same thing.
	So in that sense, of course they were talking about the same thing.
	They're talking about the most basic process.
	Right, that's a good comment.
	That is one of the characteristics of stories that Freud calls the fact that a story is meaningful on multiple levels simultaneously.
	Now, that's a perfectly good introduction to the next diagram here.
	You remember the old diagram Well, you'll see the analogies here.
	You know which one I'm talking about.
	Alright.
	Okay, so before what we had were a bunch of arrows here, right?
	This being the ends, and these being the means to get there.
	But that's not a sufficient way of looking at the problem, and since you already have mastered that way of looking at it, we'll introduce a more difficult level, and that level is that all the ways of getting to an end are also structures that are like the whole structure.
	Which is to say that when you're doing anything, when you're engaged in any activity, You're engaged in a whole nested hierarchy of goal-directed behavior.
	And the nesting goes all the way down to the lowest level of analysis and all the way up to...
	And then how do you construe this?
	Well, you're sitting in this class and you have a certain, you're trying to obtain certain goals in just this lecture.
	And this lecture is nested in this class.
	And this class is nested in your educational curriculum.
	And your educational curriculum is nested in your career goals.
	And your career goals are nested in your culture, and your culture is nested in, well then it gets a little bit more difficult.
	What's your culture nested in?
	Well, I would say it's nested in religious presuppositions.
	What are they nested in?
	Well, it's nested in philosophical presuppositions, then in religious presuppositions, then in behavioral presuppositions, and so on out who knows how far.
	I mean, even within the domain of the class, the single lecture, while you're doing anything in particular, that's a sub-goal that's nested inside the class.
	Like, you're taking notes because this point has relevance at different levels of the class system.
	There's all sorts of procedures that you undertake as the class continues.
	Anyways.
	Now, there's different ways of thinking.
	This is vague, by the way.
	This is going to be a vague lecture because some of the things that I'm talking with you about today, I'm trying to figure out because there were some errors in my original presuppositions.
	I'm trying to clear them up.
	So if you have any comments that you think are particularly insightful, I'd be more than happy to hear them say.
	You can think of this as a corporate structure, too.
	A whole corporation's Going off to do something, and these would be vice presidents, sort of of equivalent status, and then each vice president would occupy a domain.
	He has underlings, and they have their particular story to act out in the domain of the corporation, and they govern some other people, and so on and so forth, all the way down to the bottom level of analysis.
	And even a thing like the corporation, if you think of this as a corporation or any other Any other structure for that matter.
	Again, corporations are nested inside a political structure that's nested inside a philosophical structure.
	That's why people, big businessmen, are generally advocates, at least explicitly, of the free market.
	Because their whole story only maintains its validity.
	Within the context of a whole network of philosophical presuppositions.
	And that's the case in every single level of analysis.
	I guess part of what we're interested in is what's at the highest level of analysis?
	What's out there at the edge?
	I just wanted to ask you if you would point out where you're making corrections as you go along.
	If what?
	Well, you said you were going to make, you said this would be a little vague because you're sort of making some corrections in what you were initially talking about.
	Yeah, well, this is slightly different.
	We're basically dealing with chapter.
	The idea is not necessarily different even on the diagram.
	No, no, it's still, that's right, I'm still in the same ballpark.
	I'm just trying to, this is still the same.
	If there was anything radically different, I just wanted to make sure I noticed.
	Yeah.
	Question.
	Does it necessarily have to be so hierarchical?
	What if you were simultaneously looking towards two separate goals, or what if, could it be the case, could it be the case that your religious story and your behavioral story are at odds?
	And then you're neurotic.
	No, I mean that.
	I mean that.
	Yes, it has to be hierarchical.
	And all this has to be subjugated to...
	That's the question.
	What does it have to be subjugated to?
	That's why I put this diagram up.
	What is that based on?
	Well look, there's going to be lots of situations where you can have story A and story B, and they're going along in parallel, and there's no problem whatsoever.
	Just like there are lots of cases where culture A and culture B occupy the same territory, more or less, no problem.
	But then, now and then, a historical event will pop up, and that event points out those areas where those two parallel stories actually conflict.
	Look, for most of us, most of us Westerners, so to speak, are the educated population.
	There's a conflict, I think, between how we act and our moral presuppositions and how we conceive of the universe from the scientific perspective.
	It's a big conflict.
	Well, most of the time it doesn't make any difference.
	But now and then it makes a big difference.
	And when you say that someone's psychologically integrated, Or when you say someone, when you see someone who has an impeccable character, that might be another way of looking at it, what you see is the fact that all their stories make one story.
	Because they're not working at cross purposes.
	So you could be operating different stories, but they're not going to complete some right now.
	Well, you've got some superstructure.
	If you're integrated, you have a superstructure.
	That I think is relatively explicit, to which all your other ends are made subject.
	And then the question is, what constitutes the king?
	You can look at this at lots of different levels of analysis, okay?
	You say, well, all your different motivational subsystems have to operate in harmony, right?
	So each of them has to take all of the others into account.
	Well, that might be one way of looking at it, sure.
	I was thinking more intra-psychically speaking.
	You have to eat.
	You have to sleep.
	You need social contact.
	Et cetera, et cetera.
	There's all these basic preconditions for your existence that have to be met.
	All of those, and you have specialized biological subsystems that are responsible for ensuring that one of those particular needs is met.
	And the way those systems ensure that is by, I think, by gripping your fantasy when something within you is out of kilter.
	So, for example, if you're in this class, you haven't eaten for five hours.
	While I'm talking, intrusive thoughts about what you might eat afterwards are going to pop into the theater of your mind, because that's the subsystem that's responsible for maintaining your caloric intake, is not being satisfied by your current state of goal-directed activity.
	Your job to adapt is to organize all those motivational subsystems into a unit, such that none of them conflict, and so that all of them work towards the same end.
	So that all of them get what they need, while also paying attention to the fact that every other one gets what it needs.
	Now the same thing exactly can be said about your relationships with other people.
	Because you could say, Just as you have to take all of your needs into account, you're operating in a social environment.
	And to take all your needs into account also means to take into account the needs of everyone that you come into contact with.
	So it is the case even that when you're trying to modulate the environment so that you get what you have to get, a lot of the environment that you're modulating is other people.
	So there's an isomorphism between the way you construct your internal hierarchy And the way that the social hierarchy around you is constructed, a necessary isomorphism, that works all the way up.
	Now the Mesopotamians, they ask the question, who should be king?
	And on the mythical level, that means who should determine destinies.
	And what that means is how should behavior operate, under what ages.
	And the Enuma Elish, which is their creation story, says all gods should be subordinate to Marduk.
	And Marduk's the god who goes out to the unknown and creates the world.
	And that's what this diagram is about.
	That's right.
	That's your group identification.
	So that's a provisional answer to the problem of adaptation.
	The question is, though, What should everything be subordinate to, including your group identification, which is your particular solution to your motivation problems?
	Everything should be subordinate to the process that generates new information out of the encounter with unknown and updates known territory.
	So then, to get right back to your question, all your stories should be arranged in a hierarchy.
	Such that the highest story is allegiance with the process that engages in creative contact with the unknown.
	To the degree that that's not the case, then you've deviated from the path.
	For example, there's another New Testament story where Christ says, he's driving on a cart with a rich man, and the rich man says, what do I have to do to get into heaven?
	And Christ says, we have to sell everything you own.
	And all the disciples are just flabbergasted by this.
	You know, they don't like this.
	They say, well, if that's the case, there's no hope.
	No one's going to do that.
	And then Christ says, well, it's easier for a camel to go through the Ivy League and go through a rich man to enter heaven.
	Now, the reason for that, it has nothing to do with money like that.
	It has nothing to do with money.
	It has to do with the relative importance of goals.
	He says, because this young guy is so preoccupied with his wealth and maintaining it, which is this, that he won't risk this to do this.
	And so, all that that story is pointing out is that if you want this and you won't risk this to do this, then you don't get Your money is just a proxy for that.
	It's false security.
	There's a copy machine right outside the door.
	If you could loan me that for one second, I'll make a copy for everybody.
	Okay.
	I think we could write notes on it.
	It would be helpful.
	Okay.
	Would you consider that pathology, Jeremy?
	Yes.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Look, one of the things that Nietzsche asked in the late 1800s was, are there neuroses of health?
	And by that he meant, can you be properly adapted to a pathological circumstance?
	And the answer is, yes!
	It's like, when you say crime of obedience, What you say is, adherence to this and sacrifice of this.
	That's why most people are a little pathological somewhere.
	Well, it's also that, like, you know, one of the things that the 20th centuries haven't struggled with is the notion of crimes against humanity, right?
	Because the Nazi would say, and accurately would say, look, I'm a trivial individual.
	I was doing my job.
	I was following orders that moved down the hierarchy.
	It wasn't my responsibility.
	Not only that, not only was it not my responsibility, but I was doing what I should have done.
	And you could say, well, those people were just rationalizing their behavior.
	But the point is, is that they're making a valid statement.
	But the Nuremberg trial says, look, for reasons we don't understand, which is to say, for reasons we can't make explicit, there are certain rules you can't break, even if you're morally Upright from this perspective, which is to say, there's certain orders you can't follow.
	I think that's tough, isn't it?
	Because if you're a soldier in wartime and your commander, say three or four levels of hierarchy up, says, you know, shoot these villagers.
	And you don't shoot them.
	You're dead.
	But the Nuremberg Trial says, tough luck.
	Basically.
	There are certain orders that you can't follow.
	And then the question is, what does that mean?
	There are certain orders you can't follow.
	Well, it means that there's something outside of what you can define explicitly, or what your culture's defined explicitly, or it doesn't mean anything.
	I would say, well, the crime against humanity, this is the definition.
	You do what this says, instead of what this says, and that's the definition.
	Perhaps it just means that when you come to the Nuremberg, you realize for the first time that you're actually subject to two times.
	Okay, and the tyrants would be?
	The person who gave you the order, and the person who tells you that you shouldn't follow it.
	And we don't know why on both ends.
	Fair enough.
	Although I do think that the Nuremberg trials were...
	I don't think that it's reasonable to construe them as the response of one tiredness to the excesses of another.
	I don't think so.
	I think there's more to it than that.
	Even though, you know, for the person who's caught in the middle, I mean, they're in trouble, aren't they?
	It looks the same.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	How do you go from a pathological individual to a pathological society?
	Well, that's the whole last half of the course.
	Because that's what I'm interested in.
	Because these isomorphisms exist, the simple answer to that is that your personal response to anomalous information in a way that's not trivial determines the course of your culture.
	That seems like a completely ridiculous statement, but whatever.
	I still think it's true.
	So, a culture that's made up of people who take a characterologically negative stance towards anomalous information, that's a fascist state.
	That's why, well, the thing about a fascist state is it's not just a political structure.
	We have to remember that our current states are bodies of law, which means their explicit descriptions of behavioral patterns That when put into operation are actually embodied.
	They're rules about how to act, which is to say that what a state is, is a description of an ideal personality.
	All the laws in a state constitute the description of an ideal personality, because what a law says is, at least you can't do this.
	So at least it defines what you should be by exclusion.
	And all those things that you can do, well that makes up the ideal citizen, and everyone who's The member of the same culture is a duplicate of that ideal citizen.
	So then the question again is, what's the ideal citizen?
	And someone who's bureaucratically inclined will say, well, the ideal citizen does exactly what the hell you tell them to do.
	And that makes everyone predictable.
	But then there's this leap above that morality which says, well, no, the ideal citizen knows what to do and what not to do, according to the rules.
	But when the circumstances change, Or when the circumstances call for it, then there's another morality that supersedes the group identity, upon which group structure is necessarily maintained.
	That's the thing that's so interesting, is that the harder you try to ensure that these boundaries are impermeable, the more likely you are to kill everything that's inside here.
	Just in regards to the social, taking on the identity of the group, the hardest question for anyone is what should I do?
	And that's why it's so easy to be told what to do.
	Well, yes, sure, sure, of course.
	Look, we do not want to ever Make the mistake of presuming that there aren't tremendous advantages to staying inside here.
	I mean, there's no anomaly.
	Well, what's the problem?
	Well, there's no interest.
	I mean, because if you, by definition, if you exclude novelty, you exclude incentive reward.
	So, what happens is that you get protection at the cost of all the interest in life.
	Now, what this alternative route says is, Well, if you face the anomalous information, there's enough interest generated there, which is enough hope, so to speak, that that in itself will provide a barrier against all of the negative potentialities that occur as a consequence of doing this.
	Which is to say, if you're willing to take the leap outside, there are phenomena that you'll encounter there that will protect you from all the negative things that you've encountered there.
	So here, everything is predictable, but sterile.
	That's why in mythology, in a kingdom ruled by a tyrant, everything dries up, right?
	The rivers disappear, the trees die, the grass dies, everything's dead, and everything's old.
	But as you just pointed out with the Nurnberg trials, that's not necessarily true.
	You jump outside, you're quite likely to end up dead, depending on how strong...
	No, no, the people who were tried at Nurnberg didn't jump outside.
	No, but I mean, I was referring back to the fascist state that you were discussing.
	The person, if someone four or five levels up orders you to kill these villagers...
	Yes.
	If you don't do it, you're dead.
	And that's jumping outside.
	You have to read the second volume of the Gulag Archangelica.
	Because that answers that question.
	And there's no simple answer to it.
	If you want to start the book, there's a chapter at the end, which you probably read in the personality text last year, called The Soul in Barbed Wire.
	And this is exactly the issue that Solzhenitsyn discusses.
	When the price for stepping outside is death, then what?
	Well, read the book.
	Because it's the only book I know that...
	Well, there have been other books written like that.
	But he really addresses the question.
	So either you die or you stay in? - Well, and-- - Aren't there a term of the sanctions? - Well, one of the things that's not necessarily, because the thing is, the threats for stepping outside, It's like, this chaos might mean death.
	I mean, this is a real thing, you know, it's not just a circle on the wall.
	That's right, it's not just a circle on the wall.
	It might kill you.
	I mean, people get depressed and then they shoot themselves.
	You know, it's like...
	This is really dangerous, and one of the things that might happen to you might be killed.
	That's why in one of the standard features of a hero mythology is the negative encounter with the group, right?
	In the New Testament story, for example, Christ is exposed to his peers, all who say, kill him.
	And so that's the price for stepping outside, even though, theoretically, he's the embodiment of the process that revitalizes the group.
	Last week you talked a little bit about the empty egg, how it's similar to the processes.
	Right, right.
	Well, that's what this is trying to represent.
	Right.
	But what's the motivation for Confronting that which might kill you.
	And I feel like that's just sort of, what characterizes that empty egg of that?
	What is it that motivates someone to step into chaos?
	Well, I would say, again, it's anomalous information here.
	Full, I see what this is.
	What would you put?
	No, it's full of this.
	It's full.
	What characterizes it?
	You say anomalous information motivates a movement.
	Yeah, well, the simple answer to that is faith.
	One of the things that Jung said that was useful about a religious tradition and the use of religious traditions in psychotherapy is that if, prior to the dawn of empirical medicine, a medical personality, if you were suffering from a particular disease,
	would tell you a story about a god who had the same problem, and you're Mythical participation in the adventures of that god would constitute a curative ritual.
	Some of these rituals are very, very elaborate.
	Now, you could say that the purpose of a religion, in a sense, is to provide you with a body of images that describes how this process works, and that points out, in a sense, that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and its identification with that image It can sort of provide a barrier against all the chaos that's outside of the group.
	So that's what identification with the central figure of a given religion, that's what that's supposed to do.
	So it's almost, look, here's an example.
	Vampire movie.
	Vampires hate crosses, right?
	A vampire is a symbol of the unknown.
	There's some sexual contamination there as a general rule, too.
	It's a night creature.
	The sun destroys it.
	And you can be protected against it by the cross is one of the things that works in horror stories.
	A frequent occurrence is, you know, this vampire is after a priest.
	He holds up a cross and it's glowing wind.
	He's out of there.
	And then the priest gets afraid.
	And the glow goes away, and the vampire eats him.
	It's the same notion.
	He takes his blood away.
	Well, that's the best answer I knew about that question.
	I think, okay, so the first thing I want to say is that, so you called the second envelope there identification with the group.
	Right.
	That's adolescence.
	Okay, that's adolescence.
	You said that even when you try to be an individual, you're still part of a group of people who think that they're individuals.
	So I would say it would be possible to think of the top oval as identification with a group whose main motivation is the process.
	I think that's still possible.
	And the second thing I want to say is That's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, although it's a group composed of people whose job is to revitalize groups.
	So it's not a group.
	It's not a group.
	It's a metagroup.
	And this is a metagroup.
	No, this is an important point, because one of the things that I brought up yesterday, or last week, was there's two types of primary philosophical question, in a sense, about morality.
	The first question is, what is the good?
	And that's a question.
	But then there's a meta-question, which is, what is the nature of the process?
	It provides answers to the question, what is the good?
	Now, a group answers the question, so what is the good?
	Being a Nazi, What is the nature of the process that allows you to answer the question, what is the good?
	Well, that's identification with a metagroup, and a metagroup is the group of all individuals whose job is to revitalize the group.
	I think that is possible to identify with that.
	Fine, fair enough.
	The second thing I want to say is that I don't think that it's possible for everyone to attain that level.
	Although I'd like to.
	What do you mean, not possible?
	I think that some people, temperament-wise, are not...
	So you say that the top level...
	No, the monsters you encounter are exactly your size.
	Right, right, right.
	But you've said that shamans are people in that upper oval, right?
	I would say that.
	Okay, so now the Mayans and the Aztecs believed that not everyone could be a shaman.
	That's true.
	That only certain people with a certain unconscious You know, a certain unconscious strength could be one.
	And so I think that it's, you know, some people just have a...
	Okay.
	Again, I want to go...
	Well, that's a perfectly reasonable objection, in a sense.
	But it's also the case that heroism, in a sense, occurs at different levels of analysis.
	So let's...
	I want to show you another diagram then.
	Okay.
	Oh, well, here, let's do a simpler one first.
	So there was this idea, right?
	That's how your plans are actually organized.
	And under some circumstances, you have...
	Plan A or Plan B, and they're both more or less, one is as good as the other.
	That doesn't really work, but it's a reasonable way of, because almost always, you do Plan A because it's better than Plan B, at least you think it is.
	So it occupies a position that's higher up in the hierarchy, and you'll shift down to Plan B if you have to.
	So, that's where I kind of said, well, you have two alternative plans, and this would be the representation where, well, no, you just, it's only one plan that's nested.
	Ultimately, you can only do one thing at a time.
	That's the problem.
	That's the problem.
	That's right.
	That's why, that's actually why we have intra-psychic conflict, I think, because we have one output apparatus and a dozen input apparatuses, and only one gets control at a time.
	So that's the nature of conflict.
	It is when motivational system A is saying run like hell, and motivational system B is saying, well, let's get something to eat, and motivational system C is saying, well, we should actually go visit our friends, and so that's conflict, and there's only one output, that's right, that's affective dysregulation.
	But you've got one output that serves one of the goals.
	That's true, that's true.
	That's what we're hoping for.
	One output that serves all goals, all goals that are valid.
	That's what we're looking for.
	What behavioral pattern best satisfies all conceivable motivational goals in a social context composed of individuals who are doing exactly the same thing?
	There's more to it.
	It works over time.
	It's stable enough to maintain itself, and flexible enough to readjust.
	That's the criteria for the solution.
	That's listed out in there somewhere.
	So yes, temporality makes a big difference.
	Another attraction for authoritarian societies is they work, but not for very long.
	They're not very good at They're not very good at power transitions.
	When the king dies, all the people that he squashed are just squashed people, because they don't make very good kings, and that sort of makes the authoritarian state decline.
	So, okay, now, let's look at how you actually maybe choose between different alternatives.
	Now, this kind of touches on some of the things we discussed yesterday.
	You know, this is an interesting question.
	You fail a test.
	Well, that blows your course goal.
	Let's say your course goal was to get an A, now you're going to get a C. And maybe it has some transient effects on your educational attainment.
	Some even more transient effects on your career.
	The valence of the anomalous information, which is the B-, shifts with your framework of reference.
	Say, with regards to this course, it's a catastrophe.
	With regards to my education, it's an inconvenience.
	With regards to my career, well, it's trivial.
	With regards to my life, it's a non-entity.
	So you can switch the valence of an anomalous piece of information, shift with frame of reference.
	That's a useful thing to know.
	So here's the idea.
	If you're trying to get from here to here, And you have a plan.
	But it doesn't work.
	Right?
	So within that larger frame of reference, you undergo a small descent into chaos, and you come up with another plan.
	But the chaos here...
	I mean, this deals with some of the issues you talked about with me at one time, too, about the idea that the chaos that was outside was also inside.
	Well, that's how it works, as far as I can tell.
	The affective valence of this particular anomalous piece of information is bounded by a larger story.
	The thing is, it's a drag that you get a V- from the perspective of the course.
	But the valence of that anomaly is bounded by the fact that it's really not going to hurt your educational goals that much.
	And that it's not going to affect your career at all.
	So there's a domain There's a domain in which the anomalous information is actually valid, and there's a whole bunch of domains where it isn't.
	Now, the problem is sometimes you encounter an anomalous piece of information whose valence is unbounded, and it blows apart whole structures of stories.
	So let's say, this is a bit of a different circumstance, you're hovering on the edge of acceptability for medical school.
	It's like, one more B-, you're out of there.
	You have a professor that everybody gets along with except you, and you get a B- from him or her.
	It's like, you know this is the end of medical school.
	Plus, there's this other residual mystery which is, why does everybody except you get along with this person?
	Maybe this is also something you've noticed in other classes.
	It's like, this particular piece of anomalous information The domain is very unbounded, right?
	It blows the course.
	It blows the educational table.
	We'll say, all you were going to university for was to be a doctor.
	That's it.
	It's like the rest of it.
	It was a means to an end, and that's it.
	You're not interested in biology.
	That's right.
	You don't have any other legs to stand on.
	That's right.
	You've sacrificed your own interest, even, which is a dangerous thing to do, in pursuit of this bounded domain of stability.
	That's gone.
	Well, then you have a piece of anomalous information that's here that just blows whole sequences of stories, and you're depressed.
	So, and the larger the area, like, well, inside each of these, right?
	These are the turtles all the way down.
	The turtles go all the way down.
	Yeah.
	Anyways, the broader the domain that the anomalous information destroys, the more of your life falls into pieces.
	Well, you can think of it in terms of group behavior, too.
	To the degree that you and I share a goal, A threat to that story will unite us as a group.
	So let's say the Republicans hate universities.
	We both like universities.
	Well, therefore, for the purposes of that particular event, we constitute a group.
	But if the Republicans hate, now let's say we go in the university administration, the dean hates science but merely likes the humanities, and you're in the humanities and I'm in the sciences.
	Well, we're two different groups all of a sudden.
	That's right.
	The anomalous information has a different valence for us.
	Our goals determine which, because we've identified with the group, right?
	Our goals are going to determine the elements of the information.
	also who constitutes a valid group.
	This is easier to understand with regard to getting in a medical school or anything like that.
	There's some kinds of information that can plunge you into despair that don't seem to be directly related to any plan of action.
	For example, if you're a delusion of a Okay, next diagram.
	No, this is really good.
	That's right, that's the brief answer to that.
	Look, what this story does, what a story does, literally, Is provide all the events that you encounter with determinate significance.
	And they're all construed, the significance of any event is construed with regards to its perceived relationship to a goal.
	Okay.
	Say that it's the loss of your mother.
	That doesn't seem to affect any story that you can, say, put your finger on.
	Okay, well then the question is, look, this is tough.
	This is a really tough issue.
	I'm glad you brought it up, because a lot of the stories that we participate in aren't explicit.
	We can't state what they are.
	Now, look, for example, I made the case, and you can think about it if you think this is accurate.
	You take something like the American Constitution.
	Okay, that's an explicit body of rules that defines a state.
	So that's a bounded domain, a state.
	But it's predicated In the first of that chapter, I pointed out that Thomas Kuhn, no, Kurt Godel, said that any system that's internally coherent and complete is necessarily predicated on presuppositions that can't be proved from within the system.
	Okay, he's talking about this, I think, this infinite regressive systems.
	Say, well, you can look at Euclidean geometry as an example of this, right?
	You accept the first five axioms, Then you're in the story, and away you go.
	But you have to accept those axioms on faith.
	And I would say, well, those axioms are actually nested in another story, and that story in turn is nested in another story, and so on and so forth as far as you want to look.
	Now, the American Constitution, for example, It's predicated on natural rights.
	That's how I read it anyways.
	Natural rights are a brief description, some explicit, some implicit, of what it means to be human, or what being human means.
	It means lots of things.
	It means that you're equal before God.
	That would be the most fundamental presupposition.
	And that's a weird question.
	That deals with your question, to some degree, about the capability of everybody to get to that highest level of achievement.
	Well, the Constitution is predicated on the notion that everyone has that capacity, universally, equally.
	Everyone has the capacity to follow the growth path, but not necessarily to go to a certain level.
	That's true.
	Look, the level of the activity is individual specific.
	That's why you have individual interests, right?
	That's what makes you individuals.
	Those things that appeal to you and your domain of competence is unique.
	But still, the capacity to engage in this process at some level, we don't care what the level is, as long as you're identifying with the process, you're identifying with the process.
	Well, so it's predicated on these presuppositions that I think have religious, they're derived from religious presuppositions, especially the idea of equality of all individuals before God.
	That idea, when it's explicit form, that's 2,000 years old, and that's it.
	Before that, it sort of hung around.
	The Egyptians thought that the higher-level aristocrats were perhaps equivalent to the pharaoh in terms of their potential for immortality.
	But it wasn't made explicit until about 2,000 years ago.
	So it was implicit.
	So it was the kind of story, before it was explicit, it was in some other form.
	So the question is, we're not conscious of all our stories, which is for me to say, what I mean by that, is that although we have stories, some of them we can't, we don't know they're there.
	We can't explain what they mean.
	Some of our stories, the best we can do is transmit them in images.
	Some of them that we know even less well, the best we can do is act out.
	Okay.
	Does that make any sense?
	It's like we had religious stories.
	They guarded our behavior.
	They constituted the basis for our unions into groups.
	We had these stories, but we didn't know what they meant.
	So the story was encoded in the form of image and action, and not coded in the form of any sort of explicit content.
	You couldn't say what it meant.
	You could also say our behavior is better than our storytelling.
	Well, yes, that's exactly the case.
	At least that our stories, it's a causal loop.
	Once you tell the story, it modifies the behavior.
	But I would say, to the degree that you can draw temporal inferences, the behavior precedes the description of the behavior, at least as often as the description precedes the behavior.
	And Nietzsche pointed out that, like most Most Westerners sort of have this presumption that we constructed moral rules, then we followed them.
	Nietzsche said, no, no, no, no, no.
	We had moral rules.
	Then we're embedded in our behavior.
	Then we observed them.
	We told stories about them.
	Then we dissected the stories, and we came up with general principles.
	Then, once having formulated the general principles, we turned around and said that the fact that the general principles existed were the reasons for the behavior.
	Wrong.
	Although, not completely, because once you can tell the story, And once you can make the rules explicit, that can change your behavior, although it's not so easy.
	Yeah, you were saying that the state is predicated upon, like, religious assumptions, and do you think that every state should be a religious state and, like, just make that explicit?
	No, because usually what religious means is that it means dogma, not spirit, right?
	The reason that the church and the state were separated, I think, was quite a complicated idea.
	You have to make a distinction when you talk about religious structures between the explicit beliefs and the spirit that moves the entire religion.
	It's the same distinction that Dostoevsky was trying to make in the Grand Inquisitive, where the dogmatic part of the Catholic Church is tyrannical.
	Absolutely tyrannical.
	All it's concerned with is the imposition of order.
	But then there's this other part that's signified in Dostoevsky's story by Christ.
	When those two come into contact, the dogmatic aspect attempts to kill the creative aspect, but in Dostoevsky's story, the tyrant lets him out the back door.
	Which is again, that's why that's a brilliant story.
	The problem with a state that's religious is that the religion becomes dogma, and I think part of the reason that the church and the state are separated in part is another barrier to stopping that from happening.
	But I would also say that the American state, it is religious, it's Protestant.
	It's structured.
	It's like what Jung said about organized religion being designed to prevent you from having religious experiences.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, yes, that's what a dogma does.
	And a good thing, too.
	It's a good thing, because prior to the adolescent stage, you don't want that sort of experience.
	Like, you don't want to expose your child to the unknown.
	Expose them in very measured doses under controlled conditions in a secure environment.
	And then only when you can't do that anymore do you say, well, you're on your own.
	And the reason you say that is because it's true.
	It's like, you know, your mother can't get dates for you.
	That's just a condition of life, at least in our culture.
	That's just reality.
	Right, we were talking about implicit stories.
	So let's look at how these stories get constructed.
	Well, this is an idea.
	Yeah, this is a new one.
	Okay, so here's your nested story structure.
	All the way down there are stories.
	Well, how do the stories come about?
	They come about, empiricism, I put that in for reasons we can argue about, but these are all different ways that we figure out how to behave.
	And sometimes we figure out how to behave here, and we move back here.
	But sometimes we figure out how to behave here, and we move up here.
	And each of these levels informs and alters all the other levels.
	For those stories that are most profound, The stories that we really understand poorly, what's happened?
	Well, if you put four people on an island and they can't talk, they're deaf and dumb, they're going to organize their behavior into a particular structure.
	And that structure takes into account, we're assuming that it's a healthy society.
	People say, well, that's relativistic, right?
	There's lots of different sorts of healthy societies.
	I think that's a crock, by the way.
	Anyways, they have a set number of problems to solve, and the problems are, how does each individual fulfill those tasks they have to fulfill in order to live in the presence of the other people who are doing the same thing, in a domain that's bounded by whatever resources happen to be there.
	So these people who can't talk, can't use language, are going to modify each other's behavior by an exchange of information.
	Reinforcements, positive reinforcements, negative reinforcements, punishments.
	We always modify each other's behavior in every social interaction by gesture and look and attention and inattention.
	They're going to construct a way of being that has a structure, but none of them are going to be able to say what it is.
	Take that analogy as just an idea and imagination and extend that to groups that compose thousands of people.
	We've been interacting over hundreds of thousands of years.
	All that social behavior, from all that social behavior emerges a pattern insofar as the culture is successful.
	Well, we imitate behaviors that we see as successful.
	We play with the imitations and ritualize the play, and dramatize the rituals, and then we collect our information about how to behave into images.
	We formalize it into myths.
	And once you have a religion established, which is a codified description of acceptable behavioural patterns, you can start drawing general rules from it, and you can start criticising, and so forth and so on.
	And each emergent level of abstraction alters the function of all the previous levels.
	And that's how we construct our stories.
	Now the danger, of course, is that having abstracted up the story, say part of the story, You can criticize it and destroy it without even understanding what it was that you were destroyed.
	And I think that's what we've done once we got to this level.
	At all these levels, we were storing behavior and analyzing.
	We developed a scientific methodology that said, if that's not what the universe is like, bang!
	Here go all the stories.
	This is some kind of a hierarchy of stories all the way down to philosophy.
	But then I don't understand how to rationalize it.
	Well, the bridge from philosophy to rationality doesn't seem to be qualitatively different.
	Science was originally called philosophy.
	Right.
	Right.
	But look, all I would say here is that up to this point, You're starting, of course, by saying that there's two completely different ways of knowing.
	Right, yes, that's why I said I didn't know if I should put this in here.
	Right, so it's confusing to see that.
	It is confusing, absolutely.
	And that's probably the problem with this particular diagram.
	Something happened here.
	What happened here was that from here to here, When we said knowledge of the world, what we meant was knowledge of the world plus knowledge of how to behave.
	When we got to here, what we said was that the world was a place where facts, that the world was a place of facts.
	And we saw that the world of facts wasn't constructed the way the world that you act in was constructed in our images, which is to say, there isn't a god in heaven and the devil below, and man isn't at the center of the universe from a factual perspective.
	And from the empirical perspective, it seems very unlikely that the world was created in seven days, and so on and so forth, and it looks like there was evolution.
	And that really played havoc with this whole sequence of stories.
	The problem was these stories were about the world as a place to act, and not about the world as a collection of facts.
	So we made a category error here, I think, and undermined our belief in our accumulated culture without ever understanding it explicitly.
	So that maybe shouldn't be there, but it does come at the end of the process of abstraction, I think, from a historical perspective.
	Does that help?
	Do you still have a residual concern?
	I think the empiricism that you have there is not the empiricism that everyone else thinks.
	It's the empiricism that you think.
	It's the empiricism that you would like us to attain.
	No, you shouldn't get that complicated with this.
	I just put that here because it looked to me like it was at the end of a historical change of development.
	But it's qualitatively different in some ways than these things.
	Okay, this represents historically.
	Well, it's complicated, because...
	I would say yes.
	But it's not so simple, because...
	No, no, that's the problem.
	That's why it's not...
	No, no, I didn't.
	There should be arrows back and forth all the way up.
	But, okay, so because that's what I said, every time a new level emerges, it modifies all the previous levels and all the levels that are in front of it.
	So you get this loop...
	You get a kind of a multi-dimensional causal loop of phenomena.
	But there does also seem to be a certain amount of historicity to it, which is to say that rational philosophy, or even philosophy, say that at least is an emergent property maybe of complex language use.
	It's only been around for 5,000 years, possibly.
	So, it seems, it's hard to say.
	Is what pre-empirical shaman engage in comparable to philosophy?
	Well, I don't know either.
	There's a lot of argument about this.
	I'm not thinking of this as a simple historical progression, but there's a historical aspect to it, I think.
	The way I see it, it is a qualitative hierarchy, because it seems like empiricism is a point at which you can start experimenting with not only objects and facts, but also with myths, and you can start talking about religions in an objective manner, I guess, which is what you want to be able to do with what you're teaching us.
	Well, that's possible.
	So where philosophy is thinking about these ideas of behavior, empiricism is actually testing out these ideas of behavior and subject to...
	Well, philosophy does some of what empiricism does.
	It's just less formulaically.
	I mean, there's a lot of play back and forth.
	You know, I shouldn't have put this in here because it's causing...
	You can define empiricism instead of what it is in terms of what it does to the things that came before it.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	And that's basically the reason that it's in there.
	That's a very good point.
	It has an effect on, because each of these emergent abilities has an effect on everything that goes before them.
	And empiricism has a dramatic effect on our ability to believe the stories that were constructed up to this point.
	With regards to the historicity of it, it is the case that we organized our behavior before we understood how we did it.
	So our capacity here and here seems to be phylogenetically more ancient than our capacities farther on down the line.
	They also seem to be more linguistically dependent as you move down the chain.
	That's right.
	You get a lot of creative behavior and imitation with primates.
	A lot.
	And they can move a lot of information around that way.
	A lot of cultural information.
	And certainly it's the case that much of the information that we get from each other occurs at that level.
	And I think that's phylogenetically more ancient.
	Merlin Donnell, you remember Merlin Donnell?
	He was here for a while as a visiting scholar.
	He gave a quote a couple years back.
	He wrote a whole book on, about a third of the book, it's called The Evolution of the Modern Mind, on the role of imitation, mimesis he calls it, and its culture-constructing role.
	These are ways of communicating Information about behavior.
	Not only that, there are ways of constructing stories.
	Like Eliade points out, for example, when the Polynesians go fishing, when a Polynesian goes fishing, a primitive or pre-empirical Polynesian, he adopts the guise of the ancestral hero who first fished for the Polynesians.
	Now, Iliade has pointed out that if you go back three generations in preliterate cultures, all the historical events that occurred before that are sort of telescoped into the time that existed before the present time.
	And all they remember is the things that they should remember, which is how to act.
	And how to act, which in this case is how to fish, is to imitate the ritual model of fishing, which is the Polynesian's collection of successful behaviors about how to catch fish that have been stored and transmitted down the generations, using this sort of process.
	If they imitate, say, or maybe you can imagine the Polynesian children playing out the fishing routine.
	It's a ritual as well.
	Who knows, in that culture, maybe it's also something that's dramatic, I don't know.
	So, I think more than a historical chain, this is a chain of obstruction.
	And it increases as you go down.
	And I think it's roughly analogous to this.
	Behavioral information moves from here to here to here.
	First we act, then we make images of our auction.
	Then we tell stories about the images of the auction.
	Then we use words to describe the images of the action.
	And that is the story.
	So, when I read to you a Shakespearean play, I'm using words to activate memories in your imagination of behavioral patterns.
	And that's where the information is.
	It's not in the words.
	That's why you Well, people have said that Shakespeare knew everything that Freud did, for example, that Freud tried to make it explicit, and Shakespeare's still implicit.
	Still, I would say, most of the information's still here, and this system is just cueing it.
	So, that's what we do for kids, too, when we tell them stories.
	Anyways, the point of all this was to kind of describe how our stories get constructed, and you'd ask the question about, Stories that are implicit.
	So you say an anomalous event occurs, and you say, well, like the mother, and you can't say what story it disrupts.
	Well, I would say that's in large part, because as you move outward to larger and larger scale structures of stories, in a sense you move back In a sense, you move backwards in time.
	God, are you sure?
	Well, yeah, because the stories get more and more archaic and less and less explicit.
	So you could ask the average undergraduate, what are the presuppositions of the American Constitution?
	And they might be able to list off the rights.
	And then you say, well, what's outside of that?
	Well, the English libertarian tradition, the English liberal tradition.
	Okay, that's philosophy.
	What's outside of that?
	Well, then what?
	Then what?
	You might get the answer, well, it's the Judeo-Christian culture or the Western tradition.
	Okay, things are starting to get pretty vague at that point, which is to say that the outer levels are still mostly implicit.
	And then the question is, what does implicit mean?
	And I would say, well, what it means is that the information there is still lodged mostly in image and Encoded in behavior, but not explicit.
	So, here's another example.
	There's a group of two-year-olds, pre-verbal two-year-olds, quasi-verbal two-year-olds.
	They're all active in a very complex manner, and you go in there and you study them.
	You're trying to derive rules like Piaget did for their behavior.
	You list all these rules.
	Say, the children are behaving according to those rules, which is wrong.
	They don't know the rules.
	They can't say that.
	Now, if you say they're behaving to rules, what you're saying is that there are rules that can be followed but not stated.
	Okay, fair enough.
	And I would say, well, that's what we're doing too.
	Our rules describe our behavior.
	But the behavior precedes the rules.
	So, in what form are the rules if they're not explicit?
	Like, the children are acting out patterns that you can use words to describe as rules.
	Where are the patterns?
	Where are the patterns coming from?
	And what are they?
	Where are they?
	Well, they're certainly in the children's behavior.
	So I would say they're coded in their procedural memory.
	How'd they get there?
	Well, the children.
	The children watched their parents act, and imitated, and played with the imitation.
	Plus, in their social intercourse, Not only with their parents, but with their parents.
	Their behavior is constantly being modified by the exchange of reinforcers.
	So that constructs a pattern, which you can use rules to describe.
	You can use words to describe, or you can tell a story about the child's behavior, which is what you'd very like to do.
	If you spend all day studying kids, and you went home, you'd say, I saw the cutest thing today.
	Then you tell this story.
	And that would be a way of getting the information about this behavior up a few levels of abstraction.
	You can codify it too.
	I'd say you're engaged in this process.
	Anyways, as you go out levels of analysis, you go back in time, that's one way of looking at it, you also move from the explicit to the implicit, increasingly.
	So when you say, an anomalous event occurs, and I can't identify the story it affects, I would say, well, it's having an impact at a story level that's not explicit.
	So at some level, we're not aware of what our ideal future is?
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	It's unconscious.
	It's coded in these images.
	It's coded in the myths.
	We're not aware of it.
	We're just telling stories about what we do.
	Well, and we're acting it out.
	We're acting it out.
	But look, let's say you're severely psychopathological, and you go and you see a psychologist and you say, This is my ideal future, but this is always what keeps happening.
	Well, I would say there's no isomorphism between what's happening here and what's being stated here, which is to say the person's actions act out a story that the person does not know explicitly.
	Which is why Jung said, you should know the myth that you're living.
	The myth operates here and here.
	And McClellan has noted the same sort of thing.
	I think it's something that's very much analogous.
	He says that That's why he looks at the thematic apperception test.
	Your explicit statements about who you are and what you want do not match your episodic representations.
	And if you want to predict behavior, this is McClellan's point anyways.
	You look here, not here.
	So when he's looking for things like need for achievement, which I think is really interesting because that's a hero analog.
	Cultures that have a lot of Need for achievement-like themes in their children's stories have higher socioeconomic status.
	And that's because those are hero myths that are coded here.
	People act them out.
	They're taught to the kids.
	It's all unconscious.
	Then the question is, what does unconscious mean?
	This is what it means.
	It's coded in behavior, or it's in image.
	It's not yet explicit.
	So this is also a way of trying to address the idea of the collective unconscious in a more Sorry, but back to my mother.
	Yes.
	If that has an enormous impact on anything on my entire life, although...
	It takes all the energy out of your actions.
	Right.
	In no explicit way, I can't tie it to any particular thing.
	There was nothing that I was going to do before that I can't do now.
	Right.
	Or that I shouldn't do now, but it still serves the purpose that it was going to be your mother.
	The goal is a state, which implicitly includes your mother.
	Also, mortality is a good issue, because the problem with the dramatic demonstration of mortality is that it's a form of anomalous information that can knock out your highest levels of stories.
	But I hardly think that the severe repercussions are because I'm faced with my own mortality.
	No, I would say more particularly that the severe repercussions are because the story that you've been telling yourself no longer maintains its validity in the light of an event that's that dramatic.
	And I would say that's an indication that the story you've been telling yourself does not include the fact of mortality as a constituent element and is therefore vulnerable to that as an intrusive event.
	Which is to say, you don't have a story that makes sense of mortality.
	And most of the time...
	Shelly, go ahead.
	I was just going to say, also, I think a mother is a culture.
	A mother is a guide for how to behave in the face of anomalous information.
	That's certainly the case often as well.
	So if you lose a mother, you've really lost You've lost your means of knowing how to behave in the face of anomalous information.
	You've lost the process because you can't go back to your mother and find out how to deal with new information.
	Possibly.
	Here's an example.
	That's a very good point.
	It's much simpler than the way I was going about it.
	Agoraphobic women often experience a dramatic loss in the pre-developmental period of their pathology.
	And agoraphobic people, I think, are people whose stories have collapsed completely.
	What is agoraphobic?
	It's basically fear of leaving any place that's viewed as secure.
	So it used to be called fear of open spaces, but it's more like, it's fear of being away from security, fear to venture out, fear of being away from hospitals or doctors, or actually figures of authority, is really what it boils down to.
	So, you're a 45 or 50 year old woman, your husband dies, your developmental history is, you're a dependent child, you married at the age of 17, you relied on your husband to make your decisions, and he's divorcing you.
	What's happened is your culture has disappeared because your mode of adaptation was anomaly.
	What does my husband think?
	So it's recourse to authority.
	So there's a little authoritarian So you could have anomalous information that pertains either to your specific goals or means or to your story, your process.
	Under what circumstances?
	I haven't lost my mother, but either it's a huge impact because there's some super story implicit in which having your mother is a big part and you realize this, so you've got to find that story somewhere, or You've lost your mode of adaptation.
	That's another possibility.
	Right, which is the process.
	So your ability now to take anomalous information and then reintegrate, you feel you've lost that ability because you've lost your mode.
	That is literally the case with children.
	If they lose it to their parents.
	Because their childhood mode of adaptation is authoritarian, more or less.
	If something anomalous happens, I ask mom and dad, and they tell me what to do.
	So, when you lose a parent at that age, you literally do lose your process.
	It's an authoritarian process, but it's necessarily most of the process.
	I mean, kids do some exploring.
	Authoritative or authoritarian.
	Yeah, well, I was just speaking this roughly, politically.
	There are different modes of adaptation.
	Three of them, actually, I think.
	One is recourse to authority.
	One is decadence.
	You just give up.
	The other is the pattern that we're trying to outline.
	And societies waver between the first two.
	Sometimes the solution is authoritarianism.
	There's too many refugees.
	Let's close the borders and enforce uniformity.
	Or our culture's threatened by forces that we can't tolerate.
	Well, we'll just give up and perish.
	And I think that's what happened to ancient Romans.
	For example, when they were finally overrun, they had an army that was perfectly sufficient to repel the invading forces.
	They ate too many gods and died in digestion, basically.
	So then the Daoists would say, well, if your culture's out of whack, it's because there's too much chaos, or there's too much order, there's too much yin and there's too much yang.
	You have to put the balance back in.
	And then the proper mode of adaptation is walking down the line.
	So that's another example of what we're trying to lay out of this.
	Can I just make a comment on this mother thing?
	It seems to me that what this is to say, this whole picture, to put quite simply, is that we are creatures of habit.
	And your story, which is the domain of the known, includes, well, is really everything that is experienced, which includes all of your history.
	And your mother is one of the most fundamental constituents of your entire history.
	So even if it doesn't have anything to do Specifically with any of your higher-level goals, it's still blowing holes in your story, which dysregulates your...
	Yeah, in some of your stories, for sure.
	Like the stories of going home for Christmas to visit your mother, for example, is pretty much...
	And the older the thing that's there, the larger, the more...
	What's going to cause when it's gone?
	Because the more you count on it.
	Right, the more you depend on it.
	Absolutely.
	Let's see, because the question we're trying to answer here is what can you depend on when there isn't anything to depend on?
	If you lose a little of the coastline, it's not so surprising, but if something drops out of the middle, it's very peculiar.
	Just to make a comment on what we were talking about last week about the possibility of sexual differences, this bit about the mother kind of reminds me of that.
	It seems to me girls do tend to go from here to here without descending to this level quite to the extent that males do.
	Therefore, the death of mothers seems to have more of an influence at times on, like, the adolescent female than on the adolescent male.
	Well, like I said, I've never really thought about, I've never considered the possibility of sex differences in this process, and I'm sure that there are sex differences.
	Well, I'm not even sure about that, but there may be.
	Think of what that'll do to your diabetes.
	You said there were three modes of adaptation?
	Yeah.
	What do you call this or that kind of adaptation?
	Is that exploration?
	Well, that was Jung's turn for it.
	Nietzsche called it will to power, which I think was basically what he was after.
	I don't know.
	He also called it the camel of the lion and the child.
	Right, right, right.
	The cow of the camel.
	So, I don't know what you'd call it.
	The third way is one...
	I mean, there's descriptive terms of all sorts that are being used to describe it.
	It's also...
	You know, you see books that allude to this in the title all the time, like The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham.
	That's another image of this path, because it's balanced between two...
	It's balanced between chaos and order, basically, and it's a razor.
	It is literally a razor's edge.
	Somerset Maugham's book is about somebody who discovers that path, actually.
	I go into the East.
	I just want to think if there's anything that I wanted to talk about today that we didn't actually get at.
	So what's to sum up?
	Well, I wanted to show you the notion of these nested stories.
	And also, they introduced the idea that anomalous information can occur within any bounded domain, and it has a range, and that's something that's very interesting.
	It's like George Kelly said, constructs have a range of convenience.
	It's also the case that anomalous information has a range of effect.
	And there are occasions where you encounter a piece of anomalous information that might take decades to wreak its have-off on all the levels of analysis that it's actually challenged, because you have to figure it out.
	Let's take your example again.
	If the parent dies, there are implications for that at all sorts of different levels of analysis, some of which might not become evident for Every time one of these levels of analysis collapses, that's a mini death of God, so to speak.
	The God that rules The ancient Romans, they used to think that every different room had to go up.
	And I guess in a sense what they were alluding to was the fact that you have different patterns of core-directed activity in every specific context and you shift between them.
	And I read you that Indian myth the other day about The endless cycles of embedded creation and destruction, and that's what these, each of these stories goes through this process of dissent and reconstruction at every different level of analysis.
	When you encounter something really anomalous, then it blows I guess the only way to think about that is in terms of the contact of cultures that hadn't appeared before being isolated.
	Their whole developmental history has been separate.
	Then they come together and it's a terrible catastrophe usually for, well, it's a catastrophe or it's a tremendous opportunity.
	It depends on the circumstances.
	with regards to motivation for social conflict.
	The thing that people are motivated to avoid above all else, I think, are involuntary high-level challenges to these stories. are involuntary high-level challenges to these stories.
	So, we're very much motivated to Eliminate, or ignore, or repress, or otherwise obliterate any evidence that suggests that our higher level structures of adaptation are insufficient.
	Because when we lose those, we lose everything that's nested with them.
	That's the other thing to say.
	An anomaly that's relevant at one level tends to demolish all the levels that are inside.
	All those levels inside are dependent on that story.
	Okay.
	Next class, we're going to talk about some of the ways that anomalous information manifests itself.
	The easiest way to conceptualize that is that anomaly can occur in any of these levels of analysis.
	So, the mirror presence of someone who behaves differently, for example, can constitute a challenge to the integrity of your stories.
	The stories that someone tells, that the foreign tells, that's another example.
	That would be here.
	Alternative myths can wreak havoc on your culture, perhaps certainly the case.
	We think about that in terms of the clash of religions.
	New ideas can blow your stories, and all this information comes in all of those guises, and there's stories about that as well.
	There's stories about its appearance in each of those guises.
	So we're going to talk a little bit about how anomalous information manifests itself, and then the course switches into the last half, which is much more focused Well,
	at the same time, there are individual differences.
	I mean, every individual's episodic.
	Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's...
	Generals in the West are becoming more amorphous.
	But in many cultures, there's a strict distinction between the sexes.
	There were Native American cultures where the men and the women spoke different languages.
	So it depends on the culture, but it certainly...
	There are many cultures where women...
	That's the case.
	Where women had a domain of activity that was their sacred domain, and the same with the men.
	And there was no cross-talk to speak of.
	Women tend to...
	Well, the traditional domains of women have been cloth making, pottery, and agriculture, which are three non-trivial domains.
	Yes, yes, absolutely.
	Of course.
	I was thinking of more specifically cultural issues.
	So, and then I would say, well, yes, the procedural memories, well, just to a certain degree, there are differences there in terms of their habits.
	Isn't the Demeter and Cori story pretty different from the U.S. story?
	Well, like I said, this is something I haven't really worked out.
	Because I don't know, a lot of the feminine images in mythology seem to me to be representations of the unknown, rather than representations of the individual.
	And like Newman would say that, well, the feminine consciousness, construed as the hero, is masculine, symbolically.
	It has nothing to do with gender, except, I suppose, perhaps that The Aztecs, for the Aztecs, a woman who died in childbirth, went to the same heaven that warriors went to if they were killed in battle.
	Well, so I would say even there, and that's pretty much what I really agree, Even the most biological aspect of a woman's role was construed as heroic in that particular case.
	So as equivalent to war, to battle.
	Well, what about the idea that the myths that are part of our culture, such as Disney or some of the ones you showed us, have this sort of prince charming figure and sort of identifies with the hero that goes out and conquers the dragon or whatever for the princess or rescues the princess.
	That people will identify along gender lines, that men are taught to identify, or boys are taught to identify with the prince, and to what extent women are taught to identify with the Barbie doll or the princess or the female character.
	Well, this is an unresolved issue.
	I think one of the reasons that That fairy tales tend to, and this is a nice idea in light of the Aztec notion, that fairy tales tend to portray women, say, as dependent, so for someone to rescue them.
	Well, I would say the reason for that is because, this is my own personal interpretation, is that in more traditional cultures, which I would just say are cultures that don't have access to reliable birth control, women are necessarily put into a dependent position by their biology.
	And the notion of heroism that those tales sort of portray is voluntary acceptance of that role, and voluntary acceptance of the necessity for a protracted period of dependence.
	And it's reasonable to construe that as a form of heroism.
	So that's why the Aztecs had this particular attitude.
	Biology, Freud said, biology is destiny.
	Well, that's true and not true.
	It's not so much destiny when you have the birth control pill, but without it, there's a big chunk of destiny there.
	And it's voluntarily facing the things that have to be faced.
	That constitutes heroism.
	But, I mean, I don't know how that applies to our age when we're in an age of birth control, when still the men are taught to be heroes and the women are taught to be saved.
	Well, first of all, there hasn't been enough time for our stories to be changed.
	And second, in many ways things haven't changed.
	Like if you have a baby, There's a year of dependency.
	You can do it in lots of ways.
	You can put the baby in daycare.
	And, well, that's a solution.
	All that means is that the dependency stage is transferred to someone else.
	It's still there.
	It's just being moved, usually down the socioeconomic ladder.
	But anyways, if you don't choose that, you have a one-year period where there's something that's absolutely dependent on you to the degree that it'd be really useful for you to be able to be dependent on someone else.
	So, to the degree that child-rearing still is a feminine role, and I think it's going to be a long time before that changes.
	If it ever changes, who knows what will happen.
	The notion of voluntary dependency still has an aspect of truth.
	That's how I look at it.
	And it's dangerous, like, there's lots of people who've wanted to rewrite fairy tales, you know, because they have sexist themes, but Shelley pointed out something interesting in her last essay.
	It's like the three little pigs, you know, they keep building houses, and they get stronger and stronger, and the wolf blows them down, but finally they build a stone house or a brick house, and the wolf Climb through the chimney, but he falls into a pot of water, and then the pigs eat, cook, and eat him.
	Well, Shelley's pointed out that in the sanitized versions, the wolf just pops down the fire, and he cinches his tail, and he goes back up to the chimney, and he gets away.
	But she pointed out that, well, the fact of having constructed this fortress in the proper manner allowed enough of the external unknown, symbolized by the wolf, to enter, so that it could be Prepared and assimilated.
	Now you think, oh, this is a violent story, the poor wolf.
	Well, it's like you're thinking here about something that's all encoded here.
	So you mess around with it.
	You say, well, it'd be much nicer if the wolf got away.
	All right, fine.
	But there's no story there.
	It's like the reason you build the stone house is so that you can cook and eat the wolf.
	Well, you lose the graphic imagery, you lose the story.
	And that's the problem with Messing about with traditional tales.
	I mean, I can understand why people want to do it, and there's lots of traditions, perhaps, that aren't so beneficial.
	But it might be good to understand them before they're transformed.
	The other thing is that we do not have an answer to the question, what constitutes a valid feminine idea?
	Well, just about the feminine part I wanted to say.
	It seems to me that what the feminine counterpart of exploratory behavior is endurance of the unknown rather than exploration of the unknown.
	Females, through myth, are taught to endure.
	Not necessarily dependency, I don't think, but just to endure it, to sit there and write it out.
	And it seems to me that in fairytales and in mythology, that's what the poor females have to do.
	They don't get to actively explore the unknown.
	They just endure it.
	And that's how they become heroes.
	Because the thing is, if you have a problem, there's two things you can do about it.
	You can either change how you act or change how you think.
	Right.
	So it seems like there's a prerequisites for that.
	Well, and I do think it's the case that among human beings in general, men are viewed as Both more necessary and more expendable than women, both at the same time.
	Sorry, men are sent off to war, for example.
	Got a lot of useless adolescent men hanging around?
	Well, that's a good thing for them to do.
	And that's basically how society works.
	Boys, old boys fight wars.
	They're expendable.
	The thing about something that's expendable is that it can also be something that's very creative.
	Because exploration is dangerous.
	And if you lose a few adolescent males while they're out exploring around, well, Okay.
	You know, tough luck.
	Whereas women, well, you like to have them around.
	Well, that goes to my question that I asked you yesterday.
	Can there be too many heroes?
	I mean, it seems to me there's only a certain amount of creativity that any society can endure at a given time.
	Right.
	If you've got everybody out there trying to bring the unknown in...
	That's why I mentioned today that there are three patterns of adaptation.
	There is recourse to authority.
	That's the authoritarian pattern.
	Whatever we're talking about.
	And there's decadence.
	And decadence occurs when, under the guise of constant creative behavior, everything is undermined.
	But it's the case that a real hero myth says, when you explore, you bring your culture along with you.
	Because you're absolutely right.
	Heretical activity.
	I mean, the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages earned heretics.
	And why was that?
	Well, because you couldn't say there was at any time in a given medieval country there was like 250 religious visionaries wandering around.
	Well, if all of them establish a religion, well, instantly you have 250 countries all fighting with one another.
	The Catholics, they didn't know, and we still don't know, how do you mediate between competing moral claims?
	Well, who knows?
	Suppress it.
	Why?
	Because you need order.
	Well, that was their attitude.
	And it's understandable.
	You say, well, the inquisition and so on.
	Yeah, well, no kidding.
	It's a terrible thing.
	I'm not saying it's not a terrible thing.
	Too much order is a catastrophe.
	And so is too much chaos.
	And too much chaos is generated by careless activity that runs under the guise of heroism.
	But that's why the myths say, if you're going to be here, you master the culture first, before you undermine it.
	Because otherwise you might do something careless that you think is creative, that blows everything into pieces.
	Like, a minor example is the modification of that fairy tale.
	So people have been telling that fairy tale for God only knows how long.
	And someone comes along and chops the ending off.
	It's like, oh, this isn't violent.
	That isn't even the point.
	That's careless activity.
	So that is definitely a danger.
	When I said the Romans died in indigestion, that's not a joke.
	It's like they expanded like man, collected all these gods.
	It's like their morality was decimated.
	They didn't know how to act anymore.
	So Nietzsche, that's a Nietzschean thing, says the modern European is full of undigested cultures.
	That's why we're at war with ourselves.
	We don't know how to act.
	Historically, in cultural constructions of gender, the woman is simultaneously the mother and the witch, or the source of all things, and yet the unknown.
	It's interesting to look at the woman and say how she sees herself, how she sees her own story, because yes, in one respect she is the source of all things, and in the other respect she is danger.
	And you can look like culturally, when you talk about the Inquisition, at that time the women were all being called witches, because basically they were trying to uphold the tradition, So they were all witches, you know, doing these crazy rituals.
	And they were the threat.
	They were the enemy.
	They were the unknown.
	Whereas, like, and the witch is something, you know, historical, like, throughout, you know, history, the woman is witch in pure danger, you know, in, you know, just a little...
	Well, that's the split of the archetype.
	The archetype of the unknown is feminine, and femininity has two aspects, positive and negative, and positive in medieval culture, that was sort of wrapped up in symbolism around the Virgin Mary, and the other half of it sort of occupied this territory of the witch.
	Well, I guess I'm just reiterating your point in what was the mythology that applies to females is very complicated, because you have all these different aspects.
	The embodiment of the unknown, Plus the capacity for heroic behaviour.
	The embodiment of the creative unknown plus the capacity for exploratory behaviour.
	And those two things are hard to mediate.
	Yeah, because they're two stories that are very different.
	The woman tells her the story that she's in love with the source of all things and that she's a witch and she has to integrate that because you have to understand yourself from your stories.
	When women were separated even during menstruation because they were called to be dangerous or impure, they had to incorporate that into who they were.
	They were danger, they were this and that.
	There's two different stories and I think that's ultimately the problem of understanding who you are as a woman.
	But the male also saves you and kills you.
	The fact is that all three pieces of the entire world The unknown, the unknown, and the thing between both save you and kill you.
	So everyone's got that.
	That's true.
	To what extent do we accept or do we take into account that the stories, even the stories about what the hell have been passed down?
	Well, I don't know how true that is.
	I suspect, I doubt that it's true because, well, here's an example.
	If you want to predict the educational status of a child, The best predictor is mother's level of education.
	Of the two parents, father's level of education does not correlate.
	Although it correlates with the mother's level of education.
	That's true, but it's not anywhere near as good a predictor for the child's development as the mother's level is.
	And I think it's reasonable to say that in large part, women are the primary socialization agents, at least they have been historically, for the first two years.
	Three years?
	Maybe even longer than that.
	Plus, I also don't think that women's role in history has been nearly as subordinate as people generally claim.
	It depends on your standard for defining subordination.
	I'm not saying that at every level of analysis, functional equality reign, because that's not true.
	But I also think that women have a tremendously potent impact on the course of human development.
	Their contributions in agriculture, for example.
	I don't think that we, I don't really think that we live in such a male-structured universe.
	Like the fact, for example, that men are always sacrificed in war is one example of that that tends to be overlooked in peaceful times.
	Because men are always sacrificed in war.
	Well...
	They probably...
	Sacrificed how?
	Oh, eaten and killed.
	Fair enough.
	I mean, there are problems in gender relationships and in adaptation everywhere.
	In peaceful times, maybe men have the upper hand, but in war, the situation, at least historically, has reversed itself.
	But in Greek societies, such as Athenians, the men directly voted to take themselves to war.
	So, I don't know, while women did have a positive role historically, it was through the perspective of male-written history, or male tradition.
	And just like looking at the ideas of freedom and slavery, women were sort of Developed the idea of freedom, because they are the ones that had the suppression of the slave, but had the possibility of achieving some kind of freedom.
	So I think women have been powerful.
	Yes, I agree with you.
	But I think they've been written into history from a male perspective.
	Could be.
	Or women have had a huge history.
	Their story has been written by males.
	Well, the thing is stories are written by people who have leisure.
	Right!
	Especially if that also shortens your lifespan.
	So women's influence may be large and implicit in stories and the ideas are all explicit.
	Nietzsche said that one of the reasons Western culture was so pathological was because its philosophy was written by bachelors.
	It's a good observation.
	It's a good observation, but it does take leisure.
	You don't get a culture class without leisure.
	And what we've been saying all day is that stories aren't just explicit.
	Just as much as your story is not more so as implicit as it is.
	Well, that was part of my confusion because we started the course with a lot of examples of explicit stories.
	Your story is how to get into medical school, your story is how to...
	Well, one of the things I was trying to do at the beginning of the class was to point out how an explicit story, what's formulated, can undermine a whole sequence of implicit stories.
	That's really the notion behind I've been thinking about why it is, I'm a singer and I see a lot of There's a lot of homosexuals in the art scenes and stuff like that.
	I was wondering why a lot of them tend to go into the arts and are very successful at it.
	I was thinking that maybe because they are forced to, a lot of times, To partake in a group that they aren't necessarily a part of, or at least forced into heterosexuality as adolescence.
	And then have to fight out of that, have to have a really huge internal struggle if they ever do make it out of it.
	And then at that point they are able to add more To the group.
	Through things like art.
	Creative processes.
	Sorry?
	That's what builds up creative ability.
	Or that they advanced at an earlier age because they have this, you know, this thing that they want.
	This impediment or this enormous anomalous information.
	Well, who knows?
	I thought of that sometimes in terms of the necessity for people who are homosexual to integrate different gender roles.
	And so I thought they could serve people in that position.
	Because the fact that homosexuality is very peculiar from an evolutionary point of view, it's hard to account for its existence from an evolutionary point of view, I think.
	And I thought, well, maybe they do play a particular cultural role.
	It's an intermediary between the sexes, possibly, or intermediary between the mythological domains of the masculine and feminine.
	You have another hypothesis about it.
	You know, sometimes one of the best, well, that was Nietzsche's comment, right?
	If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.
	Sometimes the best friend you can have is a really potent end, because if you overcome it, well then you've got something, although you might die, which is the downside.

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