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May 4, 2013 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:44:47
Maps of Meaning 11 (Harvard Lectures)
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And if I'm doing this right, she said that And then they had a lower, it was more than the non-soiliness.
Well that's interesting.
So what we really want, what's critical is to find out how the heart rate, the heart rate increase is associated with your heart.
With the analgesia.
Rather than soma, non-soma.
Split, which is also important.
It's not as important.
Oh, because there's a better portion of the soma, the same heart response?
And some of the non-somas have it.
Right, right.
You get it more amongst the...
Right, it's more frequent, more common.
Complex, negative emotions, like resentment and guilt.
and hatred and cruelty and the argument basically runs that you know, animals as a rule are afraid of the unknown but for human beings that fear is increased by the fact that we also abstractly understand in a sense what the unknown means Well,
the mere fact that we can abstract out a notion like the unknown as such certainly is indicative of the fact that our cognitive processes are somewhat different from those of animals.
And I tried to show, using examples drawn from both Genesis and the story of the fall of the Buddha, so to speak, that mythology, or some myths, anyways, present us with a story that says That the development of self-consciousness is tantamount to the contamination of existence with death.
And I think the logic behind that basically is that the defining feature of self-consciousness is knowledge of borders, so to speak, of our own personal borders.
And the most tangible and horrifying of those borders is our own knowledge of our mortality.
So in a sense it's the fact that we can see into the future.
And know what that future means.
And so you could say, in a sense, if you want to get mechanical about it, that for human beings, every aspect of existence serves as a cue for punishment.
Now, someone commented last week that if you put an animal into an experimental situation where it's subjected constantly to unavoidable punishment, that it develops learned helplessness, which is a man along with depression or...
It can also produce aggression as a consequence of the administration of such punishment.
So we know already that the purpose of group identification is to provide stability in an ocean of instability.
But what we've added to this, I think, with this additional line of argumentation is more clear understanding of just how terrible the ocean of instability is for human beings in particular.
Because, as I said before, I'm not just interested in figuring out why animals defend their territory, human beings being animals, at least in terms of that idea.
I'm interested in why we go that final extra bit of distance, which means that not only do we We'll be killed to protect our territory, but we'll engage in all sorts of murderous torture along the way, which seems gratuitous in a sense.
It's one thing to want to eliminate your enemy, and we understand some of the motivations for doing that.
I mean, someone who's foreign disrupts your predictability, and predictability is the essence of security.
It's another thing to...
Well, as I said, to make an aesthetic out of cruelty and to pursue the opportunity to inflict suffering on someone else justified by your express patriotism expressly, but obviously motivated by something that's more twisted and perverse.
So, and that's the core question that this course is trying to address.
What is it that makes people like that?
Not just patriotic, but totalitarian patriotic, and not just willing to defend borders, but also motivated to enjoy the construction of cruelty for its own sake.
I want to read you a quote from Solzhenitsyn to start this off.
So this is his description of the degradation of the state, the real version as opposed to the mythological version.
Solzhenitsyn quotes an author who says, told how executions were carried out at Adak, which was a camp on the Pachora River.
They would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp compound on a prisoner transport at night.
And outside the compound stood the small house of the third section.
The condemned men were taken into a room one at a time and there the camp guards sprang on them.
Their mouths were stuffed with something soft and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs.
They were led out into the courtyard where harnessed carts were waiting.
The bound prisoners were piled on the carts from five to seven at a time and driven off to the Gorka, which was the camp cemetery.
On arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive.
Not out of brutality.
No.
It had been ascertained, rationally, that when dragging and lifting them it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses.
The work went on for many nights at ADAC.
And Solzhenitsyn says, that is how the moral political unity of our party was achieved.
Hiliadis describes the degradation of the state from the mythological perspective.
He says, as has well been known since the compilations made by R. Andre, H. Usner, and J. G. Frazier, the deluge myth is almost universally disseminated.
It is documented in all of the continents, although rarely in Africa, and on various cultural levels.
A certain number of variants seem to be the result of dissemination, First from Mesopotamia and then from India.
It is equally possible that one or several actual diluvial catastrophes gave rise to fabulous narratives, but it would be risky to explain so widespread a myth by phenomena of which no geological traces have been found.
The majority of the flood myths seem in sense to form part of the cosmic rhythm.
The old world, peopled by a fallen humanity, is submerged under the waters.
And sometimes later a new world emerges from the aquatic chaos.
Well, you're all familiar with that general model.
I mean, you've seen that over and over again in the diagrams that I've presented to you.
It's just basically this notion.
People of fallen humanity deluged by the waters who then reemerge.
That's the story of Noah, for example.
But then, Eliade goes on to say, this is very interesting, it's really worth thinking about, because, well, I think it's worth thinking about, I guess, this passage struck me because it echoed long after I thought up what I'm going to tell you today,
what I had in fact thought up, which was that you can't even just say that A state gets rotten and corrupt all on its own, although that happens merely as a consequence of the passing of time, which is to say that, all right, let's take the analogy of the individual.
We all had childhood personalities at one point, and those personalities, theoretically, were healthy, given our status as children.
But as time passed, which basically meant as change continued to happen, We transformed from children into adolescents, and that meant that the childhood personality, considered as something static, would have turned pathological by its own devices as we transformed into adolescents, because the attitude of a child, although appropriate for a child, is not appropriate for an adolescent.
And one of the things that Ilyatti points out says, well, that's an idea of the The aging and senility of the king.
An idea that's good at one point in your life may become pathological at a later point.
So it's just a consequence of entropy, in a sense.
Things always change, and as a consequence you have to run to keep up with them.
But then Eliade takes the argument a bit farther, and he says, in a large number of variants, the flood is a result of the sins or ritual faults of human beings.
Sometimes it results simply from the wish of a divine being to put an end to mankind.
Noah's story is very much like that.
Anyways, the chief causes seem to lie at once in the sins of men and the decrepitude of the world.
So Iliadis says, well, it's not just a matter of the fact that things age and become decayed by themselves, but there's an additional twist on it, which is that There's some contribution, according to the mythological mode of thinking, of the misbehavior of human beings that makes the gods so upset.
They can't stand the noise, so to speak, anymore.
They decide to do away with everything that's been created.
So there's a sin of commission as well as an act of omission that leads to the decrepitude of things.
Iliade says, by the mere fact that it exists, that is that it lives and produces, the cosmos gradually deteriorates and ends by falling into decay.
This is why it has to be recreated.
In other words, the flood realizes on the macrocosmic scale what is symbolically effected during the New Year festival, the end of the world, and the end of the sinful humanity, in order to make a new creation possible.
And you might think about The myth that we discussed a long time ago, the Egyptian myth that underlies the sun god status of the pharaoh.
That's the myth of Osiris and Horus.
Remember, Osiris ends up being sent to the underworld because of the treachery of his brother, Seth, who, the Egyptian myth states clearly, he didn't understand.
So, the Egyptian myth states, That first there was something fishy about Seth, and second of all that he had such great impact on Osiris because Osiris didn't understand what Seth was.
And that myth basically is trying to point out, so to speak, to people that if you don't understand what evil is, it will defeat you.
And so what we're trying to do, At least in this lecture and more or less for the last three lectures is to come to some understanding of just what evil consists of so that we can decrease the likelihood that it will in fact defeat us.
I was showing this manuscript to a friend of mine on the weekend and he found parts of the argument that I was making, I showed on the outline I gave you last week, kind of unsettling in a sense because I use a lot of terminology that's being classically associated with religious thought.
This disturbs me as well.
Certainly, at least it did as I was putting the manuscript together because I never was inclined, I thought, of my own accord to gravitate towards religious language.
And he asked me why I insisted upon using words like evil when they have this historical context that at least places them partially into the domain of religious thinking.
Well, you know, it would certainly make, if I change the terminology and de-emphasize the mythological language, I could certainly make the sorts of theories that I'm trying to present more palatable.
But the fact is, as far as I'm concerned, that The mere fact that we know anything at all about evil is because of religious constructions of precisely what evil is, and it would be a mistake as a consequence to abandon the historical roots of the development of the idea just to make discussion of it more palatable.
One thing that occurred to me when I was reading this is that you seem not only have you been using the term, but you seem to have changed their meaning somewhat from the traditional religious sense, which you actually discussed concretely in there, but that good generally refers to a specific moral code and evil to opposition.
For instance, Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil refers to them in that sense.
In other words, that you're beyond that split, but then what you're referring to as good and evil is sort of beyond the traditional good and evil.
Right, that's right.
It's description of good and evil as processes rather than as things or states.
Yeah, I was reading a little bit about the French Revolution this morning because I referred to it in this manuscript somewhere.
I said that the French, during the French Revolution, erected a statue to the goddess of reason in Notre Dame Cathedral, which I always thought was a really telling historical event.
That's wrong, by the way.
They actually dressed up an opera singer to represent the goddess of liberty.
And paraded her around inside the Notre Dame Cathedral, which they had renamed the Temple of Reason.
So my remembrance of the historical fact was a little bit off, but the basic notion still remains absolutely solid.
I mean, the people who ran the French Revolution were, in fact, at least in the initial stages of the revolution, were out to replace Christianity, Catholicism, with rational atheism, and to enshrine reason And it was interesting to read some of the things that they had done, because it's certainly the case, for example, that our notion of natural rights Formally, derives in large part from the work that was done by certain people around the time of the French Revolution.
What was really interesting about those authors is that having constructed their explicit description of natural rights, they immediately made the presumption that they had invented the concepts, that there was no historical basis for the idea in a sense, that there was no Lengthy process of religious development that led up to the possibility of positing something like a natural right.
So once having discovered it, so to speak, which is to say, having made it explicit, they were willing to dispense entirely with all of the historical prerequisites for the development of that idea.
I mean, that was the idea here, right?
Say you come up with a rational explication of the notion of a natural right, well, that's based on An immensely long and complex history of the movement of the sorts of behavioral patterns that are encoded in the idea of natural rights up this hierarchy of abstraction.
Anyways, the point is that as soon as the French thinkers were able to make the notion of the natural right Explicit.
They were willing to dispense with the historical precursors.
And the reason I'm using that argument is because I'm trying to make the notion of evil explicit, but I'm not willing to dispense with the historical precursors, because it's absolutely obvious to me that the only reason that I can say anything at all about evil is because all the ideas that I'm describing are already played out at all these More implicit levels of analysis.
And what I'm trying to do, you see, the thing is about mythological modes of thinking, these natural categories, is that they do have really, really fuzzy boundaries.
And so when you consider this structure, you know, every one of these levels of analysis has a negative and a positive valence.
And it's very easy for us to It's very easy for us to make the presupposition that, given that the devil, so to speak, is something negative, that all the things that we regard as negatively valent, emotionally, belong in the category of the devil.
It's a very easy mistake to make.
So it's easy for us to say, well, the foreigner, like, good is adherence to a particular creed, therefore, and foreigners obviously present It's a threat to the integrity of that creed.
That threat is negatively valenced.
It's reasonable to lump everything negatively valenced into the same category.
The category that we lump everything that's active and negatively valenced into is equivalent to the devil.
So you get a perfectly reasonable logical train that leads to the demonization of enemies.
Now Elaine Pejos, who just wrote a book on the devil, said that she actually I think reversed the motivational change.
She said the reason that Christianity has come up with what I think is the most well-elaborated story of the devil, although there are other religions that have done the same sort of thing, it's certainly the notion that the nature of evil is a preoccupation of all sorts of moral systems.
But in terms of elaborating up a dramatic figure, Christianity has done a very good job of that.
The underground motivation for the construction of such a figure, which is the personification of evil, was to aid Christians in labeling their enemies as demonic and justifying their annihilation.
Now I think, you know, this is a—first of all, it's a plausible argument.
Second of all, it's a potent argument.
And it also seems fairly obvious that people do use mythological figures that represent evil And apply them to their enemies to justify their annihilation.
So then you might think, well, maybe the whole idea of evil is just a rationalization that we use to pursue ends that we want to pursue.
But I would say, well, that's not exactly right, despite the fact that it's like Freud's comments about religion.
You can use religion as a neurotic defense against your anxiety of death, absolutely.
What that means is that you identify with a given creed in a dogmatic manner And that protects you from your neurotic fears.
Now, Freud's mistake, as far as I was concerned, was to take a perfectly reasonable observation and turn it into a universal statement, the statement being that's the only possible purpose of religion.
The fact that you can misuse something does not necessarily mean that the misuse of the thing is the only use of it.
Well, and the same applies to the ideas of evil.
The fact that Having a figure at your disposal, like the devil, so to speak, makes it easier for you in some ways to represent your enemies as reprehensible.
It does not necessarily mean that that's the only reason that such a figure developed.
What I'm trying to do in this manuscript, in this lecture today, is to clarify, is to bring some clarity to these fuzzy mythological categories so that we can draw a clear distinction Between, well, what I would say are idols of evil, which are necessarily false, and the process of evil itself, which I think is actually clearly identifiable and stable across cultures, just like all these other figures that we've discussed.
Okay.
Anyway, yes?
How could you talk about evil by any other name?
Well, you can talk about it by all sorts of other names.
I guess, like, inhumanity might be one.
Well, we do that in psychology all the time.
We talk about antisocial behavior, or we talk about psychopathy, psychopathy being the thing that's most closely related in the clinical literature to classical notions of evil.
And then we say, like, standard theories of antisocial behavior, for example, and I know this literature relatively well, they're usually based on On inferences drawn from analysis of lower-level motivations, like you might say that the typical antisocial person is someone who's very high in sensitivity to incentive reward and very low in sensitivity to threat.
That's a standard theory for antisocial motivation.
So that means that they're all go, all curiosity, all novelty-seeking, and very little stop.
You can't make them anxious, so they don't have inhibitory control over the behavior.
But that's a pretty mechanistic notion of what underlies criminal behavior.
A lot of research has been devoted towards that end.
You know, the idea being the standard antisocial personality, someone who just doesn't feel anxiety very clearly, who can't use cues of punishment to regulate their own behavior.
Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with that line of theorizing.
I think there are probably Underlying motivational reasons that might propel someone who's neurotically inclined, so to speak, towards criminality rather than towards agoraphobia or eating disorders or all the other things that can complicate up your life.
But what that's missing is any appreciation for the fact that a lot of the activities that we regard as criminal, deeply criminal, have this aspect of almost an aesthetic aspect in the sense which is It's an obvious desire to wreak havoc and harm on someone else, not merely for whatever gain might be caused by that, but very often despite the fact that no gain whatsoever will be caused by it, just for participating in the act itself.
Now, there are some exceptions to this, like Dan Olwes, who studies bullying in Scandinavian countries, most particularly.
He's always been interested in one of the things that motivated his Lifetime's work on bullying is understanding of the authoritarian personality, because he makes the presupposition that bullies and their henchmen are the juvenile versions of fascists and their louts, which is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis as far as I'm concerned.
He's documented instances, for example, he has a videotape, which I haven't seen.
I just read his description of it, that shows, you know, it's been taken in a public school in Norway showing A group of bullies tormenting a whipping boy, basically, by tying a string around his neck and leading him through the hallways.
And the thing about that sort of thing is that it's fun.
And it's that aspect of the attractiveness of engaging in that sort of We really haven't been able to get our finger on very clearly in psychology, and I think as a rule we tend to sidestep it.
And it's also because we don't like to deal with issues like evil, so to speak, that have these sorts of religious overtones.
But when you're talking about the sorts of things that happen in concentration camps in the Soviet Union and in Germany, which are the sorts of things I'm really interested in, you have to use the strongest word you have at your disposal to describe those patterns of activity.
And it's also the case Well, as I mentioned last week, I think, a lot of the higher-order surviving Nazis were prosecuted after the Second World War for crimes against humanity, which is a category of moral violation which we recognize at a sort of supracultural level, which is that we say, well, yes, morality is culture-bound, which is to say that different cultures have different rules, and if you follow those rules, you're You're responsible within the confines of those cultures.
But despite that relativistic morality, there are certain activities that you can't engage in, no matter what your excuse is, and basically that's the thesis of the Nuremberg trials, basically, and that thesis is predicated on implicit recognition, at least, that there's a form of morality that supersedes cultural identification,
and also a form of morality and a form of immorality I'm just wondering,
I'm trying to understand evil in the context of mental health, and I'm wondering if, first of all, like, mental health itself can be defined, like, the idea of mental health can be defined as, like, survival or cooperation within society, or whether it's, like, a means for men, you know, within itself.
Can a disturbed person achieve a high level of success, such as Hitler did, and still be considered a disturbed person?
Well, that's the question.
I mean, I said one of the questions that I've been trying to answer all along here is Nietzsche's inquiry, which is, are there pathologies of health?
Which is, can you be the exemplar of a given society?
Which means, by the definition of that society, not only average, but in fact ideal.
And still be considered corrupt at a higher level of analysis, whose existence can actually be justified in some manner.
And that is the issue, and that's what we're trying to find out.
Okay, so I read you the little story that Solzhenitsyn told about the elimination of anomalous information in the form of other people, and that's Solzhenitsyn's argument about the social and political unity of the Communist Party.
He says, how is it attained?
You just eliminate.
You eliminate all anomalous information that's actually still embodied in people.
That's right.
So an ideologue doesn't like contrary rational arguments because they present information that violates the ideologue's presuppositions, but it's also the case that the mere existence of certain types of people, regardless of whether they're making their arguments in any abstract form, those people indicate by their behavior their Objection to or existence in spite of your particular precepts,
and the mere fact of their existence as individuals is a sufficient threat to justify their repression and annihilation, I would say, well, totalitarians are doing to people exactly what abstract authoritarians do to ideas that don't agree with us.
If you present me with information that doesn't fit my frame of reference, I'll just eliminate it.
And Iliadi talks about the notion of the flood, this universally disseminated myth that says states of being are annihilated by the gods periodically, not only because they are decrepit, Just as a consequence of their manner of being, but also because people add unnecessary decrepitude to them by their sins, so to speak.
That's a mythological idea.
We don't know what it means.
Now I'm going to read you a little section that describes the authoritarianism of an individual who I think came to realize that many of his so-called moral precepts, things that he held as As ideological ideals were in fact leading him down an extraordinarily totalitarian path.
Today is Christmas Day and I have just come home from Julie's.
while I was there, it struck me as I sat on the couch between two girls just how foolish and idiotic I have been in this my only life.
I hope you all have patience while I unburden myself on you because I need desperately to confess my sins to someone and I know that if I were sitting in a little cubicle talking to an unseen clergyman, I wouldn't do a proper job of it.
You fit the definition of a religious man as someone who gives careful consideration to the demonic and irrational inhumanity so I think you will find my confession interesting.
Imagine if you can a grown man who harbors in his heart the most vicious resentment for his fellow man his neighbor, who is actually guilty of nothing more than embodying a superior consciousness of what it means to be a man.
When I think of all the black, scathing thoughts I have directed at those who I could not look in the eye, it is almost unbearable.
All of my lofty disdain for the common man who, so I thought, was guilty of the sin of unconsciousness was, I now realize, founded on nothing more than jealousy and spite.
I hated and loathed anyone who had wrestled with their fear of leaving the maternal confines of a childish mentality and won their battle only because I had not done so.
I equated independence and success with egotism and selfishness.
And it was my fondest hope, my highest ambition, to witness and participate in the destruction of everything that successful independent people had built for themselves.
This I considered a duty.
In fact, there was a decidedly fanatical element in my urge to cleanse the world of what I perceived to be selfishness.
Think of what would have happened if I had been in a position to realize my fine feelings.
The memory makes me fear that any moment the earth will crack open and swallow me up, because if there was any justice, it would.
I, who had not the faintest inkling of a capacity for moral judgment, traipsing around passing judgment on anyone who dared cross my path, it makes me wonder that I have even one friend in this world.
But of course I had friends before, anyone with enough self-contempt that they could forgive me mine.
It is fortunate for humanity that there are few saviours of the calibre of myself.
Did you know that I used to identify with Christ?
I considered myself entirely, immaculately free of aggression and every other form of antisocial feeling.
But what about the hatred I have just now confessed, you ask?
That didn't count.
Those feelings were based on sound common sense, you see.
After all, there are sons of bitches in the world and one needs to be ready for them.
Do I smell ozone?
They say you get a tingling sensation just before the lightning bolt strikes.
That is a very apt phrase, son of a bitch.
There is a passage in Young's Phenomenology of the Self which runs, Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.
You now behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.
This insight would be useful for me as an excuse, being a perfectly accurate description of my situation, were it not for the fact that I am almost daily presented with a residual bit of undiluted evil in myself, For example, when I am faced with a frustrating situation, I do not ask myself what I am going to do about it.
I ask myself who's responsible for it, and I am always ready to conclude that if the other person were to act properly, then the problem would not exist.
What is evil about that, you ask?
Obviously, if I'm determined to overlook my own part in the failure to resolve my own frustrations, if I'm determined to find a scapegoat for my problems, then I'm just a stone's throw away from the mentality that was responsible for Hitler's final solution or for the Spanish Inquisition or for Lenin's cultural cleansing.
What was it you told me when I complained about the flaws in capitalism, about the fact that so many people take advantage of the capitalist system?
Thank you.
Something like, the fact that people go on consolidating their financial position ad nauseum is another problem, but it is no reason to conclude that there is anything virtuous in even refusing to try to consolidate one's position in the first place.
But it is much easier to crown one's cowardice and laziness with the accolade of virtue.
Just ask Lenin's henchmen, who swaggered around the countryside robbing every farmer who had managed any success whatsoever.
And called themselves friends of the common people and patted each other on the back for their moral uprightness.
I wonder if I have actually changed so much that I would not join them if I was put to the test.
The idea that morality stems from a lack of personal interest is thoroughly ingrained in my mind.
Good people are those who don't want anything for themselves, is the way I think.
But I never ask myself why such a person should put any effort into disciplining himself, or take any pains to keep his motives clear in his own mind, because there's nothing of value to him in this world.
In his essay, Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, Jung says that in an unconscious state the individual is torn by the conflict of opposites, and that achieving consciousness involves resolving that conflict on a higher level.
I understand that this particular state of adult unconsciousness is different from the original state of childlike unconsciousness in which there's no long-term conflict.
Just last week I was stuck in that dead end again.
I was sitting and thinking about what course my life should be taking, and in every imagined scenario of a fulfilling or meaningful activity I was met by a counterpoint coming from somewhere in my head, showing me how this or that aspect of my scenario was wrong because it would result in this or that problem.
To the point where it was unacceptable to consider any career at all, because just by being alive I would contribute to the destruction of the planet.
And as badly as I wanted to refute this echo of wrong to my every imagined right as an irrational chimera, the fact is, so I told myself, that we see daily in the newspapers how the activities of humanity, which are also the activities of individual men and women, are causing incalculable harm.
It is, of course, due to my being influenced by yourself that I do not remain stuck in that particular fog too long these days.
If our industrialism is causing problems, I now answer myself, then I should hope that there are people out there working to solve those problems, or perhaps I should try to do something about them myself, but settling idly by, I do not solve a thing.
Of course, what is most daunting and also most snivelly about being stuck in that bog is the fact that the rational mind wants to be absolutely sure about the successful outcome of its life plan, and obviously there is another part of the mind that knows that such certainty is impossible.
One is then faced with the need to accept on faith that things will turn out for the better with some luck and perseverance.
And being a fine, upstanding, modern mouse with an enlightened, rational mind, I have no use for faith and other such religious sign of claptrap and nonsense.
Faith is obviously irrational, and I'll not have any irrationality influencing my behavior.
Previously, my solution to this problem was to allow chance to make my career choices for me, letting my own interests influence my decisions as little as possible.
And then I believed that I had somehow avoided personal responsibility for the state of the modern world because I was not really responsible for the state of my life.
That I had escaped from the possibility that my plans wouldn't work out because I had no plans.
It was on this rock-solid foundation that I looked at the world and saw all around me people who were stupid enough to add their own selves into the equation.
Put this kind of faith in oneself.
To believe that there exists inside of one a motive force, call it an interest, which will respond to life and carry one through uncertainty and adversity, is an irrational attitude without equal.
And it is with this irrational approach to life that the conflict of opposites is resolved, it seems to me.
But the problem now is this.
In order to have this faith in one's irrational nature, one needs proof that personal interests and passions are capable of sustaining one through the uncertainties and adversities of life that the rational mind foresees so clearly.
And the only way to get that proof is to risk oneself and to see the result.
It is a very exceptional person who can take such undertaking on their own.
Most of us need guidance and support from others, from believers, so to speak.
Strange, isn't it, that religious terms should become useful for this discussion?
As I wrote that last paragraph, I was suddenly reminded of your idea that the devil as he has represented in Milton's Paradise Lost is a metaphor for the rational intellect which is being placed in the position of the highest psychic authority.
Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.
Hell, then, is a condition in which the rational mind, with its acute consciousness of the many perils of life, holds sway over the individual and effectively prevents him from engaging in life, which results in the morally degenerate state of weakness that I described in the first pages of this letter.
And Heaven, I presume, would be a condition in which the rational mind subordinates itself to faith in God.
But what is God?
You have a chapter in the manuscript of your book titled The Divinity of Interest.
Your ideas are starting to make sense to me now, at least I think they are.
Faith in God means faith in that which kindles one's interest and leads one away from the parental sphere out into the world.
To deny those interests is to deny God, to fall from heaven and land squarely in hell, where one's passions burn eternally in frustration.
What was it God said when he cast Adam out of Eden?
Something about working in the dust at the end of his days, with the specter of death always looming in the future.
I can certainly relate to that.
One of the most vivid impressions I get from recalling all those years I spent moving from one job to the next is the pointlessness of my daily life back then and the glaring knowledge that the end was drawing near.
But when I'm doing something that has meaning for me, something that interests me as I am right now, death seems far away and work seems quite agreeable, even joyous.
Well, there's two things or more about that, I guess.
The first is that the writer of this letter points out that the only thing that stopped him from From being Hitler, or Stalin for that matter, or perhaps only one of Hitler or Stalin's henchmen was lack of opportunity, not lack of will,
and that it's easy for us to make the presupposition that there's a qualitative difference between someone like Hitler, or Idiot Men, or Stalin, and someone like ourself, partly because we're never in the position to do any of the sorts of things that those men did, and as a consequence, we can use our Difference in position to support our notion that there's a qualitative difference.
But he points out, I think this is interesting also in terms of more current news about the Unabomber, because the Unabomber was a person who had the sort of attitude that's described in this letter, which is that he made the presupposition that Industrial society,
him excluded, was evil, and the appropriate thing to do was to disassociate oneself entirely from all contact with that society, and having done so, presume, and begin to fix it from the outside all on his own.
And, you know, in terms of psychological profiles, I mean, I know what the Unabomber is like, is on the outside he would appear as someone who was absolutely quiescent, Who would do anything you told him to do?
He would never cause any trouble whatsoever.
Who would appear as someone who was actually composed almost entirely of low self-esteem and doubt, but who, deep inside, believed that he was far superior to anyone that he'd ever encountered on the earth.
That's how I mean.
It's from a position like that that you can then move rapidly towards justification of doing things like blowing up Innocent people who, theoretically, partake in what you consider inappropriate from a distance, having severed, for moral reasons, all possible contact with real members of humanity.
supported in his endeavors theoretically from pity and care by both his mother and his brother who sent him money to sustain his completely abnormal existence long beyond the point that it would have been sustainable on its own.
I also wanted to read you another section from Solzhenitsyn on the authoritarianism of the individual.
This is the ideological version.
So we have the first story that describes the consequences of A totalitarian ideology put into action, which is the necessary pursuit and destruction of people who don't share the ideological view.
And then we have the mythological notion that things go from bad to worse on their own, but that people tend to help that process along.
And as a consequence, now and then God decides to obliterate the world.
And then we have an individual story in which One person confesses that, given his presuppositions about the state of the world, had he been in any position of authority whatsoever, he would have been a very terrible person.
And, in fact, that he was a very terrible person, but he was also powerless, so he didn't look terrible because he couldn't put any of his fantasies into action.
And this is, I do think, this is what separates most of us from the position that someone like Hitler found himself in.
Because I do actually believe that Hitler was not A particularly pathological individual.
He had a decent First World War record.
His sort of aimless wanderings throughout Europe at the close of World War I weren't that much different from the aimless wandering of any number of hundreds of thousands of men who'd been unbelievably brutalized in trench warfare during World War I. See,
the thing is, it's not to say that a man in that position was without faults, because he certainly had as many faults as the next person did, but the problem is that if you put yourself into a position of power, what you forego is the sort of social feedback that keeps most people in line.
So you can say, well, the average individual is composed of a certain amount of positive qualities and a certain amount of negative qualities.
But being relatively powerless, the average person is always kept in line by the social pressure of his or her peers.
So, for any of us, theoretically, if we start to move too far in our naturally pathological direction, we receive instant We receive instant feedback from our surrounding environment, suggesting that it might be better if we modify our behavior,
which is to say that people have enough courage to be irritated by us and let us know that, or people have enough courage or aren't sufficiently terrified of us, which is the same thing in a sense, to tell us when we've got too far out of line by gesture and look and interaction and all sorts of things.
That's part of the security that the social group provides.
A social group makes everyone else predictable, but it also keeps us predictable to ourselves, too, by ensuring that we toe the line.
The problem with accruing power in the manner of someone like Hitler is that you forego all that social corrective feedback.
And then, because you surround yourself by people, it's a process that feeds back onto itself.
You surround yourself by people who are essentially cowardly, who want to hide behind your charisma, so to speak, so that they don't have to face the world.
And they're willing, because you protect them from the things they don't want to look at, to exceed to your every wish.
Now, in some ways that could be perfectly positive.
I read a good biography of Hitler, I thought, that claimed that had he quit or been killed or died in the mid-30s, that the judgment of the German people and perhaps of history overall would have been that he had been a very effective leader.
He might debate that, and perhaps it's debatable.
I haven't read every biography of Hitler that's out there.
But the problem was that as things continued to, as his power continued to grow, his pathology had a wider and wider, wider and wider latitude for expression.
And then, you know, the question really becomes, so you can say, because it's comforting that there's a qualitative difference between someone like Hitler and the person who's sitting next to you, but then you also have to think, when a whole country of people think that you're the answer to all their problems, what sort of character would it take to To tell yourself that all those people are wrong, given, especially in, say, in Hitler's case, the exceptional odds against him having ever got to the position that he got to.
He was a trivial person from a socio-economic and military perspective.
He didn't come from a powerful family.
He had no influential friends to speak of, and he climbed up the ranks of the hierarchy in a remarkable manner, And gained the democratic acceptance of the vast majority of the German population.
He also viewed himself as someone who was Germany's only hope, partly as a bulwark, like he viewed himself as a bulwark from the encroachment of communism from the East, which was a real threat, and also Someone who could conceivably restore Germany to some of the power that had been stripped from the country by the Versailles Treaty, which I think is reasonable to comment on that treaty, that it was blatantly vengeful.
So you have to ask yourself, under those conditions, given that much admiration carried out over such a lengthy period of time, how many people wouldn't fall prey to their own pathologies?
That's one of the things that makes Gandhi very interesting.
He certainly enjoyed as much personal power as anyone.
Yet, he seemed to have a discipline that enabled him to survive it.
Right.
Because the Hitler pattern is much more common than the way Gandhi seems to cope with it.
I'm just curious what you think about that.
Well, I mean, I don't know exactly what to think about it.
Perhaps he was just surprisingly lacking in pathologies.
Well, that's one possibility.
He was also explicitly religious in a I mean, he had engaged also.
I've always thought his personal asceticism was great.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that was part of it.
I mean, he was willing.
Voluntarily to forego many of the rewards that he might have otherwise...
I guess basically what he did was to try to discipline himself so that he, as a matter of habit, would reject any temptation that was offered to him.
He did some strange things, things that seem strange, I think.
I remember that Gandhi used to sleep with young women in order to To attempt to suppress his sexual desire.
Right, exactly.
And you think, well, that's kind of a strange thing to do.
And then you think, well, you know, this guy, here's someone who is absolutely surrounded by temptations of every sort.
In any direction that he would have chosen to pursue, whatever he wanted, he would have been granted it, and perhaps the only way he could keep himself vaguely on course was to forego all the temporal attractions of his powerful position.
I also think that Gandhi perhaps had prepared himself for the sorts of things that he might encounter Beforehand, he engaged in lengthy letter-writing correspondence with Tolstoy before he started his non-violent movement in India.
I also suspect that maybe As his power grew, his character grew, too, because he was making the right decisions all the way along.
So when he was offered a small temptation, so to speak, perhaps he was able to say no, and then the next time when the temptation was slightly bigger, it got easier.
That's right.
It was something that was practiced.
It's a good question.
We may be confusing the situations here.
I think you could apply the same analysis that you used for Hitler.
In terms of Gandhi, because the reason why he was powerful was because he was able to resist these temptations.
So as he accumulated power, he accumulated power as a saint, not as a political leader, in a sense, because there were a lot of political leaders in India at the time.
So you're suggesting, too, that there was social pressure on him to keep him in the positive direction as well?
Yeah, well, I think that's right.
I mean, if everyone expects you to act like a saint as well, then And you're going to act even more like I said.
Right, absolutely.
Well, yeah, and certainly these sorts of feedback processes exist.
I said there's a statement in the New Testament that runs something like, to those who have everything, more shall be given.
To those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.
What I think that is is a description of this sort of feedback process.
One good decision heightens the likelihood of the next good decision, and so on and so forth.
So as you make your decisions, events conspire, so to speak, to reinforce them.
You can see this with paranoids, like Stellan.
I mean, if you're paranoid, you think everyone's out to get you.
Which means that you're very hostile and suspicious towards people, which means that you see their dark side.
It also makes them very afraid and suspicious of you.
So you can see how that sort of thing can spiral out of control very, very rapidly.
One of the really intriguing things about Gandhi, though, is that he was a political leader, as well as a saint, which is sort of an unusual combination.
And there are many who aspire to his sainthood who turn out not to be.
I mean, witness the television evangelists and all that.
In other words, his specific claim to authority is being holier than the rest of us, who then ultimately turn out not to be that.
So there's still something very extraordinary about this personal discipline or whatever it was that enabled him to function.
What, what, he had sex with young women and you're not calling that a...
No, no, he just slept beside him.
Oh, he slept beside him.
Okay.
Yeah.
To prove he could be.
To prove, yes.
And to heighten his ability to resist, that was his therapy.
I mean, who knows?
What do you think is the difference between the sort of psychic process of denying the temptation versus denying other people's ideas?
They both seem similar.
You're saying, I'm acknowledging some part of me.
They're both saying, I'm not acknowledging some part of me.
No, there's a difference between refusing to acknowledge something and acknowledging it but picking a particular course of action.
I may say, say we're involved in a heated discussion and you make me angry.
The appropriate response on my part is to recognize the fact that I am angry.
And not to pretend that I'm not because good people don't get angry, but then once having recognized the fact, choose a pattern of behavior that I feel is appropriate under those circumstances, which might be to say, you know, we'd better stop having this discussion because I am in fact getting angry, or you might say something like, for reasons I don't understand entirely, what you're saying is really irritating me.
I don't know necessarily whether that's an appropriate reaction or not, but it's really the one I have.
And that's the sort of thing that was actually put to some therapeutic use by people like Carl Rogers, because he used to do that sort of thing.
So it's not the pretense that the uncomfortable fact doesn't exist.
It's choosing to deal with it in some conscious manner, which means planned manner, once it's actually manifested itself.
One other thing that you mentioned before was that most of these leaders seemed charismatic because they seemed like they were unified in that different parts of their personality all sort of fit together well.
Sure, I would say that even about someone like Hitler.
Yeah, but, I mean, if somebody, I mean, is that weighted differently depending on whether you follow all your temptations and that's like all your needs are satisfied or whether you say...
Well, no.
Nietzsche said, when Nietzsche discussed morality, he said that most morality was cowardice, which basically meant that it wasn't that people were good, it was just that they were far too afraid to act on those motivations that actually propelled them, but that the motivations were there and that given the opportunity with no With no chance of punishment, people would act them out.
And you see this sort of behavior in riots, for example, where the likelihood of being caught for committing a criminal act decreases to basically zero and, you know, anti-social behavior, so to speak, spreads through a population like a plague.
I think the reason that people like Hitler are attractive from the charismatic perspective, and this also goes for gangster figures, for example, in American movies, of whom there's an absolute plethora, is that people do tend to admire those individuals who they see as courageous enough, so to speak, to act on their darker impulses.
I think the negative reason for that is pure desire to imitate, but the positive aspect of that is that we know at some mythological level, so to speak, that the movement from conventional cowardice-driven morality to a higher order morality involves necessarily taking into account a whole plethora of motivational states that are normally regarded as unacceptable,
like Aggression and the potential for cruelty and uninhibited sexual desire and so on and so forth.
Anyways, that's part of the reason why I think we're attracted to people like gangster figures in films.
Don't you think it's also because we're witnessing someone with an effective strategy for accomplishing their goals?
I mean, regardless of what the content of that strategy is as an overall construction, it is Sure, I would say that's more the negative end of the admiration.
The point is, did you ever see the movie Goodfellas?
I hated that movie.
Anyways, because I actually thought it glorified the mobsters under the guise of showing how despicable they were.
Well, that's whatever.
It's a debatable proposition.
The good fellows believe themselves to be certainly superior beings because they got what everyone else wanted without letting fear stop them.
And there's a certain element of truth to that, because one of the things that does stop many people from getting what they want is fear.
Now, you can't conclude from that that you should remove all fear and then do whatever it takes to get exactly what you want.
But you can conclude from that that fear is not necessarily sufficient justification for not trying to pursue the things that you want.
I coded interview data once from one of these firms that does a lot of telephone interviews, and one of the questions that people had to respond to was to name someone they admired, and why?
And this was seven years ago, and a disproportionate number of people said that they admired Ross Perot.
And the reason they admired him is because, essentially, he seemed immune to social influence.
Seemed to, and people said things like, I admire someone who stands up for what he believes in, whether or not other people agree with him, Someone who doesn't change his mind, even when he's wrong.
Even when he might be wrong, someone who sticks with...
And something about these gangsters seems to resonate with that, in the sense that they seem immune to...
Well, sure, there's a certain aspect of individualism to that whole...
In the gangster motif, it's criminal individualism, but it's still indicative Of the capacity to stand up against group morality.
And the thing is, there is an aspect to heroic behavior, so to speak, that requires the incorporation of the sorts of aggressive and defiant attitudes that in and of themselves characterize gangster behavior.
Now, I would say that from the perspective of archetypal individual behavior on the positive side, Incorporation of those aggressive aspects is necessary, but domination by them is counterproductive.
But that still doesn't mean, you know...
If you're a little boy and you get beat up on the playground, you might say, well, it's better to respond nonviolently.
But really, that's a mask for the fact that you had to swallow the defeat and couldn't respond violently if you wanted to.
Now, the appropriate Response to that might be to develop the capacity to respond violently and effectively, but not to use it.
Which is to say, the absence of the capacity to respond harshly is no evidence for morality, which is a point Nietzsche tried to make over and over and over again.
If you can't be cruel, not being cruel is not moral.
It's just your rationalization for an inability.
And I think that argument's very powerful.
And I also think that's part of the reason why we're so drawn towards people who act out their darkest fantasies.
It's because they're doing something we would like to, but won't.
That doesn't mean that things should stop there.
It's like that Jesus parable of the Gnostic Gospels that you're talking about.
If the person acts...
Right.
Right.
That's exactly what it's referring to.
Which one?
Oh, there's this story that Christ is walking down the road on the Sabbath, and he sees a farmer in the ditch, and the farmer's sheep has fallen into a hole, and he's pulling the sheep out, and Christ says to him, if you know what you're doing, you're blessed, but if you don't, you're a transgressor of the law and you're cursed, and he wanders on down the street.
It's the same idea.
So the guy who's pulling out the sheep, if he's conscious, has come to terms with his capacity to violate social rules and is using that capacity to pursue a higher order level of morality.
That's one way of interpreting it.
The other way of interpreting it is that he's just careless and acting in a callous self-interest.
So it's the thing that's interesting about that, it's the same act, it's just the intense differ.
I don't understand what that has to do with the sheep.
I mean, how is that social rule?
I mean, is there something wrong about sheep?
Yeah, you're not supposed to work on the Sabbath.
Oh, sorry.
Right, right.
That's the law, the moral law.
Right?
Well, Well, the notion of being ignorant about the law really doesn't enter into that particular parable.
I mean, if you're completely ignorant of the law and you break a rule, then you're in the situation of a child, really.
Children break social rules all the time, and people don't make any presumption about their evil as a general rule because they don't know the rule.
So the assumption is he knew it was the Sabbath.
Right, that's the assumption.
The assumption is he knew it was the Sabbath, exactly.
That he wasn't just acting out of remarkable ignorance.
Okay, so I'm going to read another story, and this is from Solzhenitsyn, and this has to do with the ideological version of authoritarianism.
So Solzhenitsyn is lying with his friend Pannon in a railway car that's been set up to transport prisoners from one concentration camp to another, or to a concentration camp to begin with.
It says, my friend Patton and I are lying on the middle shelf of a stolopin compartment and set ourselves up comfortably, tucked salt herring in our pockets so that we don't need water and can go to sleep.
But at some station or other they shove into our compartment a Marxist scholar.
We can tell this from his goatee and spectacles.
He doesn't hide the fact.
He's a former professor of the Communist Academy.
We hang head down in the square cutout, and from his very first words we see that he is impenetrable.
But we have been serving time for a very long time, and we have a long time left to serve, and we value a merry joke.
We must climb down to have a bit of fun.
For example, space left in the compartment, and so we exchange places with someone in crowd in.
Hello.
Hello.
You're not too crowded?
No, it's all right.
Have you been in the jug a long time?
Long enough.
Are you past the halfway mark?
Just look over there how poverty-stricken our villages are.
Straw thatch, crooked huts.
That's an inheritance from the Tsarist regime.
Well, but we've already had 30 Soviet years.
That's an insignificant period historically.
It's terrible that the collective farmers are starving.
But have you looked in all their ovens?
Just ask any collective farmer in our compartment.
Well, everyone in jail is embittered and prejudiced.
But I've seen collective farms myself.
That means they were uncharacteristic.
The goatee had never been in any of them.
That way it was simpler.
Just ask the old folks.
Under the Tsar they were well fed, well clothed, and they used to have many holidays.
I'm not even going to ask.
It's a subjective trait of human memory to praise everything in the past.
The cow that died is the one that gave twice the milk.
Sometimes he even cited proverbs.
And our people don't like holidays.
They like to work.
Why is there a shortage of bread in many cities?
When?
Right before the war, for example.
Not true!
Before the war, in fact, everything had been worked out, falling into precisely the same trap he just described.
Listen, at that time, in all the cities on the Volga, there were queues of thousands of people.
Well, that was a local failure in supply.
More likely, your memory is failing you.
But there's a shortage now!
Old wives' tales, we have from seven to eight billion bushels of grain.
But the grain is rotten.
Not so!
We have been successful in developing new varieties of grain, and so forth.
He's imperturbable.
He speaks in a language which requires no effort of the mind.
And arguing with him is like walking through a desert, which is the emergence of some mythological imagery, by the way.
It's about people like that that they say, he made the rounds of all the blacksmiths and came home unshod.
And when they write in their obituaries, perished tragically during the period of the Stalinist cult.
This should be corrected to read, perished comically.
But if his fate had worked out differently, we would have never learned what a dry, insignificant little man he was.
We would have respectfully read his name in the newspaper.
He would have become a people's commissar, or even venture to represent all Russia abroad.
To argue with him was useless.
It was much more interesting to play with him.
Not at chess, but at the game of comrades.
There really is such a game.
It's a very simple game.
Just play up to him a couple of times or so.
Use some of his pet words and phrases.
He'll like it, for he has grown accustomed to find that all around him are enemies.
He has become weary of snarling and doesn't like to tell his stories because all of them will be twisted around and thrown right back in his face.
But if he takes you for one of his own, he will quite humanly disclose to you what he has seen at the station.
People are passing by, laughing, talking.
Life goes on.
The party is providing leadership.
People are being moved from job to job, that's for sure.
Yet you and I are languishing here in prison.
There are only a handful of us, and we must write and write petitions begging a review of our cases, begging for a pardon, or else he will tell you something interesting.
In the Communist Academy, they decided to devour one comrade.
They decided he wasn't quite genuine, not one of our own, but somehow they couldn't manage it.
There were no errors in his essays, and his biography was clean.
Then, all of a sudden, going through the archives, what a find!
They ran across an old brochure written by this comrade, which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself had held in his hands, and in the margin of which he had written in his own handwriting the notation, as an economist he is shit.
Well now, you understand, our companion smiled confidentially, that after that it was no trouble at all to make short work of that muddlehead and impostor.
He was expelled from the academy and deprived of his scholarly rank.
The railroad cars go clicking along.
Everyone is already asleep, some lying down, some sitting up.
Sometimes a convoy guard passes along the corridor, yawning.
And one more unrecorded episode from Lenin's biography is lost from view.
Well, I mean, I read you that story because it provides an interesting relationship between the adoption of a totalitarian position and the I read you that story because it provides an interesting relationship between the adoption of a totalitarian position and the necessary consequence of that adoption, which is instantly to torment and persecute anyone who doesn't belong to that particular totalitarian position.
I would say, well, it's not just a matter of the desire to protect the integrity of the totalitarian position.
It's also the fact that adoption of the totalitarian position allows those who have adopted it to rationalize and justify their unadmitted desires to take revenge on the world.
And I would say, well, why do they want to take revenge on the world?
The revenge on the world in the form of other people.
Why would you want to take revenge on the world?
Well, it's because, from your perspective, the world has tortured you unjustly and unfairly, and under those circumstances the only logical thing to do is to, in fact, attempt to extract your revenge.
We know already from looking at the myth of Genesis and the story of the fall of the Buddha that there's ample reason in the average human life.
You don't have to have a pathological background to have had enough experiences to make it appear to you with With a substantial amount of justification that the fundamental conditions of life are sufficiently unfair so that the logical thing to do while being alive is to work for the destruction of life.
I said that we were going to spend a fair amount of trying to build up some representation of the personality that is being used in mythology to represent evil, and it's kind of complicated, because it isn't something that you can just list as a set of fixed attributes.
You have to get an idea of the dynamic nature of the process.
And, well, I'm trying to do that by telling you some different stories that hopefully fit into a pattern, but I also want to outline some of the things that seem What you said earlier in the lecture is that, and you said this last lecture, that humans see more danger in the unknown because of their cognition.
But what it seems to me, what you just said right now, is that their cognition doesn't necessarily make the unknown more potent, but that it attributes the unknown to more kinds of things, and the danger to more kinds of things.
And so this guy, or people that are in a totalitarian Regime, whatever, can see the unknown in more kinds of things.
They abstract it to other things rather than necessarily things being more potent.
I would say that's also the case.
You can see it where animals wouldn't see it.
Partly because you can switch frames of reference and something that's known in one frame of reference is unknown in another.
And you can also imagine ways where things that seem comfortable at the moment might indicate some potential danger in the future.
Which is what you do when you worry.
When you worry, basically you're somewhere safe.
I mean, as a general rule, that's not always the case.
I mean, if you're somewhere unsafe, then you're afraid of that, and that's not really worried.
Usually you're in your living room chair or whatever, and you're attributing emergences of the unknown to all sorts of potentialities, and perhaps trying to problem solve at the same time.
What is unfair and unjust in the way you're using it?
Well, I would say unpredictable.
That would be one aspect of it.
Because you can't learn to avoid something that's unpredictable.
And also, I think we tend to regard a punishment as just if it's only sufficient to eradicate the behavior that preceded it.
So, for example, I mean, we strive towards that in the criminal justice system, right?
That's what it means that the punishment should fit the crime.
Well, first of all, it means that there should be a crime, and often we seem to be punished despite the fact that there's no evident crime.
And it also should be that the punishment is the right match for the crime, and it's hard to understand what that might mean, but if you look at how you treat, well, say, a dog or that you're trying to train to not do something, if it pees on your rug, for example, There might be a punishment that you would consider sufficiently matched to that act so that it might be regarded by the dog as just.
So, like a swat on the behind with a newspaper, rather than being beat half to death with a stick, for example.
And the source of that sense of appropriateness?
Well...
Well, that's a good question.
I don't exactly know how that's worked out.
I think a lot of it's trial and error.
I can't really say much more about that at the moment.
Say you're dealing, I see this with my children, the question is how do you...
I think you have to use negative feedback as well as positive feedback to set borders around children.
And then the question is, well, where does the notion of what constitutes just punishment come from and that sort of interaction?
Well, you have to experiment with people in a sense to determine the nature of their temperament, because for some people, for my daughter for example, if I point my finger at her and say, no, she's doing something that she shouldn't do, she'll stop.
Whereas if I do that with my son, Well, that's just irrelevant.
That level of punishment is completely negligible.
So for him, what constitutes a just punishment, as far as I can tell, is something that's higher up in intensity than it is for my daughter.
And that's probably a matter of temperament.
Well, that's possible.
He's also younger than her.
Because I have two boys, and I notice the same thing.
That the older one...
Is more sensitive to punishment?
Very much so.
And the younger one...
It's like that in my family here.
I was the oldest and people being mad at me.
But my next sibling down is the wild one.
Here's another example.
In English common law, you have the right to use reasonable force to protect yourself against violation of your rights by an intruder, which basically means that If someone breaks into your house and you have a.45 revolver, you can't shoot them without saying stop.
I mean, it's a little more complex than that, but the point is that you have to use the minimum amount of force that's necessary to stop the thing that shouldn't be happening, and I think that's a critical aspect of justice along with the notion of predictability.
I think those are the two poles of justice as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, so anyways, what we're trying to do is to figure out what this personality is characterized by.
It's complex because there's a feedback problem.
Now, I would say, like, why is it...
Let's see if I can get the argument down pat.
See, the personality of evil is characterized by the tendency to deny error.
So a totalitarian personality is someone who can't admit to being wrong.
And I would say, well, that's equivalent to not being able to deny the existence of anomalous information.
Because when you say, I wasn't wrong, what you're saying is that The information that I've received, which indicates that there's a flaw in my argument, actually doesn't exist.
There is no such flaw.
But you might reinterpret the information, or you might readjust your Your totalitarian idea, to some degree, to shut the idea out more effectively or whatever, but I guess what I'm saying is that refusal to admit to error is exactly the same thing as denial of anomalous information.
And I think that's why one of the hallmark attributes of the devil in classical mythology is pride, because that's what pride is.
Pride is the statement, and it's more than that.
It's not only the statement that I never make a mistake, which is that for me there's no anomalous information.
That's also the statement, for me there is no anomalous information, is the statement, for me there's no unexplored territory, and the statement That, for me, there's no unexplored territory is exactly equivalent to the presumption of personal omniscience.
It's the same thing.
If there's no unknown, I know everything.
Well, Milton's story, that's the story of Satan's fall, is the mythological description of a pattern of behavior that's characterized by implicit adoption.
Well, it's explicit in that story.
Explicit adoption of omniscience.
So we're saying, well, what does that mean?
Well, it instantly involves these other things.
Pride.
Arrogance.
Totalitarianism.
Now, you might say that, well, the follower of a creed, rather than the originator of a creed, isn't someone who's presuming personal omniscience.
But I would say, well, they're even more corrupt than the actual leader, because they say, well, he's the boss, he's God, I'll do everything he tells me.
So they're actually eliminating their At least the person who establishes the dogma, like Hitler for example, is taking a personal part in the construction of the theory.
Someone who follows Hitler has completely abrogated any personal responsibility for making any moral judgments whatsoever to the leader, so I think actually the followers are more pathological than the leader.
I think that's true.
So these things all make a complex, which is one of these natural categories as far as I can tell.
The question is, well, what do they lead to?
Well, I would say that the reason that there's a negative here and a negative here is because these two processes feed back onto one another, which is to say, remember, Iliad said it was not only age that made systems decrepit, it was the sins of men.
So then the question is, well, what does it mean?
It was the sins of men.
You have to ask, well, what does sin mean, basically, from the mythological perspective, and that gets you into a discussion of the question of evil.
And I would say, well, the thing that underlies evil Most fundamentally, is the process of the denial of anomalous information, which is to say that you have a theory, and a piece of evidence pops up which, according to your own criteria for truth, because you set that as well, indicates that your theory is actually wrong.
It doesn't have to be objective fact of any sort.
It's by your own criteria.
Something's popped up that indicates that you're wrong, and you say, well, no, that thing doesn't exist.
And you can say that lots of ways.
You can just See, Freud thought you had to actively repress information, anomalous or traumatic information.
But that's not right.
You don't have to actively repress it because it's a sin of omission and not a sin of commission.
Because if a piece of novel information comes up and you do nothing about it, then you haven't processed it.
To take into account a piece of novel information means that you have to explore the thing that's novel, draw the necessary behavioral conclusions, and update your scheme of representation.
So it isn't as if when something novel pops up and you admit to its existence, automatically the way you think is made proper.
It's that to actually process something novel you have to go through a tremendous amount of work, some of the work which might actually involve one of these Descends and resurrection, so to speak, that we talked about.
So, if you're...
Okay.
I'll finish the argument here in a second.
So, we have sin as the denial of anomaly, but we have original sin already as curiosity, which is the precisely opposite of that.
Hmm.
Okay, let me see if...
Original sin is more than curiosity, isn't it?
It's the desire to be on the status of God, but it's also denial of, I guess...
Yeah, well, I also mentioned last week that there was a paradoxical aspect to that because The Gnostics, for example, regarded the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve as a higher order deity than the god that had created things to begin with.
And that was a heretical position from the perspective of the sect that developed into the standard Christian church.
But it's also the case that even in Catholicism, in the medieval era, original sin was regarded as a fortunate sin because it was a precondition for the drama of the passion.
So you could say, well, Original sin was regarded as a precursor of evil because it was curiosity that knocked Adam and Eve out of paradise, and also that took the Buddha outside of the walled city that his father had set up.
So from that perspective, it's very negative, which is to say that it's curiosity that brings anomalous information into an otherwise stable system.
But from another perspective, which is broader, I think, you might regard it as a fortunate proclivity.
So I think it depends on your temporal frame of reference.
I think that's a reasonable interpretation.
It's something we'll return to, actually, in the last lecture of this course, because there's a myth that Jung pulled out from England that actually addresses that point directly.
It's just a paragraph long, but it tries to put original sin into the context of the whole The whole story of redemption, which isn't just Christian, it's just this story of, you know, a stable pre-existent state, a deterioration into a state of chaos, and then a regeneration on a more integrated plane.
Original sin is a fortunate and necessary problem.
Sure, I mean, if you look at it from the perspective of being in chaos, so we say you're in chaos, you say, well, what got me here?
Well, if I would have just shut up and not bothered going down that path that my curiosity drove me down, then I'd still be, you know, sitting comfortably ensconced at home.
I wouldn't be in this horrible stew of emotional wretchedness that I'm in, which is, and I think, you know, if you think about that story writ large, the notion is, If we wouldn't have developed this cortical cap that allowed us this ability to manipulate abstract bits of information, had never become self-conscious at all, we would have been in a paradise-like position, like the animals who are, in a sense, beyond good and evil.
Now Voltaire said, well, I included Voltaire's little commentary on that line of logic, and he said, well, I know a more succinct way of putting this.
I don't remember who said this.
It's better to be an unhappy philosopher than a happy pig.
You can also think of that as a form of pride.
Of course the ultimate attainment is to be an unhappy pig.
Isn't it time, have you not considered Modifying your vocabulary, since the meaning of your vocabulary in this climate is, it takes on the meaning of that which would have been taught by the representative of the church, where the devil will be used to describe the stranger and evil will be used to describe things that go against the current moral code.
Well, I don't, so have I not considered modifying my terminology because of that likelihood?
Are you not concerned that it causes so much confusion to use a word that has been used both as the denial of anomalous information and also the generation of new information, depending on the perspective of the person using the word?
Like, you're taking a very sophisticated use of the word devil.
Yes.
Well, hopefully.
Your readers don't have your sophisticated use of the word devil.
The devil is a finger on your shoulder and removes you from God.
Whispers bad things in your ear.
Which tells you it should break away from the moral code.
Right, but that's also the case.
Like, for example, in this parable that you brought up again.
I mean, depending on...
Okay, so there's the guy in the ditch, he's taking a sheep out of the hole.
The reason that he's doing it determines the morality of the action, not the fact of the action.
So the problem is that it is the case upon occasion that the thing that tempts you away from group identification is not the positive exploratory spirit.
I would say there are two consequences, there are two political consequences to the refusal to admit to anomalous information.
And one is the construction of a totalitarian state, either as something that defines your personality or as something that defines your whole culture, depending on how pervasive that particular pattern of action is.
And that's the one I'm kind of most interested in because it's been totalitarian and fascist states that, at least in the 20th century, appear to have done the most damage.
But there's also another form of political disintegration that might be more clearly classified as decadence.
And decadence is the refusal to adhere to a traditional morality to begin with, justified by arguments such as, well, that's all archaic and useless information.
Anyhow, a free spirit such as myself, which means undisciplined and useless creatures in actuality, are actually the kind of heroes who are going to transform the world.
So I would say that For people who are following the route to decadence, so to speak, when the devil talks, he says cultural rules are all tyrannical and nonsense.
So the problem is the interpretation of the process is entirely context-dependent, and you can't make it simple for that fact, because the same act and two different consequences can have two completely different moral valences.
Nietzsche said at one point, you know, if you're If you're out in the front of your group, the first thing you should make sure of is that you're not running away.
Like, you're thinking, hey, I'm way out here in front.
I'm leading.
But the truth of the matter is, you might not be leading at all.
You might just be running away as fast as you can.
And using the idea of your leadership to justify the fact that you just can't cut it.
A lot of what passes for counter-cultural creativity and revolutionary thinking It's not at all the heroic movement away from the confines of group identification, but pure lack of discipline masquerading as heroism.
And it's just as dangerous as fascism, I think.
And it's also a precursor to fascism, because if you get a society that's sufficiently disordered, what that will produce is a tremendous desire for the establishment of rigid structure.
So anyways, is that a...
Well, I think I was just saying that perhaps the devil that Elena Kegels is writing about is not the same devil that you're writing about.
Well, yeah, I think that's true.
The only way I can think of, it is the same in a way.
The question, I think, is, or the issue is to develop a sufficiently delineated notion of what constitutes evil so that we can see the difference between the things that are just normally classified into that domain and the things that should be classified into the domain.
It's a symbol.
I mean, it operates on many levels.
You just have to make sure you talk about which level you're referring to it on.
It's hard to say what else you could refer to, since what you're dealing with is the whole mythology of the devil.
Well, you know, so you run into a problem like this.
We know from Iliad's work...
See, you're reading, your devil is from Paradise Lost, which is a different devil.
I never read Paradise Lost.
I grew up with a devil which isn't the same devil as your devil.
Really very different.
Right, right.
Your devil is like...
Well, I would say it is the case that what Milton did was attempt to codify what he saw as the fundamental traditions of the devil in true Christian mythology that had been gathered up to that point.
Here's an example.
Look, we know from Iliade that it's a natural tendency, so to speak, to assimilate the foreigner to the dragon of chaos.
It's not even an assimilation.
It's a natural tendency of people to be unable to distinguish the foreigner from the dragon of chaos.
Well, we know that dragon imagery plays a large part in our mythology of evil.
So it's very easy for us to contaminate up our notion of the serpentine aspect of evil with the foreigner.
What I'm trying to do is to say, well look, there are some things that we tend naturally to regard as evil, because they're negatively balanced, that are only tangentially and situationally associated with evil, but there is one thing at the core, which is a process, that is actually right at the basis of evil.
And I'm trying to build up a map of what that of what a personality characterized by that process would be.
So I said, well the first thing is that the totalitarian personality rejects any notion of the possibility of personal error.
Now people sometimes Hide from themselves what they're doing by saying, well, it isn't that I'm personally omniscient, it's that I'm an adherent, say, of communist ideology, and it's communist ideology that's absolutely right, and I just happen to believe it.
But I think that's just rationalization.
You get all the advantages of being omniscient without any of the disadvantages.
So it's really, really cowardly.
You can see how arrogance is related to that without any problem.
But there's also an underlying notion there of the sacrifice of the hero, which is also implicit in the whole notion of the rejection of anomalous information, because we said already that The positive aspect of the individual is the aspect that voluntarily admits to the presence of anomalous information and then modifies worldview, either his or hers or the whole society's, as a consequence of that contact with anomalous.
So there's recognition of the uncomfortable fact, then exploration of the fact, then generation of an adaptive structure to deal with the fact, and then communication of that adaptive structure out into the social community.
And that's the heroic pattern.
Well, if you don't do that, if you do the opposite, then that's tantamount to rejecting that whole process.
So I would say that someone who refuses to admit to the possibility of personal error also sacrifices their identity with the heroic aspect of the individual.
That's also a necessary consequence.
And then you say, well, what are the consequences of that?
Well, the consequences are simple.
First of all, there's only two ways of protecting yourself against the unknown.
One is by adopting group identification, and the other is by identifying with the process that makes sense out of the unknown, and most people do both, and that's perfectly reasonable.
We adopt our group identifications, and then we try to make sense out of those things that are anomalous that happen to us personally.
So that's a nice balance.
So you can either identify with the hero, so to speak, or you can identify with the group.
If you forsake your identification with the hero voluntarily, which is to say that you say there is no such thing as anomalous information, then the only thing that you've got left to protect yourself with is identification with the group.
And that makes the likelihood that you'll identify rigidly with the group much, much higher, because you don't have an alternative anymore.
It's like, if you know that you can cope, then if someone comes along Well, let's take a look at this in terms of personal relationships.
Because a personal relationship can adopt the totalitarian mode with no problem.
Let's say you're extremely dependent on the person that you're associating with and someone threatens that person.
Well, you're going to get extraordinarily upset about this because You've sacrificed your own ability to deal with the unknown through your dependency.
So you're much more likely to need the person that you're with than would otherwise be the case.
In fact, you're going to be so dependent on them that you're going to use all sorts of Vicious underground tricks to ensure that they don't abandon you.
But anyways, the point is that if you eliminate this as a possibility, basically the theory runs like this.
You draw the conclusion that the negative aspect of the unknown is so terrible that there's no possible way it can be dealt with.
Which is to say, you're making the presupposition that life is too terrible to bear.
As a consequence, you eliminate your identification with the positive aspect of the individual, That makes you much more likely to adopt tyrannical identification with the patriarchal structure, because you don't have a process that you can actually engage in contacting the unknown with.
So, it's also the case that...
Is the opposite then what goes to decadence?
In other words, if you reject identification with the group, it only would be Well, I would say decadence is a consequence of viewing society as only tyrannical, and seeing that as even more of a danger than the negative aspect of the unknown.
Because it has a positive aspect, too.
I'd say in both cases, decadence or fascism, it's still characterized by the elimination of identification with the hero.
But is the opposite true and possible?
Which is elimination of identification with?
The group.
Oh yes, I see.
On that level, that would be decadence, yeah.
Then that would be decadent.
Yeah.
If it's actually motivated by the inability to put up with any discipline.
Because the problem with, like, group identification has a cost.
I mean, you have to follow the rules, and that's hard.
Now, for some people, the threat of following the rules is more to be feared than the threat of the unknown, especially given, like, if you're a decadent, so to speak, you get to revel in all the positive aspects of chaos as well.
I mean, so you get to Maybe you have an exceptionally promiscuous lifestyle and you use all the mood-altering drugs you can get your hands on and you live for the pleasurable moment.
There's lots of positive aspects to chaos that are hidden from you by the necessity of identifying with the group.
And isn't the thing that decadence takes place in a highly developed society so that you can take for granted all the positive things that the society is giving you and that's why you can get only positive out of the unknown because you're denying that you have to follow the rules but at the same time resting on all the positive benefits.
Absolutely.
Of course that's exactly the case.
Is that you're protected by the thing you despise, despite the fact that you despise it.
It's so powerful that it can bear you along while you're doing everything you can to undermine it.
Sure, that happens all the time.
Nietzsche said at one point, this is the kind of statement that can be easily interpreted as fascist, and Nietzsche gets interpreted that way now and then, he said, the strength of a society can be measured by the number of parasites that it can bear.
But the point he was making was the point you're making.
Although you can see how, taken out of context, that statement can be viewed as support for an exceptionally powerful right-wing position.
But I'm not getting at yet exactly what I want to get at.
So we have a personality that's characterized by all these necessary consequences.
There's no anomaly.
That's equivalent to saying, I know everything.
Identification with the group is also equivalent to rejection of the heroic.
But the other thing is that...
That's the motive that I really want to get at.
The idea, I guess, is that the development of self-consciousness, which means knowledge of mortality, heightens the negative valence of the unknown to such a degree where it's easy to draw the logical conclusion that life is such an unfair process that it should be brought to an end.
And I wanted to read you a quote from Goethe.
He characterizes Mephistopheles' Mephistopheles Central Thesis.
So Mephistopheles means Prince of Lies.
So that's another attribute of the classical devil, and of course the lie is that anomalous information that upsets your particular system of belief doesn't exist.
That's what characterizes a lie.
Anyways, Mephistopheles has an express credo, and it goes something like this.
The spirit I that endlessly denies, and rightly too, And...
Agatha repeats that philosophy in part two of Faust.
He says, this is Mephistopheles speaking again, gone to sheer nothing, passed with null, made one.
What matters our creative endless toil?
When at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil.
That's the question that's posed in Genesis.
It is bygone.
How shall this riddle run?
As good as if things never had begun, yet circle back existence to possess.
I'd rather have eternal emptiness.
So Mephistopheles' credo is basically that the evidence implies that the conditions of existence are sufficiently unfair in and of themselves Such that it would be better if nothing existed at all.
First of all, it's a conclusion that people draw from time to time on the basis of the evidence that exists.
But I would also say that if you abandon your identification with the process that makes order out of chaos, that's the conclusion that you necessarily have to draw as a consequence of the nature of your experience.
If you eliminate from your life all those things that are positive, which occur as a consequence of your voluntary tendency to move out into the world, all that you'll be left with necessarily is constant evidence of the existence of unwarranted pain and suffering.
And under those conditions, the only logical conclusion to draw is that any state of existence that's characterized by constant and unwarranted pain and suffering obviously deserves to be euthanized, eradicated.
And I think that's the motive that underlies the acts of genocide that accompany totalitarian thinking.
Well, here's an example.
There's a recent biography of Stalin published.
I've only read a review of it.
Two books, actually, I want to pick up that have been written very recently.
They're very relevant to this course, and that's one of them.
Based on archived material, well, The biographer reveals that Stellan is the sort of person that we've been describing.
He was an extraordinarily cruel person, rigid, totalitarian, paranoid.
Well, what was his plan?
This biography thinks there's a good possibility that he was murdered, which is a good thing by all appearances.
It looks like what Stellan was doing prior to his demise was, like, his acts of evil had escalated in magnitude over the course of the years that he was in power.
And as he got more and more powerful, the domain of his ability to put his evil fantasies into action increased.
This biographer claims that Stellan In the years that led up to his death, was in fact planning to start a nuclear war with the West, and that all of the systematic acts of genocide that he had committed in the Soviet Union might be regarded as trial runs, which I would think of as practice, you know?
The first person is hard to kill, but once you kill one person, well, the second person isn't so hard to kill.
And once you get two, well, it's not so hard to wipe out twenty, and maybe once you're pretty good at that, a thousand doesn't bother you anymore, and then you can practice on a few million, and if that really doesn't distress you too much, well, then there's always the possibility of blowing up the whole world.
And that's what motivated Stalin, I think.
And I would also say that Those of us who tend to think of people like Stalin and Hitler as entirely foreign entities haven't come to terms with the fact that there's a big chunk of our personality whose credo is precisely that of Mephistopheles, which is that the world and its conditions are so unfair In reality, that the best thing that could possibly happen would be for all this to come to an end as rapidly as possible.
And I would say that under normal conditions, we work out of this part of our personality and this part of our personality too.
And generally it's a toss-up which part gets the upper hand.
So, to the degree that this part gets the upper hand, which is pretty constant, the likelihood of the tyrannical state increases in In magnitude.
And you might say, well, you know, that's a ridiculous argument because the actions of one individual don't have any relationship to the consequences at the level of any political maneuvering, but I would say, we don't have the foggiest clue what caused things like the Holocaust.
We don't know why the Cold War started.
We certainly have no idea why it ended.
And as far as I'm concerned, it's premature to conclude, on the basis of our evident ignorance and our inability to stop things like the Holocaust from occurring, that we have no idea how the actions of the individual might be related to the development of genocidal states.
So I'm suggesting that they might be allied much more closely than people have been I'm also suggesting that part of the reason that people have been inclined to believe that they're not very closely aligned is partly because of the individual responsibility, the magnitude of individual responsibility that seems to imply.
So identification with the regenerative process is all that lies between us and that.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think you can even make a physiological argument to buttress that point, which is that to the degree that you're engaged in a constant, in the constant voluntary processing of anomalous information, your life is interesting and meaningful, by definition.
In fact, the circuitry that you activate, when you're engaged in voluntary exploration, Which is a consequence of admission of anomaly, is in fact what we call meaning.
And to the degree that you're engaged in a meaningful activity, you can put up with all the nasty preconditions of existence that make that sort of exploration possible.
Which Nietzsche said, if you have a why, you can bear any how.
And basically what he meant by that was that despite the fact that life Perhaps necessarily has terrible preconditions for it to exist at all.
It might be rendered bearable and even positive if you would only participate in those things that you know to be correct.
Well, it's a reasonable hypothesis.
It's also what everyone would...
If you could discover what it is that everyone would want, if they could really figure out what they wanted, that would be it.
Because the story says, if you pursue those things that you personally find most meaningful without deceiving yourself as to their content, what will happen is that you'll develop a mode of being that enables you to look on life as if it was a beneficial process.
And that is what people want when they say something like, well what is, like, given this terrible thing that's just happened to me, what could possibly be the meaning of my existence?
Say, well...
Okay, I have your...
I have almost all of your papers marked.
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