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May 4, 2013 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:47:48

Maps of Meaning 12 (Harvard Lectures)

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	. . .
	Thank you.
	Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
	So you find you either blind and you can't see anything else, it'll be dark and you can't take notes.
	I find the outlining is really useful.
	Every session that I was just going through to get a second reading, I'd like to see if you can find a very good reason.
	And Jeff White with Brown, I guess, like all the other areas.
	I've got a few psychiatry.
	I'll take a look at that.
	That's right.
	I think you know what I'm going to do.
	He's all like a psychosophobic.
	I don't know.
	He's all a psychosophobic.
	Yeah.
	He's all a psychosophobic.
	He's all a psychosophobic.
	That's just hard to do.
	He's got a little interesting stuff.
	No, no, I know.
	He's got a little interesting stuff.
	Murray is there.
	I went to see the bar, though.
	Gordon, all of course.
	And I saw him in the stands.
	That's the street.
	Everybody wants to get up there.
	The good brother.
	The street with the confronted evil.
	And she's amazing.
	And she's amazing.
	I see.
	The character.
	The character.
	Yeah, no, I mean, it's just like.
	It just like fits there.
	No.
	It's a little interesting.
	It's a little interesting.
	I don't know if it's a little interesting.
	Because I have.
	They're also a clearly number of spots.
	I don't know if it's a little interesting.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm trying to improve the coherency of this manuscript
	by, I gave you the summary for the whole thing last week and the week before, and now I'm going to write a summary for every chapter and hopefully that will provide a structure for the more either elaborate or vague.
	depending on your perspective arguments that follow.
	So anyways, what you have is a summary of the preface, which is very short.
	And then a summary of the argument that I've been making throughout that it's reasonable to conceive of the world in two ways.
	And I just tried to reduce that argument to its essential aspects.
	And then the last two pages contain A description of the instinctive response to novelty and the manner in which that response finds its representation in mythology.
	And maybe by next week I'll have like four more chapter summaries or something for you, if any luck.
	Okay.
	So, where generally We've been discussing the possibility that the dangers that are inherent to group identity, which is the tendency of group identity to adopt a totalitarian stance, which is a consequence of any group's propensity to try to maintain its structure over time.
	We're discussing the possibility that that inevitable tendency of the group might be heightened in its danger by certain types of individual psychopathology.
	And I was trying to make the argument...
	It's interesting, you know, this week in the Atlantic Monthly, there's a discussion of William James and his inquiry into religious phenomenology, which was apparently motivated in large part by his use of nitrous oxide.
	But there's also an argument in there that elaborates upon Shelley Taylor's findings in social psychology.
	Some of you know this, that positive illusions, according to Taylor, foster mental health.
	Anyways, that idea has now spread right out into the mainstream press and The guy who wrote the Atlantic Monthly article was making the point that the validity of a belief might be determined by whether or not it makes you happy, which is a very, very, very dangerous perspective.
	Anyway, it's back to this.
	Back to this main argument.
	The reason I brought that up is because, of course, that's a point that's absolutely contrary to the point that I've been trying to make in this class, which is that it's the individual tendency to deceive themselves, to deceive ourselves, or to deceive oneself, about the nature of reality as it's defined personally, that constitutes the basic form of psychopathology, that turns the group, which is a necessary but dangerous structure, into something that's pathologically dangerous.
	Now, the argument basically, well, I'll start.
	We'll discuss that argument today in a little bit more detail, but then I want to flip to the last part of the course, which is a discussion of the process that hopefully will serve as an antithesis to this individual pathology.
	So you can describe, you know, you can define something very well by describing its opposite.
	And that's why we have anti-heroes in literature, at least in part, because they're good, bad examples.
	And you can infer The opposite of something from a description of that thing.
	So it's perfectly reasonable to start a description of identification with heroism, I suppose, by discussing its opposite.
	Nietzsche said, I wrote a quote from him on page 211.
	He said, who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality?
	And his answer to that was, he who suffers from it.
	Well, that's an interesting statement, because obviously it's not a description of an individual person.
	Or a way of drawing a distinction between those who lie and those who don't, really.
	It's more a way of saying that since it's obvious that everybody suffers from actuality, that everyone has sufficient motivation to lie.
	And what we're going to try to get at a little bit today, again, is precisely what that motivation is.
	and then what the consequences, the inevitable consequences of following a pattern of adaptation might be.
	I made the point last week that it's difficult to get a picture of the process that serves as the adversarial counterpart to the mythological hero because the reason that that process is being described as a personality in mythology is because it consists of a number of things simultaneously.
	It's difficult to discuss something that consists of a number of things simultaneously, because when you discuss anything, you have to break it down into its constituent elements.
	Then you risk oversimplifying the personality or reducing it to something, to one single thing that it's not.
	And the tendency to lie is a bunch of things at once that are all interrelated, and it would be a mistake to try to reduce it to a single thing.
	But I think, at least in part, One of the essential aspects of the tendency to lie is rejection of the error.
	Now, there's a quote.
	I'm going to read you a quote from Milton.
	He describes Satan's attitude.
	I have a little comment on that.
	He says, first, which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, and in the lowest deep, a lower deep, still threatening to devour me, opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
	The devil, whose traditional representation of evil, refuses any recognition of imperfection, refuses to admit I was in error in my action or in my representation, accepts as a consequence of unbending pride eternal misery, Refuses metanoia, which is confession and reconciliation.
	Remains forever the spirit that refuses and rejects.
	This is a quote.
	Oh, then at last relent.
	Is there no place left for repentance?
	None for pardon left.
	None left but by submission.
	And that word disdain forbids me.
	And my dread of shame among the other spirits beneath whom I seduced with other promises and other vaunts than to submit, boasting I could subdue the omnipotent.
	I, me, they little know how dearly I abide that boast so vain, under what torments inwardly I groan, for they adore me on the throne of hell with diadem and scepter high advanced.
	The lower still I fall, only supreme in misery, Such joy ambition finds But say I could repent And could obtain by act of grace my former state How soon should height recall high thoughts How soon unsay what feigned submission swore Ease would recant vows made in pain As violent and void For never can true reconcilment grow Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep Which would but lead me to a worse relapse and heavier fall
	So should I purchase dear short intermission bought with double smart?
	This knows my Punisher.
	Therefore, as far from granting heed as I from begging peace, all hope excluded thus.
	Such refusal, the inability to say, I was wrong, I'm sorry, I should change, means the death of hope and existence in the hellish abyss.
	Rejection of fact means alienation from meaning, from truth.
	And life without meaning is suffering without recourse, worthy of nothing but destruction in accordance with self-definition.
	So the idea, I guess what we're trying to do in a sense is to unpack what rejection of error means.
	We already know from looking at the picture we put together of the mythological portrayal of reality, that all new information is gathered as a consequence of contact with the unknown.
	I mean, this is just a definition, right?
	You can't gather anything, any new information, unless you're somewhere that you haven't been, so to speak.
	You have to be in territory that's unexplored to gather anything that's novel.
	Now, the problem with that, from the moral perspective, so to speak, since we're dealing with behavior and emotion, is that the only way that you can get to be somewhere that you don't know is by admitting to the existence of anomalous To the existence of anomaly, and that's tantamount to an admission that you were incorrect.
	The idea of being an ally.
	You have a vision of yourself and where you are, and you're contrasting that with a vision of where you want to be.
	That's sort of your own definition of what constitutes the world, and both of those poles are subject to modification, but you're the one who decides what the poles are.
	I mean, you're setting up the rules of the game.
	And then, if by your own definition, your actions, which are designed to bring where you are to where you want to be, produce a contrary result, that's anomalous.
	That's an anomalous piece of information.
	By your own definition.
	See, I stress that because the problem with talking about something like error is that you might think that implicit in that discussion is a notion that you have to make recourse to an idea of absolute truth to talk about error.
	But you don't.
	This model is predicated on the notion that you define the terms of the argument for yourself, which is to say you're the one who decides where you are and also where you're going.
	I mean, you pull in information from outside to make those decisions, of course, but it's still your game.
	And if the actions that you've constructed produce results that you didn't intend, that's what constitutes an anomaly.
	So it isn't that you have to know anything about absolute truth, so to speak, What if you get novel information by establishing a relationship with the unknown, or an aspect of the unknown, and that information that you get back in the context of that relationship, when it contradicts information that's coming from another source, is the error.
	So rather than it being some sort of internal It's a conflict between the meaning you're getting from two different relationships you have.
	I would say that that's an equivalent phenomenon.
	One of the examples I'm using in the text is the debate about abortion.
	There's a lot of emotional intensity surrounding the abortion debate because it pits two cultural schemas against one another.
	One says, the right to life is paramount.
	Which is a perfectly valid position.
	And the other position says, no, the right to freedom, the right to free choice is paramount.
	Now, under most circumstances, most people in this society accept both of those moral presuppositions, but abortion happens to be one situation, assuming goodwill on both sides, so to speak, that happens to be one situation where the phenomena the world presents us with puts those two positions necessarily at odds.
	It's necessary, which is the decision to hierarchically arrange the two presuppositions.
	So it can be the case that one philosophical stance that's valid in most circumstances and another valid in most circumstances can meet in the third place and war in opposition.
	Then you get a situation where there's an environmental phenomena Which would be the possibility of unwanted persons, the possibility of abortion, that the two moral systems, which are modes of adaptation, do not properly address.
	And then what happens?
	Well, that's the eruption of an anomalous occurrence into a cultural structure.
	And one of the things that happens when that sort of thing happens is that you get a war.
	And there is a war in this country between those two positions.
	It's just mostly still fought at the level of words.
	But not always.
	So...
	That's a conflict of values.
	And Jung said, for example, that the most difficult moral decisions always come about when there's a conflict of duty.
	One valid principle says, action pattern A. Another valid principle says, action pattern B. The two action patterns juxtaposed produce an irreconcilable situation.
	Then the question is, what do you do?
	What can you do?
	Well, that's part of what we're going to get at When we get to the end of the argument today.
	If it's impossible here and it's impossible there, what do you do?
	That's the question.
	Yeah, I guess I was wondering whether those two situations are analogous, but the emphasis is slightly different, whether you've got to resolve it internally.
	Or whether you've got to resolve it in a sense of severing your connections with one of those sources.
	Well, that's an option.
	That's an option.
	I mean, I would say one of the things we're going to discuss today is consequences of response patterns to enormous information.
	And I would say, well, one common way of dealing with an enormous occurrence of that type is just to fortify the position that you think is most appropriate and exclude the rest.
	Well, it's that sort of solution, writ large in society.
	I mean, it has its advantages.
	It's protective, but it's also that sort of solution that, taken to its extreme, causes the walls to rise up around communities.
	One way of eliminating anomalous information is to increase the conformity within the group and to put more barriers up to stop information from flowing in.
	It's a good solution, but it has its problems.
	So, anyways.
	The idea that all anomaly is personal error is experienced as personal error.
	Yes, at least that's basically the idea, exactly, is that the unknown Because the unknown, the way that we're construing it, is a phenomenon that appears cloaked in affect.
	It's always necessarily making its appearance on the scene of individual consciousness.
	So the thing is, you're acting out your moral presuppositions, which you have determined by your own rules are the ones you should act out.
	Then a piece of information pops up its ugly head, suggesting that your means are wrong, or in a catastrophic case, the manner in which you construe the present, or your ends are wrong, in which case you're really in trouble.
	The question is, what then?
	What do you do then?
	Well, that's part of what we're going to...
	There's three alternatives, I think.
	One is that you can just pretend the anomalous thing never happened and continue on in your path as if the world was the way you thought it was, when you know it not to be the case.
	That's one.
	The other is to actively take measures to get rid of the anomalous information.
	That's a more extreme variant of that first position.
	The second is to give up your whole moral system.
	And the underground advantage to that is that moral systems are a pain, in a sense.
	I mean, they have a protective function, certainly.
	But to adhere to them means that you have to discipline your behavior.
	So, I made a comment in there at one point about the dark side of liberalism, as well as many comments about the dark side of conservatism.
	One of the reasons to be extraordinarily, to welcome novel information is so that you can dissolve all those structures to which you might have otherwise had to adhere.
	The problem with adhering to those structures is that it takes a lot of work.
	Like, if you want to be an optimal member of any given society, there's a whole structure of discipline that's necessary to adhere to.
	And it's easy to say I'm very tolerant, when actually what you mean is, I can't tolerate any of this responsibility, I'll just let it go, and everything's okay.
	Well, you can get away with that for a long time, because usually you're protected by other people who are adhering to the rules, and who make sure that, like the Unabomber, make sure that you stay alive.
	Okay, so...
	This argument always loops back onto itself, because the processes are actually, can only be described as in terms of a feedback loop, so it's very difficult to get a handle on the origin of the story, so to speak.
	Why would you reject the appearance of anomalous information?
	Say, animals don't seem to do that.
	Well, the argument that I've been trying to present is that As Nietzsche pointed out, we all have a reason to lie.
	Nietzsche said, well, why would you bother lying to yourself by an actuality?
	His answer was, well, because you suffer from it.
	That's a good answer, and that's a one-sentence description of the process that I was trying to describe in the chapter on the development of self-consciousness.
	The problem for human beings is that, well, even for animals, the appearance of an anomalous piece of information is sufficient to activate the right frontal cortical circuitry that governs negative affect.
	An anomalous occurrence stops you in your tracks.
	So if you're a rabbit and you're hopping along in the bush and you hear a noise that shouldn't be there, or you see a shape that's moving like a predator, what will happen to you, and that's something that should not be, what will happen to you is that you'll freeze.
	Because the systems that govern anxiety and inhibition of behavior have gripped your cortical apparatus.
	The same thing happens in people.
	Our first response to an anomalous event is anxiety and the cessation of ongoing behavior, which is exactly how it should be, because if an anomalous event occurs, it indicates, by its very nature, that the plan you are undertaking is wrong, because otherwise the anomalous piece of information wouldn't have showed up.
	But the problem with us is that the whole domain of anomaly Which can be conceptualized as a place, and is conceptualized that way in mythology, is contaminated by our knowledge of the potential consequences of error.
	And those consequences, I mean, you can kind of divide them into two camps.
	One price of admission of error is that you have to regard yourself as less than the group that you've identified with, which is to say that you look like a fool in front of people who, theoretically, you want respect and admiration properly.
	Those can be actual people, or they can be the people that live in your head, so to speak.
	The superego personified.
	It doesn't really matter.
	Either way, it's the same thing.
	You have to recognize yourself as less than you might be.
	That's one consequence.
	And people are very terrified about that.
	We don't like exposure of our weaknesses in front of the social group.
	Even Frank pointed out in his interpretation of dreams, a common anxiety dream is to appear naked in front of a crowd.
	Which is basically to say, to expose your vulnerability to the world.
	Or to have that vulnerability accidentally exposed.
	But when you make a fool of someone, that's exactly what you're doing.
	It's like they have pretensions, which are their plans.
	You just twist them.
	The plans fall and you see the person behind the plans while they turn red and turn away because their vulnerability has been made manifest to the group and also to themselves.
	It's a very unpleasant occurrence.
	That's shame in part.
	So that's one reason.
	The other reason is that for us the whole domain of anomaly is contaminated By the threat of mortality, which is something that's not true for animals at all, because animals can't conceive of themselves as an object that faces these extreme limitations, the limitations of mortality.
	So we have real reason to turn away from anomaly.
	You know, you want to make it concrete.
	For example, wake up in the morning and you have an ache in your side.
	Well, that ache, which is an anomalous piece of information, since you're always acting to I mean, if you worked out at the gym the night before, you have a ready-made reason, and the ache is bounded by an explanation, and its affective valence is basically zero.
	I mean, you might be a little stiff that day and favor the side, but you're not going to walk around in a state of terror.
	If you have no ready-made explanation for the anomaly, then there's It has an unbounded potential significance.
	Now, under normal circumstances, you would like to think, well, it isn't all that serious.
	I'll go on with my life and see what happens.
	If you're hypochondriacal, which means that it's easy for you to blow things out of proportion.
	We're going to allow your fantasy, which is a hypothesis-generating machine, to work on providing potential explanations for the ache, which might range from, I slept wrong, to, this is the incipient sign of the cancer that will kill me.
	I know someone, for example, whose father and grandfather both died of a heart attack when they were in the neighborhood of 40, and he's 35, and he's borderline agoraphobic, which basically means that he can't tolerate Any fluctuations in his heart rate, because that's one of the signs of anger phobia.
	People with anger phobia, if their heart rate goes up, they tend to think, oh no, this is the event that will either lead me to make a fool of myself, or that will kill me.
	Well, he's in a situation that's very much like that all the time, because every time he feels some unexplained internal event, he thinks, you know, that's the end of me.
	Well, you can see why he would be neurotic in a situation like that.
	I mean, he has good reason for doubting the The easy explanations for the existence of this anomalous information, because, you know, heart disease is hereditary.
	He's a little overweight.
	He drinks a little bit too much.
	He smokes a little bit too much.
	He works too hard.
	There's good reason for being afraid.
	But that's the sort of thing that an animal's never going to experience, because an animal can't Use its cortex against its limbic system, in a sense, which is something that can weaken.
	What your cortex is supposed to do, your frontal cortex, basically.
	If an anomalous piece of information pops up, your frontal cortex is supposed to map out a behavioral pattern that eliminates the valence from the phenomenon.
	But sometimes you can't do that because your frontal cortex basically says, oh no, this might be the thing that exposes my weaknesses to the group, or kills me.
	In which case, your limbic system responds to that labeling as if that in itself is threat, And out of control you go, which I think is an explanation for panic attack phenomena, for example.
	It's catastrophic reasoning.
	But everybody has.
	For me, the mystery of panic attacks is more why people just don't have them all the time.
	Really, really.
	Because the people who have them have good reason for having them, but those reasons are very much like the reasons that we all have.
	So, we're lucky is the answer, I think, under most circumstances.
	We're protected by our implicit theories of belief, or our implicit systems of belief.
	And most of us, I suppose, were taught as children, if a minor physical anomaly arises, that the best course of action is to carry on, at least as a mode of hypothesis testing.
	And that's a form of acquired adaptation.
	So it's also like, if you're willing to consider alternative explanations, it might be what protect us from that attack.
	Well, sure, and that's one of the things you teach in cognitive behavioral therapy.
	But the thing is, most of us are lucky, you see.
	With most people who are neurotic, if you provide them with an alternative explanation, that they find plausible, it has no impact whatsoever on their symptomatology.
	So you take someone who has obsessive compulsive disorder, for example.
	Which is often manifested in fear of contamination.
	So here's the line of logic.
	There's a garbage can.
	Garbage cans are dirty.
	Dirt contains bacteria.
	Bacteria might kill me.
	Or worse, my children.
	So this is an example drawn from a case that I know.
	It's a university educated woman.
	Nothing wrong with her intelligence.
	Perfectly normal unless she encountered something that was contaminated.
	Due response prevention treatment.
	Which is that you have the person encounter the thing that they fear the most and then stop them from doing their habitual response passage, which for her was washing her hands until they were so raw they were shiny.
	Anyways, she thought that there was a possibility that if she encountered something that was contaminated, which was a category that got broader and broader as her disease progressed, that she'd carry home a disease to her children.
	Now the problem, see the problem with that line of reasoning is that it's possible.
	And you could say to her, and she could understand that, The probability of such an event occurring was virtually zero.
	But the fact of virtually zero was not sufficiently satisfying for that to conquer because.0001% was too much.
	So you couldn't rationally reduce the probability to a small enough degree so that her thought of that probability could regulate her emotions.
	And the only reason we don't know why those sorts of thoughts regulate our emotions So you're willing to accept it on fate for whatever reason.
	You jump in a car.
	You do all sorts of things that are dangerous without any real consideration of it.
	I knew another woman who was agoraphobic.
	First thing she used to do when she went into any new building, what she didn't like doing, was check out all the fire escapes.
	Why?
	There might be a fire.
	Right.
	There might be a fire.
	What's the probability?
	Well, it's low.
	She knew that.
	She knew that the probability was low, just like the rest of us know.
	But the capacity of that information to inhibit her anxiety was gone.
	The only thing you can do under those circumstances is actually have people act out not caring.
	Then that works.
	Don't some people argue that her rationalization, that there might be a fire from her behavior, is something that comes after her behavior and not something that...
	In other words, couldn't it be one of two things?
	Either she enters the building and thinks, my goodness, there could be fire, I have to check the fire escapes.
	Or maybe she walks into a building, anxiety rises, and she says, I have to check the fire escapes.
	No, no, that's possible.
	Some of these explanations are post hoc rationalizations, and it's hard to tell Like, I'm not trying to specify a causal sequence.
	What happens in agoraphobia, I think, is the behavioral avoidance takes precedence over the cognitive rationalization, whatever they are.
	What happens to the agoraphobics?
	They go to the mall, something frightening happens, and they run away.
	Now, it's the running away that constitutes the point of origin for the pathology.
	Now, they may say, I ran away because, you know, here's my set of cognitive rationalizations, many of which might be post-hoc explanations for my behavior.
	But the thing is, when you run from something, what you are doing, regardless of what you're thinking, is labeling it as something so frightening that I have to run away from it.
	And that's the most profound level of labeling that you can actually utilize.
	It's much more And then, you know, the secondary or even tertiary semantic labeling that we usually associate with categorization.
	To run from something means to categorize it as too frightening to bear.
	And also, one more thing, it also means to categorize yourself, and this is even more important, as something that's so small that in that situation the only thing that can be done is to run away.
	And the reason that exposure therapy works is, I think, mostly because it counters that latter argument.
	Which is that when you teach someone exposure, when you use exposure to help someone overcome their fears, what you are doing is teaching them that they're not so small that fear will devour them.
	And that's what causes the generalization.
	It's learning that.
	There's also profound social expectations in a situation like that.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	No, the therapist uses modeling and social pressure and everything else to To foster the notion that the person can withstand the exposure.
	Can I just translate something back that I seem to be hearing, in a sense from what you said today, so far?
	If I may, it seems as if the thing that protects us from mythology, the ability to To attribute multiple meanings to something, the ability that our prefrontal cortex gives us, is the same thing that can cause a problem also.
	Right, that's exactly right.
	Because if you've got multiple meanings, you've got a conflict.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	Any religious myths, for example, myths of the fall state fundamentally that the development of self-consciousness Which is associated with a tremendous expansion of cortical ability, plus the ability to model the self as an object, precipitated a catastrophe, an emotional catastrophe.
	But the cure for the catastrophe is more of the same disease.
	So the problem is that a little self-consciousness is terrible.
	A lot, however, might It might be redemptive.
	And that's the notion that underlies all sorts of redemptive mythologies.
	And that's the notion that's underlying the argument that I'm trying to elaborate on today.
	If you know enough about yourself, then the consequences of a narrow self-consciousness can be removed.
	And I would say, well, what myths are trying to teach you, as if they're trying to teach you something, which they're really not.
	I mean, they're just there.
	What they're trying to teach you is that Your normal conception of who you are is much too narrow.
	Now you know, at some level, you know that's true.
	Because your model of yourself is wrong.
	Obviously.
	Because you're too complex for yourself to model.
	It's like no one thinks that they have an accurate model of cosmological processes.
	And it's certainly arguable that the processes that make up each of us as individuals are complex At a level that's exponentially greater than any cosmological process that we could possibly conceive of.
	So, the notion that your model of yourself is inaccurate, that's just a statement of fact.
	The part that's not so factual is how you can get valid information to increase the breadth of that model.
	What I'm basically trying to point out is that mythology can do that.
	Because what myth is, in large part, Is our cumulative attempt to construct a story that accounts for our behavior in the world.
	That's right.
	We watch ourselves act and derive conclusions as a consequence.
	If you're severely neurotic enough that, like, your entire life is a lie and everything bad that happens to you, even though you recognize that it's bad and you're miserable and you're full of despair and have no hope, if it's always from some outside cause and never resigns with yourself, what's What's intrinsically rewarding about lying to yourself if you know that you're making yourself miserable?
	Because, look, any defined terror is better than any undefined terror.
	Because a defined terror has a boundary, and an undefined terror has none.
	Here's an example.
	There's been some reliable studies of late that indicate that gay men who engage in high-risk behavior for AIDS are less anxious after being diagnosed with AIDS than they were before.
	Because the possibility is worse than the actuality.
	No matter how bad the actuality is, the possibility is worse.
	But what about if you're neurotic because of pride and not fear?
	I think that's always the case as far as I've been able to determine.
	That's why I said you can't say this is just one thing.
	These things conglomerate together.
	The people that I've Dealt with who were severely neurotic, enough so that their whole life was a lie.
	And literally, it was pride as well that was stopping them from letting go.
	They wouldn't say, oh look, Jung said for example, he treated one patient who had an obsessional neurosis that lasted 20 years.
	He said, I cannot reconcile myself to the fact that I wasted the best years of my life.
	Think of what that admission requires.
	You know, you have a finite time, and if you've blown, not only have you blown out a big chunk of it, but in the course of blowing it out, you've added to the cumulative misery of the world.
	You know, lots of people who are non-physiologically unhealthy use their neurotic misery to manipulate others around them to their own ends, to make people feel guilty, to get them to do what they want because they don't think they can just come right out and say, you know, would you please do this?
	Manifest some sign of weakness so that they force other people to take care of them.
	All of that has to come up and be admitted before you can step away from the situation.
	What was Satan afraid of then?
	He had all eternity.
	He had nothing more to lose, everything to gain.
	He said, sorry, oops, and gotten sucked back into heaven.
	Where did pride become fear for Satan in Paradise Lost?
	I can't answer.
	I don't know enough to answer that question specifically.
	The only thing I can say about that is that these processes feed back onto one another.
	Let me go through this argument to some degree and maybe it'll shed a little bit of light on that question.
	What happens?
	What's the consequence of an injection of error?
	Well, we know that before you can engage in any sort of creative exploration, you have to at least admit that something went wrong.
	And so you say, well, there's something wrong with my model at some level of analysis.
	That's the admission.
	Then the next process is to engage in some sort of creative exploration, which is basically the generation of hypotheses.
	And they're testing this, right?
	You find out if you made someone upset, for example, accidentally, Well, then you think, well, maybe this was wrong with my approach, and then you talk to the person about that and see if that was right, and if that wasn't, you throw that hypothesis aside, pick up another one and act it out and see if you get the information you want, and so on and so forth, to get the answer.
	Well, that's creative exploration.
	Say, well, what happens as a consequence of creative exploration?
	Good look.
	Remember?
	We talked about symbols of the chaos that existed prior to the creation of the world, so to speak.
	That chaos, symbolized by the dragon as a general rule, is composed of the union of all things that are now opposite.
	It's the source of all things.
	Not just objects, but subjects as well.
	So it's everything that we see as distinct melded into some paradoxical unity.
	And that stands for the unknown as such.
	Now Piaget said, The children construct themselves as a consequence of their creative exploration, which basically means that a child doesn't know anything about the world.
	It's a very bounded domain of knowledge.
	What it does is encounter the vast unknown, explore, Generate information, and out of that information constructs itself as a subject, which means grants itself a self, and also the world as an objective reality.
	That's what the notion that chaos also contains the subject means.
	As you gather it, if you build yourself out of the information you generate in the process of exploration, if you stop exploring, Well, that has obvious conclusions, doesn't it?
	It means you stop building yourself.
	We already know that a system that stops growing, because everything around the system changes, of its own accord, decays over time.
	And we know what the decay means.
	It means life comes to a standstill, and the negative forces that are underneath order rise up.
	So that story basically says, reject anomaly, your personality stops developing, then you're in the kingdom that's come to a standstill.
	Everything's paralyzed.
	There's no water.
	Everything's dying.
	Well, what that means is that the mere fact of not progressing means that you go backwards, and your life becomes as though a desert.
	Nothing grows in the desert.
	Everything's unbearable there.
	That's what we say.
	If you reject the possibility of growth, what necessarily occurs is that all that's left for you is a life that gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
	Now, if your life goes from bad to worse over time, well, we know already, this addresses the comment you made last week.
	If you punish an animal, you make it mean.
	That's one way of making it mean anyways.
	If you construct your relationship with the world such that over time, The likelihood is that everything will go from bad to worse.
	The other consequence of that is that your attitude towards your existence is going to go from bad to worse as well.
	Why are people consumed with hatred and the desire for revenge?
	Which has played out completely in Milton's story.
	Once Satan determines that admission of error is completely out of the question, He turns his attention to taking revenge on existence.
	I'm trying to provide an explanation for why that's a necessary consequence of this.
	Because if you stop, if you eliminate a priori, the necessity for further growth, deny yourself the possibility of positive change and adaptation, the necessary consequence of that is increased personal suffering.
	And it's very likely, given that you're narrowing your personality, which means you get weaker and weaker, It's very likely under those circumstances that you're going to become more and more full of revenge, because life's so unfair after all, and hatred, because you're always being tortured, even though you're doing it to yourself.
	The rationalization is, why do all these terrible things constantly happen to me?
	It must either be that everyone's against me, which is a perfectly common hypothesis, or that the conditions of existence itself are so unbearable that everything should be eradicated.
	Which, as we talked about last week, is the essential credo of Mephistopheles.
	The world is so intrinsically unbearable that the only proper course of action is to work for its elimination.
	Last week I tried to tie that into Stellan's reasoning, basically.
	It looks to me like that was the philosophy that characterizes Stellan.
	Is everyone against me?
	That's for sure.
	He was a real paranoid.
	And he worked throughout his life to continually develop his capacity to destroy larger and larger swaths of people.
	What differentiates that person from someone who wants to kill himself?
	What makes the difference that they want to kill other people?
	I don't think there's much difference, really.
	If life is so unbearable, why wouldn't they just kill him?
	See, I think, like, this is not always the case, because suicide is motivated by all sorts of different reasons.
	But it's certainly the case, and I think this is particularly true about adolescent suicide, is that it's an act of revenge.
	And it also is an illustration of how deep the motivation for revenge can be.
	Because adolescent suicidal fantasies often go along the lines of, oh, won't all those people be sorry when I'm gone?
	And there's a whole fantasy about how the funeral will progress and all these people who Paid insufficient attention or being otherwise cruel will file by and think about all the terrible things they did and so on and so forth.
	Well, the truth of the matter is that a suicide leaves a hole in a community that can't be reconciled because the people who are left over are always faced with the question of why did this happen and also what could I have done about it, both of which are essentially unanswerable.
	The question that you're posing to some degree is, is one murder worse than a million?
	And I would say, they don't sum, in a sense.
	Just as our society is predicated on the idea that every individual is of incalculable worth.
	One thing of incalculable worth is worth as much as twenty things of incalculable worth.
	So it's not an additive phenomenon.
	So I think the same sort of thing.
	The vengeful aspect motivates both.
	The Newman, Eric Newman, conceptualized suicide as, he thought that was, the mythological explanation was, regressive wish for incest with the great mother.
	Which is a very awkward way of saying, if only I was gone.
	If only I'd vanished back to the point that I had come from, then all of these problems that I'm faced with would just disappear.
	And that's also something that's character.
	And Newman imagined that in a sense as an attractive force pulling someone down below the earth.
	So that's a desire for death as a solution to the problems of life.
	You can also say these things are complicated.
	You can also say that Guillaume thought that the collective unconscious produced compensatory fantasies, which basically meant that if your conscious mind, so to speak, which was in part your linguistically constructed self, was failing to take certain possibilities into account, Then the collective unconscious, which you might think about as manifesting itself in fantasies that you really can't control, that just pop up, like fantasies of death, for example.
	Often, although they may have a pathological aspect, they also hold out, at least in possibility, the seeds of a cure.
	Because you could say, well, if you're here, and you're convinced that this is unbearable, the notion that a death is necessary, is a first-order attempt to hypothesize that the thing that constrains your interpretation of meaning should disappear.
	Which is to say that the fact that your life has become so twisted that you regard it as unbearable is evidence that your mode of interpretation is so outdated that it should die.
	Now, that's a perfectly reasonable, that's a sacrificial motif.
	I read the other day I didn't know this.
	The idea of sacrificing a finger is very common throughout archaic mythology.
	I didn't know that.
	A finger is something that's very important.
	It's the same idea as the sacrifice of a virgin or the sacrifice of a hero.
	If things are unbearable, you either have to kill what's making it unbearable so that something new can come into being.
	That's one mode of the sacrificial motif.
	But the other thing that underlies the sacrificial motif is the idea of the exposure of the hero to the forces of the unknown.
	That's another sacrifice.
	So on.
	On that diagram...
	This one?
	Yeah, it doesn't matter.
	Newman basically, when he talks about suicide, it's like returning to the source of all things, like returning to the womb.
	Right, because that unconscious chaos that precedes existence has a paradisal aspect, right?
	Because there's no tension of opposites there, which basically means there's just no being at all, which can be a relief.
	Under certain conditions.
	I'm just saying, within that framework, would you say that's heading into chaos?
	Or is that going back along the diagram?
	Well it depends, you see.
	If you move from order...
	Where's the source of all things?
	Can we put the Great Mother within that diagram?
	Yeah, sure, sure.
	Look, no problem.
	This is anomalous information here.
	So you say, well, chaos is unknown as such.
	You never encounter that.
	Because you always encounter things that are more or less within a determinate framework.
	You never see what you don't understand in its entirety.
	Or maybe that occurs to people who are having some sort of mystical experience.
	Mostly what you see are things that you can somewhat define that pop up in your day-to-day experience.
	Those are actual anomalous pieces of information that you have some definitional handle on.
	Well, the Great Mother would be the You can think of the Great Mother as the agent of chaos, which is a perfectly reasonable way to look at it, because in the mythological progression, she's the first officer, right?
	The original chaos separates into the Great Mother and the Great Father.
	So she is the first child of chaos.
	So is she a subset, essentially, of chaos?
	She's the form that chaos takes in your actual experience.
	So, wouldn't it be more accurate in that diagram to say that chaos there is the Great Mother there?
	Because what he's going back to...
	Well, you have to remember...
	...that's where the entire diagram comes from, because that's the world of war.
	It's split into that.
	Yeah, but it's complicated, because, for example, many figures of the Great Mother have a snake wrapped around them.
	Well, that's because the association between the Dragon of Chaos and the Great Mother is very, very close.
	So, to say this is the Great Mother is true, but it's not just that.
	It's also the origin of the Great Father, and also the origin of the hero.
	So, look, mythological figures are contaminated by each other because they're not tight categories.
	So lots of, like the Gorgon is another example.
	Great Mother, her hair is snakes, which is a representative of chaos.
	Now when you look at her, you turn to stone, which means that you're terrified.
	So she's an agent of chaos, That category is more than just the kind of anomaly that you encounter in your day-to-day life.
	It's the source of everything.
	It's outside the whole process.
	Okay?
	I was just saying, I know that the symbols mesh together on that level, but if we're bringing them into a more systematic framework, then to kill yourself, to eliminate the self entirely, would essentially be to Right, right, exactly.
	So, which is somewhat different from what you encounter.
	If that is the diagram of the way we encounter life, then to kill yourself is outside.
	Well, I would say that the things that make you desire a return to nothingness are the actual anomalous phenomena, threatening phenomena that you've encountered, like the sum total of all of them.
	So it's repeated appearances of Intolerable information produced within you the desire to vanish, basically.
	Anyways, the figures are contaminated.
	That's why Tiamat, for example, in the Mesopotamian myth, he's the gnome in the Mesopotamian myth, the consort of Tiamat.
	He gets very little press in that story.
	We've got four lines devoted to him.
	The gods kill him, stupidly, and of course then Tiamat rises up.
	Because he's the thing that protected them from Tiamat, but that's all that's known about him, really.
	Tiamat is female, and the mother of Marduk, but she's also the serpent that lies at the bottom of the ocean, that's the mother of everything, the source of everything.
	So there, you can see the overlap between the mythological domains.
	She's female, but she's also a serpent.
	She lives at the bottom of the ocean.
	Did Newman derive this notion of what suicide was based on the fantasies of people who later went on to commit suicide?
	Or did he just follow a train of reasoning to decide that suicide was desired for?
	I don't know the details of the conclusion he came to.
	He was a practicing therapist.
	Is it possible he got so excited about the system that he was pulling together?
	Sure, that's always possible.
	That's all.
	It's just, it's more a story.
	It's more a way of looking at the situation.
	I mean, it's not unreasonable to suppose that people who commit suicide wish for the cessation of their experience.
	Since that's what suicide produces, as well as a lot of, generally, a lot of misery on the part of people left behind.
	There's a psychoanalytic.
	This is a Jungian accent, actually.
	Okay, if you can't tell what motivates a behavior, look at the effects.
	The facts are what motivated it.
	Now, you can say, that's a pretty extreme position.
	It is an extreme position.
	But I'll tell you, if you apply it to your own life, it produces very interesting consequences, at least as a heuristic.
	Like, you can say, no, that's not always true.
	Fine.
	It's not always true.
	But if you do something, and it has a certain effect, and you say, well, I didn't intend that effect, and you ask, why did I do that?
	A first-order hypothesis, a useful first-order hypothesis is, I did intend that, but I didn't know it.
	And if you follow that line of reasoning, it can have very salutary effects, especially if the thing that you didn't intend has happened like two or three times, because then there's some indication of complicity.
	If it's only one occurrence, well, you know, mistakes happen.
	But if it keeps happening to you, I think the other statement was, if it's pointing a gun at you, it's likely that it wants to shoot the same sort of idea.
	And that was in reference to the Cold War.
	It's like, why were people conspiring to build weapons to destroy the world?
	Well, the simple, and maybe too simple, explanation is, at some level, that was the intent.
	Well, I buy that argument.
	It certainly appeared to be Stalin's intent.
	I mean, he was practicing it all the time.
	Now, the question is, how much was that the intent of the West?
	Well, that's not answerable yet, but I would suspect to a large degree.
	Does that same reasoning apply to other people's behavior?
	Well, it's dangerous to apply it to other people's behavior, but...
	Look, it isn't the principle that I rely on as an absolute explanation, but it's a useful hypothesis.
	Especially, like I said, the same thing keeps happening.
	See, like you, Elizabeth, you made the point, you know, neurotic people will find themselves trapped in misery that they recognize clearly as misery without stepping outside of it.
	And I would say, well, that fact indicates that they prefer the misery they have to the possibilities they don't have.
	See, it's the only way to explain, or it's not the only way to explain anything, but it's one way of accounting for the fact of resistance in psychotherapy.
	Isn't it also true, like, in Notes from the Underground, where the point is made that suffering is fun because, like, it gets tension and...
	Oh, sure.
	That's the secondary gain hypothesis.
	It's an effective manipulative strategy.
	It has all sorts of self-reinforcing side effects.
	I mean, that's why it occurs.
	Rejection of anomalies is very negatively reinforcing.
	That's one of the reasons why it has this attractive aspect.
	Don't attend to all those things that indicate that you're in error.
	I mean, to the degree that you're successful in not attending to them, you're not anxious, you're not depressed, you're not confused.
	But the problem is, is all that information that you don't process, first of all, isn't transformed by you into something usable.
	And second of all, as far as I've been able to tell, it accumulates over time.
	And then what happens to you is that You're getting smaller and smaller, just because that's the way things work, basically.
	If you stagnate, you get sicker and sicker.
	And the things that you yourself have labeled as threatening, because when you refuse to process something, what you're saying or what you're doing is, that thing is too terrible for me to contemplate.
	So what you're doing is transforming chunks of the world into the category of Those things that are too terrifying to convoy, or you're leaving them in that category, which is a more accurate way of looking at it.
	Sooner or later, you're this high, and the world that you've transformed into threat is everywhere around you, and it's only a matter of time until you're weak enough so that the whole The whole thing falls in on you.
	Is there a difference between ignoring it and just interpreting it in such a way like the positive bias phenomenon where nothing is ever your fault and like you're the martyr like anything bad that happens to you is because there's some evil force out there that way you're kind of taking it in only putting such a spin on it That you're saying, here's this unknown thing, I'm making it known, but I'm labeling it wrong on purpose.
	That's just a variant of the same thing.
	But it accumulates.
	I think it accumulates.
	It's a feedback mechanism.
	That's right, there's a feedback mechanism at work.
	Because you get smaller and smaller.
	Yeah, and you mislabel the problem.
	Well, actually, I think really what you're doing is that you're not pulling the label off it.
	Because we already know that anomalous information manifests itself as threat.
	That's how your right frontal cortex works, basically.
	Mistake comes up in the form of threat.
	That's how it's indicated.
	So it's already labeled as threat.
	Your job, when you explore, is to Transform the threat into something irrelevant or something beneficial.
	Not to merely label it as something different, but to actually change it by altering your behavior into something that's usable.
	If you don't do that, well then, what's happening is that the determinate world Transforms itself back into terrifying chaos.
	And you're just failing to stop that from happening.
	It'll do that all by itself.
	But by labeling it an evil force, you may then take effort to get rid of the evil force and thereby make it even worse.
	That's true.
	That's certainly at least worse for others.
	And I would say, well, also...
	And for yourself.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Oh, that's right.
	But there's more motivation to that, because as you're weakening yourself, and your hatred for life grows, your desire for revenge accelerates, so that then if you can take the next step and say, well, not only is this anomalous information intolerable, but it's evil, then I can kill it.
	Well, then you've got everything set.
	Because you can remove the source of your trouble, you can act out your hostile fantasies, and you can feel justified because you're patriotic, which is all...
	It's rubbish.
	Yeah, it's like you were talking about metastopolies and the world is so terrible that it must be destroyed.
	Is it possible to distinguish that from, like, the world is so terrible that fascism of it must be destroyed?
	Oh yes, I would say, sure, absolutely, that's distinguishable because one of the hallmarks of the hero, and this is something that I was kind of at pains to outline in the latter part of this manuscript, is the hero has two functions.
	One is To transform unexplored territory into explored territory, which is just Marduk's battle against Taiman, but also to update the social structure, which is both manifested internally and externally, as that becomes necessary.
	Now, we know the problem with updating a social structure is that sometimes that takes on a revolutionary Aspect, and then for all the adherents of that social structure who are undergoing a forced revolution, that heroic activity is going to seem like a demonic force.
	And that's why people are so irritated at heretics.
	Because they pop up anomalous information, and for good reason.
	I mean, careless hereticism is very, very dangerous because it produces schismatic activity and breaks societies down.
	But it also, it's like a genetic mutation.
	That's the best metaphor I know.
	999 revolutions are counterproductive, but the one revolution in the thousand that isn't counterproductive is absolutely necessary.
	And the problem is, how do you distinguish between the two?
	I mean, if you just use the odds, the first thing you'd say is, all revolutionaries should be regarded with skepticism.
	Like, extreme skepticism.
	But not skepticism to the point where a priority should be eliminated, because one of them just might be, well, just might be the hero.
	So, Yeah.
	I'm still trying to translate what you're talking about into sort of a parallel framework.
	And what I was just thinking of is there might be two ways to change the social system.
	One, by coming back as a heretic and advocating the way things should be.
	Telling people what beliefs should replace the ones they have.
	The other way is to Yes.
	Well, that's the sort of path that I want to outline in more detail next week.
	Because I think one piece of evidence that should justify skepticism is the overt desire of the revolutionary to maintain their position at all costs and to transform everyone around them.
	Because then you think, Was that revolution?
	Or is that fascism masquerading as revolution?
	Which it almost always is!
	So a communist ideologue who wants to transform a capitalist society isn't revolutionary.
	He's just a fascist on the left wing.
	There's no heroism in that.
	And I suppose the other thing that one might be skeptical of is revolutionaries in groups.
	Because that's sort of a contradiction in terms.
	So, not always for either of those, but that's still a sign, I would say.
	But I think that the notion of coming back change, that's the issue.
	I think what these myths are trying to point out is that the only permanently effective form of social revolution is a personal revolution that then just acts itself out.
	And that social change is just a necessary consequence of that personal change.
	It isn't something that's being enforced or even planned out to a degree.
	That strikes me as a justifiable position.
	At least then you're also much less likely to make catastrophic errors.
	Because your primary concern is always, what am I doing wrong?
	Or, here's the situation, how am I contributing to it?
	Where are all the bad people who are really causing all the trouble?
	So, I mean, I knew lots of, this is kind of sarcastic comment, I guess, but I knew lots of environmental activists in graduate school who lived in filthy apartments.
	It's like, they couldn't even keep their personal territory clean, and yet they were willing to engage in activities that, in terms of their own fantasies, had The potential impact of restructuring society.
	Practice what you preach.
	Well, at least, yeah, at least act it out so that you can see on your own territory, one, if it works, and two, if you can actually even act it out.
	The thing is, there's funny mythological statements like, the man who rules himself has performed a more difficult task than the man who rules a city.
	What the hell does that mean?
	It's hard to rule a city, but what it means is that it is actually the truth.
	You're much more complicated phenomena than a city, and to bring yourself under some sort of control is much more difficult than It's more difficult than bringing a given social structure under control, because the social structure is simple in comparison.
	Plus, it's also equivalent to bringing a social structure under control, because what you're composed of in large part, It's the sum total of social structures as they've been generated over immense stretches of time.
	So inside, for example, if you want to reconcile the abortion debate, that's an internal reconciliation as well.
	You have to rethink the philosophical presuppositions sufficiently deep enough so that you come to a solution that brings the two sides together.
	that can all take place inside before it takes place outside at all, past it.
	At some level, don't most powerful social movements bring these two things together?
	Like the vow of not drinking in the early days of solidarity, which is one of the things that really impressed me about it in Poland, was the way it translated to acts of personal transformation, or the way in which the civil rights movement evolved in this country, requiring or the way in which the civil rights movement evolved in this country, which was through, in a collective way, created social change.
	Or in the women's movement, I mean, in other words, Well, that strikes me at least as a plausible hypothesis.
	I remember George Orwell.
	He started out as a socialist ideologically, but then Well, one of the things that transformed him from a mere ideologue into a writer of note, and a political commentator of note, was that he noted that, in his experience, most academic socialists weren't all that fond of the poor.
	This was particularly true in Britain, where there's a hierarchical class structure, so they were from the upper classes.
	And acted out their detestment of the lower classes in all their action patterns while holding the ideological belief that the poor were in fact morally superior.
	So what Orwell did was, well he went to Paris and London and lived in Paris among dishwashers and in Great Britain among tramps and coal miners.
	Forcing himself to overcome what he soon recognized was a very deep set prejudice against everything that the poor represented.
	Well, then what happened to Orwell was he dropped his socialism very rapidly because he found that the ideological structure was nowhere near profound enough to encompass what he'd experienced, plus it had, you know, enormously dangerous side effects, which he increasingly came to recognize.
	So, maybe, I mean, maybe that's a...
	Maybe that's...
	Because one of the things that everyone would like to figure out is, like, how do you distinguish a pathological revolution from a valid revolution?
	And...
	I mean, I would say if you're asking someone else to bear more of the costs than you're actually bearing, then that's one sign that there's some sort of pathology at the bottom of it.
	Who knows, but that seems like a reasonable first approximation.
	I guess you also have to see who gets what out of it.
	The communist revolution, as far as I've been able to determine, just replaced one tyrannical group that at least were bound by tradition.
	With another tyrannical group that were completely unbound by tradition, and even more tyrannical.
	Because the problem was that the only reason the Russian revolutionaries were more moral than the Tsar was because they didn't have any power.
	They couldn't do anything, so they looked to themselves moral.
	I'm harmless.
	Look, I haven't put anybody in prison.
	Of course, they don't have a prison.
	Well, when they got prisons, they certainly put lots of people in there.
	So...
	Are there other comments?
	Okay.
	Daniel?
	No?
	Okay, so...
	Yeah, okay, so we basically got to this point in the argument.
	Now...
	What is the diagram of on the board?
	Which?
	What are you doing?
	Oh, I'm just outlining this argument so that I don't forget where I am, basically.
	It goes like this, and then up here, over here.
	So, okay.
	So the question is, how to get out of this?
	I mean, if we're willing to take Nietzsche's notion seriously, which is that everyone has sufficient reason to lie, and the question is, you know, given that as a premise, the conclusion is perhaps to a much larger degree than we believe we are lying to ourselves.
	One of the things, Shelley Taylor, she's the social psychologist who's been promoting this positive self-illusion notion, one of the valuable things she's done, I think, was, although I don't think she drew the right conclusion from it, was that she noted that many people who we regard as normal and healthy do, in fact, erect around themselves barriers of positive illusions.
	She drew from that the conclusion that to be normal and healthy...
	Well, first of all, that normal people were healthy, which is...
	I have a real problem with that.
	But, I mean, you can see how that necessarily emerges as a consequence of psychological methodology, in a sense, because...
	I made the argument to begin with in the class that as soon as you apply a field like psychology or medicine, you're out of the domain of science and into the domain of morality.
	Because you have to make judgements about what constitutes the good.
	You have to.
	But people who are in the domain of science don't like to admit that, so they try to figure out ways to determine what's moral scientifically without ever having to address the problem.
	And the easiest way to do that is by saying, well, here's the normal distribution.
	The optimal level is the midpoint.
	So you take the average person, you see how many positive self-illusions they have around them, and you say, those average people, they're normal.
	That defines healthy.
	Therefore, positive self-illusions are necessary.
	Well, this is a real problem.
	Because, first of all, many things that are average we don't consider ideal.
	I mean, that's why the two words exist in our position.
	We don't strive for average intelligence or average athletic ability or average beauty or average accomplishment at any level.
	We're always moving towards some sort of ideal.
	Anyway, so I think Shelley Taylor got caught in her own trap in a sense.
	She got caught in her own unconscious presuppositions and said, well, normal people have to be healthy by definition.
	Normal people have lots of positive self-illusions, therefore positive self-illusions are necessary.
	There's lots of flaws in that argument.
	I buy her argument that many people who are considered normal by normal standards erect barriers of self- But the fact that they do that is no indication whatsoever that it's necessary or desirable.
	The argument that I've been trying to outline in this whole course is that to the degree that the members of a society erect positive self-illusions around themselves to protect their normality, they will make their group pathological.
	The more pathological it gets, the more likely it is to Do something terrible to other groups.
	The sickness is going to come out somewhere.
	Our time scale analysis in psychology is something really, we don't ever question.
	It's like, you know, a given phenomena can have a beneficial effect at the level of analysis of a minute.
	A detrimental effect if you look at its effect over the course of a day.
	A mildly beneficial effect if you look at it over the course of a week.
	A tremendously detrimental effect if you look at it over the course of a year.
	The same thing can have all sorts of different effects depending on your parameters of evaluation.
	And generally psychologists pick one parameter of evaluation and say, well that's representative of the whole temporal framework.
	And that's just, it's not a justifiable conclusion.
	Say, people who are high in self-deception may Appear more psychologically healthy in the short term if you define psychological health as the absence of anxiety and depression in the short term.
	But you don't know anything about what that means for their interpersonal behavior.
	You don't know anything about what that means for the course of their lifespan or for their children.
	You have no idea what it means for their relationships with the group or between groups.
	So until you answer all those questions, you have to be pretty careful about saying About making as radical a claim as self-deception is necessary for psychological health.
	What types of self-deceptions are you talking about?
	Shelly Taylor and Jonathan Brown.
	Yeah.
	My understanding is that these are the sort of innocuous types of things that come from making downward comparisons.
	So I'm better than average.
	Right.
	That type of something.
	Yes.
	She says those are innocuous.
	Right, that's my understanding.
	So when asked, for example, if you asked people to rate their ability on a multitude of trades, if everybody in this room rated themselves, the whole group as a whole would be above average.
	Everybody could be above average.
	And this is a positive illusion.
	That's Garrison Keeter's town in Wisconsin, where every child is above average.
	That's true.
	But we can't, by definition, all be above average.
	So that's sort of the definition of positive illusions.
	But isn't it sort of a leap to go from that type of positive illusion to self-deception that could have the content of which has to do with your relationships with other people and truths about the world and all kinds of other things?
	Well, it isn't a leap because Calvin and Locke have just finished a study on people who are high in self-deception and found that over the course of a five-year period, Those very people were in fact rated by their peers as much more dislikable and in more psychological trouble than people who were lowering self-deception.
	Is self-deception the same as the people who are thinking that they're above average?
	Are these the same things?
	In other words, self-deception would be the denial of information.
	Positive illusion would be...
	That hasn't been completely sorted out.
	What if you told this person, no, the truth is you are accurate.
	And they accepted it.
	In other words, it seems to me that they're looking at slightly different things.
	Well, like I said, in the literature as a whole, that hasn't been sorted out.
	We're using one of the inventories of self-deception in our lab right now to try to sort some of this out, and it's got different It's one scale with different factors, subcategories, one of which is self-enhancement, which would be more like, I'm more than average, and the other ones, there's two others, one of which has to do with the denial of negative information.
	And maybe one of those is more pathological than the other, and maybe one isn't pathological at all, although I wouldn't bet on it.
	But I don't know for sure.
	But what's really the difference?
	Because if you say that I, if you suggest that, if you believe that you are better than you are, then that means you're not going to believe that you need to fix...
	One of the things that we did with this, by the way, we've done an experiment with this questionnaire, and we found that people who are...
	You give these people standard tests of psychological health, but you can't tell, because they might be lying.
	Well, no!
	Let's say they're not neurotic.
	Well, what we did was we took people and we looked at their tendency to self-enhance.
	We divided them into high self-enhancers and low self-enhancers.
	Then we gave them 20 photographs to rate.
	We used the Neo, the five-factor personality model, to see how they would rate other people who were just...
	We used five neo-adjectives per picture, and then collapsed them all together to kind of get their average personality inferential model.
	Imagine you force all those 20 pictures together, you get a composite individual, plus you get a composite personality score.
	People hide self-enhancement.
	We've regarded others as more negative, because we put all the negative adjectives into one category and all the positives into another, as more negative than they regarded themselves.
	So I would say, no, there's no difference.
	But wait a minute, the mechanism for having this positive evolution is making downward comparisons, which is exactly what these people did.
	Right, right.
	Well, Colvin and Bloch found that people who do that are rated by their peers as less Well, less socially.
	That's worse than people who don't over the long term.
	That's short-term advantages.
	But that's neuroticism.
	That's short-term advantages.
	That's why people do it.
	People also tend to make down with comparisons when they have their sights set high.
	Well, this is something.
	Erin is trying to work this out because she thinks that some of these inventories of self-deception are contaminated with optimism.
	And I think she's right.
	It's that optimistic people who think I can make the future brighter than probability says it is likely to be, which I think is a perfectly reasonable stance and is dependent on your ability to work.
	She thinks those people get lumped together with the self-seeders proper.
	Well, sure they would, because if they took as their reference group to one level of accomplishment up, I think I can do better for myself.
	Right, right.
	Well, a lot of this has to be pulled apart.
	Then they make general comparisons to their peers.
	Right, absolutely.
	I mean, and it's not all that easy to pull out A positive belief in the future and its possibilities from, I've already got that positive future now, even though all the evidence suggests that the contrary is true.
	So, that's right.
	A fantasy about how good things might be is not necessarily pathological, unless you presume that things are already that way.
	In fact, you need a fantasy like that to keep you going ahead.
	I think the fundamental problem with that positive illusion lies in the fact that it imputes their learning, which is exactly what we're talking about, so they're denying errors.
	Well, here's another example.
	We ran an experiment because we're very interested in this particular line of research because it contradicts everything I'm trying to say in this course, so that personally irritates me as well as, you know, Well, for all sorts of other reasons.
	I just can't believe that Shelley Taylor's right in like 5,000 years of religious traditions gathered from all over the world are wrong.
	It just strikes me as highly unlikely.
	Anyways, we use this test that has been used to discriminate psychopaths from non-psychopaths.
	Now, the thing about psychopaths is that Well, they're not very pleasant to be around in the long-term, although superficially they can be very charming.
	In fact, they make a study of how to be charming.
	In fact, if you do group therapy with psychopaths, which is a very bad idea, they become more effective psychopaths because they pick up a whole psychological vocabulary and an array of professional techniques that they would never otherwise have access to.
	So anyways, they're not very anxious and depressed.
	But they're also dangerous.
	Now, there's a test that has been used to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths.
	It's called the Newman card playing test.
	And Daniel computerized it up for use in this study.
	It consists of an extinction paradigm.
	None of you are going to take this, I hope.
	I might.
	You might?
	Yeah, should I? I should probably take that.
	Well, no, it depends.
	You can't take it if you listen to this.
	You probably shouldn't take it anyways, because you've been in this course, so you'll kind of know what the hell's going on, possibly.
	So you wouldn't be a good subject.
	Okay?
	So stay out of my experiment.
	Anyways.
	Okay, so you have, there's a hundred cards, and they're stacked, and the deck is stacked, and in the first deck, There's ten cards, and they're face cards.
	And every time you turn over to a face card, you get a quarter.
	You start with some money, you get a quarter.
	And then in the next deck of ten, the subject doesn't notice, of course, one out of ten of the cards makes you lose, randomly.
	And in the next deck, two out of the ten make you lose, then three out of ten, four out of ten, five out of ten, and so on, all the way until the end, where ten out of ten make you lose.
	Now, your instructions are, do you have our ring again?
	No, it's an extinction paradigm.
	So you win the first time?
	No, you win for the first 50% of that.
	Because you win 10 times, then you win 9, then you win 8, then you win 7, then you win 6.
	So the cards are either winners or losers.
	That's the cards are either winners or losers.
	Now all you have to do is decide when to stop.
	Now the object is to maximize your money, obviously.
	Well, high self-deceivers make half as much money as low self-deceivers, because they don't know when to quit.
	And I think the reason they don't know when to quit is because Losing is an indication of error.
	It's labeled with negative affect.
	That's what stops you.
	If you habitually ignore all signs of error, why are you not going to stop doing something stupid as fast as you should?
	So anyways, they make half as much money as low self-deceivers.
	Wait, I'm sorry.
	I don't understand.
	They keep going longer than they should.
	But do you start losing money or do you stop winning?
	Oh, every time one of these, sorry, maybe my explanation was confusing.
	Yeah, you either win a quarter or lose a quarter.
	That's right.
	So, the ratio of wins to losses decreases over time, linearly.
	And you should stop somewhere in the 50-50 range, right?
	Or maybe a little after that.
	But somewhere around there, when you're losing as often as you're winning.
	And you can see, because the numbers total up on the screen, and the quarters appear or disappear.
	So you can tell when you've hit the maximum.
	So then, that seems to me complicated with the optimism variable.
	Because if somebody just thinks, well, now I'm just going to keep going, you know?
	Well, it's conceivable.
	This is a hard thing to factor out.
	It's conceivable that it's contaminated by optimism.
	I would say that Under the circumstances of the test, optimism is unwarranted, past a certain point.
	To be optimistic, you'd have to assume that the deck isn't stacked, and therefore it came back.
	But since the things are decreasing incrementally, one by one, you might figure out pretty quickly that it was set up.
	Well, yeah, that's the hope, is you figure it out.
	That's right, you stop.
	Lots of things in life are like that.
	You do something, and it's working, and it's working, and then it doesn't work so well, It works even less well, and sooner or later you should quit.
	Now, obviously that can be contaminated by persistence.
	The other thing we did was we had these people put their finger in a pain device.
	It's a minorly pain device.
	It's just a lever.
	It's kind of about as sharp as a dull butter knife.
	It sits on your finger, and there's weights on it.
	When you first put your finger, and you can take it off whenever you want, when you first put your finger in there, it doesn't hurt at all.
	But the pressure sums The pain detectors sum the pain, and all we say is, well, tell us when this hurts.
	So people are looking at it.
	Oh, it hurts now.
	We also say, take your finger out when a reasonable person would do so.
	So, you know, they usually stay in there for about 30 seconds or so, and then they say, well, you know, that's enough.
	It's completely harmless.
	But the high self deceivers stay in there longer than the low self deceivers, too.
	Now, you might say, well, they're persistent.
	Well, they are.
	They are persistent, and sometimes that's good.
	And it's hard to tell when it's not good.
	But sometimes it's not good.
	And I would say, leaving your finger in a laboratory pain device longer than average is probably not good.
	There might be some distinction here between sort of a metacognitive assessment of the likelihood, which is something that's not like an immediate behavioral thing.
	Like, if you're optimistic and you have these far-reaching goals, that would seem to be healthy.
	If you apply those in small, minute, immediate behavioral level things, this should have been behavioral learning.
	You're not supposed to figure out cognitively, okay, it's incrementally decreasing by line.
	Right, absolutely.
	But if you don't adapt to behavioral information, they will never, I mean, by definition, in their optimistic sense, is flawed, because unless you have the ability to adapt to the everyday behavioral information, you can't learn and get progressive.
	Right, right.
	That's a good explanation for the phenomenon and the experiment.
	It's not a definitive experiment, by any means.
	But it's interesting because it even argues against the short-term utility of failure to process information that indicates that you're in error.
	And it is linked to self-deception, since we use the self-deception questionnaire.
	So you're repeating the psychopathology of neuroticism with psychopathy?
	Yes, I guess so.
	That's what I'm doing.
	I guess what I should say, though, having said that, is that This doesn't mean that I don't believe that there are genetic predispositions to different forms of psychopathology.
	And it also doesn't mean that I believe that everyone plays on the same field, so to speak.
	So it may be that if you say you have an extensive family history of schizophrenia, well that means that it's going to take a lot less to push you over the edge than it would A normal person.
	And the fact that you've gone over the edge, so to speak, is not any indication necessarily that your moral character was any less than the next person's.
	So the parameters of the game shift with genetic and environmental contexts.
	Which is to say that, I guess in part, that different people have different temptations and also different weaknesses.
	But I do think that there's a moral aspect to mental illness.
	So, it's troublesome.
	Okay.
	Before we leave the Taylor, Shelley Taylor article real quick, I think it's important to point out that what she actually says, and it's been pointed out, I call it a block, another critique, is not that positive illusions are correlated with mental health, but positive illusions are correlated with the absence of depression.
	And anxiety.
	Yeah, which is a very different thing.
	Yeah.
	Well, she takes the argument farther than that, though, because, look, she wrote a self-help book for people, telling them how to use positive self-illusions to enhance their mental function.
	So...
	She's extrapolating beyond the mere statement of absence of depression and anxiety, which is not a statement I have a problem with.
	Because psychopaths, for example, are low in depression and anxiety.
	It's taking the argument the next step that's the problem.
	So I do think she goes beyond just, well, these restricted forms of psychopathology are less frequent among people who are high in self-deception.
	That in itself is just an interesting phenomenon.
	It's the next step that sort of disturbs me.
	Is that satisfying?
	Yeah, that's what I was saying.
	Oh, okay.
	Sorry, I guess I kind of misunderstood what you were saying.
	Is it pathological then to have hope in the face, almost like hope against hope?
	Well, this argument gets more complicated there.
	One of the things that she's found is that people who say if you're diagnosed with intractable cancer, well, she's found that people who overestimate their chance of survival live longer.
	Now this is tough.
	That's the piece of her evidence that's really compelling.
	But I would suggest, and hopefully I can do more than suggest at some point, that that's because she has optimism.
	Her notion of self-deception improperly incorporates this sort of optimism that we've been discussing.
	Because in that card paradigm, couldn't it just be like, I'd probably be one of the psychopaths who played till the end, because I keep hoping that the next card would be like, the one that gives me a quarter.
	I hope I'm not pathological.
	Yeah, but you don't know how you'd behave in the task either, so I wouldn't draw, don't draw any inferences about your behavior hypothetically, because you don't know.
	You might have stopped, right?
	I mean, I don't know either.
	Maybe you would play right to the end.
	It's also pro-possible that some of the people just didn't care about the damn quarters, but...
	They like the game.
	I mean, they spend quarters to play the games at the arcade.
	Possibly.
	It's kind of a dull game, though.
	I mean, we tell people you're supposed to win the money.
	It's like, proper behavior during this test is winning the money.
	So the goal is set.
	So, I mean, you know, like I said, it's not, it's not...
	It's not a definitive case, so...
	Did you, did you have another comment, Sean?
	Oh, yeah, I just wanted to ask, um...
	Talking about hope and anxiety and everything, the words pride, fear, hatred, and revenge, what's the neuropsychological valence of, like, fear is, you know, activation of the right willingness, but what about pride and revenge?
	Well, this, I don't know about this, but the negative emotions, they tend to clump, right?
	If you look at the neuroticism scale of the Neil, all negative emotional states are in the same subscale, essentially.
	Anger, for example, correlates very highly with fear.
	But we know that anger is activation of the left cortex, not the right cortex.
	And I was wondering if revenge might be the same way.
	I mean, it seems like there's an approach aspect, rather than an avoidance aspect, to revenge as well as revenge.
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	I don't know.
	We haven't progressed very far in the study of these sorts of higher order emotions.
	I don't know what the neuropsychological correlates would be.
	Anger is not necessarily proactive, but active aggression certainly seems to involve approach behavior.
	A lot of it may be in response to fear.
	The farther you go in terms of outward behavior, the more complex it's going to have to be from the original No, I don't quite follow that.
	Well, it's just to say that fear is one of the fundamental responses that happens instantly.
	I mean, in the right frontal cortex, but then as soon as you're getting into hatred and revenge, you're getting into planned sequences of behaviors that are naturally going to be activating systems.
	And different systems, too.
	That's an astute comment, because when you say aggression, for example, What you're saying is a word that contains 40 different categories of behavioral output because there's defensive aggression, there's instrumental aggression, there's anger, Just for starters,
	there's aggression that's socially appropriate, there's aggression that's socially inappropriate, there's aggression that's punishment elicited, aggression that's fear elicited, aggression as a response to challenge to group identity, and all those different things are under the rubric of one word, but as you point out, involve activation of systems that may be in complete opposition to one another at times.
	The hope thing seems to me to be something that, like, it seems to me that there's two totally different things that in everyday life we call hope.
	And one would be sort of equivalent to the hero, and the other one would be equivalent to like an over-rigid identification with a social structure.
	Because, like, if you say, You have hope in the future.
	That hope can be the kind of thing that keeps you looking for other alternatives and helps you find your way around messes and sort of motivates you forward into anomaly or into whatever, like the hero to encounter the new information.
	Or you can have a kind of thing that we don't distinguish, we call it hope too, but it's the kind of thing where you say it keeps you from finding a way around things because you say this one will work out.
	I think what you're talking about is more like faith.
	Because hope, I think you can actually categorically define hope in a sense And I would say hope is what you experience as a consequence of the positive valence of an anomalous occurrence, which is to say that you experience the affect of hope when you're faced with a cue for satisfaction with an incentive reward, and that accompanies activation of the left front of the cortex.
	I think what you're talking about is this, and I think you're making a distinction between blind faith, which is, oh, everything's going to turn out wonderfully, even when the barbarians are at the gate, so to speak, and the faith that says, No matter what comes up, which means I know that things will transform, I can deal with the transformations if my attitude is proper.
	And it's certainly the case that those two things can be...
	One is adolescent faith, that's what I'd say.
	It's all my...
	It isn't even faith in a sense, it's reliance on the group.
	Like, if I fall over, the group will maintain me, or protect me from those things I can't control.
	The other one is, you know, I know the world's a dynamic place.
	There's something in me that can respond to it.
	I think that's the antithesis of the position that motivates the lie.
	It's also the case...
	See, one of the questions we're trying to answer is, we know the group has a protective nature that's also necessary.
	But that can be pathologized.
	So the question is, given that the group is necessary, that its maintenance is necessary, that people have to identify with it.
	How is it that the pathological aspect can be reduced?
	And I would say, to the degree that you're able to move your faith from blind reliance on the group to your own capacity to address anomalous information and transform it into explored territory, you're To the degree that you're able to do that, you can simultaneously cut your dependent ties on the group.
	Because you have this alternative standpoint.
	There's two modes of protection from the great unknown.
	One is, well, Dad will do everything.
	That's one way of looking at it.
	The other is, well, no.
	Nothing can do everything.
	But if I'm willing to meet whatever happens, when it happens, I can heighten the probability of success To its highest possible level.
	And that works out because, first of all, you're always practicing, and that's psychological hygiene as far as I'm concerned.
	I think that's why so many religious traditions concentrate on heightening attention to day-to-day processes.
	Little bits of anomalous information are always cropping up in your interpersonal interactions, in your professional work, in everything that you do.
	If you learn how to respond to those anomalous occurrences that are relatively small while they're happening, first of all, you keep your personality healthy.
	You practice knowing how to do it, so you increase your confidence in yourself.
	You decrease the amount of territory around you that's contaminated by the unknown, and you increase the likelihood that when something really It comes along.
	You'll make the right decision.
	It's important, you know, because you see in places like Nazi Germany, for example, and certainly not uniquely, that all sorts of people who we might have hoped would have been more resistant to the Nazi ideology fell over like sheep when it was paraded out.
	The intellectual community seemed to have no better record than that community at large in Germany.
	So on.
	Which to me indicates that despite their accumulation of facts, there was no concentration whatsoever on the development of character.
	That weakens, necessarily weakens the resistance of the state.
	So, I'm trying to think about how you can distinguish between the optimist and the psychopath in your experiments.
	And what it seems to be, to me, in my experience, that Or maybe at least from your experiments, that the psychopath goes on, ignoring threat, but even while being punished.
	I'm trying to figure out if it's being punished by the known or by unknown things.
	Because when he sticks the finger in the thing, that's something that's known that it's going to hurt you.
	They stick it in longer.
	So that's what I'm trying to figure out.
	The optimist, I think, ignores threat, but does not keep going on when being punished.
	I doubt if it breaks down that straightforwardly.
	The optimist is someone, I think, who's willing to endure And voluntarily meet threatening conditions in order to attain their end, but who also modifies their behavior as a consequence of encounter.
	That's the critical thing.
	The optimist who's healthy has an ideal that may even be impossible.
	In fact, I think in some ways, if you don't have an impossible ideal, then your ideal is wrong.
	It should always supersede your grasp.
	That's the whole point of an ideal.
	It's something that as you approach it, it recedes, but transforms you along the way.
	So you might say, well, that's a pathological fantasy since it can never be brought into existence, but there's a difference between your conception of the future as an ideal place and your belief that despite all evidence, the present is that ideal place, at least insofar as it's composed of you,
	apart from all these other, you know, The kind of hope necessary to risk action and optimism.
	I would say that's faith.
	Cornel West talks about it.
	A leap of hope.
	Required to sustain political activism.
	In the face of evidence that all your personal efforts are useless.
	So that's healthy?
	Depends.
	Again, it's very dangerous to try to identify a definition of that.
	Something that can be defined as healthy.
	Okay, that's all.
	Let me see if I can address that more particularly.
	I mean, our society is predicated on the idea that despite all appearances, there's something I think what Cornel West is referring to is the necessity of acting on that belief, even though, number one, it's incomprehensible, and number two, it seems to exist despite the evidence.
	Now you say, well, what would separate that from a delusion?
	Well, I think there is evidence to support the notion that it's accurate, because, for one thing, those societies that make that presupposition seem to work much better than those who don't.
	And that strikes me as a form of evidence.
	Plus, I mean, what we consider evidence, that's very difficult to come to any agreement about.
	But it also strikes me that if you look at traditional wisdom, In these myths, for example, what's constantly pointed out is, look, you don't understand the function of the individual.
	There's more to it than meets the eye, the more to it being it.
	The individual is the phenomenon that creates order out of chaos, so the incarnation of Marduk, so to speak, plus the force that rejuvenates the archaic social system when it needs to be rejuvenated.
	I mean, those two things account for the divinity of the individual, so to speak.
	And I would say, well, even though it may not be evident to you, necessarily, in your actions, how that is playing out, if you're doing it for the right reasons, then it will play itself out.
	Nietzsche said, you know, all revolutions start invisibly, which is his explicit recapitulation of a hero myth, because the hero is always born under, you know, trivial and threatened conditions.
	So Moses, for example, That's a good way of closing this.
	That ties into this.
	You can't tell using objective evidence if what you're doing is going to be successful.
	Partly because you have the wrong time frame.
	So maybe the thing you're doing is absolutely right.
	No one will know it for 300 years.
	You're not going to know it because you're not going to be here.
	So how do you know?
	Well, the only way I can think of that you might know is by watching how your actions...
	By watching how your belief in actions...
	Let me say it again.
	What is it that you want...
	Let me just get this right.
	The thing that tends to turn people against life is the fact that life is full of inexplicable tragedies.
	I would say that if you can develop an attitude towards the world that's characterized by an increase in the ability to bear its tragic circumstances, That that's evidence that your attitude is correct.
	Now, the only person who's going to be able to determine that is you, because it's not going to be evident necessarily to people around you, and it may not play out the way you would want it to in the external world.
	So then the question is, how is it that you can come to the state where you can trust your own judgment about your beliefs, given that people's beliefs get out of hand all the time, and they say, well, this belief is right.
	Well, that ties back into this.
	If you fill up your head with information that you know, by your own definitions of truth, to be false, then you can ensure that you're not going to be able to trust your own judgment.
	Now the problem is there's going to be times in your life where your judgment is the only judgment that can even possibly be valid.
	And it better be the case that when you're in that circumstance, that your head is free enough of lies so that you can be certain that the decision you're making is right.
	So I would say, and this is the thing that's going to underlie the last lecture in the course, is there's two poles of There's two poles that underlie your ability to determine if you're on the right path, this way.
	One is, you're doing something that you're interested in, that's meaningful enough so that you say, even with all the tragedy of life, the fact that I can do this makes it all worthwhile.
	And the second thing is, you better make sure that you're not deluded in what's making you interested.
	And the only way you can be sure of that is that you're not lying.
	Because you might end up developing an interest in axe murdering.
	Because that happens to people.
	Or in slaughtering.
	And then their interest guides them somewhere it shouldn't have gone.
	And I would say, well that's because they pathologize themselves.
	By filling their brain, so to speak.
	Filling their mind with information they know is not veridical.
	So there's two poles.
	One is, where something meaningful manifests itself, follow it.
	Now people want to do that anyways.
	That's what makes your life interesting.
	The other thing is, whenever you have the opportunity, make sure that you tell yourself the truth, because if you don't, your interest is going to become second, and then it'll lead you somewhere you do not want to go.
	Anyways, so our last class is next week, and we'll fold everything up.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I have your essays, by the way.
	Can I ask one more question?
	Yes, yes.

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