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Feb. 12, 2015 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
56:46
2015 Maps of Meaning 06a: Mythology: Introduction / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)
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One of the things I've been thinking about here recently, and I don't know why I hadn't really realized this before, but you realize things in stages, is that I think that this model, this hierarchy, is actually a model of the unconscious.
So when people talk about the unconscious, I think this is what it is.
Because there's the procedural unconscious, that's at the lowest level, right?
Because that's movement, so that would be procedural memory.
And then the The hierarchies above that are representational, most of them, or they're what Luria called kinetic melodies, which would be habitual patterns of behavior that you've mastered, strung together in a novel way, but then above that, that starts to become representational.
And so, I think, for example, when you're digging to the bottom of things, when you're having a conversation and the unconscious opens up in the conversation, which almost always happens if you're having a dispute with someone, right?
You say, What do you really mean?
And then they have to decompose what they're saying into its subsidiary elements, and sometimes that's a search, but sometimes it's actually a meditation.
Where did that idea come from?
What is the underlying structure?
Okay, so keep that in mind.
We were talking about play last time, and we talked about the fact that even animals have rules for play.
And that's evidence that there are modes of interaction between animals in a social environment that are acceptable to both animals, such that they will voluntarily continue, and such that they aren't.
So, you know, it's a Piagetian observation that that constitutes one of the basis of moral behavior.
And that seems to me to be a very, very powerful insight, because it takes the idea that there's something arbitrary about morality It takes that out of the picture.
It says, well, it's malleable, but it's not arbitrary.
You know, it can't just be anything.
So, that still leaves you with the problem of how large the boundaries are, and that's a tough one, because obviously you all know that there are many ways to play that all function as acceptable play.
Although, one of the rules would be, Everybody who's playing the game actually has to agree to play it, you know, and that seems to me to be something like an absolute rule regarding social conventions.
So, again, it's a process rule rather than a content rule to some degree, but that's okay.
That's still important.
Alright, so now, I believe we talked a little bit about Franz De Waal's work with chimps, right?
And I mentioned that what De Waal has found out is that it isn't just the, you know, the caveman chimp with the biggest club, Who's the top chimp?
The top chimp in a hierarchy that remains relatively stable and who doesn't get torn to shreds by his subordinates can't be an absolute tyrant.
There are social conventions that he has to follow.
And those seem to involve the ability to form coalitions with other males.
So there's a cooperative element.
And then also attention to the females and infants that are in the chimp troop as well.
In some sense what it seems to indicate is that the more Sophisticated, the top guy, because in chimps it's usually a guy.
I think it's always a guy in chimps.
The more sophisticated he is in his social maneuvering, the more stable the resultant hierarchy.
And so what that implies, as we've discussed, is that there are differences that are qualitative between hierarchies.
And again, that's a moral hierarchy.
Some function better than others.
You have to define better, but I think it's reasonable to define better, again, from a modified Kuhnian or Piagetian perspective.
You say a better system is one that does all the functions of the previous system plus more, or that it's more stable, or something like that.
You can define better.
Now, this particular Pictorial representation, I'm trying to transmute this into another dimension of representation.
So you've got here, you've got your high dominant primate, and so he represents something.
If he's dominant, what he represents is dominance.
And we're associating dominance to some degree with competence, and the competence is social competence.
And so you can think that There's a pattern that constitutes acceptable dominance.
I think you could think about that as authority.
People, especially rather simple-minded social critics, like to think that dominance hierarchies are only based on power.
Except in the most brutal of societies, that's just not the case.
Because there's power, but there's also competence.
And lots of hierarchies in a functional society are predicated on competence.
And so what's at the top isn't dominance precisely, it's authority.
And authority is a better way of thinking about it.
So, then the question might be, well, how is authority represented?
And then also, what is it?
And so, imagine that for a chimp, or maybe for...
No, we'll go with chimp, because we don't know how long ago it was in history when people started to abstract out these things.
You know, if you think of a word like chief, As soon as there's a word like that, chief, or tribal leader, or whatever the term might be, the fact that that term exists indicates that there's a category for authority, right?
And what that means is that as soon as you have a category for authority, you can detach the idea of authority from the authority holder, And you can start to think about authority itself, right?
In a troop, like in a chimp troop, there's no authority independent of the thing that's at the top.
It's completely embodied.
Even though you might be able to say, if you were an anthropological observer, you might be able to say, There's some common, here's a chimp troop here, and there's a chimp troop here, and another one here.
And you could say, well, there's some commonality in behavior across all of the chimps that are at the top.
But the chimps don't know that.
It's just a natural fact at that point.
But as soon as you can make the category, or the category leader, or something like that, then what you're starting to do is to conceptualize the principles that make authority, authority.
And that's because we can abstract and because we can represent.
We've been doing that for a very long period of time.
You know, we do that as modern people all the time.
There's a huge body of studies in management science about what makes a leader.
Now, it turns out that it's very, very difficult to go into that literature and extract out anything of any generality.
You know, I mean, my sense My sense was, in reviewing that literature, that one of the things you can say about a leader is that a leader knows where he's going.
But once you go past that, then what constitutes leadership in complex human organizations is hard to articulate, but it's also rather situation dependent.
You know, and I would also say there's different ways of being a leader that are dependent on temperament that may be All be functional.
So trying to categorize that is quite difficult, but people still have been trying to do that for a very long time, and they've gone a very long way.
So here's a symbolic transmutation in some sense.
At the top left there you've got people playing football, and then in the middle there you've got An abstract representation of a game, so computer games are quite interesting because they've taken the whole abstraction process one step further.
They're representations of representations of representations, and you can play with them.
They're simulations.
The ones on the far right, the bottom one, you see there's a guy standing down there and he's gazing up at God in heaven with this cross.
To me, that's essentially a dominance relationship.
Think about it in many ways.
First of all, you're looking up to see the source of authority, so there's the idea that authority is above you somehow.
I would say that that representation is an attempt to capture in image what authority constitutes.
Now, when people were capturing this in image, like they are in that particular drawing, It isn't that they were trying to put into images something they understood in an articulated way.
It's exactly the opposite, is that the phenomena itself of authority as a concept emerged on the basis of the processes we've been describing, which means it emerged from the bottom up as increasingly complex social animals organized themselves into increasingly complex and large social hierarchies.
There was an emergence of morality As a consequence of that organization, and then there was an observation of it.
You might think, well, what form would that observation take?
It's a Jungian hypothesis, and I think it's a very good one, that part of what the artistic endeavor does is transmute what's not understood yet into image, into image and drama.
And that's the source of its further articulation up into statable rules.
So first of all, the bottom picture there indicates that a human being can be struck by the concept of authority per se.
So you might think, well, what's even more Of an authority than an authority.
And the answer to that is, it's whatever makes authorities authorities across a large class of authorities.
And you might say, well, what is that?
And the answer to that is, well, we're still figuring that out, because it's so damn complicated.
It's unbelievably complicated.
Now, I can tell you some things about that image.
I can tell you some things that it represents.
What it means is that, first of all, it means that Authority has this transpersonal process, transpersonal existence that's eternal.
So, and why is that?
Well, it's because what makes authority authority is stable across hierarchies.
The hierarchies can come and go, but the concept itself has an eternal element to it because it remains constant across transformations.
And I think that's represented in the symbolic realm by the idea of God in heaven.
It's something like that.
Now, I've got to tell you too, I'm not trying to reduce these religious explanations to the concepts that I'm describing.
Because I don't think that what I'm telling you is a complete representation of what happens.
So, there's a transcendent element to religious thinking that you can't explain away by reducing it to its constituent elements.
But having said that, we're just going to put that aside.
We're going to try to make it as concrete as possible.
Now, In this representation, the idea basically is that authority has something to do with the Father, right?
It has something to do with eternality and transcendence, and it also has something to do with the cross.
It's a Christian representation.
So, that's fine.
That's a hypothesis, is what that is.
Now, it's a weird hypothesis, right?
If you look at that picture, and you start thinking about it from an anthropological perspective, Instead of a personal perspective, you might think, well, what the hell are these creatures up to when they're making representation like that?
What are they trying to express?
You know, and the classical view would be, well, this is a belief and the belief is being imposed on the viewers.
It's like, well, let's not assume that.
Let's try something different.
Let's assume that it's an explanation that people have been trying to work out that nobody really understands.
And I think that that's a much better way of looking at it, because otherwise you're stuck with some bloody conspiracy theory of history or something like that.
I think one of the advantages we have in the 21st century is because our culture now is composed of such an intermingling of cultures, it enables people, let's say for the sake of argument, in the dominant culture to step outside of their own presuppositions and start to view themselves as anthropologists.
Okay, so you think, well, what are people up to?
Well, first of all, that figure, I'm sorry it's not bigger, but I'll show you a bigger one later, is being held up in heaven by angels.
So it's like there's an idea that there's some divine entities out of which a top divine entity emerges.
And that's a father figure in that representation.
It's associated with light, and it has this cross.
And the cross is a very, very old symbol.
And in Christianity, obviously, the cross isn't representative of the Father, it's representative of the Son.
And so that's interesting because what that means is this representation says that whatever authority is has something of the Father and something of the Son.
And the reason I'm telling you that is because it's going to become very relevant when I tell you the Egyptian, one of the fundamental variants of the Central Egyptian religious story a little bit later in class.
So, it's not just the Father.
There's something else.
One of the mysteries about Christianity, for example, and this is one of the things the rationalists always take Christianity to task for, is the idea that God is a three-part unity.
It's a very bizarre idea.
Obviously, it's not an empirical idea.
It's some bizarre fantasy.
I think that it's expressed quite well in that drawing, at least part of it, which is, well, yeah, It's a unity because there's something similar about the Father and the Son, and there's something that they both need from each other, and it's a dynamic interplay, but it also has to be something that's differentiated.
There's utility in differentiating the concept.
So, okay, so keep that in mind.
Now, the top one there, on the right, that's Moses.
And I'll tell you the story of Exodus in detail later in the class, but one of the things I want to...
To introduce you to is this possibility.
What happens in Exodus, basically, is it's a tyranny, descent into chaos, rise story.
In some sense, the Exodus story is a microcosm of the entire Christian Bible.
So that's kind of interesting.
It's a story about transformation nested inside a broader story about transformation.
The transformation is everyone's in a tyranny.
And they're being exploited and they need to escape.
Okay, so you should be able to relate to that.
Because everybody is in a tyranny and they're trying to escape.
Now the degree to which the tyranny is tyrannical varies a lot between societies.
But the classic adolescent experience, and you see this in coming-of-age novels all the time, is the young person against the establishment.
Something like that, right?
And I would say that's an existential condition.
It's always the young person against the establishment.
Now, the establishment is also helping the young person, so it's not the only story, but it's an archetypal component of the story.
So you have to escape from the tyranny of the group.
And what happens when you escape from that is you're cast into chaos, even if it's a tyrannical group, because even a tyrannical group provides you with a hierarchy and an identity.
And maybe it's a pathological hierarchy and a pathological identity, But you could still make the case that it's better than no identity at all.
And I think you play that situation by situation.
I mean, remember what happens to the Israelites, right?
They leave Egypt, they're all slaves there, and they end up in a desert, and they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, and a lot of them are thinking, yeah, it's not so obvious that this chaotic existence out here in a desert is better than, you know, where I know my three meals a day are coming from.
And, you know, You don't want to think about that as merely something that's an abstraction.
It's like there's plenty of people in Russia who long for the Soviet Union.
Right?
Because there was a stability that was associated with it.
Now we would say, and I think the Russians themselves said, that was a pathological stability.
But whether it was worse than the consequent chaos is, well, it's to be seen.
We don't know at the moment.
For some societies, like Poland, it's like Poland seems to have pulled out of it quite nicely.
But there are other countries that haven't.
So, the chaos, and I think this is also the conundrum.
It's very much worth thinking about this, because you might think, what stops people from progressing in terms of the Quality of their personality structure.
And the answer to that is, well, every time you want to move forward, you have to let something go, and there's a disintegration associated with that, and so that's somewhat terrifying.
It's like, maybe you find, well, the case of the abused spouse is a good one.
Why go back to someone who abuses you?
And people usually do.
And that's partly because couples abuse each other all the time.
So it's a matter of degree.
But if you go out on the spectrum to the point where it's pretty damn obvious that the abuse is criminal, let's say, because that's sort of the bordering line, people will still return.
Well, why?
It's a really hard question.
Why?
Sometimes it's because the abuser conspires to make sure that the abused person is in a position of such weakness that they actually can't leave.
They have no money, they have no resources, and they're terrified.
So, you know, that aside, well, what do you give up when you leave?
Well, you give up everything.
You give up your past, you know, because you have to think, geez, that was a mistake, and that's going to require a lot of thinking through to figure out why you made that particular mistake.
And how not to make it again, because you probably will, because whatever got you into that situation to begin with is undoubtedly still there, unless you fixed it.
And then, of course, your future's shot, right?
And so is your present self-image.
And that's a chaotic collapse, you know?
It might mean that you have to move cities.
God only knows.
You have to change jobs.
You have to change where you live.
You have to change all your friends.
It's like...
Is that better?
Well, not obviously.
And so people won't take the leap off the burning, you know, the burning grasslands on the cliff into the water below, and it's not surprising because who knows how many sharks are down there.
And that, it's really useful to understand it that way, I think, because it tells you why people won't transcend themselves constantly.
It's like, well, you have to make a sacrifice.
It's not always obvious that the gain you will make from the sacrifice is worth the costs of the sacrifice, and that's even in extreme conditions.
That's partly why Exodus is such an archetypal story.
It's not obvious at all to the Israelites when they're out in the desert, wandering about, half-starving, that It's only faith that keeps them going, faith that there might be something better at the other end.
It's like, well, so what happens is that they get pretty damn crabby at Moses for leading them out there, you know, and they start to worship all sorts of alternative gods, which is exactly what you do when you're in chaos, by the way.
Because when you're in chaos, you're looking for new moral principles to orient yourself by.
And those are new hierarchies of value.
And to think about those as alternative structures of dominant structures of value that could be represented by a given deity, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Especially in the absence of articulated knowledge of what a moral structure is.
It's a perfectly reasonable way to represent it.
So that happens.
So the Israelites are trying to orient themselves on this trip.
They don't know what the hell they're doing.
And then another thing happens that's quite interesting is that, well, they're all squabbling among each other.
Now, I want to tell you a story about that.
So among the Bushmen, the Kalahari Bushmen, who by the way looked to be The most genetically similar of all human beings to what our earliest relatives would have been who moved out of Africa.
It's something like that, so that's kind of interesting.
The Kalahari Bushmen are a very egalitarian society.
And people like to think that egalitarian societies, because they're egalitarian, are peaceful, but that's not true at all.
They're not peaceful at all, and neither is the Bushmen society.
And the problem with the Bushmen society is that, let's say, I don't know, you know, You steal my wife.
Okay, well, there's no hierarchy, so what am I going to do about that?
There's no authority to appeal to, so I'm stuck with it.
So what am I going to do?
Well, often I'm just going to wait around until I get my chance, and then I'm going to take out my little bow and arrow with my poison arrow, and I'm going to nail you with it.
Because what else is there?
There's no authority.
Now this is what the Bushmen do, very interesting, is that there's another tribe located near them, and I think it's the Bantu, but I'm not absolutely certain, but I think it's the Bantu.
And they have a hierarchical structure, so there is an authority.
And so now the Bushmen will go to the Bantu to have their disputes mediated so they don't just have to shoot each other when they have an argument.
So it's quite interesting.
It's worth thinking about, because in a flat, egalitarian society, nobody has the final word.
And when everyone's getting along, that's perfectly fine.
But as soon as two people aren't getting along, it's like, who do we turn to to mediate this?
Okay, so the Israelites had that problem in the archetypal story.
And so what happens...
In relationship to Moses, is that every time two Israelites have some squawk about whose chicken is whose, they have to come to Moses, and they pour out their tale of woe, and he has to sit there and listen to it, and then he has to decide who's right.
So he's serving as a judge.
Now, you've got to think, what are you doing when you're judging?
Which is a word that people say, well, don't judge me.
It's like, really?
It's like, that's the same as not thinking.
Judging is actually an extraordinarily useful ability because it helps you separate out what isn't good for anything from what's valuable.
It isn't absence of judgment you want, it's judicial judgment, principled judgment.
And then you might say, well, what is that?
Well, that's a good question.
You could say, well, it's all arbitrary anyways.
Well, then you've just got chaos, so that's not much of a solution.
Okay.
So the Israelites are coming to Moses, like, nonstop, bitching about these little trivial things that are aggravating them to death.
And he's sitting there, like, for years, literally for years, listening to them, like, 14 hours a day.
And finally, he does this so long that I think it's his father-in-law who tells him he has to stop and distribute the responsibility because he's just going to get exhausted.
But you can imagine, what happens to you if you sit there and judge and judge and judge and judge and judge and judge and judge?
Is that you're building up a very articulated and differentiated representation of the moral structure that actually constitutes your society.
Because imagine if you're a good judge, here's what has to happen.
Thank you.
You two are at each other's throats, like in a really homicidal way.
So things have gone too far.
And so then I have to listen to you both, and I have to decide what you're going to do.
But I have to do something even more spectacular than that.
I have to decide it in a way that you both feel is more acceptable than killing each other.
And that means you have to feel that not only is it reasonable and just, It also has to absolve you of your responsibility to seek revenge.
Because that's one of the functions of law that people never think about.
You may not remember this because you're all young, but when Michael Dukakis, I'm hoping, was running for president, somebody asked him what he would do.
They were having it as Republicans.
He was a Democrat.
He had let some character out of jail and he went and killed someone.
So the Republicans made a big deal out of that during the presidential convention.
And maybe there was a rape involved.
It's possible.
He was asked on TV what he would do if his own wife was raped, you know, which is a pretty good question.
And Dukakis blew the answer because he kind of wishy-washy did way, you know.
So the right answer is, with every fiber of my being, I'd like to chop them into bits.
But as a civilized person I'm willing to defer that to the judicial system because they'll take appropriate and measured steps and then my proclivity won't generate itself through the community because the danger is if I take vicious revenge that that'll start a cycle of revenge and then the whole thing falls apart.
It's the judicial system's responsibility to take that moral burden off my shoulders, because, you know, what's the right response when someone you love is terribly hurt?
Well, it's not, well, I'll just forget about that and go home.
It's like, that's what you do if you're contemptibly weak, fundamentally.
So the judicial system has to stand in for you.
So anyways, the point is, if you make a judgment, The judgment won't hold unless it suits the people who are being judged.
And it's not going to suit them unless it matches the implicit moral presuppositions that they're already bringing to the dispute.
Now you see this in kids.
You know, the kids will be arguing over a toy.
And then they'll come to the mother or the father and they'll say...
And then the mother will say, well, you do this and you do this.
And if the kids don't like that, they'll go, well, that's not fair.
And kids, like, they're really obsessed with fair.
They want it exactly fair in an understandable way.
So the parent not only has to Adjudicate the dispute, but the parent has to adjudicate the dispute in a manner that the children will accept, or they'll just go back into the other room and have the fight all over again, right?
Or they'll poke each other, you know, they'll be tit-for-tat revenge going on non-stop.
So what that means is that the articulated representation of the solution has to match the embodied expectation of the population.
So, there's already a morality that's governing their interactions, they just don't know what it is.
If there wasn't, they wouldn't even know when they had been wronged.
Right?
Because you can't figure out when you're wronged unless you know when you're not wronged.
So to say, well, I've been wronged, means to say, well, I don't know what's going on here, but it doesn't seem fair.
And so then poor old Moses has to look at that, and he has to think about it, and he has to think, well, why is this fair, and why is it unfair, and who is right here, and then what's the solution?
And the story represents him as doing that for the 10,000 hours it would take someone to become an absolute expert at doing it.
Well, then the story, what the story essentially relates is the revelation of a moral code, and that's the Ten Commandments, right?
You think, well, they say the Ten Commandments came from God.
Well, that's fine.
We kind of have an idea about God that's already stemming from the bottom picture.
It's the abstract representation of what constitutes the source of authority across time.
That's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it.
And Moses, he has this bright revelation, which is like a moment of insight.
Now, what happens in psychotherapy when you have a moment of insight is that you figure out what you're already doing.
That's what happens, because you come to the therapist and you say, I had this relationship, and this is how it went.
Then I had this relationship, and it went the same way.
And I had this relationship, and it went the same way.
What's going on?
And so then you talk about it, and you talk about it, and you talk about it, until all of a sudden, bang!
You think, ah!
Here's the explanation that maps onto the behavior, and it feels like a fit, right?
And that's the insight moment.
It's like, I got it!
And it's interesting, because if you, you know, I do dream interpretations fairly regularly, and You know, you think, well, that's kind of like astrology.
And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable objection, except that it's more like literary interpretation.
And you think, well, how do you know when you've got it right?
And the answer is, well, it's an insight.
Like, you talk about it, and all of a sudden, it sort of crystallizes.
The person goes, oh yeah, that fits.
I've got it.
How you figure that out, I don't really understand.
I think...
I don't get it exactly.
I think it's something like, when you get the map right, what happens is that there's an understanding of how that generalizes across situations, and so partly that simplifies the problem.
You know, you say, well, here's the rule, instead of having to act it out on stage.
And I think the reason that that would come with a burst of insight is because It's simpler and more efficient, and so your body recognizes it as an optimal solution.
And I think it also opens up new possibilities for the future.
And I think that gives you a dopamine kick.
And so that's why the moment of insight is associated with this really potent Affective marker, and that's a revelation.
When you have a moment of insight, it's a revelation.
People even say that.
Now, we might not think anymore that it's a divine revelation, but I'll tell you, if you had a revelation of sufficient magnitude, so maybe it was one way up in your abstraction hierarchy, if you had a revelation at that level, you'd describe it as a religious experience.
People do all the time.
That happens to alcoholics all the time when they're recovering.
You know, they have a flash of insight.
And that's when a new personality gets catalyzed.
And if that happens to them, sometimes they can stop drinking.
It's the best...
Now maybe this is outdated because I knew the literature 25 years ago, but I doubt it because we haven't made really any progress in treating alcoholics.
Revelatory personality transformation cures alcoholism.
Now, we don't necessarily know how to bring it about, but, you know, the 12-step programs try to bring it about.
Okay, so you can think about all that.
There's a bigger representation of the picture.
So that's authority.
What is authority?
Well, there's a...
Now, I'm hoping...
It's been a while since I looked at these pictures.
I'm hoping that picture...
I think that picture is of Doré.
I think it's Gustav Doré.
And I think that's Moses receiving the tablets from God.
But I might be wrong.
But I think that's what it is.
And there's light associated.
Yep?
They just didn't know that they knew it.
Or even necessarily why they'd been wronged.
They just have a sense that this wasn't right.
And I think the best way to think about that is to think about five-year-olds.
They know when somebody breaks a rule, but they don't know what to do about it.
It really bugs them.
That's a Piagetian observation too.
You're not playing by the rules.
That's enough to make many young kids cry, right?
And when they're crying, you think, what happens when you're crying?
Well, it's a distress call.
It's a request for the intervention of authority.
That's what crying is.
So, the kid knows something's gone wrong, his pattern detection system is that sophisticated, but his capacity to represent that and articulate it, well, from a Piagetian perspective, that doesn't come until multiple stages of development later, like the highest level of development, and lots of people, according to Piaget, don't even get there, right?
And that would be the ability to play games with the rules of games.
And so you do that when you are having a constitutional discussion, for example.
Or maybe when you're talking with your friends on the playing field about what the rules are going to be for a pick-up football game.
So you can conceptualize yourself at that point as not only a thing that is good because that thing can follow rules, which is an earlier stage of development, but that as a thing that's good because not only can it follow rules, it can abstractly represent the rules, it can engage in a discussion about the rules, and it can update them.
And I would say that's part of what's being represented by this picture on the left.
So the father is the thing that's the rules, and the son, in this representation, is the thing that can update the rules.
Now it has to die and come back in order to update the rules.
And so that's partly why the father in that figure is holding a cross, because the cross is a symbol of death and reconstruction.
That's the price you pay for reformatting the rules.
Because you have to do that to yourself too.
So, yeah?
So then the value in the abstraction is not the ability to follow the rules or to play the game, but to actually be able to pay attention to how you're playing the game.
Well, it's exactly the advantage of abstract representation.
You can start to manipulate the representations before you manipulate the thing.
So that means you can start to think about morality.
Now, is that a good thing?
I think it was Alfred North Whitehead.
I hate taping these because all these errors that I'm making in my memory are going to be preserved.
But anyways, I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said something like, the reason to think, the reason that thought is valuable is because we can let our thoughts die instead of ourselves.
Right, and so then you think, well, once you can lay out the rules, okay, The kids are playing a game, one kid cheats, or another kid suspects the first kid has cheated.
And there's no adults around.
So what's the outcome?
Well, one outcome is the game stops.
That's a high probability outcome.
Or the game continues, but no one's having any fun.
Or one kid gets resentful and sullen, and the other kid just imposes his will.
Or they fight.
That's it.
Those are the options.
Now, when they can abstractly represent the rules, first of all, they can agree on them before they play the game, and kids do that automatically.
So, for example, if you watch kids play pretend games, What they do first, you can probably all remember this from when you were little kids.
You're playing some pretend game in a blanket fort or something, maybe.
You get together with all the other kids and you think, okay, well this is your role and this is your role and that's your role and, you know, and here's what we're going to do.
Here's going to be the little drama we'll lay out.
So kids are very good at that.
Once you can get the rules abstracted, you can talk about the damn things instead of having to kill each other.
And you can also update them In principle, run simulations of what would happen with the update, which is basically what an argument is, or a debate, and then you can implement them.
Hopefully you can get rid of the stupid updates before you actually implement them and die because you implemented them.
The other advantage to abstraction, either in drama, Or in articulation is that you can transfer the rules more efficiently.
So you can get the kid to act out the rule, but you can also say, here's the rule, and you should follow it in multiple situations.
And then they don't have to learn purely through imitation to embody that rule across all possible situations.
So, whatever advantages abstraction has, The pulling out of the moral rule system from the underlying behavior has those advantages.
And disadvantages.
The disadvantage is, you can come up with a perfectly good reason why you shouldn't keep doing what your forefathers have done for 20 centuries.
Because it doesn't make any sense.
Well, it does.
You just don't know why.
It's like the Mesopotamians last week we were talking about, remember?
The noisy gods killed Apsu.
They didn't know what the hell he was good for.
It's like, you know, he's their shield against chaos.
He's their tradition.
It's like, well, we'll just kill him and see what happens.
It's like, you better be careful because lurking behind your tradition is chaos.
And, you know, you might be the master of chaos, but you're probably not.
So, look out.
Now, we got some clue from the Mesopotamians.
What the master of chaos was like.
The master of chaos was a new kind of god, who had eyes all the way around his head, who could speak magic words.
So there's an attention, verbalization, communication element to that.
And the Mesopotamians figured out that thing should be at the top.
It's a staggering insight to think that, because it also might be right.
It's like, okay, what should you follow?
Well, the first answer is, follow the damn rules.
Why?
Well, because that's what people expect, and you won't get into too much trouble if you do that.
But then you might say, well, sometimes the rules are wrong, or sometimes they don't apply.
Okay, that's definitely true.
Then what?
Well, that's a whole different issue.
Well, and the Mesopotamians would say, that's a really good time to pay attention.
And to confront the chaos voluntarily.
And to communicate about what you're doing.
And to reformat the world, restructure the world as a consequence of your confrontation with this chaos.
And that's a higher deity.
And I think it's the god of attention, fundamentally.
It's something like that, but it's more.
It's attention plus articulation plus communication.
And that would be the highest.
So the Mesopotamians would say, that's the highest god.
It's a hypothesis.
Now, I wanted to tell you the rest of the Mesopotamian story.
So cool!
So, you remember that Marduk goes off and conquers Tiamat, puts her in a net, cuts her into pieces, and makes the world.
Okay, and then, out of Tiamat has organized this army to go against Marduk and his army.
And what Tiamat does when she goes out to have a war is she's at the forefront.
No, she's sort of behind the scenes maneuvering and manipulating everything.
And she creates all sorts of monsters, the worst monsters she can think of.
And then of all those monsters, she picks the worst possible monster, and she puts him at the head of the phalanx that goes into battle.
And his name is Kingu.
And so Marduk defeats him too.
He's a bit of a precursor of Satan.
He's the agent of chaos, but he's more embodied.
Anyways, Marduk makes human beings out of the blood of Kingu, which is also an extraordinarily interesting idea.
It's very much like the idea in Genesis that was picked up particularly by the Catholics, that human beings are characterized by original sin.
We're made out of the blood of the worst monster.
And it took me a long time to think that through.
I thought, what the hell?
Why would they think that?
And I think the reason is that because human beings are the only things on the planet that can deceive you.
Everything else is either the way it is, or you just don't understand it.
It's not like the garbage can isn't trying to deceive you.
There's things about it you don't understand, like it's subatomic structure, but it's not actively fighting against your comprehension.
Whereas human beings, they are completely different creatures.
It's definitely the case that along with our capacity for abstraction and self-consciousness, we immediately evolve the ability for high-level intrigue and deception.
And you even see that in kids.
The smarter the kid, the earlier they learn to lie.
And you can see, you can't separate that from the capacity to spin off alternative simulated worlds, because that's what a lie is.
Except, If you're doing it in a non-lying manner, you're trying to spin off a world that actually represents the real world better, instead of trying to spin off a simulation that allows you to avoid responsibility for something.
So it's interesting that the Mesopotamians also were very cognizant So, what happens?
The Emperor So the Emperor lived in a walled city because cities were walled at that time and the reason for that was if they weren't walled then the marauding barbarians would come in and kill all the men and take all the women and burn the place to the ground and steal everything.
So, you know, people weren't all that happy when that happened so they built big walls to make sure that that was difficult.
So that was order inside the walls and chaos outside and chaos was out where the barbarians are, which is still what we think.
But What would happen to the emperor at the New Year's ceremony was that they would take him outside the city walls.
So they'd take the emperor, who's like king of order, they'd take him outside into chaos to remind him that even the emperor is surrounded by chaos.
So then they'd strip him of all the clothing and symbols that made him emperor.
And they'd make him kneel, and then the priest would make him recount, for the last year, all the things he did that made him not a good Marduk.
So he was supposed to embody Marduk.
That was what made him the emperor.
To the degree that he could embody the attentive and communicative force that could keep chaos at bay, he deserved to be emperor.
So that's the idea of sovereignty, of lawful sovereignty.
It's brilliant.
It's brilliant.
Now, the problem is the emperor might forget that he's supposed to be Marduk and he might just be, you know, guy with the biggest harem who's stealing everything he possibly can, which is really not what he's supposed to be doing.
So they take him outside at the New Year's festival when the world was going to be renewed, which we still do, right?
Because it's out with the old year, in with the new, that's when you make your Resolutions to be a better person.
Right.
So this is an ancient ceremony.
Okay.
Out you take the emperor.
Strip him of his emperor clothes.
So now he's just, you know, some dude.
You have him kneeling there.
And then you whack him with a glove to just remind him that he's not boss of everything.
And then you get him to recount all his sins, basically.
But the sins were, okay, in the last year, how did you fail in your task as a representative of Marduk on earth?
And so then...
The emperor hypothetically would tell, you know, everybody why he was a lout and useless in six different ways and promised to be better.
And then the Mesopotamians would take statues out of the city that represented the gods that we've talked about, and they would reenact a battle of Marduk against chaos.
They'd act that out.
And then at the end, the emperor would sleep with a ritual prostitute.
So she'd be like a temple virgin, representing the benevolent element of femininity.
Then they go back in and have their year start.
Now, it's very much like St.
George and the Dragon, if you think about it, right?
You know the St.
George and the Dragon story.
St.
George goes, a dragon has captured a virgin.
And St.
George is out there, he's going to slay the dragon and free the virgin.
And that works at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.
One level is, the guy who's best at keeping chaos at bay is going to be the guy who's most attractive to women.
Because women are smart.
So that's first, that's like the archetypal level.
Sorry, that's the biological level.
The archetypal level is even more abstract.
It's that the dragon, Tiamat, is a representation of chaos itself.
And chaos is something that's deeply informative.
So the dragon has gold, or it has a virgin.
It depends on how the story works out.
When you encounter that, you free something of value.
And that's something that you can incorporate, you can have.
That's more like the treasure variant of the story.
It's also good if you kind of spread it around a little bit.
Because otherwise it's an incomplete story.
Okay, so what's happening?
What's happening?
In Mesopotamia at that time is many many tribes are being brought together.
They've all got their own mythology and Everyone's trying to figure out, okay, how do we benefit from the fact that we're all going to live together without having to kill each other?
Which is the standard human problem, right?
Because it's good to cooperate, but you don't want the foreigners upsetting your horse cart and And you don't want the whole thing collapsing into chaos.
So how do you balance that?
So what you could imagine, Eliade called this the war of the gods in heaven, which is a very common mythological motif.
So you can imagine, if you will, all these tribes have their own culture and their own representation of that culture, often in mythological stories.
They're brought together.
Where does the war take place?
Well, if it doesn't take place between the people, which is what will happen if they can't cooperate, it's going to take place between the representations.
So what's happening is, you know, Culture A's got a story, and Culture B's got a story, and the stories kind of are the same, and they're kind of not the same.
And so, you think, then everybody thinks, well, you've got your God, and I've got mine.
It's like, who are we going to pay any attention to here?
And one answer is, well, I'll just kill you, and that'll be the end of the problem.
My God wins.
Or another issue would be, well, we'll just let everything drop into chaos, which in some sense, I think, is what happened to Rome.
It just ate so many gods it could no longer survive.
Or, we're going to figure out how to get along together.
Well, that means your story and my story have to be brought together so they're commensurate.
Now, one of the things that's quite interesting is that you can actually see this happening in the oldest books in the Bible.
So the Bible is a collection of books.
There's a lot of books that were sort of Bible-like that didn't get into the final version.
People were arguing about which should be in and in what order.
The books were written and there's huge arguments about what should be included and what shouldn't and what sequence they should be included in.
These arguments went over thousands of years.
They're major league arguments.
But if you go into Genesis, for example, and you look at the story of Adam and Eve, What you find is it's not one story.
It's at least two and maybe three.
And that's been identified through psycholinguistic analysis and also through anthropological investigation.
And so there's version one and there's version two and then the guy they call the redactor, who's a hypothetical character, Organized these stories, cut them apart, sequenced them, tried to keep both in some order that made sense.
And so what he was basically doing was taking two traditions whose stories had some archetypal similarity, but whose details differed, and he's trying to make them logically coherent so they can fit together.
And you think, well, why is he doing that?
Well, the answer is, we either get our stories together, or you're a slave and I'm a tyrant, or the reverse, or we kill each other.
Those are the options.
Well, apart from pure descent into chaos, which is, you know, not going to do either of us any good either.
That's kind of a nihilism.
And it's a real threat to human societies.
So that's pretty cool.
So, the war between the gods in the heavens is something like this.
It's like, the top left-hand representation is too simple.
We know that.
Because when you're doing something, it isn't that you're going from point A to point B, and you act that out.
Because sometimes you're working at a much more abstract level.
You might say, well, I'm trying to do well at university.
Well, how do you move your body to accomplish that?
Well, and the answer is, that's the wrong level of resolution to answer that question.
You'd go, I'm trying to do well at university.
Okay, how do you subdivide that?
I take five classes.
Okay, fine.
Now you've got it subdivided down to five classes.
I do the readings in each class, so that's getting closer to behavior, right?
How do you do the readings?
Well, I open the book and I move my eyes, right?
So then you're down to a high resolution level of representation.
So, when you look at the thing on the top left, it's really more like the thing in the middle.
It's nested It's nested value orientations that ground out in action.
And how those are going to be nested exactly, that's either war or discussion that determines that.
War, thought or discussion.
That's it.
That's what you've got.
And if you can't do it with the first two, thought and discussion, the only Recourse you have is war or the degeneration into chaos which will produce war anyways So and then there's a further transformation is which is Well if I could do any of these three things to further my move forward Which takes priority now you're solving that problem all the time or you can't act and sometimes you'll actually
see this in yourself, you know sometimes If you're driving somewhere, you're not sure whether you're going to go straight or go left.
You flip between them, you know, in confusion.
Well, you're not going to go anywhere if you're doing that.
You have to make one more important than the other than before you can act.
And so whenever you're undertaking any action, what you've done is organize the whole hierarchy of values so that there's no contradictions at the level you're operating or you're frozen.
And so you're making value judgments all the time.
And you know this.
It's like, should you go to the library?
Or should you read your book at home?
Or maybe should you be studying for that course or this course?
Or, when you're really feeling desperate, should you be in that discipline?
Or should you be in university?
Or should you be alive?
That's one you should visit very seldomly.
You want the local problem to dominate.
If things have got very disorganized, you're going to go all the way to the top.
It's very, very hard on people to do that.
Societies have to get their priorities straight, which is their value hierarchies, and individuals do too.
And then if you're looking at how that happens over the historical time span, you're going to think, it's the battle of the gods in heaven.
And that is what happens.
It's the right way of thinking about it.
If there's a transpersonal space, that's the imagination, in which these Long-term discussions and battles take place.
You have to represent that somehow.
So Jung would think about that, at least in part, as the collective unconscious.
And the collective unconscious is...
Here's one way of thinking about it.
The collective unconscious is all those behavioral patterns and presuppositions that we share.
What are those?
Well, we don't know.
We don't have a full account of that.
We're trying to figure it out.
So...
Okay, so these are different representations of this.
The one on the left, at the top, there's another representation of what constitutes authority.
There's God the Father.
You see, he's kind of got a little pyramid hat on, which I think is quite cool.
And it also, I think, helps explain why the damn Egyptians were so obsessed with pyramids.
You know, it's a hierarchical structure, a pyramid.
And they thought about that as something sacred.
And there is something sacred about a hierarchical structure.
The question is, what's the structure and how should it be structured?
So there's God with his little pyramid hat.
And then in front of them, he's got a cross.
And I think that's in an orb that represents the world.
And then in front of that, there's a dove.
And the dove is the third part of the Christian trinity.
And the dove represents the Holy Spirit.
And the Holy Spirit, hypothetically, is...
You might think about it as the action of conscience.
It's something like that.
It's the manifestation of tradition and the capacity to update tradition in you.
So there's a personal element to it.
And that's why the dove is a thing that communicates between the heavenly realm and the earthly realm, fundamentally.
Something like that.
Now, you see that on the American dollar bill.
That's pretty cool because what they've done there Same kind of idea, except the top of the pyramid is detached from the bottom.
Which I really love, because it's making this claim that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid isn't part of the pyramid.
And that's bloody brilliant.
And I think that that's an observation the Egyptians first got right.
And we're going to tell that story here in a minute.
It's that...
Think about it this way.
We'll go back to the game idea.
Your kid's playing hockey.
And you say, be a good sport.
Now, then the question would be, if the pyramid at that point is the hockey game, if he's a good sport, does that mean he's going to win the hockey game?
And the answer to that is no.
It doesn't mean that.
What it means is that he's going to win the game that goes across multiple sets of games across very large spans of time.
And so it's not really part of any hierarchy.
It's something that's above them all.
And that's the best game to play.
At least that's a theory.
Even in that representation, there's an eye.
It's like, pay attention!
Pay attention!
The Washington Monument at the top of it has a pyramid.
There's a cap on that pyramid, and the cap is made out of aluminum.
You might think, why would it be made out of aluminum?
The answer was, when that monument was made, aluminum was the most precious metal on the planet, because people had just figured out how to make it.
We made this nice cap that was even more precious than gold.
So what the symbol is is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid that isn't quite connected to it is more precious than gold.
And that's an alchemical idea too.
And it's right.
It's right.
It's not a metaphor.
Or it is, but it's...
A lot of things we think our metaphors aren't.
They're just descriptions of things at a level we don't understand.
Yep.
You seem to stress the sacred nature of paying attention.
Can you clarify to some degree why it would be sacred?
Because it keeps chaos and order properly balanced.
Everywhere.
And we'll get into that more deeply as we get into these stories.
It's a very good question.
To answer that, you sort of have to answer, well, what constitutes sacred?
And what I would say is, the more unshakable a truth, the more sacred it is.
Now, you might say, well, how do you know if one truth is more unshakable than another?
And the answer is, well, you've got to figure that out.
And so what I'm presenting, as far as I can tell, is how people have figured that out over God only knows what span of time.
Like, it's 150,000 years for sure of actually trying to figure it out.
And then the dominance hierarchies themselves, man, those things are, we know, they're 400 million years old.
So we've been working at this for a very long period of time.
And I would say, well, one of the things that's sacred, roughly speaking, is how you keep that thing intact and transforming.
Because if it's intact and static, it just falls apart.
Because the environment around it changes, right?
So what the hell good is that?
You can't play the same game forever, but you have to play a game.
So how do you do that?
Well, that's the question.
And that's why I'm going to tell you the Egyptian story.
So what time is it?
This is a good time for a break.
And then I'll come back and I'll tell you this Egyptian story.
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