Lecture: 2015 Personality Lecture 13: Existentialism: Nazi Germany and the USSR
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Okay, Okay, so now we're going to talk about the phenomenological, existential slash phenomenological psychiatrists and their theories from the 1950s.
And as I mentioned to you before, a lot of their thinking was motivated by what had happened in World War II.
When I lectured to you last, I described Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's summation of the world situation and really the world psychological situation at the end of the 1800s.
And that was that our new modes of thinking had undermined our faith in our old modes of thinking.
And that was a problem because people need something firm to stand on, to orient themselves and to move forward.
so Nietzsche and Dostoevsky basically both prophesied that the consequence of that dissolution would be Increased probability of nihilism and everything that went along with that and Dostoevsky wrote about that actually quite extensively in a book called Notes from Underground which if any of you are interested especially in clinical psychology that's a book you should really read because it's one of the most brilliant psychological studies of a psychologically disturbed man that's ever been written.
It's very accurate and there are sections in Crime and Punishment that are like that too.
I think they're unsurpassed in their representation of Of psychological phenomena.
I don't know how he managed it.
I mean, Dostoevsky was epileptic.
I don't know if you know that.
But he was arrested by the Tsar's men in the late 1800s for being a student radical.
And they threw him in the main prison in Moscow.
And then, one day, they took him out in front of a firing squad and shot him at 6 in the morning.
But they only used blanks, which, of course, he didn't know about.
Scared him so badly, he developed epilepsy.
That can happen, by the way.
And then he had epilepsy for the rest of his life.
But he had this strange kind of epilepsy, which is actually not all that rare.
Sometimes when people have epilepsy, they experience this phenomena they call an aura, which is an altered state of consciousness before the epileptic seizure hits.
And they can be very strange, these auras.
So, I read a case study once about a guy who...
His aura was that his hand was being possessed by devils from hell, and he could feel the possession move up his arm and into his shoulder, and once it hit his head, he'd have an epileptic seizure.
And so then there was another case where this man, his aura was that his exact double had appeared behind him.
And if he turned to look, then he'd have an epileptic seizure.
But if he didn't turn to look, then he wouldn't.
So these, you know, brain disorders are very strange things because they're Well, the system that is disordered is alive and it's capable of any number of extraordinarily peculiar misbehaviors.
Anyways, Dostoevsky's aura was a world-revealing aura and so what Dostoevsky would experience was that the meaning of things got deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and then just as he was on the verge of discovering the secret to everything, he'd have an epileptic seizure.
But he said that the quality of experience during the aura was so high So overpowering and so deep that he would have traded all of his normal experience just to have had those experiences.
And he had them repeatedly.
I really do believe that it was this broadening of his vision and concept by his epilepsy that transformed him.
Among other things, he went through some pretty damn rough experiences because he was in prison with rapists and murderers for a long time in Siberia.
Even though he was kind of an aristocratic guy.
He had a rough time of it.
And I imagine that that also broadened him tremendously, given that it didn't kill him.
But I really do believe that the epileptic insight was key to his unsurpassed genius.
And his aura, and other people do experience epileptic aura symptoms like that, by the way.
And some people are so enamored of the aura that they won't take their anti-epilepsy medication because they don't want to forego the Experience that precedes the aura, or the actual epileptic seizure.
So, Dostoevsky's experiences, the awe element of the aura, is also relevant to what we're going to talk about today, because both Binswanger and Boss were very interested in how meaning revealed itself in the world, and they had opposing explanations.
I actually think they're parallel explanations, but the meaning that Dostoevsky experienced is an amplification of the normal manner in which meaning reveals itself in the world.
So, I mean, and people experience that sort of thing in various altered states of consciousness.
Anyways, Binzwanger and Boss, so they worked mostly in the 1950s, and as I said, they were very concerned about what had happened in World War II, and So Dostoevsky and Nietzsche had basically predicted that it was going to be nihilism or ideological totalitarianism, and that's basically exactly what happened.
And by the time the 1930s appeared on the horizon, the Germans had been, you know, they'd gone through an absolutely brutal First World War, and then they went through hyperinflation of insane proportions.
So in the 1920s, Germany Underwent this partly because they had such heavy war debts to pay for World War I. German inflation got to the point where it was literally upwards of a hundred million marks to buy a loaf of bread.
So they were taking wheelbarrows full of money to the grocery stores.
What happened was their currency devalued to zero.
That actually happens to economies more often than you might think.
So the thing just hits zero and that's that.
And then it has to be rebooted, so to speak.
The war was dreadful, and hundreds of thousands of men were killed or brutalized.
Then their economy just absolutely fell apart.
And then, of course, at the same time, well, a little bit earlier, the revolution had taken place in Russia, right at the end of the First World War.
And the communists had come to power, and the communists were agitating all over Europe and in North America.
And their goal was to produce...
A communist revolution that was worldwide and so the Germans were all shorted out that the communists were going to take over the country which was a perfectly reasonable fear and you know instead of that what happened was that fascism arose and fascism was a form of state totalitarianism and I think the Germans were so desperate for order by that point that and that's what the fascists basically offered them at least in theory Unfortunately,
as it turned out, they offered them a little bit too much order, or maybe a lot too much order, and things went dreadfully south.
So then the whole world had to walk through the horrors of World War II, and it was shocking in a variety of ways, not only because of the brutality of the warfare, but because of the genocidal actions that took place consciously by the Nazis.
And those actions were, in many ways, very difficult to understand.
And here's why they're particularly difficult to understand.
There were certainly times where the brutality that the Nazis employed in their eradication of their theoretical enemies Far surpassed the necessity for the mere eradication, but even worse than that, so it went past eradication into real torture constantly.
And not only that, there are many situations in which the Nazis, especially near the end of the war, they had to decide really whether they were going to continue exterminating Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and all the people they felt didn't fit into their culture, or whether they were going to win the war.
And there were decisions they had to make About the distribution of resources, where if they were going to pursue the genocidal extermination, that would mean it would decrease the probability that they would win the war.
And that happened a lot, especially at the end, and the Nazis always picked continuing the extermination.
Now that's pretty damn interesting, you know, because you can think, well, on the one hand, If they are serving a creed, and the creed is world domination, and the extermination processes are considered a step towards the actual end point,
which is the establishment of a world state, a fascist world state, or at least a fascist European state, then you would think that the extermination attempts would be subordinate to that goal, if they were actually pursuing the goal that they said they were pursuing.
But, you know, there's an old psychoanalytic idea, which is really worthwhile.
It's like a surgical tool, and I would say, if you're going to use it in your own life, use it carefully, because you don't want to do unnecessary surgery.
And the rule is, and I think this is a Jungian rule, but I can't remember exactly where I read it.
If you can't understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever those might be, and then infer the motivation from the consequences.
So if you see someone who seems to be doing nothing except making everyone around them and themselves miserable, and you can't understand why, one of the hypotheses that you might entertain is that they're trying to make everyone around them miserable as well as themselves, and that's actually their goal.
And it's hard for people to understand these sorts of things, because when we see phenomena like the Columbine shooters, you know, we always assume that the reason that these people are doing these sorts of things It's for other reasons than the reasons that appear to motivate them, or even the reasons they say they're doing it.
Because the Columbine Killer, especially the more literate one, he said exactly why he was doing what he was doing.
It's as clear as it could possibly be.
All you have to do is go online and read what he said, and he tells you what he was up to.
But people don't like to think that way, because they don't believe that anybody could be consciously possessed of that much malevolence without there being some other kind of cause, like You know, he was bullied at school, or you know, he was an outcast, and those things were only vaguely true, and they certainly weren't more true of him than they were true of, you know, how many people in high school are, you know, bullied and somewhat outcast.
Jesus, it must be 10%.
It's probably more like 30.
You know, that doesn't mean that the schools are blowing up all over, you know, all over all the time.
It's a completely insufficient explanation.
Anyways, for whatever reason, you know, People turned to possession by very, very strict ideological ideas and, you know, they were willing To be possessed by those ideas to the point where they would undertake actions that you'd think would be completely impossible for theoretically civilized people.
It turned out that those actions not only were not impossible for civilized people, but that the people themselves, especially in Nazi Germany, they pretty much knew what the hell was going on.
You don't take several million people out of your population without rumors spreading, let's say.
And so we should never forget that Hitler was elected.
And he was elected by a large majority, too.
It was a landslide vote, the kind of vote that no modern democratic leader ever gets.
So, you know, although it's difficult for people to swallow, it's hard not to assign culpability for what happened in Germany to the society at every strata.
You can't just dump it on the leaders.
And in fact, here's something to think about with regards to Hitler.
Because one of the things you might ask is, how the hell could he be so absolutely compelling to his audiences?
But here, I'll give you an explanation.
So let's make a few assumptions.
And the first assumption is, there were a lot of resentful Germans kicking around.
Why?
Well, they lost the First World War.
That wasn't so good.
There were a lot of brutal men left because they'd been in the trenches and they'd been fighting and shooting at each other under absolutely abhorrent conditions for years and years.
And so there were plenty of brutalized men around.
And then their whole damn economy collapsed because they were forced into signing what historians regard as a very punitive peace treaty.
And so everything had fallen apart to a degree that we can't even begin to imagine.
In the 1930s, the Germans were starting to get back on their feet, and when Hitler came to power, he started not only to re-arm, but to re-industrialize the economy, and he was actually pretty damn good at that.
Now, Hitler was a good orator, but it isn't exactly clear that he was a coherent philosophical theorizer, although to think of him as stupid is completely missing the point.
He was by no means stupid.
I wouldn't say that he was particularly educated.
But he had a very powerfully developed aesthetic sense and he spent a lot of his time designing the cities that would be built after World War II was over and those cities were generally conceptualized by him as places where The arts, or at least the Nazi version of the arts, could flourish.
So there's no real evidence that what was wrong with the Nazis was that they weren't civilized.
There's more evidence, actually, I think, that they were too civilized.
And I'll talk to you about that later.
But anyways, you think, how did Hitler get all these people under his spell?
Well, here's a hypothesis that's basically derived from Jungian thinking.
And I should let you know, by the way, because sometimes Jung has been accused of being an anti-Semite.
And there's various reasons for this, partly because of what happened during World War II, and partly because his theory drew heavily from Christianity, although from many other sources as well.
And he did believe that there were differences in the psychology of people with different ethnicities.
Whether that's racist or not depends on whether or not you like the person you're talking to, because the lefties think that there are cultural differences and they're important, but if you ever talk about them in the wrong way, then you're racist.
And the right-wingers, well, they just think there are ethnic differences to begin with.
So, it's a tricky issue.
If there aren't differences that are important, then who the hell cares about multiculturalism?
It's not even worth preserving.
And if there are differences, well, then you're stuck with having to deal with the differences.
So you're basically screwed either way.
Anyways, Jung has been the target of many accusations of anti-Semitism, particularly by biographers who were resentful and clueless and historically uninformed and I would say malevolent, fundamentally.
He worked as a CIA agent.
It was just revealed last year.
He provided psychological reports to the American government On the underlying psychological structure of the Nazi leaders for years.
And he never told anybody about that while he was alive.
It only came to light, as far as I know, last year, or perhaps a year before that.
So, anyways, the Germans, you know, they weren't very happy about the whole damn situation.
And so, when they were aggregating en masse, you think, well, what happens when all people get together in a group?
You know, we talked about that last time, when we talked about Kierkegaard's idea that As soon as you get a bunch of people together, no matter how truthful they are all as individuals, instantly the crowd is not a truthful thing.
And, you know, there are real reasons for that, real psychological reasons.
So there's the famous ASH experiments.
I hope that those are the right experiments.
A-S-C-H. About line length, you know.
So you draw two lines on the board and they're the same length and you get the crowd to...
You know, collaborate with you, and you ask some poor sucker who doesn't know about the game to play, and you know, you ask one person, and they say, no, those lines are different in length, and you ask another person, they say, well, they're quite different in length, and another person says, yeah, sure, I can see the difference in length, and then you ask the poor pigeon, you know, are they different in length, and he says, yes, you know, and you can understand why.
It's like, if all those other people are saying it, There's either something wrong with all of them, which seems unlikely, or he's the victim of a conspiracy which is a little on the paranoid side but happens to actually be true in this case or he's just not looking at it right and you might think well the humble thing to think is he's wrong and so you know the fact that somebody might go along with the crowd you know you can blame that on their ability to be social and
conventional which in many ways is a huge advantage because if you are all anti-social and unconventional You know, I mean, there'd be a good chunk of you in jail, and we certainly wouldn't be having this, you know, delightful, peaceful conversation that we're having.
So, you know, you don't want to underestimate the utility of conventionality to too much of a degree.
Anyway, so, there's this funny story I read once, I don't think it's true, but it might be, where a psychology class got together and decided they'd play a trick on the professor.
The trick was that he would walk back and forth.
The trick was that they wouldn't pay any attention to him at all if he was on the left side of the room.
They'd talk a bit and look up.
If he was on the right side of the room, then they'd really focus in and pay attention.
The story goes that by several weeks of this little trick, they had him lecturing right beside the door.
He wouldn't move from that spot.
The reason I'm telling you that is because it's pretty obvious that people can respond to the cues that a crowd is delivering.
You know, and a good speaker does that, right?
So, a good speaker does a variety of things, and one is he never talks to the crowd, per se.
You know, you pick out specific individuals and talk to them, and they're sort of reflective of the crowd, and then you can tell if everybody's understanding.
And the other thing that a good speaker does is pay attention to the damn responses of the crowd.
Because, you know, if a lecture is really a dialogue, even though the audience is only emitting the nonverbal elements of the conversation, those nonverbal elements, those damn things are important.
So, you want to stay in touch with the nonverbal communications.
Hitler, he's kind of a chaotic guy.
He's very angry.
He's angry in part because he was a frustrated art student.
He tried to get into art school like four times, so really the person to blame for World War II was the four person committee that wouldn't let poor Hitler into the I believe it was the Viennese School of Art, because he really wanted to go.
You know, and he had some artistic talent.
He was a little on the conventional side, by all appearances.
But, you know, I've seen some of his sketches, and, you know, he wasn't a complete piker, and he kind of felt maybe it would be okay for him to go to university, because he'd just been through World War I, you know, and that wasn't much fun.
There's a story about Hitler where he was out in the trenches, and he was there with all his buddies, and He wandered off to do whatever he wandered off to do, and when he came back, they were all dead, because a bomb had landed right in the middle of them.
You might think that would do a little something to your psyche, because after an experience like that, you're either going to think, oh man, things are pretty damn random and horrible, or there's something pretty damn special about me, because I wasn't killed by the bomb.
Maybe God has saved me for a higher purpose.
You can be absolutely sure that if you went through an experience like that, that something like that would be rattling around in your mind.
And he won a medal for bravery.
And then after World War I, he kind of wandered around like a lot of men, unemployed and sort of like a tramp.
So he wasn't very happy about that, and no wonder.
So, anyways, he didn't get into art school.
Now, he didn't really have a fully developed political theory, you know, but he was pretty good at speaking.
And there were lots of people who had come to hear him speak because people were sort of trying to figure out what the hell to do about all the chaos, you know.
So, then you think, well, what was Hitler good at?
Well, okay, now I'm going to switch to a slightly different story and then I'll get back to this one.
So, I don't know if you guys know about the...
The daycare scandals that were very, very common in the 1980s.
So, horribly common actually.
This infested many towns.
And usually what would happen is somebody who is a little on the paranoid side, or maybe a lot on the paranoid side, would send their children off to daycare.
And that was a whole new thing in the 80s, right?
Because women were, you know, moving into the workforce like mad, and so they were handing over their Often their infants, kids below three, say, to total strangers.
And, you know, for some of them, that set up a fair bit of worry, like it still does.
And sometimes that worry got out of hand, especially among the people who are a little predisposed to paranoid schizophrenia, and maybe even had had some previous episodes.
And so, you know, the kid would come home, and...
The mother would observe, or not, something kind of peculiar about their behavior, and then she'd fantasize about maybe what that was, and then she'd start asking the child if the child had been touched in any particular way, and she'd keep this up for a good length of time, and then the child would start to have nightmares.
and then the child would tell the mother about what the nightmares were and then that would freak her out and so she'd ask even deeper questions and soon you know her children were telling her that horrible things were happening to them at daycare and so then she'd go to the police and they wouldn't look into her psychiatric background and then the police would go out and they'd start to interview other children and if they interviewed them properly then the other children would start to produce all these stories as well because the now how did that happen well a bunch of ways the first is The
police would ask leading questions, like, did anyone touch you?
Well, of course, someone touched the kids.
I mean, people touch kids.
Did anybody touch you there?
Well, that's not a question.
That's a piece of information.
The piece of information is, if someone touched me there, an adult would be very interested in that.
Right?
So now, what's a child doing when he's answering an adult's questions?
Well, the child doesn't bloody well know.
What the hell do they know?
They're like three.
They can hardly organize their story.
If you're talking to a kid and you want to get them to give you an account of their day, You have to really guide them through the organization of their memory and partly what they're doing when you're doing that is they're looking at you trying to figure out if they're telling you the right things which is what they should be doing because what they're trying to learn to do is to tell people things in a way that they'll understand them but that makes the child very very responsive To the non-verbal and verbal cues of the adult.
You think about how fast those little rats learn how to pick up language.
It's really very fast and no one really teaches them.
They're just paying attention like mad.
So you get a bunch of cops who are on a half-cocked adventure and they think there's some serial sexual pervert in their midst and they go interview 15, 20 kids and they do it a lot and they use little dolls.
They do it a lot, and they do it a lot, and they do it a lot, and sooner or later, all the kids start having nightmares, and then they start telling the cops these terrible things happen, like they're taken into underground caverns, and they're stripped naked, and they're forced to leapfrog over each other.
You just can't believe it, what happened.
You can't believe it.
It's all documented in a book called Satan's Silence, which was written by a social worker and a lawyer.
It's mind-boggling.
The longest prison sentences in American history were handed out to a series of middle-aged women who were taking care of little kids.
And the FBI even came up with a whole new criminal category.
Late onset female sexual offender.
Well, why didn't that category exist before?
It's simple.
There are no late onset, middle-aged female sexual offenders.
That's why we didn't need the category.
But once all these accusations came up, well, poof, you know, you had to have some damn category for these poor women.
Some of them were put in jail for 350 years, which seems a bit excessive, given that they're only going to last about 40.
You know, they'd get 12 consecutive life sentences.
And, you know, there was actually a situation where One town went so far as to start digging underneath the town to find these underground satanic lairs where all these weird ritual things were going on.
And along with this was not one shred of concrete evidence.
And the eventual conclusions, and this affected thousands of people, the eventual conclusions was, well, there actually isn't anybody who's satanically Torturing children in daycare centers.
Now, anyways, why am I telling you this?
Well...
What the children were doing...
You think about it.
How the hell did the children come up with these weird ideas?
First of all, we should note that children are not stupid.
And they can also dream up the most horrible things.
Because they have an imagination that's capable of extending itself out into the terrifying.
Now everyone knows that because all you have to do is remember when you were a kid, you know, when you were hiding under the covers because there were horrible things in your dark room, you know, you can populate the darkness with monsters with no problem.
And you should be able to because there are monsters in the darkness.
Even though your parents might tell you there aren't.
It's like, there might not be any dark monsters in that particular piece of darkness.
And that's a perfectly reasonable thing to tell your children.
But in the darkness as a whole, it's like, yeah, look the hell out.
So the children aren't stupid.
Now, so then the adults start to question them.
And the kids are, the back of their brain, the little imaginative part is thinking, What do these people want?
What do these people want?
What do these people want?
And so they'll throw them out a little bit of information, and the adults will perk up.
They'll focus right on that piece of information.
So, maybe it's a cop who really hates child Satanist abductors, which, you know, is a perfectly reasonable stance.
And so, when the child offers any information about the existence of such a thing, well, the cop will perk up.
And then the child thinks, oh, I see.
Well, so sort of what's going on seems to have something to do.
They don't think this consciously, you know, but their imagination is working.
How do I model the reality that's been presented to me?
And that's when the dreams start to kick in, too.
Okay.
So, by speaking in the appropriate way You can get all sorts of things churned up in the unconscious minds of your listeners.
And by watching them as well, you can extract out their unconscious desires.
So now, I'm speaking to you all, and you're all irritated because your life has been really awful for 15 years.
And I'm saying this, and I'm saying that, and I'm saying this, and I'm saying that.
You know, and then I say something, maybe I say something initially dismissive of Jews.
And you're all mad, and there's two or three people who go, yeah!
And then I think, oh, you know, that's kind of an interesting response.
And then, you know, I... Lay out a couple more ideas, and some of them don't get any response, and others, you know, people perk right up.
And I'm not stupid, and I'm trying to get the bloody attention of the crowd.
And so, if I do that 50 times, the crowd's going to tell me an awful lot about what they want, especially if I'm willing to follow them.
And I can do that easily, especially if I can start to work the crowd a little bit, because I can capitalize on their emotional...
On their emotional...
capitalize on their emotions and the display of that emotion and I can learn to play that.
And then that turns into a positive feedback loop.
And so Hitler is informing the audience, and the audience is informing Hitler, and that's why Jung believed that Hitler embodied the shadow of the German people.
So that's another reason why you should be careful what you say.
Okay.
And why you say it.
And why you're looking for attention.
And all of those things.
And actually what's motivating you.
And actually what's motivating the people who are listening to you.
Because God only knows where it might go if you're not careful.
Well, actually we do know where it goes if you're not careful.
And it's not pretty.
That's for sure.
And to think that we've learned anything from that.
It's like, no, that's not right.
We haven't learned a damn thing from it.
Because we don't want to understand it.
Now, these guys are all concerned with that sort of thing.
They're highly concerned with it.
Now, Binswanger and Boss had both been influenced by Freud and by Jung.
You can see in the bottom right hand corner there, that's Boss with Jung.
And that's Binswanger on the left and Boss at the top there.
So, you know, they're pretty thoughtful looking guys and they were pretty damn smart.
And they were quite philosophically oriented and They had both studied Heidegger and they both studied Husserl who were German philosophers Heidegger actually got tangled right up into the Nazi movement and you know his philosophy has been cast under a cloud of suspicion perhaps a well-deserved cloud of suspicion as a consequence of his cooperation with the Nazis so It wasn't only stupid people who got tangled up in this.
It was pretty much everybody who got tangled up in it.
And one of the things you might think about, and this is worth thinking about, is that if you were there, for any one of you, there's a 90% chance that you would have got tangled up in it.
You wouldn't have been the person who rescued the gypsies.
It's like, forget that.
It's like, unless you think that you're heroic far beyond the average, and I would be very, very careful about assuming that.
You could assume instead that you would have been swept along with the crowd just like everyone else.
Because everyone else was.
All right.
Now, part of what these guys were trying to figure out is, in some sense, there were two things.
There was the function and structure of belief systems.
And then, the nature of that which transcends a belief system.
Okay, so, you know, what transcends a belief system is what you don't know if you use that belief system, right?
Because there are things outside of your belief system.
And they have a nature as well.
And you usually run into those sorts of things when you make a mistake.
And things don't happen the way you expect them to, or want them to, or desire them to.
And then the other problem they're trying to solve in some sense is, well, what's the appropriate mode of behavior for an individual in relationship to belief systems and to the world that transcends the belief systems?
And the reason they were interested in that is because they thought, well, maybe it would be a good idea if our belief systems didn't get so damn pathological.
Because if they do, then, you know, six million people end up in ovens or the equivalent.
120 million people end up dead in battlefields, and that doesn't count the Stalin massacres, or Mao, who made Hitler, in some sense, look like an absolute amateur.
I mean, Stalin starved 6 million people to death in the Ukraine in the 1930s, and he was just warming up.
How many of you have heard of the Ukraine famine?
How many of you haven't?
Yeah, well, think about that.
How many of you knew Mao killed 100 million people?
How many of you didn't?
Yeah, well, you might think about why you don't know that.
You know about the damn Nazis, but you don't know about the horrors that the communists perpetrated.
It's worth thinking about why.
Because the communists, especially the Maoists, man, those people were brutal.
So, it's really important.
Of all the things we could possibly learn psychologically from the 20th century, And is what these characters in the 50s were concentrating on.
It's like, okay, things can go powerfully sideways.
It was quite a shock to everyone because in some sense, you know, everyone was pretty thrilled at the beginning of the 19th century that religion, classical religion beliefs, had crumbled.
You know, the Marxists said, well, the damn religions were only there to oppress the poor anyways and to keep the priesthood and the aristocracy in power.
You know, I'm sure you learned plenty of that in your...
In your classes, that sort of thinking.
You know, it's power, economics-related thinking.
And it's typical of what?
What would you say?
Intellectually manipulative left-wing thinkers, I would say.
That's basically their routine.
You know, they reduce everything to a single damn motivation.
It's usually economics or power.
Then they explain everything from that perspective.
It's like, it's so boneheaded, it should be illegal.
Anyways, the Marxists were happy that religion had collapsed because they thought that that would eliminate an entire strata of oppression.
And you can see that.
It's not like the Catholic Church, for example, was free of corruption.
It was, in many ways, a corrupt enterprise.
And you could read it as solely a corrupt enterprise, and to hell with it.
It's good that it's gone.
You know, the Freudians basically thought the same way, and so did most intellectuals.
Freud thought that religion was nothing than a childish delusion that people identified with because they were afraid of dying.
It was a defense against death anxiety.
Look, the Marxist argument and the Freudian argument, those are bloody powerful arguments, you know, because you can see it.
Do people use their religious belief as a defense against things they're too terrified to confront?
Well, obviously!
You know, does the church oppress people?
Did it oppress people?
Did it engage in conspiracies with people in power across centuries?
It's like, obviously!
The question is, well, what do you make of that?
Well, partly you make of it that all sorts of structures do that.
It's like structures do that.
You can't just damn one structure and think the others are going to It's like the right-wingers, they're always on about big government, how terrible that is, and the left-wingers are always on about how big corporations are terrible.
It's like, well, big is terrible.
It doesn't matter if it's government or corporations, because things tend to tilt towards corruption across time, and that has to be taken into account.
But, Anyway, so the Freudians and the intellectuals and the Marxists were all pretty happy when the religious dreams started to come apart, and they believed that the new edifices that they were going to construct, fascist and communist, would be so much better than what they replaced that, you know, everybody would be drowning in utopia.
It's kind of too bad that isn't how it turned out.
But it's certainly not how it turned out.
How it turned out was Hmm.
Sometimes when you tear something down, even if you think it's terrible, you end up constructing something on its runes that makes the previous terrible look like the work of rank amateurs.
And that's certainly what happened in the 20th century.
No matter what you say about the Catholic Church and its basic barbarism, especially when they were involved in the witch hunt in the Middle Ages, it's like, those guys, they were amateurs compared to the fascists and the communists.
They were counting their victims in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions.
So anyways, things didn't go so well.
And so by the 1950s, especially because the Cold War started the day the Second World War ended, and it ended with the atomic bomb in Japan, And the Russians had the damn atomic bomb, like, you know, tomorrow, fundamentally.
And both the Russians and the Americans had the hydrogen bomb by the early 1950s.
And I don't know if you know this.
You can tell me how many of you know this.
Do you know that a hydrogen bomb uses an atom bomb for its trigger?
Okay, so, the atom bomb stands in relationship to a hydrogen bomb, like the ignition cap on a shelf stands in relationship to the gunpowder.
The atomic blast just gets the explosion going.
So hydrogen bombs, they're like way, way more explosive than atomic bombs.
And so, you know, by the middle of the 1950s, we'd pretty much put ourselves in a position where...
And they were building some mighty big bombs.
I mean, really.
Unbelievable, unbelievably big bombs.
400 times as big as the ones that wiped out Hiroshima.
Huge, huge bombs.
And they're getting pretty damn good at it.
So by the mid-1950s, it was like we developed enough firepower on both sides of the Atlantic along with the missiles necessary to deliver them, which the Nazis had basically invented in World War II. It was all Nazi scientists who invented rockets and they were all taken by the Americans.
After the Second World War to work on the American space program basically.
And so by the 1950s we had the missiles to deliver the damn things too.
So not only were the psychologists who were thinking about things sort of shorted out about what happened in World War II for good reason.
And then of course all the Stalinist horrors were starting to be revealed at that point.
Although it took Western intellectuals like 30 years before they gave them any credence at all.
I think Jean-Paul Sartre was still a member of the Communist Party up until 1970.
It was very common, particularly among French intellectuals.
Even though the news was getting out, careful observers like George Orwell had pretty much figured out by the late 30s that not all was right in the paradise of Stalin.
But people thought he was a right-winger and didn't listen to him much, even though he was a left-winger.
So these These existential phenomenologists, they're trying to figure out, okay, we've got a big problem here.
The belief systems are seriously going sideways.
And there's some indication, you know, there's some individual responsibility for that of some indeterminate nature.
Like, if you live in a country where everyone's turned into a fascist murderer, like, is that your fault?
Well...
You know, it's not obvious that an individual should be held responsible for the actions of an entire country, but then again, the country is made up of individuals, so...
It's a very difficult problem to solve.
You know, and one of the tenets of Western law is that you don't hold an individual responsible for the actions of the group, even if he or she happens to be a member, willingly or unwillingly, of that group.
But you can't ignore the fact that all these things were made up of people.
And then you also can't ignore the fact that it was individuals who were doing the terrible things that were being done to people.
You know, so in Auschwitz, for example, one of the Little tricks that the guards used to do.
They'd bring the Jews off the freight cars.
A lot of them had died in the freight cars.
Because they were packed in there like this.
So lots of them would suffocate.
Or the old ones would die.
Or the little kids would die.
And that was okay.
And then along the outside of the freight cars.
Especially if it was winter.
Well, it's like 20 below.
And so the ones on the outside would freeze.
But you were going to get rid of them anyway.
So that was just convenient mostly.
So then you'd take them to Auschwitz.
And they'd all spill out.
Speaking different languages, torn up from their family, you know, as miserable as people can possibly be, And then one trick was to have, you know, someone who was not quite dead enough pick up a sack of wet salt, so that's a hundred pounds, and carry it from one side of the compound to the other.
And then back!
You know, one side and then back.
And you know, you don't want to be thinking about these camps as like a football field.
These bloody things were cities.
They were big.
They held tens of thousands of people.
And so there's some guard.
He thinks that's a pretty good joke.
And it's not just a few people that are like that.
And we found out from the Stanford Prison Experiment, which every psychologist likes to think of as immoral, you know, because we actually discovered something with it, that if you gave ordinary people the opportunity to be fascist barbarians, in six days, 30% of them would be.
And, you know, what we learned from that is that social psychologists shouldn't run the Stanford Prison Experiment.
That's not the right conclusion to draw.
So...
So these phenomenologists, we're all concerned about this.
It's like, what the hell should we do about that?
So they're starting to think about how belief systems are constructed.
The first proposition that they make is that we should treat the reality that we're dealing with as psychologists, we should treat human experience as that reality.
And so the reality for you, from a phenomenological perspective, is everything you experience.
They assume everything you experience is real, and they also assume that you can't actually get more real than that.
And so your consciousness, whatever that is, is real, and your dreams are real, and your emotions are real, and your pain is real, Which is a really useful thing to think if you want to make sure that you're not going to hurt people.
You know, you kind of have to think that maybe pain should be treated as a fundamental reality instead of as an epiphenomena of some material substrate.
And so that's their first perspective.
And they took that from Heidegger because Heidegger thought that Western philosophy had gone off on the wrong track, you know, 3,000 years ago.
Because we didn't really concentrate on being itself as the fundamental mystery and so the fundamental mystery is why the hell is there anything and since there is something Experiential being, what are its fundamental elements?
And so that's the phenomenological stance.
It's not the same as a scientific approach, because it starts with a different presupposition.
You know, the scientific presupposition, roughly speaking, is that the objectively real elements of things are the most real elements.
And there's no sense complaining about that, because it's an approach that works tremendously well for many, many things, including making hydrogen bombs, for example.
But it's also reasonable to think that, well, it might not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and maybe you could also suspect that the fact that we can manufacture hydrogen bombs also might indicate that there's something a trifle off with our fundamental belief systems, scientific though they may be.
And that was certainly something that concerned Heidegger, even though he got all tangled up with the Nazis.
So, the phenomenologists were trying to take apart experience as such, and they made some hypotheses and then some observations.
So the first is that we're going to assume that your experience, like experience itself, is real.
Now, just because dreams are real and pain is real, and objects that we can all perceive are real, doesn't mean you should put them all in the same category.
Like, my dreams are not in the same category of reality as this table, because you don't have access to my dreams, and you have access to the table.
But that doesn't mean that my dreams and my pains and my emotions aren't real.
They're real.
So that's the first.
Now, you should note that this is a This is a proposition.
What they're saying is, let's act as if that's true, and then work from those premises and see what happens, see where we can get with it.
And that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because at the bottom of a theory, you always have to put an assumption.
Because otherwise, your theory would be 100% right and would cover everything, and it doesn't.
So you have to throw an assumption somewhere in there at the bottom and say, okay, we're not questioning that.
That's the starting point.
You have to do that, because you're ignorant.
You don't have a full theory.
So, they don't like the idea that mind can be reduced to matter.
They're not playing that game.
They're not playing the game that the subject is only epiphenomenal and the object is real.
They're not playing that game either.
And it's partly because, as Bos says, without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such.
True, this implies that every object, everything objective, in being merely objectivized by the subject, is the most subjective thing possible.
It's a radical claim, you know.
But here's something to think about.
When I look at that Coke can, you might say, I perceive the object, and then I make inferences about its use, and then I evaluate it, and then I use it.
And, you know, that is not actually what you do.
In fact, it's not obvious at all that what you perceive are objects.
And if you think about it, well, people weren't perceiving scientific objects until, like, 1500 AD, or 1450.
So, there was no objective object before then.
So, Obviously, whatever we were perceiving was not precisely that, because we would have been scientists right off the bat.
George Kelly claimed that people were natural scientists, you know, that we're always investigating hypotheses and trying to disprove them and so on.
It's an interesting theory, and it's right in a sense, but fundamentally it's wrong.
We are not natural scientists.
We're natural engineers.
And when we look at the world, we don't see objects and then infer their use.
What we actually see is the use.
So, for example, when I look at that coke can, my visual system activates my motor cortex directly.
It can do that without me seeing the damn can consciously, to some degree, because there are people with blindsight, I've told you about those people.
They say they can't see, but if you ask them which hand you have held up, they can tell you.
So, they might not be able to see, but they can map patterns from their visual system onto their motor output.
That's basically what Piaget said we do when we deal with the world.
We're embodied creatures.
What we see when we look around aren't objects.
They're things we can use and things that get in our way.
That's a theory that was derived originally from J.J. Gibson, who wrote a great book on that called The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
His science is a brand of pragmatism.
The pragmatists basically claim that Things, including theories and perceptions, have a limited range of truth.
And the limited range of truth is determined by the match between your actions and the outcome.
So I think this is a Coke can.
Is that what it is?
No.
But it's good enough for me if I want to drink a bit of Coke out of it.
God only knows what it is.
You know, if you go into communist China and you start advertising these things...
Then what are they?
Because this thing tells a story, right?
What's the story?
Like really, do you need Coca-Cola?
No!
It's like, it's a bit of frippery, you know, it's a bit of, it's non-necessary luxury.
It's not even very good for you.
But it's kind of fuzzy and it's sweet and you get to buy it.
And why is that?
Because no matter how stupid you are in your nutrition choices, as far as our society goes, you have the right to poison yourself in whatever way you think.
Best befits you.
And so when you send this little coke can off to communist China, this thing screams stupid individuality all over.
And God only knows how it undermines the state.
You know, and if you don't, if you're not thinking about that, you're not thinking.
Think about what happens when we export cars.
What does a car say?
It says, hey, you can go wherever you want, whenever you want, you don't have to tell anybody at all.
And you can do it in a really dangerous high-speed manner.
It's like, you want a political statement?
Wrap it up in metal and ship that thing off.
And everybody goes, whoa!
I'd really like to have one of those!
It's like, poof!
Communism disappears with that.
You know, there's nothing that says individuality and capitalism like a personal automobile.
You know, you even get to pollute the atmosphere and ruin the planet with the damn thing.
But, you know, if you have to drive to the corner store and pick up your damn coke, it's like, to hell with the atmosphere.
So don't be thinking that the things that appear in front of you are merely objects, because they're not.
You know, I started thinking about this, for example, when I was thinking about people going down to Graceland to look at Elvis's guitar.
You think, what exactly is it that makes a guitar Elvis's guitar?
You know, it's not exactly the guitar.
Because it's just sitting there like any old guitar, you know, and maybe you could even think about it.
You could take that guitar out, and you could put another guitar in that looked just like it, and it would still be Elvis' guitar, because no one would know.
And you might think, well, then that's not really Elvis' guitar.
But that's a funny thing, because you'd only think that if you thought that Elvis' guitar was the thing that was made out of material that was sitting right in front of you.
And that isn't what it is.
That's only one tiny little bit of it.
That bloody thing is a part of an incredibly layered reality, right?
I mean...
The people who want to go look at that, they're looking at it in some sense because of the magic that's emanating from it.
But the magic is actually real.
You know, the magic is the effect of that guitar, let's say, on the entire culture.
And those effects are the damn guitar too.
And it's weird because when you go look at Elvis' guitar, you're not looking at the guitar.
You're looking at the magic.
And weirdly enough, the magic is actually real.
Well, you can't think that way if you're a materialist, because you think that the thing is the material.
It's like, yeah, right.
I can tell you another story.
So, when the Europeans came to the South Pacific Islands, the South Pacific Islanders, because there weren't that many of them, they didn't have a very highly technical society, you know?
And so, like, if you were, like, Joe...
Dominant guy in a Pacific Island culture, you know, you might be able to have a stone axe, like a well-made stone axe, because you go out and make a stone axe and see how long that takes you.
It's like, that's a bit of work.
And so, if you're a high-status guy, if you've really worked your whole life to be at the top of your damn pyramid, you get, maybe you get two axes, you know, it's like a red-lettered A. You've got two axes.
Which is more than any other animal has, by a lot.
So it's not trivial.
And then the damn missionaries come in, eh?
And they set up shop, and what do they bring?
Steel axes.
It's like, that's kind of a downer, you know?
You've worked your whole damn life to get these stone axes, and that makes you, like, head tribesmen.
And then your kid wanders down to the local missionaries, and they say, oh, we got an extra steel axe.
Here, why don't you take that back home?
And it's like, it's so shocking, because not only do the missionaries have this thing that is so much better than a steel axe, it's like a jet plane compared to a...
To a wheeled cart.
Like, they're really, really different.
But the missionaries, they don't even notice.
That's the horrible thing about it.
It's like they give away this thing that has virtually infinite value.
And it's like, well, it's okay.
We've got a couple dozen of those sitting in the storeroom.
And, you know, we're just willing to hand them out.
It was a little demoralizing.
It was a little demoralizing for the Pacific Islanders.
And so, you know, was it an axe that the missionaries gave away?
It wasn't.
You'd think that if you were a Westerner and you had a bunch of axes, it's like, yeah, that's an axe.
It's like, yeah, right.
It's a lot more than an axe.
A lot more.
It's a weapon to bring down a whole culture accidentally.
One of the things that the phenomenologists claimed...
This is a cool claim.
I didn't know they claimed this.
It took me quite a long time to figure this out, because I thought I'd figured this out on my own, but it turns out that's very difficult to figure out anything on your own.
Now, when I was doing my investigations into how the brain works from a neuropsychological perspective, and that was informed a lot by Jeffrey Gray, who we're going to talk about later, one of the things I noticed was that You don't actually see things when you first see something.
In fact, when you first see something, you don't even see it.
You react to it.
You react to it with your body.
So I can give you an example.
So you have a partner, and you have a trusting relationship, and then you find out that they're, you know, they tell you or you figure out from their phone or something they're having an affair.
And you look at them.
And you think, well what do you see?
And you think you see, well you see the person.
It's like, no you don't.
You do not see the person.
That's wrong.
What you see is a huge pit that you're going to fall into.
And you don't even know you see it.
But your body knows.
As your blood pressure goes through the roof and your heart starts to pound and you sweat.
And the reason for that is your body sees what you can't see and what it sees is something it seriously does not understand.
It does not understand it.
It sees the territory behind the map.
Because when I look at you, for all intents and purposes, really what I'm looking at is my presuppositions about you.
And because you're polite and well behaved, you're gracious enough to act in accordance with those presuppositions so I don't even really have to look at you.
And thank you very much for that.
Because it's very difficult to look at people because they're horrifying and profound creatures.
And so everybody walks around behaving so we don't terrify the hell out of each other all the time.
Now, when someone betrays you, it's like, poof!
Presupposition's gone.
Okay, what's there?
Well, God only knows.
And that's what your body reacts to.
And that's partly why the phenomenologist said, we react to meaning first.
We don't react to the object.
It takes a long time to see the damn object.
So, for example, let's say that your person has betrayed you.
Now, you think you knew who they were.
And you thought you knew who you were.
Ha!
Guess what?
You're wrong.
You don't know who they are.
And because you're such a moron, that means you don't know who you are.
And it means you can't trust any of your memories with that person.
And maybe none of your memories in any intimate relationships at all.
Plus, what about the future?
Well, so when you look at the person, what do you see?
You see all that.
It's like chaos.
Whack!
That's what you see.
And that chaos is the meaning behind your presuppositions.
And that's why the phenomenologists would say, meaning shines forth.
That's fain is thy.
It shines forth.
And that's the primary thing we encounter.
It's like, that's smart.
And you know what's really weird?
That's how your damn brain is organized.
And that's weird, eh?
Because you think, let's think about it.
How do you define reality?
That's a tough one.
So I would say, most of you define reality like your Isaac Newton.
Or maybe like your Democritus, who was the first person who hypothesized atoms.
And so in the Newtonian world, it's like billiard ball world, right?
Everything is made out of little billiard balls, and they bang together in a causal way, and you can predict the consequences of their banging together.
And if you extend it enough, you can Conjure up an entirely deterministic world.
A happens, causes B, B causes C, always the same way, and everything runs like a giant clock.
That's Newton's model.
And it was a clock model, because, you know, back at that time, clocks, man, those things were pretty damn impressive.
Clocks got the whole Industrial Revolution underway, and, you know, medieval cities would put an awful lot of time and work into their clocks, and they thought those damn things were really cool.
You know, they could keep track of where the planets were moving.
It's like, that's a big deal, a clock.
And if you want to think about an invention that changed the world, it's like the clock's a big one.
Now we can measure time.
In the same way, everyone can measure time.
It's a big deal.
So the idea that the universe is like a clock, given that the clock can predict the universe, is a pretty damn powerful idea.
Turns out that it's wrong, because You know, causality is a mess.
No one really understands it.
And there are levels of analysis at which causality, just in the way we experience it, doesn't seem to apply at all.
You go down to the subatomic level, it's probabilistic.
You can't predict single events.
I don't believe that you can predict the future.
You can predict parts of the future in an extremely limited way, for some purposes, for some span of time, and you can't even predict how long that span of time is going to last.
Some things seem to be more stable across more situations and more times than others, but there's still instability everywhere, and it makes predicting things a very difficult thing to do.
That's one idea about reality.
That's the idea, really, that you have.
And that's the reality that you've been educated to have.
The idea of reality you've been educated to have.
Even though we know it's wrong.
Einstein blew that world up in the early 1900s along with the various people that Einstein depended on.
That's gone.
It's wrong.
And then there's all sorts of other extremely complicated problems like how to model positive feedback loops You know, that sort of gets you into chaos theory and it's really, really hard to model positive feedback loops and they can go wild in 50 different ways and you can't really predict them because they depend on initial conditions and so on and so forth.
So the deterministic world is like, no, that's wrong.
I think part of the reason we have to have free will is because we can't act deterministically.
You know, a deterministic system is only going to work in a system that stays the same, you know, so you can wind up a little clock You know, one of those little clockwork toys and it'll walk.
But, you know, if you put a cliff in front of it, it just walks off the cliff.
So, and cliffs are appearing in front of us randomly all the time.
So, I can't even see how a deterministic system could possibly work to guide us.
It would assume that our knowledge, the knowledge that we derive from the past, is sufficiently accurate to causally guide us into the future.
It's like, no.
That's not right.
It doesn't.
Maybe that's why we have consciousness.
No one knows, but that's a good theory, if there's a why.
Anyways, here's an alternative.
The alternative.
This is a Darwinian alternative.
So here's the alternative.
The world's a complex and dynamic place.
It's full of weird things.
Basically, it's made up of patterns.
It's made up of patterns and patterns of patterns and patterns and patterns of patterns and that's what it is.
And they shift and dance around.
And then you throw something that's alive into that It's programmed by DNA and the damn thing has to keep up with the patterns and they're changing all the time.
Some of them are kind of stable, but they're pretty damn fluid.
So then you throw the DNA in there and it goes and produces a million variants of whatever it's going to produce and most of them are wrong.
So you're a mosquito.
You lay a million eggs.
So that's a million bets about how the future will causally unfold.
And the bet is, the future is going to unfold so this egg can turn into a mosquito.
And so then you might say, well, how often is the mosquito that lays the eggs wrong?
And the answer to that is, if it lays a million eggs in its lifetime, I don't know how many eggs mosquitoes lay, but they lay a lot.
All of those eggs are going to die except one.
If the mosquito's lucky.
And you know that because we're not knee-deep in mosquitoes, right?
If it wasn't the case, then there'd just be mosquitoes everywhere.
And there aren't, thank God.
There's enough of the damn things.
So basically, what's the bet?
The bet is mosquito matches environment.
Wrong!
Except once in a million.
So how do you overcome that?
A million mosquitoes, a million eggs.
And it'll do the trick.
And so, look, that's so interesting, eh?
Because it means the fundamental hypothesis that the mosquito structure matches the structure of reality is wrong at a one in a million...
It's wrong at a 999,999 level of error.
You might just think that's just completely wrong.
You know, that's really wrong.
But it keeps the damn mosquitoes going.
Okay, so then...
This propagates across time, you know.
And what really propagates across time is a massive wave of death.
Virtually everything fails.
99.9% of the species that ever lived are extinct.
It's something like that.
You know, and we're doing a very good job of making sure that a good chunk of the ones that exist now are going to go extinct.
You know, so failure and death is the norm, and it's going to happen to all of you.
So...
If the underlying structure of reality is mutable, which it is, and the only way that you can adapt to it is by generating variants and having most of them perish, except for the ones that manage more or less by chance to keep up, how do you define real?
And a Darwinist would say, and this is what a pragmatist would say too, you embody real to the best degree that real can be attained.
And it's not very good.
Your real is only good enough for about 80 years.
But, you know, what else they would say is that's as real as it gets.
Whatever reality is, it's so damn complicated, this multi-layered patterned array, that you can't even model it without using death as the mechanism.
You can't do it.
And even if you do use death, it's almost all death.
And even for the parts that aren't death, Which is hardly any of it.
Your damn solution isn't that good.
You know, you're going to wear out in 80 years.
You got 3 billion years of trying behind you.
That's the best you can do.
80 damn years.
You know, maybe if you're a parrot, you can get 150.
Apparently, there's some immortal jellyfish, which figures would be the damn jellyfish that would be immortal.
So real might, you know, that's a whole different way about thinking about real.
Now, you know, Nietzsche said, life is truth.
Truth serves life.
Sorry.
And that's a Darwinian idea, even though he didn't take it from Darwin.
It's like, there isn't anything more true than What evolution reveals as the model for reality.
That's as true as it gets for us.
And that's not a Newtonian reality.
It's a multi-level, patterned, chaotic reality that we're trying to keep up with.
And that's real.
And so what that might mean is that...
The implications for action that I derive from that phenomena...
Might be more indicative of what it is than an objective analysis.
Because your truth, the degree to which you embody truth, insofar as it can be determined within a Darwinian framework, is entirely measured by your success In living and propagating.
And that's it.
There isn't anything under that.
Now, maybe there is, but if you're a Darwinian, that's it.
And I think Darwin's right, all things considered, and Newton is wrong.
Plus, we also know that Newton is wrong.
Now, the whole Darwinian thing is more complicated than we thought, because you've run...
Do you know what epigenetics are?
How many of you know about that?
Well, that's pretty good.
So your biological education demolishes your historical education.
How many people don't know what epigenetics is?
It's okay.
It's relatively new.
Anyways, it turns out that your parents' experience can alter their genetic structure in such a way that it alters your genetic structure.
It's like, oh, that's something.
We didn't expect that.
That's for sure.
And nobody knows what the final consequence of that will be.
But it looks like There's more to the evolutionary story than mere random production and natural selection.
There's more to it than that.
Who knows how much?
So anyways, when the phenomenologists say we react to meaning first, that kind of opens a question.
It's like, well, is the meaning real?
And that opens another question, which is, what do you mean by real?
And then that opens another question.
It's like, well, is it Newton real?
Or is it Darwin real?
Well, Newton's wrong.
That leaves Darwin.
And Darwin real?
That's about as real as it gets.
In fact, that might be as real as it gets.
You know, if a partial entity is trying to model a complex totality, all they're ever going to be able to do is embody a partial representation of that.
And it's not going to be that good.
But it's going to be as good as they can get.
And that's as true as it can get.
So, the phenomenologists, you know, they have this weird idea.
We perceive meaning.
It's like, guess what?
That's how your brain is set up.
You first perceive meaning.
And then with a lot of work, you turn that into an object perception.
Christ, God only knows how much exploration you have to do before you do that.
How long do you think it takes a child to handle its soother before it builds up an accurate representation of the soother?
You know, it's going to be chewing on that thing like mad.
It's going to be taking it out and checking it out and turning it around and banging it against things.
It has to do all that, including the tactile interaction and the experimentation with the thing across situations to establish, say, object permanence.
It has to do all that before it can see the thing.
You know, like early AI... Early AI researchers who were basically under the influence of behaviorists who basically said the object is given and so they could treat the brain like it didn't even exist.
You know, the object's just there.
You can just see the world.
It's like that turned out to be seriously wrong.
It's damn difficult to get a computer to see the world.
And it turns out you have to put the bloody things inside bodies before they can even do it.
Because you really can't perceive the world without a body.
Because perception is for bodily action.
And without the framework within which...
Because really what you're doing, and this is a Piagetian idea too, this is a pattern, this thing.
And the pattern exists at multiple levels, including, say, the advertising level, and your memories of coke, and all the bloody jingles you know, and all that.
But this, when I look at that, I map its pattern onto my retina, and the pattern is a pattern because it's extending across time, right?
So it's not like smoke.
It's not just dissipating.
There it is.
It's staying there across time.
I map that onto my retina, and then the retina matches it onto my hand.
That's the coke can.
And actually, the coke can is all of this.
And you might say, that's not what it is, because it's made out of aluminum.
It's like, yeah, yeah, it's made out of aluminum.
But, that's only one part of what it is.
And it's not necessarily even the most important part, because it could be made out of plastic.
And, you know, what the hell difference would that make?
You know?
So...
So it's pretty damn weird when you start to think about it, because people make the claim that meaning is epiphenomenal.
It's like, there's no real meaning, the universe is this dead thing, and if we all went extinguished, you know, tomorrow, there'd just be a bunch of Meaningless marbles rotating in space.
Well, first of all, even that's not true, because God only knows what's out there if there's nothing to perceive it.
You know, the physicists tell us it's more like a vast potential fluctuating quantum field.
You know, and maybe it doesn't even turn into stars and planets until there's someone to look at it.
You know, and you might think that's ridiculous, but if you think about it for a while, you'll see that there's really something to it.
You know, because you are the thing that specifies the level of analysis.
Right?
You know, the way you look at the world, you don't see the atoms.
You don't see the subatomic particles.
You don't see the little rocks.
You see planet-sized things when you look out into space.
And, you know, you see it at a particular slice of time.
That's part of, maybe, your refresh rate is something like 60 hertz.
So what you see is the universe sliced into 60 hertz slices.
And you think, that's real.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
So is all the rest of it.
Including its huge expanse of time.
From beginning to end.
You don't see any of that.
It's there.
So what's there?
All those things at the same time.
And what does all that add up to?
The physicists seem to be telling us it adds up to a pool of quantum potential that isn't realized until there's something conscious that interacts with it.
It's like, who knows?
Now, You've got your meaning.
Shining forth like mad.
I think part of the reason that children are so attractive is because for them, the meaning is just shining at them like mad.
That's why they're always wandering around like this.
It's really fun to watch kids because they give you a taste of that again.
Because kids have to pay you so you don't throw them out the window because they're very annoying.
They're always crying.
They're completely useless.
They just lay there and they don't do anything.
You know, and they wake you up at 3 in the morning and annoy you.
And so, you know, because you're selfish and mean, you need something in return.
But one of the things they really do is they remove the blinders from you while you're around them.
Because, you know, you go out in like a little forest with a two-and-a-half-year-old.
It's very annoying because the bloody things, they just wander around randomly, you know.
So, you've got no goal-directed...
Nothing goal-directed is going to happen with a two-and-a-half-year-old.
But that's kind of cool, because it frees your mind from your goal-directed narrowness.
And you can watch the two-year-old look at all these things that you haven't looked at for 20 years, because you already looked at them once, and now you just have to see your memory.
And then you think, wow, that really is cool!
You know, they'll bring you something, and they'll tell you it's cool, and, you know, maybe it's a shiny piece of aluminum.
A gum wrapper.
Well, you think it's a gum wrapper.
Because that's what you see when you look at it because you've already built up gum wrapper representation and you just lay it on that.
That isn't what the kid sees.
God only knows what they're looking at.
Maybe how the light reflects off the aluminum prismatically and how it glitters.
And how cool it is that it can be folded up and how light it is.
And they're looking at it like this.
And, you know, I think it's because their cortex isn't very well developed, and they haven't built the inhibitory structures that stop them from seeing meaning shining forth.
You know, and you might think, well, is there any evidence for that?
And there actually is quite a bit of evidence for that, you know?
I mean...
One piece of evidence is that if you take a cat's brain off, out, and you just leave it with a hypothalamus and a spinal cord, it's hyperexploratory.
It runs around like everything's interesting.
It's pretty weird behavior for a thing that doesn't have a brain.
You know, you kind of think that once you don't have a brain, nothing would be interesting.
It depends on how much of your brain you have.
And there are people who've experienced that, by the way.
There was a famous case of a conductor.
who had a very serious brain injury and it basically blew out his hippocampus so he couldn't put any more information in from short-term attention to long-term storage and he wrote these articles these massive page long journals multi-page long journals and all he'd write is It's as if I'm seeing everything for the first time.
It's as if I'm seeing everything for the first time.
It's as if I'm seeing everything for the first time.
And he was wandering around in a constant state of awe.
You know, and his wife would come to visit him.
He couldn't remember any of the things that had happened to him.
And he'd just be blown out of the water to see her.
You know, because he didn't see his memories.
And he'd say, it's just like I'm seeing you for the first time.
And you know, he was.
He was seeing her for the first time.
Because the access to the inhibitory structures that were directing his attention were gone.
He was an interesting case too, because now and then, he'd sit down to play the piano, you know, and he'd have an epileptic seizure, and then he could play the piano.
And he could play just like he used to play, you know.
So it was like he had to switch brain modes, and the mechanism for switching was damaged, so he'd have to have a little seizure, and then he could lay out these, like, Beethoven sonatas like a mad dog, and then at the end, he'd have a little seizure, and he'd come back to, it's as if I'm seeing everything for the first time.
You know, and I think part of the reason that psychedelic drugs proved so attractive to people in the 60s, and have proved attractive to people since the bloody beginning of time, is because, in some sense, that's what they do.
It's like, poof!
Your memory representations, they're gone.
And what are you seeing?
God only knows.
But it isn't what you expect.
And maybe it's what's there.
Well, maybe not too.
Alright, so I'm going to sum this up a little bit.
What do you think drives people to extreme forms of pathology?
Now, that might be your pathology, your misery, your suffering and all that.
Or it might be your social psychopathology, which is your murderous desire to exterminate.
Okay, well, here's a phenomenological theory The terror management theory is that you've got to build these structures in your head To get yourself away from death anxiety, right?
And so really what the terror management people are saying is, the blinder you are, the better.
And that's what the positive illusion people think too.
Now the phenomenologists, they were going at this from another direction.
They were saying...
The meaning that constantly reveals itself is nourishing and revitalizing.
Although it's so powerful it can just blow you apart.
So it's a dangerous thing to be messing with.
It's like the burning bush.
And you have to build a structure in order to be able to cope with that, because you have to minimize it to what you can handle.
But you need to build the structure properly, properly and carefully, so that the meaning that reveals itself can be shaped by you into a world, conceptual and practical, that allows the remaining meaning to shine through in a way that you find sufficiently revitalizing so that you don't become corrupt enough to become genocidal.
Now, that's a good theory.
And that's what the phenomenologists were on about.
And that's part of the reason why the existentialists and the phenomenologists say, don't deceive yourself about what manifests itself to you.
Don't use language instrumentally.
Why?
Because if you do that and twist up the structures that you're using to interpret the world through, the world will twist up on you.
And all that will be revealed is its horror.
And if horror is all that's always being revealed to you, you will not stay good.
Because you can't, under that sort of pressure.
You'll get bitter and resentful.
And everything will fall apart around you, because you're not actually modeling the reality in a way that the positive meaning can shine through.
So you'll fail, and you'll become resentful, and you'll become bitter, and then you'll be looking for someone to hurt.
And you'll have plenty of justification for it.
So, and worse, and this is Jungian contribution to this whole idea, This won't happen all at once.
It'll happen as a consequence of 100,000 micro decisions that you hardly even notice where you can be truthful about something or not in this tiny way that hardly even seems to matter.
But that the consequence of iterating that across time, say 300,000 decisions, is that you can build yourself into the sort of monster that you would never want to see in the mirror.
And one of the things the phenomenologist would also tell you, and this is something Jung said as well, is that is the sort of monster that you probably are.
And so if you want to deal with that, you have to start taking things seriously.
And one of the things...
There's two things you have to take seriously.
And one is the meaning that reveals itself to you.
And the other is the stance of truth towards which you...
The stance of truth that you adopt while you're interacting with that meaning.
And the final consequence of that would be...
Your health, the health of your family and your society and the health of the entire society at large pivots on that.
It pivots on that.
And that the way the world moves is a sum total of all the decisions that all of us are making, all those little micro decisions.
And those bloody things echo like ripples in a pond.
And so when you do some little crooked thing that you know you shouldn't be doing, you're actually warping the entire structure of reality.
And what's really interesting about that is, now we know what happens when you do that.
What happens is that we end up with the Nazis and the communists and the hydrogen bombs.
And we haven't escaped from that yet.
And hopefully we will.
But we won't if people don't learn what the 20th century had to teach them.