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Jan. 14, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:40:50
2016 Lecture 01 Maps of Meaning: Introduction and Overview
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So, welcome to Maps of Meaning.
So the first question I guess I might have is, why are you here?
Anybody got an interesting reason?
I want to be able to manipulate reality to my best interests.
That's a good plan.
Except for the manipulate part.
It's okay.
It's better to work with reality generally than to manipulate it because it tends to, you know, kick back.
Anybody else?
Yeah?
My friend took this class a couple years ago and kind of threatened me to take it.
Oh yeah.
Because apparently he said the course actually changes like...
For the better?
Yeah.
Gotcha.
Maybe I made him write a short story or something and made him want to become an author and now he's a published author.
Really?
Yeah.
Is he any good?
I never read his book, actually.
Some friend.
You are.
No wonder he threatens you.
Yeah.
I audited this course six years ago, and this course changed the way I see the world, so I want to see after six years what happens now.
You want to see if it'll change back?
No.
Well, that's good.
So why, after all this time, did you decide to come back?
Well, I've thought about the things you discussed in the class over those six years.
It's been a while and I want to refresh myself and see, you know, with the new experiences I have and new things I've learned how and what I can take from it now.
Well, that's very dedicated and hopefully useful.
My friend said he had a spiritual awakening.
God, I hope I didn't see that.
He did, eh?
Did he give you any description?
Was it associated with an epileptic seizure?
No, it was associated with a lot of, like, visions.
Oh, really, eh?
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, that can get out of hand, that sort of thing, you know.
No, that's interesting.
I mean, one of the things that I experienced when I started to learn some of the things that I'm going to talk to you guys about is a very radical increase in the intensity and clarity of my dreams.
It wasn't pleasant, by the way.
I thought it was useful.
Most useful things aren't that pleasant.
So you're in for some of the same punishment, I guess that's the plan, is it?
Sure.
Alright, alright.
Anybody else?
I sort of have an independent interest in existential psychology, Nietzsche, Jung, etc., so this seemed like a good place to discuss it.
And I took your previous class, Personality.
When did you take that?
A couple years ago.
Yeah, well it's a good preparation for this class.
Now, is there anybody here who doesn't have any idea what this class is about and just more or less showed up because the time was right or anything like that?
So you don't really have any idea what you're in for?
Yeah, and it looked cool and it's not offered at UTSC, so...
Alright.
Well, I'm going to jump right into it, because why not?
So I'm going to talk to you for about two hours, and then you can have a break, and then I'm going to tell you what you have to do in the class.
But by that time you'll know if you want to take the class, because you'll know whether or not you're interested in what I told you about.
So I'm going to video the class.
I always do that, so the videos will be online.
The ones from previous years are online as well.
So, you know, hopefully that'll be a useful resource.
It shouldn't take me as much Setup time the next time as it did today.
You know, I'm still getting used to this equipment.
Alright, so I want to tell you why I'm telling you the things that I'm going to tell you.
I mean, when I was approximately the same age that you people are, probably a little bit older, because I imagine you guys are around 21 or something like that.
I was probably about your age and then maybe a couple years older.
The first year I was in graduate school in particular, which I guess was in 1985.
So I was 23 then.
That was, like I said, that was in 1985.
There were a couple of times in the late 20th century where the Cold War really came to a peak.
And one time I guess was probably in about 1957 when, I think it was 57, I hope I have my dates right, was whenever Stalin announced that he had developed a hydrogen bomb.
I don't know how much you guys know about hydrogen bombs, but all you really need to know about a hydrogen bomb is that they use atom bombs as a trigger.
So they're quite the weapon.
The USSR and the US made some very, very big ones.
They're big enough to make the thing that was dropped on Hiroshima look like dynamite.
So hundreds and hundreds of times bigger.
Maybe thousands of times, it's been a while since I looked into it.
And then in 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Not a good story about that.
So about ten years ago I went down to Tucson, Arizona, to a conference on consciousness there, and they have that conference fairly frequently in Tucson.
It's become quite a popular conference, even though it isn't clear to me that we know anything more about consciousness than we did before the conference started.
And Tucson's kind of an interesting town.
It's in the middle of the desert, the cool desert, you know, with the big sort of Saguaro Roadrunner cactuses.
But it's also extremely dry there, which is of course what you'd expect given that it's a desert.
And so one of the things the Americans do with Tucson is store old fighter planes there.
And so there's an airplane museum, which is an amazing place.
It has maybe 500 planes, including John F. Kennedy's Air Force One, right, which was the jet that he used to zoom around the world.
It didn't even have a shower in it, by the way.
It's funny because on the outside it looks like a modern jet, but on the inside it looks pretty much like it was from World War II. You know, because 1962 is a lot closer to World War II than it is to now in all sorts of ways.
Even the rockets that went to the moon looked like they were built by people who were using World War II technology, right?
They're full of switches, mechanical switches, and they're… it's pretty basic.
Anyways, as well as the airport museum, which is a very interesting place, there's B-52 bombers there and all sorts of things, those things are huge.
There's also an airport graveyard where they store old fighter jets, and there's a lot of old fighter jets, so there's acres and acres and acres and acres and thousands and thousands of old mothballed fighter jets lined up in the desert.
So that's kind of cool in a strange way, but there was one other thing down there that I went and saw, which was a decommissioned nuclear missile site, and it was an intercontinental ballistic missile site, and those were built in the 50s and early 60s, and they were major league rockets, those things.
You know, I think the silo, because we could go into the silo, the missiles weren't there anymore, we could go into the silo and it was certainly Farther across in diameter than this room, I would think probably twice as large as this room, so you can imagine how big a missile that would be.
It's not your grandmother's missile, it's a major league piece of armament.
Out on the grounds, these things were underground, deep underground, because they didn't want them to get blown up if they were bombed, so they buried them quite a long ways down.
To get into it you had to go through this massive steel door that was like a huge safe door except, you know, Ten times as big and ten times as thick.
Out in the yard of the nuclear missile site there were fences with barbed wire on them, of course, and there was a missile cap, you know, so it'd be the nose cone of the missile.
Now, some of these missiles had single warheads, which were more than sufficient to demolish a city, and some of them had multiple warheads, so they would shoot out into space and then come back into Earth and then they'd Essentially break apart or disperse into multiple missiles and then you could really bomb the hell out of whatever you were going to bomb instead of just destroying one city.
And so the nose cone was sitting out there and that was a pretty freaky looking thing, I'll tell you.
Like it was big, it was about seven feet high I would think and maybe about the same amount of cross and it was made out of this plastic, kind of a variegated plastic material that was about three quarters of an inch thick.
And then it would melt off, of course, on re-entry because, as I said, these things shot out into space.
And so that was, you know, kind of unnerving, really, in a serious way.
And then, so we were at the missile site and, you know, I mentioned your grandmother's missile and there was actually a reason for that.
It was a bit of foreshadowing because it was a very funny place because at the front of the missile site there was sort of this museum set up, you know, and it had pictures of Reagan and Gorbachev on it because they decommissioned The missile sites, you know, when detente occurred and then when perestroika hit and the Soviet Union started to collapse, and so there was all these pictures of Reagan and Gorbachev from 1984, and so the museum was kind of like a time capsule of 1984.
And the people who were running it were like retired Arizonans, and they were like your grandparents, assuming you have retired Arizonans for your grandparents, but they're real friendly and you know they're pretty happy to show you their nuclear missile.
Museum, and it was sort of like being in their rec room, except that it was a nuclear missile site, you know, and they were hospitable, and it was weird, you know, it's like, welcome to… you don't welcome people to a nuclear missile site, you know, it's just not reasonable.
So it was very disconcerting, and it was disconcerting that it was locked in the 1980s, and then it was disconcerting that it was friendly and hospitable, and, you know, they were kind of proud to show it off, and happy to be there, and then when you went down into the nuclear missile I don't remember if the Star Trek control I don't know if the command area
was modeled after the nuclear missile site control systems, or if it was the other way around, but I suspect they were modeled after the nuclear controls.
But that was really 1950s, like the whole place was painted in that pastel green, you know, late 50s and early 60s people really liked, and it had this 1950s What would you call it?
Aesthetic.
And you wouldn't necessarily think that a nuclear missile site would have an aesthetic, but it does, and it looked like high-tech 1957, you know, 1957 technology.
And so, they brought you into the control room, and the control desk was probably, or the module, or whatever you might call it, was about three times as long as this, maybe four times as long.
That's a pretty impressive piece of machinery.
The way you launched the missiles was not too secure in my humble opinion.
What happened was one guy wore the key around his neck and another guy wore the key around his neck and in order to launch the sights you had to put the keys in at the same time and they were far enough apart so nobody could stretch their arms, which was kind of the high tech part of it.
You had to put the key in and then you both had to turn the key for ten seconds.
Okay, so now one of the things that you may know about ballistic missiles, or you may not, is they're not cruise missiles, man.
Once you set those things off, they're not coming back.
They're bullets.
That's what makes them ballistic.
So, you know, if you aim a gun at someone and you shoot and you decide halfway, when the bullet's halfway there, that maybe that wasn't a good thing to do, it's a little late because you're not telling that bullet to come back.
And it's the same with ballistic missiles.
And those things are going a lot faster than bullets, you know, like a.22 bullet goes about the speed of sound, 600 miles an hour or so, but a ballistic missile That thing has to go seven miles a second to get out of the gravity of the earth.
Now I'm not sure they go quite that fast because that's escape velocity, right?
You need to do that to get out of the gravitational well.
But to get out there into space you have to be damn close to seven miles a second and so it's a bullet, a very large bullet with a very explosive head on it going seven miles a second and once you turn those two keys man That's it.
There's no turning back.
That's that.
And so they took us through a simulated launch, which still kind of, it's still an uncanny feeling remembering that, you know, because it's a hell of a thing to apprehend.
And then they told us that the keys were in once.
Right.
So we were ten seconds away.
Now they wouldn't tell us when, but we know when.
It was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
You know, there were a couple of times in the latter part of the 20th century where we made it through the eye of a needle.
We barely bloody well made it.
And the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of those points, but the early 80s things were heating up pretty badly too.
In about 1984 there was a movie that came out called The Day After.
You guys probably don't know about The Day After, but it was the most watched movie that had ever been broadcast on TV at that point, and basically what it showed was What a city would be like the day after the United States had been bombed into total desolation by a Soviet missile attack.
You know, it was a pretty hair-raising movie.
One of the things that was quite interesting about it was that Ronald Reagan later said that he watched that movie and that was actually part of the reason that he entered into detente talks with the Soviets.
Now, you know, Reagan had been basically scaring the hell out of the Soviets.
He called them an evil empire, which liberals weren't very happy about, but the Soviets, man, they were an evil empire.
There's absolutely no doubt about it.
You know, it's not obvious how many people the Soviets killed during their communist revolution and in the years following that, but the estimates range from 20 to 60 million.
Now that's a lot of people.
Like, even if it's 20 million, that's three times as many people as were killed in the Holocaust.
You know, the Soviets starved six million Ukrainians in the 1930s and that was just to get warmed up.
So the idea that the Soviets were an evil empire, it's like, it's a strong word.
But there's absolutely no doubt that it was true.
And the more we learn about what happened, especially during the Stalinist period, although Lenin was no picnic, you know, he pretty much created the Stalinist monster that followed him.
The more we learn about it, the more horrible it becomes, you know, and the Soviet system was The economy fundamentally ran on slave labour, for what economy there was.
What happened with Reagan in part was, well first of all the Soviet Union was falling apart because there's just so long you can keep a sinking ship afloat, and something that big can die twenty years before it falls over.
A system like that can stumble along half gutted.
And still manage, and so by the time Reagan come along the thing it probably pretty much burned itself out as a consequence of internal contradictions, but he ramped up the American military spending to a staggering degree, and part of the idea behind that, at least that's what the Republicans would have everyone believe, and it might be true, was that they're just going to spend the Russians right into bankruptcy.
And they basically did.
And so that was that for the Soviet Union, and it fell over in 1989, which was like that was a good day.
That was a really good day, and the weird thing is no one saw it coming.
You know, and that was shocking.
It was like one day the Soviet Union was there and the next day the Soviet Union was gone.
And there were no CIA analysts that said, hey, yeah, they're about ready to crumble, you know, you just have to blow on them and they'll fall over.
It was a shock to everyone.
You know, and then it was very iffy in the aftermath whether or not it would hold.
Yeltsin, who was a terrible drunkard but actually a pretty courageous, well, he was a Russian, you know, he was a pretty courageous guy and he faced down reestablishment by the totalitarians On a tank.
That was good for him because that was pretty frightening too.
Anyways, I'm telling you all this because when I grew up, most of the people I knew were convinced that there was no bloody way we were going to make it to the 20th century.
I remember discussing this with all of my friends frequently.
You know, some people kind of use that as an excuse not to get their life together, like, you know, what the hell's the point?
You know, we're going to blow ourselves up anyway, so you know, I must as well drink vodka until I fall over, and you know, that's not particularly a moral way of looking at it.
But I tell you, like, there was no shortage of thinking that this was so insane that it was going to certainly end in absolute catastrophe.
And it damn near did.
Like, it wasn't some kind of collective delusion.
There were times, in fact there was a story recently published about a Russian general who was given the order to launch the missiles.
There was a mistaken reading on their display showing that missiles were coming from North America across the poles into Russia and he was told to launch and he didn't.
It's like, well good for him!
But that's a little too close, really.
You know, and there's all sorts of other crazy things that happened during that period of time.
So for example, I read this book by an ex-KGB guy who said he worked in a biological warfare lab in the Soviet Union.
They killed a number of people by accident when some of their bugs got out, you know, on the order of 500 people, which is a lot of people, but it's not, you know, like 250,000 people, but it's a lot of people.
But what those geniuses were trying to do was to cross Ebola with smallpox.
So smallpox is unbelievably… the combination of smallpox and Ebola is extraordinarily easy to transmit and very, very, very fatal.
And so they were trying to cross it and then aerosolize it so that you could distribute it in canisters and blow it over cities.
Nice bit of scientific investigation.
Perfectly reasonable scientific question, can it be done?
A little sketchy on the moral side you might say.
It was a pretty crazy period of time.
What did Dostoevsky say about human history?
The one thing you can say about it is that it's not rational.
He said the very word sticks in your throat.
It's always been crazy and it's crazy now, but it was really crazy then.
So we got through that and thank God, as far as I'm concerned, the world is a lot better place now than it was Well it is.
Thirty years ago, forty years ago, fifty years ago, things are way better now.
You know, you hear a lot of doom and gloom about how we're going to destroy the planet, but we probably aren't.
You know, the population's going to stabilize out at about nine billion.
That's what the projections look like.
We already have about seven.
We can handle another two.
There's going to be some extinctions.
We're eating up the ocean like insane, you know, piranha.
That's mostly a fault of public policy, but it looks like we're probably going to squeak through the century with a bit of damage and then things will settle down.
You know, it's highly probable if there's anything vaguely human left in a hundred years that the big problem will be that population is rapidly decreasing.
You know, that's already happening in European countries, it's happening in Japan, it's going to happen in China, so by the year 2100 the most populous country in the world is going to be Nigeria, not China.
So, China's going to lose people like mad because they had a one-child policy, right, and everybody in China's getting old, so it's not going to be hyper-populated.
Anyways, so I was interested in all this because I kind of felt that I'd grown up, I didn't feel like I'd grown up under its shadow, I'd grown up under its shadow, you know, and it was something in the back of our minds all the time.
Then there was a question underneath that, a couple of them, and one was, How?
Why is this possible?
How is this possible?
How could it be that the world could divide itself up into two armed camps, like hyper-armed camps, right?
Tens of thousands of nuclear missiles, more than enough to wipe out the enemy many times over.
I don't remember what the American arsenal peaked at, but I think it was more than 50,000 nuclear weapons.
I don't know if there were 50,000 towns in the Soviet Union.
You know, maybe they were going to bomb Moscow 50 times or something, but after the first two or three it was probably more or less irrelevant.
So it was really, it was really crazy.
You know, and I don't know if you know this, but, and I believe this was during the Kennedy era, I hope I've got this right, one of Kennedy's genius boys came up with the Because Kennedy's administration was run by a lot of Harvard graduates and Ivy League graduates, and so they were supposed to be pretty intelligent, but intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing.
Anyways, they established a policy which was called Mutual Assured Destruction, which means if you hit me I kill you and then you kill me, and so it would be better if we just didn't bother.
And the acronym was MAD, right?
Mutual Assured Destruction.
It's like, you know, just thinking about that, It's a chilling thought.
It's like, what horrible entity thought that up as a joke?
You know, you think, well, is that some politician's idea of wit?
Like, where'd that come from?
So that's a hell of a thing to make a joke about.
You know, mad.
Well that was right, it was definitely mad.
You know, and the odd thing is that we didn't blow ourselves up, and we didn't have a third world war, and you know, you can't make A solid claim that the invention of nuclear weapons was necessarily the worst thing that could have happened.
You know, because even the Soviets who were completely insane, and of course the Maoists who were probably even worse, they weren't insane enough to start a nuclear war.
Now Stalin, there's evidence, there's debate about it, but there's evidence that Stalin was basically murdered, partly by Khrushchev, who was his successor.
When Stalin died, Khrushchev and three other people were in his house, and what happened in Stalin's house the night he died is not clear.
But I read a book recently called Stalin, interestingly enough, that was written by a guy who had access to the full Communist Party archives, which was a relatively new thing, and that was his conclusion.
And he also believed that Stalin was gearing up to do an invasion of Europe and that he didn't give a damn how many cities would have to be bombed in order For the Soviets to roll through.
And Stalin, he was like that, you know.
Stalin was perfectly capable of taking entire nations of people out in Eastern Europe by train and shipping them out to Siberia in the middle of the winter with nothing to eat and no tools and letting them live, which of course they didn't.
And that meant women, children, men, you know, shorn of all their belongings and thrust out into the middle of nowhere to perish or live as they saw fit.
And if they perished So much the better as far as Stalin was concerned.
And so he wasn't exactly the sort of person the idea of a nuclear war would necessarily stop, and it's certainly possible that that's what he was hoping for.
You know, because when we look at people like Stalin and Hitler, we think, well, you know, they're after world domination, you know, and you think, well, in some sense that's kind of a positive motivation, right?
I mean, not really, but it's like if you have a Corvette, say, and someone steals it, you can think, well, I know why they stole it, they want to have the Corvette, you know?
It's an understandable motivation to want power.
It's not necessarily an admirable one, although sometimes power is a perfectly reasonable thing to pursue.
But I don't have any idea why we ever assumed that those guys were after victory.
Like, you should never make the presupposition that everyone is out to win.
Some people are out to lose.
And the more people they can take with them, the better.
You know, and when Hitler died he committed suicide in a bunker way down below Berlin while Berlin was on fire and Europe was burning.
It's like, as far as I can tell, that was exactly what Hitler was after right from the beginning.
You know, he was interested in fire as a purifying agent.
You know, he's a fire worshipper in some sense because if you look at the Nuremberg gatherings of the Nazis, you know, they're spectacular, spectacular celebrations.
Unbelievably dramatic and impressive.
And they frequently featured fire.
And fires a purifying agent, you know, and Hitler by the end of World War II was, he was pretty contemptuous of the Germans because they really hadn't served him well.
Now it wasn't like he thought, well maybe it wasn't such a good idea to start a whole second world war, you know, because he was a little on the narcissistic side we might say.
But by the time the Russians came marching in and Germany was in ruins, Hitler was perfectly happy to have the Allies tromp all over the citizens because that's what they deserved anyways, and so that's the sort of guy he was, and so why we would assume that he wanted to win just because that's what he said is something I've never been able to understand.
You know, the kids who shot up Columbine didn't want to win.
They wanted to kill as many people as possible to make a point, and then they wanted to kill themselves just in case you didn't exactly get the point.
And the point was, the more destruction the better, and if I have to go along with it, hey, no problem, that just makes me a little bit more serious than I might have otherwise been.
And so those sorts of motivations are not pleasant to understand.
But we have enough documentation about events like that, especially the mass killings, Those guys have written down exactly why they do it.
Now I have some excellent books on extraordinarily vengeful serial killers and mass murderers.
I know exactly how they think.
There's a great book, if you're interested in this sort of thing, called Panzram.
P-A-N-Z-R-A-M. And Carl Panzram was a serial killer and rapist who lived pretty much early in the 20th century.
And he was a tough delinquity sort of kid from a large family and when he was, you know, 13, 14, they sent him off to some reform school and it was run by the same sort of people that run Canada's residential schools and you know, so those were basically predators on children and of course he was raped and brutalized and tormented in all sorts of horrible ways, but he was a tough guy.
And when he came out he decided that, you know, the human race really wasn't worth that much and that he was going to wreak as much mayhem as he possibly could for the rest of his life.
He raped a thousand men.
He killed dozens of people.
He kept track of the dollar value of the buildings he burned down.
Like, this was a serious guy.
And he was bent on destruction.
And that's that.
What were his dying words?
First of all, there was a committee, I believe, of women who intervened on behalf of him because they were anti-capital punishment, and he said to them, if I remember correctly, that he wished the human race had one neck so that he could put his hands around it and squeeze.
So, you know, that was his way of pointing out to the people who didn't think that maybe capital punishment was justified in his case, that maybe they weren't thinking clearly.
And then to the hangman he said, hurry up, who's your bastard?
I could kill ten men in the time it takes you to hang me.
So, you know, you don't get a statement like that from someone who isn't thoroughly committed to what he's doing.
So, the situation that the world found itself involved in really Part of it was, well what the hell's going on with all these weapons and how can it possibly be that anyone thinks that that's a reasonable solution and how did it come about that this could even occur and what are we thinking?
So there was that and then there was also the, why are people so damn convinced on each side of this argument that they're right enough to risk everything for?
You know, which is a perfectly good question.
And then there was the malevolence issue, like how much of this has nothing to do with wanting to see your side win, and everything to do with wanting to see everything lose, you know.
And then… Ah, then there was another issue which was, well, are both sides wrong?
Are both sides right?
Because that's more of a cultural relativist approach, right?
It's like, yeah, yeah, the communists believe one thing and the bloody capitalists believe another and they're just as bad.
Who believes what is completely arbitrary because belief systems are arbitrary and so maybe they're both right or they're both wrong.
And I thought, well, either of those conclusions was pretty damn dismal because if they're both right then, well, what are you going to do?
Have them talk it out?
I don't think so.
And if they're both wrong, well, that's not much better.
And then if one's right and the other's wrong, well, does that mean anything?
Like, is it possible for one belief system to be more right than another belief system?
Because, of course, that's certainly not a tenet of moral relativism, and you might think about that as the standard intellectual approach to morality, and probably has been for the last hundred years.
I think, by the way, that that's a reprehensible morality.
And I'll tell you why as we move through the course, because one of the things I tried to find out was, was what we were fighting for, you know, assuming that you give the West a bit of the benefit of the doubt and assume that some of the things that we stand for we actually stand for and aren't just posturing and parading, was that grounded in anything?
Or was it just arbitrary opinion?
So, that's what we're going to talk about.
We're going to talk about why people believe the things they believe, what psychological function the beliefs perform.
We're going to talk about malevolence, and as far as I can tell, malevolence is the willingness to do evil, and I think the best definition of evil And I've thought about this for a long time.
It's like what constitutes evil.
It's complicated, and we'll talk about it a lot.
But I think if you want a one-line summary, it's the desire to do harm for the sake of the harm.
So you have to think about it as a kind of art form.
Look, if you have a terrorist and you think he's hidden an atom bomb in a stadium and you think, well he's not going to tell me, you have good evidence, he's not going to tell me unless I torture him, I don't think you should torture him because torture is wrong.
But, you know, if you're doing that and you really believe he's hidden an atom bomb in a stadium, well at least you have some justification for what you're doing and it's not necessarily that what you're doing is evil.
It might be wrong, it might be misguided.
I mean, who's to say in a situation like that?
It should certainly be illegal.
But at least you can say, well, there's a plausible explanation for it, but lots of situations where there's absolute horror, there's no plausible explanation for it whatsoever.
So I can give you an example.
So for example, one of the things that used to happen in Auschwitz, if I remember correctly.
Auschwitz, I don't know what you guys envision when you envision concentration camps, you know, like a concentration camp It's a funny name, first of all, because it's not really a camp.
You know what I mean?
But a concentration camp isn't like a prison.
It's kind of easy to envision them like a prison.
Those bloody things were cities.
They have tens of thousands of people in them.
So they're massive.
At least they were large towns.
So these are very big places anyways.
At the typical concentration camp the trains would come rolling in and of course people had been packed into the damn trains like, well, worse than animals.
They'd be packed standing and lots of people just died in the cars, especially if they were old or little, or had some respiratory problem or something like that, because they'd overheat if they were cramped right in the middle of people, or they'd freeze to death on the outside because they're pushed right against the wood.
But that was okay, it just made the job easier when they finally landed at Auschwitz.
Once they were in Auschwitz, well then the guards used to like to play tricks on them.
So one trick would be to get some poor son of a bitch who'd been torn away from his country, who'd had his family destroyed, who knew where he was going, who was half dead for six different reasons, who was among strangers.
Maybe he didn't even speak or she didn't even speak the language that was most common there.
You know, guarded by absolutely ruthless barbarians who wanted to do nothing else but make people as miserable as possible in the most creative possible ways.
And so what they would do with some of the prisoners was they'd give them wet sacks of salt and so those would weigh about a hundred pounds and they'd have them carry them from one side of the compound to the other.
Well, you know, that's not so bad when you're really, really Innovative in your capacity to perpetrate evil, but the next thing they did was carry them back.
And so you think about that, you know, and this is something you have to understand if you really want to understand evil, is that it's an aesthetic.
It's an art form.
You know, and the reason that that was such a terrible torture was, well, partly because these people were already ruined and a hundred pounds is a lot of salt and maybe it was winter and they didn't have any shoes and you know, like it's just brutal labor.
But Solzhenitsyn, when he wrote about the Gulag Archipelago, he said, you know, even if you were a prisoner and they were having you build a wall, you could at least take some damn pride in building the wall.
You know, you could lay some bricks out and you could think, well this sucks and it's really horrible and everything, but you know, I built a straight wall, that's something.
But if you have to take a sack of wet salt to one side of the compound and then carry it back, like the net consequence of that is zero, right?
It's zero.
The famous signs on the outside of the concentration camps were, work will set you free.
Right?
Now that's another joke.
It's like mutual assured destruction.
A joke like that is satanic.
There's no other way to think about it.
A joke like that comes out of the deepest depths of human malevolence.
And then the work that sets you free, well it wasn't even work, right?
It was a parody of work.
And the purpose of the work was to destroy you, but not quickly, because that's not as terrible as destroying you slowly.
So these are very, very terrible things.
And so part of what I thought about in relationship to people's belief systems was, you know, people are territorial.
Chimps, I don't know if you know this or not, but chimps basically go to war.
Jane Goodall discovered that a couple of decades ago and it really, really was hard on her because she was kind of a Rousseauian.
So for those of you who don't know, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a French philosopher and French philosophers have an awful lot of sins on their conscience and of course Rousseau was certainly one of them because Rousseau was the first The fully articulate promoter of the idea that human beings were basically good, So we had a good soul in a moral sense, but we were corrupted by our social institutions.
So as far as Rousseau was concerned, it was kind of a noble savage idea.
The human being in their raw form has a pure soul and then you give them to parents and you give them to teachers and they get into politics and there's group disputes and then they get all corrupted.
Well, I don't even know what to say about that except that it's absolutely moronic.
But it's an appealing proposition if you're a naive optimist.
First of all, it doesn't explain where malevolence comes from because The people created the institutions so, you know, it just puts you into an infinite regress, chicken and egg.
If the institutions are reprehensible but the people who built them aren't, then where did the reprehensible element of the institutions come from?
You know, he might think it's an auto-generating consequence of organizing people but, you know, it's a pretty specious theory.
Of course, he had a counterpart, a philosophical counterpart, Thomas Hobbes, and Hobbes said basically exactly the opposite, that people were vicious and cruel, and unless you put them in straitjackets fundamentally and made them obey, then everything was going to go immediately to hell.
When you saw what happened in Iran after the Americans waltzed in and the power structure disintegrated, it was a hell of a lot more like Hobbes than it was like Rousseau.
The tyrant at the top, and it wasn't like everybody got all peaceful and loving all of a sudden.
It was like absolute chaos reigned.
So, you know, of course you can rationalize that.
But anyways, Rousseau, by the way, had five children by a maid, an illiterate maid, that was his mistress, and he put every single one of them in orphanages where, of course, they perished because orphanages at Rousseau's times were not exactly You know, a luxury resort, and even up till the beginning of the 20th century most children who were under one years of age who were in care institutions died.
Partly disease and that sort of thing, but often because they just weren't touched, they weren't cared for physically, even if they were fed.
You know, 200 years ago they weren't even fed.
So, anyway, so you know, but nonetheless, you know, people Maintain the optimistic idea that human beings were, you know, basically good and that they were corrupted by institutions.
It's a common idea among, I think it's a very common idea in universities, you know, because university people are always complaining about the corrupt nature of this institution and that institution, you know, while they sit here in the warmth with the electricity on, you know, It's surrounded by wealth that characterizes maybe one tenth of one percent of the entire world's population.
They complain about how oppressed they are and how nasty the institutions are.
It's like, yeah, well you actually haven't been to a nasty institution.
Because nasty institutions, they get pretty damn bad, and most of the institutions in the world are like that.
It isn't exactly clear that people are pristine in their heart and then corrupted by institutions, although I'm sure that happens.
It happened to Panzram, for example.
So anyways, this has been a line of philosophical speculation that's, I would say, constituted one of the unspoken fundamental assumptions of Western intellectuals in particular.
And Jane Goodall thought, you know, in many ways the same way.
She thought chimps were basically, you know, they're just animals.
They're okay.
We coexist relatively peacefully with one another.
Even Carl Rogers, who I talk about a bit in my personality class, he basically thought that people were fundamentally good and that institutions made them bad.
But the problem is you look at chimps and they're a fair bit like us.
Bonobos, you can look at them too, and they're genetically quite related to us, and they're quite a bit different than chimps, so we're sort of a weird mixture of the two in some sense.
But chimps, like those things, there is no evidence that they really have any internal control over their aggression at all.
You know, there was a horrible case about two years ago where a woman was interacting with a chimp and it tore her to pieces, and they can do that, man.
It took her face right off, and they have the strength of about six men Like an adult male chimp can break a 300 pound test cable.
Those things are really really strong and they're not friendly.
So, in Arnhem Zoo for example, there has been a troop of chimps there that have been Followed by an extremely brilliant parmatologist named Frans de Waal, whose work I would very highly recommend.
De Waal is a very smart guy, and he's looked at the origins of morality in chimpanzees, you know, from a biological perspective.
It's very, very nice work, very, very clear-headed, but you know, he's recounted absolutely horrific stories of chimpanzee behavior, so one of the stories he I talked about, for example, was, you know, you kind of have this idea that there's a male chimp hierarchy.
It's roughly true.
There's a female hierarchy too, but the males in the chimp world anyways tend to be the dominant ones.
You know, you kind of think of a dominant primate like a prize fighter, you know.
Pretty much he's ruling because of his physical prowess.
Now that turns out not to exactly be true.
But in this particular case, the guy who was running the chimp troop was a bit of a bully, and he wasn't very good at making friends.
You know, and that's not such a good idea because no matter how tough you are by yourself, two weaker guys can probably take you out and that's what happened during Frans de Waal's observations.
Two chimps attacked the leader and they had a coalition, they were grooming each other, they were pals.
And chimps are pretty good at remembering reciprocal relationships and having friendships, really.
They have a very highly social structure.
They just tore him apart.
The things they did to him you don't even want to talk about.
And so chimps have really no upper limit on their capacity for aggression.
And when they hunt, because chimps hunt and they like meat, they often hunt colobus monkeys and they weigh about 35 pounds.
Like a colobus monkey is a major league animal and they eat those things alive.
And they scream while they're being killed and that does not slow the chimps down one bit.
So it's not obvious that the chimp is really a creature of a lot of empathy, especially the males.
The females are likely more empathic because they have to deal with infants for longer periods of time.
What seems to inhibit the aggression of male chimps isn't anything they hold internally.
It seems that when they get hyper aggressive in the troop, the troop gets more and more agitated and basically shuts them down.
So you can imagine maybe you're in a rough bar and some dingbat who's, you know, You know,
if you read things like there's a great book There's a horrifying book published about twenty years ago called The Rape of Nanking, which is, well the woman who wrote it committed suicide, so that sort of suffices to tell you what The Rape of Nanking is about.
It's a story about the Japanese in World War II going into a Chinese city called Nanking, where I believe about 350,000 people were killed.
The Nazis in that story were the good guys, so you can imagine the kind of brutality that might be occurring there, but there's absolutely perfectly well documented Evidence suggesting that the Japanese soldiers engaged in competitive brutality.
You know, and so really what happened was the Japanese had been pretty militarized by World War II and they'd adopted a Prussian education system and the Prussians, Germans, you know, pre-20th century Germans, they were basically interested in educating obedient soldiers.
You know, because it was a militaristic culture and the Japanese kind of adopted that because they were sick of being kicked around by the Europeans pretty successfully because they defeated the Russians in the early stages of the 20th century.
It was quite a shock to everyone in Europe.
Cause for great celebration in Japan, and no wonder.
But anyways, they militarized the hell out of their young men and taught them basically that the Japanese were a master race, you know, and that other people were subhuman.
It's a very common human way of thinking, by the way.
I would say it's really the default way that human tribes think about other tribes.
You know, I mean, it's a little more complicated than that because human tribes tend to trade with other tribes.
So it's not all demonization, but a lot of it is.
If you look around the world in the anthropological literature, what you see is that the names that most tribes have for themselves is something like the human beings or the people, indicating that the rest of the people aren't really people, god only, they're barbarians or they live out where the sun is being eaten by the dragon of the night or something like that and the word barbarian is a It's a word that comes from the Greeks making fun of how non-Greeks spoke.
They thought they went bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, something like that.
So anyways, what Goodall found was that the chimps, like the chimp adolescents in particular, in particular the males, would patrol the borders of their territory in groups of three or four, and often with a female or two, but the females didn't seem to be really the They were more part of the group rather than the initiators,
but what the chimps would do is if they found a chimp from another troop, even if that was a chimp that had moved from their troop in the not too distant past and joined another, because sometimes the males leave and sometimes they go to other troops, if they outnumbered them they would tear them to pieces.
And it looked like that's why they were doing the border patrol.
They're out looking for trouble.
They're gangs, roughly speaking.
They're looking for trouble, but the point of it is that they would only attack if they outnumbered.
You know, because chimps can… I wouldn't say they count, but they have a rudimentary notion of group size, you know.
I don't think you can count without being able to verbalize, but you can estimate at a glance.
And so, you know, when I say tear apart, that's exactly what I mean.
There's no upper limit on the brutality.
And so Goodall discovered that first.
And she didn't tell anybody about it.
Now she had her reasons, I mean some of them I think were ideological, oh the lovely chimps, you know, and fair enough, but some of it was also She thought that maybe the chimps had been corrupted as a consequence of their contact with human beings and that their natural behaviour had been somehow transformed.
You know, and that's not… it's reasonable to be cautious if you're a scientist before you go out and say, hey, chimps go to war.
Isn't that revolutionary?
Because it is, right?
Because it just ends the idea that our warlike and malevolent nature is a function of culture.
Like if chimps do it, well what are they perverted by their own culture?
I don't think so.
You know.
There are more and less violent chimp cultures and there are more and less violent baboon cultures.
So there's some cultural variation.
But since Goodall's time this sort of behavior is being documented on many, many chimp troops.
So that's us, in a nutshell.
And it's not self-evident that if you put the typical adolescent male, say, who's not a very well-formulated personality, because he's not that individual, and he hasn't seen much of the world, and the typical guy that goes into the army is kind of on the margins of society, maybe he's not particularly bright, and I'm not trying to be insulting by that, but it's not exactly a high-end job.
You put someone like that in a place where there's no rules, it's like who leads where there are no rules?
Well the probability that it's the friendliest and nicest people is very, very low.
And so what seemed to happen in Nanking was the Japanese soldiers took their cues from the people with the most brutal imaginations.
So, you know, and people can have pretty brutal imaginations, especially when they start to compete.
So I was interested in that, you know.
What exactly was at the core of that malevolence?
I mean, and I think it is uniquely human.
The chimps will go tear another chimp apart, but basically they're just going to kill him.
That's their goal.
And maybe it takes a while, but it's not going to take four weeks.
Whereas if you're a human being, you know, you can draw out your enemy's death for a very, very long period of time.
And part of that is the desire to produce the misery and suffering that's attendant on the death.
And only human beings have the imagination to do that.
That's why I think, and we'll return to this, that's why I think that in the book of Genesis, when people's eyes are open and they become self-conscious, they also learn the difference between good and evil.
Once your eyes are open and you know what you're like, once you know you're naked and vulnerable, then you can exploit that in other people.
And only human beings have that kind of knowledge.
So the fact that we know that we can be hurt makes us particularly dangerous.
Because if I know how I can be hurt, I sure know how you can be hurt.
It's a nasty situation.
And then of course I'm kind of interested in the motivation for that.
So you look at the Columbine kids for example.
The mayhem they produced was trivial compared to the mayhem they were planning.
If it was up to those two guys, they would have bombed Detroit flat.
They had visions of doing exactly that.
And it was a media spectacular.
And they didn't do it because they were poor kids in some sense who were bullied.
That is an idiotic explanation.
It's not true.
Everybody's a bloody outsider.
I'm sure there isn't a single one of you that don't have a memory from junior high where you were an outcast in one way or another.
Maybe some of you weren't, but it's very, very common.
And to think of that as sufficient motivation to, you know, shoot people cold-bloodedly in a high school, it's like, sorry, that's a little on the naive side.
So I'm very, very interested in what makes up that motivation.
You know, because malevolence plus nuclear weapons is not a good combination.
And so it doesn't really look to me like we can afford that kind of unconscious malevolence anymore because we're just too damn powerful and if the wrong person ends up being like that with the wrong weapons it's like, the game's over.
I've also become convinced while I've been looking through this that the problem that we're discussing is not a sociological problem or a political problem or an economic problem.
Because, you know, a lot of what you'll read and a lot of political scientists will tell you this sort of thing because they're basically almost always closet Marxists.
They'll tell you that the reason for struggle for competition between nations is economic.
And I think that's absurd.
Not because it isn't true.
But because it doesn't actually address a more fundamental issue, which is, okay, well economic struggle is a struggle about who has access to what's valued.
But there's nothing self-evident about what's valued.
That's the problem.
It's like, you know, you have the idea of natural resource.
It's like, yeah, oil's not a natural resource until you have an automobile.
You know, I mean, the interplay between Cultural value structures and what constitutes a natural resource is so tightly put together, except for maybe air and water, that saying well there are natural resources which means things of intrinsic value and that's what people fight over.
Well you've made the mystery disappear inside the word natural resource, but you haven't solved anything.
So the question is well why would people fight over things that they value?
Well, because there's all sorts of things you could value, like peace, for example.
So, it's not a sufficient explanation.
And it's also not clear to me that people's primary motivations are economic.
You know, it's one element of motivation, it's not trivial, but I would say the motivation isn't even really economic.
It's more related to dominance hierarchy position.
And that's fundamentally a sexual motivation, especially for men.
Because if men are higher up in the male dominance hierarchy, then women are much more attracted to them.
So, you could say, well that's economics.
I don't think it is, sorry.
Economics is just a secondary consequence of that.
I don't believe, by the way, that that's a theory.
Because there's excellent documentation on hyper-aggression in adolescent males.
And the best evidence suggests that adolescent males become hyper-aggressive when you put them in situations where they can't win.
And then they become hyper-aggressive in an attempt to formulate a dominance hierarchy so that some of them can rise to the top and basically be attractive.
You can call that economic if you want, but I think you're pushing your luck with that sort of explanation.
Well, so that's basically the background.
So when I was investigating this, I first started studying political science.
I actually liked that quite a bit in the first couple of years, because I was basically reading political philosophy.
You know, and it's actually worthwhile reading great political philosophers because A they could think and that's a really good thing and B you think like they think even if you don't know it, right?
Because one of the hallmarks of a great philosopher is that his ideas or her ideas sink into the culture so deeply that like a hundred years after they've written everybody just thinks they always thought that way.
Like, that's one of the things, say, that's happened to Freud.
I mean, everybody kind of understands that there's an unconscious and that people are motivated by sexual drive.
It's like, what's so brilliant about that?
It's obvious once Freud points it out.
So anyways I started, I took political science first and literature which I found was also extremely useful because great literary people have great things to say like Dostoevsky.
His novels just absolutely flatten me.
He's so brilliant and I've never read anyone who takes moral questions so seriously.
If you look at Crime and Punishment, which is a book I would highly recommend, Dostoevsky is the absolute model of a true intellectual.
And I say that because in Crime and Punishment, for example, Dostoevsky has this character named Raskolnikov.
You guys can identify with Raskolnikov to some degree because he's about your age and he's a university student.
Now he's having a rough time because he's in St.
Petersburg and he doesn't have any money and he lives in this tiny little room which has basically a bunch of clothes on the bed that he can sleep in and he's starving to death.
He only has bread to eat.
He's a law student, so he's having a rough time.
St.
Petersburg at the end of the 19th century is kind of a rough place.
Some of you guys probably have it pretty bad, but Raskolnikov had it pretty bad.
So he's half starved and half delirious.
His ideas are very addled because he's one of the first Russians who really considered themselves an atheist.
So, you know, Russia was a medieval society until the late 1900s.
It was sort of like Quebec before 1960.
And I'm serious about that, because Quebec was really the last European country, so to speak, that underwent a secularization.
And that happened in about 1960.
And Quebec families went from an average size of about 12 to 13 to about 1.2, lowest birth rate in the world.
And all the Quebecois were married and none of them are now, and they were all Catholic and hardly any of them are now.
And it was an overnight transformation.
And that's partly what fed Quebec nationalism.
Because it was actually a study that was released by the Gallup organization.
I only heard it referred to in one meeting where they indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic in In Quebec you were ten times more likely to be a separatist.
That's really worth thinking about, right?
Because religion collapses and what happens is nationalism just rises up to take its place.
Because you need a bloody belief structure because what else, what are you going to do?
Wander around aimlessly?
That's not fun.
It's not useless, or useful, you know?
So you just jump from one structure of belief to another or you fall apart.
So that's also something that's very much worth knowing.
Anyway, so old Raskolnikov, he thinks he's a pretty educated guy, and he's pretty smart, and he is pretty smart, but he's like smart arrogant, not smart wise.
Because he's 21, what the hell does he know?
He doesn't know anything, but he's smart.
And he's contemptuous of other people, because he can probably be smarter than most of them, you know, and he confuses that with knowing what's going on.
And so, he lives in this little horrible apartment, and he has a horrible landlady, and she really, like this is where Dostoevsky's a genius.
Like, Raskolnikov hates his landlady.
And then Dostoevsky tells you why.
And you'd think, well yeah, I'd hate her too.
So she's miserable.
She owns a bunch of apartments.
She charges too much rent for them.
She tortures all the people that rent from her in every possible way she can.
The places are filthy.
She doesn't provide any furniture.
She hoards money and doesn't do anything with it, so she lives in absolute poverty and in filth.
And she's a cruel person in every possible way, plus she has this niece who isn't very bright, you know, is intellectually impaired, and she basically treats her like a slave.
So she's not doing anyone any good, and that's Raskolnikov's idea.
And then he gets a letter from his mother, and his mother basically tells him that his sister is going to go marry this rich guy, Because she's in love with him.
And that'll solve all of his monetary problems so he can keep going to law school.
But he reads between the lines and, you know, he realizes pretty quickly that this, like, rich guy is a real, like, miserly scum rat and he's gonna treat his sister and his mother absolutely miserably.
And his sister doesn't really love him anyways and the only reason she's marrying him is so that Raskolnikov can go to school.
So he's not very happy with that.
Fair enough.
You can understand his motivation.
So he's starving and he's full of these ideas also that are sort of Nietzschean.
Like, atheistic ideas hit Russia really hard.
Because it went from seriously orthodox Christian in every possible way to unbelievably skeptical in one generation.
And it just fractured the society.
It's partly why communism became so absolutely attractive for the Russians.
And Dostoevsky also details that extremely brilliantly in a book called The Possessed, or The Devils.
So it's a wonderful book.
It's hard to get into.
You have to read about 200 pages before it really kicks in.
You know, Russian novels are sort of like that.
So anyways, Raskolnikov is thinking these sort of superman-ish rationalistic ideas and he thinks, well you know, there's no evidence that there's any real moral hierarchy.
You can easily make a case that people aren't really moral, they're just cowardly.
And this is a Nietzschean observation, right?
Most of what you call your morality isn't morality at all, it's just you're too afraid to do what you want, and because you're too weaselly to admit that, you say that you don't do those things because you're moral.
But it isn't true.
You'd love to do them if you were brave enough, you just aren't.
So, people misread that to say that what Nietzsche thought was that all morality was cowardice.
That isn't what he thought.
He thought that all cowardice masqueraded as morality.
That's a whole different thing.
So anyways, Raskolnikov is thinking about these things and he's thinking Well, I could be a lawyer, and I'd be a good one.
I'd help people, I'd help the poor people, you know, and what the hell good is it for me to wander around starving like this, and it doesn't seem reasonable, and my sister's going to go basically prostitute herself for this rich guy, and that sucks, and like, there's my landlady, and she's an absolutely reprehensible creature, and everyone agrees, and she's old and worn out, and she has this person she keeps as a slave.
Maybe I should just get rid of her.
And what I love about that is that, like, this happens almost all the time.
In universities I would say.
But really between, whenever you hear people who think they're smart have a discussion.
What they generally do is they have an idea, and then they have an idea about the person who has a different idea.
And the idea about the person who has a different idea is that their idea is stupid.
And so what they do is they produce a caricature of that person's idea.
And then they blast it and they think, wow, I won that argument.
Which is really, it's pathetic.
It's a straw man argument.
It's the sign of a weak mind.
What you do if you really want to have an argument with someone is you help them.
Like let's say you're a right winger and you're arguing with a left winger, or you're a left winger and you're arguing with a right winger.
It's like you want to make their argument as magnificent as you possibly can and then see if you can undermine it.
That's what you do.
Because then you're getting somewhere.
Like any idiot can make a straw man and light it.
Dostoevsky never does that.
He makes the people that he's, like when he sets up two ideas to go to war, he embodies both sets of ideas in the most powerful characters he could imagine.
So in the Brothers Karamazov, for example, the two people, the two protagonists basically, there's a bunch of them, but one is named Alyosha.
And the other is named Ivan.
And Eliosia is kind of an innocent guy.
Good guy, fundamentally.
A little on the naive side.
Religious, but not in a way that he can defend.
You know, it's more of a natural expression of spirit.
And he's in a monastery, and he's the follower of this famous monk.
And, you know, he's kind of into Orthodox Christianity and his In a benevolent and sincere way, but he's not much of an intellect.
And Ivan, his older brother, Ivan's got everything.
He's good looking, he's tall, I believe he's a soldier, he's an impressive guy.
And he's got a viciously cutting intellect.
And he just tears Elyosha apart every chance he gets across the whole book.
And you can see two parts of Dostoevsky fighting it out in the book, because part of Dostoevsky was highly spiritualized, not least because he was epileptic, and that often For reasons we'll talk about later, that often exaggerates spirituality.
But also because he was a deeply spiritual person and also a tremendous intellect and so he was at war inside and he put those Put parts of him out into these characters and let them just go at it.
And it's brilliant, you know.
Ivan makes the best argument for atheism that's ever been written.
It's really powerful.
You know, basically what he does is he talks about all these terrible things that were being done to children in Russia at the turn of the century, back in the late 1800s.
You know, he talks about this one situation where the parents of this young girl locked her in a freezing out house overnight.
And she was crying and screaming, you know, and telling them that she was sorry, and they just left her in there and she froze to death.
And it was like front page news in Russia at the time, I guess probably in Moscow, or maybe in St.
Petersburg.
Dostoevsky lifted that argument and he said, he had Ivan ask Eliyoshis, like, okay, well, this is the sort of thing God permits?
He said, the whole damn world isn't worth that, the suffering of one child in a situation like that.
How can you possibly see that something like that can exist and wander around with your boneheaded belief in a benevolent God?
What's up with you?
Would you lock a girl in the outhouse overnight and let her freeze if that meant that other people would be happy?
You know, and of course Elie Loschus says, well no, I would never do that.
And so Ivan tells him, well, yeah, you know, you wouldn't do that, but this god that you imagine exists would be perfectly pleased to let something like that occur.
You know, Alyosha has no idea what to say about that.
And Ivan, that's just a fragment of Ivan's argument.
He's like punching Adam like mad, you know.
And I think the way Alyosha basically responds is by trying to live a good life.
You know, he can't argue.
Ivan's better at it than he is, and plus there's this vicious strain of critical thinking about religion that's being wafted in from Western Europe.
You know, there's 300 years of philosophical force behind it, and Ivan is its mouthpiece.
It's like Alyosha.
And Russia itself is just blown apart by that.
They have no defense against that.
You know, the bloody Western Europeans had 300 years to get used to it.
The Russians had like 10 years.
So, it just fragmented them and they were like waiting for the new messiah and they sure got one.
And both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied about what would happen in Russia 40 years before it happened.
That's bloody amazing.
To think that you could look that far in the future and actually get it right.
You know, I mean things didn't change quite as fast then as they are now, but you know, it wasn't like the Victorian times were static.
There were a lot of things going on, so to get that right over four decades, those guys were in touch with something very deep that was going on underneath the substrat of Western civilization.
Alright, so I'm thinking about belief structures and I'm thinking about malevolence and I'm thinking about The psychological role that these sorts of things are playing.
You know, because it occurred to me at some point, something like, an idea something like this.
And this actually tormented me for about six months, I would say, when I'd been thinking these things through, and I guess it was for probably five years at this point, and I was really obsessed by it.
I was thinking about this literally every minute of the day from the time I woke up till the time I went to sleep.
It was really manic, probably.
At one point I got to this conclusion.
I thought, okay, well here's the situation.
It's pretty obvious that people need belief structures, because first of all, a belief structure orients them to action.
So you have to believe that one thing is more valuable than another just to act.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Well it's because he thought the other side of the road was better than the side he was on, obviously.
Because whenever you're moving, The implicit hypothesis of your movement is that the thing you're moving towards is better than the thing you're leaving, you know, unless you're self-destructive, because otherwise why bother?
And so what that means is you don't move without a value structure.
And you don't get to not have one.
You might say, well I don't believe in anything.
Well, no, you say you don't believe in anything.
So technically you can't make an argument for what you believe, or you don't know what you believe.
But if you're not just sitting there, vegetating, then you believe something because otherwise you acted out.
So you have to have a belief system.
Or you fall apart.
So you're nihilistic or depressed or hopeless.
And that's certainly… who wants that?
That's not good.
That's painful.
Depression is no joke.
I know someone who had a very, very serious illness.
It was an illness that destroyed parts of this person's body, destroyed their joints, and they also had clinical depression.
And I asked this person at one point, okay, you get to have a choice.
You can get rid of the illness that's destroying your joints, so they had to be replaced, or you can get rid of the depression.
They said, I'll get rid of the depression first, no problem.
So that's worth thinking about.
If you believe nothing, you're hopeless, you've got no value structure, the place you end up is not good.
And I'm sure lots of you have experienced that.
Most people, especially the people who are likely to come to this class, Most people, by the time they're your age, have gone through a dark period or two, you know, for whatever reason.
Relationship breaks up, or maybe you lose the meaning in your life, or someone betrays you, or someone gets sick, or you get sick.
You know, some tragedy comes along and knocks you flat.
You think, what the hell?
What's going on?
Why is any of this worthwhile?
And it's a good question.
Okay, but you can't go there because that's like death.
Well then the other problem is, well let's say you do have a belief system.
Alright, so what happens if I have a different one?
What are we supposed to do about that?
You can't give up yours because then you're done.
I'm not going to give up mine for the same reason.
But it isn't clear that we can inhabit the same part of the earth peacefully if we don't believe the same things.
So when I sorted that out I thought, well that's it man, we're basically done.
Because you can't not have a belief system and if you have one you can't not fight.
And we're too well armed to fight now.
And we're not just going to collapse into nihilism, although that happens quite a bit, so game's over.
Well, it turned out that that was wrong, thank God, but it took me an awful long time to even begin to understand how it could possibly be wrong, because as far as I could tell, those were the options.
So another thing we're going to try to figure out is not only exactly why people have belief systems, exactly what a belief system is, And why they compete.
And why you can't just get rid of them.
But we're also going to figure out what it is that you might be able to do about the fact that you're going to inhabit places with people who don't have exactly the same belief system as you.
You know, in some sense it's really the problem of social being, right?
And creatures have been trying to solve this problem ever since, well, we don't know for how long.
I like to use lobsters as an example because lobsters arrange themselves into dominance hierarchies.
And they have very complex social behaviour.
They don't have much of a brain.
So you can have pretty damn complex social behaviour without having much of a brain.
And lobsters have been around for 400 million years.
Us, roughly speaking, because we had a shared ancestor with a lobster, you know, a very long time ago, we've been trying to figure out how to coexist with other creatures that don't precisely share our belief systems for 400 million years.
You know, and we've been sufficiently successful about it so that we're both social and here we are.
So obviously there's ways that it can be dealt with, although I don't think we necessarily understand them very well.
So, I didn't want to just understand what it was about belief systems, you know, about their necessity and their function and the way that they become pathologized.
I wanted to figure out if there was also a pattern to the processes by which belief systems are modified and negotiated so that belief systems that have different structures can coexist in the same place peacefully.
That's a vital question, right, because most of you are going to get married.
Successfully or unsuccessfully.
And even if you don't, you're going to live with someone for a long period of time, and you're going to find out that they're not like you.
And that's extremely annoying.
But, you know, what are you going to do?
You're either going to be a slave, Or a tyrant, or you're going to negotiate.
Because those are your options.
And negotiation is extraordinarily difficult, right?
Because you have to figure out what you want and probably won't even admit it.
And second of all, you have to listen to your stupid partner telling you what they want, and then you have to try to figure out how you're going to make both of them possible.
Well, slavery, tyranny, that's comparatively easy from a cognitive perspective compared to actually trying to figure out how you can be mutually satisfied in the same space.
But you can do it.
That's the thing.
There is a process.
And it's identifiable.
So I want to talk to you about belief systems and their psychological significance.
What they're like, what function they perform, but I also want to talk to you about how they transform.
Because they do, right?
They change, especially with humans.
So they can change, that means they can modify.
And that means, at least in principle, that we can have a dialogue.
Now dialogues, that's rough, but the alternative is war, right?
And that's partly why you're supposed to listen to your enemy.
Because if you don't listen to your enemy, the only other thing you can do is fight with them.
That's it.
You mean it's the desire for that to happen?
Well, I would say it's partly the desire for that to happen.
The thing is, whenever I look at a political movement, especially an ideological movement, I think, okay there's a bunch of things you're for, fine.
What are you against?
You know, because one of the things that people who adopt an ideological position like to presume is that all of the right is on their side.
And that makes them very unconscious of their shadow, let's say, from a Jungian perspective.
The Nazis had all sorts of positive reasons for what they were doing.
But, you know, the negative reasons were there too, and you could easily make a case that the negative reasons were really the reasons.
And when I look at ideologues, I always think, yeah, yeah, that's what you're for, sure.
But A, I don't believe all the good people are on your side.
And B, I know that negative motivations are more powerful than positive ones.
So you say you're for things, but you're against them too.
So let's start with that.
So, I started thinking about this after I'd read George Orwell.
I love George Orwell, by the way.
How many of you know who George Orwell is?
Wow, really?
That's impressive.
How many don't?
Okay, well that's good.
That's amazing.
How the hell did you learn about George Orwell?
Is it 1984, fundamentally, or Animal Farm?
Animal Farm.
Animal Farm.
Okay, okay, well that's good, because George Orwell, I tell you, George Orwell was the first Western intellectual.
Who figured out what the hell was going on in the Soviet Union.
And he did that in the mid-40s.
Early.
You know, it was complicated because we sort of knew what was happening in the 20s and the 30s.
You know, there was Lenin and that wasn't so good.
There was the Russian Civil War.
There was the idea of universal communism.
That wasn't such a good idea, you know, for as far as people who didn't want to be communist were concerned.
And then there was what happened in the Ukraine in the 1930s.
So it was like, yeah, you know, the evidence was starting to pile up.
But unfortunately what happened was the Spanish Civil War, and the lefties were pretty much the good guys in the Spanish Civil War.
It was like a microcosm of the Second World War.
The lefties were fighting the fascists.
And some of the lefties were communists, but a lot of them were also people who were, I think, genuinely fighting for freedom.
And a lot of North American literary figures went to Spain to fight on the side of the, you know, against the fascists.
And so, fair enough, you know, the fascists were obviously You know, reprehensible, clearly.
And so that kind of muddied the water, right, because the fascists were bad and then that sort of means that people that are fighting them are good and some of them are communists and there was pretty good reason for people to be radically socialist at that point in human history because the plight of the working man was relatively unpleasant.
George Orwell wrote a book called Road to Wigan Pier and he went up to this town That was a coal mining town and he stayed with the coal miners for a while and just looked at their life.
So here's part of their life.
So, you basically work a seven and a half hour shift when you're a coal miner and you think, oh that's not too bad by 1930's standards.
It's like, yeah, except you have to go down to the coal mine tunnels, you know, and like they're not eight feet high and carpeted, they're like four and a half feet high and rough and poorly lit and the air is terrible.
And so basically you have to Chimp walk or crawl up to three miles just to get to work.
And then you have to do that at the end of your shift.
And you don't get paid for that, that's just your commute.
Right, right.
So you know it was no bloody… well and then of course what you're doing when you get there is like it's absolutely filthy, it's unbelievably noisy, it's brutally difficult.
He said that coal miners they have no teeth because they're like Because of their living conditions, but their bodies were absolutely perfect.
They were unbelievably powerful and strong because all they did was incredibly intense physical labor.
But it was bloody rough.
And the housing those people had was like 50 families for one outhouse.
That's probably good enough to describe it.
And often they were row houses.
And the row houses had no back doors, and they had no paths between them, and all the outhouses were at the back.
So that meant if you were, it was like 20 below and it was the winter and you were sick, then you get to go all the way around the block to your damn outhouse, or maybe there's only one there, and you line up with 50 people so that, you know.
Orwell was an upper class guy, basically, and he was trying to help himself overcome his upper class prejudices.
He was a real documentarian of the terrible working conditions of working class people.
And he wrote this book called Road to Wigged Pier.
But one of the things that Orwell said, he wrote this story about these poor god damn coal miners.
Yeah, it's like how about some social legislation so that these people and their children aren't just absolutely brutalized non-stop, you know?
But then he wrote the last half of the book, and he wrote it for the Left Book Club, which was a socialist group that would publish a book every month or so.
And what he did was he wrote a critique of socialism, of British socialism.
And he said, yeah, well this sucks man, it's like we should be on the They're not on the side of these working people, but the socialists I meet, they're not on the side of the working people.
They're like tweed-wearing, middle-class, hyper-intellectuals who never go anywhere near the working class because of their class prejudices and for all sorts of other reasons.
They don't like the poor at all.
They just hate the rich.
And I thought, I had been a member of the NDP for a long time at that point.
There was always something a little off about it, especially the more radical end.
What's with you guys?
It doesn't look like benevolence, as far as I can tell.
There's a lot of whining and complaining and resentment.
It's like, what's that about?
I read Orwell and I thought, ah-ha, right.
If you hate the successful, if you hate the rich.
Rich, by the way, is whoever has more money than you.
That's how you define rich.
And the best way to mask your resentment is to pretend that you're on the side of the poor.
I read that and I thought, that's exactly right, and then that's part of also what made me psychoanalytically oriented, because one thing psychoanalysts always do, always, is if you say you're, here's how I'm positively predisposed, the psychoanalyst says, how are you using that to mask something easy and malevolent that you're doing?
And that's always, that's a very, very useful question.
It's not always correct, right?
But it's correct a lot more than people generally like to think.
You know, it's like the mother or the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
You know the story, right?
This guy gets married.
He's got a couple of kids.
His new wife doesn't really like the kids.
You have a hundred times higher chance, by the way, of being abused by a stepparent than a biological parent, just so you know.
So the stepmother doesn't like the kids.
She tells the guy, well, why don't you just go put those kids out in the woods?
So out they go, out in the woods.
So they're lost kids, right?
They have nowhere to go.
So they're wandering around out there in the forest.
What happens?
And they come across a gingerbread house.
You think, wow man, you're a starving kid.
Gingerbread house, that's good news, right?
Not only is it a house, but it's made out of candy.
How could anything possibly be any better?
So in they go.
Well, and then there's this grandmotherly type there, and you know, she starts to fatten them up.
She puts, I think it's Hansel, in a cage.
She gets Gretel after a while to basically work as their scullery maid and it becomes quite obvious to the children that she's actually fattening them up so that she can put them in the oven and eat them!
And so I think what Hansel does is, I think Gretel gives him this like bone from some animal and The old witch is half blind and every time she reaches in to sort of feel his leg he gives her the bone and so like she's just not all that interested in eating him and anyways the kids end up pushing her in the oven and closing it and getting the hell out of there so you know it's a happy ending as far as fairy tales go.
But it's an Oedipal story, right?
It's a classic story about an Oedipal family.
Be bloody wary of people who do too much for you.
Right.
It's like if you have a mother Or any other relative for that matter.
Who's fattening you up on mercy and candy.
The probability that her basic goal is to eat you enough so that you never leave.
The probability is extraordinarily high.
And that's no joke.
You know, one of the things that you do learn if you read about the sorts of people who burst out of their mother's basement and go shoot up Dawson College is that often that's exactly the situation they've been in.
They're burning with resentment in their uselessness down in the basement for five or six years.
They don't have to leave.
They don't have to become independent.
Everything's done for them.
So they never have to do anything for themselves.
It's not pretty.
And so, one of the rules for dealing with people, and I know this is actually a rule for dealing with elderly people in homes for retired people, is do not do anything for anyone they can do for themselves.
You're stealing from them when you do that.
And it's a great rule of thumb for kids.
Once they can dress themselves, they dress themselves.
If they can set the table, even if it takes 20 minutes, it's like they're setting the table.
You're not doing them a favor by helping them do anything they can do themselves.
And it's kind of harsh, you know, but it beats the hell out of The Witch and Hansel and Gretel.
So anyways, one of the things we're going to look at as well is the dark side of positive motivations.
Now, how are we going to do this?
One of the things you might ask yourself is how in the world do you know if something is true?
Now, the first thing I would suggest is that the attitude you guys should bring to this class is that nothing that I tell you is true.
Okay, now I don't mean that you should be arrogantly skeptical because that's not appropriate.
You should bring every critical faculty you have to bear on what I tell you to see if you can chip away at it.
Because what you want to do, you want to build yourself a body of knowledge that you cannot undermine.
And the way you do that is by trying to undermine it, by hacking away at the foundation with everything you've got.
And if the ideas can withstand a total onslaught, then you've got something, you've got a foundation, you've got something you can stand on that's going to be there when things get rough.
And so I'm going to tell you what I've found that's been useful to me when things got rough.
But I don't expect you to assume that that's going to work for you, and I don't want you to… like I want you to listen and to think, but I want you to keep your wits about you.
Now, I'm going to tell you how I go about trying to determine whether or not something is true.
Now first of all, there's different definitions of truth.
And so we're going to basically flip back and forth between two.
One definition of truth is an objective definition.
And we don't have to talk much about that because you guys already know what that is.
But there's another definition of truth that I think the best way of defining it is as pragmatically true.
And pragmatism is a branch of American philosophy and it's a very sophisticated branch of philosophy.
In fact I actually think it's the most sophisticated brand of philosophy.
Probably because it makes the least claims.
And what the pragmatists state basically is, well you don't really know anything, right?
You don't have ultimate knowledge about anything.
So your knowledge always bottoms out in ignorance.
And so then the question is, well how do you know then if anything is true?
And the pragmatists would say, well in a sense you don't.
What you know always is if something is true enough for a particular function.
So for example, your theory about getting to the door might be that you can stand up and walk there.
And you might, well, God only knows what might happen on the way there, you know.
Maybe there'll be an earthquake, or a ceiling tile will fall on you, or who knows, maybe you'll have a heart attack, you know.
So you don't know whether you can get there.
You can infer from past experience.
But if you get there, then what you can say is, my statement about truth was sufficient.
So that the outcome was what the theory predicted.
And so in some sense what the pragmatists are saying is every time you make a statement, especially if it's related to action, That you offer a theory of truth along with that statement, implicitly, which is that this is true enough if what I predict happens.
And so it's a very nice theory because it doesn't require you to be omniscient about anything for things to be true enough.
And you are ignorant, you don't know everything about anything, and so obviously you're working in the world with partial knowledge, and it works.
Not all the time.
You get old, you get sick, you die.
You're not going to work it out thoroughly.
So we're going to use the pragmatic truth framework and we're going to use an objective truth framework and one of the propositions that I'm going to make to you is that the stories that are associated with our deepest moral intuitions are pragmatic truths.
And that you need pragmatic truths and you need objective truths.
And you need pragmatic truths because you don't just need to know what the world's made of.
You need to know what to do about the fact that the world's made out of things.
And because, you know, human beings are motoric creatures, we act in the world.
We act on the world.
And so what we need to know is, how is it that you should act on the world?
And that is not a question that can be addressed by objective methods.
Technically, right?
Because it's actually a value question.
What should you do?
Science, by its very methodology, refuses to answer such questions.
And, you know, people confuse the fact that science is value-free, sort of, with the idea that existence is value-free.
It's like that's philosophically primitive, I would say, because science was actually set up To get rid of the value, of the subjective value, in its technique.
So you can't say, well, we set this thing up to get rid of the value and look, all the value's gone.
It's like, there's no value.
No, no, no.
You put that domain out of the range of consideration.
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It's just a different It requires a different philosophy, a different outlook, different techniques, different tools, different methods of proof, all of these things.
And so part of what we're going to do, I'm going to use objective truth as much as I possibly can because I think that That a lot of what psychology as a science has been able to offer in the last hundred years is actually extraordinarily useful for elucidating some of the issues that we're going to discuss.
Because we really have made some progress in understanding the psyche.
You know, especially at a, I would say, at a biological slash behavioral level.
We've got some pretty solid information.
It's not perfect, but it's helpful.
Okay, so we're going to draw on a bunch of sources.
We're going to draw on stories.
We're going to draw on literature.
We're going to draw on philosophy.
We're going to draw on religion.
We're going to draw on mythology.
We're going to draw on biology and psychology.
There's this idea, which you should have learned about if you're a psychologist, called multi-method, multi-trait matrix.
This was invented by a guy back in the 1950s, I think it was Neil and Cronbach, a famous paper that was published in the 1950s.
Everyone is supposed to know it, no one ever pays any attention to it.
But what they were interested in was how do you know if, when you say that something exists, like let's say anger, does anger exist?
Well, the answer seems self-evident, yes.
Well, it's tricky, you know, because generally no one comes up to you and says anger.
You know, they tell you a little story where they use words relating to anger in the story and then you sort of derive what they mean by angry from the context.
And the context is important in defining the reality, right?
You don't know if the central idea, anger, can be pulled out of the context and then you can say well that's a thing like iron is a thing or like mercury is a thing.
You know, because maybe it's not.
Maybe it's a pattern or maybe it's something that's a convention or you know there may be all sorts of things that are associated with it.
One of Cronbach and Miele's fundamental claims was that in order to determine whether or not something existed, you had to be able to detect it using different methods.
Now it's tricky because it's not obvious what constitutes a different method, right?
So, you kind of have to make a judgement, but I would say you use a multi-method, multi-trait means of determining what's true with your senses.
How many do you have?
Six.
Because you have proprioception, right?
Why?
Why?
Well, let's say five for the sake of simplicity.
Why?
Why not one?
To increase the likelihood of it being true, you could see something but not be able to touch it.
That might be a mirage, maybe.
So you want multiple reasons for it to be pointing to the probability of it being true.
Yes, well that's exactly it.
So the sense idea is a really good one because you can see that senses use different modalities, right?
It's like obviously the eyes rely on electromagnetic radiation.
And the ears rely on vibrations in the air, and touch is really an atomic phenomena in some sense, you know, because you're feeling the outer surfaces of electrons with your electron surfaces, and there's taste, which is again a molecular level phenomena, and smell, and you know, so our idea kind of is, If all five of those things detect it, it's sufficiently real so that we can use it to guide our action and we won't be wrong.
So it's five dimensions.
You need a five-dimensional analysis.
And that's evolved.
So you might say, well, you know, let's call that a good estimate.
You need five ways of detecting something before you can be sure it's true.
Now, you know, when you're learning about experimental psychology, they tell you P is less than 0.05, right?
You use a measurement and then you determine whether the probability that that has manifested itself exceeds a certain level of chance.
If it does, then the thing exists.
But that's actually not right.
It's not right for experimental psychology, and experimental psychologists have known it since the late 50s.
You have to demonstrate that the damn thing exists multiple different ways.
Now, what constitutes a different way can be subject to debate.
It's a complicated thing to sort out, but you can kind of figure it out, right?
You know, maybe you use a physiological measurement and self-report, or something like that.
Or use self-report and other-report.
You know, and maybe you don't need five, but you probably need three, or something like that, you know, depending on them.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you a story, roughly speaking.
And I want to make the story evident at five or six different levels of analysis.
And I want to show you how the story is the same at all these levels of analysis.
Now, one of the potential flaws of that method is this.
So, Joseph Campbell, for example, he wrote about hero mythology, right?
Some of you have probably read The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
And one of the criticisms of Joseph Campbell, and people like him, is that they read the stories of multiple cultures.
But they have an a priori framework.
And because of the a priori framework, they only see what their theory tells them that they're going to see.
They don't look for the exceptions.
So it's a problem with pattern recognition, right?
You may be able to recognize patterns where they don't exist.
Now, my method could be criticized on that grounds, I think.
But, the way I've tried to protect myself against that was to make sure that I drew from enough diverse sources so that the probability that I would be able to tell a coherent story across all those different types of methods is vanishingly small.
Now, you're going to have to decide if you think that's true.
And I can tell you roughly the dimensions of analysis.
The ideas that I'm going to talk to you about I put into practice personally.
They work for me.
They work for the people that I've taught them to.
So those are family members often, but not only family members, lots of other people.
Because I'm also a clinician, right?
And so it seems to work quite nicely.
I have a lot of people write to me and tell me that the ideas have worked.
You know, so I've got multi-rater reliability there.
I think it's manifest biologically and I think it's manifest culturally and I think it's manifested in these very, very old stories and anthropologically and so forth.
So, you know, make up your own mind.
You can see.
You know, and I think the other thing, and I don't really know what to do, what to make of this, you know, sometimes you have an intuition of truth, right?
It's like maybe you're describing a problem to someone and they say, well this seems to be at the heart of it.
And they give you a formulation and it kind of goes click.
And you think, yeah!
That's how all those things hang together.
It's a pattern recognition mechanism.
It's an insight mechanism.
People generally have the feeling that when something like that happens that something of truth has been revealed.
Now, a very common response From the students I've had in these courses, is that I never tell anyone anything they don't already know.
So, and I think the reason for that is, and I'm hoping the reason is, is that what I'm outlining are archetypal structures.
You know, and I've drawn a lot of my work from Jung, who was very interested in archetypal structures.
And so what should happen, and I think it will happen, is when I tell you a story, you'll think, oh yeah, right, that's what that means.
And I see, and here is all the things that it explains.
And so you'll have this sense, and that's the You talked about your friend with the spiritual awakening.
Often, one of the cognitive phenomena that accompanies the spiritual awakening is the connection of many, many diverse phenomena into an overarching unity.
And you feel that as a radical simplification.
It's something like that.
A decrease in entropy or something like that.
It's a very, very powerful sensation.
So, I mean, there's other sources of What you might call spiritual experience as well, but that's certainly one of them.
And so you can see, you know, I'll tell you these stories, you can think, oh well, you know, how does that story manifest itself in your experience?
And that's a phenomenological level of truth, right?
So the phenomenologists, branch of philosophy, started by Heidegger, not exactly, but let's say extended As well as anyone extended it by Heidegger.
Heidegger thought that Western philosophy had gone wrong basically since the time of Socrates, which is, you know, quite a long time.
And he said that we became interested in what the world was made of and how we knew things, and what we should have been interested instead was the nature and quality of being.
And what he meant by being isn't the objective world.
What he meant by being was the manner in which you have experience.
And so there are elements of being that aren't objective elements.
And so I would say pain is a phenomenological reality, right?
It's not something… you can index it objectively, but the index is not the phenomena.
And you know, is your pain real?
See, this is a question for people who think there's no such thing as meaning.
Like, you try to argue yourself out of pain and see how far you get.
You might think, well, that's not the sort of meaning I meant.
It's like, you know, a negative meaning is a place to start, right?
Because if something's negative and it's real, it does imply that there's something positive that's real.
It might be harder to get a hold of.
At least it's not pain.
You know, so, but pain.
Descartes, and I'll close with this.
You guys can have a break.
Implemented a method he called radical doubt when he went on his philosophical journey.
And what Descartes looked for was one thing he couldn't doubt, because he was probably clinically depressed and he was just doubting everything.
It's like, how do I know the world isn't just a mirage made by an evil demon to obfuscate reality from me?
Well his conclusion was the one thing that he could not dispute was that he was and could think Now I don't think Descartes really meant what we meant by think.
I think he meant more what we would mean by experience.
Because thought has become a much more derely defined term since the time of Descartes.
So I don't think he meant I think therefore I am.
I think he meant something like I experience.
I have experience therefore I am.
But regardless of that, modern people think about it as thought.
Heidegger was different.
Heidegger basically said The one thing you can't dispute is that experience is your experience.
It exists.
It's almost by definition, right?
It's like the definition of exist.
And then he was interested in what the fundamental elements of existence were.
And they're not atoms, like the fundamental elements of the objective world.
They're more things like pain.
And for me that was the thing that stopped me from doubting.
It's like, I cannot doubt the existence of pain.
It seems real.
And I might say, it seems more real than anything else.
Now, you might say you don't believe that, but I would say, I don't care what you think you believe.
I'll watch you when you're in pain.
And every single one of your actions will indicate that you believe in it.
And not only that, that you can't NOT believe in it.
Right?
It's there, and it's there so much that… well, that's a meaning.
And so it's in that way that Heidegger, at least in part, thought of existence or experience as composed of meanings.
And so part of the reason that this course is called Maps of Meaning is because one of the things we're going to look at is the structure of meaning.
And we're going to start with negative meaning because, from my perspective, it's… look, you can doubt whether or not good exists, but once I'm done telling you about the things I know about human history, there won't be a single person in this room who thinks that evil doesn't exist.
And you might think that's a bloody horrible thing to learn, but it's not.
It's unbelievably useful because once you can establish something that you cannot deny, then you can move from that.
And I think you can hypothesize that if you're capable of detecting radical evil, I'll tell you about Unit 731 at some point, or you can look them up yourself.
I wouldn't recommend it, by the way.
Once you can identify radical evil and you think beyond a doubt that's reprehensible, there's no justification for that whatsoever, no matter what, whenever, well then you've got something to stand on and you can start thinking, well what's the absolute opposite of that then?
You know it might be, how is it that you could conduct yourself so that in your sphere of influence the probability that anything like that would ever happen is reduced to the absolute maximum?
Well, that's a reasonable moral question.
And I don't think it's something that you can dispense with, like a casual nihilism.
I don't think a nihilist can dispense with it.
Because even nihilists suffer.
Thank God for that.
You know?
It's their only source of potential salvation.
Sometimes they notice it.
Oh, I'm suffering about all this nihilism.
Maybe that indicates that there's something flawed in it.
It's always possible.
Okay, so let's take a break.
We'll take a break for… Oh, come back at… What time is it?
I want to make sure my clock… 2.58.
2.58?
Okay.
Come back at 3.15.
We'll see you there.
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