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Feb. 25, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:12:39
2016 Personality Lecture 08: Existentialism: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Social Hierarchy
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Okay, so we're actually going to take a step back historically.
We talked about Carl Rogers last time as a phenomenologist, so we started our brief foray into the ideas behind phenomenology, but now we're going to go back in time a bit, and we're going to talk about the end of the 19th century, and we're going to discuss Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in some detail.
And the reason we're going to do that is because those three men, I would say more than anyone else in the 19th century, laid the groundwork not only for what would become psychoanalysis and then later personality psychology and clinical psychology, but they also described the broader social, political and cultural situation that Modern people find themselves in now.
And their thought is exceedingly sophisticated, and it's really worth grasping because if you can get...
You know, we're going through these personality theories one at a time, and we're going to make forays into biology and neuropsychology.
You need a structure underneath that.
You need to understand a structure that's underneath all that to slot everything into, because that way you can understand it in more detail.
And so, partly because ideas develop historically, you know, so an idea is a seed and out of the seed other plants grow and so forth, and the plant grows and so forth and branches off.
If you can get back down to the origin point, then you can often understand the entire structure more straightforwardly.
And also, these three men, they're so brilliant that it's a joy to encounter their thinking, even though it's very, very subversive, seriously subversive.
So, we're going to start with this diagram, which you'll remember.
So, okay, so think about this from the Piagetian perspective.
Like, we made the point that as the child puts itself, let's say, together, It starts by practicing micro-routines, micro-motor routines, and those are accompanied by perceptual frameworks and also they're incorporated into a motivational value system because they're motivated actions.
And then the child practices sequencing those micro-personalities, we'll say, together to make ever more and more complex and ever more and more integrated macro-personalities.
And so that's basically what this diagram describes.
We were looking at it from an adult perspective, so, you know, if you're going to be a good person, you can decompose being a good person into sub-parts of being a good person, so being a good person is an abstract ideal, but as you move closer and closer to the point where the goodness is manifested in action, you move closer and closer to actual movements in the world.
And so the abstract category, good person, is actually made out of, you could think about it as a very complex melody of motor actions and perceptions.
Perception is very tightly linked to motor action because whenever you perceive anything you're doing it in part by actively investigating the world.
It's partly why your eyes are moving around all the time and if you're listening you move your head and, you know, to touch something you have to actively investigate it.
So it's always an activity of exploration.
Now, in some ways When you think about the child piecing its being together from the bottom up, you can think about that as a biological process unfolding.
You know, you can think of the child as crawling and then learning to walk as a biological process unfolding, but that's an oversimplification because Human beings exist from day one in a very, very social world, and so what that means is the way that those behaviors or sub-micro-personalities start to organize themselves is always under the influence of the society in which they're embedded.
And so, you know, Piaget talked about the child as having reflex Basic built-in reflexes at birth.
And that those reflexes are then elaborated up into more and more complex structures.
But you can think that even the elaboration of those basic reflexes, even right from the beginning, like there's a rooting and sucking reflex which you can elicit from a child by tapping on the side of its cheek when it's very newly born, and it'll search to try to put what's tapping in its mouth.
And that's part of the reflexive process, the built-in perceptual motor unit that allows the child to begin to suckle.
Now, the thing is, though, what it's suckling isn't a static and objective entity.
It's a person.
And part of breastfeeding is the establishment of a relationship, a complex relationship, because it's also not only a feeding relationship, it's a caring relationship, it's a relationship that's based on tactile interaction.
There can be nervousness associated with it, and often is, especially for a new mother.
It's a very complex, dynamic social act, and so what that means is that right from the beginning, in order for the baby to engage in that process properly, it has to Allow its initial reflexive movements to be modified by social necessity immediately.
So, for example, if a baby is breastfeeding, it can't bite.
And, you know, it doesn't have any teeth, so being bitten isn't necessarily a catastrophe, but it's not pleasant, and so what will happen if the baby bites the mother is that the mother will pull away and startle the baby, and then the baby will cry, and, you know, the mother will be at least startled by the error, and so the baby has to learn to It has to learn to be civilized, in some sense, right off the bat.
Now, you know, when Freud was talking about the process of socialization, he tended to concentrate more on toilet training, because he thought of that as the first major place where the id of the child, which Rogers would regard as the organismic experiential domain, is brought under control of the superego.
Right?
Because the baby, obviously, its fundamental biological function is to relieve itself, but that has to come under very, very strict social control.
And it's a complex form of learning, you know?
It's basically the acquisition of voluntary control over what was heretofore an involuntary reflex, essentially.
And so that can go well, or it can go badly.
And it can go very badly.
So I knew a family who had a daughter at one point.
And that daughter would only defecate in her diaper when she was three, so that meant she had full voluntary control of her bowel function, but there was no way she was going to participate in the social ritual that surrounded proper toileting.
There was a war going on, like a serious war, and that sort of thing happens, well, not infrequently, and of course you remember in the Crumb movie, the mother The boys accusing the mother of giving them enemas and her, of course, denying that any such thing happened, which was something that made both of them roll their eyes.
You know, and they all laugh, but it's really not particularly amusing.
So, anyways, my point is, is that even at the micro level, the manifestation of what we'll call micro personalities expands and organizes into an environment that's conditioned by social expectation.
Okay, so then—and this is something we haven't talked about before—one thing you might ask is, okay, where does the social expectation come from?
Now, that's a very complex question, because in some sense that's the same question as where does culture come from, and that's partly a complex question, because you have to take into account Evolutionary history, which provides the substrata for the development of culture, so that would be human biology, you have to take that into account, and then you have to take human history into account, and what you don't have to take into account is not clear, right?
Because it's very difficult to track the origins of the social routines that make up the fundamental social contract.
You know, we know how to behave properly, roughly speaking.
We have a set of expectations and a set of wants About the way that other people are going to behave with regards to us, and they return the favor.
And everyone is participating in this, and everybody basically knows it, unless they're very poorly socialized, and you can usually tell that right away.
You know, kids can tell that because if a three-year-old is playing with another three-year-old and one of them is poorly socialized and so maybe has the behavioral repertoire of a fairly badly behaved two-year-old, the other three-year-old, being socially sophisticated, will say, will not play with the first one.
So, even though they might be perfectly happy to play for a time with an actual two-year-old.
So, it doesn't take very long.
It's really at about the age of three that children are already sophisticated enough to have embodied the rules that constitute appropriate cultural behavior.
And those rules—or they're patterns, actually, they're not exactly rules for the child because the child couldn't explicitly state them, but they can act them out.
Now, you remember—now Piaget talked about this a fair bit, right, because he said that part of the way that the slightly larger micro-personalities, say, of a two-year-old are integrated into the broader social world is through games that are played with It's a negotiated sphere of action and perception that has a
particular goal, and the goal is defined by the players.
And the sphere of interaction is defined by the players, and so then if you're a good player what happens is that you become part of a higher order structure, and the higher order structure is the game.
So if you're playing soccer, all of a sudden, if you're civilized, what you do is you manifest those behaviors that are appropriate to playing soccer, and you subordinate—voluntarily subordinate—your individuality at that point to the higher order structure of the game that's a communal agreement, so it's a basic social contract.
And so you practice being part of basic social contracts by playing games, and you can do that with games that are, in some sense, relatively straightforward and regulated by strict conventions and articulated rules, and so that would be like a soccer game, or you can do it in a more complex way and a less A less structured and less articulated manner by engaging in dramatic play.
And so what children usually do when they're doing that is that they'll gather around a little group and they'll lay out the drama.
So the drama would be, we're going to simulate X. We're going to simulate a family.
And then everybody's assigned a role, and so you're supposed to act out your role, but exactly how you're supposed to act it out is left open during the game, so you can riff and improvise, and basically what children are doing When they're doing that, is acting out the family.
And, you know, because they need to get the family in their bones, because being a parent isn't a set of ideas about parenting, it's a set of behaviors.
It's a dance that you learn to have with your children and with your partner.
And it's very complicated, and the rules go far beyond what you could ever articulate.
You know, because you can ask yourself a question like, well, how should you discipline a child?
Well, first of all, You can argue about that forever.
But second of all, you cannot actually elaborate a set of principles that will guide your behavior in every situation where a child is likely to disrupt the social circumstance.
So you have to be smarter than you can say in order to be good at doing something as complicated as disciplining a child.
Because discipline also means encouraging, right?
Because Part of discipline is, well, you shouldn't do those things, but another part of it is you should definitely do more of those things, and so it's the inculcation of a moral code, and a lot of that's done through non-verbal behavior and through providing a role model for spontaneous imitation and all sorts of things that aren't verbal.
Okay, now, so Piaget talked about the game.
And then you could think that games become more and more complex and more and more abstract, and more and more like real life as you mature, until maybe the games transform into what sociologists would refer to as roles.
So the role you're playing at the moment, at least in principle, is student.
And, you know, it's a game.
And it's a game because it's a fiction in some sense, you know, it's a fiction, it's a dramatic fiction in some sense.
The only reason that it exists as a role is because society is structured in such a way that enables this to, enables you to do what you're doing and to live at the same time.
So it's not exactly adaptation to the normal, you know, to the natural world in any sense of the In any sense of the word.
But it's also real life, or maybe it's almost as close to real life as you ever get, because almost everything that modern people do, and maybe this is true for a long time into the past, is game-like in its structure.
So the games just get more and more and more, they're more and more and more encompassing in some sense, but You can almost say that it never comes to the point where what you're doing is no longer playing a game.
Now that's a bit of an oversimplification, because there are games and metagames, but we won't talk about the metagames at the moment.
Okay.
So, now, you can understand sort of some of the lower order games, and you can even understand some of the higher order roles.
Like, you could basically articulate in some sense what it means to be a student.
But if you go up the hierarchy, you know, because good person, a subset of good person could be good student, you can kind of articulate what it means to be a good student, although You can't fully articulate it.
But if you go at levels above that, like be a good citizen or be a good person, it gets more and more difficult to fully articulate because, of course, it's more and more abstract and it encompasses more and more territory.
And so by the time you're at the top of the hierarchy, so to speak, be a good person, well, it's a much more complex phenomena than you can articulate.
It can't be fully articulated.
Now, I want to read you something that Nietzsche said.
Now, you have to listen to this carefully because there's some very interesting things about the way Nietzsche writes.
He writes aphoristically, and an aphorism is a short statement, often only a sentence, but more typically a paragraph, that's very, very densely packed with ideas.
And I think you could say in some sense that if you read Nietzsche, the stuff that I'm going to read you right now is from Beyond Good and Evil, that every single sentence has an idea in it.
And it's often an original idea.
And that's a remarkable accomplishment.
I mean, I've often gone through books and marked—I usually fold the top of the page over—marked where I think there's an idea worth keeping.
It's an idea I haven't run into before, so it's an original idea.
And I would say, in the typical book I read, there's none of them.
There might be one or two.
But with Nietzsche there's probably twenty on a page.
And so, it makes it—he's packed a tremendous amount of information into a very, very small space, and one of the things—and he tried to do that, and there was a bunch of reasons.
One was, his health wasn't very good, although he was an early stage genius.
He was a full professor in Germany, I think when he was 22 or 23, which is impossible, because you don't become a full professor, especially 130 years ago, 140 years ago, in a German university, At the age of 23, it just isn't possible, but he was a spectacular genius.
But his health failed him, and so he had a very difficult time writing.
And so what he did was spend an awful lot of time thinking and a very short period of time writing.
And so what that meant was that he would take a tremendous amount of thought, genius-level thought, and then compress it into, like, a single sentence or a single paragraph.
And he said that he liked to philosophize with a hammer and, in some sense, You know, Matt, you know that hierarchy that I just showed you?
You know, we talked about the idea that if you hit something disruptive in your life, that the magnitude of your response is proportionate to the elevation of the level, right?
It's much more It's more damaging to be accused of being a bad person, you know, seriously, than it is for someone to complain about, you know, which side of the plate you happen to put the fork on.
So, and I think you can say that you can sort of think of those Nested hierarchies of value as nested hierarchies of—they're almost like maps in a sense.
They're little units of ways that you know how to maneuver in the world.
And what that means is that as you go up the hierarchy, the map is larger and larger and more comprehensive.
And so if you blow out someone's map of, like, which fork to put on the table, that's not so bad.
They can just rectify that in no time flat.
It leaves 99.99% of their personality intact.
But if you fail a crucial exam, for example, and part of the reason that you're a student is because you want to go to medical school, that'll blow out like 50 or 60% of your personality, or at least it'll feel that way.
And that's because what's happening is that the structure that you use to regulate the relationship between you and the world It has become damaged at a high level, and that invalidates—like, if you're not a student, if you're not a good student anymore, then all of the sub-factors that make up being a good student might be invalid, and, you know, you might have put a lot of effort into being a good student.
And so if all of a sudden you're not that, you have to ask yourself, well, what exactly am I, and where are all the errors?
And that's a very—that can be a—well, that's an extraordinarily difficult cognitive The problem, because you've built that structure, who knows, you know, over what period of time.
It might be fifteen years or something like that, and you've been practicing building that structure.
And it's a huge part of your identity, because someone might say, well, what are you even?
And you'd say a student.
You know, they might say, what do you do?
But they could easily say, what are you?
I'm a student.
Well, if you're not a student, at least insofar as you define student, then just exactly what are you?
All right.
So Nietzsche, you know, when he packed a lot of information into a sentence or a paragraph, you have to be very careful reading him, and Jung is like this too, because he'll throw some information at you that's packed into a paragraph, and it'll be the kind of information that disrupts high-level structures.
You won't even notice it, and it's because he's so subversive.
And he wanted to do that.
It was an aim of his.
He had his reasons to do it.
He would say that you have to be broken down To nothing before you can be rebuilt.
So it's like a trip to the underworld thing.
And I suppose in many ways that's what philosophy is.
You don't learn a new principle without allowing old principles to disappear because you can't have the new principle and the old principle at the same time.
So almost always any radical learning involves the destruction of old habits of action and perception.
And that's a kind of death.
It's an abstract death, you know?
But that doesn't make it not painful.
And the thing is, if the abstract death is of sufficient intensity, it can drive people to suicide because they regard killing themselves as easier than making the reparation, you know, facing the anxiety and the suffering and going through the intolerably difficult task of retooling.
They may well regard that as more emotionally threatening than death.
And so—and that's not that rare, you know.
I mean, suicide is rare, but it's not that rare.
So, you know, and it's certainly a behavior that everyone is—I suspect everyone here has known someone who was touched by suicide in some way, you know.
It might not be your family member, even your extended family member, but the probability that you know someone who knows someone who committed suicide is extremely, extremely likely.
So Nietzsche is a very dangerous, dangerous thinker.
The only person I know who kind of approaches him in that regard is Jung, and Jung is actually less troublesome because a lot of what Dostoevsky offers is destruction.
It's intelligent, brilliant destruction, but he doesn't really offer a solution.
He sort of sketches out the possibilities of a solution, and he died young.
And then in many ways what happened was that Jung picked up where Nietzsche left off and tried to solve the problems that Nietzsche left So it was Nietzsche, for example, in some sense along with Dostoevsky who really definitively announced the death of God At the end of the nineteenth century, and that left people in some ways bereft of belief, and we're going to talk about why that's so important in a moment.
What Jung was doing was trying to—well, he was trying to rescue the father from the underworld in a sense.
He tried to go back to the religious traditions that Nietzsche had described as fatally anachronistic and demolished by the claims of science.
He attempted to go back To those religious traditions and reassess them from a psychological perspective to pull back the necessary meaning that was embedded in them so that people could reunite with their culture and in principle not be so prone to pathological belief systems like ideology that tend to rush in where there's a gap.
You know, and Nietzsche said very clearly, and Dostoevsky knew this as well, by the end of the 19th century, is that That the death of God would mean that people would turn en masse to rationalistic ideologies and that would be murderous.
They knew that was coming, and that's an amazing prediction.
It really is an amazing prediction.
It just shows you how thoroughly they understood the structure.
Okay, so I'm going to read you something by Nietzsche, and then we're going to return to the hierarchy so that you can kind of understand something deeper about the way the hierarchy is structured.
Okay.
Now he's talking about philosophical ideas here, and he's actually talking about articulated ethics.
So one way that you might think about philosophy is that philosophers originate articulated moral principles.
And that is often the way that people think about especially moral philosophy.
It's like, it's the philosophers who come up with the ideas.
But that isn't what Nietzsche believed.
Here's what he said instead.
Separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving.
They grow up in connection and relationship with each other.
However suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent.
Okay, so, a very interesting idea.
So the first idea that he's putting forward is that The best way to think about a philosophical system, say a philosophical system of ethics, is as if its different statements are animals related to one another in an ecosystem.
So he has a biological metaphor, in some sense, for the emergence of a philosophical system.
It's quite an interesting way of thinking, of course, and it makes sense because If a philosophical system of ethics, which is a philosophical system that tells you how and why you should behave a certain way, is about how you should act and you're a biological being, then of course it only makes sense that the concepts themselves, which are guides to actions, can logically be considered Biological entities.
They're abstracted biological entities, but they still have the same nature as biological entities.
And that means, according to Nietzsche, that they're subject to the same rules.
Now, this is the sort of place where he foreshadows Freud, deeply.
So, Nietzsche says, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members Of the fauna of a continent.
This is betrayed in the end by the circumstance.
However unfailingly, the most diverse philosophers always fill in, again, a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies.
Under an invisible spell, they always resolve once more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they may field themselves with their critical or systematic wills.
Something within them leads them, something impels them in definite order, the one after the other, to wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas.
Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a far-off ancient common household of the soul, out of which these ideas formerly grew.
Philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order." Okay, so here's the idea.
There's two fundamental ideas that are embedded in this which actually need to differentiate.
Alright, I'm going to read you another I'm going to read you another section that illuminates the first one.
It's gradually became clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of, namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.
And moreover, that the moral or immoral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.
Okay, so this is a very radical statement, because what Nietzsche is saying is that philosophies, even when they declare themselves rational, are deeply personal, and they're also necessarily embedded within a motivational structure that is either pro-life or anti-life, something like that.
So there's no value-free philosophizing.
What there is is the expression of biologically and culturally conditioned being, which is conditioned by, let's say, the same sort of fundamental forces that Freud described in the biological realm, and then that's conditioned by the cultural processes that he just discussed in relationship to Piaget, and then what the philosopher does is observe that all of those things are happening, allow that to be articulated, and confuse that with his own thought.
It's a brilliant idea.
Now, here's a way of thinking about it.
Now, one of the things Piaget said was that once children start to play games when they're young, collective games, you can watch the children play the collective games, like maybe eight kids are playing marbles or something like that, and then you can take the young kids out of the game and you can ask them what the rules are, and what'll happen is you'll get a diverse set, a diverse and paradoxical set, of articulated rules.
And what that means is that the children can play the game when they're in the game, and when they're in the context of all the other people, because in some sense the game is embedded in pieces in all of them, and as long as they're all there, that all works.
But if you pull the child away, they don't have the intellectual wherewithal to describe the patterns of behavior that make up the game.
And that's only to say that they know things that they can't say.
Because you might say, well, the rules of the game come first, and then the game But that's wrong.
It's the game comes first and only after that do the rules emerge.
And of course there's a, you know, there's a reciprocal relationship between them because once the rules are somewhat articulated then the game becomes more structured, you know, and then the rules can become more structured and so on.
So the articulation changes the rules.
What Nietzsche is saying is that the same thing applies to societies.
He says, like, insofar as you can consider society a collective game played by millions of people over vast spans of time, it's a game of games in some sense.
And it emerged from the bottom up.
It emerged out of biological impulses and interpersonal and social interactions conditioning and shaping everyone's behavior and perception.
And that happened way before anyone could articulate what those rules were.
Now, remember, when Nietzsche was writing, there was no real sense of how old the earth was or how old the universe was.
I mean, people thought—even the radical people thought maybe in terms of hundreds of thousands of years.
You know, now we know that the universe is fourteen billion years old and that the earth is four billion years old and that life has been Plentiful on the earth for 3.5 billion years, you know.
So the historical context within which we've originated has expanded by orders of magnitude since the last 19th century.
And so then what you think that means is that the way that our games have been organized It stretches impossibly back in time.
Now, I already told you, I believe, the story about lobster dominance hierarchies, right?
So even lobsters—that's four hundred million years ago—lobsters array themselves in a social space, and they regulate each other, and that means the lobsters essentially have a lobster society.
And, you know, each lobster has biological predispositions that are quite The lobster is quite a deterministic creature, but nonetheless the way that those biological predispositions manifest themselves is conditioned and shaped by the social surrounding.
And so you think, well, lobsters started to play games 400 million years ago, and, you know, as we've taken the tremendously long evolutionary journey across that time, We've been playing social games the whole time, and that means that the way that we interact with each other has evolved,
and it's even shaped the way our biology manifests itself, because that's how old culture is, and then out of that as we became more capable of abstraction, and maybe that's, you know, that's something that really took off probably seven million years ago, with modern human beings emerging about 150,000 years ago, because we We separated from the common ancestor of human beings and chimpanzees about seven million years ago.
You can tell that by doing analysis of genetic differences.
So the brain expanded very rapidly after that point and our culture became more and more conscious and articulated and complex and larger and more technological, you know, so it became In some ways more dependent on social norms and less dependent on deterministic biological predispositions.
But we've still been doing that for a very long time.
There's good evidence that, you know, we started using fire about two million years ago.
Forgive me if I told you this already, but, you know, if you look at a human being and you look at a chimpanzee, there's a bunch of things you see that are very different morphologically.
The chimp is much shorter, much, much wider, and way more powerful.
So, like, a normal male chimp is about six times as strong as the strongest Olympic athlete.
So, don't mess with chimps.
They'll tear you apart.
They're really, really strong and dangerous.
So, but the chimp is shaped sort of like this.
You know, they have a huge gastrointestinal system, roughly speaking, and the reason for that is mostly what they eat is leaves and leaves have no caloric content and so they have to eat immense numbers of leaves and leaves are hard to digest so they have to chew them like mad so the typical chimp sits around eight hours a day chewing and then They have this tremendously long gastrointestinal system because it takes that long to extract any nutrients out of leaves.
Well, we circumvented that, man, as soon as we invented fire, and fire allowed us to outsource our digestion.
Because if you cook most things—vegetables, but more importantly meat—if you cook them, they become much more bioavailable, and it takes much less energy to digest them, so that way you can shrink your gut and grow your brain.
And so, that's apparently what we did, because here we are, you know, relatively slim, at least compared to chimpanzees.
And so fire popped up two million years ago.
It's a real cultural revolution.
But, you know, that's so old, that cultural revolution, that it completely reshaped our bodies.
And so this interplay between biology and culture has been going on for an unimaginably long period of time.
And it conditions everything we do.
Here's a complicated idea.
Okay, so imagine a wolf pack.
Now a wolf pack is a pretty complicated social group.
It's a fair bit like a primordial human group, which is why dogs have been with us for 25,000 years.
Maybe they were wolves that first started to follow us around and scavenge, or more likely, I think, Someone went out—some primordial hunter went out hunting, killed a wolf female, found the pups, and brought one home for the children to play with.
You know, and that was the origin of the dog.
I think it was something like that, because dogs are basically genetically identical with wolves.
Now, the thing is, is we can get along with dogs.
And the reason we can get along with dogs is because dogs have a social organization—you could call it a dominance hierarchy—that's a fair bit like the human social organization.
And so, you can see that part of what it means to be human is the same thing that it means to be a pack animal, like a dog, or a pack animal like our domesticated animals, like horses and cows, for example, which we can domesticate partly because they're social.
So some of the structure of our social organization is the same sort of structure that an animal dominance hierarchy has, like a chimpanzee dominance hierarchy, for example.
And so, we know that chimpanzees and other primates, monkeys for example, are acutely aware of the levels of hierarchy in their social structure.
And there are, I think it's vervet monkeys, this is a very funny experiment.
So imagine that the top vervet monkeys are like celebrity monkeys, you know, and the bottom vervet monkeys are like, you know, dissolute street people.
And so, Then you take some pictures of dissolute street people who are just at the bottom of the hierarchy and you take some pictures of celebrities and you show pictures to a human audience and the human audience will look at the celebrities longer.
Well, if you take the vervet monkeys and you take photographs of the top-ranking vervet monkeys and the bottom vervet monkeys and you show them to vervet monkeys, then the vervet monkeys will look at the top-ranking vervet monkey photographs More than the bottom-ranking vervet monkey photographs.
So, in some sense, they're transfixed by the individuals who are higher up in the social order.
And that makes sense, right?
Because what you should feel, especially in a fairly aggressive dominance hierarchy, what you should feel the closer you are to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, the closer what you should feel for whatever's at the top of the dominance hierarchy, it should be closer and closer to awe.
Now, when people feel awe, they get chills running up and down their back, their neck.
Well, the reason that happens is because it's an atavism.
It's a hangover from the time that when you were threatened by something awe-inspiring, let's say a snake or a bear or something like that, Your hair—your fur would stand up, and the reason for that is so that you look bigger.
And you still see this happening all the time with cats, right?
Two cats will—normally, cats face each other this way, right?
But if they start to fight, they turn sideways, and that's so they each look bigger, and then they puff up their fur and their tail, and that's to show the other cat that they're really a lot bigger than the cat first thought.
Now, of course, they're both doing that, so it's a little bit Pointless, but they're just cats, so, you know, you can give them a break.
But the point is that they pilo erect.
And that's the same thing that happens, for example, when you're listening to very powerful music and it deeply affects you and you get chills.
It's like the hair stands up on the back of your neck.
And that's a signaling of awe.
Now, the reason you should feel awe towards something that's higher up in the dominance hierarchy is because that thing has power.
Like, well, there's more than one reason.
A. That thing has power.
You better be careful of it because it will put you in your place and fast.
And part of the reason the dominance hierarchy exists is so that Everybody knows their place and they don't have to be reminded of it by being half-killed on a regular basis.
You know, so maybe you're nine on a scale of one being the top.
Maybe you're number nine.
It's not so good.
But number nine and not hurting is a lot better than number nine and lying there bleeding on the ground.
And so what happens with dominance hierarchies is they usually arrange themselves in part by power, but by no means only in power.
Everybody knows where they are and pretty much everybody stays there.
And that even happens over multiple generations, say, in complex primate dominance troops.
Status is heritable.
So, you know, there's not much of a leap between that and heritable monarchies among human beings.
It's a reflection of, you know, it's much more complex among human beings because it's articulated and structured.
But it's the same basic thing.
Now, Nietzsche's point was—so now imagine—now, here's another problem.
So, imagine that—okay, so you've got a dominance hierarchy, and it's fairly stable.
And one of the things you want to do is climb to the top of the dominance hierarchy, and the reason you want to do that, there's all sorts of reasons.
High-quality maids, that's the primary reason.
That's particularly true in humans if you're male, because males are much more differential reproducers than females, which means a lot of males fail to reproduce completely, and some reproduce a lot, whereas the typical woman reproduces at least some.
So, that means competition is more intense among men, and that's part of the reason why dominance hierarchies tend to be tilted towards male power, because competition means more to them.
The outcome is more crucial.
So, now part of what happens is that as people compete within the dominance hierarchy, what they're doing is to try to figure out who it is that is fit to be on top.
Now, you might think that that's a matter of power.
You know, in fact, Your basic social, lefty social constructionists would have you believe that that was all there is to it, is that the whole dominance hierarchy is nothing but a power system, and the people on top are there because they have power, and what's there is power, and by that they mean the ability to enforce their will on other people.
Well, that's a dopey theory, and the reason for that is that it's unidimensional.
You know, we know that people are multifaceted.
There's no single motivation that's king.
You know, for Freud it was sex and aggression.
And, like, if you're going to come up with a couple of potent candidates, those are two.
But there's lots of other ones.
People are playful, and play is a primary biological circuit.
You know, we suffer.
We're hungry.
We're thirsty.
We're affiliative.
Like, there's a lot of biological necessity Driving the makeup of our personalities and our biological sub-personalities, and to arbitrarily call one of them the source of something as complex as social organization, it's a false form of monotheism.
It's a crazy idea, and it's the kind of idea that only people who really don't like to think would have.
Because once you come up with that idea—it's all power—you don't have to think anymore.
Someone can say to you, well, why is complex phenomena X the way it is?
Why is the economy arranged the way it is?
Well, it's so that the people at the top can maintain their power.
Well, yeah.
Sure, but maybe that accounts for 10% of the reason.
It doesn't get close to 100%.
There's lots of reasons why hierarchies are structured the way they are, and sheer physical force is one of them, but it's unstable.
So, Franz de Waal, who was watching chimps organize their dominance hierarchies in the Arnhem Zoo in Holland, Noted quite quickly that it was fairly typical, or at least possible, for the meanest, ugliest, strongest male chimp to be the dominant guy.
Sometimes it was the chimp who learned to pick up a garbage can and bwack the hell out of it with a stick because that intimidated his enemies, you know, so there's a bit of creativity there.
But what De Waal found was that the stable hierarchies were never run by barbarian chimp dictators.
And the reason for that was that coalitions of other males would take them out.
Because, you know, you think, well, if you're one antisocial aggressive male, and you're tough, it's like, okay, you're tough, but three lesser, friendlier males who are bound together in a friendship pact, which chimpanzees form quite intensely, it's like, as soon as that guy turns his back or has a bad day or gets hurt, they're going to jump in there and tear him to pieces, and that's exactly what happened.
So what de Waal found was that the stabler chimpanzee dominance hierarchies were run, usually by males, who were affiliative and gregarious, who remembered their social obligations—so that meant with regards to their friendship network—and who were also very good to the females and the infants in the troop, even if they weren't his.
And the idea there is that power is an unstable basis for the maintenance of a dominance hierarchy across time.
Because in some sense, even among chimps, you have to have the consent of the governed.
Because you'll get a revolution otherwise.
And so, you know, you're going to get a revolution if you put people or animals in a situation where they have nothing to lose.
And so what that means is there are constraints On how you can act while you try to move up the dominance hierarchy system, because if you're too aggressive and selfish and you're not grooming anyone else and you're not communicating with the other creatures in the troop, they're going to gang up on you and take you down.
And so, if you're going to maneuver your way up the troop, you have to do it in a manner that's civilized enough So that you don't get everyone against you.
And so what it means is that to maneuver up a power hierarchy, especially a complex power hierarchy, you have to be a lot more than powerful.
So, okay, now.
So now we've got this idea that there are principles governing the movement of creatures up a dominance hierarchy, even among the animals.
And one of the defining characteristics of One of the characteristics that necessity makes delimit that process is that, over time, the troop can't let anybody climb the dominance hierarchy who will destabilize the whole dominance hierarchy.
Because then that's it.
Game over.
So at the very least, you have to learn how to climb up the hierarchy so that you don't destabilize it while you climb.
Because otherwise you get to the top and there's nothing left.
Well, and animals know this.
They know this instinctively.
So, for example, when wolves go at it, you know, first they puff up and they growl at each other and they put up their shoulders, and, like, they get more and more aggressive until attack is imminent, and often one of them will back off.
But there's no fighting.
No one gets damaged.
And so that's the typical situation.
It's like one says, yeah, okay, you know, I'm out of here.
And God only knows why that is.
Often I suspect the wolf with the higher serotonin level wins because it has less negative emotion, and serotonin levels go up as you move up the dominance hierarchy.
Now and then they'll go into—you know, they'll actually have a fight, but the fight usually doesn't last very long, and then the loser will roll over, show its throat to the winner, which is quite a behavior because wolves tear the throats out of their prey, and the top wolf will back off.
And, you know, you think about it, that's unbelievably sophisticated morality.
You know, there's echoes in there of the New Testament injunction to love your enemy, because that's exactly what the wolf is doing.
And, you know, it doesn't know this because it can't articulate the rule.
But what it's doing is acting as if even the thing that attacked you is valuable in its own right if it's part of your troop.
And, you know, you can see there the ancient biological origins of the idea of the equality and value of each individual.
So these things have deep, deep, deep roots.
They're not arbitrary, and no one invented them, and that's exactly what Nietzsche is saying here.
To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well and wise to first ask oneself, what morality do they or does he aim at?
Accordingly, I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy, but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge and mistaken knowledge as an instrument.
But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man, with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as inspiring genie or as demons, will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each of them would have only been too glad to look will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each of them would have only been too glad to look upon itself So what is he saying there?
Well, you know, Nietzsche makes this explicit in passages that are related to this one.
He viewed the human being as a collection of sub-souls.
And the sub-souls were grounded in their existence in biological underpinnings.
And that was the case for every human being and that made us roughly similar.
It certainly made our groups roughly similar.
And so, each of these biological subsystems, conceptualized as a sub-soul, was something that had its own viewpoint, had its own rules, had its own games, and they'd jockey for precedence.
Now, you know that, because sometimes you're sitting there reading, and you're trying to concentrate on a higher-order goal, like completing your classes, and, you know, some biologically determined subsystem pops up and says, you know, this would be an excellent time to go have a coffee.
You know, and you might do everything you can to not allow that thing to take over, but often it does, and often that's despite what you think you might actually want to do, and then later you're all upset about it because you've procrastinated yet again.
But, you know, Nietzsche viewed the psyche as a place—you could almost think of yourself as a set of—it's like your brain is a set of animals.
And the animals are all dependent on one another, but each animal needs to be boss from time to time, and each animal wants to be boss more often than it should be.
And then, you know, the higher order cortical systems are there to figure out how to sequence all of these other animals so that they all get what they need, without interfering with each other, across large spans of time, in the presence of many other people, in a manner that's sustaining.
So it's very, very complicated.
Okay, now, so let's go back to the hierarchy.
So, you have the hierarchy, and over time—now, remember, this hierarchy stays there for a very long period of time.
And remember as well that the people who climb to the top of the hierarchy are much more likely to leave offspring than the people who don't.
And so then what that means is that the hierarchy, in part, is one of the primary selection forces operating on humanity.
And what that means is that we evolve towards the thing that can most successfully climb the dominance heart.
And so that means that we evolve towards the thing that has the best probability of ruling properly.
And that that's not just cultural.
It's cultural because it's the continual interplay between cultural and biology going back, we'll say, 400 million years or more.
Okay, but it's even more complicated than that.
And this is one of the things that you have to understand if you really want to understand what Nietzsche meant by the death of God.
Because that's his most famous pronouncement.
God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
Now, so he wasn't announcing that in triumph.
He was announcing it in terror.
Okay, now, imagine this.
So as human society becomes more complex, and as our brains become larger and larger, so that we can track larger social organizations, and we can organize more complex communities, What happens is that heretofore isolated tribes of people come together, and then they have to engage in conflict and negotiation, and partly what they're in conflict about is what is the way that you should act, and what should the values be.
Now there's an old mythological idea that the gods fight in heaven to see who is the dominant god.
Well, you can imagine all of these individual tribes, they had their ideals, and those were Creatures of their imagination, but those were imagined representations of proper behavioral patterns, and they saw those as transcendent and superordinate.
And so then tribe A would come into contact with tribe B, and the gods would clash, And out of that, and all the death and destruction that went with it, the two tribes would integrate, and maybe that would take, you know, hundreds of years, and the religious system that sat above that, which was the representation of the dominance hierarchy, would also transform.
So you take tribe A, and you take tribe B, and then you take tribe C, and then you take tribe D, and they all accumulate across time and sort out and articulate and represent all of their beliefs.
What happens is that this tribe has a game, and this tribe has a game, and this tribe has a game, and then if you put all those games together, they tilt so that a metagame emerges out of it.
It's like, if it's fortunate, the best of all three games gets put together in a larger game.
And it has to be the best, because otherwise it won't work.
The thing will fall apart, right?
Because if your family unit isn't functional, It'll disperse, you know, and maybe people will die because of it.
It has to be iteratable.
It has to be playable across time without falling apart from internal pressure and without getting wiped out from the outside.
So it's very tightly constrained.
So then let's say this happens over tens of thousands of years.
We could say, well, it happened in the Middle East, because we know that.
As Mesopotamia came together, for example, it was the aggregation of multiple tribes and all of the gods of those tribes.
And we know the Mesopotamians organized all those gods into one god.
His name was Marduk.
And that the story that they tell about the aggregation of the gods into one is the story of the gods getting together and voting on which of them should be at the top.
And then we know that the Mesopotamian emperor was charged with the responsibility of acting out that top god, and that that's what made him a good emperor.
And he got reminded of that every year at the New Year's ceremony.
He had to tell all the ways that he hadn't been a good Marduk, and then he'd get punished for it, and then they would re-enact the battle of the gods and recreate this Marduk character.
Okay, so you can understand how that might have come about.
Now you could say that the idea of that emergent ideal That wasn't rational.
It was the consequence of conflict and cooperation in the real world across time.
The representations of that were, you know, we might think about them as narrative representations or, if they're deep enough, even as mythology.
You could think about those as the soil from which religious presuppositions emerge.
And so what happens is that what you have at the top of the dominance hierarchy as your representation of the good person It's no different in its totality than the idea of the sovereign god that has emerged across thousands and thousands of years of human history.
So the whole structure has this thing at the top, and it's regarded in imagination as divine.
It's the consequence of the battle of representations.
Of morality, in imagination, across thousands and thousands of years.
And that's a reflection of the actual conflict and restructuring of societies across all that time.
So then you have this thing at the top.
So we could say, in the West, in Western Europe, that thing at the top is Christ, and that's the dying and revivifying hero.
We talked about reasons for that.
That's the thing that can go to the underworld and then come back up.
Okay, that's at the top.
What happens when it disappears?
Well, we'll turn to Dostoevsky for that.
This is from Notes from Underground.
So this is someone who's in the underground.
And that's where you go when your value systems collapse.
I'm a sick man.
I'm a spiteful man.
I'm an unattractive man.
I believe my liver is diseased.
However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do not know for certain what ails me.
I don't consult a doctor for it and never have, although I have a respect for medicine and doctors.
Besides, I'm extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine anyway.
I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious.
No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite.
That you will probably not understand.
Well, I understand it, though.
Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I'm mortifying, in this case, by my spite.
I'm perfectly well aware that I cannot pay out the doctors and extract revenge by not consulting them.
I know better than anyone that by all this I'm only injuring myself and no one else.
But still, if I don't consult a doctor, it's from spite.
My liver is bad.
Well, let it get worse.
Now, he's a civil servant.
A low-ranking civil servant.
And he's retired because he got a little bit of inheritance.
He says, when petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them.
And I felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy.
I almost always succeeded.
For the most part, they were all timid people.
Of course, they were petitioners.
But you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?
Well, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not spiteful but not even embittered, and that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it.
I was lying when I just said now that I was a spiteful official.
I was lying from spite.
I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful.
I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that.
I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements.
I knew that they had been swarming in me my whole life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them out.
Would not let them, purposefully, purposefully would not let them out.
They tormented me until I was ashamed.
They drove me to convulsions and sickened me at last.
At last, how they sickened me.
Now, you're not fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I'm asking your forgiveness for something.
I'm sure you're fancying that.
However, I assure you I do not care if you are.
It was not only that I could not become spiteful I did not know how to become anything, neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.
Now I'm living my life out in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteless and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously.
And it's only the fool who becomes anything.
A direct person I regard as the real normal man.
As his tender mother nature wished to see him, when she graciously brought him into being on the earth.
I envy such a man till I'm green in the face.
He's stupid.
I'm not disputing that.
But perhaps the normal man should be stupid.
How do you know?
Perhaps it's very beautiful, in fact.
And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute self-consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature, but out of a retort.
This is also almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too.
This retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis, the normal man, that with all his exaggerated self-consciousness he genuinely thinks himself a mouse and not a man at all.
It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse.
Well, the other is a man.
And therefore, et cetera, et cetera.
And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse.
No one asks him to do so.
And that's an important point.
Now let us look at this mouse in action.
Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted.
And it almost always feels insulted.
And it wants to revenge itself, too.
There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in the man of nature and truth.
The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in the man of nature and truth.
For through his innate stupidity, the latter, the normal man, looks upon his revenge as justice, pure and simple.
Well, in consequence of his acute self-consciousness, the mouse does not believe in any justice of it at all.
To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge, apart from one The one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it, so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there are inevitably works around it,
up around it, a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it until their healthy sides ache.
Of course, the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw and with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, and creep ignominiously into its mouse hole.
There, in its nasty, stinking, underground home, our insulted, crushed, and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant, and, above all, everlasting spite.
For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add of itself details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination.
It will be ashamed of its imaginings, yet it will recall it all.
It will go over and over every detail.
It will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might have happened, and will forgive nothing.
Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I dare say, will not even scratch itself.
its deathbed it will recall it all over again with interest accumulated over all the years.
Now, Now, the idea that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were developing was that the dawning consciousness in Western society of the mythological substructure of the value system the idea that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were developing was that the dawning consciousness in Western society of the mythological substructure of the value system and
And the impossibility of conceptualizing that or proving the validity of its structure from scientific means doomed the people who were encapsulated in that system to formal disbelief in it.
And what they concluded from that was exactly what Dostoevsky just described, which is that someone with that level of acute self-consciousness and cultural self-knowledge would immediately become fragmented beyond belief, unable to act.
unhappy, resentful, and dangerous.
And both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in their works, and Dostoevsky developed this idea most particularly in a novel called The Devils, said that once that you had got to that point, which was inevitable if you were smart enough to take seriously what was going on, it was only a tiny step to identification with a murderous ideology.
Now, some of the existentialists started to work up what you might regard as a solution to this problem.
And I'm going to read Kierkegaard's solution.
It is now, Kierkegaard was a Danish existential philosopher and he lived earlier than Nietzsche.
And he was, in some sense, you might think about him as the first modern psychologist.
He was the first person to conceptualize, for example, of the separate entity of anxiety and despair.
It is now about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author.
I remember it quite clearly.
It was on a Sunday.
Yes, that's it, a Sunday afternoon.
I was seated as usual out of doors at the cafe in the Fredericksburg garden.
I'd been a student for half a score of years.
Although never lazy, all my activity nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality and for which I perhaps even have a little genius.
I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to, so I sat there and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought.
Among other thoughts, I remember these.
You are going on, I said to myself, to become an old man, without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything.
On the other hand, Wherever you look around you in life, and in literature, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and who are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing.
And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence easier and easier, yet more and more significant.
And what are you doing?
Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was smoked out, and a new one had to be lit.
So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind.
You must do something, but inasmuch with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become.
You must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.
This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community.
For when all combine in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too great, then there is only one want left, though it is not yet a felt want when people will want difficulty.
Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it already was, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Same idea in different words.
A traveller, this is Nietzsche, and this is part of the development of his answer to the conundrum that he raised.
A traveller who had seen many countries and peoples in several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere, and he answered, men are inclined to laziness.
Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice, they are all timid, they hide behind customs and opinions.
At bottom, however, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality.
He knows it, but he hides it like a bad conscience.
Why?
From fear of his neighbor who insists on convention and veils himself with it.
But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbor and to think and act herd fashion and not to be glad of himself?
A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases.
In the vast majority, it's the desire for comfort and inertia, in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveler spoke.
He's right.
Men are even lazier than they are timorous.
And what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them.
Only artists hate this slovenly life, in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions, and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience.
The principle that every human being is a unique wonder.
They dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone, even more.
That in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and as incredible as any work of nature, and by no means dull.
When a great thinker despises men, it's their laziness that he despises.
For it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products, and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction.
The human being, who does not wish to belong to the mass, must merely cease being comfortable with himself.
Let him follow his conscience, which shouts at him, be yourself, what you are at present doing, opining, and desiring.
That's not really you.
That's Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and existentialism.
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