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May 18, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:32:17
2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower
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Music So last week I told you I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories, right?
Well, more than two, but roughly speaking, two.
The creation stories, because there's two of them in Genesis, and then also the story of the Buddha.
And I was presenting you with a proposition, and it's a multi-layered proposition.
The first proposition is that The archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories, and the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state where things are roughly functional,
so that you might think of that as the state of things going well, and that's a state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you act them out in the world, Not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself validates itself through your actions, right?
Because what happens when you act something out, and you get what you intend, just like when you use a map and get where you're going, not only does that get you to where you're going, but it also validates the plan or the map.
And so that's a definition of truth.
That's a pragmatic definition of truth.
This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris, because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always insufficient.
We never know everything about anything, and so the question then is, how can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct?
And the answer to that is something like, well, you lay out a plan, and you can think about it this way.
This is actually an answer to The postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of the world is, we won't say correct, because that's not exactly right, but, you know, the postmodernists object, say, with regards to the interpretation of a text, that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted, and that's actually true.
And it's actually a reflection of a deeper claim, which they always, often, sometimes also make, which is, well, if that's true for a text, which isn't as complex as everything, although it's complex, then it's even more true for everything.
Which is to say, the world lays itself out in a very complex manner, and you can interpret it in a very large number of ways, so who's to say which interpretation is correct?
Okay.
Fair enough.
It's a reasonable objection.
And it's tied in with even a deeper problem, which is the problem of perception itself, because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex, then how is it that you can even perceive it?
Well, that's partly the question that we're trying to answer, and the answer to that is, well, you have evolved perceptual structures, and they're actually oriented towards specific goals, and you're embodied.
So your embodiment as a goal-directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception.
But it's more complicated than that.
So we could say, well, you come equipped, and this was Kant's objection to pure reason, essentially, The problem is the facts don't speak for themselves.
There's too many facts for them to speak for themselves.
So you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework.
Well, where does the interpretive framework come from?
Well, the right answer to that is something like it evolves, right?
It's taken three and a half billion years for your perceptual structure, your embodied perceptual structure, to evolve.
And it's done that...
Roughly in a trial and error process.
I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution, but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being.
So there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival and reproduction, but there's other constraints imposed too that you might regard as subsets of that.
One is that...
Because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape, the perceptual structures and plans that you lay out, we'll say the maps that you lay out, have to be negotiated with other people.
And so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to apply.
So you can think about this in a Piagetian sense.
That is...
If they're children in a playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play, they have to agree on a game.
And the game is, of course, a perceptual structure and a goal-directed structure and a structure that delimits action and interactions.
And so they at least have to settle on a game.
And so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment to those that are deemed socially acceptable.
And then you say, well, what are the further constraints?
And the constraints might be, well...
Let's play the game and see if it's any fun.
And that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually, and then lay it out in the actual world, and see if when you lay it out in the world, it does what it's supposed to do.
In some sense, what you're doing is testing a tool.
So the idea that the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained turns out to be incorrect.
Now, that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained.
But the technical suggestion that, well, there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations is just not correct.
It's not correct.
And it's not correct on biological evolutionary grounds, and it's also not correct on sociocultural grounds, because it has to be negotiated.
And then, you know, Piaget put a further constraint on that, essentially by saying, well, not only does it have to be a game, and a game that attains its ends, but it has to be a game that people want to play.
So it also has to...
Satisfy some element of subjective desire as well.
So that's three levels of constraint, right?
It has to be a game you want to play, it has to be a game that you can play with other people, and it has to be a game that, if you play with other people, actually works in the world.
Okay, well, so much for an infinite array of options.
It's a very constrained array of options.
Now, and I think, and the idea that I've been proposing to you is that What evolved mythology does, these representations that we've been dealing with, these archetypal representations, is sketch out that landscape.
What is the landscape of playable games?
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And so it sets out a landscape...
It sets out a description of the landscape in which the game is going to be played, as well as a description of the game itself.
And so the landscape is roughly the core...
The core archetype seems to be something like...
It's something like the interplay between chaos and order.
And chaos is represented by the serpentile predator, because we use our predator detection circuits to conceptualize the unknown, because what else would we do?
That seems...
Given that we're prey animals and given our evolutionary history, It's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do.
Because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die.
Or perhaps a slight variant of that is something might kill you.
But whatever, those are close enough to the same thing.
So chaos is what causes your deterioration and death.
And there's lots of ways to conceptualize that, but reptilian predator, fire-breathing reptilian predator isn't a bad way to start.
And so the question is, well, what do you do in the face of that?
And one answer is, you build circumscribed enclosures.
That's order.
And then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosures.
So that's partly the hero.
Now the hero is also, though, that's not good enough because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable.
It can be invaded.
It will inevitably be invaded, either from the outside, Or from within, right?
And so we've been conceptualizing the predator, the malevolent predator, at multiple levels of analysis throughout our evolutionary history, say, but also in our symbolic history, trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure, right?
And we can say, well, it's partly external threat, It's partly social threat, but it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure because of our, let's say, our intrinsic malevolence, and so that would be the snakes within.
And so that accounts for the analogy, the Christian analogy, between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan, which is a very, very strange analogy.
It's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another, especially given that when the creation story originally emerged, in the form I talked to you about last week, the story of Adam and Eve, the idea that the serpent in the Garden was also something that was associated with the adversary...
Wasn't an implicit part of the story.
That got laid on afterwards.
It's like, well, what's the worst possible snake?
Well, that's a reasonable question.
And then a better question is, what do you do about the worst possible snake?
And one answer is, you face it.
But there's other answers, too, like you make sacrifices, right?
And that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos, roughly speaking.
Is that you learn to conceptualize the future, you see the future as a realm of potential threat, and then you learn to give things up in the present, and somehow that satisfies the future.
Now, so maybe you're offering sacrifices to God, and you think, well, why does that...
Well, you've got to think about that psychologically.
Why does that work?
Well, you could think about the spirit of God the Father as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group.
We'll call it the patriarchy if you want.
It doesn't matter.
It's the thing that's common across the group as a spirit, as a psychological force, across time.
Why do you make sacrifices to that?
That is what you do.
All the time.
Right now, you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the Great Father because your assumption is that if you...
Do what's diligent, so you're not chasing impulse of pleasure at the moment, unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like that.
You're not chasing impulse of interest.
You're sacrificing your impulse of interest to satisfy the spirit of social requirement.
And so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you can make a bargain with it, so that it will reward you in the future.
And that reward will be partly the staving off of insecurity, which is No more than to say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree is because you believe that it'll aid you in finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of chaos.
So, now, those things were, as we've been at Pains to point out is those things were acted out and then represented in image and story long before they could be fully articulated because we're building our knowledge of ourselves and also our social structures and also the world from the bottom up as well as from the top down.
There's an interplay between the two levels of analysis.
Okay, and so that's partly the archetypal underpinning and then with regards to the stories themselves You're in a map, so to speak, you're using a map, and with any luck, it's detailed enough so that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go.
And sometimes you don't, and that means that you have to recalibrate your journey along the map, which, by the way, is exactly what GPS systems do when you go off the pathway, right?
They stop, That's an anxiety response from the GPS system.
They stop, they recalibrate, and they readjust the map.
Now and then, if you're unfortunate, this very rarely happens anymore, you'll be on a road that isn't mapped.
And then the GPS system doesn't know what to do.
Well, that happens in real life, too.
I mean, I'm using GPS for a very specific reason.
Those are intelligent systems.
As far as I'm concerned, those are the closest things we've ever designed to intelligent systems.
Because they can actually orient, right?
They orient in real time.
And they're unbelievably sophisticated systems, right?
Because they rely on a huge satellite network and so on.
And they're cybernetic systems, technically speaking.
They respond very much like the way that we respond.
So...
So anyways, you know, you inhabit a map, you try to adjust the resolution of the map, so that it's no more complex than it needs to be to get you from point A to point B. That's it.
You want minimal resolution, because that enables efficient cognitive processing, it doesn't overload you too much.
Like, when I'm looking at this room, if I look, say I want to walk down this pathway, basically what my mind does, my perceptual field, and you can detect this, if I look straight ahead, I can barely see you people on the periphery.
You're kind of like blurs.
You two, I can tell that you have heads, but that's about it.
When you move, I can see your hand.
I can probably see your eyes, but barely.
So you're all very low resolution.
And even though I can't detect it, at the very periphery of my vision, you guys are black and white.
So my color vision disappears at the periphery, even though I can't actually perceive that.
So what happens is, if I want to walk down here, this pathway becomes high resolution.
It becomes marked with positive emotion.
All of this turns into low resolution.
Back here, it's not even represented.
And then I find out, well, am I doing this properly?
And the answer is, well, I walk forward, and if I get to the goal, then I've done it properly enough.
And if, you know, one of you stand up and get in my way, then I'm going to focus on you and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly, right?
I put you in the category of irrelevant entity, when in fact, you happen to be in the category of strange object, the thing that objects.
And so, well, so, then we inhabit those structures all the time.
We're in a structure like that, a perceptual structure.
And if it's working, then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise, so to speak, because its axioms are correct, and it's functional.
And then now and then, something comes along, and that's what the snake is, the eternal snake in the garden, that pops up inside a structure, and it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to are the most important things, rather than the least important things.
And what does that do?
It blows the map into pieces.
And that can happen at different levels of severity, but at the ultimate level of severity, it's apocalyptic.
Right?
Everything goes.
And that's a traumatic intrusion.
And essentially, the story of the Garden of Eden is the story of a traumatic intrusion.
That's exactly what it is.
And so what happens is that Adam and Eve are living in unconscious bliss, roughly speaking.
Everything's fine.
They're in their walled garden.
They're in a paradisal state.
They're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness, so they're not suffering from negative emotion.
Something pops up that radically expands their vision, and all of a sudden now they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats, so that's their own nakedness and vulnerability, and temporality itself, because they become aware of the future, and bang!
That state of being in that paradise is forever gone.
That's the strange thing about human beings.
This is what happened to us, I think, is that our perceptions develop to such a degree That we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant.
We couldn't do it.
Because we discovered, roughly speaking, once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space, we discovered that we were surrounded by infinite threat.
Always.
And maybe that's why people are so hyper-awake, because threat wakes you up.
Well, we're in a constant state of existential threat.
Now, the advantage to that is that we take We take arms up against a sea of troubles, constantly.
That's the advantage, right?
And we build enclosures, and we take precautions for the future, and we live a very long time, and we generally live quite safe lives compared to the lives we could live.
And so we've traded pain for anxiety.
That's another way of thinking about it.
Now, it's still a pretty rough trade, right?
Because who wants to be nervous all the time?
But you're alive and awake when you're nervous, and it is a form of consciousness, elevating, activation.
That's another way of thinking about it.
So, the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall.
That's what it is.
It says, look, you exist in these walled enclosures, but there's something that lurks that will always knock you off your feet.
And then the question is, what is that?
And the answer to that is being formulated over very long periods of time.
Partly, it's the probability of predation itself.
That's the snake.
The thing that can come in subtly and undermine you.
Okay, but then that's...
What would you call it?
Expand it upward to include the abstract snake, which is that thing that can undermine your conceptual schemes.
So you have your actual territory, and then you have your abstract territory.
And in your actual territory, there are actual snakes, and in your abstract territory, there are abstract snakes.
And then the worst snake of all is malevolence.
And I think that's technically correct, because one of the things that you view, for example, when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder, is that it's almost always the case that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which you might think of as a real-life reincarnation of the fall, is that people encounter something malevolent.
And it breaks them.
Because it's the worst thing to understand.
It's like suffering is one thing, man.
That's bad enough.
Vulnerability and suffering, that's bad enough.
But to encounter someone who wishes that upon you and will work to bring it about, that's a whole different category of horrible.
Especially when it also Reflect something back to you about yourself because if someone else can do that to you and they're human that means that you partake of the same essence strangely enough that's actually the cure to some degree to post-traumatic stress disorder is it like if you've been victimized you're naive and you've been victimized the way out of that is to no longer be naive and to no longer be victimized and that means that you You see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea,
for example, that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he's got a piece of him.
He's been touched by it, and the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopath so that you know one when you see one.
But that's a voluntary thing, so it's like a set of tools that you have at your disposal, which is full knowledge of evil.
And that does, Nietzsche said, if you look into an abyss for too long, you risk having the abyss gaze back into you, right?
The idea is that if you look at something monstrous, you have a tendency to turn into a monster.
And people are often very afraid of looking at monstrous things exactly for that reason.
And then the question is, well, should you turn into a monster?
And the answer to that is, yes, you should.
But you should do it voluntarily, and not accidentally, and you should do it with the good in mind, rather than falling prey to it by possession, essentially, because that's the alternative.
And how does it possess you?
That's easy.
Your suffering makes you bitter.
Your bitterness makes you resentful.
Your resentment makes you vengeful.
And once you're on that road, you go down that a little bit farther, man.
Well, you end up fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school and then killing yourself, right?
Because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning.
Being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil, and I'm exactly the person to do it, and I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth just to hammer the point home, right?
And if I can garner a little post...
Post-posthumous fame along the way, well, that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominance hierarchy imaginings, too, at least in fantasy.
So, you know, it's the full package if you want to go down that route.
And, of course, people don't like to think about that sort of thing, and it's no bloody wonder.
But without the capability for mayhem, you're a potential victim to mayhem.
So you need your sword.
It should be sheathed, but you need to have it.
And it's very frequently the case, if you treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, there's two things you have to do.
You have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil.
Because otherwise their brain bothers them over and over and over.
Why were you so naive?
How did you become victimized?
Why were you such a sucker?
These are good questions.
You don't want to have that happen to you again.
You don't want to be exploited twice.
Okay, so your eyes have to open up.
We know the price of that from the Egyptian myth, right?
You come into contact with Seth.
What happens?
Even if you're a god, you lose an eye.
It's no joke, man.
It's no joke.
And then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and the revitalization of the father.
That's the identification with the force that created culture, right?
And then there's you and that together.
Then you can withstand malevolence.
Maybe you can withstand tragedy and malevolence.
And then that's the whole secret, right?
Because that's what you want in life.
You need to be able to withstand tragedy, and you need to be able to withstand malevolence.
Because those are the forces that are always working against you.
And so this is associated with the Jungian idea of incorporation of the shadow.
Right?
You have to be...
We know this.
God!
We know how predators work with regards to children, even.
If you're a pedophilic predator, and you're looking at a landscape of children, the child that you're going to go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back.
You pick your victim.
And predatory people in general are exactly like that, man, because they're predators.
They're not going to attack someone who's going to fight back.
In fact, the issue is likely not to even come up.
They're going to be looking for someone, one way or another, that cannot conceptualize what they are.
And then, perfect.
It's an open season, man.
It's open season.
And so if you're treating someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, first, they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolence, and second, they have to learn to become dangerous.
Because that's the only way out.
What's the alternative?
They get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naivety, because by definition, if someone psychopathic has exploited you, you're too naive.
It's a definitional issue.
You can say, well, that's no fault of mine.
How the hell could I be prepared?
Fair enough, man.
A perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem.
Because it's an eternal problem, right?
The eternal problem is, how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence?
And you can say, well, I'm not prepared.
It's like, yeah, fair enough.
Unsurprising, especially if you were overprotected as a child.
It's not a good idea to overprotect your kids, because the snakes are gonna come into the garden no matter what you do.
And so then you, instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away, what you do is you arm your child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them.
So the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and malevolence is strength, not protection.
It's a completely different idea.
We also know this clinically.
We know, for example, that if you treat people with exposure therapy for agoraphobia, which is, roughly speaking, the fear of chaos, I would say, the fear of everything, you don't make them less afraid.
You make them braver.
It's not the same thing.
Because with an agoraphobic, see, what happens to them is the fall.
They never conceptualize death and suffering.
They're naive, right?
It never enters the theater of their imagination, and it's because they're protected from it.
But then something happens.
This often happens to women in their 40s, because they're the people most likely to develop agoraphobia.
Something happens.
They've been protected from chaos by authority their entire life.
So maybe they had an overprotective father, and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend, and then they went to an overprotective husband.
And maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the protection.
Right?
So that's the bargain.
They stay weak and dependent, and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyperprotective, but the price they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent.
And then something happens in their life, often in their 40s, they develop heart palpitations, maybe as a consequence of menopause.
Their heart starts to beat erratically, and they think, oh no, death.
It's like, well, who are you going to talk to about that?
Right?
There's no protection from authority for that.
Or maybe their friend gets divorced, or maybe their sister dies, or something like that.
It brings up the specter of mortality, and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality, and it brings it up in a way that authority, recourse to authority, cannot solve.
And so then they have panic attacks.
What happens?
They go out, they get afraid, they feel their heart beating, then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think, oh no, I'm going to die, and they think, oh no, I'm going to die, and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention.
So the two big fears come up.
Mortality and social judgment.
Then they have a panic attack.
It's like fight or flight's gone out of control.
Very, very unpleasant.
Then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack.
Then they end up not being able to go anywhere.
So then Tiamat has come back, right?
A huge monster, a little victim.
And so what do you do with them?
Well, there's no saying, there's no Tiamat.
That's done, right?
Their naivety is over.
They've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment.
They've met the terrible mother, and they've met the terrible father.
And there's no going back.
There's no saying, oh, the world is safe.
It's not safe.
Not at all.
It's not safe.
The fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture.
It's a gift.
And now that's been shattered.
And so now what do you do?
Well, the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go.
You're the ultimate frozen rabbit, right?
And your life is hell because you can't function.
The alternative is, let's take apart the things you're afraid of.
Let's expose you to them you know carefully and programmatically And then you'll learn that you're actually tougher than you think.
You never knew that!
And maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because, you know, people play a role in their own demise, so to speak.
When you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid, you chose to withdraw because you were afraid.
So it's not only that you were overprotected often, it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were overprotected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity.
You know, so maybe you're a kid in the playground, right, and you're having some trouble with other kids, and you know in the back of your mind, I should deal with this myself.
But you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene.
And you know that that's not right.
You know that you're breaking the social contract.
But it's easier.
And so that's what you do.
You run off to an authority figure and hide behind the great father, right, roughly speaking.
Well, the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself.
So then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40.
So then you take people out.
You say, well, what are you afraid of?
Rank it from 1 to 10.
So make a list of 10 things you're afraid of.
The thing you're least afraid of, we'll call number 10.
So we'll start with that.
Okay, well, I'm afraid of elevators.
Okay, well, let's look at a picture of an elevator.
Let's have you imagine being in an elevator.
Let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open, because that's how you're responding to it, symbolically.
Right?
And you're gonna do that at the closest proximity you can manage.
You find out you go do that, it works.
You're nervous as hell, especially from an anticipatory perspective.
Shaking.
You go out, you stop, you watch it happen, and you actually calm down.
You do that ten times and it no longer bothers you.
Well, you've learned that you didn't die, but more importantly than that, You've learned that you could withstand the threat of death.
That's what you've learned.
And then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective.
It's a tomb, right?
It's a place of enclosure and isolation.
And you learn, hmm, turns out I can withstand that.
And then you're much more...
Together, much more confident.
And that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that, I've seen this multiple times, is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that, and toughen them up, they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before, because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before, because they weren't willing to undermine the protection.
See, if you're protecting me, I can't bother you.
Because I can't afford to forsake your protection.
So if I'm gonna play that game, I'm gonna hide behind you, then I can't challenge you.
So that's no good, because that's sometimes why people, you see this with guys very frequently, they're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s.
It's like, well, why?
Well, because they still wanna believe that there's someone out there that knows.
And so they're willing to accept the subjugation, because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows.
Because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge, right?
Because he knows.
Well, what if he doesn't?
What if no one knows any better than you?
Well, that's a rough thing.
Until you realize that, you're not an adult.
That's really technically the point of realization of adulthood, is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do.
I mean, it's a horrible realization, because what the hell do you know?
It's a terrible realization, and people will often pick slavery Permanent slavery to the spirit of the Great Father, let's say, over that realization.
And it's completely understandable.
But the problem with it is that there's more to you than you think.
And so if you continue to hide behind that figure, then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think.
Far more to you than you think.
Maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of mortality without collapsing.
Maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing.
Who knows?
It's certainly possible.
And it's not an abstract question.
It's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process.
It's always the question that you address.
And the answer is often in the affirmative.
Because people can get unbelievably tough.
And you know that, because people work in emergency wards in hospitals, right?
Or they work in palliative care wards, or they work as mortuary assistants.
I mean, these people have bloody rough jobs.
You know, or they're on the front line of police investigation into, you know, highness child abuse crimes, and so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis.
You know, those are very stressful jobs, but people do them.
And some people do them without even being damaged by them, although that's a harder thing, because you can see horrible things, you know, things you'll never forget.
So, I would say the story of Adam and Eve is a meta-story, and it's a meta-story for two reasons.
One is, it's about how stories transform, because Adam and Eve are in this unconscious paradise, and then it collapses.
And that happens to every potential story, right?
That's Nietzsche's realization.
He said, look, imagine that you live within a belief system, and then something arises to challenge the belief system.
Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens.
Your belief in belief systems collapses.
And that's the road to not...
Now, it doesn't have to, because you can jump from one belief system to another.
But sometimes that doesn't work, is that you do a meta-critique, and you say, oh, I was living in this protective structure, and it turned out to be flawed.
Okay, one alternative is jump to another protective structure.
Fine.
Another alternative is, protective structures themselves are not to be trusted.
Bang!
You're in chaos.
How the hell are you going to get out of that?
That's the pathway to nihilism.
Well, you can work your way through that, that's difficult, or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul-damaging move, and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re-identify with something rigid and restricted, which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to the current state of chaos.
It's like, I know that people need to identify with local groups, I understand that.
But they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate god.
And that's order, but that's not a good replacement for chaos.
It's just another kind of catastrophe, right?
Too much order, too much chaos.
Both catastrophes.
You want to stand in the middle somehow, and mediate between the two.
And that's where you have your real strength.
Because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place.
Because even the bloody right-wingers are after a safe place, right?
They just want it to be the state.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, there's no safe places.
And the next issue is, do you really want a safe place?
Is that what you want?
You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat.
What the hell kind of life is that?
You're a paralyzed rabbit in a hole.
That's no life for a human being.
You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence.
And the reason for that, too, is this is the weird paradox.
And I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha, but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity, which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.
Now, who the hell would ever guess that?
It's a completely paradoxical suggestion.
Is that, well, why does it work?
Well, because the more you confront the two of them, the more you grow.
And maybe you can grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself.
And you think, well, what's the evidence for that?
And that's easy.
That's what people do.
That is how we learn.
Like, every time you expose your child to something new, a playground, what are they exposed to?
Chaos?
And malevolence.
Now, there's more to it than that, obviously, because kids play and they, you know, they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that.
But in the playground itself, there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully.
It's right there.
And you throw your kid in there and you say, adapt, and they do!
Okay, so they can do it at a small scale.
It's not trivial.
The playground's a complicated place.
The kid can adapt.
Well, how much can you scale that up?
Can you scale that up from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself?
Well, that's the question.
Well, I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative.
So, because we don't know the full extent of a human being.
And it is the problem that's worked out.
So, in the Buddhist story, for example, what happens after So Buddha's world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses.
It's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death.
What happens to Buddha is he realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him, the walled garden, it's exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story, it's fatally flawed.
That kind of protection cannot exist, and he discovers that in pieces, right?
Which is exactly what happens to children, is that they go out, they discover a limit, they run back.
And the parents can help them with the limit.
They run out, they discover a limit, they run back.
But at some point, they run out, they discover a limit, they run back, and the parents have nothing to say to them.
Because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit.
Which is like, well, what are you going to do with your life?
How are you going to operate in this archetypal universe?
Well, your parents can only say...
Well, they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures.
They do that, they at least act that out for you.
But at some point, it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker.
That's the thing, you know?
So, it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy, because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is, how do you not take your client's problems home with you?
It's a very common existential problem that beginning therapists face, because they're afraid.
It's like while you're dealing with people all the time who have serious problems, sometimes it's mental illness.
Although less frequently than you'd think.
And sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe, right?
Their parents have cancer or something like that.
Or their father has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed.
Or they have a drug problem or they have a schizophrenic son.
These aren't mental illness problems, right?
Those are just catastrophes.
And so people are discussing those with you all the time.
How do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking it home?
And the answer to that is you don't steal the problem.
That's the answer.
It's like, you have some problems.
If you come and talk to me, I'll help you figure out how to solve them.
I will not tell you how to solve them.
I won't steal your problems.
Because what we're trying to do in therapy is, number one, solve your problem.
Number two, turn you into a great solver of problems.
And the second one is way more important than the first one.
And so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem.
That's theft.
That's the Oedipal situation.
That's the Oedipal situation.
That's the overprotective mother.
Now, father can play that role too.
We're talking about archetypal representations.
It's like, I'll protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself.
No.
Wrong.
That's a sin.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
That is not what you do with people.
Not with your children.
Not with your partner.
Not with yourself.
You don't do that.
That destroys people's adaptive competence.
And it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence.
And that's a terrible...
You're going to send someone out unarmed in a world like that?
It's a terrible thing to do.
So...
And if people aren't strong enough to manage it, then they get resentful.
And then, you know, we get the downhill spiral that goes along with that.
Okay, so the meta story is partly...
You have a map, but it's insufficient, and things will come up to disrupt it, and sometimes the disruption is catastrophic.
Everything falls apart.
That's what happens to the Buddha, and that's what happens to Adam and Eve.
And the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together.
Now, that's been assembled, as I said, it's been assembled over centuries, right?
Okay, we've got the problem.
The problem is...
The ever-present reality of the apocalyptic fall.
That's the problem.
And so you could say, well, what is that?
It's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes.
Right.
Your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world.
It's a permanent problem.
So what do you do?
You stop relying on your conceptual schemes.
That's part of the answer.
You start relying on your, instead, on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence.
And so that makes you someone that identifies...
With your creative capacity, your creative courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown, rather than some formulaic approach to the territory.
And the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt.
And that provides a permanent solution to the problem.
Well, then you might say, cynically, what's your evidence that that's a permanent solution?
And the answer to that is, well, the evidence isn't all in yet.
First of all, because people only live that way partially.
And so we haven't put the hypothesis to the full test.
And second, we don't know what our limitations are.
We have no idea what our limitations are.
And they're both greater and lesser than we imagined.
Because you have to ask yourself, if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight, setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight, what would happen?
And the answer to that is, well, there'd be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world, so that might not be a bad place to start.
But apart from that, there's very little that we can say.
Could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality?
Why not?
Do you think that's beyond our capacity?
Could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist?
Well, possibly, because we don't know the limitations of our capacity.
We're only running at 40%, if that, I would say.
We don't make full use of all the people that are in the world.
We don't...
Have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized.
We haven't set the systems up for that yet, so we waste people like mad, and then we waste ourselves like mad.
And so I would say, this is something also that's...
One of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament Jews, this is, I think, one of the reasons that their book has become so central, is because what happens in the Old Testament After the fall is that Israel produces a series of states, right?
Rise of state, and then a fall.
And then a rise of another state, and then a fall.
So it's the same thing, except it's happening at a political level.
The political state rises, it gets corrupt, it falls.
It rises out of the ashes again, gets corrupt, and falls.
I think that happened six times in the Old Testament.
And one of the things that's very interesting is the reaction of the Jews.
They always say, it was our fault.
Instead of taking the Cain and Abel route, and I'm going to tell you the Cain and Abel story right away, instead of taking the Cain and Abel route, they always say, if the state collapsed, it was because we did something wrong.
That's very different than saying, you know, it's arbitrary fate, it's the nature of arbitrary fate, or the structure of reality, that we're doomed to collapse into chaos, and that's an indication of the corruption of being.
Well, you can take that route if you want.
It's the corruption of being.
Well, good luck with that.
So what are you going to do about that?
That's easy.
You'll start to work for the destruction of being.
That's what you will do.
The alternative is to say, this terrible thing happened and somehow it's my fault.
Well, at least that opens you up the pathway to doing something about it, and maybe it's actually the case.
Maybe terrible things happen because you're just not who you should be.
At least you know that's true to some degree, right?
You know it.
Because things happen to you all the time, and you think, well, you know, if I just would have played that game straight, and if I would have put this thing in order, that wouldn't have happened.
It's like, okay, fine.
What's the ultimate extent of that?
Dostoevsky said at one point that every human being was not only responsible for everything that happened to him or her, but also simultaneously responsible for everything that happened to everyone else.
I would say it's almost a hallucinogenic idea, right?
It's a transcendent idea, and it can go very wrong.
Sometimes depressed people, for example, get hyper-responsible for what's happened, and it just crushes them.
And so it's a mode of thinking that can produce its attendant pathologies, but there's something about it that's There's something about it that's metaphysically true.
Alright, so I'm going to tell you the story of Cain and Abel.
Now, I really like this story.
It's very short.
It's only about a paragraph long, which is very interesting, because it's one of these examples where...
It's like a genie, the story.
There's so much condensed into it that it's almost unbelievable.
And there's even ambiguity condensed into it, which is very, very interesting, because it actually makes the story more complex and sophisticated.
So let me tell you the story.
Now, the first thing, I want to tell you some things about the story first.
So, we've got the original paradisal state, and then the collapse.
And so now, Metaphysically speaking, we're in the collapse.
We're in the post-fall condition.
We're still occupying a mythological landscape.
This isn't history as we normally understand it.
It's meta-history.
So when we talk about Cain and Abel, we're actually talking about the first two real human beings.
Because Adam and Eve, A, were created by God, and B, were in paradise.
And so that's not the normative condition of human beings, right?
That's a special time that's outside of normal time and space.
Cain and Abel, by contrast, they're in history.
Because in some sense, history actually starts a couple of times in the Old Testament.
It starts with the creation of being.
It starts with the formation of the garden.
It starts with the fall.
It starts with Cain and Abel.
It starts over again with Noah, and then it starts with Abraham, which is really where what we would recognize more as conventional history begins.
So, there's a number of starts of history, but this is one of them.
Cain and Abel are the first two human beings.
Who are they?
They're the adversarial brothers.
Hero and adversary.
They're types of Christ and Satan.
It's a well-known supposition.
You see that hostile brother motif.
Well, it's an archetypal motif.
And the hostile brothers are...
The part of you that's striving for the light.
That's one half.
And the part of you that's embracing the darkness.
So that's part of you.
It's part of the social structure.
That's Seth and Osiris.
It's part of the natural order, in some sense.
That's the benevolent and destructive elements of nature.
You see that negativity running through all the archetypal representations.
But Cain and Abel are the hostile brothers.
And the...
Cain is roughly that part of you that says, oh, to hell with it.
And means it, right?
And that means you'll work for your own pain and destruction at the same time that you're working for the pain and destruction not only of your brother, but more particularly of the brother that you admire.
Because that's actually a lot more entertaining, right?
If you're going to Become destructive.
And you go destroy something bad, that hardly qualifies as destruction.
What you want to do is find something great and destroy that.
That's destruction.
That's revenge.
None of this.
Putting punishment where it deserves to be.
What you want to do, and this is partly why the story of Christ is archetypal.
An archetypal story is one you cannot push beyond.
What's the worst possible punishment?
What's the worst possible punishment meted out for the least The most innocent person.
You hit an archetypal end there.
So you define most innocent person.
You can do that any way you want.
Define most innocent person.
Define worst possible punishment.
Conjoin the two things.
You get an archetypal story.
And the reason for that is you can't push beyond it.
And so, if you want to destroy something, you want to destroy an ideal, not something that's flawed.
And so Cain and Abler set up exactly that way.
So, I'll read you the story, and I'll interleave some interpretations along with it.
So, And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
And she again bare his brother Abel.
And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
Okay, so Abel's a shepherd, and Cain is a farmer.
The shepherd is an archetypal symbol, because the shepherd is the leader of a flock.
And the shepherd is the heroic leader of a flock, and the reason this is Middle Eastern mythology, let's say, well, if you were a shepherd, what did you do?
You took your slingshot and your stick and you defended your nice, juicy, plump, delicious sheep against lions.
Right, so it was no joke, man.
You were a tough cookie if you were a shepherd, because, well, you were acting as the guardian of...
You were acting as the guardian against predation, roughly speaking, and you weren't armed very well.
I mean, well, you can just think about it for a minute.
To think about fighting off a lion with a slingshot, or with a bow and arrow, or with a spear, I mean...
You have to have a lot of courage to manage that, especially successfully.
So Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground, which isn't as heroic a role.
And so, right off the bat, you get this dichotomy between the two roles.
It's also of great interest that Cain is the older brother, and Abel is the younger brother.
And you see that very frequently in mythology, because the older brother is the one that's privileged by status.
Right?
So he's got privilege, Cain, because he's the elder brother.
That also means that if there are possessions to be handed down the generations, the older brother gets them.
Now, interestingly enough, Cain has privilege, but he's not the one that's favored by God.
And I think that's absolutely brilliant that it's set up that way, because it's actually Abel, who doesn't have the right that the firstborn has, who actually turns into the person who's the proper manifestation of the ideal.
It's because Cain has things given to him.
You might think, well, that's great.
He's privileged.
What a wonderful thing for Cain.
It's like, don't be so sure about that.
And partly because one of the things that you'll find, because many of you will be well off when you have children, is one of the problems with being reasonably wealthy when you have children is that you deprive them of privation.
Because a lot of what makes people mature is necessity.
And if you have, for example, if you have more money than you know what to do with, roughly speaking, it's very difficult to say no to your children when they want something.
Because why are you going to say no?
You can just provide it.
Well, what makes you think that that's what you should do?
Well, you can have anything you want.
Well, what happens?
You devalue what you want, and your desires continue to grow.
Well, that's not very helpful.
So it's not obvious at all that providing people with an excess, let's say, of privilege is something that's good for them from a psychological perspective.
They need to hit the proper limitations.
And if you're fortunate, it becomes very difficult to deprive your children properly.
So you'll fight with that.
It's a big problem.
And that's what happens when you get spoiled children, roughly speaking.
They get everything by doing nothing.
Well, that's not a good lesson, because that won't work in the world.
It'll work very counter productively "And in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord And Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and his offering he had no respect And Cain was very wroth, angry, and his countenance fell." Okay, so again, there's a tremendous amount packed into that
This is the first time that we see the motif of sacrifice.
And so, I mentioned to you before how these archaic people conceptualized the world.
It's a dome with A disk of land, and underneath that a disk of water, fresh, and underneath that a disk of salt water.
So that's the world.
And then, up in the heavens, that's where God is.
And so God's up in the sky, and we talked about why that might be, and part of that is, well, when you look at the night sky, you look at what transcends your current reality, and you look at what inspires awe.
So, there's a, God exists where awe is experienced.
Fine.
That's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis when you think that what you're trying to do is formulate what constitutes the transcendent.
Because if you exist within a conceptual structure, and you encounter that which is outside the conceptual structure, you will feel awe.
And that's a combination of fear, paralysis, right?
And a combination of overwhelming possibility.
And you can experience that, for example, if you listen to a great piece of music.
What happens?
The hair on the back of your neck stands up.
Why?
Because you're a prey animal, and you just puffed up to look bigger.
That's why you have that experience.
It's pilo-erection.
And it's part of awe.
So when you see a cat puff up because a big dog is in front of it, that's what the cat's feeling.
It's like, oh my god!
Puff!
So, when you encounter that which transcends your limited sphere of apprehension, then you experience awe.
You look at the night sky, that's what happens.
Music can do that.
And all sorts of things that we do can evoke that sense.
And so, they located the transcendent value in that which inspired awe.
Fine.
Reasonable.
Now you can argue about the utility of the personification, right, because God the Father was personified in human form, but that's a very sophisticated idea too, because as we already found in the Old Testament, there's an association between whatever God is, Yahweh or Elohim, and And creating order out of chaos, and something about each individual human being.
And so I don't believe that the personification of God the Father in the Old Testament is archaic and primitive at all.
I think it's one of the most sophisticated things that people ever developed.
The idea is that the ultimate transcendent value is the capacity to generate order out of chaos, using linguistic ability, let's say.
And that each person has that as an essential element of their being.
Argue with that.
See how far you get.
That is one hell of a vicious conceptualization.
And I would also say it's the bedrock upon which our legal system rests.
So you don't move that easily.
You move that and many things fall.
And there are things that you may say you don't believe, but you act them out all the time.
In fact, if you didn't act them out, People would set you straight very, very rapidly, because basically what other people want from you, even though they don't conceptualize it in these terms, is that you accord them the respect due the incarnation of the logos.
That's exactly what it means to interact with someone properly.
So it's...
you can say what you want about what you believe.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is what you act out.
Alright, so now we have this conceptualization of what's transcendent that's emerged as a part, partially, perhaps as emotional contagion.
That which inspires awe is that which is transcendent.
And it's associated with these underlying ideas about the creation of order out of chaos and the instantiation of that spirit in human beings.
That's all lurking in the background.
And then we have this other idea, which we already talked about, which is that there's a patriarchal or paternal spirit that represents the community at large stretched across time.
You can think about that as the spirit of the ancestors.
So it's the past, it's the present, but that's also projected into the future.
That's the thing you bargain with for your life in the future.
I'm going to sacrifice myself to get a degree.
Why is that?
Because the spirit of my culture will reward me in the future.
That's the sacrifice.
Okay, well, we were chimpanzees for God's sake.
It took us a long time to figure this out.
Chimpanzees don't sacrifice the present for the future.
You know, you've got to ask yourself, how long did it take human beings to figure out that there was a future?
And then what to do about it?
I mean, we didn't go from chimpanzee to fully articulated human being in one step.
It was...
Accreted knowledge that was extraordinarily painful.
What did we learn from observation?
Something like, storing up goods for the future helps us live.
Imagine how difficult that is, you know?
Imagine that you're a farmer, back when that was an extraordinarily...
You were barely scraping out a living doing that, it was hand to mouth at best.
Alright, so now it's winter and you've got your damn seeds in your cellar.
Right?
What are you gonna do?
You're starving.
You gonna eat them?
Or are you going to wait and plant them again in the spring?
Because that's your damn choice.
And so the people who decided to eat them, Well, some of the people who decided to save them died.
Well, let's say more of the people who decided to eat them died.
And so this sort of knowledge was gathered in unbelievable agony.
You don't get what you have, what you want right now.
For you, that's nothing, because you're very much accustomed to getting what you want all the time right now.
Roughly speaking.
You know, compared to people who live from hand to mouth.
But back when things were much rougher, the idea that you had to sacrifice something of value now to be paid off in the future, man, that was a rough thing to accept.
Okay, so what happened?
So people figured this out somehow.
They figured out that you could make an offering of something you valued, and that might help set the world straight.
How did they conceptualize that?
Well, they conceptualized it ritually.
They were acting it out to begin with.
It's like the Piagetian idea, you know?
When I... When I look at that cup, part of the looking is this.
Right?
It's the adjustment of my body to the shape of the cup.
That's part of my understanding.
Well, one of Piaget's great observations is that we use our bodies to represent things long before we understand what it is that we're representing.
Which is to say no more than we act things out.
We're dramatic creatures, right?
We use drama.
And the sacrificial ritual is a drama.
That points to a higher psychological truth.
And the higher psychological truth is, let go of what you value now, and perhaps that will pay off multi-manifold in the future.
You're making a bargain.
And then you might say, well, who are you making a bargain with?
And you could say, well, nature.
But that's not exactly right.
It's not exactly right, because...
Let's say I have something of value in a social organization.
And I'm going to let it go because I'm relying on a corresponding reward or a greater reward in the future.
It's a contractual relationship with other people.
It's not a relationship with nature.
It's that we've organized ourselves into a social structure.
And we're willing to maintain the integrity of the social structure across time, so that if I give up something now, I can be paid for it in the future.
And the deal is, we're gonna try to keep the future the same as the present, so that those contracts can be met in the future.
That's money.
That's what money is, right?
Here's some money.
You made a sacrifice, that's why you get the money.
What does the money signify?
It's a promise from the community.
That the labor that you invested can be stored and then brought forward for your own purposes in the future.
So it's actually part of the social contract.
So the thing you're sacrificing to is the spirit of society that produces the social contract.
And so that's conceptualized as God the Father.
Well, how else would you conceptualize it?
It's the spirit of the dominance hierarchy.
That's the right way to think about it.
So it's what's common across all the members of the dominance hierarchy across time.
Well, it's something you can negotiate with.
True or not?
What the hell do you think you're doing when you make a contract?
What's the law?
It's all of this.
It's the manifestation of that patriarchal spirit across time and space.
And what do you do?
You sacrifice to it.
Well, so back 4,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, however old this story is, it's probably older than that, this is the best people could do with regards to realization.
And they got it quite right, because they also noted that God was happier if you actually sacrificed something of value.
And so, there's a tremendous complexity in that idea, because one of the things I could say, and this is something Jung pointed out, let's say you're miserable and unhappy.
Okay, here's a cure.
Find what's valuable and let it go.
So we could say, well, maybe it's a relationship that you have, maybe it's a relationship with your parents, right?
And the relationship is pathological, but you're locked into it, you value it, and no wonder, because it's a relationship with your parents.
And you're suffering terribly because of it.
Well, what do you do?
Maybe you let it go.
It's a sacrifice.
And the idea is that, well, that'll clear the future for you.
Well, very frequently, when people are suffering terribly, not always, because sometimes you just suffer stupidly, blindly, and without recourse, you know?
You get cancer, and then you die.
So, we have no idea how to deal with that.
But sometimes the reason that you're suffering is because you just won't let go of the thing that's biting you.
And you think, well, I can't let go of that.
And I've had clients like this.
I can't stop communicating with my mother, who phones me three times a day, every day of my life, and never says anything that isn't unbelievably critical and demeaning.
I can't let that go.
It's like, well...
That's not such a good idea.
The funny thing too, often when people let something like that go, it goes away, sorts itself out, and then comes back.
So they don't even end up losing it.
But unless they're willing to let it go, to sacrifice it, they make no headway whatsoever.
And so, one of the rules is, if people are impeding your development, you sacrifice your relationship with them.
Right?
It's a very, very rough rule.
So...
In process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.
And Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof.
Now that's interesting, eh?
This is where a close reading matters.
So, we don't know what Cain's offering is.
It's not much described.
But we do know something about Abel's offering.
And what we know is that, by the standards of the time, it's a high-quality offering.
So it's the firstborn, and it's the fat.
That high calorie, right?
I mean, you know, we think of fat as a dietary danger.
But if you're hungry, that's really wrong, right?
Because fat is unbelievably high calorie.
And so what's happening is, the story points out quite clearly that what Abel decides to offer to God is of high quality.
So it's the real thing.
It's the real thing.
He's paying a price.
Okay, and so then it's burned.
Well, why is it burned?
Well...
This is back, again, thinking from an archaic perspective.
Well, God's in the sky.
You can't throw your lamb up into the sky.
It'll just fall back down.
But people knew, because they'd mastered fire, that smoke and savour rose.
And so you could detect the quality of an offering as a consequence of burning, and then that would go up.
The spirit of the fire would go up to the sky, and God could detect whether or not your offering was of reasonable quality.
You know, it's concretized, obviously, but you don't want to make the assumption that the people who were our forebears were stupid just because they thought using metaphors that aren't the same as our metaphors.
They were still mapping out the damn territory, you know, and you...
Look, you can read a book like you're above the authors of the book, or you can read a book as if it might have something to teach you.
And I would say, well, sometimes the book isn't worth reading.
But if a book has been around for a very long period of time, and a very large number of people have thought that perhaps there's something in it, sometimes they're right.
And it's a tricky thing, and it might also depend on how you read it.
But I found that this sort of investigation was a lot more useful if I started from the presupposition that maybe there was something I didn't know.
Instead of, you know, so funny, for example, I taught a first-year course about 10 years ago on the psychology of religion, and it was so interesting dealing with the 18-year-old students because they were completely dismissive of religious ideas, and I thought, God, you guys, you don't know anything.
And you have this specific kind of blindness that a set of very intelligent social psychologists also identified, which was blindness blindness.
Because it actually turns out that the less you know about a topic, the more you overestimate the quality of your knowledge.
And so I thought, we're in this situation where kids Who don't even know how to act in the world, they don't know anything, will come to university and start off with the proposition that they're astute critics of Judeo-Christian culture, of which they know nothing.
They know nothing about it.
They know nothing about history, they know nothing about philosophy, nothing about literature, but they're absolutely certain that they're correct in the criticisms that they're bringing forth.
It's absolutely unbelievable.
So, anyways.
And it's not helpful, because then you don't get to learn.
And you want...
Well, you know what happens if you don't learn.
Okay, so anyways, so it looks like Abel's doing a good job.
That's the implication.
The story doesn't say, Abel is doing a really good job with his sacrifices.
It just hints at it.
And I like that, because it leaves that ambiguity.
It's like...
Maybe you're working really hard, and your brother's working really hard, and you really can't tell the difference between your quality of work and his quality of work.
But for some reason, he's succeeding like mad.
That happens, right?
Because there's an arbitrary element to life.
And so, the story says, well, the Lord Has respect unto Abel and his offering, and there's an implication that maybe the reason for that is that, you know, Cain's offerings are a little second-rate, but the story doesn't come out and club you over the head with that idea.
It just leaves it as an ambiguous possibility, and the reason for that is sometimes you make sacrifices, and maybe they're even real ones, and they don't pay off, or they pay off for someone better.
And so there is this arbitrary nature of the transcendent that you're attempting to deal with.
It rewards and doesn't reward more or less of its own accord.
There's an element of that.
And so it's ambiguous in the text.
Even though there's a hint that, you know, perhaps Abel is doing a better job than Cain.
So, I like that.
I think it's very sophisticated.
So what happens?
Well, Cain makes his offerings and God isn't happy with them.
Now we don't know how Cain figures out that God isn't happy with his offerings.
We get some hints of that too, but the story does tell us that's what happens.
And so then we get the psychological response on the part of Cain.
Now one response could be, Jesus, I must be doing something wrong.
I better straighten myself out.
You know, I better come up with a better quality offering and try that again.
That isn't what happens.
What happens instead is that Cain becomes angry, wroth, and his countenance falls.
And so what does that mean?
It means this, right?
It means he is not happy.
He's angry and out for revenge.
And so, one of the...
I've been thinking about this a lot lately with regards to the literature on inequality.
Because there's a very good literature that shows, for example, that there's a measure called the Gini coefficient.
And the Gini coefficient is a numerical index of the relative inequality of a geographical locale.
So, for example, if you went to Newfoundland, where everyone is roughly not very rich, or North Dakota, say, almost everyone there is, say, lower middle class, something like that, or upper working class, something like that.
Very little variability.
Low Gini coefficient.
Okay?
If you go to Miami Beach, say, where everyone's rich, low Gini coefficient.
Because it isn't an index of absolute wealth or absolute poverty, it's an index of relative poverty.
And so if everyone's rich, the relative poverty is low.
And if everyone's poor, the relative poverty is low.
Now, one question is, where's the crime?
And you might think, well, the crime is where the absolute poverty is high, right?
Or the absolute wealth is low.
That's where the crime is.
That's wrong.
If things are relatively distributed in an egalitarian manner, the male-on-male crime, especially homicide, is low.
And it's also the case where everyone is rich.
But if you go into places where there's some rich people, but not very many, and there's a lot of people who are comparatively poor, then the male homicide rates and violent crime rates amp up substantially.
And it's a consequence of male-on-male competition.
And so what you could derive from that, and maybe even reasonably, is that you should flatten out the damn income distribution because you're destabilizing the society by facilitating male criminal aggression.
You can make a good case for that.
You know, in places like Colombia, where the Gini coefficient got unbelievably extreme, society got so violent that it could barely hold itself together.
So, you can make a conservative argument for redistribution of income, using the observation that if the income distribution gets too extreme, the whole bloody thing starts to destabilize and might fall.
But then you also might say, wait a minute, is it inequality that's driving the violence?
Or is it resentment of the inequality that's driving the violence?
Now, that's a tough question, because you might say, well, what if the game is rigged and there's no way of moving up the power hierarchy?
Well, then maybe anger and the desire for revolution is the appropriate response.
But that doesn't really mean to me that the response should be the sort of thing that you see in high Gini coefficient neighborhoods, which is interracial, intra-racial violence between men.
Right?
So, for example, in neighborhoods where there's high murder rates, the murders are always between young men, and they're always within race.
And so that doesn't seem to me to be exactly a politically revolutionary move, right?
It's more like violent competition for the sake of attaining status.
And you might say, well, that's reasonable, but because the inequality is there, and men need to find status, because it's part of what drives them forward, it's part of what makes them attractive to women.
It's a necessity.
Well, the question is, do you attain status through destruction?
Or do you start making your offerings, putting your offerings in order?
And that's something we really need to figure out, because that's a fundamental political question.
It's a fundamental political question.
Anyways, what happens in this story is that Cain decides that the fact that God isn't accepting his offerings means that he's entitled to become angry and negative.
Those two things are both put together, right?
He's wroth, he's angry, and he's also depressed.
And so he's in a state of mind that, well, I think the best characterization for that is hostile resentment.
Because it's unfair.
It's like, yeah, it's unfair.
So what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to get destructive about it?
Or are you going to change your approach?
Well, Cain, he does the ultimate thing, and this is what people do when they do the ultimate thing.
Because that kind of hostile resentment has an archetypal endpoint.
And the archetypal endpoint is the point that you get when you're hostile and resentful because you haven't been successful.
And then you go sit in your mother's basement for about ten years.
And then you start imagining just how nice it would be if you shot up the local high school so that everybody knew your name.
and what happens is you go from I'm irritated because things aren't working out for me very well to I'm irritated and I hate those people for whom things are working out well to I'm irritated and I hate the fact that the world is set up so that this has happened to me and then you go to well because I'm irritated and hate the world I'm going to do whatever I can that will destroy it most rapidly and with the highest possible amount of pain and suffering Conceivable.
And at that point, then you don't just go shoot up the high school, you go up and shoot up the elementary school.
And so if you're wondering what kind of pathway people walk down to get to that point, that's the pathway.
And the ultimate cap of that is, well, I'll kill the kids because, well, we already know that killing the innocent is a lot more effective than killing the guilty.
And then just to cap it off, I'll blow my head off at the end just to show you just how goddamn pointless it all is.
And so that's the logical extension of Cain's attitude.
And you might think, well, that's a bit of an over-reading.
And I will say, it's not an over-reading at all.
It's exactly what happens in the text.
So it's exactly what follows it.
So fine.
So Cain is not happy.
And so who's he not happy with?
Well...
He's not happy with God.
So what does that mean?
Well, we've already unpacked this.
He's not happy with the social contract.
Because that's part of the spirit, the patriarchal spirit, let's say.
And then there's more to it than that.
Because we've already analyzed what God, the idea of God, might represent in the background of this story.
He's not happy with the transcendent.
He's not happy with the idea of the logos.
All of that.
No faith in the transcendent.
He does nothing but despise the social contract, and he's got no faith whatsoever in the logos, let's say, the word that brings chaos out of order.
He's got nothing but contempt for all of that.
And, you know, certainly you know people like that.
And if you don't know them, you just go on YouTube and read the comments, and you'll see all sorts of people like that.
So...
So anyway, so God has a little chat with him and he says, why are you angry?
And why are you upset?
And Cain says, and God says, if you do well, won't you be accepted?
And if you don't do well, sin lies at your door.
And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
Okay, that's a very mangled translation, I would say.
So I'm going to take it apart.
So what God says is, well, you're angry and you're upset.
It's like, well, what's your problem?
And then God tells Cain, if you did things properly, they would work out for you.
Well, it's the last thing he wants to hear, because what Cain wants to believe is that the reason he's not doing very well is because there's no sense having any faith in the Logos, the transcendent is evil and aimed exactly against him, and the entire social contract is faulty.
That's what he wants to hear, but that isn't what God says.
God says, well, wait a minute.
Maybe you're doing something wrong.
Well, that's maybe a worse message than everything else is corrupt.
It's like, you're having a problem because you're just not everything you could be.
Well, and then God says something really nasty, and you can't tell from this line.
I read a bunch of translations to try to figure out exactly what it meant, so this is what God tells Cain.
He says, you're in a room in a house, and there's something at the door.
And he uses a metaphor.
God uses a metaphor.
It's a sexually aroused predatory cat.
And you invite it in.
You invite it in.
You know that it has evil intent.
You invite it in to mate with you, right?
And its union with you, this malevolent force, its sexual union with you, has produced an offspring.
And that offspring is what possesses you.
And so, not only have you done something wrong, you've invited the spirit of wrongdoing into your life and you've creatively intermingled with it voluntarily to bring forth a monster of your own creation.
So that's what God tells Cain.
It's like, Look, it's bad enough that God says, you know, you should get your act together, because maybe that's why things aren't going so well for you.
Before you criticize the transcendent, and the world, and the structure of being, maybe you're doing something wrong.
But it's worse than that.
He says, not only are you doing something wrong, you bloody well know you're doing something wrong, and you're doing it creatively and with intent.
So not only are things not going well for you, but You've played a creative role in producing that situation.
And so God basically says, I'm taking zero responsibility for rejecting your sacrifice.
It's all on you.
And so Cain leaves, and he's like, seriously, not happy with that response.
Because he wanted to hear Pat, Pat, you're a victim of circumstance, and everything's conspiring against you, and really, being God, I should get my act together and just give you what you want, because obviously, being God, I'm wrong, and you're right.
Well, that isn't what happens.
It's exactly the opposite of that.
It's completely on you.
That's the judgment.
And so Cain leaves, and believe me, he was wroth before, and his countenance had fallen before, but it's nothing like it is now.
And so he hits the next stage, and he thinks, okay.
I'm going to take my revenge.
What am I going to do?
I'm going to find the most innocent and worthwhile thing, that's favorite of God, and I'm going to kill it.
And that's what he does.
And it doesn't matter that it's his brother.
And Abel, you know, we're drawing the inference.
Abel's done the right things.
Everyone likes him.
Everything's flourishing for Abel.
He's a good guy.
He's one of those people that you meet that has everything, and then you meet them, and you wish you could hate them, but you can't, because they're really good people, and then you really hate them.
Because not only do they have everything, but it appears that they deserve it.
And there's nothing that sort of sits in your soul and rots it more than that realization.
And so that's the situation with Cain.
And so Cain thinks.
Cain talked with Abel, his brother.
And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him.
So that's so interesting, because look at what happens to Cain here.
So, he's not doing well.
He's separated from the transcendent and from society.
He's bitterly resentful.
And now he goes out and kills the very thing that he most wants to be.
So he destroys his own ideal, right?
He demolishes his own ideal.
That's how far his resentment has pushed him.
And so he's done, right?
But he doesn't matter, because it enables him to take revenge.
So he doesn't care.
It's like the suicidal school shooter that blows off his head at the end of his mayhem.
It's like, it doesn't matter to him.
It's part of the same art form.
And the Lord says unto Cain, where is Abel thy brother?
And Cain said, I don't know.
Am I my brother's keeper?
Well, that's a good question.
That's why it's posed in the story.
Because the answer to that is supposed to be yes.
And God says, what have you done?
The voice of your brother's blood cries unto me from the ground.
That's actually the motif that Dostoevsky explores, I would say, in Crime and Punishment, because what happens is that Raskolnikov is Cain, for all intents and purposes, and he commits a murder.
But he gets away with it.
Well, so he thinks.
So he thinks.
No one suspects him.
He buries the money.
He can't stand to touch the money.
He buries it in an abandoned lot, and he's drawn there now and then to look at where it is, but he can't touch it, because the money...
It's so funny because the money before he kills the pawnbroker is not the same as the money after he kills the pawnbroker.
And the Raskolnikov before he kills the pawnbroker is not the same as the Raskolnikov after he kills the pawnbroker.
In fact, they're not the same at all.
And so Raskolnikov is tormented by God, you could say, but not from the external world.
He sets the crime up quite nicely.
It's that the spirit against which he transgressed tortures him from within.
And there's no escape from it.
And so eventually what happens in Crime and Punishment is Raskolnikov continues to manifest himself as guilty in every possible way until he receives the punishment that he desires, because it's the only way that he can set things right.
He actually, he actually, he essentially turns himself in, eventually, because he can't tolerate what he's done.
So, well, so that's the idea.
Thy voice of thy brother's blood cries unto me from the ground.
It's guilt.
And now you're cursed from the earth, which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand.
When you till the ground, it will not henceforth yield unto you its strength.
A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
You know, and you might say, well, why does God not just strike Cain dead?
And the answer to that, perhaps, is that wouldn't be sufficient punishment.
That's what it looks like to me.
It's like, what's the punishment?
You live with what you did.
Right?
And I don't want anybody taking you out either.
Because then you won't have to live with what you did.
So that's the punishment.
And Cain says unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear.
It's like, yeah.
Behold, you have driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid.
That's the same as what happens to Adam in the Garden of Eden.
Remember, Adam hides from God.
And he has his reasons.
And now Cain is alienated from God.
There's no...
There's no reconstructing that relationship.
He's put himself, by violating his contract, let's say, with the transcendent, and also with society, and also with his own spirit, he's put himself outside the possibility of redemption.
And that's why he says, the punishment is greater than I can bear.
There's no hope left, right?
So he's in hell for all intents and purposes.
Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid, and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth, and it shall come to pass that everyone who finds me will kill me.
And God says, therefore, whoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
And the Lord set a mark unto Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
Now that's interesting, you think.
Why in the world would God protect Cain?
Well, the next part of the story actually tells you that.
You have a family.
I have a family.
Your brother kills my son.
So what do I do?
I come and I kill your father and your cousin.
And then you think, well, I killed your father and your cousin.
I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna kill four of your people.
And then I come back and say, yeah, no problem.
It's 16 of you this time.
And then you come back and you say, 16, eh?
Let's try for 32.
And so this is what happens.
This is actually why justice systems are set up, by the way.
There's a bunch of reasons justice systems are set up.
And one is to punish the guilty.
That's one.
The other is to have the guilty repent.
That's two.
To maintain social order.
That's three.
Here's another one that no one ever thinks about.
Back 30 years ago, The governor of Massachusetts, whose name I forget, was running for president.
And while he was governor of Massachusetts, he had released a number of prisoners, one of whom's name was, I think, Willie, maybe Horton.
Doesn't really matter.
And when Willie was released on this program, he went out and raped someone, and perhaps killed them, I can't remember, but it doesn't matter.
The rape is good enough.
And the governor was asked during a debate, What he would do if a released prisoner had raped his daughter or his wife.
And he gave a very weak answer.
What was his name?
He gave a very weak answer of something about, you know, letting the law take its due course.
And that's the wrong answer, right?
The right answer is, I would be compelled with every fiber of my being to hunt that person down and to tear him into bits.
But I won't do it.
So what's the purpose of the justice system?
It's to alleviate you from the responsibility of revenge.
That's what it's for.
Because otherwise, what happens?
You kill one, I kill two, you kill four, I kill eight, you kill sixteen, and soon, everyone's at war.
And so God protects Cain to stop that from happening, to stop the feud from emerging, because those things can go forever, and then from transforming the entire society into a state of war.
And so what's also...
So I'll tell you the rest of this story.
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived, and bare Enoch, etc.
So now you have a genealogy, right?
So Cain starts to have a family, you have a genealogy.
And so, a number of people are named in the lineage.
And so, and it tells you what, this is sort of an attempt to describe how things came about.
So this is like the naming of the heroes of old.
And so, you have Enoch, who builds a city, You have Jebel, who is the father of those who dwell in tents and of those who have cattle.
You have Jubal, who is the father of musicians, and Zillah, who bore Tubal-Cain.
Now Tubal-Cain is a very interesting person.
By tradition, Tubal-Cain is the first artificer of weapons of war.
So Cain's descendant, After multiple generations, is the person who produces weapons of war.
Alright, and so there's another bit of the story within which that needs to be placed in context.
And Lamech, who's one of the...
Grandchildren of Cain.
Says unto his wives, Ada and Zillah, Hear my voice, you wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech, for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
Okay, so what he's saying is, he's been involved in a murder.
If Cain be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
And so there's the implication there that The tit-for-tat process has begun.
Cain kills Abel.
Cain's children kill seven.
Cain's grandchildren kill 70 fold.
And then Tubal Cain pops up on the horizon and he's the person who makes artifices of war.
And so the story, in its fragmentary manner, ties the individual psychopathology that's resentful and revenge-seeking to the proclivity for broad-scale warfare.
And this really hit me because I was interested particularly in what was happening in the Nazi camps with the guards.
Because the guards were gratuitously cruel.
And I was very curious about that.
So here's an interesting story.
This was in a book called Ordinary Germans.
Hitler's Willing Executioners.
And it was a book that was written about 30 years ago that challenged the idea that the Nazi phenomena was top-down, order-following.
Which I don't believe, by the way.
I think that that's a very weak, weak hypothesis.
Fascistic societies are fascistic at every single level of organization.
Spiritually, within the family, within the local community, it's like a holograph.
It's the same absolutely everywhere.
It's not top-down.
I mean, there are leaders who get produced and maybe they catalyze it, but to blame it on the leaders is to forget about the process by which the leaders come to be.
So, no, you don't get a pass that way.
So here's one of the things that happened.
As the Nazis started to lose the war, So here's what you should have done if you were a Nazi and you wanted to win the war.
You should have enslaved the Jews and the gypsies and had them work.
Right?
You should have had them work for the benefit of the victory.
And then, if you wanted to, you'd liquidate them afterwards.
That's the logical thing to do if you want to win.
Right?
And we assume that Hitler wanted to win.
But that's not a very intelligent assumption.
Why would you assume that?
He wasn't exactly a good guy.
So why should we assume that he was aiming at the good that he was promoting, even in his own terms?
Right?
The glorious, everlasting, fourth, third Reich.
Right?
That'll rule for a thousand years and be a bastion of civilization and music, because that's the sort of thing he purported to be interested in.
Well, so what do you do with the Jews and the gypsies?
Well, round them up, fine.
Enslave them, fine.
You don't kill them.
You certainly don't devote a substantial proportion of your war resources while you're losing to accelerate the rate at which the extermination is taking place.
Because that's a bit counterproductive.
Unless what you're aiming at is the maximum possible mayhem in the shortest period of time.
Well, so what happened as the Germans started to lose the war?
Did Hitler lose faith in his own ability?
No, he believed that the Germans had betrayed him with weakness.
And so he was perfectly willing to accelerate the rate at which Germany was losing the war.
And so when Hitler and his minions had the choice, here's the choice.
You can suspend your unnecessary demolition of people, win the damn war, and then pick it up afterwards, or while you're losing, you can just accelerate the mayhem even though it's counterproductive.
It's like, what'd they pick?
Well, they pick to accelerate the mayhem.
And so to me, there's an old psychoanalytic idea.
I think this was derived by Jung.
If you can't figure out what someone is doing, or why, look at the outcome.
And infer the motivation.
If it produces mayhem, perhaps it was aiming at mayhem.
Now, you know, you have to use that dictum carefully.
If someone's irritating you, you know, maybe it's because you're irritable that you should sort yourself out, but maybe it's because they're actually aiming at irritating you.
And that's the actual motivation.
So, perhaps not, but it's another tool in your analytical armament.
So...
And so you see, well, this is the thing about warfare that's so interesting about...
because you can attribute it to territoriality.
You can attribute it to a war for resources.
That's what the, I would say, wretchedly simple-minded Economists presume people fight over scarce resources.
It's like, hey, we're a little bit more sophisticated than that.
And first of all, what resources are you talking about?
The bloody Inuit had nothing.
They lived perfectly well.
What did they have?
Snow and seal blubber.
You know, people can live in unbelievably deprived conditions.
And so, the idea that there are natural resources that we fight over because there's a shortage of them is a pretty oversimplified view of human beings.
It's like, well, why do people fight?
Well, maybe they fight sometimes for good reasons.
But very, very frequently they fight for bad reasons.
And those bad reasons are personal.
As well as sociocultural and economic.
You know, if you were a Nazi prison guard, for example, whatever pathologies you were carrying around in your destructive little soul, whatever element of Cain was deeply embedded in you, had the opportunity to be manifest fully at every moment of your waking existence, right?
You had these people who were completely beholden to you, with no rights whatsoever, to whom you could do whatever your evil little heart determined.
Think, well, maybe that was a motivation for putting them there to begin with.
And all the cover story about, well, we're trying to build the Third Reich, and we're trying to stabilize the state, and we're trying to do all these good things.
Maybe that's just a cover story for the real motivation.
Which is nothing but, but what?
The construction of death camps that killed six million people.
How about that?
And the obliteration of 120 million people on the planet.
And the leaving of Europe in ruins.
Maybe that was the motivation.
Or are we going to attribute to Hitler the highest possible motives?
Say, no, it's an archetypal manifestation of Cain.
Now, he's going to put up a front that says, well, I'm your savior.
It's like, well, destructive people think that Cain is their savior.
Let's take a break for 15 minutes.
So, okay, so...
The next thing that happens...
These stories were sewed together, right?
To make something that resembles a coherent text.
And there's this literary analytic...
No, there's a literary technique known as metonymy.
And metonymy is the juxtaposition of two things beside one another, with the implication that because they're juxtaposed, they are causally...
They're related in some important manner to one another.
And so, the stories are sequenced, and there's an implicit...
The stories are sequenced in a particular manner, and you might operate under the assumption that that sequencing occurred because the sequencer, who was an editor or a group of editors, they call that person the redactor, but they have no idea if it was one person or many people who organized these texts into something resembling a coherent story.
So imagine the stories evolved somewhat independently.
And then they were organized so that they produced what approximated a coherent narrative.
It's not entirely coherent because there are paradoxical claims, say at the level of the sentence.
So, for example, the creation order in the first story in Genesis isn't exactly the same as the creation order in the second story.
And, you know, people who insist upon the literal truth of the Bible, whatever that means, are bothered by those contradictions and turn themselves into knots trying to iron them out.
And fair enough, right?
Because you want the story to be coherent.
But, you know, that's sort of...
It's important, but it's also beside the point.
You don't want to focus on one level of analysis at the exclusion of all the other levels of analysis.
That's probably the right way to think about it.
Now...
The fact that these stories are sequenced in a particular manner and that that kind of makes sense implies that there's some sort of narrative coherence underneath driving them forward.
Otherwise, they would be nothing but a random assemblage of stories and they're by no means random, that's for sure.
They're selected and edited and put together in a particular manner and then stored that way and dealt with in a particular manner by thousands of people over many, many years.
What happens after Cain and Abel is, well, there's an interlude, which is this interlude, and it's kind of a bridge, and there's a lot packed into it too, although I'm not going to take it apart very much.
So this is after the Cain and Abel story.
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and then took them wives of all which they chose.
And there were giants in the earth in those days.
And also after that, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men, which are of old, men of renown.
Okay, so I already pointed out that if you go back just a little bit, you see that the descendants of Cain are represented as founders of institutions, right?
There are Enoch, who builds a city, and Adah, or Jabal, who is the father of those who dwell in tents, and of those who own cattle, and then there's Jubal, who's the father of all that are musicians, and so on.
So one of the things that you see in myths, very frequently, is that if there's a pattern of behavior that's characteristic of the culture, that pattern of behavior is attributed to a hero who was, in the past, who was the first person who did that.
And so you might say, well, What does that mean?
Well, it means in part that there was a first person who did that, although more likely there was an assemblage of people who aggregated that particular ability, say the ability to play music, across a very large amount of time.
But these are pre-literate people, right?
And they're trying to remember the past.
And so what happens, Murcia Elliot had documented this quite well, is that that aggregation of people gets collapsed into a single meta-person, and that's the hero of old.
And so, and we already talked about how this works, is that, you know, there are admirable people, and then you can tell a story about an admirable person, and then you can extract a story out of the set of admirable people, and you keep building higher and higher order admirable people until you extract out at the top what's ultimately admirable.
And this is actually an indication of that process occurring.
The giants that are being referred to in this particular phrase are the heroes of the past who established the traditions on which the society...
And so that's all compacted into this little paragraph.
So, this little paragraph here.
There were giants in the earth in those days, and after that, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men, which were of old, men of renown.
Well, you could hardly say...
I think there's very little difference between what I just told you and what this story says.
I mean, it says it as if it was something that literally occurred, but in some sense, it doesn't exactly say that.
It says, well, the ancient landscape was a landscape of heroic adventurers.
It's like, well, we do that to our own history, right?
I mean, even when we consider it literal history, we don't...
We pick people at random to historicize.
We pick people who had some substantive impact and tell stories about them.
And they're emblematic in some sense of the spirit of striving that characterizes humanity.
And so you can't have history without some mythologization, because the mythologization occurs at the level of the selection of the entities about which you're going to weave the historical tale.
Okay, so anyway, there's a little interlude there that talks about the appearance of heroes in the past, but then that's just done with very, very rapidly.
And then we move into another story.
This is the story of Noah.
So, the way it looks to me is that The part of Genesis that I'm going to talk to you about ends with the flood myth and also with the Tower of Babel.
And so the flood myth is the demolition of everything that came before and the Tower of Babel in some sense is exactly the same thing.
So there's two Chaotic...
I mean, it's like the fall occurs in stages.
There's paradise, and then Adam and Eve fall into culture, and then Cain and Abel.
Cain falls into chaos, and then the entire society falls into chaos.
And the flood comes, and the Tower of Babel is produced, and then that's the end of the truly archaic parts of the Bible.
And so what that seems to me, what's happening, it's very sophisticated, is that There's an implicit causal narrative being woven about the manner in which Cain responds and the probability that human beings are going to deteriorate and the flood is going to come.
So, and God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
And it repented the Lord that he had made man on earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Well, we already encountered a story like that once already, right?
That happened in the Marduk story, where Taimat and Apsu give rise to the Elder Gods, and they kill Apsu, which was not a very smart idea, right?
They demolish the substructure of their stable society.
And, of course, chaos comes flooding back.
Well...
What does it mean to say that human beings The wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, is not much different than to say that people are acting in a manner that demolishes the cultural structure.
Now, we've already even pointed out that the cultural structure that happens in this story was produced by the heroic giants of the past, right?
And we've also noted that what Cain is objecting to in his Cain-like manner is the social structure, which isn't rewarding him properly, and the transcendence that's above that, and the spirit of Logos itself.
He's rejecting all that.
Okay, so the issue here is that when that sort of evil is produced, exactly as when Apsu is slayed, Slade?
I guess that's right.
By the elder gods, then all hell breaks loose, all chaos comes back.
Now, Tiamat, if you remember correctly, is the god of the salt water, goddess of the salt water.
And so the return of Tiamat and the flood are mythologically similar ideas.
Now, Eliade has taken apart flood myths from all over the world, and he made two brilliant comments about them.
And they're also akin to some degree to what you can see in the Egyptian story about Seth and the corruption of the state.
So, because the Egyptians figured out that there's always a power working within the state, let's say, that corrupted it.
Now, that was Seth, and that was always working for its overthrow.
It's an idea like Satan, and I said that the word Seth becomes the word Satan through Coptic Christianity.
So...
So, Iliad's idea was this, that things fall apart of their own accord merely because they age.
That's the first motif in the flood story.
And that's only to say that if you build something, it decays.
If you build something and you just leave it the hell alone, it will soon not work.
Right?
And that's entropy.
So one of the reasons that the flood always threatens is merely because of entropy.
And you see that reflected in the Egyptian story, because one of the reasons that Osiris falls prey to Seth is because he's old.
You know, he was a great hero when he was young and created the Egyptian state, like the men of renown.
But now he's old, and it's worse.
He's willfully blind.
But that's the next thing.
But the fact that he's old is just to start.
Things fall apart of their own accord.
So once something is given to you, you have to maintain it just to ensure its continued existence.
So you actually...
You actually have a contract with most of the things that you own.
It's like a moral contract.
Let's say you have a car.
Well, you've decided that you're going to sacrifice to have the car.
and so you've performed an ethical calculation but the car was only worth the sacrifice as long as it functions as a car and so what that means is that to justify the sacrifice you made to have the car you have to maintain the car because otherwise you're acting out the proposition that the thing you sacrificed for actually didn't have any value and so you're obliterating that as a useful contract and you run into the situation where the car will just deteriorate of its own accord And then you won't have a car at all.
Well, so let's say, how do you speed the process by which your car deteriorates?
Well, that's easy.
You're driving it along the road, and it starts to make a ticking noise.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
And you think, I should go have that ticking noise checked, because you've heard it.
And then you think, no, it won't matter.
It's like, yeah...
Probably it'll matter.
And what does matter mean?
Well, matter is mother.
That's chaos, too, you know, matter.
But what it means is that that little ticking noise is the birthplace of Tiamat in your car.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
It's your first indication that the dragon of chaos is going to manifest itself in your car.
That happens when you...
I've got a funny story about that, so...
I had a friend in graduate school, someone I really liked, but I wouldn't call her mechanically inclined, let's put it that way.
And she had an old Honda, and those things were notorious for rusting out, this is 30 years ago, when they were first produced.
They weren't adapted well to Canadian winters.
And we used to go in her car, in her Honda, and it got a little on the scary side, because it was so rusty underneath that you could actually see through the floorboards.
And that actually made me nervous, because if you can see through the floorboards, that means that They're not really floorboards.
What they are is like rust.
And so, I mentioned the fact that that might be a problem to her a couple of times, but she was sort of blithe about it.
And one day she was driving down St.
Lawrence Street in Montreal, which is the main street, running roughly north and south, and her hood popped up.
It bent and popped up spontaneously.
and so she was really curious about that and so she was with this friend of hers who was just as clueless mechanically as she was which is really quite remarkably clueless and so they pulled off into a service station and had the guy come out and look at it and, well, he opened the hood,
obviously and what had happened was the body had fallen off the frame and what had happened was the shock, which is supposed to be attached to the car had pushed up through the hood So, literally, the car body had, like, fallen onto the ground, but she managed to drive the car.
Okay, so look.
I wouldn't exactly call that willful blindness, because perhaps there was an element of willful blindness.
She didn't know anything about mechanics, but you get the point, right?
It's like...
Let's say she would have been in a fatal accident.
You might say, well, you can shake your fist at God for producing the circumstances.
But, you know, the fact that you could see through the floorboards, that's probably something that you might have paid attention to.
And so it's always the question, if things fall apart around you, To what degree is it the mere tendency of things to degenerate entropically, because they do that of their own accord, or have you sped the probability of decay by failing to pay attention when a little snake manifests itself inside your paradise?
And it's always a question.
So, and here's an example, an interesting example, I think.
So, I thought about the actual floods, like the New Orleans flood.
Okay, so, New Orleans is built where there are floods.
Everyone knows that.
And it's a major port in the United States.
A huge part of American trade goes down the rivers to New Orleans.
So there was a reason it was built where it was, even though it was a dangerous place to build it.
And in order to maintain New Orleans, they had to build these levees that kept the water back.
Now, the American...
What is it?
American...
The Army Corps of Engineers, if I remember correctly, was responsible for building and maintaining the levees and the dikes.
Okay.
Holland is also built underwater, as you may or may not know, and they built huge dikes to keep the ocean back so they could reclaim the land, and that's basically Holland.
Holland is an unbelievably organized society, and part of the reason is it isn't land, it's underwater, and so if you're not bloody well awake in Holland, then the ocean comes in and you all drown.
And so the Dutch are very, very careful about such things, and they build their dikes so that, they calculate storm intensity, and then they calculate the intensity of the worst storm in 10,000 years, and then they build the dikes to withstand that storm.
The Army Corps of Engineers built the dikes in New Orleans to withstand the worst storm in 100 years, and they knew that was insufficient.
And New Orleans, Louisiana, is an unbelievably corrupt state, and you can't dump money in there to fix things, because people just steal all the money.
So, and then nothing gets fixed, and so then what happens?
There's a hurricane, and then what happens?
There's a flood, and everybody says, why would God send the flood?
And the answer to that is, well, was there a flood, or were the dikes not high enough?
And that's what's so interesting, is that it's always, this is a great father versus great mother conundrum.
If a system fails, is it because of the surround overwhelming the system, or is it because the system was insufficiently awake and doomed itself?
Okay, so Iliad's take on the flood myth is this.
God comes along and floods the world periodically.
Why?
And that's the catastrophic influx of chaos, right?
So chaos will wipe you out from time to time.
Why?
Well, entropy does in your conceptual schemes, and your willful blindness speeds the process.
And remember, that's what the Egyptians said about Osiris, right?
They said he was a great king, a man of renown, but he was old.
But he was also willfully blind.
And it was the combination of his age and his willful blindness that allowed Seth to chop him up into pieces and depose him.
And so, well, fair enough.
It's brilliant, right?
It's like, why do states fall apart?
Because the structures get old, and no one's taking care of them, and people have their eyes closed.
And so it's the same situation in the flood myths.
It's like, well, yeah, things fall apart, and they're going to flood, but if you were awake enough...
And you were on top of it, then you could continually stave that off.
And actually, partly what you're doing, because you're alive, is staving off entropy.
Like, you're an anti-entropic process.
That's a really good definition of life.
There's a great physicist named Erwin Schrodinger who wrote a book called What is Life?
And that's the fundamental thesis of the book.
You're always trying to stave off entropy.
What's the best way to stave off entropy?
Decay.
Chaos.
Keep your eyes open.
That's the rule.
Shut your eyes, especially to things you know you should see, the flood comes.
And that's the evil of man that's laid out in this story.
Because that's the worst sort of...
Perhaps it's not the worst.
It's one of the primary sins, so to speak, that will bring about the flood.
We already talked about the other things that characterized Cain's attitude.
So...
Here we go.
So God's upset because he made man on earth and grieved him at his heart.
And God says, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for I repent that I have made them.
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
Okay, so that's an interesting thing.
So here what we have is, the question is, The whole world's in chaos at this point, right?
At this point in the story.
And the chaos is of multiple sorts.
It arose from the fall.
It arose from the emergence of self-consciousness.
It emerged, say, arose from the sins of Cain.
Like, things are not going well.
It's multiple levels of collapse.
And it's got to the point where God's saying, this is a mess.
Like, it's such a mess that the whole thing has to be washed away.
The first fall wasn't enough.
Even Cain's collapse wasn't enough.
We're going to just scrub the whole bloody thing clean.
So it's the ultimate in traumatic collapses.
The question is, well what do you do in the face of the ultimate in traumatic collapses?
And the answer is in the story.
So Noah is someone who finds favor in the eyes of God.
So he's like Abel.
There's something that Noah's doing right that's going to enable him to ride out the storm.
And so the question, here it's the same question.
Do you want to have a life where there's no storms?
Or do you want to have a life where you can ride out the storms?
That's the issue, right?
Are you behind the dikes or do you build a boat?
Do you captain the boat?
That's the same idea.
And so, the idea here is that the thing that rides out the chaos is the thing that builds and captains the boat.
It's another dominance hierarchy idea.
What should be at the top?
Well, it's the top of something that doesn't get flooded out as well.
What should be at the top?
Well, it's to be the boat builder and to be the captain of the boat.
It's not to be hidden from the flood, precisely.
And so, I mean, here's a...
Here's something to think about.
Identity.
Identity politics.
Because that's what we're up to our neck in.
Okay.
Are you who you are?
Can I box you in?
Will you accept that as an identity?
So I could do that lots of ways.
You're male.
You're Asian.
You're young.
Right?
There's things about you that I can derive because of your putative membership in a set of different groups.
The problem with doing that is that the number of groups that I can assign you to is without end.
So, I have to pick arbitrary groups to assign you to, and you can accept that if you want, but there's no evidence that those are the proper canonical groups.
But maybe you're happy about that, because now you've been assigned membership in a group, and that's your identity.
Okay, so the question is, well, fine.
What happens when that identity is blown into pieces?
Then what?
Well, here's the answer to some degree.
And this is the answer that's embedded in the story of Noah.
If you want to withstand chaos, do you want to be who you are, or do you want to be the thing that changes who you are constantly?
That's the question.
And that's the difference.
That's the difference.
There's a categorical difference in identity.
Are you who you are?
Or are you the thing that could continually be more than you are?
And that's the thing that isn't the stable identity.
It's not the initial state.
It's also not the state of being in chaos, that nihilistic state, let's say.
And it's not even the state of reformulation that occurs after you've gone through the process.
It's the state of continually going through the process, so you can identify with the thing that you are, or you can identify with the thing that transforms who you are.
Right.
And that's the same as the state subjugating itself to the individual.
Because the individual is the thing that transforms the state.
And what the state should do, the state's necessary, because obviously it organizes all of us into peaceful cooperation and competition.
The state's necessary.
Then the question is, is the state the highest good?
And the answer to that is, well it can't be, because it's old and dead and blind.
And so if the state becomes the highest good, then you're occupied by the spirit of something that's old and dead and blind.
Well, that's not only not good for you, because then you're old and dead and blind, but it's also bad for the state, because as soon as the state gets old and dead and blind, God gets unhappy with it and the chaos comes in and washes it away.
So it seems like a bad solution.
So what's the proper solution?
You subordinate your group identity to the identity that transforms your identity, right?
And the state subordinates its power to the vision and articulation of the individual, because that's what revives the state.
And so that's what these stories are trying to stumble towards, roughly speaking.
So, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
Why?
Well, Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.
Now you remember, In the Adam and Eve story, Adam was walking with God to begin with, but then he got all self-conscious and hid behind a bush, and when God came to walk with him, he blamed his wife for his insufficiencies, which I still think.
That's such an unbelievably comic story.
I just can't believe it.
It's so absolutely ridiculous.
But that's exactly what happened.
Well, you have Noah here, and Noah...
Noah's like another counterpart to some degree to Cain.
Noah's a just man, and he walks with God, and so he's oriented properly.
And because he's oriented properly, when the flood comes, Not only does he manage to get through it as an individual, he manages to get through it with his family, and he saves, well, he roughly saves the world.
That's how the story puts it forward.
I mean, it's an ark, and it's full of animals.
You know, it's got a child story element to it.
In fact, I suspect it probably was a story that was primarily told to children.
You know, it's like a fable.
But it's a fable with punch.
Like the Pinocchio story is a fable with punch.
It's like, well, yeah.
There's going to be a flood.
There's always a flood.
There's always a flood.
So who are you if you want to get through the flood?
Well, then you're Noah.
You're the thing that builds the boat.
You're the thing that acts justly.
You're the thing that walks with God.
We already know what that means.
You identify with the transcendent.
That's like Geppetto pointing to the star before the...
Transformation process that occurs with Pinocchio.
It's you're identifying with the benevolent spirit of the state.
So you have a relationship with the transcendent and the benevolent spirit of the state.
And you're also identified with the capacity to generate chaos out of order and the reverse.
That's what it means to walk with God, roughly speaking.
It's across all of those dimensions.
So what does that do?
It gives you the power to withstand the flood and to bring people and being itself and civilization along with you.
And that's the story of Noah.
Abel is a precursor to the idea of the redeeming Messiah.
Noah is a precursor to the idea of the redeeming messiah.
You could think about them as proto-messiahs, or proto-meta-heroes, something like that.
And they manifest themselves.
They're part of the giants that walked in the past.
And their attempts embodied in story to elucidate the triangle that's at the top of the pyramid, right?
The eye that's at the top of the pyramid.
So...
So I won't tell you the rest of the Noah story, because...
I don't think it's necessary for us to delve into the more narrative details.
But I do want to...
So it's a pretty rough, I can point out it's a pretty rough story.
Every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle and creeping things, and the fall of the heaven, and they were destroyed from the earth, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
It's a very terrifying story, you know, and it's worth attending to, because we are currently in a period of extreme chaos.
So...
Okay, so anyways, works out.
God's had enough.
He's killed enough.
He's killed enough of everything.
It's a traumatic occurrence.
We can put it that way.
The waters recede, and God is done for the time being.
And so then, this is what happens at the end.
So...
The ark settled down, they're unloading it, and creation is reborn.
And so then you think, well, what sets things right again between man and God?
And the story says that.
Noah built an altar unto the Lord, and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
So it's the same idea here.
It's the same idea that you started to see emerging in the Cain and Abel story.
What is it that sets things right between man and God?
Sacrifice.
So the flood comes, then Noah makes the proper sacrifices.
Right?
It's part of re-establishing the proper order.
He makes the proper sacrifices.
And so God is happy with the sacrifices, which is a good thing, given that he's pretty ornery.
And...
And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.
So remember I told you before that the reason people thought that this would work was because the smoke would rise up and God would be able to detect whether or not the sacrifice was of high quality.
Well, you have it written right there.
You know, it's a very concretized image of the archetypal spirit, right?
The Lord smelled a sweet savor and said in his heart, I will not curse the ground anymore for man's sake.
For the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.
Neither will I again smite any more every living thing as I have done.
So that's pretty nice, as Noah's sacrifice actually calms God down to the point where he says, well, I'm not going to wipe everything out again.
It's like, well, fair enough, you know?
But I would consider it somewhat of a tenuous contract.
Because we've seen more than one example in the recent century where we came bloody close to wiping everything out again.
While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease, neither again will I smite any more every living thing as I have done.
So, alright.
So, that's that.
He basically tells Noah the same thing again that he told Adam at the beginning of the Genesis story.
So, fine.
And then he tells them a bunch of rules, which I could go into, but at the moment I won't.
But I want to show you that...
Basically what God...
I guess I should do this to some degree.
God lays out a bunch of rules, so you could think about it as a precursor to what happens in the story of Exodus where the Ten Commandments are revealed.
So this is like a foreshadowing of that story.
Noah makes the proper sacrifices and God says, okay, fine.
Here's the rules.
Follow these rules.
And then they're laid out.
And things will go okay with you.
That's the covenant.
That's the agreement between the individual and the spirit of the state.
That's one way of looking at it.
But it's not enough.
Because it isn't merely the spirit of the state that's being negotiated with.
It's the spirit of the state.
It's the spirit of that which transcends the state.
And it's the spirit of the moral order that's within the individual.
All three of those things are being negotiated simultaneously.
The proper sacrifices are made, the proper rules are laid out, and the idea is that there'll be a good balance between order and chaos as a consequence as long as people continue to play by the rules.
So that's the offering, fundamentally.
So, fine, that seems to work out.
And then, this one, I think, is extremely interesting.
It's also very short.
It took me a very, very long time to understand this.
All right, so this is after the story of Noah.
So what happens is, you get this situation where things descend into chaos and there's a great flood.
So that's sort of like the ultimate chaos story.
I think of it as a...
So you imagine when things fall apart, one possibility is that they fall into chaos.
The other possibility is something like they become hyper Conceptualized and hyper-orderly.
And so then the state itself, which would be the antidote to chaos, actually becomes a source of pathology.
And I think that that's what's being hinted at in the story of the Tower of Babel.
So here's what happens, is that human beings...
I'll read it to you.
This has to do with Noah's descendants.
It's a flip into another story.
And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east...
Oh, yes.
And all the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died.
New story.
And the whole earth was of one language and one speech.
Everybody's getting along fine in their tribal organization, let's say.
It's homogenous.
They can all speak to one another, and they all speak the same language.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.
And they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly.
And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
And they said, Go to...
Go too, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.
And let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
Okay, so what's happening here?
Only the bear...
What this story means is very deeply implicit in the story.
It's hinting at it, and I think it's because it was really beyond the power of the conceptualization of the people who generated this story to elaborate it to any great detail.
But I think what it means is this.
There's a guy named Robin...
I think it's Robin Dunbar.
And one of the things that Dunbar has done is do a very in-detail correlation analysis of cortical expansion and group size.
And what he showed is that If you plot primates by cortical size, let's say you correct it for body size, you plot primates by cortical size, and then you plot the size of their social groups, you see a very tight relationship between the size of the social group and the size of the cortex.
The optimal human social group is like 200 individuals, something like that.
Which is maybe roughly the number of people that you can reasonably track on Facebook.
After that it's like, well there's names, but you don't know those people.
You're not capable of tracking social dynamics that are any more complex than that.
Partly because you have other problems to solve.
And so one of the things that has been observed is that human groups tend to fractionate if they start to exceed 200.
And maybe that's partly because you can't keep track of the complexity.
But there's another constraint, which is you want your group to be big enough so that it protects you.
But you want it to be small enough so that you can climb to the top.
So when the group gets really, really, really, really big Well, maybe it can protect you, although it also doesn't give a damn about you, like once you're one sixty thousandth of the group, like you are at the University of Toronto, or one thirty millionth of the country, or maybe one three hundred millionth of Europe, which is partly why Europe is going to fragment, because that's just not enough, right?
You're just not enough there.
The group is too big.
What happens?
You keep aggregating the group, it gets more and more powerful, and you can think of that as something that has the capacity to replace the transcendent, right?
We'll make a society that's perfect, it's like a utopian vision, that's what I see happening in this story.
It's like, we'll make something so great on the part of human beings that it will reach up to heaven itself, which means it will take the place of God.
That's what it means.
That's exactly what the communists did in Soviet Russia, and that's what they tried to do in China too, and so that's why you end up with people like Stalin as the god.
So, talk about getting what you deserve.
So, anyways, so you build these monolithic Enterprises.
Let's call them state enterprises.
And the idea there is that the state, the hyper-organized and all-inclusive state, can bring about utopia.
That's what it means to reach to heaven.
So what happens?
So God gets wind of that, and he says...
God says, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.
And the Lord said, hmm, behold, the people is one.
And now they all have one language.
And this they begin to do.
And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and therefore confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
Well, it's interesting, because it's sort of, the story kind of portrays it as jealousy on God's part, right?
It's like, oh, these human beings, they're building so magnificently that they're starting to challenge my dominion.
Well, I'm going to go down there and play a trick or two on them, and that'll take care of that.
So what happens?
So the group gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and what happens?
It starts to fragment.
That is what happens.
That's exactly what happens.
That's part of the reason why the totalitarian state enterprise, to replace the transcendent with structure, that's one of the reasons it's doomed.
As you pull more and more people in, what happens is you start to pull in chaos itself, and that starts to fragment the order.
Here's an interesting thing.
I think that's happening with the...
So, the LGBT power groups are...
Exclusion.
Excluded groups, right?
And so it started out with gay rights.
And then one of the things that's happened that's so interesting, so you could think of, there was a normative group and there was excluded people.
Okay, and so one section of the excluded people stood up and said, hey, you know, enough of this exclusion.
So we're going to categorize ourselves and we're going to fight for recognition as the excluded.
We're going to fight to be Included.
But what happens is, well, it's L, and then it's LB, and then it's LBG, and then it's LGBT. And the last thing I saw, which was actually handed to the medical students at the University of Toronto, there's 20 letters.
Why?
Well, because You can't, this is tangentially related to this story only, you can't come up with a category of the things that don't fit inside categories.
Because there's an infinite number of things that don't fit inside categories.
And so when you try to build a category out of all uncategorical entities, all that happens is it starts to fragment.
Because there's actually no unity there.
And one of the things you are starting to see is that there's power battles emerging on the part of the excluded, on the left.
And it's inevitable.
And I think that's what this story is trying to represent, is that you can't build the state up beyond a certain size.
If you do, it will fragment and fall apart.
The people within it will no longer speak the same language, and they'll disperse themselves to different corners of the earth.
And so I think we're actually in real danger of forgetting this.
And one of the things that I saw, I read a couple of ominous things.
So, if you plot the size of economic catastrophes over the last 30 years, they're getting bigger each time.
So that's scary.
Now, part of that is because the world economy is getting bigger, and so maybe you have to control for that.
But the magnitude of the chaos has been increasing with each collapse.
Okay One of the things that came out of the last collapse, 2008, was the government rescuing collapsed companies like AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland Which by the way was the biggest company in the world No one knows that, but Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed, it was the biggest company in the world.
And AIG was the insurer of insurers.
And so it collapsed too.
They were rescued by the government, and maybe fair enough.
But one of the motifs that came out of that was the idea of too big to fail.
Well this story says, wait a second.
It says, too big means definite failure.
It means inevitable failure.
And that strikes me as highly probable.
There's a warning in this story.
Although it's a bare story, right?
It's only four or five lines.
It's just the outlines.
But it's placed in a very particular place.
It's placed right after the flood, right?
It's like...
Well, there's the nihilistic chaos of the flood, and then there's the totalitarian temptation to build hyper-structures that can theoretically replace the transcendent.
Well, what happens?
You build a hyper-structure and it fragments from within.
And then people don't speak the same language, and they, you know, distribute themselves sort of chaotically on the surface of the earth.
So...
Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth, and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
I think the other issue, too, is that what's the problem with the homogenization of a group?
It's like you bring everyone into the group, and then they're all the same.
Uniformity.
Well, the advantage is you can understand everyone.
The disadvantage is there's no variability left, right?
There's no variability.
Everyone is a clone of everyone else.
And that's great if you know where you're going and you know how to get there, but it's really, really bad if the underlying structure shifts on you.
Because the fact that you're adapted to one situation, hyper-adapted to one situation, might mean that you're completely not adapted to the next situation.
You build groups that are too big and too homogenous.
They're effective.
But only within the limited range of their map, and if the map no longer functions, then the whole thing sinks.
And that's, I think, what happens in this particular story.
And then, okay, at the end of that, then what happens is that soon afterwards, and I think perhaps immediately afterwards, the story of Abraham emerges.
And that's really, I would say, that's when the prime myths, the primal myths, Take on a more historical element, and history, you know, roughly speaking, history as we know it, begins something like 6,000 years ago.
So, and then, you know, the rest of the biblical stories proceed apace from there.
What basically happens is that this is something that was well mapped out by Northrop Frye, and you'd think at the University of Toronto that you all would have been encouraged to read Northrop Frye because he was perhaps the greatest literary scholar that the University of Toronto ever produced, and He outlined the Old Testament very interestingly.
He said that what happens after these initial stories is that the state arises.
So it's like the Tower of Babel is continually rebuilt over and over.
It's the state of Israel.
The Israelites get their act together, build a state.
What happens?
They get corrupt.
A prophet comes up and says, you better watch out, because what you're doing is not making God happy.
And the prophets are very brave, because they come forward.
The kings are authoritarian, and they can kill them at an instant.
But the prophets are moved by walking with God, let's say, for lack of a better argument.
They come to the king and say, look, you're not caring for the widows and the children.
You think that's okay, because they're weak.
It's not okay.
You're breaking the covenant.
You're breaking the rules.
And the price for that is what we already saw.
The price for that is the flood.
It's like, get your act together or you're going to be sorry.
Now, sometimes the kings to whom the prophets speak listen.
But often they don't.
And then the whole bloody state is demolished.
And then the Israelites are back.
Like, they're enslaved or they get wiped out by their enemies.
Like, it's a complete bloody catastrophe that lasts for centuries.
And then they kind of struggle back up and make another state.
And then they get arrogant.
And then it gets corrupt.
And then a prophet comes along and says, You know what happened last time.
It's like, well, that was 600 years ago, right?
And I know everything now, so I don't have to pay any attention to you.
They ignore it.
And the prophets say, you are violating a fundamental moral order.
As king, you're supposed to be subject to something.
Higher than yourself.
It's like the idea that the Mesopotamians had that the emperor was supposed to be an emissary of Marduk.
That's why he was the emperor.
Because he was a good Marduk.
He could confront chaos and make order.
That was what gave him his sovereignty.
Or the Egyptian pharaoh was a combination of Osiris and Horus.
That's what gave him sovereignty.
And so the idea was, you get to be king, But you have to act out the spirit of being king.
And if you don't do that, then, well, king or not, all hell's going to break loose for you.
And that's what the prophets continue to say, but the Israelites, you know, they don't pay enough attention, and they continue to get absolutely demolished.
And so, the Old Testament can be read, at least in part, as the description of a sequence of the rise and fall of states and their descent into corruption and chaos.
And so, we'll leave it at that, because I want to tell you the next part of the story, the last part of the story, roughly speaking, in our next lecture, which is also the last lecture.
So...
We've got about 12 minutes if we want it, so if anybody has any questions, you can ask them, or we can, and if you don't, then we could call it a day.
So, does any, well, it's a lot of information, so, and it's a lot of strange information, so I'm curious, you know, if it, what you make of it.
Yep.
So, two sort of separate and inter-regional questions.
You were talking about Europe being around 300 million people.
So why is a group of similar size, which is America, will it face similar?
You think the right and left can talk to each other?
You think they speak the same language?
Right.
You see that fragmenting occurring.
And they really are, not only are they speaking different languages, they really are speaking different languages.
It's the right way of thinking about it.
Yes, it's very, very dangerous.
You know, I think the U.S. worked for a long time, first of all, because it didn't always have 300 million people.
It's a lot of people to put under one umbrella.
Now, the utility of the American system is that it is a hierarchy, right?
There's individuals, families, towns, states, underneath a somewhat loose federal structure.
And that's sort of...
So it's not a monolith where everyone has to speak precisely the same language.
It's got some flexibility built into its structure, because it's...
It's formulated into components which have a certain amount of autonomy.
And so far that's worked sufficiently well.
And it'll probably continue to work.
I mean, the Americans are a very, very robust people.
And they've gone through things that are analogous to what they're going through now many times.
God only knows, right?
But it's a very dangerous thing to presume that the Americans are down for the count, because they have an uncanny ability to rise out from the ashes even stronger than they were before.
But you can certainly see the danger lurking.
In Europe, that's a different thing.
Like, I think the European state is doomed, because I think it grew too fast.
And it severed the connection between, like, there's not the proper hierarchy of identification.
So, and people are saying, wait, Brussels?
Like, who the hell are you guys?
Why are you making decisions for us?
And we don't agree with your decisions.
And, like, are you sure that Greece and Germany can be in the same place?
Because that's by no means self-evident.
The Germans aren't very happy about it, and the Greeks aren't very happy about it.
And one of the rules for making an organization is that it's a lot easier to make a functional organization worse than it is to make a dysfunctional organization better.
And so you might say, well, you've got Germany and France and England, well, let's say Germany and France, powerhouses, especially Germany, they can afford to bring Greece in.
Well, Maybe.
But there's no evidence that they can afford it.
So, I mean, Greece is unbelievably corrupt.
No one pays their income tax.
That's a big problem, right?
And bringing them into a union at a high order has no effect whatsoever on the micro-behaviors.
And the thing is, the micro-behaviors have to be rectified.
And no one really knows how to do that.
How do you stop a country where people don't pay their taxes from...
How do you stop people from not paying their taxes?
Why do we pay our taxes?
Who knows?
We could just all of a sudden decide not to, you know, and the government wouldn't have the resources to run around gathering them all up.
For one reason or another, it's become customary for people in functional Western democracies to pay their taxes.
But why?
Who knows?
It would have been way easier for us just to do what the Greeks did, and pretend to pay them, you know.
So, they're too big, I think.
And so the people on the right are saying, back to the nation.
Like, I understand why they're doing that, but...
But...
The danger is the nation will subordinate the individual.
And I do see it as another example of safe spaces.
It's just scales different.
So, and that's why I think that the proper antidote to that, to both the chaos on the left and the order on the right, roughly speaking, is to walk the proper line in the middle.
And we better do that, because things are not, things are too chaotic at the moment.
So, it's not good.
Maybe it's really good, that's possible.
But we're in a state where, I really believe, we're in a state where things could go Any number of ways, and there's no predicting it.
And I've never felt that, you know.
I mean, I lived in the 80s, and, you know, political correctness rose up in the 90s as well.
And I can remember a lot of what happened in the early 70s with the oil crisis and all that.
So there were times when things were...
Shaky.
But they weren't shaky the way they are now.
They're an internal shakiness.
Rather than something that was a threat that seemed to be imposed from the outside.
And that's different.
It is associated with this intellectual war that's going on with post-modernism and neo-Marxism and all of that as well.
The future authoring program, there's a heavy emphasis on the need to use imagery to conceptualize the ideal and worst future.
You've mentioned that the program's positive effects are much more pronounced than men, specifically non-Western ethnic men.
So I wanted to ask our imagery, specifically goal-directed That's a lot of questions.
They're good questions.
Well, I'll tell you a couple of strange things, things that I don't really understand.
The first is, when we've done the analysis of the effects of the Future Authoring Program, it has had a differential impact on men.
And it's had a particularly differential impact on what I would call excluded men.
And so that would be non-Western ethnic minority men, or, or, what?
Majority men who aren't doing very well.
So, for example, at Mohawk College, the Theatre Authoring Program had a particularly robust effect on Mohawk College students who were men who hadn't done very well in high school and who hadn't picked a major that had a destination, a career destination at its end.
So you can imagine those people are, they have an ambiguous relationship with the idea of education.
And they're not oriented specifically towards a goal.
They're not very motivated.
Now, why did it have a differential effect on men?
That's a good question.
Well, first of all, the women are doing better.
So it might just be a matter of the fact that it does better for people who aren't doing as well, and at the moment most of them are men.
I don't believe, I think that might be part of it.
But I don't believe that's all of it.
I think that part of the reason that women are doing better is because they're agreeable.
And so if a system sets out a structure and says, here's a pathway to attainment, the women won't rebel against that, they'll go along with it, and that's working very well for them at the moment.
The men, especially the men on the disagreeable end of the distribution, and there's way more men on the disagreeable end of the distribution than there are women, right?
That's what you get from, if you look at overlapping normal distributions.
So there's the female distribution for agreeableness, Male distribution for agreeableness.
Tremendous overlap.
Okay, women are higher.
All the really agreeable people are women.
All the really disagreeable people are men.
And maybe the real differences occur at the extremes, right?
So, and it's a very interesting side effect of overlapping distributions.
So people can be mostly the same, but that can still produce radical differences.
Disagreeable men won't do anything they don't want to do.
They just say, up yours.
I'll go home and play video games.
I'm not listening to your stupid classes.
And why should I work for you?
I'll just go have fun.
I'll do my own thing.
I don't think they're motivated.
And so then if you take the men who are like that and you say, okay, what do you want?
You can have what you want, but you have to figure out what it is.
So then they write down what they want, and they think, oh, hey, well, that might be worth having, so maybe I'll put some effort into it.
That's what it looks like to me.
Now, you know, that's weak evidence.
And this is a weak argument.
But I'm trying to stretch out my understanding to account for this.
But I'll tell you something else that's really weird.
I don't understand this either.
So...
More than 90% of the people who watch my videos on YouTube are men.
Now that's weird, because about 80% of psychology students are women.
So that is not what you would expect, right?
You'd expect that the majority of them would be women.
And you might say, well, it's because of the political stance I've taken.
And I thought, well, that's possible.
So I went and looked at the demographic data, because I have that.
Well, before I did any of the political videos, 85% of my viewers were men.
So it's actually increased a bit.
It's increased by 6%.
And that's not trivial, but it was still overwhelmingly meant.
So that was interesting.
I thought, what the hell?
Why is that exactly?
And then now I've been watching crowds when I've been talking to them.
and the crowds that have come to see me in person this happened at the University of Toronto free speech debate and I actually noticed it and commented on it before the debate took place because I was talking about intrinsic differences between men and women and I looked around the room and I thought, hmm, hey, 80% of the people in this room are men so I had all the women stand up and then all the men stand up I said, look, like, here's a natural experiment For some reason 80% of the people who showed up to this are men.
Now everybody thought I was kind of cracked to do that.
And it was a risk, you know.
But I thought, no, there's something going on here.
And then what's interesting now is that every public appearance that I've made that's related to the sort of topics that we're discussing is overwhelmingly men.
It's like 85 to 90%.
And so I thought, wow, that's weird.
Like, what the hell's going on here exactly?
And then the other thing I've noticed is that I've been talking a lot to the crowds that I've been talking to, not about rights, but about responsibility.
Right?
Because you can't have the bloody converse...
What are you doing?
You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility, because your rights are my responsibility.
That's what they are, technically.
So, you just can't have only half of that discussion.
And we're only having half that discussion.
And the question is, well, what the hell are you leaving out if you only have that half of the discussion?
And the answer is, well, you're leaving out responsibility.
And then the question is, well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility?
And the answer might be, well, maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life.
That's what it looks like to me.
It's like, here you are.
Suffering away.
What makes it worthwhile?
Rights?
You know, you're completely out...
You're completely...
You have no idea what you're...
It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is.
Responsibility.
That's what gives life meaning.
It's like lift a load.
Then you can tolerate yourself, right?
Because look, you're useless.
Easily hurt.
Easily killed.
Why should you have any self-respect?
That's the story of the fall.
Pick something up and carry it.
Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yeah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there.
Well, what's really cool about that is that when I talk to these crowds about this, the men's eyes light up.
I've seen that phenomenon, because I've been talking about this mythological material for a long time, and I can see when I'm watching crowds, people, you know, their eyebrows lift, their eyes light up, because I put something together for them.
That's what mythological stories do.
So I'm not taking responsibility for that, that's what the stories do.
So I say the story, and people go click, click, click, you know, and their eyes light up.
But this responsibility thing, that's a whole new order of this, is that young men are so hungry for that, it is unbelievable.
And one of the things I've been talking to some of the people who've been running for the Conservative leadership in Canada, and I've been talking to them about, well, the difficulties they have communicating with young people, because Conservatives, what the hell are they going to sell to young people, right?
Because being Conservative is something that happens when you're older.
They can sell responsibility.
No one's selling it.
And the thing is, for men, there's nothing but responsibility.
You know, I was watching The Simpsons the other day.
I watched the first Simpsons episode and I deconstructed it.
And so it's really interesting.
So what happens in the first Simpsons episode is that It's Christmas, and Homer and Marge are going to buy some Christmas presents, but Homer doesn't get his Christmas bonus.
And so he's absolutely crushed by that.
And that actually is a recurring theme in The Simpsons, where Homer loses his job or something like that, or can't make enough money.
He's completely crushed.
Even though he's kind of useless, bumbling, laughing fool of a guy, you know, the thing that gives that show his soul is that he's still oriented towards his family.
That's what makes him honorable, is that...
Foolish as he is, he's decided to adopt responsibility for his family and to try to bear that.
And so he's not, he's a holy fool.
He's not a complete fool.
And it's so interesting watching the story because he suffers dreadfully as a consequence of not being able to fulfill his responsibility.
Well, that's for men.
Women have their sets of responsibilities.
They're not the same.
Right?
Because they're complicated.
Because women, of course, have to take primary responsibility for having infants, at least, but then also for caring for them.
They're structured differently than men.
For biological necessity, even if it's not a psychological issue, and it's also partly a psychological issue.
Women know what they have to do.
Men have to figure out what they have to do.
And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan.
And why the hell not?
Because the alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive, low-class pleasure.
And you saw that in the Pinocchio story, right?
That's Pleasure Island.
It's like, well, why lift the load if there's nothing in it for you?
That's another thing that we're doing to men that's a very bad idea.
And to boys.
It's like...
You're pathological and oppressive.
It's like, fine then, why the hell am I gonna play?
If that's the situation, if I get no credit for bearing responsibility, you could bloody well be sure I'm not gonna bear any.
But then, you know, your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self-contempt and nihilism, and that's not good.
And so that's why I think...
That's what I think's going on at a deeper level with regards to men needing this direction.
A man has to decide that he's going to do something.
He has to decide that Yeah, well, you know, partly what you're trying to do in the future authoring process Is say, okay, well, what's your highest value?
It's the star.
It's like, okay, what are you aiming for?
You can decide, man.
But, you know, there's some criteria.
It should be good for you.
It should be good for you in a way that facilitates your moving forward.
Maybe it should be good for you in a way that's also good for the family and the community.
It should cover the domain of life.
I mean, there's constraints on what you should regard as a value.
But within those constraints, you have the choice.
You have choice!
Well, the thing is, is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the goddamn load.
So, and they think, well, I won't carry any load.
It's like, okay, fine, but then you're like the sled dog that doesn't have a sled to pull.
You're just gonna...
You're gonna tear pieces out of your own legs because you're bored.
You know?
You need...
People are pack animals.
They need to pull against a weight.
And that's not true for everyone.
It's not true, particularly, say, for low conscientious people.
I mean, maybe they're open and creative or extroverted and some other things, but for the typical person, They'll eat themselves up unless they have a load.
This is why there's such an opiate epidemic among dispossessed, white, middle-aged guys who are unemployed in the US. It's like, they lose their job, they're done.
Right?
They despise themselves.
They develop chronic pain syndromes and depression.
And the chronic pain is treated with opiates.
It's like, that's what we're doing.
So, yeah, that's what it looks like to me.
And it's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility.
They're so goddamn thrilled about it.
It just blows me away.
It's like, really?
That's the counterculture.
Grow the hell up and do something useful.
Really?
I could do that?
Oh, I'm so excited by that idea.
No one ever mentioned that before.
It's like rights, rights, rights, rights.
Jesus.
It's appalling.
And I feel that that's deeply felt by the people who are coming out to listen to these sorts of things, too.
They've had enough of that.
So, and they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being.
Responsibility, man.
That's where the meaning in life is.
So...
Alright, good.
One more class, eh?
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