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Nov. 29, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:29:34
The Uniting Power of Story | Angus Fletcher | EP 205
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The wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story, and beyond that, to build stories that we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories.
And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about.
And also these emotions that you're talking about.
And to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperating together towards the same ends, right?
So that we all come under the same banner in some sense.
And that's that shared intentionality that's very specifically human.
You don't see that much manifest itself much in other animals.
Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us.
Absolutely, yes.
And, you know, what's a big, what's really important about that is that it's ultimately voluntary.
Hello, everyone. everyone.
I'm pleased to have with me today Dr.
Angus Fletcher, who wrote Wonderworks, which is a study of the psychology of stories, the psychology of narrative.
I'm going to read you Dr.
Fletcher's bio from the back cover.
Dr.
Angus Fletcher is a professor at Ohio State University's Project Narrative, the world's leading academic think tank for the study of stories.
He has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature, received his PhD from Yale, taught Shakespeare at Stanford, and has published two books and dozens of peer-reviewed academic articles on the scientific workings of novels, poetry, film, and theater.
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
He's done story consulting for projects for Sony, Disney, the BBC, Amazon, PBS, and NBC Universal.
And is the author, presenter of the Audible slash Great Courses Guide to Screenwriting.
So, Dr.
Fletcher, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
I'm looking forward to this conversation greatly.
So let's start a bit with this project narrative at Ohio State.
I hadn't heard of that previously, and so tell me how you got interested in that and then maybe how you got interested in the psychology of stories more broadly.
Well, thanks for letting me be here, Jordan.
I'm thrilled too.
Project Narrative is best known as a rogue outpost of literary studies.
We do literary studies completely differently from everyone else in the Modern Academy.
Basically, there was a split in the 1920s that started with New Criticism.
And New Criticism went on to develop what is essentially the modern literary studies.
And New Criticism is based on the same method that was used in the Middle Ages to interpret the Bible.
That's the same method that's used really across the academy, even though New Criticism has itself fallen out of favor.
And in Project Narrative, we take a different approach.
And in my case, it's a scientific approach.
We're interested in studying how stories work in the brain.
And the particular focus of my research is the belief that stories are the most powerful things that humans have ever invented.
They're the most powerful tool we possess.
And the simple reason for that is that the human brain is the most powerful thing on Earth.
For good or for bad.
I mean, you look around, the extraordinary achievements of our mind, the cultures we have created, the science we have created, the technology we have created, the art we have created, but also the fact that we have the power in us to wipe out this planet, to destroy everything.
And when you realize that stories have the power to change how our mind works, to troubleshoot it, to make it more resilient, to make it more creative, to make it more scientific, to do all these things, you realize that when you couple the power of stories with the human brain, You throw open the doors to anything.
So that's sort of my focus.
And that's sort of what we do at Project Narrative is we study stories, how they work scientifically, what they do.
And because of that, we're considered somewhat heretical, somewhat maverick, and definitely on the fringes.
Although I should say, I did get my PhD at Yale.
So all of us are reputable and well-respected scholars.
So, are you on the fringes among psychologists or among literary critics?
No, not among psychologists.
So, I mean, one of the extraordinary things about my career is that my work is backed by some of the biggest neuroscientists and psychologists in the world.
Doctors, nurses, social workers, big businesses, the US Army, special operations community, The Air Force, I mean, there's an enormous amount of backing from my work among people who are pragmatic and empirically based and are interested in science.
But the way that literary studies has become, I mean, what has happened in literary studies is because everyone is using this method, which is really from the Middle Ages, The same thing is happening in literary studies now that happened in the Middle Ages.
People read the same book, they come up with conflicting interpretations of them, those interpretations reflect their ideologies, and then they argue about them.
And so we just have these sort of endless combustions.
That don't go anywhere, just like the Protestants and the Catholics in the Middle Ages.
And so, you know, what my work basically says is, what if we just back out of that?
And what if we just do the same thing that science has done?
And we focus on the way that stories can empower us.
The way the stories can improve our human performance.
Because that's really why they were created by our ancestors.
Our ancestors came to be in a tragic world where they realized their own frailty and insufficiency.
They said, how do I cope with this life?
How do I find strength in the face of my own mortality?
How do I lift myself up when I see so much frailty within myself?
I see so much frailty in terms of my capacity for anger, for hate, and also my ability to be damaged, my ability to suffer grief and trauma and loneliness.
How do I lift myself up?
What tool could help me do that?
And so the beginning of that, literature with Early scriptures, there's a ton of technologies, as I talk about in my work, that we can actually trace their effects in the brain.
And then going beyond that healing work into actually making us into our better selves, empowering us with joy, with creativity, with resilience, with the power to lift up others, and perhaps most importantly, the power to grow.
To not stay still.
To take on damage and turn that damage around into a source of strength.
And so what my work does is my work focuses on how literature does all those things, which all of us know intuitively.
All of us have read a book at some time, have read a novel at some time, or watched a movie at some time, or read a poem at some time.
And felt healed or uplifted or strengthened.
If you have a favorite musician, a favorite artist, a favorite rapper, you know, you'll listen to their lyrics and feel the same thing.
But the question has always been, how?
How is it doing that?
And so my work goes into that, but also more powerfully, my work breaks down the technology of literature so you can identify the specific nuts and bolts, the specific blueprints that are having those specific effects.
And so that's the work that I do at Project Narrative.
So in Wonderworks, in this book, which I referred to earlier, you...
...list out what you consider 25 inventions, and they basically constitute the chapter structure of the book.
And so you examine the manner in which stories do such things as rally courage or stoke romance or help control anger or transcend hurt or excite curiosity.
I'm not going to go through all of them, but to dispense with pessimism and banish despair and heal from grief and...
Decide more wisely and so in some sense it's a listing of existential concerns and so you've broken down narrative in this in these 25 ways in this book to discuss the major sources of existential concern that plague mankind and then have put forward the notion that we have stories that surround each of these fundamental concerns that help us understand We're
good to go.
I mean, that's exactly right.
And even more than that, so, I mean, part of what stories do is they give us a plot, a roadmap, out of some of these negative emotions into positive emotions.
But even more powerfully, they can actually shape our emotions once we understand how to use them.
Certain stories can just build optimism or resilience or courage.
So to take the first chapter of the book, which is about courage, Homer's Iliad, this extraordinary work, When you read the Iliad, it makes you feel braver.
It makes you feel stronger.
And it can do that even when it's not talking about courage, even when it has no message about courage, even when it's talking about, oh, well, how does it do that?
Well, Homer, he probably didn't invent this technology, but we don't know who did it before him, so we give Homer credit.
Homer realized that when he saw soldiers marching into war, they sang songs.
And those songs made them feel braver.
Why did those songs make them feel braver?
Well, those songs made them feel part of a larger voice.
They felt they were bigger than themselves.
And on a deep psychological level, they could feel that strength because they knew that even if their individual body died, the voice would carry on.
And that's a scientific power of song.
We know that to be the case, that when people sing together in choirs, they feel braver, they feel more courageous.
And so what Homer did is he said, well, what if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing?
What if I could create a technology, a way of writing, so that it tricked your brain into thinking that you were singing as part of a choir?
And that's, of course, what the Iliad does.
It makes you believe that you are listening to the song of a god, sing goddess of the anger.
That's how it begins.
And it uses all these tricks and techniques, which I go through in the book, into making your brain believe that you are singing as part of this larger chorus.
And so when you simply read the book, it makes you feel braver.
And that technology...
That idea that you had there that...
That group singing unites you with the central voice whose existence transcends death.
I mean, there's a very deep religious-like idea in there that's implicit, right?
That there is a voice and there are words that unite and transcend and that supersede death.
And so that's part of that heroic pattern, I suppose, that Homer is referring to, that you can step into as an, what would you say, an active agent in engaging in this literature.
Just like when you walk into a movie and...
You embody the heroes or the anti-heroes sometimes that you see on the screen and experience the emotions that they experience, for better or for worse, as I suppose as a form of practice.
That's exactly right.
And you know, one of the things that is distinct about the Homeric gods is they're large humans.
You know, Homeric gods, you know, unlike sort of an extreme Gnostic version of God as, you know, as the via negativa or something that is completely non-human and that we can't access, these Homeric gods are essentially heroes in the sense of just being bigger versions of us.
And so they're gripped with all the same problems that we have, all the same frailties that we have, jealousy, rage, insufficiency.
And so when you join with them in this bigger voice, just as you would in a hero in a movie, You feel that you are becoming yourself only greater.
You don't feel like you're losing yourself, but you're joining this bigger thing that is yourself that makes you bigger, that makes you more powerful.
And that's where the spiritual experience comes from.
And absolutely, one of the basic primordial experiences of literature, which is so basic, I don't even include it as one of the technologies in the book.
I just talk about it in the introduction, is spiritual experience.
We can actually detect you having deactivation in your parietal lobe, as you have what's known as a self-transcendent experience, in which you feel the boundaries of yourself and the world dissolving, between yourself and the world dissolving.
And that's associated with increased life purpose, increased generosity and kindness, because you no longer have the same sense of ego.
You feel connected to others.
And that sense of spiritual, I mean, the word literature and the word scripture are synonyms.
They mean that which is writ.
And so if there's one fundamental thing, more fundamental even than any of the technologies I talk about, to get from literature, it simply is that sense of spiritual experience.
And I do think that that is the basic and most powerful experience that any of us can have in this world, because it makes us not only stronger and more purposeful in ourselves, but kinder to others.
And really, that's ethics.
To be stronger in yourself and kinder to others.
Right.
To be more effective and more useful socially, broadly.
So, okay, I want to ask you a couple of things.
I've done a lot of thinking about narrative.
When I read this book back in the 1980s, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray, and that book had a tremendous impact in the field of psychology, although it took about 20 years before people...
I suppose, incorporated at least some of what Gray had proposed.
And he got a lot of his ideas, although I didn't know it at the time, from Norbert Weiner, I don't know how to say his name, a brilliant cybernetician who worked on establishing what might be the basis of intelligent abstraction, and so that it could be mechanized.
So I read Gray at the same time and learned about his association with Weiner and cybernetics and at the same time that I was reading a lot of analytical psychology, mostly by Jung and his students.
And I started to understand that the basic cybernetic mechanisms that Gray was discussing as characteristic of cognitive processing seemed to me to be the same thing as the fundamental elements of the story.
So let me run this by you, and you tell me what you think about this, okay?
We'll see how our thinking is meshing, perhaps, and differing.
So I thought that...
That there are basically two types of stories in a functional sense.
There's a simple story, and there's a story about how stories transform.
And the story itself is actually the frame of reference that we use to perceive the world and act within.
So I don't think we have a...
I don't think we think, and then we think in stories as a subset of thinking.
I think that the story is the frame for our thought.
And that frame is actually what produces our motivation and our emotions.
And so a lot of this is, again, influenced by this cybernetic work that was developed by Gray.
She has tremendous knowledge of animal thinking.
Behaviour and cognition, because he was an absolute genius.
I think he cited 2,000 papers in the Neuropsychology of Anxiety.
It took me like six months to read that book and understand it.
It was really dense.
So imagine that in the simple story, you mentioned literature as a story as a map.
And I think that's the fundamental issue.
So we're always somewhere.
That's our starting point.
And we're always moving somewhere else because we're active creatures.
And so we have an image of the destination in mind.
And so we segregate up time and space into a functional unit that defines the geographical and temporal bounds of our current operations.
And we specify a target.
And even when our imagination is free-floating, partly what we're doing is playing with different spatial-temporal frames of reference.
So we might be playing with 10 minutes.
We might be playing with an hour.
We might be playing with a day.
We might be playing with two weeks.
We can expand and contract that, more or less at will.
So the map...
The map covers a spatiotemporal domain.
Okay, and then the goal is specified, and then we feel positive emotion when we see any indication from the environmental feedback that our actions are moving us towards the goal.
And we feel—and that's technically positive affect because it's associated with forward movement, left hemisphere activation, dopaminergically mediated.
So we can conceptualize the goal abstractly, interestingly enough, and we have to do that because we can play with these spatiotemporal frames of reference— And then, if we see a pathway to the goal, a clear pathway that we can implement behaviorally, then that fills us with positive emotion.
If we see obstacles in the way, then that induces negative emotion and stops us.
And when we stop, we'll play around with the spatiotemporal framing, making it smaller, maybe we have to deal with the next minute, or larger, trying to reconceptualize the territory so that we can continue our movement forward.
Okay, so that's story number one, simple story.
I was here, I went there, and here's how I got there.
And you might want to listen to that because maybe you're there and you want to get to the goal and you need directions.
Okay, the next story is different.
It's the transformation of stories.
And so it's the typical fall or paradise fall, paradise rekindled story.
So, you have a frame of reference.
You're moving towards a goal.
Something that isn't modeled within that frame of reference occurs.
It's like an alien invader, in some sense.
It doesn't make sense from within that current frame of reference.
It blows the frame of reference into pieces.
You enter a land of, in some sense, of narrative fragments.
That's the underworld in mythology.
You have to sort those narrative fragments up and rebuild them, remap the territory, and then you build another story.
So that's a meta story.
It's a story about how a story can decompose, collapse into catastrophe, and rekindle itself.
And it seemed to me that there isn't anything more basic to our abstract thinking than that sort of nesting inside of stories.
First of all, I completely agree on the overall point.
So, I mean, I actually have a book coming out next year on Columbia University Press, and the title is Story Thinking, because basically my belief is that human cognition is largely narrative, and that actually we process the world narratively.
In this exact way, and this is actually what makes our brain function different from computers and AI. Whether or not computers and humans can do the same tasks, we do them differently.
Computers think in these kinds of logical correlational sequences, and humans, to your point, think in plots and plans and narratives and goals.
And those plots and plans are then associated with emotions, because a computer exists in the mathematical present tense, so it cannot have desire.
There's nothing missing to a computer because it's always in the same place all the time.
It's always the equal sign of the mathematical present tense.
But we as humans are able, through plotting and planning, to imagine a future that is distinct from the present, which creates desire or fear or hope or all these other emotions.
Narrative and emotion just go together completely in human experience.
That's why emotions are both shaped through narrative, but narratives are also shaped through emotion.
The kind of simple thing is to say, well, you know, we can use narratives to influence people's emotions.
I mean, this is the sort of thing that, you know, is somewhat, sometimes positive, but often a kind of cheap political trick.
Right, right, exactly.
To scare people or manipulate them into doing things and whatnot.
But the real power here is to say, first of all, how can I shape my own emotions with narratives?
In other words, I'm not trying to shape your emotions.
I'm trying to shape my own emotions.
I'm trying to control my own anger or increase my own hope.
How do I do that by retelling my own stories in my own head?
And then the second factor of that is, how can my emotions come into play and enable my narratives?
How can I develop the emotional resilience to be more likely to carry on my own story?
How can I complete my story even though I have these obstacles in front of me?
And to me, the function of literature.
So literature is related to stories, but slightly different in the fact that literature is really the kind of experimental zone where you're pushing the envelope.
I mean, literary writers are people who are somewhat dissatisfied to think about how you're talking about stories breaking.
They're dissatisfied with the stories they have.
They're not working.
And they say, how can I take these stories and somehow make them new?
How can I innovate them?
How can I go beyond the stories that I've inherited?
How can I push that envelope?
And so really what I do in the book is say, you know, here's 25 examples of how stories were broken and then put back together again, and how this technology, just like, you know, any technology that humans have developed, has been expanded and innovated over time to go beyond that simple I just have to get to this goal story, which I agree with you.
That's a fundamental story.
Beginning, end.
The most basic unit.
Beginning, end, and I find myself in the middle.
But the wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story, and beyond that, to build stories that we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories.
And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about and also these emotions that you're talking about.
And to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperating together towards the same ends, right?
So that we all come under the same banner in some sense.
And that's that shared intentionality that's very specifically human.
You don't see that much manifest itself much in other animals.
Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us.
Absolutely, yes.
And, you know, what's really important about that is that it's ultimately voluntary.
Because, I mean, again, if we brainwash people to have the same story as us, you know, that's to me a biological no-go.
It's not particularly effective and it's unethical.
But if we find a story that's so compelling that when we share it with someone else, it empowers them and they join our story.
So let's talk about that compelling issue because that's something that's really phenomenally interesting.
You can get gripped by a story, right?
And that's sort of extra rational.
And what I mean by that, because, and that makes sense, if the story is the frame within which rationality takes place, being gripped by a story would be extra rational.
And so you can see that when you walk into a movie theater and you get engaged, maybe even despite yourself, you might be thinking, I didn't want to go to this stupid movie.
My girlfriend just dragged me there and then, you know...
It's too far-fetched for me to suspend disbelief, as if you suspend disbelief voluntarily, because you really don't.
The story grips you.
And so you're in there, and you're gripped.
And then, you know, someone taps you on the shoulder and says, you know, this isn't real.
And you say, shut the hell up, because I'm watching the story, right?
So the question then is, from a psychological perspective, is...
What is that mechanism of grip?
And what might its biological roots be?
And my sense is, you know, if you watch little kids, you watch a three-year-old.
A three-year-old will be enthralled by a three-and-a-half-year-old or a four-year-old.
Now, they're not enthralled to the same degree by a 14-year-old.
I mean, and the reason for that, and criticize this, okay, because I want your perspective on it.
So, Vygotsky talked about the zone of proximal development.
And Vygotsky pointed out that, I believe it was Vygotsky, but it's been established by other psychologists in any case, that parents use language automatically in the presence of children who are developing their linguistic skills that is somewhat more complex than the child can currently understand.
So they communicate with them, but at the same time they're communicating with them, they're teaching them how to communicate better by stretching their limits.
So that's like that stretch you talk about in Wonderworks.
Okay, so I'm going somewhere with this.
So now you've got your three-year-old, and your three-year-old is enthralled by a four-year-old.
And the reason that they're enthralled is because the four-year-old is a stretch for them, but almost within their grip.
So what the enthrallment does, I don't know if that's a word, Being enthralled is a manifestation of the instinct that specifies the zone of proximal development and facilitates imitation.
So we're unbelievably imitative, right?
And what we're moving back and forth are units of behavior or units of perception.
And when we find one that our intuition senses is in the zone of proximal development, then we're gripped despite ourselves by the power of the story.
And the biological basis of that, I believe, is the instinct for mimicry.
And that's what's operating in literature as well.
It's abstract mimicry.
Any of that seem implausible?
Well, so first of all, to your first point, I completely agree that we seek out growth spaces.
I would use the term growth.
In other words, the sense that we're always looking for that threshold where we can pull ourselves forward and become more actualized.
And enter that space where, you know, we become, you know, more of the self we can be and want to be.
So, and absolutely, that again goes down to plot.
I mean, plot is always about the next step.
The reason that plot and narrative are so powerful is again, unlike logic, which is eternal, plot is always about the next step.
Where are you going?
And where are you growing?
And so plot naturally plugs into that because, I mean, the first thing that happens to us, even when we watch a bad movie, is we want to know where is this going.
I mean, if you watch a movie for even just 30 seconds, that's usually your first.
Where are these characters going?
What's happening here?
You know, this isn't going anywhere.
Right, right.
And then I got to walk out of it, you know?
But then what makes the movie emotionally gripping, to your point, is the sense that it's taking me somewhere where I want to go.
Or in other words, where my psychology wants to grow.
It's pulling me and growing me and developing me.
So I agree with all that completely 100%.
What I think is interesting is, you know, again, and this is sort of the work that we do, is that Different people, we just noticed, are drawn in by different aspects of stories.
And different stories draw people in differently.
So this all goes back to biology.
So I'll just give you a few quick top lines.
You tell me if you buy any of this or you want me to go deeper.
So we just know that the thing the human brain is most interested in is other people.
The human brain is just most interested in other people.
And that's because other people...
Inevitably, are both our greatest opportunities in life and our greatest obstacles in life.
You know, in other people, we see our friends, our mates, you know, our potential partners, our children, whatever our legacies.
But we also see our adversaries, our critics.
And so humans just notice other humans very, very quickly and prioritize them incredibly quickly.
And that's why characters are so important in stories.
We identify characters, and we develop these relationships with those characters, which can be imitative in a heroic story, but we have other relationships with characters, too.
We can have crushes on characters.
You know, we can feel protective of characters.
There's also relationships you can have.
So the first thing that will often get us to grip is just the characters in the story, because they're a human.
The second thing that humans notice immediately is the world.
I mean, the human brain evolved in this incredibly dynamic landscape where we're constantly having to shift where we're living.
We're constantly having to move into new terrains.
We're constantly having to be brave.
And so we have this huge ability to immediately sense what is this...
How is it working?
What are the different rules that operate here?
And we get this in modern society all the time whenever you enter into, you know, a different person's home or a different business space or whatever, you immediately sense, okay, the rules of operation here are a little bit different.
And you pick them up and you modulate your own behavior.
And in films, this is the most obvious effect of like a sci-fi world or a fantasy world.
You immediately feel like, okay, here's a space I'm going into where I can pull out parts of myself and explore them.
But you can also feel that in a very realistic story if you just feel that that human environment is somehow different from your own and the possibilities for human action in that space.
And that's very exciting and empowering for us as well.
So that's the second major thing.
And the third thing is the story itself.
If the story itself is taking you on a journey that you recognize on some level as a journey you could take and might want to take but haven't taken yet, then you say to yourself, this is a growth space for me.
Because by going on this journey, by continuing this plot, I can go to places, and most importantly, not just external places, but internal places.
I can find out who I become.
When I go on this journey, which I haven't gone on before.
Okay, let me ask you a question.
Yeah.
Okay, let me ask you a question about that, because that's kind of a mystery, eh?
So, how is it...
So, you have the three-year-old who's watching the three-and-a-half-year-old, and the three-year-old figures out that...
Or is gripped by the three-and-a-half-year-old because...
He or she can almost do that.
And then you see the same thing in adults.
You're talking about this growth opportunity.
How the hell do you think we conceptualize what we could be so that we can see that instinctively when we don't know what we could be because we aren't that yet?
You know what I mean?
We've got some conception of what constitutes the horizon, even though we're not there.
And so...
Well, first of all, I don't want to pretend to have the final answer to this.
And, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book and one of the reasons I think story is so wonderful is we just need to do more research on it.
And I would love anyone out there to dedicate their lives to delve more into these mysteries.
I just want to put that out there that, you know, I mean, this is a huge mystery and it might be the most important mystery.
But one of the things I can say is that one of the things we know about the origins of story in the human brain is it goes below consciousness.
A lot of what goes through our consciousness is just simply tiny bits Parts of the story machinery of our deep brain.
And that's one of the reasons why opportunities for action ideas just seem to just pop fully formed into our consciousness.
If you work as a writer ever, I mean, I've done a ton of work in Hollywood.
All of a sudden, these ideas just pop in your head.
Where do they come from?
Well, there's a huge amount of unconscious machinery in there.
And another way of saying that is there's this huge processing system, this operating system that's constantly hypothesizing like a little scientist.
Here's what could happen.
And when all of a sudden your conscious brain gets an opportunity with one of the possibilities your unconscious brain has, click, it says, let's go.
The main point here is that the human brain, the flip side of anxiety is creativity.
They're both about restless energy.
They're both about restless imagining.
They're both about restlessly thinking what could be.
Anxiety manifests itself as the nervous side of that, the fearful side of that, the more negative affect side of that.
Creativity manifests as the more hopeful side of that.
Our brain evolved To be constantly trying to grow, because otherwise it was dead.
I mean, in the kind of primordial culture in which we evolved, you could not sit still.
You would get eaten.
And so the whole pressure on you biologically was, can you get to that next step?
We don't know what it is yet, and it can't be preordained, because life around you is evolving.
And humans around you are evolving.
And so to a certain extent, there has to be this open-endedness to the process, where you're both piggybacking on other people, but Also leaping in a direction that they might not go.
Okay, so here, so I've got some comments about that, the unconscious aspect of that.
So I was imagining a way while you were talking and thinking about the structure of that unconscious.
And so this is part of the reasons why dreams are pre-cognitive in some sense.
This is how I think it works.
So imagine that We're watching people act all the time, all the time, in small groups and large groups, as individuals, in fiction, all the time.
And then, so we have this vast knowledge of embodied action.
Now that's not propositionalized, it's imagistic.
It's like the movie that runs in your head.
It's like a dream.
We can't propositionalize all that.
That's partly what a great storyteller does, is take a great set of images that reflect a compelling pattern of behavior and turn it into verbalized propositions.
And that insight you described, so imagine you have these images of behavior and in those images there are patterns, but we don't know what the patterns are because they're extremely sophisticated and we're not intelligent enough to fully understand them, which is only to say that human behavior at the individual and the social level supersedes our explicit grasp.
No one would dispute that.
That's why you have to learn about yourself, which is kind of a strange thing, right?
You're you, but you don't know who you are.
And so we have these patterns of behavior at hand, and then we abstract out images of those patterns of behavior.
And that's, at least in part, the source of dreams.
It's the abstract representation of the patterns.
Not of the actual behaviors themselves, but of the commonalities or something like that.
The commonalities between behaviors.
So, imagine this.
You talked about the Greek gods as being superhumans.
Okay, so...
There's patterns of behavior that strike us as admirable.
Those are in our zone of proximal development, otherwise we don't understand them.
We collect our brain, and maybe this is a right hemisphere function, our brain makes associations between these patterns of admirable behavior based on their emotional commonality.
Then it abstracts out a pattern that constitutes that set of admirable behaviors.
Okay, that's a super stimulus that's a hero, or perhaps someone who's successful at romance.
So, and it's the same thing in some sense that I'll go back to childhood.
I was struck when my children were young about their fantasy play.
I was very, very interested in fantasy play as a psychological phenomenon.
Now, one of the things that's very interesting about watching children pretend play is that we tend to say that what they're doing is imitating.
So, say they're playing father when they play house.
But they're not actually imitating because they never do exactly what they saw their father do.
What they do is they watch their father across multiple manifestations of father behavior.
And they combine that with fathers in books and fathers in movies.
And they're pulling out a pattern of the father.
And that's made out of all these representations of these behavioral patterns.
And then the fantasy is trying to represent that abstractly in images to draw out the central spirit...
And the spirit is the thing that's imitated, and that's what drives the fantasy play.
And I also think, I'll jump one more place here, that's the source of the abstraction of religious conceptions.
Imagine that you extract out the father as such.
It's not characteristic of any one human being.
It's that ideal spirit that transcends the individual, that's immortal in some sense, because it manifests itself in body after body throughout time.
See, Jung talked about this space where these transcendent spirits existed.
This is something almost no one knows about his work.
He called that the Pleroma.
And the Pleroma was the space that abstracted figures of imagination exist above temporality and death.
It's a very weird way of thinking about it, right?
You can imagine there's this space that's composed of the collective imagination, right?
And in that collective imagination, there are beings.
And those beings outlast all of us.
Now, I'm not making a case that that place is material the same way that we think of materiality, but it's a space that's composed of...
It's very difficult.
All the human nervous systems are constituent elements of that space, and those characters inhabit that.
It doesn't matter if one person dies.
The spirit continues.
You can think about the spirit of evil that way.
And you can think about our attempts to represent it.
Here's another interesting thought.
You know, my brother-in-law is a computer chip designer.
He's one of the best computer chip designers in the world.
And I've had very interesting conversations with him about computation and artificial intelligence.
You know, interestingly enough, and this is to your point about the importance of stories, Much of what drives the demand for higher and higher in computational resources is the economic viability of producing artificial realities for fantasy simulation to play out scenarios like the eternal battle between good and evil.
Those movies, the Marvel movies, For example, the superhero movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
They're unbelievably technologically sophisticated.
They gather huge audiences.
And that's part of the representation of that pleroma, so to speak.
So, sorry, that's a lot of ideas to throw out at once.
No, no, no.
Well, so to start with the artificial intelligence component, I should I could say that I'm working with Eric Larson on a project for DARPA on artificial intelligence that's also involving certain elements of the military.
It's important that the human brain has computational powers, but it's also more than a computer.
And computers abstract everything.
I mean, that's the power of a computer, and that's the power of logic, is to think of everything in terms of symbols.
But humans have this interesting interplay between the two, because there needs to be this productive tension, at least in biological life, between the abstract and the particular.
If you get too far into the abstract, then you end up in...
Well, you know, a world in which everything is identical on some level, or this sort of identity is there and we should all be acting the same.
And that to me is essentially the idea of Marxism or communism, the idea that there are these ultimate You know, we can abstract truth out of enough data.
I mean, AI leads us towards a world in which there's no volition, no choice, no individuality, because the answers become clear through abstractions of enough data.
You know, and this is sort of Marx's view of science.
My view of science is that life is different from that because our world Is constantly changing.
And so we need to both be able to abstract and to particularize.
And that the abstraction process is incredibly helpful for us at finding these patterns that you're talking about, these kind of deeper action scripts, deeper characters.
But then we have the challenge of applying it to our own life and then finding out how we can tell it into our own story.
And so a computer is always going to exist on the level of the universal human.
I mean, computers are always going to try to go to that point where it can take all of humanity and find the kind of essential unity in our psyche.
And as humans, we resist that because we say, actually, we're different.
And that difference is meaningful.
And, you know, and life also verifies that.
I mean, the reason that I'm opposed to communism and Marxism is not on ideological grounds.
It's on practical grounds.
It didn't work.
And I, for the same reason, think that AI doesn't work.
Okay, let me throw...
So, when I was thinking about computation, I was thinking more about the fact that the economic demand that drives the necessity for more and more potent computational power is because people want us to render fictional universes with more and more sophistication.
And that's very interesting, that that's what's driving that immense technological transformation.
And then, this idea of the absolute and the particular.
So...
I think that that is a fundamental problem.
And one of the interesting...
That's a story that...
I don't know how to exactly frame this properly.
That problem is addressed in Christian religious doctrine.
And so let me tell you what you think about this idea in light of what you just said.
So...
We talked already about the set of all admirable behaviors.
And then we could think about the set of all behaviors that are the opposite of that.
And in some sense, that's good and evil.
And as embodied.
Not as abstract ideas.
The abstraction's there, but as embodiment.
So, you know, you'll see.
You go to a party and someone will do something.
They'll do something disgusting and you're turned off by that.
So that goes into the collection of Vile actions.
And societies generate characters of vile action.
So And those are abstracted.
They can be abstracted ultimately.
So in Christianity, they're abstracted up into Christ and Satan, for example.
And so those are abstractions that haven't completely lost their particularization because they're still embodied.
But Christianity, interestingly enough, takes that idea one step further.
This is quite fascinating, I think.
So there's this idea that's extraordinarily abstract.
Of Christ as the hero of heroes.
And I'm speaking technically here from a literary perspective.
So if you amalgamated all the heroes across 10,000 years and abstracted out the central figure, and this is a Jungian notion in some sense, for all intents and purposes, that's the ideal man.
And if you encapsulate that within the confines of Western civilization, let's say you come up with the figure of Christ.
It has nothing to do with the religious conception in some sense.
I'm purely speaking psychologically.
But then there's the problem of the abstraction.
It's too abstract.
And so the way Christianity solved that in this weird narrative way is to make this abstraction...
Exist in a particular time and place, right?
2,000 years ago.
Why 2,000 years ago?
Why a carpenter?
Why in this little godforsaken town that no one even wanted to visit?
And the answer is because the absolute has to meet the particular.
That's the psychological answer, and I believe it's an answer that...
Because obviously Christianity is a narrative, whatever else it might be.
It's the central narrative of Western culture, for better or for worse.
And then you can see this abstraction particularity issue play out really interesting, too, in the difference and similarity between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
Because Nietzsche abstracted out all these philosophical principles, and Dostoevsky extracted out almost exactly the same principles, but they were all embodied in characters.
And it's so interesting to read them in conjunction, because Dostoevsky's characters act out Nietzsche's philosophy, and they're more accessible in some sense, and they're also broader and more significant, even though they're not as propositionalized.
So...
There's untold wisdom in Shakespeare, right?
We haven't particularized all that.
We haven't propositionalized all of it.
So, okay, so that's the absolute and the particular.
So, yes, so you're born about Christianity.
I mean, I take your reading of Christianity to be, for example, compatible with Star Wars in the sense that Luke Skywalker is a very quirky, odd guy, you know, in the middle of this random planet.
Of course.
I mean, just as weird and odd as a carpenter in Galilee, right?
You know, and yet he is the embodiment of this kind of eternal spiritual thing, you know, and that's where you get that kind of melding together.
Right.
In Star Wars, we should just look at it historically.
Star Wars.
George Lucas, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung.
Because all of Campbell's thinking was Jungian thinking, all of it.
And The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a great book, especially as an introduction to that kind of literature.
But yes, Star Wars is Christianity for atheist nerds.
Yes.
Fundamentally, yeah.
And you can't get rid of that.
There's no getting rid of that, right?
If you throw it out in one direction, it comes back in another.
And that's something we should talk about, too.
Well, it's a very powerful story.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
The one thing I would want to say, though, is that we are most happy when we do not perceive ourselves as inheriting an archetypal story from somebody else.
If I were to say to you, you know, here's the archetypal story.
You're going to end up back there.
You know, that would be disinteresting to us emotionally.
You know, we want to tell our own stories.
We want to be particular in ourselves.
I would also say that Even though human psychology has remained relatively constant for at least 300,000 years and parts of it for over a million, our world is changing and has changed.
And there are real differences between the way the world works now, the kinds of actions and behaviors that are going to function now, than there was even 500 years ago.
And so there is this need for flexibility in narrative.
So even as what you're talking about, I think, Jordan, is this fundamental spiritual component of narrative, the way in which narrative can connect us with the eternal A sense of things bigger than ourselves.
And that transcendent sense of purpose is what lifts us.
But narrative also has this flexibility outside the spiritual, in the material world, to say, okay, how do I navigate this challenge?
I'm not going to navigate this challenge as Luke Skywalker or Christ, because Luke Skywalker or Christ didn't encounter it.
Okay, I don't think it's abstracted outside of the spiritual.
I think this relates to the issue of the relationship between the conscious propositions and the unconscious understructure.
I think that we think in stories.
We frame the world in stories.
We see in stories.
And this is partly why, for example, our eyes are adapted with the whites of our eyes so that other people can see our eyes.
It's really important for us to see other people's eyes because we can see where they're pointing their eyes.
And if we can see where they're pointing their eyes, we can see what they're interested in, we can see what they value, and we can instantly infer their motivation.
And that makes them predictable.
And it's so important that all of our ancestors whose eyes weren't that visible either didn't mate or got killed.
It's really important.
Now, this shared narrative.
So imagine, this perhaps relates to the particular and the absolute.
As you specify the narrative for small-scale actions, and those would be particularized...
The connection with the absolute, the larger absolute, in some sense falls away, but it's nested.
So you could say, if you're an integrated person, it's nested.
It's so like, right now you're listening to me and sometimes you're talking to me.
And the story there is, well, we want to have an engaging conversation.
And why?
Well, there's a bigger story outside of that because we want to further our knowledge about narrative and we want to share that with other people.
And then there's a story outside of that, which is, well, why?
Well, because we're both educators and public communicators.
Well, why bother with that?
Well, because we think education, rationality, and narrative are important for the proper functioning of human beings.
Well, why is that relevant?
Because we care about the emotional experience of people, and we want to further their growth because we want things to be better.
And what's outside of that?
Well, the idea that Well, it's something like the idea that truthful and engaged exploration is a high value.
And then outside of that, well, at some point, you get to the ultimate abstraction, right?
Which is the ultimate good.
And if you're an integrated person, the particular of your action is associated with that broad-scale abstraction, but you don't have to refer to it in the moment, and thank God for that, because it would be overwhelming.
It would be overwhelming.
Here's something I'll throw out just sort of sideways.
I think what happens when people take psychedelic substances that blow apart their latent inhibition is that they start to become cognizant of those underlying nested structures.
Like, they start to invade the current reality, and that's what makes it saturated with meaning and pregnant with meaning.
It also sometimes produces that catastrophically terrible experience.
Because if that nesting is fragmented, so maybe there's part of you that's motivated by bitterness and despair and jealousy.
There's a war at the broader narrative levels, and you're a disintegrated character.
And that's extraordinarily stressful physiologically, partly because you can't act out the contradictions without running into trouble.
So, see, part of what you're doing in psychotherapy all the time, and this is like an integration of cognitive behavioral and analytic psychology, is you're trying to hammer the person's narrative into a single non-contradictory functional unit at all levels of apprehension simultaneously.
The stories can help with that.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
So there's actually a chapter in the book where I talk about how literature can give you the positives of psychedelics without the negatives.
And there's a lot of evidence that literature, particularly certain types of poetry, can deeply stimulate the visual cortex and create these feelings of awe and pop that sort of allow you to open your mind and start to put together some of the different narratives, different stories you have.
So is that more effective when the lyrics are set to music?
Yes.
So has that been demonstrated neurologically?
Do you know?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know about, I don't know a specific test that has set the poems that I've talked about to music.
But yes, absolutely.
Music has the same, can have the same convergent function.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And as far as the therapeutics go, I mean, a lot of the work that I do, I mean, I do a lot of work with veterans, a lot of work with trauma survivors.
There's no question.
I mean, the origins of Greek tragedy are therapeutic.
It was written largely, I mean, initially by veterans, performed largely for veterans in ancient Athens.
And when you take out the story components of Oedipus and you use them in modern military settings, they continue to have these cathartic effects because they continue to allow I mean, the thing that happens in war is you get tragic knowledge, tragic knowledge of the world and of yourself.
Sometimes malevolent knowledge, which is even worse, like the people I've seen who were traumatized.
We're not so much traumatized by tragedy as they were traumatized by malevolence.
Because that's the voluntary imposition of tragedy.
And there's something about...
And so one of the things you see with soldiers is that often when they get traumatized, it's not because something terrible happened to them.
It's because they watched themselves do something so terrible they can't imagine being human and having done that.
So one of the things Jung pointed out, for example, when he was dealing with people who were extraordinarily traumatized was that helping people understand the battle between good and evil, let's say, so that's a narrative at the highest level of abstraction, is to understand that, because imagine what would happen if you in some sense had to take personal responsibility for your own malevolence.
And you got a glimpse of that, right?
A glimpse of that murderous malevolence that you're capable of.
And you have nothing, no place to put it.
Well, if you can put it in a universal narrative, you can say, well, these powerful forces of good and evil are always operating beneath the surface.
And that's been the case for the entire corpus of human history.
And God only knows what it means in the final analysis.
But it's possible for an individual to be caught up in that.
And that's not an excuse, right?
But you...
Man, if you've done something terrible and you need to recover, you need a story to put that in because otherwise it just hangs.
It's like the sword of Damocles over your head all the time.
Who the hell am I? I'm capable of that sort of thing.
Who the hell am I? And you can't live without an answer to that question.
No, and I think also I will say, to move the conversation, not just veterans, I think all of us do things in our lives that we're ashamed of, and then we wonder where that comes from, and then we have to square with our own experience.
Yes, definitely.
I mean, one thing I'll say is, at the bottom of my worldview is Darwin, not Jung.
So I myself don't subscribe.
I'm an agnostic.
I don't subscribe to strict good and evil.
I mean, I subscribe to pain and joy, or something like that.
And so a lot of what I- That's at the propositional level, but you still admire Star Wars.
But so a lot of what I think, a lot of trauma processing is actually subconscious.
I mean, you know, your conscious brain, it helps to have a narrative and a story, you know, and that's empowering to say, this is my life.
I am to some extent engaging in all three.
And there's no question that the more you can perceive yourself as often in your own life.
But I mean, also a lot of it is simply just in the memorial circuits of our brain, the amygdala.
And a lot of it just is crashing around in there and causing flashbacks and other forms of symptoms because it hasn't been processed.
Okay, so let's talk about that hasn't been processed.
Okay, so now you're driving somewhere that...
Ah, I'll give you an example.
I was at the Orpheum Theatre in LA. I think it was the Orpheum downtown.
And I hadn't been in downtown LA. I was with my wife.
And we went for a walk.
I think we camped in some trailer outside the Orpheum.
When I was on this tour, I camped with my wife in these mobile homes outside theatres in the downtowns of cities, which was really weird.
But anyways, we went for a walk in LA. And...
We walked about two blocks and all of a sudden we were somewhere where we absolutely shouldn't have been.
It was not a good neighborhood.
It was a seriously, seriously bad neighborhood.
And so we didn't have a map for that neighborhood.
We didn't know how to act in that neighborhood.
And so any territory that you cannot perceive through the overlaid projection of a narrative map is traumatizing.
And so those fragments that re-emerge, those are territories that have not been mapped with the narrative.
And the reason that they re-emerge is because the anxiety systems, so the amygdala in concert with the hippocampus, and this is probably a right hemisphere function, it collects unmapped territory representations.
And then it amalgamates them and it attempts to find commonalities between them.
That's part of the process of unconscious mapping that leads to the ability to produce a narrative.
And that's partly what dreams do.
So you can see, if you deal with people who are traumatized and you do dream analysis, you can see the dreams producing fragmentary representations of the unmapped territory that they've wandered into.
And part of what dream analysis can do is further that process by making the new mapping explicit.
So, I mean, a big part...
So, first of all, the fact that that experience happened to you in Los Angeles is not surprising to me as someone who spent a lot of time in Los Angeles.
I mean, the city itself literally tries to be anarchic, I think, actually, for the reason that you're talking about, because it sees that as generative narratively.
I mean, there's almost this way in which the city itself has emerged to...
Be unmapped spaces or spaces in collision with each other as a way of generating this sense of constant storytelling, constant story thinking, constant narration.
I mean, other cities are not as fertile in that regard.
If you look at Shakespeare in England, same thing.
I mean, it was a very chaotic city.
It was not at all like Napoleon's Paris.
It was not laid out in a kind of geometric shape.
And that's why, I mean, I think it enabled and created an audience for Shakespearean plays, which at their root are about these collisions, right?
Are about stories coming together, breaking apart.
I mean, Lear seems to me the sort of epicenter of that kind of narrative experience, where you have everyone in the story having their mind break down, but in a different way because they're in different unmapped spaces or different moments of collision.
And then at the end of the play, the play basically turns to you and says, are you going to be able to make coherence of this?
You know?
And that is both the terror but the opportunity of Lear.
And that's why Lear inspired Steve Jobs.
I mean, that's why Lear inspired Van Gogh.
I mean, it's a play that if you put your mind into it, it will blow your mind apart.
But if you can put your mind back together again, you will have something that changes your reality and possibly everyone else's reality too.
So, one of the things I've always been struck by in that academic psychological community is, you mentioned that at the bottom of your supposition network, say, is Darwin and not Jung.
There is a tremendous resistance among academic psychologists to take a look at analytical psychology.
And it's a huge mistake.
It's a huge mistake, especially for people who are interested in narrative.
And it's a hill I've been trying to climb for a very long time, trying to convince people of this because Jung has a bad name as a mystic, let's say, which is...
Unwarranted accusation, given what he was attempting to analyze.
If you're interested in the story, I mean, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there's three versions of that book.
There's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
There's The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann.
And there's Psychological Transformations.
I hope I've got that right.
It's Jung's book.
And they're all the same book.
They're just written by different people.
The Origins and History of Consciousness was written by Eric Neumann, and he was Jung's most outstanding student.
Jung wrote the prologue to that and said that was the book that he wished he would have written when he wrote, he said, Psychological Transformations.
I hope I've got that right.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a narrative analysis of these superstimuli that you described in Wonderworks.
But all of that's taken from this underlying investigation that was conducted by Jung.
And it's summarized best in Eric Neumann's book, The Origins and History of Consciousness.
And that book isn't widely known among academics, and it's a big mistake.
Now, I talked to Camille Pagli about this.
And Paglia's more in the field of the literary criticism that you're differentiating yourself from.
But she told me, and this was with no prompting from me, that the cultural split that we see now is predicated in part upon literary critics following the guidelines of Foucault and Derrida.
Paglia believed, it's Paglia actually, believed that We should have turned to The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann.
Because he got the story of narrative right.
And I believe that that's true.
If you're looking for a single book that takes you into this vast corpus of analytical thought about the symbolism of literature, that is by far the most valid entry point.
And it's really something for someone like Jung to say, this is the book that I tried my whole life to write but couldn't.
Well, so I will be honest again.
I mean, I like Jung a lot.
I admire him as a thinker, and I think that he is himself a magician with story.
I am, however, not of the view that there is one master story out there in that kind of Jungian way.
I mean, and you can feel free, and I know you will, to demolish this.
But so let me just start with the Darwinian view of life.
I mean, in a Darwinian view of life, to have a Jungian view, you'd have to have this idea that over time there evolved a story, if you're Darwinian, that just worked all the time.
And it kind of got embedded in our brain, and we could go back to it over and over again.
On the view that I hold, life, because it's unstable and changing, requires us to adapt.
And therefore, narrative is flexible.
Narrative allows us to adapt.
Narrative is another word for plot, is another word for plan.
We can be flexible.
We can shift.
That's not to say that certain stories don't have deep emotional and spiritual power over our brain.
Those stories do.
But that's one category of stories.
I mean, the idea of the book is to say there's a ton of stuff that stories can do for our brain.
Let's go to the stories.
Let's see what makes each story different from every other story as opposed to archetypal.
I mean, let's go into the particularity.
So again, I'm not saying this is the only approach.
I'm just saying that my approach is basically the opposite of Jung's.
So maybe we're yin and yang.
No, that's a perfectly reasonable objection in some sense.
And I think it's very tightly associated with this discussion that we engaged in a little bit about the particular versus the absolute.
And so, you know, your objection is, and it's Mircea Eliade, great historian of religion, great storyteller.
He talked about deus abscondas.
So we have this idea from Nietzsche, let's say, of the death of God.
Now, Eliade, and he isn't saying this in reference to Nietzsche, said that one of the problems that religious systems across time faced Was Deus Abscondes, the disappearing God.
And his proposition was, as you move towards a universal absolute, the absolute gets so de-particularized that no one knows how to embody it, and it loses all emotional connection.
The Catholics solve this problem to some degree with the saints.
Because they're quasi-deities in some sense, and they're very diverse in their behaviors.
But this deus abscondes problem, according to Iliad, has plagued humanity forever.
We abstract out these universal ideals, but they become so abstract that they no longer have any grip.
They lose their narrative grip.
And so, your objection, forgive me if I've got this wrong, is that you have to be careful about Stressing the absolute to greater degree because you miss the advantages of the particular.
But we could say, I think the way to solve that is to go back to the idea of this nesting of stories.
Right?
Is that you want to rely on the particular because it provides you with specific instructions about how to act here and now.
But when it fails, you refer to a level below that, that's more abstract, to drop a new set of particulars.
And so the Jungians are investigating the base, which it would be...
Now, see, because I would say an objection to your objection is...
No, we have this problem of particularity because we have our individual personalities, and there are particular problems we have to solve, but we have to unify our behavior under some set of abstractions because otherwise we can't exist socially and cooperatively, right, without a standard set of values and mores, and we're disintegrated internally.
So we need to solve the problem of particularity and universality simultaneously.
And so...
I wouldn't throw out the universality end of it because it isn't in contradiction to that.
The nesting solves that problem.
Look, I agree.
So first of all, anyone who knows me will tell you that, yes, I am the most rigorously unified person in my own behaviors.
And it's possible that part of my own obsession with particularity comes from the fact that I am unified already.
And so I'm drawn in a way to find the specific.
But I agree with that completely.
I mean, I think that there needs to be a balance of the two.
It's just that my own career, my own expertise is in the specific.
And I have gotten a huge amount of grip in that area because no one has really looked for that before.
And a big part of my research is to say, what's actually different, not just about Shakespeare and Homer, but what's different about Hamlet and Lear?
What's different about Hamlet and Henry V? What different story mechanisms are in them?
If we push those forward, can we actually track different mental effects of those?
Yes, we can.
And so that's, to your point, that's not at all to abnegate the general, nor to say that the future of humanity lies in some sort of diaspora condition.
In which we're all just reading single text.
But it is to say that, you know, there's clearly more for us to learn.
And the danger of generalities and abstractions is always the belief that somehow we know more than we do.
Because we will say, oh, you know, I've seen that before, or I know that already, you know?
And, you know, one of the problems I think with Hollywood nowadays is that the impact of Star Wars, which is a tremendous movie.
I mean, the original Star Wars, I... Love.
But the problem is everyone said, oh, that solved the problem of movies.
We're just going to keep telling that same movie over and over and over and over again.
And that's not enough.
That's not enough.
I mean, you don't want to make this mistake of having a great breakthrough and then thinking that's all there is.
And so the purpose of the book is basically going through 25 things that are incredibly...
But each of them has this effect.
You know, I mean, I talk about, for example, how Socrates develops this technology for allowing you to float above Hertz.
Or I talk about how Hamlet has the technology for helping you grieve, or how the Godfather makes you less lonely.
Or maybe even more importantly, how their technologies can make you more creative, more imaginative, more emotionally resilient.
I mean, that's the work that I'm doing now with the military and the special operations community.
Right, so you're opening up multiple areas of research by engaging in that analysis of particularity, right?
How can stories make us more courageous?
How can they make us more satisfied lovers?
How can they make us happier?
Yeah, so that particularization is very good because you need very, very specific hypothesis to pursue research.
That's exactly right.
And that's the difference between, say, philosophy and empirical science.
I mean, in philosophy, you want that unity.
And you want that kind of logical coherence.
In empirical science, you want to say, what is the most specific thing that I can test that I can falsify?
And this is the reason, honestly, why I am unpopular with literary critics.
As you should know, there's many ways to be unpopular with contemporary literary critics.
Yes, I've embodied some of them.
Yes, you and I have discovered different ways of being considered heretics.
But my particular way is to say literature can be incredibly useful.
Literature can build emotional and intellectual resilience.
And the fact that this has been uptaken, so, you know, for example, at the Army's Command and General Staff College, there are faculty there, such as Kenneth Long and Richard McConnell, who have adopted this literature work and have put it into the curriculum where it's now training Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of majors who will go on to become colonels, who will become generals.
Tell me more about that.
I'd like to know the particularities of that.
So, first of all, how did they become convinced that this was useful?
Because that sounds like something very, very difficult to manage.
And then, how is that actually taught day-to-day in some practical manner?
Yeah, so this is the extraordinary breakthrough of my career and the sort of surreal reality break moment that I had in a miniature of what you've had, you know, because you've obviously ascended to kind of global celebrity and I've ascended to sort of minor celebrity.
That's probably a good place to stay, I would say.
I'm going to do my best.
My family certainly likes it better this way.
But yeah, so basically, so, you know, after I published the book, I got a call from the University of Chicago's Business School, actually, a professor there, Greg Bunch, who was like, have you ever thought of applying this to business folk?
And if you were to say that to your average literary critic, they would immediately just hang up the phone because they'd say, oh, that's disgusting.
You know, I don't want to have anything to do with practical applications.
Or with business faculties, you know, because God, you know, they're not trustworthy.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, because honestly, yeah, I mean, modern literature has become gripped with a culture of moralism.
Essentially, this idea that there is right and wrong, and we know it's right and wrong, and our job is to judge people when they shift outside.
Yeah, we're going to go back to that.
We want to go back to that topic.
All right, we'll come back to that.
Yeah, because I have a very different view of things.
But anyway, I said, yes.
I said, I'd be very happy to work with business students.
And we started applying this.
We have since applied it to numerous Fortune 50 companies and C-suites and And Greg Bunch, who's a wonderful teacher, will charge you $45,000 a day for operationalizing the stuff in the book.
And at some point he said to me, Angus, he said, I have a friend in the Army.
Would you like to talk to him?
And so I said, absolutely, I'd be happy to talk with someone in the Army.
And so we ended up talking with- No wonder you're a heretic.
That's well, that's exactly right.
God.
And I just want to say, I mean, I think if you want to be inspired Talk to somebody in the Army.
Talk to somebody in the U.S. Army.
I mean, I talked...
Yeah, and if you want to be safe in your bloody university, you should thank God that you're surrounded by a ring of soldiers who you could look down on for their immorality while they protect you.
Yeah, and who have the courage of self-sacrifice, who are willing to die for you.
I mean, this is the thing I just say, is what is that?
I mean, that is the ultimate heroism, to be willing to give up your life for somebody else, and they make no money.
I mean, this is the other shocking thing.
You go through the army.
Everyone always says, well, the military takes all this money and so on and so forth.
And it's certainly true that there are a small number of incredibly expensive machines that the military has.
But the actual personnel in the army and in the military make almost nothing.
And their compensation pay for being under fire is something like a couple of hundred extra dollars a month.
I mean, think about that.
Would you take a couple of hundred bucks a month for someone to shoot at you?
It's real courage, real heroism.
I work a lot with the nurse corps.
The nurse corps is so beyond what I could even describe.
I mean, I met a nurse the other day.
Her job is to fly in these helicopters to frontline casualties, jump out of the helicopters at basically 200 feet, and do triage on these wounded individuals, many of whom are civilians, and then bring them back so their lives can be saved.
And what's even more exceptional about that to me, as I discovered, she's afraid of flying.
She can't get on a plane, but she has that much courage that she gets on these helicopters and does this thing.
And that's me.
Just everyone I've met in the military has just had that courage, that self-sacrifice.
So anyway, I get a call and they say to me, and this is another thing that's typical of the military, is they're always examining themselves.
How many people can you say in your ordinary life go around examining themselves in a critical manner and then say, how do I improve myself?
And this is just a constant process in the Army.
So I get this call and they say to me, you know, Angus, we have this concern in the Army.
We just think we're just not creative enough.
We just feel like, you know, I mean, you know, we do these things and then they work and then we just kind of replicate them.
But how can we become more adaptive?
How can we go into these situations?
And I said, well, look, another word for being adaptive is to be emotionally and intellectually resilient.
It's to me that when you go into a situation, to be open to the situation to the point that it can scare you and that it can break your plans.
And then to see that moment of breaking as an opportunity to become more than yourself, rather than shirking away from that or trying to impose yourself on the situation, being open but being resilient.
And so what we have done in these classes, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to reveal the course number, but maybe I am, at C122 at Command and General Staff College, is we have started to implement this new creativity training.
And from there, it attracted interest from special operations community.
And we have gone in and done train the trainer.
And we've also initiated pilot programs with the Air Force and the Space Force.
Just out of curiosity, speaking from a psychological perspective, I don't know how much research you're doing while you're doing this, but obviously, and this is something that is a wide open field of investigation as well.
I mean, creativity is associated with trait openness and resilience with low trait neuroticism.
I mean, would it be useful to pre-select people on the basis of their personality proclivity for creativity training?
It's hard, because if you have someone who's low in openness, and that's often characteristic of people in the military, because they tend to be more conservative, which means higher in conscientiousness, but lower in openness.
So you're totally right.
And this is Jonathan Hayes' work, another work, and absolutely, yes.
And this is true.
Each of us has our kind of own individual boundedness.
We're not blank slates where all of a sudden we can become anybody we want to be, and that's completely correct.
What I just say to people is, we're here to maximize your potential to be creative.
And that's all we can do in this situation, and we're going to trust that that's enough.
But I agree with you that the military could benefit from bringing on board more creatives.
The other thing is, though, is creativity is not taught in schools.
I mean, our educational infrastructure in this country is not helping to access so much of our human potential.
It's hard to grade creativity.
That's part of the problem is that creative people, because they're doing something new, it's very hard to lay an evaluation system on them.
So they're always breaking out of the mold.
And so it's very difficult to build administrative structures around that.
It is, but we think we've cracked that problem.
Well, not about administrative structures.
I should be honest with you.
I mean, one thing that you and I, I think, have in common is I don't get too high into structural reform.
You know, I get very nervous about...
But I'm all about empowering individuals.
And I just trust that the more you empower individuals to be themselves, the more that the organic kind of community will kind of grow up and around that.
But yes, absolutely, we have ways of testing creativity.
We're doing them in conjunction with...
Antonio Damasio's lab at the Brain and Creativity Institute.
My partner there is Professor John Monterosso.
And basically, what we do without going too deep into the secret sauce is we bring in experts and ask them, how confident are you that this idea is going to work?
So we don't ask them how creative it is, because we discover that you get a lot of expert bias when you ask experts about whether somebody's creative.
Because experts will often decide, well, if it's not something that I came up with or it doesn't fit with my own plans, then it can't be creative or it can't work.
But if you ask them how uncertain it is that it's going to work, it immediately pushes them outside of their expertise range.
And what we're starting to identify there is therefore it must be new because even an expert hasn't seen something like that.
So if an expert thinks it probably won't work, but they're still uncertain, that's still probably creative.
And if they think it will work, but they're uncertain, that's probably creative too.
And what we do is we have panels of experts who come in, we can kind of systematize the process.
And to answer your earlier question, it's all research.
That's why we're doing this with the military, is the military is actively interested.
I would love to do this research in the academy, but the academy is less interested in doing the research than the military is, and less interested in the business community.
So it's the business community and the military that has opened their doors.
And so Yeah, and you said yes, which is an interesting personality characteristic on your part.
And I said yes, because I'm open.
Right, right.
Yeah, no, I have my openness, as you've probably deduced.
Not always to my own benefit.
But it tends to fragment.
That's the problem with openness, right, is you get scattered.
That is 100% my problem.
But yeah, so I'm not getting paid.
I mean, a lot of people around me, I mean, a lot of people who are using the techniques that I've developed are making a lot of money off them, but I haven't made any money off them because I'm only interested in doing the research.
And so that's why I have kind of gone into all these spaces.
You know, my hope overall is that I believe deeply in public service.
I believe deeply in the ethos of the military.
We can debate and have a debate about whether or not we agree with the ways in which the military is applied and the uses to which it's put and all those kinds of things.
But the idea of having a group of people whose job it is to put down their lives to secure our safety seems fundamental to me.
Well, you already made your moral stance clear about that.
You said that your fundamental supposition is that the best way to make better societies is by concentrating on making better individuals.
And so hopefully you're contributing to that.
And, you know, if someone criticizes you, you could always ask them, well, how are they contributing to that exactly?
Well, you know, so...
Here's the thing, Jordan, as I've discovered in life, you can sound smarter faster by being negative about someone else's idea than by having your own idea.
So a lot of people just like to kind of be smart by attacking me, as opposed to coming up with their own ideas.
So I don't usually ask them for their own because I assume that they don't have them.
But yeah, no, I mean, I think to your point, yes, the way forward for human society...
I'm going to ask you a weird question.
So some of that money might be real useful for you.
You're a very creative person.
And you said, you know, lots of people are making money applying your ideas.
And so I think, well, you know, you had these ideas.
God only knows what you might be able to do if you had your position and some money.
So...
So this is something that people have brought up with me before.
They say, Angus, they say, if you have more money, you would have more power.
And if you have more power, you could do more of the things you want to do.
And I actually, and this is perhaps erroneous, and you might want to put me on the couch and just abuse me of this notion.
I have the view that I'm actually more existentially free by not worrying about money at all.
Because the more you fixate on money, at least in my experience, the more you end up doing things you don't want to do.
And in my life, the more I've said no to money, the more I've been like, this is really It's fun, and I'm enjoying myself, and also I'm empowering the people around me.
I just want to be honest, Ohio State pays me a ton of money.
I mean, I make a ton of money as a professor, and I get invited up to give speeches for 50 grand a pop, and you do a couple of those a year.
That's a really good answer to that.
I'm thoroughly retracting my suggestion.
I make enough money.
And, you know, there's plenty of studies that show that if you make more than, you know, 80, 100 grand a year, you're not really substantially more happy.
I have had the experience in my life to see a couple billionaires up close.
And, you know, I won't deny that it would be fun to be a billionaire for a day, you know, and just be able to have your own private island and your own planes, all those kinds of things.
But very rapidly, I mean, one of them said to me once, pretty famously, Angus, there's only so many waterfalls you can see.
And I think that goes down to the point that ultimately, you know, life is about finding ourself.
And we find ourself through conflict and through struggle.
And if you have money to remove all the resistance from everything around you, it's actually much harder to grow.
And I don't mind the challenge, and I don't mind the difficulty, and I don't mind the friction and the fog of life, because to me, that builds me up.
And so I think a little bit of money is good and necessary because you need a safe space for yourself.
You need a protected area where you can preserve your sanity and kind of have kooky ideas and whatnot.
But if you have too much money, I mean, you know, this goes down to kind of my general diagnosis of kind of what's wrong with America at the moment.
I mean, I should say I'm an immigrant.
People often don't know this about me.
And so I have a very kind of quirky view of America.
I chose to become an American.
I was not born an American.
And so I think like a lot of immigrants in America, I almost love America more than most Americans because, you know, I have given myself to it, you know.
But I mean, I think the American dream in America has kind of gone in these two ultimately uninteresting directions.
One is the idea that the American dream is basically having as much money As you can get, you know, and that's the kind of like the capitalist kind of conservative side.
And then the other side is, oh, America is here to provide me with security.
And that's the kind of this kind of like socialist kind of left-wing thing, whereas America is here to protect me.
And America is not about that at all.
America is about freedom.
America is about freedom.
I came here and I was more free.
I've had more opportunity in America than I would have had before.
And that's not to say I have perfect opportunity, or everyone in America has perfect opportunity, or we can't get up every day and give other people more opportunities.
But that's the point of America is to increase freedom, to increase opportunity, not to make yourself richer or to be safer.
And if you want to be more free, a big part of that comes from being free of fear.
Taking risks, being free from yourself, being free from your own anxieties and your own fears.
And so a huge part of what I just try and do every day is push myself to where I'm lightly uncomfortable.
Obviously, I'm widely uncomfortable being on this podcast because it's scary to be honest about your thoughts when a lot of people are listening because you might say something dumb or you might say something you regret.
But I want that because I want to get up tomorrow morning and say, you know what, I should have said this other thing or I wish I hadn't said that other thing because in terms of my plan, my path, that will help me.
And so that's one of the reasons I'm so honored to be here, honestly, is because I just don't have a chance to have very frank, open conversations like this as much as I would like.
Yes, it's a privilege to have that possibility manifest itself.
It's been quite exciting for me to be able to call people who I'm interested in and say, well, you want to talk for an hour and a half?
And they say yes, and I think, well, isn't that something?
I can ask them all sorts of questions, and I can learn all sorts of things, and I can share that with, like, 500,000 people, and, like, what a deal that is.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
And that's the real freedom.
Because I think when people look outside, you know, people sometimes look at me and say, oh, you know, money or wealth or celebrity.
And I'm sure people look at that same thing with you and they say, oh, money, celebrity.
Isn't that the really wonderful thing?
And it's actually like, no, that's not the one.
It's a chance to meet people.
It's the removing of friction so I can call people and they take me seriously.
I mean, that's the real joy of my current position, you know, that you can suddenly start to just talk to almost anyone you want and share those ideas and experience that personal growth and that building of community.
Yeah, well, it's such a privilege, too, to be in a position to be able to bring discussions like this for no cost to, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people, you know?
It's an educator's dream.
So...
This is a good place to stop, Angus.
You know, we've been going pretty hard for an hour and a half, and I like the way this just closed, and we covered a lot of territory.
I would probably like to talk to you again at some point.
There's more things that we could discuss, I have no doubt.
We'll see how people respond to this and what else they might want to hear about.
You got anything else you want to bring up, mention, or...?
No, this has been perfect.
And I'm going to go back and read some of the works that you suggested.
And if you want to have me on again, I would be honored and excited to participate, especially if your audience would like to hear more of us kind of go back and forth.
Yeah.
Well, that Neumann, Eric Neumann, he's a name worth knowing.
He wrote The Origins and History of Consciousness.
And that's a great book.
It's a tough one.
It's the...
It's the much deeper version of A Hero with a Thousand Faces.
And he also wrote one called The Great Mother, which is an analysis of representations of the feminine, narrative representations, dramatic representations of the feminine across history, which is also a great book, especially if you're interested in neuroscience and instincts, because...
The archetypes are tied to instincts in a profound manner.
And so it's the representations, imaginative representations of the maternal across time.
That's The Great Mother.
It's a great book.
I will read it.
And then hopefully next time I can come back, maybe things with special operations will have advanced a little bit.
Some of the work I'm doing with anti-fragile AI, maybe some of that will have advanced a little bit.
Great.
And we can get into that.
I'd love that.
All right.
Thanks very much.
It's a pleasure talking to you.
And good luck with your work and your writing and your educating all of that and the work you're doing with the military.
Thank you.
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