Original subtitles

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 the 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...

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 is the

same It's a it's actually 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 that the The problem is, 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,

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 will 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...

to apply.

So you can think about this in a Piagetian sense.

That is, if there are 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 it's that that is 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 not 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 that 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 what is

the landscape of playable games? That's a good way of thinking about it, and so

it's 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 lens of the game

itself and so the landscape is roughly the the core the core archetype seems

to be something like it's it's 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 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 you're right now you're

sacrificing your time to the spirit of the great father because your assumption

is 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 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 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

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 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 more like, 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 then, 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

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 is this

is what what happened to us i think is that our perceptions developed 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 while 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 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 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 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 reflects 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.

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 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.

Right and then but that's a voluntary thing it's it's so it's like a 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 monsters 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 how does it possess you

that's easy your suffering makes you better 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.

And if I can garner a little 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 there because they're predators

They're not going to attack someone who's 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 going to

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 that 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 their theater of their

imagination And it's because they're protected from it But then something

happens this this often happens to women in their 40s because they're the people

most likely to develop agoraphobia

Something happens there. 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 project protection right so 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 hyper protective 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...

No, there's no timeout.

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.

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 this with 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 going to 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 going to play that game, I'm going to 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?

No, because they still want to 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. You don't. Until you realize that, you're not an

adult. Right? 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.

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

and hospitals, right? Or they work in...

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 and you know those are very

stressful jobs but people do them and 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

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 tonight 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 new life for a human being you

should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence because and the

reason for that too is this is the weird paradox this is 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.

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 the cue 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 playgrounds a complicated place the kid

can adapt well how much can you scale that up can you scale that up to 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 buddha 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 as 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 is is It's it's

what it's 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 limit they run back But some 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 just 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, or like, 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

thing. You're going to send someone out unarmed in a world like that?

It's a terrible thing to do.

And if people aren't strong enough to manage it, then they get resentful. And

then, you know, you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that.

Okay, so the meta-story is partly...

You're in a mat you're 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 that's been assembled as I said it's been assembled

over centuries, right? Okay, we've got the problem the problem is the

apocalypse 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 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 that it not and that 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 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 happens six times in the Old Testament

and one of the things is 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, so, 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, 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.

Now, it's a very, it's a...

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 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,

this story.

There's so much condensed into it that it's almost unbelievable.

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, right? This isn't history as

we normally understand it, it's meta-history.

So when we talk about Cain and Abel, 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.

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 and 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 of nature right you see that

negativity running through all the archetypal representations but cain and

abel are the hostile brothers and the kane 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 and the archetypal story is

when you cannot push beyond What's the worst possible punishment?

What's the worst possible punishment made it out for the least?

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 Abel are 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

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 while 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...

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 you'll

fight with that. It's a big problem That's what happens when you get spoiled

children roughly speaking, right? They get every 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... 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 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 piloerection. 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. Right so you when you encounter that which transcends your your limited

sphere of apprehension Then you experience all 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 all fine reasonable now you can argue about the utility of the

personification

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

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 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

it's like 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 this 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.

All right, 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.

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 created knowledge in... 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 you're

a farmer back when when that was an extraordinarily uh you were barely

scraping out a living doing that it was hand to mouth at best all right so now

it's winter and you've got your damn seeds in your cellar right what are you

going to do you're starving you're going to 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 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 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, Piaget's... 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 going to 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 it's the spirit of the dominance hierarchy that's the right

way to think about it so it's the 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 you 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

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, 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, you know, 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 and so

but people knew because they'd mastered fire that smoke and savor rose and so

you can 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 and 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.

So... 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 least 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 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 over and club you over the

head with that idea It just leaves it as a 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 That 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 there's a 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, 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 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?

Gonna get destructive about it.

We're gonna change your approach. Well Kane 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.

And 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 Nothing, but he does nothing but despise the

social contract and he's got no faith whatsoever in the the logos Let's say

the word that brings chaos out of order. He's all 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 anyways, so God has a little chat with him and he says well what why are

you angry and and why 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 gonna 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, 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 lines 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 a lot 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 it. 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 am 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

that's the judgment and so Cain leaves and believe me He's he was Roth before

and his countenance had fallen before but it's nothing like it is now And so

he's 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 favored 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 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 it 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 a 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 shall 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.

And 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 re... 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 to stay 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 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 going to

come back and I'm going to 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, 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 them into bits But I won't do it Now what so

what's the purpose of the justice system is 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 now tell you the rest of the 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 bear 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 Zilla 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 all right and so 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...

He's been involved in a murder.

If Cain be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech 70 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. And 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 liquidate them afterwards.

That's the logical thing to do if you want to win.

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 picked 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...

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 cane 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.

You 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 what?

The construction of death camps that killed 6 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 the 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 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

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 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

preliterate people, right? And they're trying to remember the past.

And so what happens, Murcia Elliot 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... the society exists.

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...

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 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 so, okay, so anyway, so there's a little interlude there that

talks about the appearance of heroes in the past, but then it's just, 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 desert 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 Tiamat 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...

Let's see to say that The wickedness of man was great in the earth and that

every imagination of the hearts of his 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 by the elder gods then all hell breaks loose

all chaos comes back now time at if you remember correctly is the god of the

salt water goddess of the salt water and so the return of time at 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, 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 to

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 a 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 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, nah, 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, is that 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 so and what had happened was the shock which is

like supposed to be attached to the car had pushed up through the hood so

literally the car body had like fallen onto the ground and but she was she

managed to drive the car okay so look that's 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 is this 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 when a little

snake manifests itself inside your paradise and it's always it's always a

question so and here's a 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?

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...

the surround Overwhelming the system or is it because the system was

insufficiently awake and doomed itself Okay, so Iliad its take on the flood

myth is this God comes along and floods the world Periodically why and that

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, 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, 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

Schrödinger 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... There we go.

So God's upset because he made man on the earth, and it 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 rose from the fall. It rose from the emergence of self-consciousness. It

emerged, say, it rose 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 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 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 trans... 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. While you have Noah here, and Noah is like

another counterpart to some degree to Cain. Noah is 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 and well he saves 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 and you know it's 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 And being

itself and civilization along with you and that's the story of Noah. So it's a

precursor It's it's another able is a precursor to the idea of the redeeming

Messiah, right?

Noah is a precursor to the idea of the redeeming Messiah. You could think about

the best 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

they're embodied 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 to to

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 that 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 reestablishing 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 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...

The sacrifice was of high quality. Well, you have it written right there.

You know, it's 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 anymore every living thing as I have done.

So that's pretty nice, is Noah's sacrifice.

actually calms down 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 it 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 all right so

that's that he basically tells Noah the same

thing again that he told Adam at the beginning of of the 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... You could say

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.

Alright, so this is after the story of Noah.

So what happens is you get the situation where things descend into chaos and

there's a great flood So that's sort of like the ultimate chaos story and I

think of it as a it's it there 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 to, 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 this is this 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 is that

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 if you plot

primates by cortical size, let's say you correct it for body 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 It's 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

because and 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 160 thousandth of the group like you are at the University of

Toronto or 130 millionth of the country or maybe 1 300 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 that this 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 ended up with people like Stalin

as the God.

So you 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?

The people within the... 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 gonna

categorize ourselves and we're gonna fight for recognition as the excluded,

we're gonna 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 what 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 because 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 is that there's a warning in this story Although it's it's it's a

it's a bear 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 temp totalitarian temptation to build hyper structures

that can theoretically replace the transcendent Well, what happens? You

build a hyperstructure 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

the prime myths the primal myths Take on a more historical element and and

history You know roughly speaking history as we know it begins something

like 6,000 years ago So and then 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 what he outlined in 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 that the Kings are authoritarian. They could kill them at

an instant, but the prophets are moved by Walking with God let's say for like

lack of a better argument They come to the king and say look you're not caring

for the widows and the children Right 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, or, 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. You're supposed to, as king, you're supposed to be subject to

something higher than yourself, right? 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.

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 continually 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 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? Sure. You

think they speak the same language? Right, right, right. 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 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 that's a different thing like I think the European state is

doomed because I think it grew too fast and It's severed the connection between

like there's not the proper hierarchy of Identification so and people are saying

wait I 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, right? 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 the 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 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 was seemed to be imposed from the outside and that's

different and and It's it's it's it's it is associated with With this

intellectual war that's going on with post-modernism and neo-marxism and all

of that as well, so

and visual-spatial ability related, and if so, given that men on average have

greater visual-spatial ability, could this account for the gender difference

in the programs that we can see?

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 majority men who

aren't doing very well so for example at Mohawk College the future 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

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.

That's what you get 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.

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 men 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 men, 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, it's like 85 to 90 percent.

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 at you, 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 could 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.

That's very like 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 people go click click click you know when 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 its 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 going to play?

If that's the situation, if I get no credit for bearing responsibility, you

can bloody well be sure I'm not going to bear any. But then, you know, your life

is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self-contempt and nihilism

and... and that's not good, and so that's why I think that's what I think

is 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?

right, 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 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 low... 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.

You have to... 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 what's... 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.

And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being.

Responsibility, man.

That's where the meaning in life is.

All right, good.

One more class, eh?

We'll see you next week.