The Line Between Play and Malevolence

You Irishmen are such an excitable bunch! It's always fun to come to Dublin. I think it's probably too much fun to come to Dublin, actually. Yeah, so, uh, it's really remarkable to see you all here. I appreciate, as I always do, the fact that you've all taken the time and expended the effort to come and see this.

I thought I would wander through the 24 rules, and I don't know how many I'll address, but we'll see how it goes. So maybe we'll start with a rule from the first book: 12 Rules. Treat yourself! This is rule number two: treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping. That's a hard one, you know. There's an injunction, a moral injunction, that you should treat other people like you would like to be treated yourself—the Golden Rule, let's say. And, uh, rather than “he who has the gold makes the rules,” right? Um, that's not an injunction to sacrifice yourself in some unending way for the benefit of other people, which is often how it's interpreted.

And it's not that it's, uh, it's advice in relationship to reciprocity. This is something really worth knowing. I've been thinking about this for a long time, you know, because I got interested in the nature of malevolence and motivation for atrocity. I got interested in the nature of evil, and certainly, as a consequence of studying atrocious behavior at the clinical level and then also at the political, economic, and sociological level, I definitely became convinced that it's a very naive person indeed who doubts the existence of evil. I think it's easier to become convinced of the reality of evil than it is to become convinced of the reality of good. It's easier to define evil than it is to define good.

But if you can specify the nature of evil, you help yourself infer the existence of good because you can say to yourself—you can conclude that whatever good is, difficult though it may be to put your finger on it, it's the opposite of evil. I did have this inkling, you know, way years ago when I taught at Harvard. I was teaching about very dark things about individual motivation for the sort of acts that characterized, say, the worst atrocities of the Holocaust and the catastrophic situation with regards to Stalinist Russia. Those were the two places I focused on the most.

And I had this voice in the back of my head always when I was lecturing very serious lectures that if I could really manage those lectures properly, I would do it with a sense of humor. And I thought, that just cannot be right! How in the world can you deal with a topic that dark in a manner that's playful? I thought that's… but the voice wouldn't go away, and I knew there was something to it. I knew there was something to it.

And so I've been trying to think about how do you concisely conceptualize the opposite of evil? How can you tell when things are going the opposite direction? What if there's a malevolent spirit that might inhabit you if you walk down the darkest possible road? What would be the opposite of that spirit if it is inhabiting you, so to speak, if you were walking down the most positive of roads? And I would say I do believe this to be the case: that that's play.

So, you know, children play, and it says that there's a gospel statement: that unless you become as little children, you'll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That's a very complicated statement. It means, in part, to regain the pristine perceptions of wonder that you had as a gift, in some sense, when you were a child. If you have children, young children, you get to partake in that if your eyes are the least bit open. Because one of the things that's absolutely wonderful about young children, and having them around, and the way, in some sense, they pay you for the painstaking care that you need to exercise when you're caring for them, is that they enable you to see the world through fresh eyes and to see things in their Untamed by cynicism glory.

And it's hard to open yourself up to that, you know, especially if you're an adult who's built layers of shells around yourself for any number of reasons. But children offer you that opportunity. One of the reasons that you should become as little children is so that you can see miracles when they unfold in front of you instead of being blinded by your own defense of cynicism. And children can definitely help with that.

But also, children play. And you know, we sort of stop playing as we grow older, and we think we mature out of it, but that's not right. What happens is that we can no longer do it, and a lot of that, I think, is associated with the shock of puberty, you know, because you have to integrate sexuality into play. And that's really hard; it's really challenging for people, partly because you're more likely to be rejected on the sexual front, for example, and that's very hard on people.

And then also, it's a more dangerous game, that's for sure. And so it's a big challenge, and a lot of people stop playing when they're teenagers. One of the reasons I think that we've had somewhat of an explosion of unhappiness and mental illness, particularly among women, by the way, over the last 30 years is because a lot of what we've done inadvertently has interfered with children's ability to play.

For example, it's very hard for boys to play in school because almost everything they're required to do is antithetical to the rough-and-tumble ethos of masculine play. That's really hard on young boys. And with young girls—oh, I was talking, I believe it was to Jonathan Haidt recently, a famous psychologist in the United States, and he said that girls have almost stopped doing pat-a-cake and skipping and that sort of thing, you know? And these are deeply embodied forms of play that might be something like the female equivalent of rough-and-tumble play among males.

And that rough-and-tumble play is a form of embodied dance, you know, because if you're wrestling—and fathers really like to do this with their kids, and kids really like it, and they really need it—it teaches you the extent of your body, you know? It teaches you how to twist your body and to push it to its limits and to expose yourself to fear. You know, maybe your father throws you up in the air and catches you. Can you imagine someone doing that to you as an adult? A 12-foot high person just tosses you in the air and catches you? It's no wonder children sort of scream with terror and delight!

But they do, and they really—you just can't believe how much they need that to engage in that play because they also learn what hurts them and what doesn't. The most fun direct physical play with kids pushes them right to the ragged edge of disaster, right? It's like it's right where it almost hurts that it's most exciting.

And partly what you're doing when you're playing is calibrating it to make sure that it's as exciting as possible but not too exciting. The rough-and-tumble play is deeply embodied. It's not just abstract, right? It involves pain and anxiety and excitement and frustration and turn-taking and tension. It's very sophisticated, and that's just on the rough-and-tumble front.

And then later, you know, as kids develop, they start to engage in pretend play. There’s no difference between pretend play and thinking; they are the same thing, you know? Children envision who they might be. They construct a fictional character—a father or mother playing house, let's say. That's a very common form of pretend play, and then they act it out.

In doing so, they inhabit the roles that they're going to take on as adults. And if they don't do that, they don't know how to do it. You know, one of the things I was worried about to some degree when my son was little, uh, he had an older sister about a year and a half older. He was often surrounded by her friends, and they used to dress him up like a princess or a fairy. I was always looking kind of askance at that, so I didn't want it to go too far, you know, whatever that meant.

But then I realized when I was watching, he was having fun, and so were they. I was watching it very carefully to see what was going on, and I thought, "Oh, oh, I should—I've got to leave this completely alone!" Because what he's doing is acting out what it's like to be a girl, and how in the world are you going to understand that if you can't act it out? And then if you forbid it, say, "You can't do that," well, what's the message? It's like you can't understand females. Well, of course, you can't, but you shouldn't stop your son from trying, that's for sure.

And so, and that should be done in a spirit of play. And you know, if you have a good marriage, good partnership with anyone—I don't care who it is, but let's say a marriage—the more that you can elevate what you're doing to play, the better off you are in every possible way. You know, there are preconditions for play among children. One precondition is the person that you would like to play with has to want to play with you, right? It has to 100% be voluntary.

It cannot emerge—even we know this; even psycho-biologically, there's a fair bit known now about say the underlying neurological circuitry that's involved in play because there's a specialized neurological apparatus in mammals for play. It's not merely a decoration on top of something more fundamental; this is a very, very deep and fundamental part of the human psyche, and the psyche of any animal that has to engage in reciprocal repeated social interaction.

Because you might ask yourself, you know, how do you know if you're interacting with another person properly? Well, you might ask, "Well, what does properly mean?" Well, it might mean they want to interact with you. It might mean they want to interact with you in a way that could repeat many, many times and maybe improve as it's repeating. You know, you want to get along with people, and you want it to work now, but you want it to work now in a way that gets better over time. And then you might think if that's the right way to act, whatever that means—and it's a stable right way to act—because it emerges out of iterated social interactions, that you might have an instinct to mark when that's happening.

And that's what happens when you play, and people find that absolutely delightful. If you're sitting around with your friends in a bar, generally you're joking around, and you know, that can get kind of rough, but it doesn't have to. But it could edge towards rough because that's kind of fun, and it's a bit proddy, you know, to see where you can find the edge, and that can be riotously entertaining. And that's all done in the spirit of play.

And so you could say that a proper friendship is actually predicated, has its basis, in the spirit of play. And then with regards to the atrocity and evil that I was discussing earlier, say, well, if it's power and compulsion, and pride, let's say—self-centeredness, a kind of narrow self-centeredness and a narcissism, hatred, a bitterness—all of that mangled together, resentment, vengefulness, that all constitutes the central spirit that inhabits you if you're acting in a malevolent manner.