2016 Personality Lecture 15: Final

I don’t know how many of you got my email this morning, but this is the last class. And so, I sent in my email a link to the other lecture that was supposed to happen, but I have to go to a conference on Thursday and Friday, and so I’m going to do the last lecture today. You can watch the second-last lecture from last year, which will cover the territory, hopefully, sufficiently well. So, I usually use the last lecture to sort of sum up where we’ve been and also to talk to people about… let me open it up here first… about my more specific thoughts on personality. So, I think that’s probably what I’ll do today. I’ll start with what we’ve… where we’ve been.

So, I started talking to you about mythological representations of personality, and I wanted to do that for a variety of reasons, but the most important was to place the rest of the course in a deep history context, essentially. Because personality is the consequence of very many things. And many of them are grounded in our biology and therefore grounded in evolution. And I generally think that in some ways, the social sciences don’t take evolution seriously enough. They don’t take the fact that we’re 3.5 billion years old seriously enough. It’s a serious thing.

And some of that is evident in a relatively straightforward way conceptually, in that we share so much of our biological platform with other creatures. You know, there was a recent genomic analysis, I think, of gorillas. And I don’t remember what percentage of our DNA we share with gorillas, but it’s like 99.2% or something like that, which, you know, is quite shocking, until you realise that we share about 70% of our genetic make-up with yeast. So, you know, yeah, obviously we’re a lot closer to gorillas than to yeast, but we’re still pretty damn close to yeast. And it also indicates not necessarily just how similar we are to gorillas, but how minor modifications in a genome can also make substantial differences, because alike as we are to gorillas, we’re a lot different from them too.

So, there’s the biological aspect, which is really important. But then there’s what you might describe as a quasi-biological element, which seems to be operating in the space between biology as evolutionarily determined and culture. Those things are often… you know, we have an archetypal tendency to consider culture as something in opposition to nature. And there’s utility in that, from a heuristic point of view. You can do a lot with that division from a conceptual perspective. But in a lot of ways, it’s misleading. Because some of the primordial elements of culture are biological.

And I think the most striking example of that, fundamentally, is… there’s two striking examples. One is the existence of structures of power, or structures of authority, or structures of influence; hierarchies, which are incredibly old, at least 400 million years old. And which have, in consequence, been around for so long that you also have to think about them as part of the environment, part of nature. Because we tend to think of the hierarchical structure as cultural and also as easily alterable, in some sense. But there’s no reason to think that, given that it’s been around, as I pointed out in one lecture, longer than trees. It’s a very, very permanent element of the environment that human beings find themselves in.

So much so that… you know, you can think of a dominance hierarchy as the prototype of culture, but because it’s been a constant environmental feature for so long, our nervous systems are built for operation within a hierarchy, and they’re really built that way, and it’s not a trivial matter. Because the serotonin system that regulates our emotions (because the serotonin system does that, fundamentally), is also the system that sets up your brain during fetal development. The serotonin system is above all, perhaps, concerned with calibrating your nervous system in accordance with your position in a hierarchy.

And its basic rule is, the higher in a hierarchy you are, the less negative emotion you have to feel. And the lower in the hierarchy you are, and the more tenuous your actual life (because there’s a direct connection between the tenuousness of your life and your position in a dominance hierarchy), the more negative emotion you’re going to feel. And then that has drastic consequences, and those are best exemplified in longevity. So, there was a famous study called the Whitehall study, which was done in Britain.

And basically what they were looking at was health, including mortality, of English civil servants. And the first study was done 50 years before the second study. I think the second study was done in the 80s. Anyways, in the first study, you have a power hierarchy, with the top civil servants at the top, obviously, and the bottom civil servants at the bottom. And you might ask yourself, what constitutes top and bottom? And some of it might be regarded as autonomy over choices. So that would be part of it; you can make choices, so you have a bit more control over what’s going to happen to you.

But also, the probability that you have a stable and productive place is higher the higher you go and lower the lower you go. And the consequence of that, all things considered, is that the civil servants at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy died younger and more frequently than those at the top. Now, you could attribute that to poverty, right, because the people at the bottom, especially in the 1930s, were materially deprived in comparison to the people at the top, although they certainly weren’t materially deprived in comparison, say, to UK citizens a hundred years before, or to most people in the world at that time.

So, a poverty argument is hard to make, although a relative poverty argument is easier to make. But then, 50 years later, Britain was a lot richer, and so the absolute level of wealth of the entire hierarchy moved up substantially, so that the people at the bottom were richer than the people in the middle in the previous study. But the pattern of overall mortality remained quite similar. And you know, the importance of studies like that, as well as studies that indicate the consequence of income inequality on behaviour, are so important that they should be put front and center in university curricula.

I mean one of the things that really bothers me about the humanities education in particular, although some of the social science education too, for modern university students, is that there are some things we know that you’re never taught. And it’s really appalling, especially the relative poverty issue, because most of the phenomena that people tend to attribute to poverty have nothing to do with poverty. It’s relative poverty. And that is absolutely not the same thing. Because the first one is a material deprivation hypothesis. But if you think about it, there’s almost no one in America who’s materially deprived.

Now, you know, you could become… and I’m not saying there’s no one. I’m saying there’s almost no one. And you know, it also depends on your definition of material deprivation, but most people, the vast majority of people, have too much to eat and a place to live. And, you know, once you have plumbing and heating, and food, and access to information, you’ve pretty much got everything that wealth can give you that isn’t relative. The privation part of it is gone. But relative poverty, relative position, is an unbelievably powerful determinant of almost everything that you could imagine.

So, longevity is one, health is another. And a lot of those are stress-related. It’s a lot more stressful at the bottom than it is at the top. I’ll tell you something interesting we found out about conservatism. And this is… when I wrote… I wrote a book called Maps of Meaning a long while back, and I realised that I was trying to account for why people are prone to identifying so strongly with their belief systems, you know. And part of it, in some sense, was a control over negative outcomes hypothesis.

So partly, if you have an ideological theory, it’s a set of tools that you can use, with quite a bit of proficiency, to operate in the world, right? Simplification strategy enables you to control uncertainty. It also enables you to communicate with people. But even more importantly, to the degree that we share a cultural system, we can predict each other. And that’s not psychological; it’s you act out the game and I act out the game, and so, I don’t really have to know much about you. And I don’t have to assume that you’re a barrel of snakes.

I can assume that you’re more or less like me. And so if we interact, I don’t have to be on constant alert. And so that’s not a psychological function of a belief system. That’s a direct, real-world function. And if you listen to people like the terror management theorists, they’re always telling you how belief systems protect people against psychological uncertainty, or maybe the fear of death. They never tell you that shared belief systems actually prevent from death, which is even more important than protecting you from the fear of death.

So, there is the stabilisation of society aspect that’s a motivator for maintaining a set of shared beliefs. Because it kind of makes us identical. Which you might say is bad on the side of individuality. It’s like, yeah, yeah, individuality. It’s really good on the side of not having to assume that the next person is going to kill you. And that’s way more important than individuality. You know, the other thing that I’d like to make a case for briefly is that, you know, in the West… people think that Western people are individualistic.

That’s the stupidest theory ever I think. Except for maybe the theory that poverty is at the root of all these social problems that we see. Western people are hardly individual at all. All you have to do is go out and look at traffic patterns to figure that out. Everybody stops at a red light. Everybody crosses when the walk signal turns. Virtually everybody waits in line when there’s a line-up for some restricted access event. We all dress the same way, men and women alike. You know, we follow the rules like mad, like crazy.

And then on top of that, there’s a bit of fluff, which is the things we could do if we were free, which we could talk about and dream about but which hardly anybody does. And that’s what looks like individuality. So you get that freedom, but the cost of it is incredible obedience. But you know, the fact of the obedience is that, well, you can sit here for example, and look at this, it’s all safe and everything. And you can come here with all these other weird primates and you don’t know a damn thing about them, and they come from all sorts of different places, but there’s a shared social structure and everybody participates in the game, and then all of a sudden, it’s basically safe.

Fine. That’s one reason for conservatism and for identification with a belief system. It’s like, stabilise the damn game so you can predict the other primates. And a lot of people who talk about conservatism as a political belief make the assumption that that control element is the fundamental motivator for right-wing political belief. But weirdly enough, the other thing that happens when you stabilise a game, let’s say, which would be a shared belief, is that you provide a goal.

Because a shared value system is always oriented towards a goal. Otherwise it’s not a value system; it’s not a belief system. And the thing is, and this is a Piagetian point, as soon as you organise something around a goal, you give the people opportunity to do two things… three things. Cooperate within the rule framework, compete within the rule framework, so that brings in the possibility of victory and loss, and also to experience some positive emotion. Because if we haven’t unified our game (which is basically the job of a bloody three-year-old), and so we’re each playing our own games, there’s no way that we can collectively aim at something and there’s no way that you can progress.

So, you know one of the things that, when you’re taught about the oppressive structure, say, of the patriarchal system, one of the things that’s never noted is that because that’s a hierarchical system, it’s also a pre-condition for any kind of victory. And that would even be victory over yourself. If you want to be better tomorrow than you are today, basically what you’re doing is aiming at a point that’s defined by the value system, so that’s aiming up, and trying to move yourself towards.

If you get rid of that shared value system, there’s no structure for positive emotion anymore. So, part of the reason people want to stabilise their belief systems is so that the environment (mostly other people, but also the environment) remains under control, and thank God for that, because otherwise it’s just outright bloody chaos. But the other reason is, no game, no winners. Nothing to do.

And that’s, I think, why there’s an orthogonal relationship between agreeableness and conscientiousness. You know, conscientiousness seems to do something like stabilise rule structures across long periods of time. So it kind of defines the game explicitly, and that lays out the possibility of a hierarchy and a value system. And then agreeableness says, hey, don’t get too carried away with that. You know, you don’t want to make the game so damn tight that the losers stack up at zero and die. You know, it’s egalitarianism versus justice… I mean, that’s not exactly it, but it’s something like that.

You know, everybody should go to university. Fine, egalitarian presupposition. The people who work hard and study should do better. Well, that’s a presupposition of justice. And those aren’t the same thing, right? Actually, they work somewhat in opposition to one another. So, you could say let everyone into university and fail half of them in the first year. And that’s kind of what they do in places in Holland, whereas we have fairly structured admission criteria.

But you know, we can see the tension there, because if you let everybody into university, then the really smart people are being dragged far… they’re being put into a position where they’re able to advance much more slowly than they would otherwise. So, that’s a real price to pay at the top of the distribution. On the other hand, you’re opening up opportunities for people who for one reason or another might have not done well in high school or previously but could actually thrive in university. But you see that those things… you know, there are two value structures there and it’s not easy to optimise them, and that’s exactly why I think we have those two parallel personality dimensions.

And it’s real hell when one of them gets the upper hand. You know, part of it is balance. Inclusion and hierarchy. You need to have those things operating at the same time. So, back to the mythological representations. I mean, partly what you see in mythological representations of reality, and we have to talk about reality a bit too, is the presence of something that represents the hierarchy. I would say, you know, in fairy tales that’s often the king, wise king or otherwise, and then in religious mythology it’s usually something that represents the king or the Father.

And I think that’s because the primary social hierarchies among human beings are masculine in nature. And I think that’s probably because, well men are more like pack animals. And why aren’t women? Well, I think the reason for that is that the things that men did historically had a communal element, like a goal-directed communal element that wasn’t as prevalent in female dominance hierarchies? It’s something like that. So, there’s a representation of the hierarchy. But then there’s a counter-representation, which is a representation of the individual.

And that’s another really tight balance that societies have to manage… “I don’t want you to be too different, because if you’re too different, I can’t predict you”. And you may actually be a threat to the integrity of the society, because you might come up with something so wild and so unconstrained that it just blows the entire game into pieces. On the other hand, to the degree that I’m a rigid hierarchy, I’m going to fall behind as the environment transforms.

And the environment, the natural environment, let’s say, or the environment that’s outside the dominance hierarchy is also something that is stably represented in mythology. And so one of the things that you see happening is there’s a hierarchy, and the other thing is there’s a force outside the hierarchy and it’s often represented by an eye. So you see this in a variety of ancient myths. And that represents the capacity of the individual to pay attention and to maintain and update the hierarchy.

So you’ve this dance between the individual and the hierarchy. The hierarchy structures the individual and disciplines them, and produces a cultured being, but then hopefully the cultured being kind of pops up above the hierarchy and then can start, you know, altering it, hopefully relatively minimally, where it’s necessary. It’s very much akin to Piaget’s idea that once children hit higher levels of moral development: first of all they play alone, then they can play with others, then they know the rules, and then morality is following the rules, and after that, and not every child gets to this point (at least according to Piaget), the child starts to guard him or herself as something that can make the rules.

So you could think about that as the (and Piaget did), as the pinnacle of ethical development. And whether or not that’s the pinnacle is debatable, because I think Jung… see Jung extended that idea, although people never think of this as a variation on Piagetian theory. So, for Piaget, once you hit individual status, you pop out of the group and you hit individual status, it’s not like you’re a rule-breaker, because you can follow the rules, and usually do, but you can observe them and modify them when necessary.

It’s almost exactly what your consciousness does to your own internal neural structure. So for example, imagine you’re playing a piano, and you’ve automatized most of it. So you’ve built little machines in the back of your head to take care of the trills, let’s say, and the arpeggios, and then you make a mistake. Well, your consciousness picks up the mistake, and then you slow down what you’re doing and observe yourself for the motor errors. And then you correct them, which is difficult, and then you practise and practise and practise and practise, and you automate the new routine, and then you go on.

And so what consciousness is doing is watching output, and when there’s a mismatch between what you’re aiming at and what happens, you stop. That’s basically anxiety. You make your error correction, and that fixes the hierarchy, and then you go on. Well, that’s really the relationship of the individual to society as well. Now, Jung pushed that idea a fair bit further. And I might as well tell you about this; we never discussed this in our section on Jung, but it’s pretty interesting.

Let’s see if I can get this right. Okay, so Jung basically presumed that as you were socialised, you developed a persona. And the persona was you insofar as you’re socialised. Now you can see personae when you listen to someone who’s very, very concerned with their appearance and whose speech is somewhat false as a consequence. You know, so they don’t seem genuine; they seem too polished, let’s say, or something like that, you know. There’s not a lot of emotion, for example, in their speech. They’re very self-contained and concerned with their public appearance, which seems also to be a very undesirable consequence of spending too much time on social media.

Because it’s all persona development, eh, it’s not necessarily a good thing. It does seem to be associated with higher rates of depression. Anyways, your persona is you as socialised being. And so Jung would say, yeah, obviously you can be socialised. And what that means is that some of you is invited out to play and to develop, but a lot of you is left undifferentiated or even forbidden. So for example, this happens with agreeable people. Agreeable people think aggression is wrong. Well, that’s not very useful, because first of all it’s not wrong, and second of all because they have the capacity for aggression.

And so if that isn’t brought out to play, it sits at home in its closet and gets all warped and bent and only comes out at night to cause trouble. And so, one of the things Jung would say is, well (this is part of the exploration of the shadow), there’s going to be you as persona and then there’s this mesh-mash of undeveloped and resentful potential, roughly speaking. And your job is to transmute your moral system and integrate all that stuff that was rejected into your personality. And that often involves a descent into the underworld and a rebirth.

And that’s another mythological motif. So, his idea was… you could think about it this way. So Piaget said at the utmost step of moral development, you view yourself as someone who could alter the rules. And Jung would say, wait a minute, there’s another point in that. Not only do you alter the rules, you alter them so you can include things that were denied or forbidden by the previous system of rules. And so, it’s a more inclusive game.

And part of what it includes is those parts of you that you’d cast off because they were socially inappropriate. And often… Freud’s comment about that sort of thing was that that was often sexuality and aggression, partly because those are kind of individual in nature, and they’re kind of integrate into a social group. And people will take offense to them. I mean, look what’s happening on college campuses. Universities are spending more time worrying about sexual assault than they are worrying about education. And the reason for that is the reason we’re just describing.

It’s that sexuality and aggression are very hard to integrate. So they remain on the outside. Now you might say, suppress it, for Christ’s sake. Get your sexuality under control and eradicate your aggression. That’s a stupid idea because we know what happens when you do that. You turn into a little milk-soppy sort of creature with a tremendous amount of resentment, and then you sporadically explode. Plus you’re denying yourself immense depth in your personality. You know, like a person who has repressed their aggression and their sexuality, generally, is just dull as you can possibly imagine.

You don’t even want to talk to them. Whereas someone who has that integrated, they’re far more interesting, you know, because there’s a provocative element, and a teasing element, and a dangerous element, and a colourful element, and all those things that make, you know, social interactions much more interesting. It’s… you know, you’re playing with fire, at that point in your personality development, but human beings are born to play with fire. So you don’t want to deny yourself that.

So anyways, so Jung’s idea of continued moral development was, you know, haul the oppressed self out of captivity, so to speak. Notice what you’re doing, partly to refuse to take responsibility, but also partly just to tame yourself so that you’re at least not annoying, and get that other stuff up into the game. So he would think of that, at least in part, as the union of the articulated self with the unarticulated self, a lot of which would be grounded in emotion and motivation.

So that’s… he thought of that as a conjunction. That’s conjunction #1. So that’s the bringing together of spirit and soul, or articulated self and inarticulated self, something like that. So now you’re an organised, from the perspective of your psyche, but then there’s another step. So now you think of that as an organised thing. The next step is to integrate that with your body. And that basically means, not only to have that integrated state of being as a belief system, and system of representation at perception, but also to act it out in the world.

Because it’s one thing to know something, it’s another thing to do it. But if you really know it, there’s no difference between knowing it and doing it. Okay, so then your mind and your body are unified. And then there’s a third step after that, which is really quite complex, and this is where Jung starts to shade into phenomenological perspectives. So you know, when we were talking about phenomenology, one of the things I pointed out was that the phenomenologists are playing a… you can say they’re playing a complex philosophical game, and the game is ‘what if?’

And the what if is: okay, forget about the idea of subjective and objective, just forget about it for a moment, okay? We’ll start with a new set of presuppositions. The presuppositions are that everything you experience is real. And everything you experience is you. So you say, reality is experience. But there’s an implication to that, and the implication is that, insofar as you’re part of my experience, the separation between us is illusory.

And so the next stage that Jung proposed was that the integrated self eliminates the distinction between self and other. So that would be recognition, for example, and everyone already knows this, that it’s pretty hard for me to be stable and happy if I see you miserable and suffering. Well, why is that? Well, it’s because, insofar as I encounter you, at least, your misery and suffering is my misery and suffering. You know, unless I’m psychopathic to the nth degree.

And so the idea that… and that has to be taken care of. Well, I mean, you certainly see this in the realm of the family. If you’re in a family and one of your family members is, you know, not doing well in a manner they can’t help, or not doing well in a manner they can help, the probability that that’s going to have a direct bearing on your quality of being is 100%. In fact, it might be the prime determinant.

And so then you have to seriously ask yourself, what makes you think you’re separate? And you know, a phenomenologist would say, well, you know, that’s your assumption that the subject/object divide is absolute, that’s what makes you think you’re separate. And so, the final step… it’s kind of akin to a Dostoyevsky idea. Dostoyevsky posited, in one of his weird sort of transcendent moments, that everything that happened to you was not only your fault, but everything that happened to everyone was your fault.

And he didn’t mean it precisely like that. He meant it more like, everything that happens to you is your responsibility, and everything that happens to everyone else is also your responsibility. And that’s a… well, it’s an insane claim, to some degree, because it broadens the realm of your responsibility out to unlimited reach. But life is an insane thing, and so there’s no reason to assume that just because that, you know, seems exaggerated to the point of irrationality, that it’s wrong. There’s lots of things about life that are exaggerated to the point of irrationality.

Like the fundamental structure of life is irrational. You’re born arbitrarily, there you are in your particular time and place, you live in accordance with your talents and limitations, and then at the end of that, there’s no you anymore. It’s like, good luck making that rational. Like it’s intrinsically irrational. And one of the things that really advanced theories of human development posit is that to answer an irrational question, you need an irrational answer. And I think that’s exactly right. If life is an impossible burden, which is clearly the case, then you need an impossible goal to set against it to justify it.

And part of that might be, well, you know, get your act together, improve the quality of being around you, but then that starts to stretch its tentacles to include more and more people. And so… you know, one of the things I’ve thought about for a long time is, there’s this proclivity of people to flee, into let’s say, nihilism, for every good reason under the books, or ideological possession. And the alternative to those two things you might think of as chaos. Well, nihilism is sort of a form of chaos anyways. It’s not surprising that people become nihilistic. Plus it’s easy. And it’s not surprising that they become ideologically possessed, plus it’s easy.

The question is, is there any reasonable alternative to that? And if you read people like Ernest Becker, who wrote a book called The Denial of Death (he was a hyper-Freudian, really), his whole hypothesis, like the terror management theorists (who derived their ideas from Becker, by the way), is that everything people do is illusory. You know, no matter what it is, it’s an illusion. And so the fundamental underlying reality of human life is that it’s hopeless. Well, God, you know, that’s a hell of a conclusion to draw. And I think it’s clearly the wrong conclusion, because it leads to places you just do not want to go.

And for me, that’s enough evidence that there’s something wrong with it. You know, like if you’re following a path and it’s leading to Auschwitz, I would say, hey, there’s something wrong with that path. And you might say, well all paths are equally absurd. It’s like, yeah, okay, but some of them really hurt, and maybe we could do without those. I think it’s very difficult to dispute that. I mean you can, but what you have to say then is, all the pain and suffering in the world doesn’t matter, you know, along with all the good stuff.

You can make that irrelevant right away, just by doubt. But you’re really going to take the next step and say, all that human-induced and unnecessary pain and suffering is actually meaningless and irrelevant? It’s like, I think yeah, put that person in jail now, before they do something really dangerous. Well, I don’t really mean that but you get the point. You draw a conclusion like that, which is a logical conclusion of nihilism… it’s like, all bets are off for you.

So there’s something that just seems to be wrong, it just seems wrong, that conclusion. And so, then one of the things you might ask is, okay, that doesn’t seem very good, what’s the opposite of that? So one of the things that I’ve really been trying to figure out is, what is the opposite of the path that leads to Auschwitz? You know, once we can agree that that’s a bad path. Okay, fine, we’ve got a ‘bad’ identified. That implies the reverse, a good path. It doesn’t define it though, right? It just implies it.

So the implication would be, whatever is least likely to lead you there is de facto good. Or at least you’ve basically identified the territory. And it seems to me that the opposite of not caring about anyone, and wishing, perhaps, for their painful destruction, is something like caring for everyone and wishing for their universal betterment. Something like that. And that seems to me to be associated with the idea of improving being itself.

And that means yours and your family’s and your community’s and as far out as you can reach, probably starting with the local, you know, till you get yourself all practiced. And so, that seems to me to be an impossible aim, in some sense, and that’s actually a good thing, because the psychological consequences of pursuing an impossibly good goal are that everything you do seems to become meaningful, because it’s related intelligibly to that goal, and you have a structure within which you can grapple with uncertainty.

You know, because if someone, even you, says that, well why do you bother with that? You can say, well, because of this and this and this and this, and then it leads down to Auschwitz, and we’re not going there, and that’s why I’m doing this. And that’s a hell of a tough argument to argue yourself out of. And you know, one of the things you really need in life is an argument for life that you cannot dispute. You know, because otherwise you’re plagued, like the existentialists would say, with this constant recurrence of existential doubt.

And that paralyses and cripples you. And it makes you weak. And worse, you know. It’s worse. You can end up with so much self-contempt just because of who you are as a creature, that you’re unconsciously wishing for, you know, absolute annihilation. I see this in many, many places, but one of the things I’ve seen… most frequently probably in the last 30 years, is the insistence, on the part of certain parties who are at least in principle concerned with environmental issues, that the planet would be better off with no people on it.

It’s like, I think, well the first thing I think is, well let’s start with you, but the next thing I think is really? That’s really what you think, eh? It’s like you know, you don’t have to go very far down, from a psychoanalytic perspective, into the dream underlying a statement like that, before you see that it is the sort of dream that you do not want to have anything to do with. Because there’s an actively genocidal component to it. And it’s based in loathing of humanity. Self-loathing, but also loathing of the entire species. It’s like, better beware of that sort of thinking.

Which is not to say that we have some things that we could clean up, you know, but a little sympathy for humanity wouldn’t be a bad thing. We do have a relatively hard time of it, after all, which is also something the existentialists… you know, they’re a nice corrective to Freud, because Freud says hey, you’re probably healthy unless something terrible has happened to you. And the existentialists come along and say yeah, but something terrible happens to everyone. So you know, existence itself is sufficient cause for human insanity. And you know, I basically buy that. I think everyone has an impossible existential and moral burden. It’s a condition of life.

And so, when you see a creature like that, you think, yeah, it’s no wonder you’re cracked and maybe somewhat dangerous, but man, you’ve got the motivation for it, so, you know, a little understanding might be in order. You know, when I see people who are agoraphobic, they come to me and they say, well I’ve become afraid of everything. I think, yeah, that’s easy to understand. I just can’t figure out how the hell it was any different than that. How did you ever manage to not be afraid of everything? Because that’s the question.

And that’s the fundamental existential question too. When you’re surrounded by infinite vulnerability, how the hell can you stay calm? Well, you know, there are a bunch of answers to that, we’ve explored some of them. Partly, is well, you organise yourself with everybody else so that the chaos is at least held at bay. You know, you’re not confronted at every single second with the possibility of insanity or disease or death. You could put some distance between you and that. And that’s not an illusion, it’s like, you know, you don’t want to spend the night in a hospital room where an epidemic of Ebola is raging.

And that’s not a psychological problem. You just don’t want to be there, and intelligibly so. So even putting any distance between you and that outcome isn’t illusory. But then, you know, there are the other things that we do too, which is try to find meaningful things within the confines of our own life. And the destructive and nihilistic philosophies basically always claim that that’s delusional. And I don’t believe that; I think that’s wrong. And I think it’s dangerous, and I think it’s almost everything that students are now taught in universities.

And so, over the last ten years, it seems to me to be, and maybe this is an overstatement… but the university education in the humanities and often the social sciences causes more harm than it does good. Because this is basically what it teaches students, at a point in their life where instead of confronting the radical uncertainty underneath everything, is that, you know, you should be invited into life, helped find a niche that’s fulfilling from a human perspective, master that, and then you know, maybe start thinking about extending yourself a little bit beyond that into the unknown.

But to take people who hardly know what the hell they’re doing to begin with, and then expose them to, you know, post-modernist, ultra-rational fundamental critique of everything, it’s like, what do you expect is going to happen when people have that experience? Plus, I think it’s wrong. That’s the worst of it. I don’t think it’s factually true, I don’t think it’s philosophically true, and I think it’s dangerous. That’s a bad combination.

And, you know, part of the reason I think that people do this, and are such admirers of post-modern nihilism, is that it abdicates the necessity of responsibility. You know, because people say, well, I’m just thinking it through. It’s like, you’re never just thinking something through. The probability that motivation has nothing to do with that is zero. Because we already know, just from the things we covered in this class, that motivation frames your perceptions, you know. You can’t even see the damn gorilla when you’re counting the basketballs.

And so, you know, if you’re forming a rationalistic critique of everything, and then you say, oh well, I’m not motivated, it’s like, well you’re motivated when you count the basketballs, and so the probability that you’re motivated when you’re doing something far more extensive and difficult than that is 100%. You know Jung would say, you know, this is when we get back to the mythological underpinnings of things as well… in the Egyptian myth of creation and reality, Osiris is the figure of tradition. So he sort of represents the dominance hierarchy, roughly speaking, in all of its manifestations.

And he has an evil brother named Set. Set is a typical figure in fairy tales. You know, in The Lion King, you see Scar, who’s exactly the same figure, and the Scar/Set figure stands for the proclivity of bureaucracies to degenerate into malevolent totalitarian states, which is always a problem, right, because they rigidify and then oppress. That’s the price you pay for existing within a hierarchy. And then they rigidify and oppress, sometimes because that’s just what happens as they age. And sometimes because there’s a voice recommending that as a mode of being. “It’s okay if you do this, it’s okay if you break this rule, what the hell difference does it make anyways?”

You see some of that being played out right now with the revelation of all those Panama papers, right? Which is a huge revelation of corruption (hardly surprising) at high levels of power all around the world. Now, I see the… you know, at the bottom of everything, so this is the archetypal depths; I see this battle in the human soul, basically, between an attitude that says “despite its limitations, life is valuable and worth preserving and improving”. That’s proposition 1. And the other proposition is: “the suffering that life involves renders it ethically untenable and physiologically and psychologically unbearable, and as a consequence of that, it should just be eradicated”.

And so it’s a binary choice, in some sense. Yes to being, or no? And you know, you can conjure up powerful arguments on both sides of that. But to some degree, your whole being is an argument between those two questions. You know, and one of the things that Jung said, which I think is extremely worthwhile, is that you should figure out what archetypal forces are in charge of your being. Because they’re there whether you know it or not.

Now, you know, we’ve walked through that in some detail. You can look at it… in a sense, from a biological perspective, it’s more mechanistic. You know, you’re a tool of hunger and anger and fear and love and lust and all of those primordial forces that make up your field of experience. That’s a purely biological way of thinking about it. A more archetypal way of thinking about it is that those things are actually characters or personalities.

And they’re organised into hierarchies that are also characters and personalities. And anger and fear and resentment and hatred and the carnivorous soul of human beings and all of those things aggregate into one form of meta-personality. And all the things that you might think about as existing in opposition to that aggregate into another. And then the top-most struggle for integration is the struggle between those two things. That’s a very common mythological theme. That’s basically the battle between good and evil in heaven.

And that’s an unbelievably old… it’s as old an idea as human beings have. You know, the battle of the gods for dominance in heaven. Even if it’s not strictly between good and evil, even if it hasn’t been developed to the point of that ultimate opposition, it’s still a battle, at some level, between titanic forces for domination. Well, that’s partly a description of your own psyche, and partly a description of the organisation, or lack thereof, of societies across time.

Well, and it seems to me that… one of the things that Jung was insistent upon, because he was trying to… and many of the thinkers that we’ve covered in this series, they were trying to answer the question (this was especially true for the clinicians) of how it is that an individual should conduct themselves so that their mode of being is optimised.

You can say, well that’s mental health, but that’s a radically insufficient way of describing that, because, well, it’s not merely the absence of pathology; it’s something much more complex. It’s something active and it’s not even individual; it’s individual and social. You know, because you’re not going to be mentally healthy unless you’re integrated into a functioning social community. You just can’t do it. Because other people are part of what keeps you safe.

Because they’re always whacking you when you get out of line a little bit. They just tap you with sarcasm or raised eyebrows or frowns or smiles. They’re constantly tapping you into being a proper person, whatever the hell that is. But they’re telling you all the time what it is. So Nietzsche’s idea was that the modern world had landed itself in hot water because its own proclivity for searching out the truth had undermined its faith in traditional axioms of morality. Fair enough. That seems about right.

And his cure for that was that people became, he called it ‘overmen’, often translated as supermen, which were people who created their own values to fill the void left by the absence of traditional values. But there are a bunch of problems with that idea. One is individuals probably can’t do it because they don’t live long enough, and second, it’s really hard. I mean, just from the perspective of “what are you going to be, the best philosopher who ever lived?” because that’s really what it requires.

And then the third problem is, what makes you think you create values? Like it isn’t phenomenologically obvious that you do. It’s more like you experience them, and sometimes you don’t even know where they come from. You get angry. Do you know why? Maybe you’ll have to think about it for like three days. So in what way you created that is, well, it’s not self-evident. And Jung’s idea was well, the forces that we had regarded as traditional sources of values were actually spontaneous constructions of the human psyche. They weren’t arbitrary systems of rules. They were way deeper than that.

And I think, if you have an ounce of biologist in you, you immediately read that and think, yeah, obviously. Obviously. Even the social rules that govern a dominance hierarchy, they’re instilled in you. You know them. They’re right in your body. And so there’s a biological basis for your understanding of culture right at that level. That’s damn near spinal. Like it’s old.

So, Jung’s secondary proposition, and this is quite an interesting one, was that by attending to your fantasies and your dreams, and your daydreams, for that matter, you can come into contact with some of the primordial psychic forces that originally produced religious revelation. So that you can find what’s lost by looking within. And that’s basically the entire point of Jungian psychotherapy.

And part of the reason I’m concentrating on Jung is because guys like Rogers, you know, and the phenomenologists, they’re moving down the same trail of thought, but they didn’t get as far as Jung as far as I can tell. Like, they never took it to its ultimate conclusion. You know, Maslow, for example, talked about a hierarchy of needs, and the self-actualised person was someone who had accomplished all those basic needs and popped out at the top.

It’s like, kind of true, but sort of primitive. Because it is by no means obvious that you have to take care of all your basic material needs before you can act morally. It’s a foolish idea. It assumes that people are going to become more moral as they get richer. Now, I’m not saying that they become less moral, because I don’t believe that, but I don’t see that there’s any positive association.

It’s just that you can use your wealth well or you can use it badly. Just like you can use your poverty well or you can use it badly. So Maslow, it’s like, yeah, there’s a hierarchy, yes something emerges at the top, no it’s not a consequence of the fulfillment of needs, it’s way too materialistic, it’s basically like a utopian socialist idea, right. If you feed people enough cake, all of a sudden everyone will get along. It’s like, people aren’t like that at all.

So, Jung took this idea of personal development, as far as I can tell, to its ultimate extreme, to its logical conclusion. And that’s where he ran into the archetypes, because what archetypes are, in some sense, is the ultimate instantiation of an idea. You can’t go beyond it. That’s why it’s an archetype. So there’s an archetype of death. Well, why? Because you can’t go past that. Words fail when you’re confronted by that.

And there’s an archetype of love, and there’s an archetype of evil, and all those things are beyond articulation in their archetypal form. And they’re the place where your articulated thought ceases to be relevant. So, for Jung, you know, the self-development route was the confrontation of those things that you had abandoned within.

Now, I’ve been thinking about Jung for a very long time. And I think that one of the things that struck me about the psychoanalysts is that they’re much too concerned about the idea that if you’re properly organised as a human being, that organisation is intra-psychic, like it’s in you somehow. So for Jung, the hero’s journey was a journey into the unconscious. An individual journey into the unconscious. Now, he started to see flaws in that idea as he moved forward with his thinking, but one of the flaws in that idea is that you’re not only individual, not at all.

And if you’re situated properly, we’ll say in being, your familial relationships are healthy, as well as the proper balance being struck inside you, between the competing sub-personalities that make you up. And those things are actually not different, you know what I mean? You can’t have one without the other. So to think about them even as separate spheres is improper in a sense because you’re limited in your well-being by the well-being of those people who are in concentric circles around you.

And no matter how well-organised you are internally, it’s insufficient. You know, you see that reflected in stories like the story of the Buddha. Because at one point, the Buddha, after being walloped by knowledge of old age and sickness and death, because that’s really what does him in, he attains enlightenment under a tree (for a variety of reasons we won’t go into).

So he’s attained a perfect state of primarily subjective being. And that’s sort of like, it’s a temptation; there’s a temptation to remain there. But he shuts that down and then goes back into the world and teaches people, because his realisation is, Nirvana attained individually is not true Nirvana. You can’t be not suffering in a sea of suffering. You know, all that means is that you’ve got a particular kind of blinder on.

So he goes back, so to speak, and then suffers, mythologically speaking, suffers a normal, human death. And in some sense, that’s portrayed as voluntary. Sometimes I show people Pinocchio in this class; I think we did a little bit of that… did we do a little bit of that? Well, you know, in Pinocchio, Pinocchio’s trying to become a real person. And he has to do a variety of very strange things to manage that, one of which is to go down into the depths of the ocean and confront the most frightening thing, roughly speaking, and simultaneously rescue his father.

Which is a very, very strange set of ideas, you know. It’s definitely a descent into the Underworld; there are elements of Jonah and the Whale in there, which is a very, very old story. But there’s an idea that’s very much associated with Jungian thinking too, and that is that in the background chaos of your mind, there are depths. And in those depths are the forgotten or non-articulate structures of your culture, but more than that, the forgotten or non-articulate parts of your psyche that would make it a culture-creating entity.

And that has to be discovered in order for you to have the courage to be an individual. And there’s nothing delusional about that, you know, because the idea there, as opposed to say, the typical nihilistic or terror-management theories, is that if you got your act together, the fear of death would no longer be the thing that fundamentally rules you. Like that’s actually possible. So there’s a weird idea there, and the idea is not that fear of vulnerability and death is irrelevant, or not even that it’s not central, but that people are so God-damn tough, that it’s possible that they can face that directly and say: “that’s not going to be what rules my life”.

And I believe people can do that. I’ve seen people do that, certainly, in their careers. You know, even if they can’t articulate that philosophy, you put them in a situation where they’re dealing with nothing but death and destruction, and, you know, they can do it, which is mind-boggling. And a great thing to be able to see. And it’s… you know, you search in vain throughout the annals of psychology for optimistic ideas.

And I think that’s particularly true with regards to, like, the more experimental brands of psychology that are associated with being, like social psychology. Personality we’ll leave out of this for the time-being because it’s become more statistical, you know. But the idea that there is enough in you, so that if you don’t flinch from life, you can become strong enough to master it, that’s an amazing idea. It’s the only optimistic idea that I’ve ever seen that’s profound that I actually believe.

Because of most of the profound ideas that are easy to believe are terrible ideas. You know, they have to do with the inevitability of malevolence and death and insanity and suffering and all of that, you know, those things trying to blow through your persona. But trying to find something optimistic to counter-balance that, that’s tough. But you know, the other thing we know about people now, that we didn’t know a few years ago, is that if you put yourself in new environments, you actually change yourself genetically.

You know, so if I take you out of your safe environment and start you to expose you, say, to situations that you fear, you could say that one of the reasons that you transform is because you observe yourself mastering those situations. So you get bigger, so to speak, and the situations get smaller. Lovely. You can account for that by learning. But there’s an additional dimension that might be related to the learning, which is that if you put yourself in a new situation, then different proteins start to be encoded in your brain and in the rest of your nervous system.

So you actually transmute, literally speaking. And the total range of human transmutation is unexplored. So there’s this idea, let me show you, this is a cool thing to know about. Okay, so that’s a picture of a labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral. Now a cathedral is shaped like a cross. And then the focal point of the cathedral is right at the middle of the cross. And the cross is an X, so to speak, and the centre of the X is where you are.

And the reason it’s a cross is because the centre of that X is suffering. And so the central aspect of consciousness of being is integrally associated with suffering, betrayal, all of those things. That’s the nature of the centre of the world. And so then the question might be, well how do you cope with that? Well, the typical religious idea is that you identify with a hero figure of some sort, although that’s often warped and morphed into the idea that you believe in them. It’s not the right idea. The right idea is that you identify with them.

So I can give you an example of that from the Christian mass ceremony, which is actually a cannibalistic ritual. And it’s a very, very old idea. And the idea is that you become what you ingest, right. And so, it’s… the mass ceremony, which is in principle the eating of the flesh of a God, is not a ritual to instantiate articulated belief. It’s a ritual to instantiate embodied transformation. You’re supposed to become what that represents.

Question is, what the hell does it represent? Well, we know some of that. It represents, for example, the ability to pay attention. That’s one thing that for sure it represents. Because, you know, Christ is an analogue of Horus, a very tight analogue of Horus, as a matter of fact. So… but what else does it represent? Well, I can give you some suggestions. One of the things that is often required of the believer in a traditional religion is a pilgrimage.

Now, that was quite common in Christianity in the Middle Ages; that’s kind of disappeared. You see bits and pieces of it in Judaism, modern Judaism in particular, with the idea that, you know, every North American Jew, for example, should go to Israel at least once. And then, of course, it’s a massively featured element of traditional Islam. So you think, well what does a pilgrimage do to someone? Well partly it’s a journey to the holy city, whatever that means. The holy city is a symbolic representation of an ideal mode of being.

So you’re making a symbolic journey to an ideal mode of being. Okay, well let’s say you’re some ratty villager from somewhere and you’ve never been more than a mile away from your village and you’re functionally illiterate and you don’t know anything about the world. And one day you decide to take that 1500 or 3000-mile pilgrimage. The probability that you’re going to be the same person when you come back as you were when you left is zero. And the reason for that is, well a lot of things are going to happen to you along the way.

God only knows. It’s going to be a big adventure. And you might say, well what’s the utility in that? And the utility is that with each stressful situation you encounter, and master, your capacity grows. And so maybe you’ll encounter five hundred of those on your pilgrimage. Maybe it’s dangerous enough so there’s a reasonable probability that you won’t even come back alive. But if you do come back, you’re not naïve. You’ve seen the world. You’re going to be someone who’s much more difficult to contend with.

And you’re going to be a bit of a foreigner to the people in your village. That’s the price you pay for that. Remember in The Hobbit when Bilbo goes out to confront the dragon and then he comes back, no one really likes him anymore. Like they respect him, but they think, well, here’s this weird guy that transformed himself into a thief and then went and confronted a dragon. He went way the hell away from his home, so he’s sort of contaminated by the foreigner, and he made it back. You don’t want to mess with him.

But he’s not the same thing that he was when he was there. And that’s all to the good. I mean, what happens in the next series of books makes it quite evident that if Bilbo hadn’t undergone his adventure, then the battle between good and evil would have gone to the evil side. That’s the entire plot of The Lord of the Rings. It’s this massive fantasy of good versus evil. Just like Harry Potter. And those ideas never go away. You see that with The Avengers too.

In the… one of the scenes in there is extremely interesting. So there’s this scene where… what do they call those foreign aliens? Is it Katari or something like that? You know, the big monsters that come through the portal and invade New York? Anyways, I don’t remember what they’re called. But there’s a very interesting scene in there where the armed forces send a hydrogen bomb to take New York out because of the descent of these terrible aliens. And Iron Man, who’s this weird android-like thing (so he’s a human being that’s transforming himself into something that’s more than a human being… one of the things that happens with Iron Man is that his suit gets increasingly gold as the series continues, there’s a real reason for that), he makes a personal sacrifice to avert the hydrogen bomb, and then it blows up all the bad guys, and then he falls to Earth, just like Icarus.

That’s pretty cool. And then, what’s really interesting is that when he falls to Earth and he’s dead, it’s The Hulk who wakes him up. And the reason for that is that The Hulk represents masculine energy that’s completely unbound. And then Tony Stark is sort of this tightly constrained intellect character who’s half-machine… he’s not enough savage, that’s one way of looking at it, and so when he’s lying there half-dead he’s missing something.

And so The Hulk comes along and yells him into being again. And he’s already made a relationship with The Hulk. And these things are genuine myths because they’re co-created with their audience, you know. All of these stories have a back-story. And if you’re a comic book writer and you deviate improperly from the back-story then you’re going to get like ten thousand letters from fans saying “well what about issue #118 on page 13? That’s part of the necessary plot.”

Well, alright, keep Tony Stark in mind for a minute. Now, you see this labyrinth here, so I’ll tell you what you do in the Chartres Cathedral. So you’ve got this cross, and then this thing is at the point of it. Now, if you go on a pilgrimage, you go out there and expand your personality by visiting the North part of the world and the West part of the world and the East part of the world and the South part of the world. You go everywhere. You’re a wanderer that’s gone everywhere.

But maybe you can’t go to the damn pilgrimage for one reason or another, so you do a symbolic pilgrimage. You go to the cathedral, and you go to the point of suffering, so to speak, and then you enter this maze, and to get to the middle of the maze, which is very much like the flower that the Buddha sits in, because it’s a flower. To get to the middle, you can’t just walk straight to the middle. You have to wander the entire maze and cover every square foot of it.

And only once you’ve done that (so that’s a symbolic journey to North, East, West, and South), only after you’ve done that do you get to the middle. And the middle signifies the point where the suffering that’s represented by the entire structure of that building can be withstood. And you know, you’ve got to understand, this idea is so… you think about what those damn Europeans were doing when they were building those cathedrals.

You know, some of those things took five hundred years to build. You can’t even imagine a modern society building something that would take five hundred years to build. It’s unimaginable to us. And these cathedrals were so expensive, they were like the trip to the moon in the 1960s. The whole damn culture was devoted to producing these fantastic structures of stone and light that had this particular message embodied in them.

It’s like, why were they doing that? Well, you know, you can get cynical about it, although I think that would be a little premature, but this is part of the answer. It’s like, the culture was trying to figure something out. And what they were trying to figure out was where you should be. And how you should get there. And to point out as well how massive the consequences were of failure versus success. Because failure, that leads to hell. And success, that leads to heaven.

And you know, you can think about that as something projected into the future life, which Nietzsche called ‘the biggest error Christianity ever made’. But if you dispense with that, at least provisionally, the reality of that becomes clear right away. What happens if you don’t take the voyage? Well, you become corrupt, because you’re weak. It’s as simple as that. And you have every reason to become corrupt.

Like you could say the conditions of existence are such that if you cannot tolerate them, you will become corrupt. And I just can’t see, in any way, how that’s not self-evidently true. And so, if you don’t take the voyage, well what happens is everything tilts towards hell around you, but you have a lot more influence than you think. So you don’t know exactly what waves of causality are emanating from your decisions.

You have no idea. And then if you do decide to go everywhere and to pick up your responsibility, then what emanates from you, maybe in receding waves, is the idea that it’s possible to live life properly and to make things better. And that’s an idea… like I think that idea is more powerful than death. And it would be really good if that was the case.

You know, the existential element comes in, and I guess this is also the element of faith, is that the only way you’re ever going to figure that out is if you try it. Because no one else can demonstrate the truth or falsity of those two branching pathways except you, because you have to test it in the conditions of your own life. And at some point… by the time you hit about 30, nobody can tell you what to do.

And you think, well, hooray. It’s like, let’s go a little easy on the celebrating. You know, it’s quite a relief when you have a problem and you go to someone and they say, well here’s what you can do about it. But by the time you’re fully adult, your damn life is so individualised that, you know, you could use moral guidelines, and you should, for sure, but you’re basically stuck with the choices.

All these old ideas, they suggest that if your choice is to voluntarily confront and to improve and to repair, that not only do you repair the things around you (they don’t have to be within you; they can be anywhere around you), you continually heal the structure of being. Well, that would be a good thing to try, you know? It’s a big deal; it’ll keep you busy. It’ll provide your suffering with some meaning.

That’s a big deal. And the alternative looks dreadful. Well, you know, I walked you through all these various theories, some of them about behaviour, and some of them about personality, and some of them about philosophy, and some of them about clinical psychology. And it’s an attempt to allow you to take multiple snapshots of what a human being is and how we might manifest ourselves.

For me, knowing all those things has been ridiculously useful, ridiculously useful. Far more practical than anything else I ever learned. And one of the advantages to knowing about personality is that, you know, instead of reducing the individual to some set of measurable phenomena, which I’m all for by the way, it also expands your conception of what the individual can be to an almost unlimited degree.

So instead of a human being being something that has to waver and be crushed under the weight of its own being, a human being could easily be something that could stand up and say, yeah, well, I can handle that. And I think people can do that. People are so damn tough, it’s unbelievable. I’ve seen people go through things that are just grinding, terrible, and not only come out the other side, but actually put themselves together enough to clearly be a force that rescues the culture and tries to improve the structure of being.

And so hooray for us. If we can do that, that more than justifies whatever horrors might be laid at our collective feet. So, I would say, don’t underestimate yourself. You guys all have a lot going for you. You’re smart, you’re young, you’re reasonably conscientious, a number of you are creative. You have access, tremendous access, to technological power.

So God only knows what you might manage to hammer yourself into over the next thirty years or so. But the more people that try to make things better, consciously, rather than worse, the better off everything is going to be. And that would be a hell of a fine thing to aim for. That’s mostly what I’ve learned from studying personality. So thank you very much for attending the course, and good luck with the final!