2015 Personality Lecture 22: Conclusion - Psychology and Belief

We come to the end of the year, so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the whole course today, I guess, and try to sum up what might be most useful to remember about it. When we started at the beginning, I made it the case to you that people have been studying personality and its transformations for a very long period of time, and that the earliest forms of knowledge that we have about what people are like and how they change come to us from stories and from very, very old stories.

Those stories represent how people act in the world fundamentally rather than what the world is made of, and the fact that people are confused about that is part of the reason that there's still tremendous confusion about the proper relationship between science and religion or science and ethics. Almost all of the forms of information transfer that we regard as engaging our narrative in their format; we love stories, and the reason for that is that stories tell us how what people are like and how they behave. They present the world as a place in which people behave, and so the stories help us understand how people behave, but they also help us understand how people must and should behave given that they have a certain nature and that they have to organize their behavior with other people.

That puts a set of very serious constraints on how it is that people can exist in the world. The stories basically take two forms, and one form is the description of people acting in motivated states of one form or another, and those are usually motivated states that everyone is familiar with. Most stories, whether they're archaic or modern, have to do with exploration and adventure or romance, and the reason for that is that we're biologically constructed so that we're adventuresome, exploratory, and interested in intimate relationships.

So the stories reflect that and they help us understand how those fundamental motivations could be manifested in behavior in a manner that's productive, partly for each individual and then partly for the individuals in relationship to other individuals, to families, and to broader communities. The other form of story that seems to be of critical importance from a historical perspective is stories that describe transformation, and transformation tends to be represented as using symbolism that's associated with death and rebirth.

The reason for that seems to be that, almost inevitably, when you learn something new, you learn it because something that you're doing or something that you're using to structure your perceptions no longer works. It produces a result that you don't intend, and because of that, before you can learn to restructure your behavior, you have to allow yourself to let go of the things that you're doing that are in error. Those can be small things in situations where only small direction is required, but sometimes they can be very large things. If they're very large things, then it's as if there's a large element of your personality or yourself that has to degenerate and transform itself into chaos and then reemerge, hopefully restructured.

The archaic stories about death and rebirth and the transfiguration of the soul are stories about the necessity of dissolution and disintegration preceding ascent, and it's a very useful thing to know because it means, first of all, that you're going to be resistant to learning things as you progress through life because every time you learn something, you have to let go of something that you hold dear before you can reconstruct yourself. That accounts for people's unwillingness to learn things and their unwillingness to face facts that aren’t in accordance with their current view of the world.

But it also helps you understand that it might be worth letting go of the things that you're doing that aren't productive because even if it's painful in the short term, the consequence might be the kind of personality transformation that stops you from having to suffer stupidly as you move through life. One of the reasons that I entitled this course "Personality and its Transformations" is because the transformation part of the study of personality is probably more important than the study of personality traits themselves.

This is part of the reason why, for example, PJ thought it was much more important to learn how it was that people learned things than it was to learn what they were learning. He was more concerned about the process by which people generate information and transform their personalities than he was in determining the nature of whatever theory it was that people happened to be using to interact with the world at a particular historic stage or at a particular developmental stage.

One of the things that's most important to learn from archaic stories, which is where we started, is that it's much more useful to envision yourself as something that can continually transform in response to challenge than it is to view yourself as the static embodiment of any particular strategy of knowledge or perception. You know, one of the things that you'll see quite frequently—and you certainly see this in universities now, I think perhaps you see universities more than you see it anywhere else—is that people adopt a static ideological stance on the world, and they try to interpret everything that happens in the world through the lens of that static ideology.

They try to compress the entire world into that particular theoretical framework and become extraordinarily upset when the phenomena that confront them don’t fit in accordance with the ideology. The reason that people do that is because they identify themselves with their ideological beliefs, their static ideological beliefs, instead of identifying themselves with the part of their personality that's capable of continually assimilating new information and accommodating to it or transforming. You're a much more powerful person if you can understand that what's most essential to you is your capacity to transmute and transform as challenges come towards you rather than your ability to develop a coherent and all-encompassing totalitarian theory and attempt to impose it on the world.

I think one of the most tragic mistakes that modern universities make, especially on the humanities end of the distribution, is that people come to university looking for orientation in the world, looking for ways of understanding it, and essentially they're taught two things. One is that there is no fundamental meaning to things, and so that if you're a rational and intelligent being, your only reasonable outlook is nihilistic. What seems to go along with that is some insistence that you do adopt a particular ideological stance as some sort of counter-position to that.

To me, that has nothing to do with education at all; that's just corruption from both directions because there's no real utility in nihilism and there's no reason to assume that it's the appropriate stance on life. Everything we've learned from the 20th century indicates that there's virtually nothing that you can do that's more dangerous personally and socially than to grasp an ideology and attempt to apply it to everything that comes your way. The fact that universities teach people how to do that in some reasonably rigorous way is nothing short of appalling.

I think the only way that you can transcend that is to understand that what you know is not as important as what you have yet to learn. What that means is that people often find strength in regarding themselves as the sort of being that can comprehend everything and that the sort of being that's competent and sufficiently well-developed at the current point so that they have the appropriate answers to the appropriate questions. The thing about that that's wrong is that you don't have the answers and often you don't even have the questions.

If you can identify with your capacity to learn, that means that you don't have to be afraid of the things that you don't know, and that means that you can listen to people and you can discover new things, and that you can continually make your personality expand and transform. We have no idea what the limits are to the human capacity to expand and transform, and you're much more powerful from an existential perspective if you regard yourself as the sort of person who can surf on change rather than someone who has to make everything static and unchangeable just so that they can adapt to it.

I learned a lot of that from reading archaic stories and trying to understand exactly what it was that they were trying to communicate to people, and the fundamental communication is that it's reasonable to conceptualize the world as a place of action rather than a place of objects, and then to regard the central problem of human life—the existential problem—as how is it that you should look in the world and look at the world and act on it. From a scientific perspective, that's generally regarded as something that's epiphenomenal because behavioral analysis of appropriate behavior falls into the domain of ethics and philosophy.

But that's foolish for people because everything we do revolves around how we have to look at the world and how we have to act. This is part of the reason that I talk to you about PJ because I think PJ had cottoned on to something that was unbelievably profound. It's an element of P thinking that generally you don't hear much about. If you take courses on psychology, especially in relation to developmental psychology, especially North Americans like to reduce psychology to a list of developmental stages, and that is something that P really wasn't all that concerned about.

He was interested in how the processes that people use, or how the structures that people use to interpret the world transform across time, but he wasn't particularly interested in exactly what those stages were and how they sequentially followed one another. P's fundamental idea was that there were ways of organizing complex systems that could sustain themselves with very little input of energy and effort and resources.

The fact that those forms of organization existed meant that some forms of organization were better than others, and the reason that that's so important is because P, for example, is one of the only thinkers I've ever come across that managed to transform what you might think about as a qualitative evaluation—an evaluation, say, of the appropriateness of a solution to a problem like a moral problem. He managed to transform the discussion of that into something that was virtually quantitative. PJ's idea of the equilibrated state was the notion that you could set up a complicated system so that all the parts of the system were operating in some kind of harmonious balance, so the system wasn't continually fighting itself either at any given moment in time or in multiple situations across time.

For P, an equilibrated state was a state that was relatively free of conflict. I started with P instead of Freud because people often start personality courses with Freud, because I think P actually had the model for how people organize themselves. I think he had a more accurate representation of the model of how people organize themselves than Freud did.

Now, you know that Freud conceptualized people as an ego, right, with tremendous id-like forces underneath pushing the ego around. We would think about those as classical biologically motivated or biologically predicated motivations like aggression and sexuality and all of the other elements of our motivated behavior that make us animal-like. Freud thought of the ego as trapped between those and the demands of the social world, and so he thought of that as an intrinsically conflict-laden process where you're trying to manifest all of your animal instincts as an animalistic individual, and society is attempting to hem that in and repress it.

As a pure manifestation of biological animality, you're dangerous, and you can't fit into a social environment without inhibiting that or sublimating it or transforming it in some manner. Whereas the Pedian perspective is more something that is predicated on the idea of a game, and I think it's a more sophisticated way of looking at it because when you look at how children organize their personalities, especially between the ages of two and four, it's certainly the case that to some degree, they learn to inhibit their impulses as a consequence of social pressure.

But it's much more appropriate and accurate to notice that actually what they mostly learn to do between the ages of two and four is get along with themselves and get along with others. What's happening is they burst onto the world with a set of sub-personalities that are predicated in biological reality, so they're hungry, and they're thirsty, and they have to maintain their body temperature at a certain level. They have to learn how to cope with all of the demands of being a biological entity, like toilet training and learning how to share and learning how to play with siblings and establishing a relationship with parents, and so forth, and so on.

But the way they seem to do that is by organizing their behavior into more and more complicated and sophisticated games that stack back on top of one another. The child learns how to regulate their biological rhythms and go to sleep at the appropriate time and wake up at the appropriate time, and if the parents scaffold them properly, then they learn to eat at the proper time so that they're not disregulated by starvation or hunger or thirst. They’re not disregulated by temperature extremes either.

They learn how to incorporate their aggression into cooperative games rather than how to inhibit it, and they make their personalities more and more sophisticated as they're doing that. They learn how to play a larger and larger number of more and more complicated games with more and more people, and that's a kind of hierarchical organization that extends inside the person in so far as they're organizing their fundamental biological motivations and their emotions, and then starts to extend beyond the individual as they start to organize their fundamental motivations and their emotions while other people are doing the same thing.

It's out of that continual interplay of game-like cooperation and competition that society itself emerges. That’s not an inhibitory or conflict-laden model. The conflict between society and the individual in the Pedian model only occurs when the game-like structure of the personality is not sophisticated enough to interact properly with the environment at that point. You can see that the idea of a Pedian equilibrated state is that you could imagine an individual at all the levels of existence that the individual exists at, from the microcosm, the micro-world, way down at the subatomic and atomic level, stacked up on top of each other, all the way up to the societal level, so that everything in that hierarchical organization is working to make every level work properly.

I think it's a really good model for what you might conceptualize as mental health broadly speaking because your mental health is of course dependent on the appropriate organization of your psychophysiology, but it's also dependent on the integration of that organized psychophysiology into an intimate relationship and then into a familial relationship and into a relationship with the community and then into a relationship with the structures that are beyond the community.

The fact that many of you are concerned, for example, with environmental issues means that you understand at some level that in order for your being to be optimized, you also have to exist in some relatively harmonious manner inside large biological ecosystems—social ecosystems, economic ecosystems, and political ecosystems. All of those levels have to be stacked on top of one another so each level supports and fosters all the other levels, and that's a very complicated thing to attain. It's also something that has to be continually negotiated and transformed because, of course, you're trying to stack all these processes in a hierarchical manner, in a self-sustaining hierarchical manner, in an environment that also continues to shift and move.

Not only do you have to back up this structure to begin with and organize it, but you have to transform it at whatever level needs to be transformed as you move throughout the dynamic environment that changes from day to day. It's a very complicated process. Now, it seems to me that one of the things that you can come to understand—and this is something that I took at least in part from reading Y—is that the process that you engage in when you're organizing your personality in this hierarchical structure and the process that you engage in while you're updating it actually manifests itself as intrinsically meaningful.

There’s an element of your intrinsic being that's actually devoted toward fostering that process, and when people talk about the idea that life might have some meaning, it seems to me that you can actually experience that meaning when you're engaged in the process of producing this hierarchically organized structure and balancing and maintaining it across time. I think—and this is Yung's idea too—that what you experience that as is engagement. When you're very much interested in something that you're doing and you're sunk right into it so that you're not even self-conscious, then that's a signal from your—I wouldn't say from your nervous system, but from being itself—that you're in a position where all the levels of being are properly organized.

I think that people experience that as a deeply meaningful state of being, and I don't think that that has anything to do with rationality. You can make a very strong case that from a rational perspective that life is devoid of meaning, but the problem with that is that it starts out with the presupposition that the rational analysis of the situation that brings that question to life is the proper level of analysis. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. One of the things that Carl Rogers continually pointed out in his phenomenological approach was that to evaluate how you're progressing through life, you cannot only rely on your rationality.

It's a mistake state because you're an embodied creature, and you're constantly being informed by all sorts of processes that can't be reduced to straightforward rationality. It's a mistake to assume that the rational mode of interpretation of experience from moment to moment is the one that should actually be superordinate. It's a mistake partly because you're more complicated than your rationality, and so is existence itself, being itself.

For the existentialists and the phenomenologists, especially following Heidegger, the question was the nature of being. I think that's the proper question to pose to yourself when you're trying to assess exactly what constitutes the human personality. These things, to me, are part of the reason that I was so interested in the existential approach because the existentialists take the idea one step further, and it's in a very complicated and sophisticated way.

Now, they make the case that you have an ethical responsibility to being, and that would be to your being, but to being in general. The ethical responsibility is that you have to confront it straightforwardly and honestly, and the way the 19th and 20th Century existentialists came to that was really twofold: it was mostly from the negative direction. People like Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, when they were pushing the idea that it was necessary to have a truthful relationship with being, the reason they came up with that inclusion was by observing those circumstances where people clearly did not do that.

For Frankl, that was basically his observations of what happened in Nazi Germany, and for Solzhenitsyn, it was his observations of what happened in the Stalinist Soviet Union and in other places that were directly committed to a comprehensive totalitarian view of reality. Their observations were that as soon as that totalitarian viewpoint was imposed and everyone acted as if every problem had been finally solved, the immediate consequence of that was that everyone had to lie about everything they did in order to support the system.

The next consequence of that was the system became radically genocidal and murderous. For Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, their diagnosis of that was that it was necessary for individual people to adopt a truthful relationship with being because the consequence of not doing that was the degeneration of everything into something that basically resembled hell. You can align that idea with the Pedian idea of the game-like hierarchy and you can say something like—and this is also drawing on the ideas, say, of Rogers—that the pathway to the appropriate hierarchical organization of the personality, from the microcosm up to the macrocosm, is actually fostered by a relationship with truth.

For Rogers, he talked about the physiological and psychophysiological manifestations of that. For him, that was partly the willingness to enter into a dialogue with your physical being, which is also a notion that the psychoanalysts pushed in a slightly different direction. Because people like Freud, regardless of the fact that his notion of what constitutes socialization was predicated too much on conflict, one of the things that Freud certainly continually pointed out was that it was necessary for you to bring all of the diverse elements of your personality into the game.

You weren't supposed to repress things; you weren't supposed to forget things. You weren't supposed to leave elements of your being that were troublesome and difficult to integrate; you weren't supposed to leave those lying out where nothing could be done with them, because the consequence of that would be that those dissociated parts of you would become pathological and dangerous. They would pose a threat to you, because if you didn't incorporate those cast-off elements of being, then your personality would be too weak to prevail. For Freud, of course, the probability was very high that the cast-off elements of being would be those that were associated fundamentally with aggression and sexuality, because you might think that those are the two most dangerous motivational forces that people have at hand.

You're a pretty hollow and thin person if you're not capable of aggression, and if your sexual morality is continually predicated on your inability to engage in sexual activity because no one wants you or because you're repressing it. You're very awkward and unskilled at it, so that the question never even arises. That's the approach people take when they try to make their children so naive about sexuality and so protected that they're terrified to have anything to do with it whatsoever. That might work very well as long as they're in a situation where they're so underdeveloped and repressed that no one has wants to have anything to do with them, but as soon as they get out into the world where sexual behavior, for example, starts to become a possibility, all that does is leave them completely open to their own pathologies and to the predatory behavior of other people.

It's not much of a solution. The existentialist idea—and that's the idea of authentic being—is that the most appropriate way to interact with being as it emerges is by maintaining some relationship with truth. That's a very difficult concept to really come to grips with because, as is famously known, it's not that easy to identify exactly what constitutes truth.

I think that's part of the reason why Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, when they were talking about the existential approach to being, were more likely to concentrate on falsehood rather than on Truth per se because I think it's easier. You can think about this yourself, but I think it's easier for each of us to identify when we're doing something wrong than it is for us to determine whether or not we happen to be on the right path.

The issue of whether right now you're doing something wrong is simpler, in some sense, than the question of trying to understand whether the sum total of all your actions right now are those that will put you into the appropriate place in the future. I think that as you establish a relationship with truth, the first thing that you try to do is to stop lying.

That's not exactly the same thing as telling the truth because, I would say, you can't actually tell the truth because you don't know what it is, but you can certainly strive not to speak or act in ways that you know to be false. By doing that, that's part of how you integrate your personality and you strengthen your personality across time and also how you learn to understand larger and larger sections of what might actually be true instead of only being able to identify from moment to moment what's false.

Now, Kard would say, "Well, there's an element of faith in a decision like that," and I can tell you a little bit about what he meant. So, you know when we were talking about Carl Rogers, we talked about the instrumental use of language, right? So the idea there would be that I'm using language constantly to get what I want from the world in any given situation, and that instrumental use is predicated on the idea that I know what I want and that I know what's good for me.

The problem is that it's very unlikely that that's true because you don't know what's good for you in the final analysis because you're too ignorant to know, and so if you're using language to manipulate the world to ensure that things turn out the way you want them to right now, then you're acting as if your knowledge about what constitutes the good is sufficiently well-developed and final so that you can rely on it as a guide to what you're going to say and do.

Now the alternative to that is something—there's an alternative to that, but it's a very complicated alternative. The alternative to that is something more like it has more to do with reliance on your capacity to transform because here's an alternative to that kind of rigid and manipulative approach to life. The alternative is to try to act out what you think is appropriate and to say what you think is true as carefully as you possibly can and then to see what happens. That's a completely different way of approaching the situation, and it's a lot more interesting.

One of the things I've been thinking about is that I truly believe that the idea that people speak potential into being is accurate. I think that what we face as we move through life is a realm of potential that's in front of us that we can continually interact with, and I think that's actually how people think about the world when they think about it because we think of the future as a place of diverse possibilities and we think of the future as something we can maneuver through and turn into actuality.

So, then you ask yourself, "What's the best technology that you have at your disposal for transforming potential into the kind of actuality that you actually want to see around you?" Then you might ask yourself, "Is it more likely that you're going to get the actuality that you want by grappling with potential in a truthful manner, or is it more likely that you're going to get the kind of actuality that you want if you grapple with reality in a manner that's rife with falsehood?"

I would say, "Well, if bringing potential into actuality is like building a house, then I would say that if you build a house out of the proper materials, then it might stand." But if you build a house out of cut-rate materials and you take shortcuts wherever you can and you pretend things are other than what they are, then as soon as the ground shakes, your house is going to fall. That seems to me to be something that's fundamentally undeniable.

If you mix too much sand in your cement, then your foundation is going to be weak, and you can do that merely by ignoring what you know. So I think that the root out of inauthentic being and the root out of our proclivity to identify with ultimately genocidal ideologies is to attempt to establish a relationship with being that's not predicated on falsehood; at least, you know. One of the things Rogers would say—and I think he's right about this—is that if you consult the totality of your being when you're acting and you're speaking, you can tell by paying attention to the way that you're responding to your actions and to your words whether or not what you're doing and saying is pulling you together and making you integrated and making you strong or whether it's pulling you apart and disintegrating you and making you weak.

One of Rogers' claims was that that's actually a psychophysiological sensation. He called that you know, he described that in association with the wisdom of the body, and I really believe that to be true. I can see this when I'm talking to people. When I'm talking to my clients or when I'm talking to other people, I can see as soon as they start to misuse their words or start to use them in an instrumental manner, the strength goes out of them completely. You can detect that there's something shallow and false going on, and you know that if you call people's attention to that fact when it's happening, they're often rather resistant to noticing it.

But if they do open their eyes and pay attention to it, they can see right away that that's what's occurring. Now, when we moved towards Freud and Jung, well, I mean, I was extremely interested in Jung, and I have been extremely interested in Jung because he's one of the few thinkers that I've ever encountered who takes culture seriously, you know, and he believes that it's necessary because we're historical creatures and we're shaped by historical facts.

It's necessary for us to understand our culture and our past because we're embodying it. We're historically constructed creatures, and so the reason to study history is that history is you. If you don't understand history, then history is going to have you in its clutches, and it's going to be moving you from place to place. You know, because it was Jung who formulated the idea, for example, that people don't have ideas; ideas have people.

I think if you take that notion seriously, it's one of the most frightening things you can ever realize because of course everyone thinks that they have ideas. But if you look at people, for example, who are possessed by an ideology, obviously the idea has them because you can predict exactly what they're going to say and do in every situation. You can predict exactly what solution they're going to bring to the table whenever you discuss any problem, and if you come up with an idea about a problem and it's the same idea, the probability that it's you coming up with it is zero.

Whatever it is that's coming up with the same idea is the thing that's got control of you. You see this with people all the time when they arbitrarily divide the world, for example, up into those things that are good and acceptable and those things that aren't. You see this with right-wingers, and you see it with left-wingers because the right-wingers make the claim that government is evil, and the left wing makes the claim that corporations are evil. If you take five left-wingers, you can tell exactly what they're going to say about any given problem, and if you take five right-wingers, it's exactly the same thing.

So, then that brings up the question of who exactly is doing the talking and the thinking. Of course, the people who are spouting those ideas think that they're doing the thinking, but there's no reason to assume that that's the case at all. I can tell you something else that you can determine right away: people are dead boring when they're spouting ideological claptrap. You can hardly even listen to them, but you can take virtually anyone educated or uneducated, and if they start to tell you the truth about their own experience—even if they do that in a stumbling way, in a halting way—they become fascinating instantly because they're the only people who have access to that information.

It's rich and deep information, and you know that it's personal. It's material that they have a right to, you know, and they can intermingle that with the ideas that that culture has produced, even ideological ideas, and come up with something that's richer and more brilliant as a consequence of that. But if they're not speaking their own words, well, first of all, there's something else speaking through them, and second, there's something about it that's dead.

I don't remember if I told you the origin of the word "slogan." So "slogan" comes from two Welsh words, and one is "slagh," which is "s-l-u-a-g-h," and the other is "gairm." So it's "slagh gairm." "Gairm" means the battle cry of the dead, and to me, it's a perfect example, often it's a perfect example of how fascinating the process by which words emerge actually is, but it's also a dead accurate description of what's speaking through a person when their language has been reduced to slogan and they're not paying any attention to their own individualized being.

What it is is that it's the army of the dead speaking through them. There's no spirit there; there's nothing that's alive, and I don't think that being possessed by the army of the dead is a very good idea. I mean, that's all wisdom that was useful for the past and that's lost its ability to be applicable to the present.

One of the other things that seems to me to happen to people in university is they don't really get educated about how important what they do actually is. I think that goes along with the nihilistic cast of modern people. You know, it's easy to view yourself as one little dust mote floating around in a stadium full of dust motes, and you're all disconnected with each other, and none of you have any causal impact on anyone else or on the whole.

But I don't think there's any reason to conceptualize yourself using that model at all because the first thing that is very easy to notice is that you're very much networked. Over the course of your life, you're going to have direct and relatively profound influence on several thousand people and some of you maybe more, some of you less, but we could certainly say a thousand people, you know. Each of those thousand people will know a thousand people, and that's a million, and one step past that is a billion.

So you basically sit in the center of a network that, with very limited extension, covers virtually everyone on the planet, and that's becoming more and more true rather than less and less true as everyone becomes increasingly networked and connected. So what that implies is that the things that you do, that you choose to do, or the things that you choose not to do, are going to have effects that ripple far beyond your particular individual existence.

Part of what that means is that all of the choices that you make as you're confronting the unstructured future as you move through your life are going to alter the structure of being itself. One of the things that I've shown you guys repeatedly is that hierarchy of action, right? With the highest resolution level being the things that you actually do with your body—the muscle movements that you manifest in the world—and how those are hierarchically organized into higher and higher systems of value.

When I showed you that hierarchy, the thing I put at the top was "be a good person." Well, I think that can be elaborated out in a reasonable manner so that it's possible to understand more and more what being a good person is about. Part of it is that you have to have organized yourself into something that's well-structured and useful, and I think you do that by disciplining yourself and by adopting some role in the world that's meaningful and profound so that you have to—so that the stress and demands of that organize you into something that's strong, flexible, and productive.

That's one element of it. I think of that as a kind of apprenticeship element, and I think I learned that mostly from Nietzsche because one of N's claims was that in order to become properly developed as a human being, you had to undergo a position—you had to undergo a process of voluntary slavery, in some sense. You had to give yourself over to some sort of role, perhaps it doesn't even matter what role, so that you became an expert at that.

That was going to cost you in that you were going to be bent and twisted into that role, but it's also going to discipline and organize you. The alternative is to become nothing, you know, and that's not a useful alternative. So you want to become something, and then once you become something, well, then you want to be able to transform that something into whatever is necessary at that particular point.

I think that's where the ideas that are associated with hero mythology start to become particularly relevant to considerations of higher order ethics because the hero in mythology is the representation of the human being in so far as mankind understands what it is to be human. What the hero does is confront the things that he or she does not understand and take what's valuable from that confrontation and then reintegrate it into the personality and the society.

That's why the hero goes out to where the dragon is, takes the gold, and then brings the gold back to the community and distributes it. I would say well, part of being a good person is being good for something, and then another part of being a good person is being better than being good for something. You want to be not only good for something, but you want to be able to be good for something in a way that keeps making you better and better at being good for something.

That means you can't just be something; it means that you have to become something constantly. I think that a tremendous amount of what constitutes the intrinsic meaning of life can be found in that attempt to continually expand and reorganize as you're expanding because this is a Yung idea. I mean, human beings are cognitively dynamic creatures, and we find intrinsic worth in participating in that cognitively dynamic process.

So, then I think outside of that, there's another question, which is well, what is it exactly that you're aiming at? My experience has taught me—and this is partly a consequence of studying archetypes for a very long period of time—that I think the fundamental question that's on the very outer reaches of the hierarchy associated with ethics and morality is: Are you trying to make the world a better place or a worse place?

I believe that every time you make a decision, when you could go one way or you could go another, that in some sense, you're acting out your conviction in relationship to that highest order question. You say, "Well, would people really work to make the world a worse place?" The answer to that is, "Well, if you have to ask that question, then you should open your eyes," because we know the answer to that. The whole 20th century was full of decades, and decades—in fact, the primary, I think the primary, the most important information that you can derive from an analysis of the 20th century is that it's pretty damn certain that people are willing to work to make everything as terrible as they possibly can.

That's definitely worth considering, because if people are willing to do that and motivated to do that, that probably means that you're willing to do that and motivated to do it too. I think it's fairly easy to understand why. I think the reason that people are motivated to do terrible things is that they're angry at the conditions of their life; they're angry at the conditions of being because being is composed of suffering and vulnerability.

People lose, and they suffer, and they get resentful and angry about that, and they feel hard done by. The entire structure of the world is aimed against them in some unfair manner, and then they get revengeful and corrupt and feel that everything that they do is justifiable given how much torment and suffering they've been living through. Once you make the—once you move into that particular realm of thinking, your ability to start to make things worse starts to accelerate exponentially.

I don't believe there's a single person on the planet who hasn't been in a situation where something has happened to them that's sufficiently disappointing and tragic so that their thoughts turn to revenge and destruction. I think that happens to people all the time, and it's understandable, but the problem is it seems to be extraordinarily counterproductive, and all it does is make the situation that everybody's complaining about worse instead of better.

What seems to be the case is that you have to bear the fact that you're incomplete and vulnerable and underdeveloped and weak in many ways without becoming vengeful and corrupted by your knowledge of that. While still trying to do everything you can to make being better rather than worse, I think the upside of that mode of thinking is that I don't believe there's anything that's more engaging and interesting than continued attempts to make things better.

The problem is it requires the adoption of a tremendous amount of responsibility, right? I think that it's the unwillingness to accept responsibility that stops people from waking up and becoming enlightened. If you want to make the world a better place, then you have to take responsibility for all of the ways that you look at the world and everything that you act out, all the things that you say, and it means you have to pay a tremendous amount of attention to what you're doing as a consequence.

That's very difficult, and it's also frightening because it means that you have to entertain the hypothesis that the things that you're doing are important. I think part of the reason why our culture has taken such a nihilistic bent is because people have actually decided that life would be a lot easier if it didn't have any meaning.

People run around and complain about the fact that life is meaningless or that life is devoid of meaning, and we've drawn that conclusion from both a rational and empirical perspective. People will tell you that they came to that conclusion purely logically and scientifically, but when I look at that claim, I think, "Well, maybe you want life to be meaningless because it lets you off the hook." If everything you do hasn't got any value, then why do you have to pay any attention to it? You can do whatever you want, and if it's the opposite—if everything you do has meaning and it's important—well, then you better be awake because what you do matters.

Then you get all the meaning you want, but the price you have to pay for that is that you have to take responsibility. If you start to seriously entertain the idea that with every decision you take you're tilting the world either towards heaven or towards hell, then that can instantly start making you a lot more serious about what you choose to do and not do. My understanding of personality development and personality development in relationship to history is that that is exactly what is the case: when you're making decisions in your life, you face a field of infinite potential, and you use your will for good or evil in order to shape it into what it's going to be, and that's really what a human being is.

A human being is the sort of creature that can do that. One of the things I found that's extremely interesting is that there's an idea at the very core of most modern legal systems; it's certainly the case for English common law, which I think is the most sophisticated legal system that's ever been developed, and it's predicated on an idea that every single person has intrinsic worth. That's sort of the ground of the idea of natural rights.

I've spent a lot of time looking into that idea—why is it that the idea that each person has intrinsic worth ever developed, especially when you look at the situation and you see that some people are clearly doing everything they can to make the world an absolutely terrible place? Under English common law, for example, even if you're a serial killer and everyone knows it, you still have rights before the law, and there's an idea there that no matter how corrupt you've become, there's still something that's intrinsically valuable about you.

You know, people in the modern world claim that they don't have any metaphysical beliefs, but insofar as you're an advocate of the legal system that claims that people have intrinsic worth, then you're acting out the idea that there's something of value about every single person. You might ask, "What is it that might be of value about every single person?" It might easily be that it's the faculty that each person has to turn potential into actuality.

If you do an analysis of the fundamental basis of modern law, and you go down into the underst structure of the ideas that gave rise to that entire body of law, what you find is that is the idea at the bottom of it. It's the idea, in some sense, that people are made in the image of God, and it's God who makes order out of chaos and sometimes turns chaos into and sometimes turns order into chaos when that becomes necessary. People are capable of doing that, and I think that we're continually involved in the co-creation of reality and that we can choose what sort of reality we want to bring into existence.

You can do that in a resentful and murderous way, and you have every reason to do it, but it seems to me to be the wrong choice, and you’ll pay a big price for doing that. You pay a big price for doing that every second of your life. The things that I've been talking to you about for the entire course, you know, they are things that I've tried to put into practice in one way or another. When I'm engaged in therapy with people, what I'm really trying to do is to listen to what they have to say.

I don't really want to give them advice because advice isn't that helpful, but usually what we try to do is we try to lay out what the problem is. That's a consequence of mutual discussion because often people don't really know why they're troubled. They have some ideas about it, and they can talk about the situation in their family, and the fact that the relationships aren't going well and so forth, but it's no easy matter to actually specify the problem. Because if things aren’t going well for you, it’s not necessarily the case that you know why. You might know some of it.

You might even know that there are some things that you're doing that you should stop doing, but you can't stop doing them. So a lot of the initial discussion is mere delineation of what the problem constitutes. Then the next part of the discussion is, "Well, if that’s the problem, what would a solution look like? How could things be better than they are now? What would that actually look like?" The next issue is, "What steps could you put into place to start moving toward that goal?"

That's all an exploratory process, you know, and I think it's a process that's basically grounded in a search for the truth. What I found in my psychotherapy practice is that in so far as that's happening during the discussions, then the process itself is extraordinarily gripping. You, I think, you also experience that whenever you sit down with someone and have a conversation that's serious and meaningful.

A conversation like that grips you, and I think the reason for that is because you are in the right place at the right time, so to speak, and what you're doing is important and meaningful. It's difficult, though, because you have to face up to what the problems actually are, and you have to pay careful attention, and you have to run through all the options, and you have to plan strategically, and you have to be careful about what you say. You can't get too self-aggrandizing or egotistical, and you can't offer simple solutions, but it's an incredibly engaging process.

It’s like reading the highest quality fiction in some sense, and so a lot of conversations between people can be like that if both people who are engaged in the conversation—and this is something Rogers pointed out—are willing to admit that there is, in fact, a problem and then to do whatever is necessary to lay out the structure of that problem meant to solve it. That's an admission of vulnerability to a large degree, and it seems to me that that process actually works. It facilitates trust, which is extraordinarily useful.

With some of my clients, it's taken me years before we can actually have a genuine conversation because they're so afraid of engaging in a discussion that's actually real and genuine and exposing their actual problems that they hide often behind the sorts of things that Jung described as a persona. You can't get to the real person because they're so covered up by a shell that you can't have a genuine discussion, and the reason that's the case is because they've attempted to engage in genuine interactions with people in the past and have been betrayed or hurt or undermined in some way that's really profound.

They learned that that's very dangerous to do that, which is exactly true, but it's a lot more dangerous not to do it. One of the things that I hope for when I teach this class and the other classes that I teach too is that people can come out of the classes with a different conceptualization of what they might actually be like. I really do believe that people are remarkable creatures. The extent of our capacity is by no means known, and there's so much about what we're like that we don't understand.

We have no idea what it means that each of us is a locus of consciousness. You know, I don’t know if you know this, but the word "genie" is the root word of "genius," and the idea of the genie is a very interesting idea, right? Because with a genie, you have this incredible capacity for magical power in some sense all collapsed into this incredibly tiny container. There's this weird constraint between the divine possibility of the genie and the fact that it's encapsulated into this unbearably tiny space and, in some sense, is trapped inside that.

The reason that "genie" is the root word of "genius" is because that's exactly what people are like. We have this incredible capacity for imagination and for speaking things into being and for acting things into being but at the same time, we're limited by our frame in time and space. It limits us, but it also allows us potential. It's a very strange set of limitations.

One of the things I've wondered very deeply over the last 20 years is, you know, that people are often upset about the structure of being. There’s a good argument in "The Brothers Karamazov." The "Brothers Karamazov" features a very large number of characters. It has a very fraught and eatable subplot, but one of the continual battles between characters in "The Brothers Karamazov" is a battle between a young man named Alyosha, who's going to be a monk at a monastery, and he's trying to live a classically good life; a traditionally good life, as it might have been conceived of in the 1880s and 1870s.

His brother Ivan, who's an older brother, is extremely intelligent, charismatic, and very rationalistic and arrogant and creative and intelligent, and he likes nothing better than to go after Alyosha with all the stories about the horrors of the world to try to undermine his faith in the divinity that he's attempting to establish a relationship with. So he tells stories, like this is a story that Dostoevsky took out of the newspaper around the time he was writing "The Brothers Karamazov."

It's a story about this family; this father and mother locked their three or four-year-old daughter in a freezing outhouse overnight, and she was screaming the entire time to have someone let her out, and they let her freeze to death in the outhouse. Of course, that produced a big scandal, and one of the things that Ivan uses that story—or Dostoevsky uses that story in "The Brothers Karamazov"—is so that Ivan can torture Alyosha about the fact that there's no way that you could possibly envision that being itself could be good or that God could be good, if you want to put it a different way, when that sort of thing can happen in the world and that it happens over and over and over all the time, everywhere.

Dostoevsky, because he's no parer, when he sets up an argument between two positions, he sets up the argument as powerfully as he can. He has Ivan tell Alyosha endless stories like that and make the claim that as far as Ivan is concerned, the mere fact that any of those things could have ever happened, even once, is a sufficient reason to never allow yourself to conceptualize the idea that being itself might be good. In fact, Ivan's presupposition is that it's evil enough so that it should be eradicated. Any game that has that element of play in it is a game that should never be played. That's basically Ivan's stance.

That's a very archetypal stance, by the way. It's the same stance that Mephistopheles adopts in "Faust," and it's the same stance that Lucifer adopts in "Paradise Lost." It's the rational opposition to being, and it's a very powerful idea, but there's something wrong about it because if you pursue that and you act it out rigorously and consistently, then all that happens is you turn into someone who adds to the misery rather than putting an end to it.

One of the things I've wondered is—and this is something that's worth thinking about—if everybody abandoned their pathological nihilism and despair and did what they could to make things better wherever they could, then maybe we could turn the world into a place where that sort of thing didn't happen. Then what would that be like? Now, you ask yourself, "Have you done everything you possibly can to put your life in order?"

If the answer to that is "no," then what makes you think you have any right to complain about the conditions of your existence? There's a story in T.S. Eliot's play, "The Cocktail Hour," and the story involves a woman who's thinking about seeking psychiatric treatment. She approaches a psychiatrist, and she basically says, "I really hope there's something wrong with me."

The psychiatrist says, "Well, why do you hope that there's something wrong with you?" She says, "Well, I'm having a really miserable time of it, and as far as I can tell, that means that there's only two options. Either I'm doing something wrong and there's something wrong with me, and that’s the reason that all this pointless suffering seems to be occurring, or there's something wrong with the structure of being per se that makes all of this inevitable."

That's a perfectly reasonable laying out of two options, and so she says, "Well, I hope that we can start to discover what it is that I'm doing wrong because it would be a lot better if the reason things weren't so good was because I was doing something wrong than it would be if the reason that things are wrong is because they're just wrong and there's nothing you can do about it."

It's an easy question to answer because that's an existential question. It's the sort of thing that you can answer over the course of your entire life, and it's the sort of question that no one else can answer for you. But one thing you can find out is just exactly what your life would be like if you stopped making it unnecessarily miserable. To do that, you have to abandon your dissatisfaction and your vengefulness and your resentment and your arrogance and your willful blindness.

All those things that stop you from seeing what's right in front of your face and try to make things as straight as you possibly can in those places that you can make them. As far as I can tell, if you do that—and I think it's what I teach my clients to do in psychotherapy—if they do that, their lives get a lot better. I don't know exactly how good your life could get, but I don't think that there's any necessary upper limit.

If people can figure out how to set things right, the more you practice that in the places you can actually practice it, the better and better you get at that, and the more things that you can set right. You're also not setting other people right, which I also think is something extremely useful because my suspicions are that you have enough to do just setting yourself right without having to worry about all the other people who are running around mucking up the plan. You don't know what to do with them anyway or what they should be doing, so it's just as well to start with yourself.

It's an extremely useful adventure, and it's something that will never allow you to become bored even for a moment. That's worth something too, you know, because even if life is fundamentally suffering and there's nothing that can be done about that—which is a possibility—there's always the possibility that you could learn to live in a manner so that that suffering was actually justifiable even to you.

Because you might say, "What I'm doing is so worthwhile that even if I have to suffer to do it, it's worth it," and I would say that's actually the ethical imperative for your life: you're obliged to find something to do and some way of doing it that's so deeply meaningful that the fact that you have to carry around your mortal vulnerability is something that you can accept and even be happy about. Because the alternative is gloomy and dim, and it's worse than that—it's not just gloomy and dim; it's gloomy and dim, and then it's vengeful, and then it's murderous, and then it's genocidal.

That seems to be something that we could really do without. I’m hoping that as a consequence of having taken this course, you have some expanded idea of what it might mean to be a human being and that you can carry that with you as you move forward in your life and find out what you really like. Find out what you could do if you put your mind to it because God only knows what you could do if you put your mind to it, you know.

The more people who are doing that, the better things are going to get, and that would be a good thing because things aren’t so bad, but they could be a lot better. It’s hard to say just exactly how much you could contribute to that if you decided that that’s what it was that you could do, and I do believe that is what you can do. I also believe that you are doing that; you're shaping the world for better or for worse regardless of whether or not you decide to do it and take on the responsibility. You're basically destined to do that, so it seems to me that you should make that conscious and decide if you're going to do it properly or if you're going to make things worse.

Well, I guess the other thing I have to say is that I wish you luck as you proceed through your university career. I mean, this is an awkward institution in many ways, and you're faceless and numbered while you're here, but it's also a place where the fact that you're engaged in this university means that the social community has given you an identity that's acceptable. You're a student, and that's an honorable thing to be, and that means that you can spend a few years trying to learn the most important things that you have to learn.

You're granted a role that makes that acceptable and justifiable. I would say, well, you've got a couple of years here. The wisdom of the world is collected at the University of Toronto, and it's going to be discussed and displayed awkwardly by your professors because they’re incomplete incarnations of historical wisdom. But you should forgive them for that and try to do everything you possibly can to extract everything you possibly can out of this place while you're here, because if you do it properly, then it’s going to make your life a lot richer and more productive than it could otherwise be.

You might say, well, what about getting a job? I would say, well, if you learn to think and you learn to speak, and you learn to act properly, and you learn how to be articulate, and you conduct yourself with a certain amount of wisdom and grace, you'll never have to worry for one minute in your life about what you're going to do that will sustain you and be productive, because people like that are in unbelievably short supply.

All the people out there in the world who have some—and there’s quite a few people like that—are desperately looking for people like that. If you happen to be one of them, you will have more opportunities in your life than you possibly know what to do with. I don't think you have to worry too much about exactly what you're going to be or what role you're going to play when you come out. If you prepare yourself and you turn yourself into an articulate, honest, and educated person, people like that are incredibly valuable.

As I said already, if you transform yourself into someone who's like that, the world will open doors for you in ways you can't possibly imagine. It will happen in ways you don't even understand. I see this with students who do the opposite, you know. With my graduate students and sometimes with undergraduates as well, I'll give one of them a job to do, you know, and they'll either do it and do it well, or they'll come back and tell me why it was impossible for them to do it and how many things got in the way. The consequence of that is that for the person who comes and tells me that they don’t get another opportunity.

For the person who comes and does what's asked of them, or maybe gone over and above the call of duty, then I have six more opportunities for them or maybe twenty more opportunities for them or maybe fifty more opportunities for them because I have more opportunities than I know what to do with. It turns out that if you're the sort of person who's useful and direct and honest, then invisible doors will open for you everywhere. If you're not, then invisible doors will shut until no doors are open, and you'll think you'll curse fate for that and complain about the structure of being.

The reason it's like that is because you didn't take the opportunities when they were offered to you and you didn't do things properly. You can learn how to do things properly at university, and you can turn yourself into someone who's a lot wiser than you were when you first came here, and there isn’t anything that's more valuable than wisdom and truth. So I would say you take the next couple of years while you're here, see if you can turn yourself into something that's useful and honest, and you'll be so prepared for life.

You won't be able to believe it, and there's absolutely no reason to be cynical about that because I've seen how the world works, and that is how it works. I wish you well while you attempt to do that, and I hope that you've learned something in this course that enables you to do it in a manner that's more powerful and richer and more worthwhile and less nihilistic and less cynical and more meaningful because that would be a good thing if it happened.

It was a pleasure to teach you this year, and I wish you the best of luck as you proceed through your education.