2015 Maps of Meaning 09a: Mythology: The Great Father / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)

The heroic path is laid out in a meta path by religious systems, basically as The Road to Redemption. This redemption is from chaos but also from tyranny. It's redemption from both, and in the transcendent space that those meta stories exist, that's a divine archetype, right? It's the successful hero. But then that's an archetype.

So, you know, let's say you're doing everything right and then your family gets killed in a car accident, and you slip and fall down the stairs. You know, you have a concussion, and maybe you wake up and your brain damaged. So, while you're recovering, you might get hit by some other illness. Because that often, one punch like that will often really hurt people, you know, 'cause they're just getting up. They're quite fragile and they're pretty hurt. Then something else comes along and whacks them.

You know, it isn't the case that identification with the archetypal hero will stop those things from happening because there's an element of randomness in life. So, you have to be sensible about it. You have to say it's your best bet, which is a different thing. It's no certain path, but given the range of potential negative outcomes, voluntary confrontation with emergent anomaly, roughly speaking, gives you the best poker hand or maybe makes you the best poker player. That would be a better way of thinking about it.

Now, so people can be traumatized by failure to update their models, because then the model gets old, like Osiris. It's unable to see the tyranny, plus it's archaic and can just get wiped out because it no longer is adapted to the situation. It would be like that if you were still using DOS as an operating system. Well, it's a perfectly reasonable operating system, but it used to really work. All you had to do was not update and you'd be extinct.

One of the things Marcialata pointed out was that one of the processes that's sort of universally regarded as a sin, insofar as that's a universal conception, you might think about it as a meta error, is speeding along the process of inevitable decay through willful blindness. Things will decay of their own accord. You have to be awake just to keep the bloody thing alive. But you can speed the rate at which it decays by pretending that nothing's wrong and refusing to change anything at all.

Then you say, "Well, not only does it decay, but your blindness is contributing to the decay." In one of the stories we're going to talk about today, which is the flood story, that's basically the underlying story of the flood. He's like, God's pretty irritated that everybody's blind and stupid, but he's particularly irritated that they stay blind and stupid, and so the consequence of that is everything gets washed away.

That actually is the consequence of that. When the ancient Hebrews were imagining that story, you know, when modern people look at that story, they think, "Well, what kind of God would do that?" It's like we talked about New Orleans. Why did New Orleans get washed away? Well, one answer is hurricane. That's a good answer. But the other answer is, um, maybe they should have made the dikes stronger. Like, they knew for the last 100 years. Maybe all the money that was supposed to be spent on the dikes shouldn't have got diverted into the pockets of corrupt politicians.

Then you say, "Well, why did New Orleans get flooded? Hurricane or the sins of man and the tendency of things to decay?" Well, the truth is that they're both equally potent causal elements. You know, when your city collapses because your engineers have built the concrete with sand, which happens all over the world, right? Especially in corrupt countries where they don't make the concrete properly because it's cheaper just to fill it with sand, the whole bloody city falls over. It's like, is that the earthquake? Well, yes, because it wouldn't have happened without the earthquake. But it also wouldn't have happened if people weren't corrupt.

So, there's a constant. That's the dynamic between the terrible mother, chaos, and the terrible father. The other dynamic there is also the adversarial element of the individual. You can't assess the situation without taking those three causal forces into consideration simultaneously. Someone just gave me a paper a couple of weeks ago linking corruption to poverty. Now, I knew that for a long time because if you look at the list of countries and rank them by GDP and then look at their corruption indexes, it's like there's a tremendously high correlation.

You might say, "Well, poverty causes corruption." But really, that's what you're going to say. You're going to say that poor people are corrupt? Really? No, I wouldn't do that. First of all, there's lots of poor people who aren't corrupt, but corrupt people are poor. You can bloody well be sure of that. So, GDP? Well, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the rubble was falling like mad, you know, and there's a variety of causes of that. But Russia is corrupt beyond belief, you know?

Corruption is like inertia. You know, if you and I have a transaction and we both stick to what we say, I hardly even have to think about you. You know, you're just a sentence on a page: "What a good deal!" But if you're not that, God only knows, you might wipe me out because I'm trading with you. You know, I mean, I've had business dealings with people. Some people I don't even have a contract with. We just say what's going to happen, and that happens for years.

Then other people, it's like detailed contracts. They take really six months of work to lay out, and they're violated continually, and it turns into just an absolute catastrophe. The cost of that is exceptionally high. You can't have a transaction that can be profitable, roughly speaking, in the presence of corruption because the transaction cost is too high. So it just spirals into poverty. You spend all your time trying to figure out what the hell the other person is up to instead of concentrating on what you could actually do.

So, I think the only real natural resource is honesty, you know? And you might think, "Well, that's, you know, what's your evidence for that?" Like, that's not a problem in stable democratic countries. The best predictor of long-term success is intelligence and conscientiousness. It's like, isn't that an index of the integrity of the system? I mean, I don't see how you can argue any other way. Conscientious people are diligent, dutiful, and honest. They do what they say they're going to do. Smart people are faster.

So, basically, what the data reveal is that if you're fast, while you're going to get there faster than other people because you're fast, and then if you're fast and honest, the probability that you're going to move up your dominance hierarchy is massively, massively increased. You know, the correlation is probably about 6 between IQ and conscientiousness, but a lot of that is measurement error, you know? Because I can't figure out how conscientious you are with a questionnaire; there's going to be a lot of measurement error there.

There's less measurement error with IQ, but then the performance indexes are also full of measurement error, right? Because it isn't easy for me to tell how well you're doing. I could use estimates of your income, self-reports of how you're doing, peer ratings of how you're doing, your supervisor's ratings of how you're doing, your subordinates' ratings of how you're doing—how much money you make if you're a salesman or someone who has a direct income. But that only captures, you know, maybe that captures 60% of your success, or something. If that's the case, then the correlation for the measurement of your success is only about 75.

So, if the measurement error for IQ and conscientiousness tops out at about 7, which is probable, and the performance index accuracy tops out at about 7, a correlation of 0.5 is not 35% of the variance. It's like 70% of the measurable variance. You know, and I can't think of a counter explanation for that. Now, if you look in creative domains, you have to use openness because you have to use different measures.

Because creative people, it's not easy to assess the performance of creative people. If it was, they wouldn't be creative because the problem with creative people is they keep mucking with the structure that you would use to assess them. You know, so you couldn't assess Picasso as an impressionist; that just isn't going to work. It's very hard for people to think about what to do with someone like Picasso because he demands that you come up with a whole new rating scheme, and that's, you know, that's the real problem with creative people.

But anyways, I'm going to talk about this Summit, this mind matters thing on Sunday because I've been thinking about power. You know, we can segue into this. So, we already talked about how the great mother emerges from chaos, and so this idea, that's God the father. By the way, I think that's an Eastern Orthodox representation. The Eastern Orthodox Church split off from the Western Christian Church, and it was a long time ago. I don't remember exactly when it was; within 200 years of the 10th century, so I know that's a fairly big error.

I can't remember exactly the difference, but it was way before the Protestants and the Catholics split, for example. So, it happened a long time ago. But the idea here is that there's a structure that emerges out of chaos, and that structure is symbolized by the father. Basically, what the father represents is the model of behavior and perception that has been constructed by history.

So, roughly speaking, it's what the feminists referred to as the patriarchy, except the problem with the feminists is they only see the tyrannical element of the patriarchy. A lot of the reason for that is because they were strongly influenced by the postmodern philosophers of the late 1960s, who were almost all, without exception, radical left-wing student revolutionaries who were working for the overthrow of the French government in the late 1960s.

So, it's like there's a problem with that. The problem with assuming that the great father is only tyrannical is, well, first of all, it's ungrateful because, you know, you're in the university. I know that, as a general rule, University of Toronto students aren't, you know, the happiest creatures in the world, and their reaction generally to the university—not that it's not good. I think it's because the workload is pretty damn high and the place isn't that social, you know?

Um, they're stressed and unhappy, especially in their first couple of years. But what are you going to say about that? You're going to say the whole bloody institution is nothing but a tyrannical mess? It's like, if so, what the hell are you doing here? You know, you've got to give the devil his due. So, maybe it's 30% oppressive and ridiculous and 70% good. I mean, what would you say? What do you guys think? How would you balance it?

You've been through the university; you're in your fourth year. What proportions would you suggest?

"Sounds 70/30."

Okay, well one of the things I can tell you is that's a hell of a lot better than most institutions, right? So, you know, even if it's not the ideal, which perhaps it isn't, compared to actual institutions rather than comparing it to a utopian ideal, it's not too bad. You know, it didn't crush you completely, you know, and you guys are all going to graduate, and that's actually going to be of some benefit.

There's even a possibility that you know more than you did four years ago, right? And you haven't starved to death, and all those things, and everything you were taught wasn't a complete or were taught wasn't a complete lie, you know? So, all things considered, all right? It's 30% you know, man-eating tyrant and 70% benevolent father, and maybe we could push that up to 80/20 or something, or maybe 85/15. But believe me, you're never going to get it past that.

I think at some point, your attempts to make it better than that will actually make it worse. You know, so it's like in the old Egyptian story of Seth and Osiris and Horus. Horus comes along and chases Seth away, but he's just, you know, hovering around there out in the border. You don't get rid of him. So you're never going to get completely rid of the tyrannical element of your cultural heritage, and that's partly because it's made out of the past.

The past is dead and blind for obvious reasons, you know? All the people who made it are dead, so it's static, dead, and blind, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth knowing about. Your job fundamentally is to revivify it. One of the things I often do in this class—I'm not doing it this year—is show students Pinocchio because, you know, Pinocchio is a dramatic tale about a marionette whose strings are being pulled by forces he doesn't understand, transforming himself into an autonomous individual.

A variety of things happen to Pinocchio. He has to deal with corruption in the form of the criminal underworld, and the devil himself sort of lurks behind that in the story. He has to deal with the temptation of idle neuroticism because at one point, the criminals entice him into being useless and lazy because he's too sick to stand up for himself. Then he also has to go deep into the oceanic depths to confront chaos itself.

When he does that, he finds his father, who's blind and dying, roughly speaking, and brings him up to the surface. He actually sacrifices himself to save him, you know? Even though the story insists that, you know, while the father's drowning after the whale has been chasing him around, he basically says, you know, "I've had it, Geppetto! I've had it! Swim to shore and save yourself."

But Pinocchio refuses and drags him to shore, and then he dies, is reborn, and then, poof! You know, he's real. It's like, yeah, it's exactly right. So, you know, part of your obligation as a student is to come to the university, that's 15% corpse, or 30% corpse, we'll say, and make the bloody thing come back to life without assuming that it's all tyrannical and just rejecting it.

It's very dangerous to do that because, first of all, if the past is corrupt and tyrannical, so are you because you're an embodiment of the past insofar as you're enculturated, you know? So it's not like it's outside of you; it's inside of you too. So that's a hell of a thing. Are you going to write off your socialization completely as nothing but tyranny? I mean, that's a big problem.

A, it's not true, although for some of you, it's probably more true than others. And B, well, if that's the case and you're utterly corrupt, what the hell do you think you're going to do about it? So, that's a big problem, you know? Plus, it's ungrateful, and that's a big mistake because, you know, if you're ungrateful, you can get arrogant, and then you're really in trouble.

"Sure, well, that's exactly why I made reference to what happened in the '60s, you know. Because the idea there, part of that was because people thought the Vietnam War was staggeringly unjust. Part of that was because people were pretty tortured existentially by the underground battle between communism and the West, roughly speaking, which was, you know, breaking out all over the world, including in Vietnam.

There was a lot of underground turmoil, but that doesn't mean you get to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know? Timothy Leary was a good example of that: "turn on, tune in, drop out." It's like, no, no, no! Turn on, wake up, and adopt some responsibility, you know?

And so, but you see, because as soon as you go to drop out, you think, "Well, are you running away or leading?" And I would say you're running away. That's what you're doing. The probability that you're leading is vanishingly small. The probability that you're deluding yourself about being a leader when you drop out is exceedingly high. So the right assumption is if you drop out, you're useless and lazy as well as arrogant and resentful, and you should start with that presumption and then go through, you know, cataclysmic soul-searching to see if maybe it might not be true.

If it's true, you know, well, what's the probability? You know, saint or loser? Well, there's so few saints that just using baseline predictions, you know, actuarial tables, you have to assume loser. So, you know, and if you're a loser who thinks they're a saint, well then you're going to cause an awful lot of trouble, you know?

A lot of that happened in the '60s. So, you know, the '60s generation likes to think about themselves as admirable rebels. It's like, “Yeah, let's check a bit for some self-serving tendencies there, you know? Like the refusal to adopt responsibility, and that's always lurking underneath a revolutionary facade."

So, you know, and I think that's had an absolutely pernicious influence on the universities, especially the humanities, which are dropping in enrollment cataclysmically, deteriorating in influence, and based far more on, you know, the, uh, what would you call it? The idea that you have a moral imperative to be a radical activist. It's like, no, you have a moral imperative to be useful and honest. That's a whole different thing, you know?

If you want to change things, like, fair enough, but don't be thinking that change isn't dangerous and that you're right. It's highly unlikely. So, anyways, it's very—my point is there's an archetypal way of representing the great father, and the archetypal way is tyrant or benevolent dictator. It's something like that. You don't get to just say one of them.

Now, you know, here's a way of thinking about it historically. You could say that once—like these are archetypes in religious representation—so you could say, well, roughly, that's God the father, and God the father there is ruling over a walled city. The walled city is the father as well because it's an enclosed space that's keeping chaos out, and there's a hierarchy in there, a dominance hierarchy, and everybody's slaughtered in the hierarchy.

You could think of the dominance hierarchy and the value hierarchy as the thing that manifests itself as the father, symbolically speaking. You're protected by the fact of the hierarchy, even though it also oppresses the hell out of you. Maybe you're like a serf, you know? But maybe it's better to be a serf than to be someone alone in the middle of a battlefield. You know, that's certainly possible. You can make a case for that.

Anyways, so then you look at that and you think, well, is that tyranny or security? The answer is, well, it's both. And what's the balance? What you hope is, well, let's have a little more security than tyranny. And then what's your moral duty? Well, to ensure that the great father, who you are not bloody well going to get rid of and you better not, because you'll end up like the Mesopotamians when they slew Absu. You remember what happened to them, right?

Absu was Tiamat's consort; he was the masculine element—chaos in order. As soon as the ancient gods were formed, they made a lot of racket and were really careless and they killed Absu, and then they lived on his corpse. Well, that's not a very good idea because then Tiamat comes, you know, swarming back, and the probability that she's going to do you in with all her monsters unless you really pay attention and speak properly is very, very high. You know, the Mesopotamians had that figured out... well, they had it figured out in image.

It's an absolutely remarkable, remarkable story.

So yes, but I can imagine times where it would provide—okay, there's two questions in there. One of the things was, sometimes it would provide a lot of both. Well, I think that's what happens when you're subjected to extraordinarily high standards, you know? Is that order or chaos? Well, it's both, you know, because there's massive benefits in high standards.

The problem is they provoke anxiety, and they're very hard to attain. Does that make them bad? There's no saying it makes them bad and good, and it's even more complex than that because whether they're bad or good depends on how you react to their imposition. If you discipline yourself and straighten yourself up and learn a tremendous amount and achieve the high standards, that's way better for you than if the high standards weren't there.

But they're also going to crush people. You know, they're going to crush people for all sorts of reasons. They're going to be really hard on people who just aren't that fast, even if they work really hard. Or they're going to be really hard on people who are quite fast but really don't work very hard. They're going to be hard on people who, you know, have impediments to their progress in one unfair way or another, so the tyrannical element is exactly there.

So, you know, I think the whole bloody thing degenerates into tyranny when the people inside it are doing nothing but lying. That's the pathway to tyranny, you know? And I would also say that that's the hallmark of the adversarial personality. You know, we've talked about the great mother, creation and destruction, and the great father—tyranny and security. But on top of that is the individual, and there's the part of the individual that's heroic.

I would say that's exploratory, attentive, and capable and willing to articulate the truth, insofar as that can be conceptualized. Then his polar opposite is, well, the opposite of that, willfully blind and deceitful at every possible opportunity, you know? There's certainly an interaction between all three of those levels. You know, I think that's part of the reason, you know, one of the things that happened in Christianity was that the serpent that was in the garden got associated with Satan.

It's a very weird thing, you know? It's very unlikely when that story first emerged that the serpent had any association with the idea of the adversary at all. But as the story developed through time, what happened was, if you construe the serpent as chaos itself, and maybe the negative element of chaos, it was easy to associate that with the tyrannical father. So, there'd be a satanical element to that and the adversary himself, right? Because it's all negative.

So, that's the connection between the three levels, and it took Western culture, roughly speaking, thousands of years to delineate that idea. You know, it probably didn't come to its full poetic flowering until Milton. Very little of it is in the Bible, as it currently stands, virtually nothing. Doesn't Satan literally translate into the adversary? That's one translation. Lucifer is also the bringer of light, though weirdly enough.

So, you know, it's a very, it's, it's, well, it's again, it's one of these paradoxical situations because it's also not always the case that your adversary is the devil, so to speak. It might be an angel in disguise, you know? And that's Jung's notion with regards to the shadow. You might think that it's evil, but it might be the thing you actually need.

Now, lurking underneath that is the idea that there is absolute good and absolute evil, and I think you can make a case for that. In fact, I think the 20th century made a case for that, and I think that's what was decided at the Nuremberg trials after World War II because the judicial decision was there are some things you don't get to do, no matter what your culture is like and no matter what your excuse is.

You know, and the alternative to that was deciding, "Well, we can let you off the hook because you were following orders." You know, and people really debated that. You can say, "Well, the Nuremberg judges were the Allied victors and so they just imposed their own viewpoint." But I think that's pretty damn cynical.

There's probably some of that because things are tyrannical and benevolent at the same time. But, you know, accepting that judgment is a very peculiar metaphysical move. But rejecting it, that's also a very peculiar metaphysical move, you know? Because basically what you say if you reject the Nuremberg decision is that what happened in the Nazi concentration camps had to be judged through the lens of cultural relativism.

So, you can say that if you want, but you know, it's not one of those things that you should do lightly because, well, you run into Dostoevsky's problem. Dostoevsky's problem, fundamentally, is if there's no order—no hierarchical order, if there's no God, then everything is permitted. And you can walk down that road, but it doesn't lead to a very good place.

Okay, so, you know, what we're trying to sort out is the idea. We're trying to propose the idea that what myths are doing is trying to represent the fundamental elements of being, as being is experienced at every level of being. So, it's not a reduction to chemical or physical constituent elements. It's a perception of the world as it manifests itself at every level of existence simultaneously, and it's predicated on the proposition that there's no reason to make any one of those levels primary from an ontological perspective.

So what that would mean in part is that the web of relationships that you find yourself in is just as real as the physiological components of your cells. Now, obviously, in some sense, it can't be measured or even conceptualized in the same way, but that doesn't mean that the relationship isn't real, you know? So it's a much more comprehensive way of looking at things, and it tends to take on this dramatic and imagistic form, I think, because, well, first of all, it was acted out before it was understood, and second, images can capture all sorts of things that words cannot yet express, which is why we like looking at profound artistic images.

They're filling us with information, you know? And what I found out recently is that Hegel—whose ideas actually have a fair number of similarities with what I've been teaching you—except I'll tell you something interesting that I think is true. So, Hegel tended to view modern civilization, he tended to view it as the tyrannical element of the great father stopping us from being able to interact with pure being.

So, his proposition was that we reconnect ourselves with the positive element of being and produce a culture, a social culture, that was much more benevolent. But I think if you think about this from a Jungian perspective, what the Jungians claim—and this is Alfred Adler claimed the same thing—and so did Nietzsche to some degree—is if you tilt too far in one direction a counterposition develops in your imagination and starts to have an uncanny influence on you.

So, I can give you an example. I've had clients, for example, who are way too agreeable. You know, so maybe they're pushed around by their father for decades, and one of the ways they react to the hyper-aggression of their father or the dominance of their father or maybe their own weakness is that they classify dominance and aggression as evil and then refuse to engage in it. Of course, that just weakens them further, but then they harbor resentment, you know?

One of the things Jung suggests is that if you get gripped by an emotion, you need to let it manifest itself in a fantasy. You know, I've had my clients tell me fantasies once they've learned to let them manifest themselves. You know, they'll be irritated, for example, by something their father says, and they'll let the fantasy play out. It's like, not only is it murderous—like you would not believe—but it's viciously and violently murderous, you know?

And what happens there is that because the little issues that constitute the tyrannical element of the relationship between them are never dealt with, the part of them that is capable of standing up and pushing forward has been assaulted by a million blows. And it's so been pushed into such a pathologically defensive position by that point that it doesn't fantasize about, "Well, maybe I should have a chat with my dad and settle this." It's like, "Oh no, no, no!"

It's like full-fledged murderous impulse, and by that time the person is also terrified even to let that fantasy emerge because then they'll think, "Oh my God, you know, am I some kind of serial killer or some kind of homicidal maniac?" And, you know, the answer is, "Well, of course you're partly a homicidal maniac. You know, you've got to keep that stuff under control."

So otherwise you take it out on your children and the people that love you and all of that, but that's not so bad if it's, you know, manifest in day-to-day trivialities and you kind of keep things sorted out. But if you don't do anything about it for 20 years, you always hear about these guys that burst forth and do something ultra-violent. What do the neighbors always say, especially if they're the lone killer types? "Oh, he was such a nice boy! You know, we never saw him, and he never caused any trouble." It's like, "Yeah, right, he never caused enough trouble; that was the problem. But he sure made up for it in one fell swoop."

So anyways, back to Hegel. Hegel seemed to have this vision of the patriarchy, roughly speaking, as hyper-dominant, and then valued the opposite—which was more cooperative and in tune with nature—and, you know, sort of like an environmentalist's dream of what human society should be like. And I say that seriously because I believe a lot of what the modern environmental movement uses to drive its utopian visions is actually derived directly from Hegel's thinking.

I mean, you can trace the causal pathways. You've got to think—remember what happened to Hegel, though. He became a Nazi, you know? And it was a real shock to everyone who was a Hegelian follower because he seemed like such a good guy.

It's like, "Yeah, well, maybe he was too good a guy," you know? And so there was—he was all sweetness and light, so to speak, on the patriarchal end of the distribution, and then the counterbalance to that manifested itself politically, and he was just pulled right in. So, I think one of the differences between what I'm proposing and what Hegel proposed is that I would never say that there's a utopian solution to the problem of the great father.

I would say you're stuck with the positive and the negative. You're stuck with it. Now, I think through diligent effort you can keep the positive on top of the negative, but you don't do that by sacrificing strength. You know, you don't get rid of tyranny by weakening society. All you do then is you increase the probability that when tyranny bursts forth, it's going to be far more brutal than it would otherwise be.

You know, you increase the benevolent element of society by increasing its competence and power. So you make it more powerful, not less. Now, that doesn't mean more oppressive, right? How do you accept that? It is not something they don't. So, that's a Solzhenitsyn problem.

So, one of the things Solzhenitsyn wrote about was he was in prison in the prison camps in Russia for a long time, and one of the things that he used to amuse himself with in the darkest possible way with his compatriots was teasing communists once they got arrested. You know, and it was pretty brutal because once you were thrown into the Gulag system, the probability that you were going to get out, especially if you were a political prisoner, was like, you're in there for 20 years, you know?

You're lucky if you didn't get worked to death, and the thugs and the murderers and the thieves didn't beat you senseless constantly till there was nothing left of you. So it was no joke to be thrown in the Gulag if you were a political prisoner, and there were lots of people who were thrown in there purely arbitrarily. And that's actually because if you really want to punish someone, you punish them because they didn't commit any crime—that's a way better punishment than punishing them if they actually committed a crime, you know?

Because that's just justice. But random punishment, if you want to be brutal, that's the one to use. So the communists would get thrown in with the prisoners who'd been in there for a while, and they'd still be like rampant communists. They'd be writing letters to everyone and trying to extricate themselves from the situation, assuming that a mistake had been made, you know? And Solzhenitsyn and his compatriots would just tease the hell out of them because they had nothing left to lose.

Plus, they thought, well, you're still part of the goddamn system that actually imprisoned, brutalized yourself and us. So part of Solzhenitsyn's moral problem was, "What should I do with you? Should I feel sorry for you because you've fallen into this absolutely hellish category of that person betrayed by their own ideals and their own person? Or should I treat you like, 'Well, serves you right, you blind tyrant, and look at what you've produced?'"

And Solzhenitsyn's answer was, "You're a blind tyrant till you repent!" Right? So as long as you still think you're right, there's no possibility of communication. So then what he observed was some people would collapse. They'd admit, and maybe it took a long time, that maybe there was something wrong with the system and that the other people in there weren't all the guilty ones and them the only innocent ones.

So some people would accept the facts, even at whatever brutal cost that would be. And what that would be was starting to decompose the entire value system they had that was predicated on axiomatic communist belief. But the other ones—and these are the ones that Solzhenitsyn also writes about—they just never changed. You know, released 20 years later, they'd say, "Well, that just proved the system was right all along and that I was in error because you know, you can always interpret the data. The data does not speak for itself."

That's a big problem. So, I thought his solution was brilliant. It's like, "Well, what do you do with someone who's still acting out what has destroyed them?" Well, until they stop being part of that, you can't really forgive them or communicate with them. But as soon as they drop it, it's like, well then you give them a hand, which seems to me like a reasonable balance between justice and forgiveness.

And that's a very hard balance to strike, right? It's a very hard balance to strike. So, okay, so then I kind of differentiated this into the tyrant as the king that eats his own son, roughly speaking. That means that if you have a tyrannical father, say in your actual family, what that father is going to do is to react to everything that makes you independent or that could make you an independent being as if it's a challenge to his own authority and dominance.

Whenever you stand up and make your little thrust forward, like you would if you were a three-year-old, you're going to get whacked hard for it. You're going to get punished for everything that would allow you to climb a dominance hierarchy and become a challenger. So that's the sort of paternal element of the Edle situation. You know, a mother who demands nothing and a father who punishes everything good. It's a perfect combination if you want to raise someone who's completely demolished and also in high probability resentful and dangerous.

You have societies like that too. You know, you see this in corporations, especially when they start to deteriorate, as they start to punish the people inside the corporation for being hardworking and creative. You know, the thing is in real trouble at that point. It's basically dead. It might take 10 years to fall over, but it's basically dead. So, as corporations, as hierarchical structures get full of people who are doing nothing but trying to climb the dominance hierarchy—you know, they're power motivated, they're very annoyed at anyone who's competent and creative because the competent and creative people are using competence and creativity to climb the hierarchy, whereas they're just using political machinations and the desire for power.

So they want nothing. They don't want to have those people around because all they are is competitors. And they're not even that. They don't even actually care if, while they're climbing the ladder on the ship, the thing is sinking. You know? In fact, they might be facilitating it sinking and trying to pirate everything they possibly can while the thing falls apart. That happens all the time, and it happens in all sorts of institutions.

So, that's sort of the sun-eating father representation in a political or corporate institution. You know, and what's interesting about that, I think, is that both the liberals and the conservatives see that. The left-wingers see the tyrannical element of the great father in corporations, and the right-wingers see the tyrannical element of the great father in the government.

So, it's projection, you know? I mean, it seems to me like a radical oversimplification to assume that all the evil is embodied in the government or all the evil is embodied in corporations. It's like, you know, we should be a little more differentiated than that. So, all corporations are not the same, obviously, and all governments are clearly not the same, and all governmental policies are clearly not the same. But people are lazy, so they don't want to do the differentiation.

What happens is that the archetypal representations possess them initially, and they fail to differentiate them, you know? And they're pretty happy about that because their theory explains everything. I talked to a guy a while back, and he's a pretty smart guy, and I was thinking about this issue of corruption. I was trying to think, I thought, "How the hell did some countries get not corrupt?" Because I cannot figure that out. It—I cannot understand how that can even be possible, and for me, that's a massive mystery.

Like, I can imagine digging through that for like 30 years trying to sort it out. He answered in two seconds: "Well, it's government." I thought, you know, "All that means is I don't want to think about that." And so here's my one-word low-resolution answer that covers 50,000 snakes at once; it's not helpful. You know, it all it does is convince him that he possesses knowledge because he's using low representations to encompass huge swaths of the complex world, you know?

So, the optimal game for the work with unless betray—and then them—yeah. Well, but that is exactly so. So, the reference there is, you know, people have tried to model optimal social interactions. You know, so should we cooperate or should we fight? And so, first of all, the people who tried to model that were doing it in one-offs, so you can make a case that if there's $20 at stake and I could get $20 by, like, giving you zero, I should do that if I'm only going to interact with you once.

The initial experiments basically showed that if you were a psychopath, you'd win. But then someone figured out that, "Well, wait a minute! You don't ever do anything once; you iterate it." And that's a Pettyan idea, right? Because Petty would say, "Well, what's the stable solution across multiple iterations of the same thing?" So, it's like, "Well, what if we always cooperate, a group of us? We always cooperate." Well, there's a problem with that because then a psychopath will pop up randomly, and he's like a shark in a tank of guppies. He just eats all the guppies, and that's the end of the situation.

So if all we do is cooperate, someone who's non-cooperative can immediately get everything we have. And so then the problem becomes, "Well, you don't want a tank full of sharks, and you don't want a tank full of guppies. What should you do?" And the answer, because this has been played out on computer simulations, by the way, all over the world, is, "Well, how do you ensure stability?"

It's something like, "I trust you! I start with the presumption that you're trustworthy. If you are not trustworthy, we act accordingly away; we go, we trade, and it's transparent. If you screw me, I whack you. Then I offer to trade with you again." Cool! And that seems to be—now that's really worth thinking about because there's a shadow idea in there, right? It's like, "I trust you, but if you bother me, I'll bite you, and I'll bite you hard. But then we can trade again."

What that allows is that you can screw up, you know? And you will, so it means that we can continue to play even if you're not perfect, but you're going to get punished an appropriate amount if you're not perfect. Then we'll try to get the game going again, and so I would say that's an example of a Pettyan equilibrated solution, roughly speaking.

It could be that that does have something to do with the way that a culture learns to become non-corrupt, but it still doesn't explain how that gets implemented, you know? So, okay, so there's a wall city, you know? And that's, uh, that place exists. That's in France. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it at the moment. It's one of the best-preserved medieval cities in the world, and there's actually quite a few of those left in Europe. I've seen a lot of them, and they're staggeringly beautiful—unbelievably beautiful!

So, but you see how those things were constructed? Because there's a double wall, right? And so you think about, well, that's the psychological message that's embodied in that city, and the message is inside the walls, where there's a civilized organization, you're safe from barbarians and chaos. The barbarians and chaos surround that, and so it's better to be inside the city.

Now, obviously, the problem is the city is walled, so it's not that easy to get out. You're trapped in there, you know, in some way. So, you could see, well, you could find—you can imagine if you're a teenager in a medieval city like that, you're 12 years old or 13 years old, you're off with your ratty little buddies, and the first thing you want to do is go outside the wall and see what's out there.

But by the same token, if there weren't any walls, well, then the barbarians would come in, and they'd steal everything you've had, and everyone would be dead, and that would not be a good thing. So, you know, it was also a place to store produce, agricultural produce, so that it couldn't, wouldn't rot and wouldn't get eaten by bugs and wouldn't be stolen by thieves, you know?

So, and that was also extraordinarily useful. And so there's a belief system embedded in that. That would be the medieval world order. But as well as there being a belief system and a psychological representation, it's obviously a physical structure, and it's also a mode of relationship. And all of that together constitutes the great father. It's not just the belief.

And some of that's going to be tyrannical because there's a king, and some of it's going to be beneficial because, well, maybe better to have one king than 30 kings that are having a war. So, that's been the dilemma in American foreign policy, you know. If you give American foreign policy some credit, you know, which is a reasonable thing to do because part of what the Americans were always trying to figure out, especially since the end of World War II, was, “Is it better to have a tyrant or take them out and have 30 of them?” You know? And the answer to that is, who knows? You know?

So, they took the tyrant out of Iraq. What happened? You know, the country basically fractured. It happens very frequently. It's a quasi-failed state. You get little toms of warlords, basically, who are certainly no improvement over the original tyrant, and they tear the place apart.

Now, I'm not making a case for the utility of a tyrant, but the opposite of order is chaos, and chaos can be just as destructive as tyranny, or maybe it can be more destructive. So, you know, the same thing happened, to some degree, with the Arab Spring. It was like, "Okay, poof! Chaos!" It's like everybody thinks, "Well, this is a chance for a new beginning," and, you know, it seems like in places like Tunisia that actually worked, and things loosened up a bit in Morocco too, so there's some indication of some progress.

But in places like Libya, it's like, "Well, that looks like it's degenerating into complete hell." And you see the same thing in many places in the Middle East where the Arab Spring occurred. So, that's also why it's so necessary to understand what lurks behind tyranny. Because what lurks behind tyranny is not freedom; it's chaos.

And chaos has the potential for freedom, but then it depends on what people do with the chaos. So, it's not self-evident that the chaos is better than the tyranny, and part of the reason for that is that in every society, there are agents of chaos, and they're people. They're often at, you know, relatively low strata on the dominance hierarchy. They're usually young men. They're usually extremely aggressive. They're usually incredibly resentful and displaced.

For them, as soon as chaos appears, it's like it's open season. You know, the struct—the society has been restructured, and they can just go about taking everything they want. So, you know, you see that even in countries like Canada, where those are the guys who riot after a hockey game, you know? They need no excuse whatsoever to go out in chaos and act like absolute barbarians. Absolutely, yeah.

But it's a causal interrelationship, you know? There's a whole chapter on that near in the last third of Maps of Meaning describes the relationship between the two halves of the adversary. There's a nihilistic element and a fascistic element, you know? And once the value hierarchy falls apart, one response is, "Let's go in there and get up the gold and rebuild something." You know, I'd say that would be the heroic element. But the adversarial element is, "Well, everything's fallen apart. It's every man for himself," and the fascistic element would be me, right?

"I'm going to exert power, not for competence, dominance—pure dominance, and that's like rape and pillage. That's what that is." So, you know, and that's what it is. And you know, if you contrast that with utter powerlessness, you can see how rape and pillage might be attractive.

That's also why I think it's attractive often to young men at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy who are dispossessed. You know, the other one of the things we know is that if you have a fairly flat dominance hierarchy so that opportunity is distributed and there's a reasonable probability of getting from the bottom to the top, so you have hope, let's say, then the males at the bottom don't get very aggressive.

But if you get the damn thing pointed up so that there's almost no possibility of M moving forward, even if you use competence, then the males at the bottom, especially the ones that are disagreeable—so they would be more warrior types—man, they get aggressive right away. And they’re gangs, they dominate the gangs, and they go to war with each other. And the reason for that is that the successful gang members are far more successful as successful gang members than they would be successful as low-end poorly paid conformists.

Now, most of the guys in the gang are worse off, actually. Some of the best anthropological evidence that's been collected suggests that most people in a drug ring, so they're the people at the bottom, make less than they would if they were working for minimum wage. But it's a lottery, you know? Partly the violence helps because the top of the damn hierarchy is being peeled off by deaths all the time, so there's always the possibility that you're going to pop yourself up three or four levels and then you'll have a riotous old time for the next five years until you die, which would be a lot better than having a chaotic existence with nothing for the next five years until you die.

So, you know, part of what societies always have to do is to make sure the damn dominance hierarchy doesn't get so steep and unmanageable that all the ordinary men at the bottom start to get hyper-violent. It's well documented, and the best work on that was done at McMaster, and I can never remember the people who did the work, unfortunately. I can never remember their name; it'll come to me.

So, yep, so then I guess the best strategy then for deciding whether to remove from that is to assess the potential for payoff to manifest a productive form in a more heroic form as opposed to the adversarial. Right, right!

But, you know, people generally don't do that calculation. You know, remember when the Americans went into Iraq? What did they think? What was the theory? "We'll be welcomed as liberators." Well, that was actually true in some cases for about a week. But the problem was they wiped out the power structure; they dismantled the army. And you can see why. But then what the hell are all those soldiers going to do? They're soldiers; they know where the weapons are.

They're not just going to sit around, especially not the hyper-aggressive guys who are already soldiers. They're going to think, "To hell with this! It's chaos, and I'm going to get what I want!" It was so interesting when I saw that happening because they went and wiped out Saddam. Then there were all these people stealing computers and things from the government offices, and the Western media kept saying, "Looting, looting!" And I thought, "It's not looting! You just wiped out the legal system! There's no legal system anymore!"

It's not looting because that would be against the law; there's no law! You just wiped it out. He was a dictator. Now, you could say, "Well, those people should have followed the law," as if it was there. It's like, well, you wouldn't have gone into that country if it were true because that would only be true if the law was just. Because if it wasn't just, then why the hell should people obey it?

If you'd been tyrannized by people for 30 years, and you could take a computer, it's like, who's to say that isn't exactly what you should do? The West acted like, "Well, actually, natural law governs this, and Hussein is just a what do you call it? An anomaly." And so you take him out, and then there's natural law and you should follow it? That wasn't looting; there's no looting when there's no law.

I'm you're just saying, um, importance oftal, and it's kind of, I think, of—axiomatic. You have to do it voluntarily because if you do it voluntarily, you'll do it in a way that you can take account—fact, you care about yourself—own dictator.

Well, that's exactly—that's exactly right, so. Well, they also might blow it apart at such a high level in the hierarchy that there's no bloody way you're going to be able to bite off and digest the huge pieces of Tiamat that happen to be laying around. You know, so one of the—because part of the reason I was trying to lay this out over these years is because I was trying to figure out since there's a relationship between the adversarial element of the individual—so that would be the part that's willfully blind and that likes to lie—and tyranny and the abolition of the positive element of chaos, you know, and the tendency for things to deteriorate.

Those are all causally linked in a really tight manner. That's Solzhenitsyn's observation, and Frankl's observation, and Hegel's observation. It's the whole essence of existentialist thought. Okay, what the hell are you supposed to do about that? And the answer seems to be don’t have it happen. And so you say, "Well, when should you stand up against tyranny?" Well, you should stand up against tyranny when it manifests itself at micro-levels right in front of you.

That's what you have to do, and so that means you have to be awake all the time for transgression against the positive element of the individual and the positive element of culture, and you have to do it right then and there. And you can't say—and people say this all the time—"Well, I can't take my boss on at work." It's like, "Well, what's going to happen to you?" Well, "I won't get the next phase," or "Maybe they won't like me."

It's like, well, that's fine. So that's your courage. What are you going to do when there's a real tyrant? Well, we already know the answer to that. If you're not even going to stand up when you're protected beyond belief by the structure and you have everything you possibly need and you could probably even stand up without—with—and get away with it, or you could even stand up and you would be more respected and the probability that your career would go properly would increase. If you're not going to do it then, well, you're certainly not going to do it when it's Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler! Like, forget it, man. It's way too late for that.

The problem with that is that there's not a lot of self-evident heroism in it. So, you know, you don't get to go party in the streets about how brave you are. But one of Solzhenitsyn's claims—and Frankl as well—was that it was the accumulation of micro-lies that built up to produce the Nazis and the Stalinsts. So it was bottom up and top down at the same time—lots of causal interconnections and loops. But basically, people put up with the first imposition that was only this big, and then they put up with the second imposition, and then they put up with the third imposition.

By the time they noticed that, it was really like a major league imposition—pointing it out would get you arrested. Well then man, then the stakes—like, then when does it end? Well, it doesn't; it doesn't end; it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse, you know? And it almost got so bad in 1962 and in 1984; it almost got so bad that we had the Third World War! Like, it was that close.

So, where it ends is apocalypse. And so that's why you see very often in religious writings that the sins of the individual are linked to the apocalypse. The reason for that is they're linked to the apocalypse. That's why it's just that you don't see the causal connections. So, okay, so any questions about that?

Okay, so there's the representations in a bit more visible form. So, you know, this is—you’re trying to get the thing on the left to be working properly, and you're trying to stop the thing on the right from taking over completely, and it's a real balance because you don't know, for example, even with your own children, how the hell do you know when you're tyrannizing them? And how do you know when you're socializing them?

One of the things that I noticed with my kids—and this was much to my chagrin—was lots of times I was confining them in a tyrannical manner because they were having too much fun. You know, 'cause you always think you're punishing your kids, so to speak, when they're doing something bad. It's like, no, you're not! You're yelling at them because they're running about like, you know, completely insane, impulsive manic hyenas and they're having a great time, and so you say, "Calm down!"

You know, what are you going to turn them into? Some kid that can sit there in their desk for eight hours when they're in grade two and not complain? It's like, is that an improvement? Well, yes and no. So, I also noticed with my kids that when I was more tyrannical than might be popular now—especially with my son—I crack down on him now and then because he was being a little rodent, and he was really—he was really pushy.

He's a dominant kid, you know? And I don't know if you've ever had a dominant dog, but you have to flip those things over, you know, on their back all the time because otherwise, they just push and push and push. He was sort of like that, and so he'd get all up and then I'd talk to my wife, and we'd say, "All right, so we're not going to let him get away with—it—he can't even breathe wrong for the next two weeks."

You know? So every time he did a micro mistake, we were on him, and I thought, "You know, this is a bit much." But what was so bloody weird about that was every time I did that, he liked me better. It was so interesting, you know? But I think it's very much like the situation with the dominant dog: partly what the dog wants to know is, "Who the hell's in charge?" And if it's you, he's perfectly happy about that.

But he doesn't want there to be any ambivalence about it. So, oh well, like if he did anything that I thought was a little crooked or a little deviant or a little too pushy, what I would usually do with him is make him sit on the steps. You know, I'd say, "Okay, here's the deal." He could communicate more or less at this point because he was around two and a half to three.

The deal was you sit there until you've got yourself controlled and you're willing to be a civilized human being, and then you can come back to me and tell me that. And if I like you, then I'll let you come up. So, 'cause, you know, sometimes you'll have a kid do that, and they'll come back, and they say what they think you want to hear, but they don't mean it.

You think, "Oh, I'll give them a chance." But you can't do that; you have to see if you like the kid now. Because if they come up properly and say things so that it's true all the way down, instantly, if you have any sense, you're not angry at them anymore. You think, "Yeah, I like that kid," and then, so, you know, if your goal is to produce a kid that you really like—which I think is a really good goal—then you don't let him off the damned hook until he's that kid.

And it was really interesting to watch what that did to him, and I think it was part of cortical integration and hypothalamic impulses. He'd sit on the damned steps like this, you know, just enraged. And I'd go over to him and I'd say, "Well, you know, are you ready to get off the steps yet?" And he'd go, "Not yet!" You know? And then he'd get himself together, and then he'd come and talk to me. And then, like, my rule was as soon as he did it right, it was over.

No grudge is nothing; it was done, you know? And so that was also very rewarding for him because he could specify the length of punishment. The length of punishment was as long as it took him to start acting like a civilized human being again. And the consequence of that was end of problem. So, that seems to be—that's like tit for tat, fundamentally, but as soon as you're straight again, poof! We'll trade again.

So, and you know what I noticed about him in particular—and he was a dominant kid—was you know, you set a rule, whatever the rule was. Like you had to be—maybe you had to go to bed at 8 or something. It was like, "Well, what happens if I wait till 8:15? You know, or 8:05 or 8:10?" Like he just pushed until he knew exactly where the line was. He was very pushy, but he was also extraordinarily exploring, right?

Because someone says, "There's a rule," but you don't know what that means. So what do you do? You harass and push and push and harass until you find out where the boundary actually is. And if it's nice and firm and doesn't move around, then you think, "Oh, that's like a table, and if I stand up underneath it, I'm going to whack my head, so I won't do that." And then you move on to something else. But if the damn boundaries are going like this all the time, the kid will just torture you forever.

So, which is exactly what he should do. So, I think whether or not you are going to tyrannize your child, in the final analysis, depends on exactly what acting ethically in general depends on, which is, in the final analysis, do you want to make things better or worse? What are you aimed at? And, you know, there isn't a way of—there isn't really a way of managing that unless you get the whole hierarchy clear in your head.

You know, do you want to make the world a better place? Well, part of that is, do you think it should exist at all? Are you resentful because it's tragic and limited? Are you angry because you're not as successful as you could be? Do you have 85 unresolved things with your wife? You know, are you intimidated by your child if he happens to be successful? Maybe he's going to be more successful than you. You know, you think you're going to be able to tolerate that?

You know, those are all questions you have to think through, and you need answers to them, you know? If your goal is, "I'm trying to produce a child who's better than me," first of all, then you have to admit that there could possibly be something that would be better than you, you know? And then you have to think that it's actually your responsibility to facilitate that, and you have to be committed to it.

Without that—well, to the degree that you haven't got that formulated and articulated and embedded in you and acting it out in your household, you're going to be a tyrant, especially when you're tired and upset and hungry. You know, maybe you failed at something and you've had an argument with your wife.

So, I don't think there's any general rules except you know, have a relationship with a kid and keep your damn eyes open and make sure that you're aiming at what's best for that child. And you have to love the child to do that, and then you have to figure out which part of the child you actually love. So, you know, in therapy, I always envisioned myself, Rogers—it was unconditional positive regard; that is the way I look at it.

It's like, if you come for me to therapy, I'm on the side of you that wants things to be good. I am not on the side of you that does not want things to be good, you know? And we have to sort that out. I'm assuming that the reason that you're coming for therapy is because you would rather that things were going to be good. And so I don't even think it's appropriate to be on the side of the client that is aiming at death and misery, you know?

The fact that it's there means—it doesn't mean you should throw the person back out on the street, you know, because it's there. So, in that sense, the regard in some sense is unconditional. It isn't unconditional; that’s not the right way of thinking about it. You make a contract, which is, "Okay, our purpose is to narrow the influence of evil and expand the influence of good, and we're going to tell the truth to each other in an attempt to figure out how we do that."

And we're not going to blow the relationship apart if horrible things come up as long as we're both convinced that that's what we're aiming for and that the communication is actually honest. And so it's unconditional in that you won't break it if things happen that are pretty unseemly, but it's conditional in that, no, no, I'm on the side of you that's going to tell the truth and that's going to aim towards the good—and that's actually what you want from me.

You know, it's sort of impartial. What time is it? Okay, let's stop for 10 minutes.