2015 Maps of Meaning Lecture 03b: Narrative, Neuropsychology & Mythology I (Part 2)

Okay, so here's some other ideas. Here's an argument, I don't know what you think about this, but I've often thought about it as an argument by necessity for evolution. It's like if the environment is such is too complex to predict, then how do you build anything that can live in it? Because living in the environment is the same as predicting it. It's the same problem.

Well, let's think about that for a minute. The first answer is it doesn't work very well because you guys have been around for about 80 years, and that'll be that. So, in so far as you are a solution to the problem of the environment, you're a pretty temporary one. And that's pretty much the best that our path of evolution could cobble together in 3 billion years, so that just shows you how complex the problem is.

The other issue is that maybe there is no other mechanism than the Darwinian mechanism to account for any success whatsoever. Because the basic idea is, well, you cobble something together, and is it good enough for the environment? And the answer to that is probably not. So, you make a million variants, and all the ones that aren't any good die. So it's evolution by an excess of death, fundamentally. You solve the problem by failing brutally generation after generation.

I can't see how the problem could be solved in any other way. If the answer to the question is the environment predictable? No, because then failure is... there's no alternative to failure. The best you can ever get is temporary success. So, anyways, you can chew on that; it seems to me to be correct.

Now, a couple other things here, because you have to accept some propositions for this argument to go forward. Actually laying out the propositions is the hard part. So one of the propositions I offered you is that you look at the world through a frame of reference, and that frame of reference is both cybernetic and narrative.

Now, you can debate both of those. You could debate about whether or not the frame of reference is cybernetic. All I can tell you about that is when I've gone through the animal neuroscience literature, the people who I thought were most informed, broadly informed about psychology in general, psychopharmacology, neuroanatomy, functional neuroanatomy, the really hard end of the biological sciences that are relevant to psychology, their models are cybernetic. So that's kind of interesting.

Then the next interesting thing is the cybernetic models were designed by people who were the founders of artificial intelligence. So there's an interesting parallel there, and a lot of the great personality theories are cybernetic. You know, P's theory is basically a cybernetic theory. And so, perhaps the cybernetic theories are not exactly right. That's fine, but they're pretty damn good, so I'm going to rest on that for the time being.

And then the next question is, well, is it reasonable to propose that the fundamental cybernetic frame is narrative? I would say pretty much none of the theorizers, except for maybe P, who have a cybernetic model have drawn a relationship between narrative and cybernetic models.

But here's why I think... if you look at someone like Jeffrey Gray, who was incredibly intelligent and well-educated psychologist, I'm really an outstanding scholar in my estimation, he derived his cybernetic models from Russian cybernetic models that were based on the presupposition that what you do when you move in the world is you compare the current state of the world to the state you expect.

And that's wrong. It's wrong in an important way because you're not an expectancy machine; you're not a cold cognitive computational machine. You don't act in the world in accordance with what you expect; you act in the world in accordance with what you want. And that's like... it's a critical difference.

So if you read Gray, for example, "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," and you get a sense of the cybernetic model that's underneath there, there's never any real mention of motivation per se, except for emotional motivation. There's the approach system and then the fear system and the negative emotion system, but motivation as such doesn't seem to enter into it.

You know, the fact that entities, animals, are hungry and thirsty and desire sexual contact and playful... all those sorts of things, you can read Yak-Panp for better descriptions of those systems. But those things have to be brought together, and my proposition, as soon as you bring them together, is you get narrative.

Because you're talking about people who are motivated and want things and then descriptions of the structures that they use to operate in the world to get the things that they want. That's a narrative now. So you can think about that. That's how it looks to me.

So here's another set of propositions. The propositions are this: that is that the systems that we use to perceive and categorize the world did evolve, and they evolved in a manner that's standard with regards to how things evolve, which is that new things are built on old things. And you can't escape from the old things; you have to have them; they're present in your current model.

So you can't get somewhere from nowhere, and so you're constrained by your starting points. And so I would like to offer you the proposition that the basic sub-elements of our conceptual structures and therefore of our narrative structures are symbolic representations of the world as a place to act that are based in our long prehistory of fundamentally social existence.

And so I'm just going to give you a brief introduction into some of those categories, and I think that the more probable, the more long-lasting a phenomena is, the more it's probable that a biological entity in contact with that phenomena is going to have adapted to it perceptually, behaviorally, and conceptually.

So one of the things we might think about is, given your nervous system, given that you're an evolved organism, what have been the most permanent features of your evolutionary history to which you've adapted? And I'm going to talk about some that are more complex than the fact that the ground beneath your feet is generally firm.

We obviously have adapted to that, you know, and we've adapted to the presence of light and we've adapted to the presence of an atmosphere and so forth. Those are all very constant phenomena. But then there are constants of social being that are virtually as old, and we've talked about that a little bit. One of them I posited was the dominance hierarchy. I gave you some evidence that that's at least 400 million years old.

But then there's also the fact of sexual differentiation. You know, one of the fundamental facts of human being and human social being is that there are roughly speaking two genders, and that's permanent. So a masculine element of the social world and a feminine element of the social world are constants, just as the social world is a constant.

And then I would say mothers and fathers are very constant; they're as constant as mammals are. Right? Because we've had mothers and fathers roughly speaking since we became mammals, and there are some reptiles that actually manifest some pretty decent parental behavior and it occurs in birds as well, and even in fish. So, you know, it's pretty constant.

Then I would say the figure of the child is a constant and the figure of the old man and the old woman are constants. And there's some more important constants that are necessary to consider. One constant is that you have a territory; the other constant is that there's something outside that territory. Another constant is that you can be prey for a predator - that's a big one - and then another constant is there are predators.

Okay, so your conceptual systems, the ones that you utilize today, are going to be grounded in representations, embodied representations, and conceptual representations that have already structured themselves in accordance with the existence of those constants. And you're drawing on them as part of the representational system that orients you in the world.

And weirdly enough, it actually works, which is a very peculiar thing as far as I can tell. One of the things that's struck me as in some sense incomprehensible is that the use of these fundamental cognitive categories to when you apply them to a world that in some sense isn't objectively configured in accordance with those conceptions, it works; it functions if it actually applies so that you can live using those categories and you're successful.

So, anyways, that's a tough one. So, I said well, you have to have a frame of reference, and the frame of reference is cybernetic. And then there's an analogy between the cybernetic structure and a narrative structure, and that's a very tight analogy; it's likely an identity.

Okay, so that's a set of premises. The next premise is that within those narratives, there are constants of representation and action, and that those are human procedural universals, so things that we do. And then there are human conceptual universals. And those conceptual universals, the grounding of those conceptual universals, is in ancient biological systems that had to conceptualize - that failed if they didn't conceptualize a certain realm of constant in the environment.

And I laid out the constants: masculinity, femininity, youth, old age, explored territory, unexplored territory, prey and predator. Now, I'm not saying that's all of them because I don't think it is all of them, but we can get an awful long way with just those.

Now, if you read terror management theorists, the terror management theorists will tell you something like your belief system, which is kind of conceptualized as a system of interrelated abstractions, prevents you from terror of death. All right? So that's Ernest Becker; that's Ernest Becker's theory. It's a pretty good theory. It was grounded on Freudian presuppositions, and he developed that theory in a book called "The Denial of Death," which is also a pretty good book.

There's a problem with the basic theory, as far as I can tell, though. Well, there's multiple problems. It's not a bad theory, and at certain levels of analysis, it's a pretty good theory, but it has serious flaws. The first flaw is your belief system is not merely conceptual; you act it out, and that's really important. And it isn't also not the belief system that protects you; it's the fact that other people have organized a society around you predicated on that belief system, and the society works.

Like, it's not a psychological phenomena; you have a representation of it, and the representation in part is a psychological phenomena. But the fact that you can sit here in relative peace, harmony, security, warmth, and light is not a psychological phenomena; it's embedded in the world. So a lot of what protects you from death anxiety isn't a psychological structure that stops you from being afraid; it's an actual structure that stops you from dying.

And so both are right, but you can't forget about the most fundamental one, right? The most fundamental one is the most fundamental one. And if events occur, maybe even social conflict, and I perceive that the consequences of that social conflict is not only a disruption of what I believe but also a disruption of the society that protects and shelters me, then of course I'm going to respond negatively to that.

And it's not only for merely conceptual reasons; it's because if the substructure of society is actually destroyed, I'm going to freeze to death in the dark immediately. So we don't want to make things more psychological than they actually are, and we have to remember that these structures, the dominance hierarchy, is represented, but it also exists out there in the world, and it's a real thing.

Okay, now we're going to progress through some models of emotional processing and then some neuropsychological models, and then we're going to get to the symbolic domain; that's what's going to happen. Now, so you're going from point A to point B, and you're looking at the world through that framework.

So that framework also configures your perceptions, and it also configures your emotional responses. And so it's variable, but within the variability, there are constants. And the constants are you're going somewhere, you come from somewhere, and when you go from one to the other, there's only three things that can happen: something you want, that's a good thing, that gets to where you're going, and it validates the theoretical integrity of your perceptual frame.

That's an important thing, right? It does two things: you get to where you're going, and it provides evidence that your current model is actually functional. So if you fail, both of those things go into question. One is you're not getting where you want to go; that's a problem. But the worse one is, oh, the whole system that you're using to try to get to where you go also might be wrong, and you don't know where.

Okay, so that's things that happen the way you want them to happen; that gets you to where you're going, validates your model, that produces positive emotion. The way it produces positive emotion is by activating the dopaminergic system. The dopaminergic system is embedded; it has its roots in the hypothalamus, and the hypothalamus is roughly split into two parts.

One part pops up sub-personalities that are charged with dealing with fundamental biological necessities. So aggression, hunger, thirst, sexual activity, temperature regulation, you know the real basic animal-like drives, so to speak, that have to be gratified in order for you to survive. Half the hypothalamus deals with those things, and then the other half deals with exploration.

And so that's pretty cool because what it implies is that the urge to explore and the capability of responding to things that serve as markers on your way to that system is about as old, from a phylogenetic perspective, as the systems that regulate such things as hunger. It's a very fundamental and deeply rooted system, and so we're not talking about something that's peripheral or that's only cognitive or it's only a manifestation of a few thousand years of culture; it's deep, and it's so deep that you can't even fight with it.

So for example, part of the reason that you can tolerate being alive is because when you're progressing towards goals that you regard as valid and when you're making progress, the dopaminergic system kicks in. It's an approach system; it kicks in, it makes you feel good. So there's a positive emotional element to that, which is sort of like, it's okay to engage with the world; that's sort of the message of that.

It also facilitates certain kinds of learning because it basically says, since what you're doing right now is working, it's okay if you learn how to do it better. So it reinforces it, right? That's part of the reinforcement structure. And then it also suppresses anxiety and pain. So for example, I don't know if you know this or not, but cocaine is a pretty good analgesic.

And if you mix cocaine with opiates, which is something to think about if you're ever dying of intractable cancer and you're in terrible pain, if you mix stimulants with opiates, you get a better pain medication than either one of them alone, plus you stay alert, which is also a useful thing to know. So ritalin and opiates work as well.

So it's important to know that if you ever know someone who's in severe intractable and final pain, because it can be managed, although doctors are loath to mix those things, but whatever. Okay, so when does the dopaminergic system manifest itself? Well, under two conditions. One is when you're moving towards a valued goal and the signs are that you're actually succeeding in your movement towards it, and part of that is because the dopaminergic system responds to cues of consumatory reward.

And consumatory reward is any reward that brings the perceptual system, we'll call it the sub-personality, to a halt. So for example, if you're hungry, then as long as you're hungry and in that frame of mind, then anything associated with food is going to be reinforcing in a dopaminergically mediated way. Technically, that's incentive reward.

But as soon as you eat, well then that frame of reference is no longer relevant; it disappears, and then food isn't reinforcing, even though it’s… It's interesting because you might think that one of the ways that you could stop eating when you'd had enough is that food would stop tasting. But it doesn't, right? It's kind of weird; the food still tastes the same roughly speaking, but it's no longer enjoyable.

And the reason for that actually is that the taste system has two elements that are separated physiologically. One of them is responsible for taste, and it's also responsible for sort of making you want to crave different foods during an eating episode. So there's actually a separate one for sweets for example, and so you can satiate the others and not satiate the sweet receptors, and then you want some dessert.

And if you keep rewarding that system with dessert, then it's going to get more and more powerful. But there's another system that sits on top of that that acts independently, and its job is to say how good each of those tastes now are. And so as you get satiated, what happens is that system just shuts down; it stops associating the tastes with reward.

So, you know, it's kind of a cool way of setting it up; I think you can still taste things, which you need to do because you're an omnivore, and if you couldn't taste things, well then you'd die because you'd put something stupid in your mouth and that'd be the end of you. So you can maintain the taste, but the reward varies.

So the dopaminergic system responds to incentive reward, which is access that a consumatory reward are forthcoming from a behavioral perspective, and the consumatory reward stops the action of the cycle. And then another system that needs a consumatory reward pops up. So, in some sense, what's happening is that you're continually subject to the emergence of new motivated sub-personalities or frames of reference, and you're just cycling through those things all the time.

And then you might say, well, what happens if you are in some favorable state and you've just satiated everything? And the answer to that is you'll find the environment itself mildly curiosity inspiring; the dopaminergic system will make exploring novelty rewarding.

And so you'll go out and you'll do some random exploration because what the hell, you might as well do something while you're awake, and that will increase your realm of competence and the size of your explored territory. And that's a fund - that's a very fundamental. It's not a drive; it's a very fundamental sub-personality.

And the reason I'm telling you that it's nested in the hypothalamus is because I don't want you to be thinking that this is some new thing; it's really, really old. It's probably about as old as pain, and it's older, I think, than anxiety. Because anxiety seems to be manifested mostly as a consequence of higher order cognitive-emotional systems that evolved after the hypothalamus evolved, roughly speaking.

So, okay, so when you're on your way, somewhere good things or bad things can happen. If good things happen, you get a dopamine kick, and that keeps you focused on your goal, and it validates your theory, and you get to move to where you're going, and you get a consumatory reward, and good for you; that's success.

Except then a new frame of reference pops up, and you have the same problem; that's Sisyphus, right? You're always pushing the damn rock up the hill; it's always rolling back down. The question is do you find any delight in pushing the rock up the hill?

So the other thing that can happen is something you don't want to have happen, and that thing indicates that you're not getting to where you're going. Now the question is, what should you do when you find out that you're not getting where you want to go? And the answer to that is you don't actually know; you actually don't know.

And this is where things get complicated because on the one hand, you could say you could run into a known obstacle. You remember Rumsfeld? There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. No, that's probably... you're probably too young for that. Anyway, if I'm walking towards the door and I encounter this table, then that's going to frustrate and annoy me.

But it's only going to do it to a limited degree because I can make a very trivial correction in trajectory, and I can get to the door. And so I would say, well, that's just an obstacle; it's an obstacle. I know its features; I have a pre-arranged schema of conception and action, so that I can render it irrelevant with very little effort.

Okay, so it's a known obstacle. But then, that's fine. So those are just negative things, and you try to get them out of your way. So for example, that's partly why you clean up your house, right? Because you want your house to be in order so that if you're doing things in there, things don't get in your way and annoy you.

It just makes it more efficient. So basically what you're doing is trying to ensure that the paths you take to desired ends are clear. That's what it means to have a place in order. So, you know, it means also the next thing, which is even more important, which is fine. Sometimes you're walking from point A to point B and a table gets in the way, and it's like you're a little annoyed, and you go around it; that's not a problem.

And sometimes something else happens. So my old supervisor had this dog, and he used to take it for a walk. It's like every... you can take your dog for a walk; it's no problem. So one day he was walking along the curb, and his dog pulled him a little bit into the street, and he fell, and he shattered his leg, like in seven places.

And there was just nothing wrong with him physically; it's just that he fell wrong and like poof he was... they had to put a bunch of plates in there. It's like, hm, that's a whole different category of event, right? The magnitude of that negative thing is very large compared to just running into a table.

And then, okay fine, there are hospitals and everything, so he got dealt with, and he was put back together. And even his fear of the event would be bounded by his knowledge that there is a hypothetical means of dealing with the unexpected occurrence. So it's nasty, but it's not as nasty as things that you don't know what to do with at all.

And those are things you encounter in life too. And so I've given you some examples of those before. Betrayal is a big one, and I think the reason betrayal is such a big one is because first, if you're going to form a partnership or a friendship with someone, you're staking a lot of your life on that, right? Because you're staking your future on it; you're staking your present on it.

It's an important presumption of the nature of your reality moving forward. So the next thing is, when someone betrays you, they violate your model of what it means to be human, and that's a big problem because you're dealing with humans all the time, and you're also a human. So if you're betrayed, that casts the validity of the entire structure you use to orient yourself with regards to yourself and in the social world into disarray.

So that's a very big explosion of snakes. And so, you know, I could say, well, people are full of snakes, and you might say, well, what does that mean? And it means that something like during our evolutionary history, predatory reptiles were a big problem. So for example, when we used to live in trees, then tree-dwelling snakes would eat us and our offspring more likely because that would be easier.

So that's a big problem; it lasted some tens of millions of years; it's not a trivial amount of time. And then there was when we're on the velt and we're going down to get a nice drink of water, and then there's a Nile crocodile down there, and he comes up and snaps you and pulls you in. So that subterranean predatory reptiles really sort of make us nervous.

And you know, perhaps that's why people think snakes are slimy. And they're not, but if you talk to someone who's afraid of a snake, they'll say, oh, it's slimy. It's like, well, no, an underwater reptile might be slimy, and a snake is quite a lot like an underwater reptile.

And who cares how they're different? The question is the relevant issue is how they're the same. And so you could say, well, this is one of the categories; it's a horrible predator that lurks; that's a category. Now, I think that what happens when we run into something that's radically unexpected is that we use our horrible predator category to get ready for it.

And so that's partly, I think, also why the terror management theories aren't exactly right. And like we have some evidence from our lab that I've really been wrestling with over the last few years. Because one of the things we found is that conscientious people are more conservative. So they tend more towards right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, and you can conscientiousness up into two elements; industriousness, and that sort of predicts academic performance and success in life.

And orderliness predicts right-wing authoritarianism. And you might think, well, that's no surprise; it's like authoritarians are orderly. But it's a bloody big surprise, I can tell you that, because we've been trying to localize the position of authoritarianism in the personality hierarchy for 50 years.

And for the longest period of time, people thought that the reason that people were conservative and right-wing is because they were afraid. But it turns out that's not true; they're lower in neuroticism than liberals. And you could say, well, that's because they're so well protected by their rigid theories that they never have to expose themselves to anything that's frightening.

But if you can use your damn theory to predict results that are opposite to what you predict, you know, it's really not much of a theory. So I think it's better just to take the data on the face of it; conservatives are higher in well-being and they're lower in neuroticism.

Now, it's not a huge difference, but it's different enough. However, orderly people are high in disgust sensitivity, and that's a whole new realm of horrors. Because disgust sensitivity is the action of an intrinsic biological system that stops you from being contaminated, and contamination kills you if it's contamin... if you're contaminated enough.

So here's one way of thinking about it. So what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up? 95% of them died. Right, measles, they didn't... measles wasn't good. Measles, smallpox, fatal. So, you know, you shake hands with someone from Spain and poof, 250 million people are dead.

It's like, so you think about that over the course of evolutionary history, like this is still happening by the way. So, you know, there are still isolated tribes in the Amazon. And so when the miners or the oil explorers or whatever go into the jungle and they find a new tribe, it's like they interact and poof, then the whole tribe's dead.

And so you think how often in our evolutionary history has it been the case that when we encountered a group that had been separated from us historically that one or the other of the group just basically all died? God only knows. And we... and so that's something to think about, because what's one of the things that seems to happen is that we associate the strange and unknown and foreign with the dis... with the disin and contaminating as well as with the frightening and uncontrollable.

And I think the best way to conceptualize that is as a global pre-predator response. We're responding using the biological systems that we originally used to protect us from predators that were lurking. And I don't know if you've ever... my daughter picked up a garter snake at one point, and the males exude this sort of sticky substance that's protective.

And I tell you, man, there is nothing in the world that smells worse than that; it's just indescribably horrible. And she used to keep snakes in her room and she'd have nightmares about snakes fairly often, which I thought was quite interesting because I think it was probably an olfactory issue. But again, their biological byproducts, shall we say, are unbearably disgusting.

And so, well, what should be the response to a predator? Hard to say, but disgust is pretty good to go along with fear and apprehension and readiness. And so... so, all right, so then you might say, well, how is that associated with the fact of the unknown?

So, because I was talking about betrayal, I said, if you betray someone, then what happens basically is that you manifest yourself as a set of snakes. And I said, well, why? How can I justify a statement like that? And the answer is, first of all, don't be thinking that we've never been preyed upon by each other, because that's definitely wrong.

You know, humans are a very murderous lot, and we've been running back and forth across the surface of the Earth, wiping each other out for a very long period of time. So the idea that you're full of snakes is a perfectly adequate idea, except maybe it's, you know, you're full of Nile crocodiles.

Except you're even worse because you have a huge brain and weapons; you're one nasty thing. And so for me to respond to you revealing yourself as something other than what I expected as if you were a predator is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And in fact, if you betray someone, it fundamentally is the case that you've been a predator in relationship to them.

You know, it's more of an abstract predator in that you've been taking advantage of them, but who cares? It's close enough so that it'll work. So if you understand, if you're willing to accept the idea that you use the same systems to deal with profound anomalies that your ancestors used to deal with predators, then there's a whole bunch of things that start to become clear.

One of them is the symbolism that's associated with the unknown. But the other is the pronounced human tendency to demonize the foreigner. So we don't demonize the foreigner; we de-demonize them once we get to know them. They start out demonic; they start out as prey predators, and it's very difficult for us to pull back from that.

Now I'm not saying that's the only way we respond to people who are different than us, because, you know, they're unknown and the unknown is complex, and there's promise in that too. But we know that for human beings, negative emotions are far more powerful, pound for pound, let's say, than positive emotions.

And the appropriate way for me to respond to you if I don't know you is to start out with the presupposition that maybe you'll kill me. Now, I don't know if you know how isolated tribes start to trade with each other; it's pretty interesting. So maybe they'll get some idea that there's another tribe around, and so maybe they'll observe that that tribe is doing something that might be interesting.

And so what they'll do is they'll find a border between the two territories and they'll leave things that might be valuable there, and then they'll run the hell away. And then maybe what'll happen is the other tribe will come along, and if they want those things, they'll pick them up and they'll leave some other things that are valuable that maybe they make behind.

And then, you know, that's the beginning of trust. But it's certainly not, you know, we run up to each other and see what the hell is going to go on right off the bat, because God only knows what's going to happen if you do that. And so it's reasonable for us to conceptualize the foreign other as a predatory entity, even though obviously that has all sort of catastrophic consequences.

But it doesn't matter; like, if you want to fix that, you have to understand why it's happening. So it isn't that we attribute to the strange person the strange idea, the foreigner, what's negative from a conscious cognitive perspective, although we might also do that, is that that's just the way we are with regards to things that we cannot conceptualize or frame in question.

Yeah, so you'll have to make that a little bit more specific, right? Well, I would say the reason that eBay worked is because all it was, all the members of the same tribe that were doing it, we'd already laid down rules for trading that everyone really understands and we automatically engage in, so we could just transfer what we already knew about trading to the new domain.

So, well, I think it's the basis of reciprocity. It's basically sharing, you know, and human beings are deeply sharing creatures. You know, it's one of the things to think about when you're, you know, thinking about us wandering around desecrating the planet; we're really good at sharing, and other animals aren't good at that at all, generally speaking.

And so sharing and trading, trading is sharing over the long run, right? Because, you know, if I'm only sharing with you, that's... and you're not sharing with me, that's going to get pretty damn boring pretty quick. And so you're going to be very careful about reciprocity arrangements, and so that can keep the sharing going, and that's basically what trade is.

So, okay, now you're going along, and you can encounter positive things, you can encounter negative things, and then you can encounter the category of things that you don't understand. The question is, the fundamental question is, what should you be doing about the category of things that you don't understand?

So I'm going to go back to this figure. I hope this is it. No, good. So we're going to try to understand this. You're betrayed by someone. Okay, you had them in the good person category. All right, now they're not in the good person category. All right, so exactly what are they like? And the answer to that is, well, all these sub-routines are up for grabs.

You don't know what any of them are composed of anymore, so in some sense, the fact that the person has betrayed you reveals to you their potential inner complexity, and it also reveals to you the potential inner complexity of beings in general. All right, now you might want to say if something unexpected happens, how should you calibrate your emotional responses?

And the answer to that, because the problem is here, is that responding to novelty turns out to be a very complicated phenomenon. And the reason for that is that novelty or anomaly is a very complicated category. And the reason for that is that sometimes when unexpected things happen to you, they're good, and other times when unexpected things happen to you, they're bad.

And that means they're a paradoxical category; they're a category to which the rules of logic do not apply because they can be A and not B or A and not A at the same time. It's not a good thing. So if something unexpected happens to you, what's the appropriate way to respond?

And the answer to that is, well, you do a first-hand approximation. When the unexpected thing first reveals itself, then basically you adopt the stance of this might be a fatal predatory manifestation. And then, pretty rapidly, if nothing else happens, you're going to loosen up and start to infer that the unexpected thing isn't as catastrophic as you thought it would be.

The question is how do you determine the difference between levels of catastrophic unexpected events? And the answer to me seems to be found in this idea of hierarchical structure. Is that all right? Person betrays you; the idea that they're a good person no longer holds. That's very upsetting.

Why is it upsetting? Well, here's the answer: If a person is good, how do they behave in every situation like a good person? If they're not good, how do they behave in every situation? The answer to that is you don't have a clue how they're going to behave. So, man, they're all of a sudden extraordinarily complicated.

And so we could go through this. If you do a, let's say, you play with a baby and you make it cry, all right? So, and that's unexpected. You're playing, this baby poof, it cries. It's all upset about it. So then what do you think about yourself? You think, I'm not a good person because I make babies cry. It's like, you know, it's a reasonable inference, right?

But you probably don't want to immediately leap to that conclusion. It's an anomaly; the baby cried; it isn't what you wanted. So you've got to frame that anomaly in because it could be, you know, maybe the mother comes running in and says I got a story about this. So one of my friends, he's kind of a wild guy, and he was babysitting his daughter and another woman’s daughter from down the street.

He plays with them, and he plays with them, you know, pretty intensely. And so the kids love that except when they don't. So what he's doing is he likes to chase his daughter around with this remote control car, you know? So he's chasing his daughter around with this remote control car and she's having a fine time, and her friend is there, and she's also running away from the remote control car.

And, you know, they're having fun, and then the two girls run into the closet and hide. And so my friend is like roaring the car up against the outside of the closet and scratching at it a little bit. And then his daughter says, "Daddy, daddy, you have to stop. My friend is crying." And it's for real. It's like, okay, so he's feeling pretty bad about that.

So he takes the little kids out, he's picking up the daughter and giving her a pat, and then she's pretty upset, she's wailing away about this. And then the doorbell rings, and it's the girl's mother. And then he's thinking, hmm, I just chased this girl into the closet and then made like scratchy monster noises on the outside, and now she's really upset.

How exactly am I going to explain this in a way that doesn't make me look like a pathological beast? So... and he is kind of a pathological beast, so it's a good question. But anyways, you see the point there.

So, all right, now the question that he posed to his neighbor was, where in the hierarchy did I go wrong? And what he was afraid of was that her response would be, if you chased my child into the closet and then made monster noises and scared her so much that she's this upset, that doesn't mean you don't know how to play with the baby. That means that you are not a good person, right?

Right, right? So you can see how that inference can propagate itself up this chain. Now, generally speaking, if you make an error like that, you should make the presupposition that one of your local routines is at fault, and you should also make that proposition in relationship to whoever might be making a mistake like that around you.

You should start from the high-resolution level and say, well, maybe they are missing a micro-skill instead of the low-resolution level, which is they're a bad person. Now, the problem with that sometimes is that the reason that things didn't go well for them is that they are a bad person. But probably you should explore that possibility a bit before immediately leaping to that conclusion.

Because if you do leap to that conclusion, and you're wrong, that's also a huge problem. The problem is that when the unexpected occurrence occurs, like in this story, the entire framework is up for debate because you don't know how to localize the error and you don't know how to localize its magnitude.

And so what your body will do is default to the worst possible option, at least initially. And then... and that makes sense because that's a defensive reaction, right? And that can really get out of hand. I mean it got out of hand with the daycare scandals in the 1980s when, you know, there were daycare centers all over the United States and Canada where there were these horrible stories emerging of satanic ritual abuse in the daycare centers.

And it's like, well, that's pretty bad. You go up to the top and you say, not only are you not a good person, you're actually Satan himself, or, you know, a pretty good approximation, a sufficiently good approximation. So the title is accurate, so...

And that caused a lot of people a tremendous amount of trouble, but it's a perfectly... it's an a priori undifferentiated natural response, and the category of Satan, so to speak, is individual human being as hyper-predator; that's a perfectly reasonable category because individual human beings are hyper-predators.

So luckily enough, that's not all we are. So, all right, so the idea in some sense is that when you're walking along and something unexpected happens to you, you basically fall into a hole. And the hole is the complexity that's underlying your presuppositions, and that's a whole different place.

And then the next proposition I would say to a next proposition I would like to lay out is that we actually represent that domain symbolically, and we represent it first of all often as a whole. So it's the water you plunge into when the ice beneath your feet breaks, the thin ice you're always skating on; it's the underworld of the ancients; it's hell; it's the place you go when you're desperate and anxious and unhappy.

Um, it's the source of all terrible things, but at the same time, it's also the source of all possibility because as the unexpected itself, as the anomalous itself, it's not only everything that can terrify and destroy you but it's also everything new that can emerge as a consequence of old habits and presuppositions falling apart; they're erroneous.

And so I would say one level of representation that we use for that domain and for the denizens of that domain is prey animal, and so that's roughly toothy reptile. And that can be subterranean toothy reptile or it can be under the ocean toothy reptile, and they're variants of that, and they take monstrous form, you know? So it's a complex of of things that will destroy you in a predatory manner.

So that's one domain of symbolism. The other domain of symbolism is that which lies outside tribal territory; that's no man's land. And no man's land is, in a complicated way, that's where you go when your culturally sanctioned presuppositions do no longer function.

It's a weird thing because on the one hand, you could go outside the borders of your community, you know, as a physical act. On the other hand, you can go outside the metaphysical boundaries of your community by acting out a culturally sanctified role and failing because as soon as you fail, then you're somewhere your culture isn't, and that's for all intents and purposes, that's unexplored territory.

It's not just a metaphor; it's actually the case. It's just the idea of territory is much more complicated. And then the other domain that seems to be consistently used to represent the unknown as such is the feminine. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, we talked about this a little bit, is that females are actually the gatekeepers to propagation among human beings.

And so the idea that they should be symbolically represented by the terrible and rejecting element of nature is a perfectly reasonable perspective, even though it's harsh. But also because the unknown is not only the place where terrible things happen; it's also the place where everything new is born, so to speak.

And the most salient characteristic of the feminine is that the feminine is the place where new things are born. And we had to use some damn category for it, you know? And we only had a certain number of categories at hand because of our biological evolution.

So what happens is you're wandering around in your life, and then you fall into a hole, and the question is how big is the hole? And at the moment you're falling, you don't know. So I have another story. So I had a friend who was... he used to hang out in the bush in British Columbia, and now and then he would be tromping around there out in the winter, and sometimes he'd cross rivers.

And one time he was crossing a river that was covered with snow, and he fell through the surface. Now, he was very lucky because what he had fallen through was a bubble of ice, so he fell about four feet, and he hit ice again. But you can imagine what must have been going on in his little sphere of the world during the one-tenth of a second where he was falling before he hit the new ice.

Well, that's... that's a good story to indicate the, you know, the similarity between the unexpected and falling into the underworld. And one of the things that I think is extraordinarily useful is that once you guys know that the idea of a journey to the underworld is the same thing as the idea of the validity of your conceptual structures breaking out from underneath you and plunging you into the complexity that characterizes life, then you have one of the keys that you need to understand mythology. And that's a big deal.

Because most of our history, like our cultural history, is presented to us in the form of extraordinarily ancient stories. And the categories those stories use are, as far as I can tell, are the categories that I'm outlining to you. And once you know what the categories mean, then you can read the stories, and they make sense.

And that's a mind-bogglingly important thing because some of the stories that we're going to be studying, like people worked on those things for 150,000 years, you know? Now, maybe that's an overstatement, but we certainly know that they worked on them for thousands of years. And if you can't understand them, it's a big problem.

You know, before, maybe you could just believe them, whatever that meant, but people, modern people can't do that anymore because partly, because I think we've developed a new kind of cognitive system that essentially responds to the world as if it's a place of objective material. But, and that's fine; it's pretty useful, maybe it'll kill us, but it's certainly useful.

But then there's this other cognitive domain that we actually have to understand, because without it, we're bereft of our history and our values, our bedrock values that we use to orient ourselves in time and space and to protect us from the catastrophic release of our emotions. All of that's invalidated.

And you might say, well, you know, does that really matter? And it's like, well, I don't know how many of you have gone through nihilistic periods in your life, but I suspect that it's more than one or two. So that's one danger, is that when the... when the validity of your value system is demolished, then you end up in a place where everything's so terrible and overwhelming that you cannot survive.

And one response to that is you become nihilistic and depressed and anxious. And that's not merely psychological; that's really hard on you; it can undermine your entire will to live; it can even drive you to suicide. And the other option is you adopt some moronic totalitarian ideology that purports to explain everything with a few simple axioms, and that's equally catastrophic because that makes you immediately a danger to anyone who doesn't believe what you believe.

Plus, you're fragile because, you know, if it's a simplistic but coherent ideology like the idea that all knowledge systems are motivated only by the pursuit of power, it's like, good luck implementing that in the world. You know, you'll find out pretty soon that that sort of theory is just not going to get you anywhere at all, so it makes you brittle and fragile.

So, all right, so I'm going to stop and let you ask questions because I threw a lot of information at you in the last three weeks. And what I want to do now, I'm going to the next thing is I'm going to tell you a little bit about the brain areas that are associated with the information processing phenomena that I described.

So like one of the things that's quite interesting, apart from the fact that the exploratory system is grounded in the hypothalamus, which is a mind-boggling fact given how the hypothalamus operates, is that your right hemisphere, if you're left-handed and relatively lateralized in the approximately normative manner, your right hemisphere basically deals with novelty and anomaly.

And your left hemisphere deals with explored territory. So it's sort of like you have... your brain is split in a manner so that one part of it, which is mostly responsible for negative emotions, so that's the right hemisphere, is kind of good at global pattern, global quick pattern recognition. And it responds to anomaly and novelty with its initial formulations of what might be there.

And then the left hemisphere is specialized for operation in explored territory. So the left hemisphere is primarily what's operating when you're somewhere that you understand and everything is going according to plan.

And it's pretty damn interesting. You can, if you're dubious about the validity of this theory, you could look up Elkhonon Goldberg. So he's one of the people who proposed the novelty-explored territory dichotomy with regards to brain hemispheric specialization.

And Goldberg was a student of Luria, and Luria was a student of Pavlov. And like, there's a pretty vicious intellectual history there, so it's not something to be dispensed with lightly. He thinks the reason that the left hemisphere is linguistic, roughly speaking, is because it... it... because the ability to use linguistic systems is one of its preconditions, is that you're operating in a domain where things are understood and shared.

So, there's that. And then there's the response of your emotional systems that are at least in part hippocampally mediated that outline the manner in which you respond to novelty. So, we're going to talk about both of those things.

And the prefrontal cortex is very good for exploration and abstract representation. So I'm going to lay out a bit of a brain theory, and then the next thing we're going to do is start to look at narrative patterns.

I want to show you one more slide, sorry, before we... I want to show you that one. Now, most of you have seen that probably multiple times, but here's the idea: you're going along just fine, something emerges from the depth so to speak, so it's some complex phenomena that was heretofore invisible that made its manifestation.

It knocks the validity out of your current mode of operation and it plunges you into a place that's chaotic and complex where you flail about mostly in negative emotion depending on how radical the discontinuity is. Because if it's just a little one, well maybe you'll find it exciting. But if it's a big one, man, you're down there in the dumps, so to speak, for a very long period of time.

Now with any luck, and this is sort of a Piagetian idea, you do some exploration and some recategorization. You ingest the new information that was associated with the anomalous event, so that's like the treasure that the dragon guards. And then pop, you pop up, and you have a new framework of reference.

And it's better than the old one in that it does everything the old one did, plus it accounts for the new thing that brought you down. Now, if you can't do that, and you've been hit hard, then you have something like post-traumatic stress disorder or an anxiety disorder, long-term depression, and you're stuck down there in chaos and you're in the underworld, and maybe you never get back up.

So narrative, narrative: one point A to point B, and here's how to do it. Narrative two: what do you do when your narrative falls apart? That's a meta-narrative.

The narrative falls apart; you fall somewhere; something happens there that's transformative or not. And then you pop back out. So the meta-narrative is a narrative about the transformation of narratives. And it's the meta-narrative that most mythologies feature front and center because it's basically the same as the hero myth.

The hero myth: the hero is the person who encounters the anomalous and the unknown at a time and place of their choosing, garners the information, which is the treasure that the anomalous predatory thing guards. And if it's a full hero myth, shares that with the community and reconstitutes themself, and that's the fundamental story of mankind. It's the fundamental story.

And if you understand the categories, or if you're... I think if you understand the categories in the manner that I laid out, then you can understand those stories, and that is so cool because they're so powerful, and they orient you properly. And it just demolishes the nihilism and totalitarian belief-inducing elements of moral relativism and the collapse of religious belief systems because it can put some ground underneath your feet again.

And it's important. Like, it's a defense against ideology and it's a defense against despair, and those things are attractive forces. And nihilism in particular, it's like, life is suffering; why shouldn't you be cynical about it?

Well, that's a real question. It's... that question is no joke. It's like just get on with it. Yeah, right? That's not going to help, is it? A defense ideology because it's a defense against... I can... that's a good question.

This is a defense against ideology because it tells you something different about the state of your being. So here’s how it works: you could be locked in your first system; I don't care what the system is; you're locked in it; you're an ideologue. Something come along and blows your system into bits; you're in the underworld; you're in chaos.

So you're either an idal or protected or poof; you're blown into bits. Okay, well then, another identity you could have instead of the identity of the initial framework is you can have the identity of being in chaos. And then you're sort of a nihilist, you know, you're fundamentally depressed, you're cynical about the world, it's hard for you to get motivated, and so forth.

So that's your identity, or you could have the identity that you rebuilt after going through one of those processes, and you think, well, that'd be an improvement because it's a better identity than the previous one, and it's certainly a lot more pleasant than being neck deep in snakes and lizards.

And so that's an improvement, but then there's a step that you can take that's further, that's better, which is forget about identifying with the first stage or the second stage, which is the collapse or the third stage; forget about all of that. Realize that you're the process of doing that. That's what you are fundamentally.

So you don't have to identify with what you believe, and you don't have to identify with despair; you can identify with the process of coming to terms with the world as it manifests itself. And you do embody that process if you want, and not only that, while you're engaged in that process, number one, you're engaged; that's a good thing, and number two, the systems that protect you against despair and pain.

So if you're going to think about it biologically, that would be the dopaminergic system primarily; that thing is on; you're in the game, but you're a player; you're not the game.

And I believe that what religious stories attempt to teach people, among very many other things, is that you're not the bloody game and you're not the chaos of defeat; you're the player and you play many games and the meaning is in the playing. And it's not a platitude; that is actually where the meaning is, and the meaning is real.

And so then the question is the more fundamental question: is that meaning real enough to protect you from cynicism and nihilism? And the answer to that is you have to figure that out for yourself because no one can tell you that. But the stories can show you the way, so to speak, which is why they're there.

When you said, "You see about religion, protect from rel experience," what does that mean? What's so dovi is in the prison after getting arrested by the Tsar's men. And then at six o'clock in the morning, after a couple of weeks in his cell, they take him out into the courtyard and shoot him with blanks.

Yeah, that moment when he's standing there before he's going to be shot, that's a religious experience. And the thing is it overwhelmed him to such a degree that it basically, well, gave him epilepsy. It's like, full... there's a reason to say that in the Old Testament, God is represented as the burning bush.

It's like, don't get too close to that stuff; it'll... it's too much. The reality that transcends your models, forget about personified representations of the deity for the time being; the reality that transcends your models is sufficient so that if you're exposed to it in an untrammeled manner, it will hurt you; it might destroy you.

And it's not a trivial sort of objective experience. It's like the awe that a rat feels when it's trapped in the corner by a very large cat; its hair stands up. You know, when you feel awe, what happens? Your hair stands on end, yeah. Well, there's a reason for that; it's like the remnants of a prey response.

So, also, be enlightened? Yeah, but who wants that? You know, because your New Age types and your Joseph Campbell types, they say, well, you know, enlightenment; it's all good. It's like, forget that. Believe me, if it was all good, people would be doing it. It's not all good, and that's one of the major differences, say, between the Jungians and the New Age people.

The New Age people say, follow your bliss. It's like, yeah, right. The Jungians say, look, follow what you're interested in; it will take you places you do not want to go, and you're not getting anywhere till you go those places.

And so everyone takes one look and says, hey, no, that theory is wrong. It's like, it's not wrong; it's just very, very difficult. So enlightenment is down first and then up. And the more enlightened you want to get, the more you go down before you go up.

And that's a harder question, I think. Part of what enlightenment is not is not hiding behind the shields of your tentative belief systems. That's one way of thinking about it.

Another way of thinking about it, I think, is that if you're engaged in a conversation with someone with whom you disagree, the more you're enlightened, the more you'll listen to them. Because otherwise, you have to prove to them that the way you look at the world is correct.

Well, that's not an enlightened stance; that's a dogmatic and totalitarian stance. It's like, I’m right, I’m right; here’s why. It's like, fine, except if I'm right, I already know what I'm right about. And if you disagree with me, there's always the possibility that you know something I don't.

Like, horrifying as that possibility is, so listening to you would be a good idea. And so then another way of thinking about that is you can think about this yourselves: what's your friend, what you know or what you don't know?

And part of identifying with the process of transformation instead of the stages of it is to understand that what you don't know is a more reliable friend than what you know. First of all, there's a lot of it; you're not going to run out. And second, every time you encounter it successfully, the world becomes a more comprehensible place and you become a more powerful force.

So, you know, you could be running around all the time looking for little things that you don't know; it makes you tough and awake. And that's... and if you're tough and awake, maybe you don't have to believe things to make sense out of life.

Maybe your life is so damn rich that you think, yeah, well, you know, suffering, disease, death, tyranny, all that; it's like, yeah, well, I can deal with that. I don't want to wish it away even though I'd rather it wasn't there. That's not the point; it's like I can have my eyes open and see that and still think, no, this is worth continuing to stay and only invest.

Oh, yeah, well, through experience and training. Yeah, because, I mean, think about it this way. It's like you guys just don't have enough life to figure everything out for yourselves. Forget it; you can't do it; life's too complicated and you're too short; your life is too short and you're not that smart.

You know, and so unless you have guidance, obviously, people have to be socialized; you know, they have to be socialized or they're just ruined. The question is what's the end product of the socialization? One is, well, nihilistic totalitarianism; the other is... the other is the person who has one foot in order and one foot in chaos.

And that's a better place to be because the world isn't just order, and it's not just chaos. So then, given that we're not getting that training, would you default the state that over time compound towards...?

Well, I think that's what happened in the 20th century, and that's what we're going to take a look at. Like part of the re... I talked to you guys about Nietzsche and his announcement at the end of the 19th century. You know, okay, so what he was announcing is, oh no, our new mode of thinking has invalidated our old modes of thinking.

And that's not... it's like a mass... it's like a gig... it's like a murder of the most valuable thing you can imagine; that was his perspective. And then his observation was, look out because when something of that magnitude dies, there's a big void, and something's going to take its place.

So what took its place? Well, it's pretty obvious. I mean, communist totalitarianism took its place; that was pretty much half the planet. We haven't quite, you know, scrapped all the problems that were associated with that. And then there's widespread nihilism and, like, a pathological form of relativism.

So for Nietzsche, those were the two options. It's like, where else do you have to go? Well, that's what happened and it wasn't good. And I think, you know, it's like one of the things that Viktor Frankl said about his clients, his clinical clients, and Frankl was a psychiatrist who'd been through the concentration camps. You know, he said that very frequently, the problem that his clients came to him about was the problem of meaning.

It's like the... and I think who was it that said he opened his book? I think it was Camus; the only philosophical question worth posing is why not commit suicide? Now, it's a little on the depressing side, but if you ever talk to someone who's thinking about committing suicide, I’ll tell you, they can come up with some pretty comprehensive answers for why that's a reasonable thing to do.

And, you know, you just don't leap there from happy to suicidal. You have to go through a lengthy process of determining just exactly why suicide is the appropriate option, you know, unless you're tremendously impulsive. And so to me, it's like if we lose our grounding in history, given that we're historical creatures, and if we lose the proper sense of identity, then we're either going to be weak or dangerous; those are the options.

And if you're weak, you're dangerous, and if you're dangerous, you're weak. So like, you know, either way, it's not good. And I also think... and this is skipping ahead in the class a lot, is to the degree that you think that existence is unbearable because of its meaningless structure and its implicit suffering, it's going to be a big chunk of your psyche that's wandering down genocidal and apocalyptic lanes because if it's pointless misery, why not put an end to it?

And, you know, if you don't think that people are trying to figure that out all the time, you're just not paying any attention because people are trying to figure that out all the time. So, and if you read the Brothers Karamazov, I think is the best example of this. You know, Ivan has a figure in the Brothers K, whose name is Ivan, and Ivan's a pretty vicious character.

He's smart as can be; he's good-looking; he gets along well with people; he's, you know, he's Dier Suave, and he's a committed nihilist. And he has rational arguments to back up his nihilism, like that are the most powerful ones that Dovikov could invent. And so they're powerful enough; like, he's done as good a job as anybody needs to.

And he puts forth a vicious argument for the pointlessness and essential immorality of existence. Well, maybe he's right; maybe not. That's the question. So part of what I've been trying to figure out is how could it be possible that Ivan is wrong and if so, why?

And that's what I'm trying to tell you, is that these things that we think of as archaic superstitions are not theories about objective reality and they're not archaic and they're not superstitious. And not only that, you already live by their dictates in one form or another, whether you know it or not. And their old stories are perennially attractive to you, and you need them; you can't live without them.

So what I'm trying to do, what I've tried to do is to figure out how they can be true while still allowing the other things that we know as modern people to be true. True. So that's what we're trying to figure out. Other questions?

The actual stories themselves? You're trying to think how can religious stories be true? Yeah, and what it means for them to be true. What that means because one of the things we've been doing over the last three weeks is thinking what does it mean for something to be true. That is not a simple question.

And one idea is that theories about objective world are the only form of truth, but that's not... that first of all, that can't be true because your problem is how to act. And you might say, well, that's not a real problem. It's like, at that point in the discussion, then we start talking about what's real and what isn't, right? It's such a deep question that the nature of your terms starts to become important.

And I would say the most important question that you have to answer is how and why to live. And you might think, well, that's an epiphenomenal question. It's like, well, I don't think it is, and I don't think there's any evidence that it is; I think it's a proposition that it is, and I don't think it's supported by the fact.

And that's what you're going to be trying to figure out while we go through this course. So other questions? And if any of the things I don't... if I say don't make sense, please tell me because I know that it's a complicated thing to try to explain how there are questions about the belief world, but religions are... no, goally, yeah, the dogma is just the dominance hierarchy.

So everything has a dogmatic structure that doesn't mean... it's right. I mean, religions are generally made out of a... forget about religions; belief systems have a dogmatic element and a transformative element, and they're always at war because one, the dogmatic element constrains the revelatory element and the revelatory element undermines the dogmatic element.

But they're both necessary, so it's a very... it's a form of dialogue; it's the best way to think about it. There's got to be a dialogue in belief systems between the structure and the process of updating the structure. And any belief system can err too much one way or the other, and the only reason way that you can figure out if you're erring is by paying attention and communicating.

So, and if you want a definition of religion, well, you know, that's not a straightforward thing to do. But I would say that you have axioms of belief and your axioms, whatever they are, are religious entities for you, whether you know it or not. Because you hold them as absolutely true and you have insufficient evidence for anything.

So, you know, this is a Kardian idea; you are by necessity a creature of faith. And the reason for that is there isn't much of you and there's a lot of the world. And so you have to make assumptions in order to move forward. And you might think, well, I don't make assumptions.

And then I would say, well, when you cross the street, you're making an assumption. The assumption is that the other side of the street is a better place to be than the side of the street you're already on. So that's an assumption. You know, maybe you're going to get hit by a bus as you cross; you know, so much for that axiom.

But you just can't move forward without making assumptions because if you question everything all the time, then you're paralyzed; you're in chaos. So I'm wondering... excellent question. Well, that's partly what we're going to talk about a lot.

Um, it's the difference between... it's like the difference between surfing and being in a Styrofoam bubble on a lake. You know, there's a dynamic element. So if I say, well, if you're going to identify with the process of transformation, I'm... first of all, I'm not saying that's all you should identify with. That's a different question; it might depend on where you are and what you're doing and at what stage of life you are and all sorts of other things.

But to the degree that you identify with the process that transforms belief systems, you're not an ideologue. It's as simple as that because an ideologue is a totalitarian. They say, well, here's the bloody axioms, here's the system it generates; we're done. So you're not done, and you've left things out.

Now that doesn't mean you don't need structure to move forward, right? So it's a tricky thing. But you can say that's why I'm trying to communicate to you the idea that it's better to conceptualize a belief system as a set of tools. They don't have to be perfect, you know? You can fix a pipe with a pretty lousy wrench, so you've got tools at your disposal and you shouldn't abandon them.

I mean, thank God for the tools, you know? But if you can think up a better tool, it's more power to you. So, yeah, so a lot of what you're... it seems like particularly it seems helpful for people who have been disused with religion and don't understand the ideology, think it's all crazy.

And now they have this new framework; they go up to the religious stories and ideas. To what extent might that help someone who's in a religion? Because it might not help them; it might knock them right out of the bloody thing into a pit.

I mean, I've had fundamentalist Christians in my classes before, you know? And it's pretty... it rattles them up pretty hard because they implicitly... they're kind of funny. They're sort of like the rational atheists. They tend to think of the religious system as a theory about objective reality.

It's so funny because they both share that; they both share the same presupposition. And so, you know, I outline evidence that it's not. And that often is extraordinarily hard on their fundamentalist viewpoint. So, but that's okay with me.

It's like a lot of... because an assumption is that... over to as a culture, and then that probably affects the belief system. Rel... so not even fully understanding what beliefs are. Oh, definitely not.

Like, I mean, all of you people in this class are unconscious advocates of ancient religious ideas; like I don't care whether you know it or not. It's like, because otherwise you run into the Dovey conundrum. If there's no absolute morality, he really meant if there's no God, then you can do anything you want; everything's up for grabs.

And so the question is, do you run around doing anything you want? Or you can say, well, you don't because you're afraid. It's like, fine, you can take that avenue; I don't care; that just puts it outside of the context of this argument altogether. Why do you act morally? Why should you? Why shouldn't you lie to get what you want?

Or why should... or... or should you? Why shouldn't you steal to get what you want or kill to get what you want? Why not? There's got to be answers to these questions. Obviously, every three-year-old knows that if you lie carefully, you can get what you want.

So why not do it all the time? Why not practice it until you're great at it? I think it's interesting that people that do lie all the time, like a compulsive liar, are so repulsive to other people. It's almost like I find that interesting, that people do that. Like other people see it really, so...

So I've got a story for you. So if you got a chimp, a bunch of chimps in a cage, and you bring a snake in there, even a plastic snake, they'll all hit the ceiling, get away from that snake. But then they'll all look at it and look at it and look at it, and if a snake... if a chimp comes across a big snake in the wild, they have a particular call they use, which the primatologists call a "snake rap," which is W R A A.

So it's sort of like the sound the chimps make. So they make this noise, and then all the other chimps will come, and they'll just look at that snake—like, they stay a fair distance from it, but they'll look at it and look at it and look at it and look at it for hours and hours and hours.

It's like Dexter, right? Right? The serial killer, a contempt object, and eternally fascinating. It's the same sort of thing, you know? And so there's disgust and attraction at the same time. So there's a relationship between...

Able to feel that? Well, that's a good question. So Alexia is a hypothetical psychiatric condition that consists of the inability to articulate emotional states. It's a good question because it depends on the degree to which your personality has to be articulated in order to be functional.

And one of the things I would propose to you—and this is partly why we're doing the exercises that we're doing—is that just like imagine that if your joints weren't articulated, it's not very helpful because you could just sort of slap things with your hands. You know, they'd be like paws, but they're fully articulated.

And there's a conceptual relationship between articulated speech and articulation, articulated speech means that your tools for dealing with the world are more differentiated. Perceiving; acting in the world. And so the more you can articulate yourself, the more of you there is; the more of the world there is, and hypothetically, that's a good thing.

So if you're without terms for emotions, pretty damn hard to communicate.

Um, what do you say, some of the New Age concepts kind of combat the objective reality, I guess, that we're living right now in terms of...? Yes, maybe standing for bliss and falling in line and kind of trying to tap into...

Yeah, well, a big part... a big part of the New Age movement is, in fact, a reaction against rationalist nihilism. So, and to that degree, there's some utility in it, but the problem is, is that it's sort of like Protestantism without the devil—the world is all good.

Well, no, wrong. That's not even close to right; the world is a horrible place and people are terrible creatures. But that's not the whole story, right? Because the world is also a wonderful place and people are amazing creatures.

So, but I think that's another answer to the ideology question too, is that in my understanding, a philosophy that unites the opposites, which is kind of a union idea, is not an ideology. So here's an ideology: human beings are despoiling the planet; Western culture does nothing but rape and pillage, and nature is an innocent, virginal victim.

It's like, yeah, yeah, that's all true, but it's only half true because human beings are all also unbelievably interesting and remarkable creatures. And it's no bloody wonder that we're trying to survive, and that has costs, and thank God for culture because otherwise, you know, it was minus 10 last night, so we'd all be popsicles, and nature is doing everything it possibly can at every moment to destroy and undermine us.

So it's like, okay, you want an ideology? You can pick the first one; that's an environmental ideology. The second one is like a frontier myth, so you put them together, and you've got nature is terrible and beautiful and culture is tyrannical and provides security, and the human being is, you know, a remarkable exploratory hero and an absolutely satanic figure.

And then you've got the whole thing not quite because there's one other category that is sort of like the category from which all those categories emerge. It's a very low-level category, but as far as I can tell, a system that has representations of those classes of phenomena is not an ideology.

And I also think that's partly why it's so damn hard to get rid of Freud because Freud's categories map onto that map. You know, there's the id, that's sort of nature, and it's a great source of energy; it's horrible. And then there's the ego, and you know, the ego is a pretty good thing with all sorts of weird troubles and pathologies.

And then there's the superego, which is society. You need that; otherwise you're out of control. But it can also be a crushing and tyrannical force. It's like, well, you can't get rid of Freud because he got that story right. And you might argue about his categories and all that; it doesn't really matter because they're grounded in something deeper than the terms that Freud used.

So, and if you see Christ, any Disney movie that's worth its salt has all of those characters in it; otherwise it gets one-sided. Like Frozen, which was an absolutely dismal and wretched movie, was myth... it was... Disney's