2016 Lecture 06 Maps of Meaning: Part II: The Primordial Narrative continued

To I want to tell you a story now, and it has these characters in it. And so this is a very important story. And it's called the Anuma Elish, and it's the Mesopotamian creation myth. It's important for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it's the oldest written story we know of, but it's also a Middle Eastern story, and all the Abrahamic religions emerged out of the Middle East. So it's a foundational story. It's a story that sits at the bottom of our culture.

Now, it has similarities to the creation story in Genesis. Whether the creation story in Genesis was derived from it, or whether there was a whole variety of similar stories floating around in the Middle East at the same time that were variants of a theme, we don't really know. But it doesn't really matter; we don't know how old the story is. We know how old it is in its written form. It's thousands of years old in its written form. Maybe it's 10,000 years old, but probably not. It's probably more like 5,000 years old.

But the thing is that a 5,000-year-old story is a lot, and that's written. It's way older than 5,000 years. Like, we're used to being in an environment where there are a million stories, you know, because we have books and movies and all of these things. But, you know, in slower-moving and more archaic cultures, especially ones that just have an oral tradition, it's not like there's a million stories. There's like 20 canonical stories, and God only knows how old they are.

There was evidence, linguistic evidence. I just saw a study on this last week; someone sent it to me, showing that some of the fairy tales that the Grim Brothers gathered might be 10,000 years old. And that doesn't surprise me because the kind of depth that's in a good fairy tale is so profound that there's no way that someone could have just conjured it up, you know, 100 years ago. There are layers and layers and layers of meaning, and they're basically archetypal and religious in significance.

Hansel and Gretel's story is a good example of that, and Sleeping Beauty is a good example of that too. A lot of the canonical fairy tales are very powerful; they pack a lot of meaning into a very limited amount of time. So it was great that this was unearthed, and it was only unearthed in the late 1800s. So we haven't known about this story, you know, for a long, long time. And so it was a tremendously exciting discovery on the part of the people who dug it up.

So I'm going to tell you the story. The primary character in this story is a dragon mother named Tiamat. You could think about her as half the dragon of chaos and half the destructive creative feminine. You could think about her as what's sort of on the border between what's a known known and an unknown unknown. She's construed as the mother of all things.

Now, the mother of all things is like what was revealed when the towers came down. It's this tremendously complex background, multi-level system of operations that's always going on, that identifiable singular things emerge from. Now, the Mesopotamians wouldn't have said that because what they said was this story, because that's the form in which their knowledge had developed to the point where they could tell a story about it, instead of maybe acting it out or dreaming about it in some sense, you know. But they couldn't articulate—we can barely articulate it now.

So there's Tiamat. She's viewed as the mother of all things, and she has a husband named Absu, who's her consort. Very little is said about Absu in this particular story, and I think the reason for that—although I'm not sure of this—is that the Mesopotamian civilization was new enough as a technological state, let's say, because they made cities as a technological state, that the myths of humanity hadn't figured out how to encapsulate the nature of a technological dominance hierarchy. There was a sense that it existed, but there wasn't a sense of it as a character-differentiated character that was capable of doing all sorts of different things. I think that didn't emerge until Egypt, although I'm not certain of that, but that's how it looks to me. So Absu is her husband.

Now, the way the Mesopotamians thought of the world—and this is the same way that the people who wrote Genesis thought of the world—they thought that the world was a disc. You know what the world is like when you go outside, and you stand in a field? It's a flat field. You look at the world; it's pretty obvious what it is. It's a big disc of Earth, and then there's a dome on top of it. And in the dome are the sun and the moon and the stars.

Then you might ask, well, what's underneath the earth? And the answer for the Mesopotamians was fresh water first, and then salt water. And how did you know that? Well, if you drilled down, then up the fresh water would come. So obviously, there was fresh water down there. And then if you went to the edge of your territory, it's like, well, there's the salt water. So the Earth was, you know, the Earth, roughly speaking, was a disc of matter resting on a disc of fresh water, resting on a disc of salt water, and Absu and Tiamat were the fresh and salt water respectively.

Okay? And now the Mesopotamians thought that the way that Absu and Tiamat gave birth to everything was that they joined together in sexual union. It's like the Yin and the Yang, and it's very much like that, in fact, and that it was out of their union that the elemental gods emerged. And I think you can think of the elemental gods as their forces of nature, and they're viewed through—they're not personified because to personify something means that you see it as an objective phenomenon and then attribute human characteristics to it, and that isn't how people work.

What happens is we perceive human characteristics, and then only with terrible effort do we extract out the objective reality from that. So we depersonalize things when we become scientific, but we just naturally see them as characters. And you can see this when you read books to kids. You know, like everything's a person— a train is a person, and a car is a person; the moon is a person, and the sun is a person. And, you know, you read stories to children that have that as a presupposition; it doesn't bother you at all. You know, you can just fall right into it with no problem.

You know, and in the animations, you see the sun in the sky smiling and bouncing along, and it doesn't bother you. You know, it's no problem to look at the world that way, and there's some utility in looking at the world in that way, as we'll discover. So anyways, I think part of the reason that we view things that way—oh yeah, that was the other thing I wanted to tell you about our perceptual systems—is that we do have a social cognitive platform, an intellectual platform, which means that our primary categories, the primary categories of our mind, do seem to be social.

So you could say that the reason our mind evolved, or no, you could say that the fundamental selecting pressures on our mind ensured that the primary substructure of our cognitive ability was modules that could understand social behavior. Men could understand women; women could understand men. Men and women could understand children; children, men and women, could understand the social world. And that's what we're specialized for.

Then it was only after those systems developed, hyperdeveloped probably under the force of sexual selection, that they became able to separate themselves to some degree from that underlying social cognitive structure and start to see the world in ways that weren't personified. But what that means is that our natural categories are still anthropomorphic and dramatic. It actually turns out they work, so absolutely entire map nature and culture is a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about them.

Now, they would say, well, it's the interplay between nature and culture that gives rise to the primordial forces of nature. Now, those forces of nature would be, to some degree, external, like a storm or like fire. But they would be, to some degree, internal too, like the fire of passion, right? And the storm of sorrow because those are natural forces as well. And one of the things that the ancients knew was that man was created to serve the gods.

And of course, modern people think of that as a superstition. But that's because they don't really understand how archaic people thought. Archaic people thought like Freud thought. It's like, yeah, yeah, you have an ego, fine, you know, and as long as you're in a box within a bunch of other boxes, the ego runs things. But as soon as we put you somewhere where those boxes are gone, it's the underlying forces of nature that run you—hunger, thirst, you know, aggression, sexuality, and all those things that are impersonal because of course you have them, and you have them, and so does everyone else.

So they're impersonal and transcendent, and they're also eternal. And so when the archaic people said— and they usually said this with sorrow—that man was destined to serve the gods, that's what they meant. They meant that we were the playthings of these unbelievably powerful primordial forces that manifested themselves within our lives and determined our destinies. And in fact, the Mesopotamians said that specifically about the elder gods. They said they were part of that which determined human destiny.

Marduk, who we'll talk about in a while, was given the tablet of destinies because when he was asked to become top god, he said, well, if I'm going to be top god, I get to determine the destinies. And well, we'll get to that. So you kind of got to know what these archaic gods were, and they were personalities. You know, and you could say, well, yeah, yeah, maybe it's a mistake to attribute the qualities of personality to a storm. Although it depends on what you think a storm is.

Like, a modern person would think of a storm as an objective event that you have subjective reactions to. An archaic person would more likely think of the storm as the subjective consequences of the storm plus the storm all at once. They wouldn't make that separation. So it's a lot easier to personify something under those conditions, or not to personify it but to stay within the realm of conceptualization that makes it a personified force.

So the storm god is something that, you know, can instill terror into your heart. It's like, well, you know, yeah, fair enough. You know, all right. So anyways, Absu and Tiamat, they give rise to these primordial gods, and I'm going to think about them as forces of nature, and I think that's a reasonable representation for a variety of reasons. They're like the Titans.

All right, so they give rise to these gods, and the gods are their children. They run about making all sorts of racket. They're making racket, and they're doing this and they're doing that; they're building things, and they're messing about with things, and they're noisily engaged in their interactions with one another. They're having children, and they're fighting about sex, and they're just making racket like mad.

And then they do something stupid, and so they're annoying Tiamat as they make all this racket. She's sort of slumbering down there in the depths, leaving them be. But they make all this racket, and they annoy her. It's like it's the environmentalist myth, by the way. It's exactly the same idea. So, you know, human beings, we're kind of dopey; we're running around gratifying our fundamental needs and making racket and destroying things, and if we're not careful, Mother Nature will come flooding back and wipe us out.

It's like, yeah, that's happened in the past; it could happen. But it's an archetypal idea; it's a mythological idea. So fine, they're making racket, and Tiamat's leaving them be. But then they get arrogant, I would say, or careless, and they kill Absu, and they make their dwelling place on his corpse.

Now, that is a brilliant, brilliant symbolic idea because what it means—it means a bunch of things, but one of the things it means is that in so far as the gods are, because they're masculine, they're part of the representation of the dominance hierarchy and the human interactions within it. The idea that that's all existing on the corpse of Absu is something like the idea that all of the natural forces that are embodied within human beings and driving them are resting on a substructure of dead culture, and everyone knows that—because everyone says, especially modern people, they look back at their culture and they think, "Oh, that thing's dead."

You know, and we can rest comfortably on its dead surface. Well, that's not right because if it's dead—well, if it's dead, logically speaking, it's not alive, and if it's not alive, it can't adapt. And if it doesn't adapt, then it falls behind and gets full of errors, and it gets corrupt and starts to fall apart. And if it gets corrupt and full of errors and falls apart enough, then chaos comes back. That's exactly what happens in the Mesopotamian myth.

So they kill Absu, and they keep making racket, and Tiamat wakes up one day, and she thinks, "Oh, they're noisy; I don't like them that much, and now they've gone and done in my husband," which is order. So I'm going to wipe them out. The gods get wind of this, and they're not very happy about it, you know, because after all, they're gods.

But she is the goddess, a dragon that gave them all life, and the probability that they'll prevail in a battle against that which gave them form is very, very low. So they're pretty damn terrified. So meanwhile, Tiamat is generating her army, and she generates quite an army. The Mesopotamians list out what she does. She first of all picks for her consort a new character named Kingu, and Kingu was like the king of the demon monsters.

So her old husband was Absu, and maybe he was order, and her new husband is—like, he's not someone that you want to have around at all. And so he's basically put at the head of this flanks of terrible monsters, and she generates like scorpion monsters and crocodile monsters and all sorts of things in her army so that she can go wipe out these gods.

And so while this is happening, the gods gather themselves together, and they decide that they'll elect a champion from within their ranks to go out and fight Tiamat. So they do that, and they send one god out, and he comes back with his tail between his legs, roughly speaking, all wiped out by his encounter with chaos. Then they send another god out; the same thing happens, and they send another god out, and the same thing happens, and it's getting pretty damn hopeless because they're sending out their best men against chaos and the mother of all things, and they're getting scuttled all the time.

While this was happening, they continue to produce new generations of gods, and at one point this new god emerges as a young person, I presume. But there are some things that are different about him than any other thing that's been produced so far, and one of the things that's different is he's quite tall and powerful.

So, you know, that's not necessarily so radical, but he has eyes all the way around his head. And when he speaks, he can speak darkness into being, and he can speak light into being. So things obey the commands of his words. So he's a master of language; he can see everywhere, and he's a master of language.

Okay, and so the gods are checking him out. They think, well, you know, he's quite something. Maybe we can get him to go after Tiamat. So they all go to him in this little group, and they say, "Look, Marduk," because that's his name. "We've been checking you out, and you're looking pretty impressive. So we've got a proposition for you. How about if you go fight Tiamat?"

And Marduk, who’s not only all-seeing and very capable with language, is no fool. He says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get what you want, but here's the deal: you get everybody together first, and I'll go fight your monster, but you're going to have a Congress, and at that Congress, you're going to elect me king of the gods, and then I'll go fight Tiamat."

And so, of course, the other gods aren't very happy about this, but they go off and they have a Congress, and they invite Marduk to it, and they talk about it, and they realize they don't really have any other choice. So they decide that they're going to elect Marduk to the top of the hierarchy of gods.

Now, that's such a smart idea. So if you think, for example, you can think of a hero, and then you could think if you took 10 heroes and averaged them out, you'd get a god, right? So it would be 10 heroes; you'd get a meta-hero out of that, and that would be a god. And then maybe you do that to 10 sets of 10 heroes, and you get 10 metaheroes, and then you take all those metaheroes and you figure out what's the same about them and you abstract that out, and then you get the hero of heroes of heroes, and that's the archetype.

It's a process of distillation. It's like, who's the most interesting, capable possible person? Well, that would be this person; this is the most memorable possible person. Well, we don't know who that is, but this is how we figure it out. Now I can say, well, I admire something about you, and I admire something about you. I can notice that as a phenomenological fact. You seem very capable in a certain way, and you know you have this attribute.

And then I might say, well, if I was going to sort out an ideal for myself to follow, then I'd take the good parts of all of you, and I'd put that into one thing, and then I would make that my ideal. Well, that's the origin of the idea of the savior or the messiah; it's an emergent idea. It emerges when people notice that the hero is part of the force that makes order out of chaos, or sometimes the reverse, when order has become too rigid.

It can also decompose order, bring a little necessary chaos into it, and rejuvenate the whole structure. So anyways, Marduk gets elected king. Now you might think about how would this happen historically speaking. Well, here's an interesting way of thinking about it. So imagine a landscape that consists of tribes. Okay? And then on top of them, imagine a landscape of the imagination.

So each member of each tribal group lives in their imagined world, and that imagined world is full of deities and natural forces of various kinds that they're following. But then you can imagine that as the tribes battle it out and organize themselves, the figures of the imagination do exactly the same thing. So as the people are battling, the gods in heaven are battling, which is also a very common mythology.

And as human beings beat themselves into a functional group, their world conceptions do the same thing. And so over time, you move from polytheism, roughly speaking, to monotheism as all these tribes communicate with one another in language and in combat and sort out just exactly what should be sovereign, what should be powerful, what should be dominant.

Right? It's a major issue, and it's partly practical; it's partly conceptual. So this is reflected in the Mesopotamian creation myth. The gods assemble themselves, and they look among them, and they think, "Okay, well, someone here has the characteristics that should be the central element of the top deity, which is like the ultimate value."

Okay? Well, the Mesopotamians chose wisely—vision and language; those are your most potent weapons you have against chaos because if you pay attention, you can see chaos when it first emerges, and then if you are a master of language, you can encapsulate it and articulate it very rapidly, and you can communicate that to other people.

It's like now this—the you just cannot overestimate how radical an idea that is. It's a staggeringly radical idea, that that's the set of attributes that should be at the top. The Mesopotamians are trying to figure out what should be sovereign, what should be above everything else. Well, you might say a person. It's like, yeah, yeah, no, the person embodies sovereignty. Sovereignty itself is something else.

So when Frans de Waal, for example, he was watching chimpanzees hash it out for dominance in the zoo in I think it’s in Holland, I think anyways, it's a zoo that has a lot of chimpanzees in it. He spent a lot of time watching them, and you know, one idea about the dominant chimp is that he's just the biggest, meanest, like, most tyrannical chimp; it's sort of the strongman theory of chimp leadership.

But what de Waal observed was that, well, that was sort of true in that the strongest and meanest chimpanzee could obtain dominance. But the problem with him is if he was really like selfish and cruel was that he didn't have any friends. Now, chimps have friends, and they spend a lot of time with them, and they groom each other and they protect each other in fights.

And like you can be the ugliest, meanest chimp around, but if there are two chimps that are 3/4 of your strength coming at you, it's like you lose. Now, so that means two chimps that are capable of enough civilization to bind themselves into a dyad that has mutual obligations across time is way stronger than one chimp who doesn't.

So what that means is that strength and viciousness, you know, there'll be times when that can emerge as the dominant power, but it's very, very unstable, and everyone's motivated to bring it down as fast as possible. And the best way to bring it down is with a coalition. And so partly, what that indicates is that it's actually the chimp who's the best at making coalitions that's most likely to become sovereign.

So, and that's actually what happens with the chimps. The dictator chimp is very unstable, and in the one story I read of Arnam at the Arnam Zoo, he rose to the top—the, the, you know, bad bad guy, the gangster guy—and two chimps went after him and tore him to pieces. They tore off his testicles, yeah. And you know, it agitated the hell out of the rest of the troop, and it was like a bloody revolution. You know, it was really, really stressful for the troop, but what it indicates—and it's so interesting—is that the idea that in a dominance hierarchy what's most dominant is power, that there's no evidence whatsoever that that's true.

And in fact, I was talking to what—I have a partner in a business that I have who was a student of mine at Harvard. He's a very, very smart person, and I was talking to him about dominance hierarchies, and he said something very, that I found very upsetting on a variety of levels. He said, "It's not a dominance hierarchy if you can't put a dog collar on the person one level below you," which is a pretty bloody blunt statement.

But when he—he's prone to that sort of thing—but what he meant is that it's possible that the idea that the term dominance hierarchy is not the right term to be applying to these sorts of social structures because what it implies is that what keeps the structure in place is power. You know, and that's the sort of claim that people like Foucault make; it's all about power. It's like, the thing is, it's not all about power.

It's not all about power; it's not all about power among animals. So with power, with chimps, if that's all you've got is power, you're going to get wiped out. You have to—so what de Waal found was that the chimps who were able to establish stable patterns of leadership were quite congenial. They had a lot of allies, so they engaged in mutual grooming and a lot of social interaction, and they were very positively predisposed to the females in the troop.

So that's pretty interesting, you know, because we don't know what constitutes valid sovereignty. But even in animals, it doesn't seem to be power. So and then, you know, you look at wolf packs and that sort of thing. And you know, if two wolves go at it for dominance, one wolf will back off and roll over and show his throat. And you know, like, Stalin wolf would just tear out his throat.

But you know, Churchill wolf, let's say, would say, well, yeah, you're kind of useless, but we might need you around later. So why don't you get up, and you know, we'll let bygones be bygones? And that's what wolves do, you know? And unsurprisingly, because what are you going to do? Kill everyone in your troop? Well, that doesn't seem like a very effective strategy either for mating or for survival.

So the Mesopotamians are trying to work out practically who's going to be sovereign, and at the same time conceptually what is the proper basis for sovereign, which is really the ultimate question in some sense. So anyway, so they elect Marduk, and Marduk's got all these eyes, and he can speak. And so he thinks, all right, he says, if I win, I'm going to get the tablet of destinies, and then I'm top god.

And they say, yeah, yeah, whatever, if you win, no problem. So he goes out to fight Tiamat, and he takes a sword, and he takes a net, and they meet on the battlefield, and he encapsulates Tiamat in a net, which I think is a brilliant, brilliant metaphor again because chaos is amorphous and unformed, right? And if you want to conquer it, you have to encapsulate it within a net.

You have to make it into something rather than something amorphous, you know? And so, look, maybe a client comes to me, and they say, "Oh, I've been having these terrible symptoms; my heart races, and I can't catch my breath, and I think I'm going to die. And I think maybe I'm having a heart attack, and I'm always at the hospital, and they tell me that there's nothing wrong with me. But I'm afraid all the time, and I'm starting not to go out."

And I say, "Oh, you have agoraphobia; lots of people have that. You're not the only person like that in the world. Not only that, it has a name; we know what to do about it, and there's a treatment course." And the reason for that is that the unknown unknown has just been turned into a known unknown, and that's a massive improvement.

And so the person who conceptualizes the anomalous situation fastest is, in fact, the leader. That's the definition of leadership. It's like we don't know what's going on; this is what's going on. And when you say this is what's going on, you also simultaneously say, here's a million other things that could have been going on that aren't. So it's a process of radical simplification, and it lowers the stress levels immediately.

Anyway, so Tiamat goes—or Marduk goes—and he gets her in a net, and then he splits her in half, and he makes heaven out of one half and the earth out of the other for human beings. And he goes back and defeats Kingu and all the monsters, and then he goes back to tell the other gods, and they're pretty happy about this.

And Kingu had the tablet of destinies, but Marduk took that from him, and now he has it. So he gets to determine destiny, and he makes human beings out of Kingu's blood, which is quite an interesting little twist to the story. And he makes them to serve the gods.

So that's that, and so the idea is that the hero who can see and can communicate is also the hero who separates out the elements of existence so that it becomes a habitable place. And that humans should serve—serve Marduk. Well, you have to serve something. Well, you're going to serve a natural force of some sort. You're going to be all anger; you're going to be all lust, or are you going to be all love, or you're going to be all hunger?

Or are you going to represent some integrated, balanced, and integrated emergent property of that that's also socially constructed, you know, so that you're a balance of natural forces and you're a civilized person? And that's some sort of essence, and that's what you're going to strive for—well, that's Marduk. So you're supposed to be a good Marduk now.

Marduk is immortal. Now the only person who was identified with Marduk in the Mesopotamian realm was the emperor. Now they lived in a walled city, and so what the emperor—the reason the emperor was sovereign was because he was supposed to be the embodiment of Marduk on earth, which meant that his job was to transform chaos into order whenever chaos threatened.

He was supposed to transform it back into order. So this is what the Mesopotamians did at the New Year's celebration when the year is rejuvenated, right? The old year dies, of course we know that because we still do it. And the new year is this new baby; it's a time of new beginnings. So the Mesopotamians would take the emperor out of the city, and they'd strip him of all his emperor clothes, and then they'd make him recite all the ways during the last year that he'd been a bad Marduk, like he hadn't kept—he hadn't been encountering chaos properly, and he hadn't been keeping order properly.

So he had to confess all of his inadequacies. Then the priest would whack him with a glove as a, you know, as a ritual punishment. And then they'd take all the statues of the old gods out of the city, and then they'd re-present the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. And then the emperor was Marduk, and he would win and then he would have sex with a ritual prostitute, which was—this is a much tougher concept but it's a way of symbolizing the fact that if the creative force encounters the positive element of the feminine, it's like the prince in Sleeping Beauty getting Sleeping Beauty from the grasp of the evil queen who turns into the dragon.

It's exactly—because it's weird, right? You've seen that and you understand it, right? Sleeping Beauty is all in the tower; she's covered by a—she's hemmed in by huge fields of thorns. The evil queen is trying to stop the prince from getting to her; she turns into a dragon, which makes absolutely no sense, but everyone follows it.

And then he has to fight his way through that to get to the maiden. It's the same idea in a different context. And then orderly productive order being reestablished, everybody goes back into the kingdom, and it's renewed for the next year, and that's the idea behind Mesopotamian sovereignty.

And it's bloody brilliant because it's an—it’s, it's the beginnings of law in some sense. It's the idea that to be proper, even if you're a despot, even if you're the king, there's a sacred pattern of behavior that you must adhere to, which is the consequence of a Congress of the gods deciding what the most effective mode of being is. It's staggeringly brilliant, and it took that story—we just have no idea how long that story took to emerge.

I would say it’s the consequence of the full course of human evolutionary history. There are elements in it that are as old as mammals and maybe older than that, you know, if you think about those patterns being embedded in behavior long before they were abstracted out into representations. It's unbelievably archaic and ancient.

And so you have Tiamat, the great mother, you have Absu, the great father, you have Marduk, the archetypal son, you have Kingu, who's the negative element of Marduk, right? And you have the drama of all those characters interacting across time, and that's the myth—that's the mythological representation of reality.

And to tie it into the neuropsychology that we talked about, you know, we talked about anomaly, right? And how anomaly—you have a box that you're in that is your world, but that box doesn't contain everything in the world. There's a lot of things that aren't in it, and sometimes they poke their head in like a snake and then that's disruptive.

And what do you do? Well, you have to—you have to voluntarily encounter the snake and either defeat it or make something valuable out of it, you know. You can cower and hide, but all that generally means is the snake grows and grows until there's hardly any you in the box and there's all snake.

And that's actually the Mesopotamian story. It's like if the elder gods weren't so careless and had been paying attention and hadn't killed Absu, Tiamat would have stayed asleep the whole time. So well, so that’s the—that's the level of isomorphism.

So what's fascinating, but I think inevitable, is that the mythology reflects the physiology, but how could it not? The physiology produced the mythology. Like, of course, that's going to be the case; it shouldn't be a surprise. It should be—the reverse should be a surprise. It's like, there's no relationship between these old stories and the way that human beings are structured.

It's like, well, no, no, that's a dumb idea. So well, that's the Mesopotamian creation myth, and it's a killer. It's a staggering story, and you know, it still sits—whether we know it or not, it sits at the very base of our culture. It's Absu that story, and if we kill it—which we will or have been—then look out. You know, we know the story from so long ago.

If you let your culture die and act carelessly towards it, all hell will break loose, and it's no joke. So here we are trying to revivify it. It's pretty weird that these things happen to be real, but then if you think about it, well, how could it be otherwise? You know, I mean, you think all these people who lived before us for the tens of millions of years that, you know, we've had our vaguely human predecessors were stupid—they weren't, and they weren't ignorant, and they weren't superstitious or any of those things.

They were tough enough so that we're here.