2015 Maps of Meaning Lecture 02b: Object and Meaning (Part 2)

One person who visited me during the break had a question that was good. Not that all the other questions weren't good, but this one is a question of good general relevance. So do you want to repeat your question?

Even if they don't know who the top of the hierarchy is, but don't they? Right. Well, it's a really good question.

So the question is: Nietzsche said God is dead, and he believed that things would fall apart as a consequence of that. I'm claiming, for example, that people have an implicit religious structure, and they act it out.

Okay, so there's actually a lot of things happened as a consequence of the fact that that's a reasonable issue—a good question. One of the things you might think about is that so Nietzsche's claim and Dostoevsky's claim were quite straightforward. They said that once you took the foundation out of something, it would fall. Now, it might take a long time to fall, especially if it's a big thing. So, you know, you could make the claim, for example, that the Soviet Union basically fell in like 1970, but it took 19 years to topple over because it's a big thing, right? It just doesn't crumble all at once.

And so Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's claims would be once you hack out the basic assumptions and question them, then it's only a matter of time until the entire structure decays. You could think that perhaps, you know, if you have a habit, and then you become conscious of the habit, and you practice a new habit, then you can have a new habit.

And so what that means is that you can use your conscious mind to restructure your implicit beliefs. It's hard. Or you can use your conscious mind to destroy your belief in the value of those implicit actions and demolish them across time.

Okay, so that could happen, and I think to some degree that has happened. It's certainly happened enough so that people are very confused about what they believe or even about what belief means because there's a contradiction between what people think and how they act. So, okay, that's one tangent, so to speak.

Jung actually took that question very seriously in some sense because here's the flaw in Nietzsche's argument. I think it's like I hesitate to ever say that because, like I said, he was a staggering genius. So, Nietzsche believed his proposition was that once the religious edifice fell, that people would have to create their own values.

So he believed that the Overman, the Superman, so to speak, would be a new type of human being—like an existential type of human being—who would be able to accept the fact that there was no ultimate meaning, but create their own values.

Okay, but the weird thing about that is you don't actually seem to create values. That's where Nietzsche is flawed, and I think that's where he implicitly accepted the presuppositions of the rationalists. Because if there's no real source of value, then it stands to reason that you create values, but you don't—not easily. Like, you know, think about your own life, you know?

So let's say you make a New Year's resolution. You say, "Well, I'm going to study for like three hours a day." It's like you're trying to create your own value structure, right? But then you find out it's a lot harder than you think because you don't listen to yourself. It's like you wander off and, you know, play video games or watch something on YouTube, you know? And you know why you're doing that? Well, it's because you're led by values; you don't create them.

Now maybe there's a co-creation, you know, because it's not like you can't change yourself at all, but we should be very careful before we jump to the conclusion that values are or even can be something that people actually create.

Now the phenomenologists, like Heidegger and Jung as well, would say, "No, no, let's just not get too hasty about making the presupposition that we can or should create our own values."

Now one reason you might be hesitant to do that is that Hitler created his values, so to speak, and so did the Soviet communists and the North Koreans. You know, they're trying to impose a rationalist value structure on a society, and the consequences of that have been, you know, people debate about how many people died in the Soviet Union as a consequence of internal repression.

And as the Marxist revisionists rally back to their original beliefs, the estimate keeps going down. But, you know, it was tens of millions of people. So, and in China, who knows? It was maybe it was a hundred million people; it was a lot of people.

And then, of course, there are the Nazis. The act of attempting to rationally construct a value system and then impose it—that doesn't seem to work out very well. So, you know, on a sociological level, we seem to have evidence that that's dangerous.

And then on a personal level, it's like, "Yeah, are you so sure you create your values?" I would say, to a large degree, you discover them.

And so, you know, here's an experiment you can try. One I told you last week, I think, to try to watch yourself speak for, I think you should do it for the rest of your life. You know, because words are very, very powerful, and they lead you places. So you should be careful how you use them.

But, like, here's another really interesting experiment: watch what you're interested in. Try—don’t try to control it so much—just see where it is. Because, like, and the phenomenologists certainly made much of this, it's like for them, like for Heidegger, value was something that manifested itself in the world and attracted your attention. You know? It wasn't something you precisely created.

Now, I believe you have a hand in creating it. We'll talk more about that later because you're not a deterministic entity precisely. So it's like you can participate in the construction of a value system, but, you know, you have to take your biological nature into mind, and you have to take your cultural nature into mind, and you have to take other people into mind.

And so, you know, you have—you can vary the game, but I don’t think you can really change the rules. That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

Now, what Jung did, in many ways, was he said, "Well, maybe we have to go back down into the deep symbolic substrata of the human psyche to find the origin place of the ideas that we used to hold as religious." It was a hypothesis in some sense.

And so, the psychoanalytic hypothesis is something like it's the psychic substrata, the prelinguistic psychic substrata that is the source of ritual, symbol, and religious ideas. And so that you can go back to the source, in a sense, to revitalize those ideas. And that strikes me as a wiser approach than the rational approach which says you can just create your values.

It's like we tried that; it didn't work. It really didn't work. It was murderous.

So, and then the alternative—the no value proposition is, well then you're going to be nihilistic, and that's not good. I think nihilism is a form of mental illness. It's a sociological—it’s caused by sociological conditions, but fundamentally it's a mental illness.

How do you revise what you mean by belief? That's part of it, and that's what we're going to try to walk through. You know, this is a very—that's a linear argument in some sense, although there's going to be a lot of tangents. I want to show you how that might be done, and what it might mean.

I mean, who knows what it ultimately means, right? There's just no going there. But my experience with these ideas has been that once you understand them—and it's a different way of categorization, I would say—all sorts of things that you didn't understand all of a sudden light up for you, and it's really helpful.

You know, because—for let me just give you a couple of examples. You know, I would say that it's an unspoken proposition of much of today's socio-ideological thinking that there's something pathological about human beings. You know, like I've heard people say, like, "Human beings are like a cancer on the planet." It's like, I went to a talk—a TED Talk at Queen's, a TEDx talk where one of the professors, who was a radical environmentalist of sorts, you know, he told the whole audience—they were all people about your age—that if they had any ounce of ethics, if they had any ethical standards whatsoever, they wouldn't reproduce.

It's like, you know, really? He said, "Well, we've only had one child," and for me I thought that was one child too many for him. But you know, I thought that's bloody pathological when you stand up in front of a bunch of young people who have their whole future in front of them, and you say, "Well, you know, you're such a horrid creature in your very core that it would be a moral violation for you to propagate."

It's like, you know, so I mean one of the things that that's happened to me is like I kind of like people. You know, they're peculiar and weird, like hippopotamuses and rhinos and penguins and all that, but you know, I certainly don't think that we're some sort of cancer on the planet.

I really think that's a pre-genocidal idea as far as I'm concerned. It's like the planet would be better off without any people on it. It's like, hey, glad you're not near the old thermonuclear button.

Yeah, really, really, you know? It's like that's an archetypal idea: fire will cleanse everything. It's like, that's what Hitler believed; that's why all Berlin was burning when he committed suicide. It's like that was what he was after from the beginning—the cleansing fire.

It's like beware of those ideas, boy, you know? And so I can see the intrinsic dignity of people and their intrinsic value and how that can be expressed across time. And, you know, I value that. It's something pristine and remarkable, you know?

And understanding, I believe that understanding these ideas properly can give you that kind of orientation. You know, I mean, everybody's flawed and useless and half crazy—I mean obviously—but, you know, that's not exactly the point. There are reasons we are flawed and useless and half crazy, you know? Life is hard, and we're finite, and you know, so we have big problems that confront us.

It's like I don't think any sane person cannot be crazy, so to speak. But having said all that, the idea that there's something intrinsically pathological about human being is like—that is an absolutely, what's the word—apocalyptic idea.

It's like beware of people who tell you such things, you know? So, and it's certainly not something you should be thinking about yourself, God! It's like, who knows what you're up to. You know, maybe some of you will be great people, you know? Good luck with it.

So, I want to walk you through what I think these ideas mean, and I'm not asking you to believe anything I tell you. It's like don't hack away at it, man; see if you can see where it's flawed.

I can't—I’ve tried. So, I don't want to be standing on sand. And so what I've tried to do is to look at human history and prehistory and to see what it is that we need to move forward. And we have to be united with our history. Human beings are historical creatures.

And so if there's a divide between us and our history, then all sorts of weird ideas are going to invade us. You know, it's quite funny because again with the rationalist atheists, you know, they basically think that if we dispense with religion, everybody would turn into René Descartes. You know, it's like we'd be all rational.

It's like, are you out of your bloody mind? Look at the New Age people, you know? That's where we'd be going first. It's like we'd be like Shirley, what's her name? Mlan? I read once believed that the reason there were so many allergies in San Francisco was because of aliens.

It's like that's a much more likely place for human belief systems to end up than like, poof, we're all René Descartes. Like that's not going to happen. You know, one of the things Jung said, which I just loved, he said, "The purpose of religious structures is to stop people from having religious experiences."

Now that's a smart saying. So anyways, so we're going to walk through this, and you know what I've come to believe is that the archetypes we’re going to talk about—because I believe archetypes is a pretty good way of thinking about them—constitute the fundamental presumptions of human being. You can't not presume them; that's why they're religious.

You can't escape from them. Now, that doesn't mean they're right, but it means that they're as right as we are. And how right are we? Well, we don't know.

You know, I mean, there were people that I read—somebody in the 1970s; he was a journalist. He wrote a book called "The Ghost in the Machine." You know, and this was a fairly common proposition at the time. His idea was that, well, you know, we're animals that have become self-conscious and that basically drove us incurably insane.

And so we're like an evolutionary dead end, and it's only a matter of time before we extinguish ourselves. It's like that's possible. You know, no other animal has ever become self-conscious. It's a big burden.

You know, and it does drive people kind of crazy, and no wonder. You know, because you have to contemplate your mortality all the time, or at least some of the time. And also, you're completely aware of how useless and ugly and, you know, all these other things you are compared to whatever the ideal might be.

It's a lot of burden. But it seems to me too that human beings are peculiar in that we can actually choose. We have some facility for choice.

I think we can decide whether we're an evolutionary dead end or not, and I also believe that grounding our thinking in these ancient ideas makes it far more likely—far less likely—that we're going to fall prey to ideological possession, which is extraordinarily dangerous.

And it'll also give us the meta-framework to conceptualize what might constitute an ideal. Well, so, you know, that's a—because I wanted to find out what's an alternative to ideology, and nothing is the wrong answer because people can't live on nothing. Life is too hard.

You have to see that your being is justifiable in order to thrive, and given that your being is characterized by suffering, that's no easy matter. Suffering and limitation—that's the basic truths of life. It's a Buddhist doctrine for that matter, right?

And it's certainly not something that the Jews would disagree with, and it's central to Christian thinking as well. You know, most religious structures think you're doomed, and there's going to be a lot of pain along the way. It's like, yeah, that's true.

Okay, now we've got that out in the open. What do you do about it? Well, that's the question. So let's see. What do we have for time? Is it 3:45? Is that about right? This old computer—I'm not sure it's accurate.

Yeah? Okay. So question—now that we've conceptualized it as a problem, it is a problem. Oh yeah! Well, the thing is, you know, sometimes conceptualizing a problem brings it into focus.

There are multiple ways things realize themselves, right? You know how it is: if you learn something complex, you think you’ve learned it, and then a little later you articulate it more, and you think, "Oh, I didn't understand that completely."

And then you know, you think you’ve got it, then three years later you think, "Oh no, I really didn't quite have that; I'm going to articulate it more." So knowledge comes into focus.

And so okay, so let's move away from this philosophical evolutionary discussion for a moment. I want to start again with a series of propositions.

So 10 minutes ahead—just know it's like 3:33. It's 3:00. Okay, good, good, good. 3:38. Alright, fine. So now when I first started to construct this representation, I'd been reading heavily a book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety" that's written by Jeffrey Gray.

Jeffrey Gray was one of Hans Eysenck's students, and Eysenck was one of the founders of modern psychometric personality theory. For a long time, he was the most cited psychologist in the world, and Jeffrey Gray—who died recently—was, uh, he was a literate guy, man.

"The Neuropsychology of Anxiety" is a tough read because he was sort of a master of neuropharmacology, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and animal behavior. So he's a behaviorist and cybernetic theory, although I don't really think he knew exactly that he was a cybernetic theorist.

He sort of knew it. It took me a long time to figure out that he was a cybernetic theorist. Cybernetics emerged as a consequence of the work of someone called Norbert Wiener, who was at MIT, and he wrote a book called, I think, he wrote the—I think the book was called "Cybernetics."

Actually, anyways, you can look them up. And there are cybernetic principles that I extracted out of Gray and started to utilize, and then I only found out later that they were actually consequences of Wiener’s thinking.

Now, he infected lots of people, so Luria, who was a great Russian neuropsychologist, was basically a cyberneticist. And there were a couple of other Russians, Sakov and Vinogradov, who discovered the orienting reflex, which was like— that was like discovering a new planet or a new continent.

It's like an important discovery; they should have gotten the Nobel Prize for it, as far as I'm concerned. It's a big deal. And so Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic thought really spread everywhere, and it pops up in many ways.

And there's modern personality theories that are fundamentally cybernetic. So this is basically a cybernetic model. And cybernetic models hypothesize that active organisms—they basically perform according to the following schema: they pause at a target and move towards it, and then they regulate themselves so they don't deviate too much from the trail.

So that's what this is, as far as I'm concerned. So here's the basic framework within which you live, as far as I can tell. And I don't think you can get out of it. You carry this frame with you all the time, and you're looking at the world through it.

And the framework has a couple of substructures, and one is you have some sense of where you are, and that's like a theory. It's a theory of where—who you are and where you are. It's a theory of the present.

Now, you might think you observe the present around you, and those are factual observations. And so your conceptualization of the present isn’t a theory; it's a fact.

But don't be thinking that you know it's a theory. You might be wrong about the present. The person you're in love with might be having an affair, right? So there can be massive gaps in your assumptions about the present.

You know, you think you're healthy, but maybe you're not. You know, you think your boss likes you, but maybe they don't. You think your degree is going to be useful, but maybe it isn't.

You know, well, it's just an important observation. But it's an important one: you could be wrong about now.

Okay? Because one of the things we're going to try to figure out is where is it that you could be wrong, and what does it mean that you could be wrong in all those places, and what should you do about the fact that you could be wrong all those places? And then we're also going to try to figure out what happens if you find out that you've wronged.

So, for example, you're going out with someone; you love them. Perhaps they've made promises to you, and, you know, poof! You find out that they've been having an affair with three people for the last five years. It's like, "Hey, you're wrong!"

And so now where are you? What does that mean that you're wrong? Well, it means a lot of things. It means—it means a lot of things that you— it might mean a lot, lot more things than it means, which is a very strange thing.

It might mean that you're so clueless that it's just mind-boggling, you know, and that you're blind as a bat. So that's one possibility. It might be that you hooked up with a psychopath, right?

Which is also something that you should avoid. And, but that would mean you don't understand people well enough to know when they're psychopaths or not, or maybe that you're fatally attracted to them in some bizarre way.

You know, it also means that whatever future you were envisioning was really a delusion because that's gone. And it also means that you've blown out most of your past, at least in so far as that relationship was part of your past because nothing that you thought was happening was what was happening.

So then you might think one moment you're somewhere, then you get the realization, and the next moment you are somewhere else. And so one of the things I would propose to you is that those are actually two important places. The one place is the place you are when what you're doing is working, and the other place is the place you are when what you're doing is not working.

And I would also say, in some weird sense, those are permanent places. And I'll tell you why I think this—but I think they’re akin in some manner to explored territory and unexplored territory, and that's their sort of biological basis.

Because we know that animals are territorial, right? Almost every animal has a sketched-out territory. If social animals have to organize themselves within that territory with other creatures like them, so part of their territory is almost always a dominance hierarchy. But they have a territory, and they don't like going outside of it.

So I can give you an example. So my parents had a dog and a cat. And my dad used to take the dog for a walk all the time, but the cat really liked the dog. And so it was kind of irritated that the dog would leave.

And so the cat started following my dad around on his walks. And so it was really interesting because the first thing the cat did was, when it was following, it wasn't right behind the dog. There's no way it was going to do that. It would slink along all of the buildings.

So it would follow about 30 feet behind, and it would keep one side right against a building. And then it would sort of zip across the intervening spaces of the houses, right?

And you might think, well, why was it doing that? And the answer is it didn't know where the bloody predators were. It didn't know where the big dogs were. It didn't know anything about the new places it was going.

So it was going to stick its side against one hard wall so that the complexity was cut in half, and it was going to go really slow on the off chance that some massive hound came out and ate it. So it’s being very careful. So that was pretty cool.

So it did that for quite a while, and then because nothing massive jumped out and ate it, and because it started to understand the territory and knew where it could hide, it got a little braver.

And over a couple of months, it got to the point where it actually followed the dog because it had mastered its— it had expanded its territory and mastered its knowledge of the territory. But then I was walking with them one day, and they had a route.

Hey, and my dad had the dog, and he wanted to take the dog a little farther than he would normally go with the dog, and so he was taking the dog across the street, but the cat just stayed on the corner and cried because it was, you know, meowing obviously, but it was very upset because it wasn't going out into that weird new place that it had no knowledge about.

And so it was, you know, making its fear really known, and animals are like that. You know, so here's something to think about. This blew me away when I first conceptualized it. It was one of the things that made me understand that psychologists are always asking questions backwards.

I'll give you an example. It's like, why do people take cocaine? That's a question, right? I think it's a good question. It's a stupid question.

The question is, why doesn't everybody take cocaine all the time? That's the question because we know what cocaine does, right? It activates the primary incentive reward systems, and almost everything you do is in an attempt to activate the primary incentive reward system.

So you've got this white powder, and there it is. It's like you should be nose-deep in that stuff non-stop, but you're not. Why? What's wrong with you people? You know?

So that's one example of where psychology got it backwards. We know why people take intoxicating drugs; it's dead simple. Sometimes it reduces their anxiety, sometimes it reduces their pain, sometimes it cranks up their incentive reward systems.

You know, it hijacks the system; it does it biochemically. It's perfectly obvious. So that's one example. Now, another example is this: how do animals learn fear? It's a prime behavioral question, right? It's the wrong question because it presumes that the standard animal is calm.

Why would you presume that? Why wouldn't we presume instead that the standard animal is terrified and that the animal only learns how not to be terrified with difficulty and under very restricted circumstances?

Well, that's a much better way of thinking about it, and it makes a lot more sense because the animal's in danger, especially if it doesn't know its territory.

So here's how you teach an animal to be afraid—if you're a behaviorist, and I am not making fun of behaviorists. A lot of what I've learned about psychology that’s actually real has come from behaviorists. Like, they’re serious scientists, and they learned an awful lot from analyzing animal behavior that was incredibly profound and laid the ground for modern neuroscience, the real stuff, not the fMRI stuff, you know, the real stuff.

So okay, so basically what you do to train an animal to be afraid is you take a rat, let's say, and the rat's in its cage, and you put a little electric shock pad in the rat's cage. So it maybe electrifies the bottom a little bit, and you turn on a light, and you electrify the bottom, and the rat jumps into the air, and then you shut it off.

And then you wait a while, and then you do the same thing: turn on the light, then you turn on the electric shock mechanism, and the rat jumps in the air, and you do that ten times. And then when you turn on the light, the rat goes like this—freezes—because it's learned.

Right? Light equals shock. Everyone knows that. You know, that's basic conditioning. So the rat learns to be afraid.

Okay, that makes sense, except here's your experimental box, right? You got the electrification going on in there, and you grab your rat and you drop him in the cage. What does he do first?

He freezes because he's afraid. He's afraid as soon as you put him in the new environment. That's the normal rat. The normal rat is like this, and why is that? Because things like to eat rats.

So, you know, they don't like light; they like it dark, and they don't like being exposed, and they don't like being in a new damn cage because God only knows what's in that cage. So the a priori rat is this.

So then what does the rat do? Well, it's like this for quite a while. It can be really a long time. I'll tell you a story about that. He's like this, and then maybe he sniffs because rats—most animals are mostly smell-oriented, right?

Human beings are weird because we're visually oriented, but almost all animals, it's all smell. Their whole brains are organized around their olfactory system. So it sniffs, and if it can't smell anything—rats, man—they can smell.

So there’s experiments indicating that if you take a rat and you poison it, and then it gets sick, and another rat has smelled its breath, that rat will not eat the poison that the first rat ate. Now that's why it's hard to get rid of rats—they're smart and they have great senses of smell.

So the rat's checking out, like is there anything here that smells like something that might eat me? So cats, for example— a rat doesn't never have to meet a cat to be afraid of its odor. Rats hate cat odor.

And so you can take rats in like a box and blow a fan over a cat so that the odor wafts into the box, and like the rats are all like this because God only knows what a cat smells like to a rat, but it ain't good, whatever it is.

So the rat's like this, and then he's sniffing, and he's looking around, and if nothing happens, then he starts to relax a little bit, but not that much. He's still crouched down, and he's still like a tentative rat. Then he starts to look around a bit, and then he starts to loosen up.

And then maybe he starts to move, and his theory is possibly it's safe enough here. So a rat that's careful can move and nothing painful or damaging will happen.

And then he starts to move, and nothing happens, and then he spends a bunch of time sniffing around every corner of the cage. And you know, sooner or later, he thinks, "Rats aren't going to die here now." And then he's sort of a relaxed rat.

And then the behaviorist says, "You are now a normal rat. We can teach you to be afraid." It's like "You don't have to teach me to be afraid. I know how to be afraid. I have to learn how not to be afraid."

Now that's a good way of thinking about your brain. So you could think about the underlying motivational and emotional systems in your brain as default-on systems. They’re like a nuclear reactor—like the core of a nuclear reactor. You're ready, man! Except when other parts of your brain are telling you just to keep it calm.

So, but you don't need to learn to be afraid any more than you need to learn to be hungry. You need to learn how to be calm and secure, and that's really worth thinking about because you got to ask yourself, for example, why are you calm and secure in this class?

What are the preconditions for you not being afraid here? So think about it. Why are you not afraid? Well, the floor is solid; that's a good one. The roof is probably not going to collapse.

Why? Well, it's actually because you could rely on the structural engineers who built the building. That's kind of interesting. Why? You know, in the Soviet Union, they used to make cinder block buildings out of old radioactive waste, and then, of course, they'd put way too much sand in them so that if the earth went like this once, it'd be like "Collapse!"

And so the typical Soviet couldn't be reasonably fearless in this room because the walls were radioactive, and if the earth moved a little bit, the whole thing would collapse. And so part of the reason that you can sit in here without fear is because the system that regulates our construction enterprise is actually not very corrupt.

So that's pretty cool. So, you know, you think about that. That means that one of the preconditions for your relative fearlessness is your implicit belief that the builders who built this building can be trusted.

And that's really unlikely! You know, if you look around the world, how many countries are there that aren't corrupt? I mean, you know, the West is corrupt too; there's no doubt about it.

But compared to a really corrupt place, you know, we don't even register as corrupt. So what else? Well, look at the people around you. You know, you guys look a lot the same, all things considered.

You know, none of you have painted your face in rainbow colors, and, you know, you're not decorated with ostrich feathers, and you're not wearing some outlandish Victorian costume, and none of you are stark naked, and most of you aren't foaming at the mouth.

And you know, like fundamentally, you're in a—there's some variation of the uniform allowed, but not much. How many of you are wearing jeans? Right? It's like 50% of you.

Why are you wearing jeans? So other primates don't think you're insane; that's why. I'm telling you, it's a big part of it. It's acceptable.

And so most of you are wearing clean jeans, I presume, or they're clean enough anyway, so that if they're not clean, it's not detectable, which is another sign that you're not completely insane, right?

And so you're manifesting markers like mad that you're basically a normal primate and that you live in accordance with a set of well-understood implicit rules, and that for the purposes of this set of interactions, you're not going to violate them.

So everybody can come in here, like the terrified primates they are at their first class, and they can look around and they see the desks are all in order. So that means order prevails here.

The desks all face this way, so it's a standard lecture theater. You know what's going to happen here. People walk in, they all sit properly at their tables. Most of them don't talk, which is another rule.

How many of you are sitting in the same chair that you sat in last week? Right? And you know pretty soon you're going to figure out which chair is yours.

And then if someone comes in here and sits in your chair, you're going to think that person's in my chair. And you know the reason for that is you're trying to stabilize the environment.

You've learned that that chair is safe, and so are the people around you, and so now you feel kind of comfortable in that chair. You sort of think it's your chair.

And so we do everything we can to structure the environment so that signals that you're safe are radiating at you like mad. And that way you can be calm enough, despite the fact that you're a crazy chimpanzee, you can be calm enough to sit here and not be distracted by fundamental motivational systems that are out of control, and maybe listen and attend.

And like you just think about how much work—just think about it—how much work went into building this room for you to sit in, you know? It's like there have been universities for about a thousand years, so there's a thousand-year conceptual history of the university.

That's one of the preconditions, and then we had to figure out how to make all this stuff, and then people actually had to put it together. And then you all had to be socialized for like 19 years so that you could sit here relatively quietly while you're listening to a lecture.

And you know, we had to build the idea of the university into our culture, and you know, somebody's got to keep the lights on, and look at this technology that works.

It's like there are people out there just slaving themselves to death to make sure that this little box that you're sitting in is sufficiently predictable so that you don't have to be terrified. It's like good for them, you know?

And it's all happening so invisibly that you know you're probably irritated because your internet connection doesn't work that well or something like that, you know?

So it's really, really useful to know that it's—the idea that your normal state is calm and well-regulated is highly debatable. It's highly debatable. I would say there's very limited preconditions under which you are going to feel safe.

And then I would also say you're highly motivated to maintain those conditions, and you're also highly motivated not to go somewhere where those conditions don't apply, right? You're just not going to do it because that's a different kind of place.

And I would say that place is chaos—the place where the rules do not apply—that's chaos, and it's a real place—it's unexplored territory.

And people—you are hardwired at an instinctual level to deal with unexpected exposure to unexplored territory, and you do that by going like this: it's a startle and fear. You're frozen, and the reason for that is you're a prey animal.

And you have subcircuits in you that are millions of years old that are there to protect you from becoming prey—and that could be prey of other people, that's for sure—but it could be prey of anything that would like to eat you, you know?

And part of the reason you might understand is that it's not there aren't that many large predators around anymore, you know? Part of the human despoil of the planet is that mostly people don't like having their children eaten by tigers, you know?

So, and it's not because there's something wrong with us; it's because that's actually a rather unpleasant experience. And so if you could have a tiger around or not have one, you might well choose not to have one, especially if you have some, you know, certain amount of love for your children, who although lovable, also happen to be delicious, right?

So, well okay, so it's a proposition I want to undermine because I want to start with the presupposition that fundamentally, as a biological creature, you're like a wild animal, and you're like a prey animal.

Things might happen to you, and you're ready for them, and then what we do with society is we construct up an edifice that has multi-level—some of it's actually instantiated, right? And the rest of it is cultural and ritual and behavioral so that you don't have to be a prey animal.

You can be relatively calm and assured that nothing terrible is going to happen to you in the next ten seconds, and that's worth fighting for. So alright, that's probably good enough.

So now we've got some basic presuppositions laid down, you know, and so let me just review them briefly. One minute: stability is not your normal state; it's an abnormal state, and it's very, very difficult to maintain.

Okay, you maintain it at least in large part as a consequence of being enculturated. And to be enculturated means to adopt a value system that works for you but that also works for everyone else.

It has to fulfill those criteria. Furthermore, it should be the kind of value system that allows you to move up dominance hierarchies if you can manage it—a lot of constraints on your value system.

If your value system is producing the kind of behaviors that fulfill those criteria, you don't have to be terrified. Now it's not just terror because I've also learned that a lot of what culture is controlling is disgust.

That's actually not in the book because I just learned that. So, and I want to talk more about— I want to talk to you more about disgust because we've learned, for example, that people who are orderly temperamentally—which is an element of conscientiousness—are very sensitive to disgust, and I think part of the issue is that it isn't only that things can eat us; it's that things can infect us.

And so we're just as prone a priori to repel anything that's disgusting as we are prepared a priority to keep at bay anything that's frightening.

One of the things I learned, which was terrifying to me, I read Hitler's Table Talk, which was a collection of his spontaneous dinner speeches that were taken down by a secretary. It's a very interesting book, but one of the things I realized once we kind of made the disgust-orderliness connection in my lab about two years ago after looking for the biological basis of conscientiousness forever—Hitler basically used a bodily metaphor to underpin his entire political philosophy.

So for Hitler, who was hyper-orderly bordering on obsessional—he bathed four times a day, for example—and he was a vegetarian, which actually is relevant, because he didn't want animals to be hurt. You know, he was sensitive to disgust, and that was part of what underlay his vegetarianism.

He construed the Aryan race as a body. Like that was his metaphor—it's a body; it’s a pure body; it has pure blood. So there are purity ideas that, you know, made part of what he was saying motivationally significant, and it was under assault from parasites, and the parasites were, well, for him, anyone who wasn't part of that body.

So it was disgust gone mad; it really was, you know. And so that forced me to modify my theories—the theories I'm going to present to you—because for me, a lot of what society did was control anxiety, you know, and hunger, and a lot of other things, obviously.

But I didn't realize to what degree society also controlled disgust and how powerful disgust is as a political motivator. So there was a paper published in PLOS ONE about three months ago—five months ago, maybe more than that now.

It showed that the correlation between totalitarian beliefs in any given geographical locale and the prevalence of infectious disease was about—7. And that was true not only across countries but within countries if you divided the places up by how likely there were to be infectious diseases in the relevant states.

So prejudice, xenophobia, fear of foreigners—all of that—a huge chunk of that is disgust sensitivity gone mad. So anyway, so we're going to talk about that too, as a part of a control mechanism.

Yep. What's that? PLOS ONE. P-L-O-S ONE. It's a public journal you can find. Look up infectious disease and totalitarianism. There's a lot of work done on that now.