2017 Maps of Meaning 12: Final: The Divinity of the Individual

I started that I started the beginning of the class three months ago, talking to you about what the problem was that I was trying to address? The fundamental problem was the problem of belief systems, and the issue was what precisely constitutes a belief system. Then a secondary question was why are people so inclined to even engage in conflict to maintain and expand their belief systems? And then maybe a sub-question of that is, is there an alternative to conflict with regards to belief systems? The last issue was something like, well, is there a way of judging the relative quality of belief systems? Those are all very, very complicated questions.

I mean, the first one is something like: how is it possible to understand the structures by which we orient ourselves in the world? The second one is something like: what's the psychological significance precisely of those systems? What role does it play in psychological health, and maybe also in social health? The next one is can you make a [non] [relativistic] case when you assess an array of different value systems? Linked to that is: is it possible to hierarchically organize value systems in the manner that's justifiable, so that something can be reasonably considered in a superior or subordinate position?

Now, the last question drew my attention because of the implications of the first set. The last question drew my attention because I was trying to sort out the metaphysics, in some sense, of the Cold War. The question was: was this just a battleground between two hypothetically equally appropriate belief systems, which could be a morally immoral relativistic perspective? Right, it's: belief systems are arbitrary, and so combat between them is, in some sense, inevitable. Even more to the point, there isn't any other way around the discontinuity, in some sense, other than combat or subordination, because there's no way of adjudicating a victor if there's no such thing as victory if there's no way of ranking value systems. It's arbitrary.

As a frightening prospect, it means that if you have a value system and I have a value system, and they're different, I mean, we can talk, or you can subordinate yourself, or I could do the same. But there's also no reason why we shouldn't just engage in flat-out conflict. Now, it's complicated in the modern world, obviously, by the fact that conflict can become so untrammeled that it risks destroying everything, and that doesn't seem necessarily to be in anyone's best interest unless your interest happens to be in destroying everything. Certainly, there are no shortage of people whose interests tilt in that direction.

Alright, so the first question was: well, what does it mean to have a belief system? That’s a very complicated problem. I think it's a subset of the question of being. Maybe you can break the question of being into two domains, which we've done in this class, and you could say: well, you can assess being from the perspective of what exists, and then you can assess being from the perspective of how you ought to act. So it's like you walk into a room and you can describe the furniture, or you can determine how you're going to conduct yourself in the room.

Maybe it's the difference between a play and the stage setting for a play. Now, the Modernist perspectives, roughly speaking, is that the fundamental reality is to be found in the description of the furniture, so to speak, in the description of what is. That's the scientific process. The scientific process seems to involve the stripping off of the subjective from perception and, to some degree, from action, and the extraction of the commonalities across perception as a means of delineating the nature of reality.

Now, obviously, that's a very powerful process and it has many advantages, but exactly what it is that science is doing is not precisely clear. One perspective might be that we are genuinely discovering the nature of objective reality, perhaps even the nature of reality itself. But there are some problems with that perspective. One of them being that the scientific process seems to strip the subjective from the phenomena. It does that technically, right?

I mean, you have a hypothesis about what something is, and you have a hypothesis about what something is, and you have a hypothesis about what something is. We undertake a number of procedures to assess what the fundamental phenomena is, and then we look across our perceptual set and we extract out the commonalities and dispense with everything that is superfluous, everything that's merely subjective. So what you feel about the chair is not relevant to the objective existence of the chair, and so it eradicates subjectivity. That's a very useful process because it does seem to enable us to grasp reality in a fundamental sense more profoundly. But it leaves the subjective behind, and maybe that's a problem.

Because it annoys. Okay. Thank you. What if I just didn't? Alright, appreciate it. So then the issue might be: well, is something irretrievably lost if you dispense with this objective? And also, how deep a hole do you dig when you dispense with this objective? I think that that's intrinsically associated with the problem of the relationship between is and ought because that's an old philosophical conundrum, I think first put forth by David Hume, who made the claim that no matter how much you know about something from an empirical perspective, you cannot use that as an unerring guide to action in relationship to that empirical object or set of empirical objects. People, it's a tricky issue.

You know, because obviously you can use empirical information to inform your decisions. But I think the problem is that there's multiple pathways of action that are implied by any set of data. That seems to be the fundamental problem. It's something like that: you can't draw a one-to-one specification between the empirical description and what you should do about that. Maybe an example is: you can gather a lot of information about AIDS, and you can gather a lot of information about cancer, and you can gather a lot of information about educational outcomes, economic outcomes, and so forth.

But it isn't obvious how you then use that empirical information to guide policy decisions because you might say, well, how much money should we spend on education compared to cancer prevention, and how much money should be spent on cancer prevention compared to curing AIDS, or addressing disease in a third-world country? What happens is that the set of variables that you encounter while trying to make your empirical calculation gets to be so massive so rapidly that there doesn't seem to be any logical way of linking them to a behavioral outcome.

Now, it's kind of associated with the postmodern conundrum as well, which is: well, if you have a set of data, and it could be a literary work, there's a very large number of interpretations that you can derive from that set of data and there's no simple way of deciding which one is going to be canonical. So, I think the reason that you can't derive an ought from an is is because you run into something like combinatorial explosion. It's like you have an infinite number of facts at your disposal, roughly speaking, and then another infinite number of ways that you can organize those facts. That massive array of facts and categorized facts doesn't tell you what to do in a given situation.

So maybe the question of what to do in a given situation is a different domain of question, and I believe that to be the case. I think it was Stephen Jay Gould who talked about religion and science as, I think he called them different magisteria, two different fundamental domains that each had their realm of operation. One was the description of the objective world, obviously that's on the scientific end, and the other was the realm of ethics, and so you could put religion, mythology, narrative, the humanities, all of that, history even for that matter to some degree, into the ethics category.

Because I don't see a straightforward way of taking a set of facts and then transforming them into a behavioral compulsion, then I do think that these two things are reasonably regarded as overlapping and intrinsically associated but technically and philosophically separable. Alright, so then the next question emerges: well, if they're separable, there has to be a domain of inquiry into the structure of values. What might that look like? How is it that you would understand the psychological and sociological phenomena that are associated with a moral stance? How would you understand the details of that?

Then even more to the point, is there any way of subjecting different sets of ethical interpretations to testing so that you can judge their comparative validity? Because that's sort of the way out of moral relativism, roughly speaking. It's like, first you make the proposition that there are value structures and that they're independent from empirical investigation, and then the next is that you investigate the possibility that you can compare and contrast different structures of ethics and draw some sort of conclusion. That's not merely arbitrary.

Now, it might be turtles all the way down. That's how the old joke goes, right? But maybe not. Then I was interested in that again because I thought, well, are we fighting the Cold War merely because we're having an argument or is there some manner in which one of these systems can be just determined to be wrong? Of course, there was more weight behind that query because the Soviet system and the Maoist system and the system that's in place in North Korea were not only predicated on different assumptions than in the Western system, but they were also extraordinarily murderous. So that seemed to add additional weight to the sequence of questions.

I was reading Jung at the time, and Jung, Carl Jung, was fundamentally, I would say, a psychologist of narrative, of story, and he outlined the idea for me that people inhabited stories, roughly speaking. He said actually they inhabited myths, and even more to the point, whether they knew it or not, they inhabited archetypal myths or even that they were possessed by them. It was the first time I'd really come into contact with the idea directly put that there was a direct relationship between the structures that you use to orient yourself in the world and stories.

So then I started to assess the fundamental elements of stories. What does a story look like? While I was doing that, that was informed by a number of other things that I was reading about, including a set of—I read the neuroscience literature with regards to information processing fairly extensively, and that introduced me to a whole set of other ideas, including cybernetic ideas, which have been incorporated into what I was describing to you. This basic cybernetic system is a system that has a starting point in a system that has an endpoint, and a system that has a subsystem that monitors progress or deviation from progress along the pathway to the endpoint.

I thought, well, that looks a lot like a story or a map. That's another way of thinking about it. I thought, okay, well, that's where the overlap is. The fundamental story is something like it's very straightforward. It's also the frame that you inhabit when you conceptualize the world. Narrow and simplify the world, which you have to do because it's so complex. You have this infinite number of facts that are laying around you. Well, so what are you doing?

Well, you're a mobile creature, a living creature, not a static information processor. You're targeted; you're a targeted creature. Otherwise, you wouldn't move, right? To move is to be a targeted creature because you have to move towards something or away from something. So the targeting is built right into the fact that you're a mobile creature. Then you might say, well, what do you target? The answer to that is: well, you target. You could say you target what you aim for, but then you could say: well, you aim for what you want. You target your desires.

Then that leads you into a discussion of the underlying neurobiology, essentially. You bring to the table a set of inbuilt desires, and the targets that you pick have to address the fact that those desires exist, and the desires are actually grounded in necessity. This is a sidebar, but this is where I think Piaget’s theory is weaker than it should be because Piaget—and you know I'm a great admirer of Piaget—believed that the human infant came into the world with a fairly primordial set of reflexes, mostly sensory motor reflexes, and then bootstrapped him or herself up on the basis of those reflexes in the sociological—in the social surroundings viewpoint.

That the child comes in with a few basic elements that can get it going; elements of exploration and memory, essentially, and then it builds itself off the consequence of its exploration in the social community. Now, I think that's true, except that it's too empty because what it fails to take into consideration is the fact that—and I think this is an observation, in some sense, philosophically that was first made by Immanuel Kant when he criticized pure reason—that you can't come into the world structureless. You have to come into the world with an inbuilt structure, and then it's the interaction of that structure with the world that provides the information that you can use to build yourself.

But the structure has to be there, and I would say that's the sameness logically speaking as the idea that the great father is always there, right? There's the great mother is always there; that's chaos itself. The great father is always there; that's order. That's the interpretive structure that you use to interact with the chaos. Of course, the individual is always there at the same time. Piaget, in some sense, retold that story except he didn't give enough credence to the fact that the infant comes into the world far more fully formed than his theory presumes.

Now the problem with that is that without that additional underlying set of, let's call them neurobiological constraints, the interpretive universe gets too large. You need constraints to narrow the domain of phenomena that you're contending with, and it's in the analysis of the constraints that the answer to how do you stop drowning in an infinite number of potential interpretations emerges. The interpretations are subject to constraints, and that's also the way out of the moral relativist paradox as far as I can tell.

Now, one of the things I really liked about Piaget was that he describes some of the constraints. One of the constraints was: well if I'm going to exist in a social world—and I'm going to, because I won't exist at all if I don't exist in a social world—then there are constraints on the way that I have to interact with other people. Piaget's essential point was I have to organize myself to play a joint game with you, but the joint game has constraints.

One of them is you have to want to play because you have other options. There are other constraints. You and I have to be able to play in a way that other people don't object to, or maybe even that you and I have to play in a way that other people will support. Then you can imagine another constraint, which is you and I have to play a game in a way that other people would support that will last more than the moment. So it has to work today and tomorrow and next week. It has to work across the span of times. It has to work not only for you and I, but it has to work for our future selves.

So the damn constraints are starting to pile up. That's just on the socio-cultural side; that's on the constructionist side only. But the biological constraints are equally important because not only does the game that you and I have to play have to satisfy those emergent sociological constraints, but the game also has to be organized so that the internal polity that’s composed of, let's call them the fundamental motivational and emotional systems that constitute us, they have to all find satisfaction because otherwise the system grinds to a halt.

This seems to me to be the beginnings of an answer to the postmodern conundrum: okay, any set of facts is amenable to an infinite number of interpretations; fine, got it. That makes deriving an is from an ought very difficult endeavor. Right, no problem. Alright, but that doesn't mean that any old solution will work. Why? Well, first of all, it's merely because we introduced work into the conversation to begin with. The interpretation has to be functional, and again, that seems to tie it back to the story.

This is also what got me interested in pragmatism, technically speaking. Because if your conundrum is here you are and there you have to be, how to get there? Then one of the constraints on the manner in which you interpret the world is when you apply your interpretation, do you end up moving from the point you're at to the point you want to be? If the answer to that is no, then the solution is insufficient. Now, you could call the solution untrue, but it's dangerous to introduce the truth-falsity dilemma because it isn't; its functionality is more. Its functionality is more than truth, although I think you could say that in the final analysis, truth is integrally linked to function.

But I'm not going to touch that question for the time being. The point is that your interpretation of the world carries within it implicitly a theory about its own validity. The theory about its own validity is that if you enact it in the world, it will produce the result that you desire. The consequence of that is that if it doesn't produce the result that you desire, then it isn't a good enough theory, period. That's how you grapple with the fact that although you don't know everything, you still have to orient yourself in the world. You lay out partial theories that make partial predictions, and if they do a good enough job, then you don't worry about it anymore and you go on to the next thing.

So then you think there's a lot of constraints piling up on your interpretations. Number one, they have to work for the creature that you are, and so we can lay it sort of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Something like that's not exactly the same because I don't think that he got the hierarchy right for very complex reasons, but it's reasonably obvious to observe that, well, you're not going to work out very well if you don't have anything to eat. You know you've got about a week in you if you don't have anything to drink, and obviously, you need shelter. You know you need companionship.

By need, what I mean is that if you don't have these things, then you die. The whole game comes to a halt without any real problem, and you might say, well, what's the list of human necessities? That's a difficult thing to parameterize because you can argue about the degree to which something is necessary, but there's some things that we know about. We covered the basics: temperature regulation, elimination, food intake, shelter. But then there's more subtle things, like well children, for example, die without touch. So there's something integral about tactile interaction with other people, so we could call that love if you want to do that.

It's not optional. Play is the same thing. Children do not develop properly unless they play, and I would say that adults also can't maintain their mental health or physical health unless they play too. You can say, well, there's a core set of necessities, and then off of that, there's a secondary set of what would you call them? Their own ultimate necessities? But they're going to be pretty highly valued by people and more or less universally pain avoidance, for example. Under most circumstances, most people don't really like to be in terror. Most people really don't like to be disgusted. You know, you can lay out the basic emotions. You can lay out the basic motivations.

You can say, well, the game that you're going to play has to operate within a space that's defined by that set of a priori constraints. Fine. Now things are getting pretty constrained here. So the game you play has to satisfy that set of biological demands, intrinsic biological demands, and it has to be something that you can utilize with other people voluntarily. It has to be something that will be playable across multiple iterations. And I would say there's a very limited number of interpretive structures that are going to satisfy all of those preconditions simultaneously.

To me, that just blows out two things: it blows out the claims of moral relativism, and it also demolishes—and this is the same thing in some sense—it demolishes the idea that the manner in which people organize themselves in the world as individuals and in societies is somehow arbitrary. Doesn't look to me to be arbitrary at all. So I think Ampere's genius, I think in some part, was observing that in children spontaneously, in that when children pass the egocentric phase (which means after they're about two years old, maybe they're—what?—they're approaching three years old), they've more or less got their internal mechanisms organized so that they're unitary beings.

Roughly speaking, at three they start to develop the ability to use fictional frames of reference. So that's an interesting thing because I would say that the fundamental biological systems come armed with their own frame of reference. So if you're hungry, poof, up comes a frame of reference. Within that, your perceptions are shaped; the action proclivities are primed, and the world lays itself out around that particular biological necessity. You can lay those out the same if you're thirsty, the same if you're too hot, the same if you want to play. All those systems come built in.

But then the problem with that is that they compete because it isn't obvious which one should take priority. It's not that easy to organize them in a social space. What seems to have happened to human beings is that we've been able to replace the frame that's predicated on motivational necessity with abstracted frames that are more voluntarily constructed that incorporate multiple motivational systems simultaneously.

That's, in some sense, the same thing as we've learned how to think abstractly. The frame that you're going to lay out on the world, if it's a good frame, is one that solves a whole set of problems at the same time. You can slot different frames; you can experiment with different frames. That's a precondition to being able to play because one of the things that Piaget pointed out—you can see this when children pretend play—it's like four, and even more clearly in games that have rules.

But let's say they're in pretend play, and they're going to say, well, we're going to lay out a little fictional schema here. We're going to play house, and you can be the cat, and I'll be the dad. Then you negotiate a bit to see if those rules are acceptable, and then you run it as a simulation. That's what kids are doing when they're playing, and they're experimenting with different superordinate frames of reference that are active all in the world, and they're learning how to develop those perceptual schemes and also how to interact in a manner that allows the scheme that they're using to find its social acceptability and success.

The child assumes that the scheme is successful if both children have fun while they're doing it. That's the volunteerism. Piaget made a very interesting point about that that I think is absolutely brilliant. He said there's a difference between a game that people will play voluntarily and one that has to be enforced. Then you can imagine an environment where Game A is played voluntarily; it has a certain end, and Game B is played by force. But both of them are moving towards the same end. Piaget's claim was that the game that's played voluntarily, or even more to the point, the set of all games that are played voluntarily, will out-compete the set of all games that are played by force if they're put head-to-head in a competitive environment.

I thought, God, that's such a brilliant observation because there you have the basis for a pragmatic grounding of the evaluation of ethics. It's like you can pick the target; it doesn't matter whatever target you pick. If the game is voluntary and aimed at the target, it will defeat a game that's imposed by tyranny. Now, it's a proposition, but it's a pretty good proposition, and I would say there's a fair bit of evidence for this proposition, and a fair bit of it is actually derived from the observation of animal behavior because I ran you guys through the emerging literature on the stability of chimpanzee hierarchies, and the chimpanzee tyrant hierarchy isn't very stable.

The reason for that is that subordinate chimps who are three-quarters as strong as the dominant tyrant can take them out, and they do. So then the question might be: well, how do you have to conduct yourself as a high-dominance chimp if you're not going to be torn apart by those who are hypothetically your subordinates? The answer to that is: well, don't be too much of a tyrant; formulate some social connections; engage in some reciprocity with regards to your social relationships; don't oppress the females; don't torment the children, etc. Because that makes you unpopular, and then you'll get torn to shreds.

There are practical limits on the expression of tyranny that are a consequence both of biological limitations—because people are going to object if the system is set up so that their fundamental needs are met—and they're also going to object if the game that's being played isn't functioning socially. So this is a very, very tight set of constraints. The question might be: okay, if you take that set of constraints, what sort of systems can operate? Just that: what systems can operate within those sets of constraints? If you take that set of all systems that might operate within those constraints, and you look at what's common across them, then you could extract out what's essentially a universal morality.

It's something like that, and I don't see how that proposition is precisely questionable. It seems to me that all of that's built on rock. Like there's no doubt that infants bring biological necessity to the table. I think that's fully established, and it's established physiologically, it's established behaviorally, it's established with regards to evolutionary history because we can take the motivational systems that are part and parcel of our being and we can trace their development back in some cases half a billion years.

So the idea that the infant is a blank slate when it's born and thus subject to infinite sociological manipulation is a dead in the water. That's just not the case. So, okay, so far so good. We've got that nailed down hard, and then the idea that your identity is also shaped sociologically—well, I don't think anybody disputes that. It doesn't matter where they are on the interpretative framework. They might dispute the degree to which that occurs and the mechanisms by which it occurs, but the fact that it occurs—that's close enough to self-evidence so we can just leave it there.

Well, then the question is, what are the consequences of the sociological socialization? Once you admit the nifty existence of the realm of biological necessity, you instantly put a set of constraints on how societies can structure themselves so that they will not be torn down and overthrown. Well, if you look at how kids are socialized, I think PSA’s developmental observations are absolutely correct. The first two years, it's mostly interactions between the infant and the parents. It's bi-directional, though, because the infant has to come to terms with the mother, but the mother also has to come to terms with the infant.

So it's not even top-down at the level of the infant-maternal relationship, quite the contrary. If you watch a new mother adapt to a baby, you can see that the mother is doing as much adaptation to the baby as the baby is to the mother because the infant has this inbuilt character already and has to be charmed into a relationship that’s love, attention; it's very little different than establishing a relationship with someone who's older. It's lower resolution, and it's harder to make the observations because of course, the infant is only capable of behavioral displays; it can't speak.

But nonetheless, the necessity for establishing the individual relationship is there to begin with. Even in the early stages of the infant's realization, the process isn't top-down; it's mutual. By the time the child is old enough to be launched out into the social world, then all the constraints that are associated with the playground are immediately placed on that child, and that's a very unforgiving landscape, right? Because the last thing a child wants, really, the last thing a child wants is not to have any friends or even, perhaps equally seriously, not to have a best friend.

I read something so idiotic the other day that I couldn't believe it. The newest Prince—Queen Elizabeth's, I guess, great-grandchild is off to daycare in the UK. In this daycare, they don't let the kids have best friends because that's unfair. I thought, you know, sometimes you see something that's so stupid you can't even believe it exists, and that was one of those examples.

It's been known for quite a long time that one of the developmental milestones that children attain somewhere between, say, the age of five and ten is they pick a best friend. And, you know, the hypothesis is, well, that's unfair to all the other children. It's like, well, first of all, you can't be the best friend to everyone because you didn't. Maybe there are a billion children; so each of them gets one second. It's like, that's just not a very deep relationship.

The idea that you can be equally friendly with everyone is preposterous. Even worse, the thing that the child is doing is actually becoming— they're stepping out of their egocentricity because their best friend becomes more important than they are. That's a precursor for adult relationships where you know, if you're married, your partner should be at least as important as you are, and the relationship should be more important. But then when you have children, it's like, they're more important than you.

Unless there's something wrong with you, you come second and your children come first. That's that. Unless there's something wrong with you, you come second and your children come first. And their way first! They're not just a little buddy; you're necessary because without you, they're not going to manage. So you have to take care of yourself, but you're not number one anymore once you have kids unless, seriously, unless you didn't learn the lessons in the playground.

When you have a best friend, you're not number one; they are.
Anyways, there are these constraints that emerge in the social landscape. You have to have friends, and you also have to single someone out as particularly unique among those friends and establish a genuinely reciprocal and caring relationship.

I can't remember the psychiatrist who studied this so intently, unfortunately. He was the first person to do a detailed analysis of the best friend relationships that children established, and I'd like to give him credit for his ideas, but unfortunately, I can't remember his name.

Okay, so what are the propositions so far? You inhabit a structure, the direction you’re looking in the world that has something that's akin to a narrative structure: I'm here, I'm going there, and this is the way I did it. It's narrative—if you describe it, it's based on biological necessity, but it's shaped by socialization. The fact of that base and that shaping means that the set of interpretive schema that you can lay out in the world are bounded.

Those would be functional systems, hypothetically functional systems, and maybe they compete over the evolutionary timespan. But there's something in common across that set of functional interpretations, and if you extract that out, you can get the initial images of what you might describe as an archetype. You never see it; that's what archetypes are fundamentally.

So, to say all that is no more than to say that people can extract across instances, and we can obviously do that. So then the question is, can you start to develop an articulated picture of what that archetypal structure of universal morality might be? My answer to that was basically, well, let's look at old stories, as many old stories as we can collect. If their stories are stories that have survived for a very long period of time, so much the better because that indicates that they're acutely memorable and peculiarly functional.

If they weren't memorable, then they'd have been forgotten, and if they weren't functional, they wouldn't have managed to be the foundation stories for cultures that lasted for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. So we could say, well, let's collect a whole variety of these stories and see if there's patterns across them. Now, the danger of that is, have you collected an unbiased set of stories? Danger number one.

How do you know that you're not just reading into the stories? That's the postmodern problem: reasonable objections, and those objections have been laid against people like Sir James Frazer, who was one of the first anthropologists to collect stories from all over the world and to start to look for commonalities. The same objection has been laid at the feet of people like Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung. It's like, how do you know you're not just cherry-picking your damn interpretations? Perfectly reasonable.

Perfectly reasonable objections, and I would say that the reason I don't believe that I'm cherry-picking my interpretations is because I used a method. It's a method that's akin to the multi-trait, multi-method method of construction that clinical psychology and other disciplines of psychology rely upon. But it's also akin to a process put forward by E.O. Wilson that he called consilience. The process is something like: well, pick your level of analysis. Does the phenomena manifest itself at that level of analysis? Yes, pick another level of analysis and another level of analysis and another level of analysis.

See if the same phenomena manifests itself at every single level, and then assume that the probability that that will happen by chance decreases with each additional level of analysis that fits that, where there's concordance. I thought, okay, that makes sense. So it isn't only that you can look for patterns in stories because you know, what if you're a hyperactive pattern detector?

Which basically means like there are people like that; people who tilt towards paranoia; people who tilt towards conspiracy theories. You can see it manifest itself in new age thinking all the time because new age thinkers are very high in openness but not very good at critical thinking. They see phenomena A, B, C, and D, they think, "pattern," then they think "universal pattern," but they don't attempt to disconfirm their pattern prediction.

What I tried to do when I was starting to see patterns emerge in the stories informed by people like Campbell and so forth was to see if what they were describing manifested itself at any other levels of analysis that were independent intellectually from that stream of thinking. I found it in two places: targeted cybernetics, and I found it in neuroscience and so on. The neuroscience element includes physiology but also the behavioral analysis that was done by people most particularly like Jeffrey Gray and the animal experimentalists who were brilliant, brilliant scientists and who've done a very good job of laying out the manner in which interpretive frameworks exist within the realm of animal cognition and describe how they manifest themselves in the world.

So I thought, okay, that's not too bad because we've got maybe four different levels of evidence all pointing in the same direction. That's why I walk you guys through the neural psychology. It's like a story is: you're going somewhere, you're somewhere, and you're going somewhere, and you're tracking your progress. Okay. That's the story. Well, what happens when you look at how people lay out their cognitive maps?

Well, it's the same thing: you specify a target, an endpoint; you specify a beginning point, which is just where you are, and then there's a mechanism—a comparator mechanism—that operates or multiple comparator mechanisms that operate physiologically to orient yourself towards that goal. The emotions basically emerge as a consequence of that: positive emotions indicating that you're moving forward properly; negative emotions indicating that you've encountered some kind of obstacle.

It's like, well, that's the basic structure of a narrative. Okay, fine. Now, we can see how it's instantiated neurally, physiologically. That adds a fair bit of credence to the entire process. Normally, when you look at the basic cybernetic work, there's a hypothesis that the system is oriented towards a goal and that it's comparing what is manifesting itself in the world to that desired end state as the system moves. But it's too simple because people don't precisely have goals; they have nested hierarchies of goals.

The issue of emotional regulation becomes more complex than are you proceeding happily towards your current goal. Because your goal is composed of micro-goals and it's a constituent element of a set of macro-goals, that makes the problem of error far more complex than it would be if you only had one frame of reference, and you were only adjudicating your error within that frame of reference.

The question starts to become: what does it mean when you make a mistake? The behavioral answer to that was, well, you encounter a stimulus that's a threat, or maybe a punishment, or an incentive reward, or a consumer reward, something like that. It's a unit dimensional and oversimplified answer. I'm not complaining about it; it has great utility.

But there's a problem, and the problem is it doesn't take into account the nested structure of this goal hierarchy. What that means is that it underestimates the difficulty of responding to an error because the problem with an error is that you don't know what the error signifies, and that's a huge problem. That’s part of what I want to delve into even in more depth today.

This is like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole; it's exactly the same thing. The rabbit hole is you made a mistake, right? You made a mistake, you've got your oversimplified representation of the world laid upon it, it validates itself in its execution if it executes properly. If it executes improperly, then what does that signify? The answer isn't precisely that you've made a mistake; the answer is that it signifies that there's something in the world that you excluded that shouldn't have been excluded.

That's a big problem because when you've laid out a simplified schema on the world, you've excluded virtually everything. What that means is that as soon as you make an error, the search space for the error immediately tends towards the infinite, and you experience that. It's part of the human existential experience, and the way you experience that, especially if your mood is shaky, is you lay out a small plan. Maybe you go out for coffee with someone that you're romantically interested in, and they're not pleasant to you.

That's an error. It means, well, what does it mean? You’ve construed yourself wrong, you've construed them wrong, you've construed the opposite sex wrong, you've construed human beings wrong, you're a walking catastrophe, and you might as well not even exist. That’s pretty extreme, but it's not that extreme. I'll tell you; it's not that uncommon for people to have exactly that set of catastrophic responses to even a minor setback.

Now, it's not good for them, and I would say, you know, just because you scraped your foot doesn't mean you should dig a grave and jump into it, pull the dirt on top of you. You know, you don't want to start by taking yourself completely apart, but that doesn't mean people won't do it. They do it all the time.

In fact, to me, it's always a mystery that they don't do it every single time because the logical inference for why didn't you get someone interested in you could easily be because you're a failure as a human being, and at some level, that's actually true. Now, it's all true in a way that's not that helpful, right? Because it's just too catastrophic, but it isn't obvious at all how people can defend themselves against that cascade of catastrophizing.

I mean, after all, if you are everything you could be, then maybe everyone would be attracted to you. I mean, perhaps not, but you get the point. And no easy rationalization is going to let you just brush that away, especially if you actually happen to be interested in the person because that's even worse because then not only are you rejected, but you're rejected by someone upon whom you've projected an ideal or perhaps from whom you've actually observed an ideal.

So, that's worse. You're rejected by someone that you want to have be attractive to you to validate your old miserable existence. It's a non-trivial problem. So you're in this protected space that I, you know, I made an analogy between that and the Garden of Eden or the city that Buddha was raised in. It's all protected and everything inside it is beautiful and functional. That's by definition because if your frame of reference is working properly, then what's within it is things you control that are functional and serving your purposes.

So when you're successful, you're in the Garden of Eden. That's one way of thinking about it: when the things that you're laying out in the world are delivering what they're supposed to deliver, that's what you inhabit. The problem is that there's always a snake inside the garden. That's the story; that's echoed in the story of Buddha. In that case, it's Buddha’s own curiosity that happens to be the snake, and you could actually say the same thing about human beings.

Maybe it wasn't the snake; maybe it was Eve's curiosity. They're the same thing in some sense. So it's Buddha's curiosity that drives him outside the city to find disease and death and to blow apart his paradisal conceptualization of the world. So when we're looking at universality, the first thing we might say is: well, you have a frame of reference that you've laid on the world; it's a story. You live inside a story.

The second thing is—and that's universally true, the content of the story can differ; that's okay. I don't care about that; it's the structural equivalence that I'm interested in. You live inside the story, and you have to because you have to live in something like that. Because you are goal-directed, and you have to be. You have to simplify the world because there's not enough of you to take into account everything at once.

In fact, you can hardly take into account anything at once, so you have to narrow things unbelievably. By narrowing, and including only certain things, you exclude virtually everything else. So you're always in the problem in the situation where you have this little bounded universe that you inhabit, but outside of it is chaos itself.

That's the existential landscape: order surrounded by chaos. Right? It's like a tree; it's like the evolutionary home of primates—the tree with the snakes on the ground. That's our landscape. Or it's the fire for tribal people and the terrors of the forest that are beyond the light that the fire casts.

It's explored territory versus unexplored territory, and that's an archetype as well. You can't not be in a situation where that's the case, even if you're among friends. You think, "that's explored territory." That's not exactly right because what happens if you're among friends is that they carefully reveal new parts of themselves all the time.

So it's like they're blasting little elements of unexplored territory at you constantly. And if they don't, then what happens? You get bored and you look for new people.

We know there's empirical data on that with regards to intimate relationships because there was a nice study done a while back showing that, looking at the ratio of positive to negative emotional experiences that were most predictive of long-term relationship success, the answer was.

Now, obviously, it depends on how you would measure an event and how you would measure positive and negative emotions. That aside, the finding was something like, if you're in a relationship and you only have five positive interactions for one negative interaction, then the relationship will end. It's too negative.

But if you have more than eleven positive interactions for one negative interaction, then it also ends. And you think, well, that's pretty bloody acute. What in the world? Why in the world would that be? Don't you want like a hundred to one positive to negative interactions? The answer is: what makes you think that you want a relationship, so that you could be happy?

Or at least happy moment to moment. Why do you think that? It's not, it's certainly not the case, as you know—that. I bet you there's not a person in this room who hasn't rejected someone because they were too nice to them or something like that. That person's no challenge. It's something like that.

You want someone who you know you can get along with them, but now and then they bite you, and you think, oh, that's interesting. You know, I didn't really expect that. And then you go and puzzle over it for a while, you torture yourself about it. And that's one of the things that keeps you really linked into the relationship, and the reason for that is that part of the reason that you want the relationship isn't so that you're happy right now.

It's so that you can live a high-quality life across multiple decades. And so you're looking for someone that you have to contend with, who's going to push you beyond what you already are, and who's going to judge you harshly, often for your limitations. Now, that'll make you angry and all about you, you know and resentful, and maybe you'll take your revenge, and all of that.

But you don't want someone who thinks you're perfect in your current form, partly because why would you want to go out with someone that deluded? So, okay, so you've got this interpretive schema laid out on the world, and it excludes the entire world. Because it excludes the world, the world tends to manifest itself inside that protected space in an uncontrollable manner, and that can take you down.

It takes you down the rabbit hole, and down the rabbit hole is where everything is. Because when you make an error, what that is, is the manifestation of the excluded world. The problem with that is that's too much.

Because if you step out of the lifeboat into the ocean, then you drown. That's not any good. You can't drown every time something manifests itself that you didn't expect. There has to be a mechanism for orienting you in the face of error.

Alright, so what exactly does that imply? The question is, what do you discover when you go down the rabbit hole? I was thinking about that a lot today. I showed you that diagram that I thought was like a map of the phenomenological world. The lowest resolution category is something like the dragon of chaos. You might say, "Well, what you discover when you make an error?" The answer is: first, it's a brief manifestation of the dragon of chaos.

That's no more to say, then when you encounter the incursion of unexplored territory into explored territory, the circuitry you use is the same circuits that we use to respond instantaneously to the presence of predatory forces. We use that circuit, and that makes perfect sense because the predator is almost by definition the thing that lurks beyond the safe confines of the community.

I told you I believe a story about rats raised in naturalistic environments. The rats have their burrows on one end of the little field. They're doing their little rat social things, they're playing and they're laughing and they're tickling each other, and they're raising their rat families, and that's all working out just fine.

Now, rats in that situation, by the way, are very difficult to get addicted to cocaine. If you want to addict the rat to cocaine, you have to put it in a cage and isolate it. It's not really a rat anymore than you're a person if you're in solitary confinement, right? I mean, you're mostly just misery.

Anyways, the rats are doing their thing and then they've learned that they can go out to the other side of the field and they can get food. So one day, the experimenters, instead of putting food out there, put a cat out there. The rat goes out, gets a whiff of the cat, which they do not like, and then the rat runs home and pokes its head in the burrow and screams for like two days. Ultrasonic screams. All the other rats are frozen stiff because of that. They're not going anywhere.

A two-day rat screaming is no trivial thing. I calculated that to be the equivalent of screaming for two weeks. You have to be pretty upset to scream for two weeks, right? So, this is hard on the rat. But the reason I'm telling you this is the rat doesn't expect the cat to be there. The rat goes out, and there's a cat, and what it uses is its predator detection and alert systems to signify the presence of the cat.

What we've done with the dragon imagery, roughly speaking, is make an amalgam of predatory monsters, and that serves as a symbol for what lurks beyond safety. Because we're observing our own responses in some sense. It's not only that we're observing our responses, but we also have a categorical set of responses to predators.

Again, there's no speculation about this: we already know this. If you go study monkeys, for example, they have distinct sets of vocalizations that are associated with predator detection that have distinct circuits. We know that there are predator detection circuits, and it's not unreasonable to also presuppose that they underlie the phenomena. For example, that human beings are very good at learning fear of snakes.

Snake fear might be innate. That's pushing the argument, but at minimum, psychologists have already concluded that even if snake fear isn't innate, and it probably is, that it can be learned like that. So you can condition people to be afraid of pictures of snakes way faster than you can condition them to be afraid of pictures of electrical outlets or handguns. That's well-documented.

I don't think anybody disputes that at all. So the first assumption is: when something unexpected emerges—so we'll call that the snake in the garden—that you're prey, and that's a predator, and the monster has come to get you. It's something like that. Now the representation of the dragon is more complex than mere monster because the dragon, the mythological dragon, also is the thing that hoards treasure.

I really like that symbol. I think it's a great symbol because it says: well, the unknown can take you down; it can write you with its fiery breath like a poisonous snake, and it can burn things like fire, and it's an aerial predator that can take you from the air, and it's a carnivorous predator that can take you from the ground. It’s reptilian; it's the sort of thing that can pull you down into the water.

It’s easy to see that as an amalgam of the threats that have been laid forth for human beings since the beginning of time. The monster is an amalgam of predator. You might say, well, there's no such thing as a dragon. It's like, yes, there is. It's just a loose category. What's common across all predators equals dragon.

It's not like they're not real; they're hyper-real. They're more real than the phenomena themselves. Just like an abstraction can be more real than the phenomena, the result—then the canonical dragon for human beings isn't just a predator. We're not rabbits. You can imagine that the dragon for a rabbit is just a dragon; there's no damn treasure there at all.

But for human beings, it's ambivalent because the thing that you don't know about is also the thing that holds the greatest gift. Why is that? It's because the unrealized world manifests itself when you make an error. And the unrealized world is something that can take you down obviously, but it's also the source of all new information. It's an infinite source of information, and that's a really useful thing to know.

Error is an infinite source of information. That's one of the things that can help you recalibrate the way that you interact with the world. You think, well, we're interacting, let's say we're having a conversation, and it's flowing melodically, and all of a sudden I say something, and there's a disjunction. Right? You're offended by it.

There's some negative emotion that comes up, or—Or, or, you know, maybe I've said something to impress you or to be arrogant, and you respond badly. It's like we've got this melodic thing going on—it's a consensual frame—and something pokes itself up to put a disjunction in the conversation. It's like, well, that's where the information is.

It's like something went wrong. Something didn't work out. I'm not looking at the world properly, or I don't know you well enough. There's something there, and if I have any sense, I'm going to focus my attention on that—like not obsessively or anything like that—but where all the information is. Because as long as what we're doing is working, then we both know enough already.

As soon as what we're doing together isn't working, then that's instant evidence that there's something about us that needs to be updated. You might think, well, that's a terrible thing. The answer is yes, of course it is. It's a terrible thing, but it's also the thing—and this is the next stage of the development of this universal morality—it's like the universal morality might be found in the answer to the question, what should you do when you make a mistake?

Now, one answer is catastrophic dissolution. That's a collapse into chaos. Well, no one is going to pick that voluntarily, let's put it that way. That's an unbelievably unpleasant, terribly anxiety-provoking, shameful, and painful all at the same time. Worse, it can mean the absence of positive emotion because if you really collapse into chaos, not only are you overwhelmed by negative emotion, but the positive emotion system shuts off, and that's what happens to someone who's extraordinarily depressed and also hyper-anxious at the same time. Not only are they suffering from an excess of negative emotion, but they've got no incentive movement forward whatsoever.

Okay, so that's not an optimal solution because it takes you out. The other possible—and so I would call that a nihilistic solution or a chaotic solution—it's not a solution; it's a dissolution, and you could think about it as a precursor to a potential solution. But it's very easy to get stuck there. That's why Jonah could have stayed in the belly of the whale along with all the other people that were eaten by the whale and never got back out. You see people like that all the time. Their error has come along, blown out their frames of reference, they've collapsed into the underworld, into the chaotic underworld, and they don't know how to get out.

They have post-traumatic stress disorder, or they're depressed, or they're hyper-anxious, or they're resentful and aggressive and destructive. There are any number of states of being that can overwhelm you when the bottom has fallen out of your life. So it isn't something that people are going to—it's not an optimal solution; let's put it that way.

Well, that's a nihilistic solution, a collapse. The other solution is we're talking and I don't get what I want from you, and so I say you'd better not do that again. I don't want to see that from you again. So that's a tyrannical attitude, right? What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my universe of order and its predictions, and I'm going to say you go along with this or I'm going to punish you.

That’s a no—there is an element in society, like society is made up of threats like that to some degree. It's an erratic level—an erratic part of society—that would be the tyrannical aspect of the Greek king. Let's say, you know, we've organized a set of punishments and threats that keep each of us in alignment. However, generally speaking, in a society that's functional, we've decided to adopt agreement with that set of principles more or less voluntarily.

We say, well, you have rights and responsibilities and I have rights and responsibilities, and I'm willing to pay a price for yours—including the acceptance of punishment if I transgress, but you're going to do the same for me. There are intelligent ways that punishment and threat can be used and bounded, so that could easily degenerate into tyranny. One of the methods that I can choose to use, if I don't want to encounter error, is just to enforce my will on everyone else.

I think when that happens personally and in the family and in the community and in the state all at the same time, then you get the emergence of a tyranny. So I would consider those two counterproductive reactions to the emergence of the unrealized world. It's like you say something I don't like, I collapse completely. Children don't like other children who do that, by the way, right?

It’s something that's very interesting to observe. Let's say kids have organized themselves to play a little game of baseball with a plastic bat and a ball. One child pitches and the other child hits the ball. The child catches it and puts the batter out, and the batter bursts into tears. What happens is the other kids, you know, the first time that happens, they'll be sympathetic; the third time that happens, they won’t invite that kid out to play baseball anymore.

So the answer to—‘we're not getting along’—is not, 'you get to burst into tears and manifest extraordinary emotional distress.' Because if you do that, no one’s going to want to play with you. That’s a lesson that many people could stand learning again.

One of the things I think that’s really destabilizing our society right now is that I'm not sure that kids have been encouraged or allowed to play enough in the last 25-30 years. I think a lot of this identity stuff is actually fantasy play. It's delayed fantasy play because it's sort of what you do when you're seven years old. It's like, well, I'm going to be this identity. That’s what you're doing when you pretend. You're going to go along with that because we're going to play this out.

It's like, that's fine; you don't impose that, though, right? Not if you're a kid that has a clue. You invite people to play; you don't insist on your identity and their compliance with it. It's not a playable game, and you don't burst into tears and run off when someone won't play your game because then they won’t play with you. Then you have to turn to force, and that’s fine if that's what you want to do.

But you better look out because you better be ready to use it. Those crazy people were some morality come to responses insurance applied in your city and will thank you. If we can say researcher A is better than this structure being from a pragmatic perspective, does it come with responses of making sure that people who are trapped, perhaps the cartel restructuring somewhere else, that we have a responsibility against—good question.

I mean, that's part of the question that, in some sense, motivated the American incursion into Iraq, right? So what's our responsibility in relationship to tyranny? That's a good question. All of the increases of families are getting in for non-processing about the situation of human solidarity, yeah.

You know, I think that criticism is more emerging because it's apparently paradoxical. And they’ve laid out a set of principles to which, in principle, they do adhere. One of those principles is to reduce the destructive power of the patriarchy. It's like, okay, there is some destructive patriarchy for you. Radio silence. It's like, hmm. Now, what am I supposed to do about that? Am I supposed to question your adherence to those principles?

Which is exactly what should be done, so I think it's a criticism of performative contradiction. You say you're for this, but when it comes to acting it out, you don't selectively in this situation. There's something wrong. There's something about your game that you’re not being straight about; that's the criticism.

Maybe there are rejoinders to that. You know, well, okay, okay. Responsibility. Well, you know, then you’d have to look at different levels of analysis with regards to interactions. You definitely have a responsibility to your partner and your children. Your responsibility to your children, as far as I'm concerned, is twofold: one, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

There's a corollary to that, which is don't be an idiot, you know. That's partly why you need a partner: because your partner has to tell you when your demands on your children are excessive because you're kind of, you know, you're not 100% oriented properly. But still, you're their target adult. So it's up to you to help them choose a path that makes you want them to be around, right? That's your critical responsibility, and hopefully, you're enough of an analog of the broader community that if they can figure out how to get along with you, it radically increases the probability that they'll be able to get along with everyone.

So for example, if you're playing with your children at two years old, you help them; you encourage them to play in a manner that's fun. If you get that down, then when you introduce them to another child, they know how to play in a manner that's fun. So great! You've solved the problem. The problem is to get your child to enter into the collaborative social world, and so, yes, you have a primary responsibility for that.

Then with regards to your partner, here's something to think about. With regards to role, my wife and I have had this discussion many times. One of the discussions is, well, how are we to treat each other in public? It isn't her name is Tammy; the discussion isn't how should Jordan treat Tammy in public or how should Tammy treat Jordan.

That's not the discussion; this isn't personal. It's how should a wife treat her husband, and how should a husband treat his wife? It's impersonal. It's partly: you don't put your partner down in public. Why? Well, it's not because you're hurting that person's feelings; that's not why. It's that you're denigrating the relationship that you are in voluntarily.

I had some of the most painful days I've ever spent in particular—one in particular I spent with a group of men who had been in therapy for their marriage and who bloody well needed that, I can tell you that. They spent their whole day complaining about their wives. I could just made me sweat the whole day. I thought, I can't believe I'm here with you guys.

I can't tell you why I was; it's just happenstance more than anything, and I thought, how can you be so damn dumb? It's like it's certainly possible that you married barbaric married barbarian witches. Fine, you're so lacking in sense that you would discuss that in public, not noticing that you picked them.

Basically, all you're doing is holding up a sign and waving it constantly that says, "I'm an idiot; I'm an idiot." Right? So back to responsibility. You have a responsibility to those whom you love and are obligated to ensure that they manifest themselves in a manner that's most beneficial to them over the long run.

Now, you have the same responsibilities, I would say, to yourself, but you'll have blind spots; other people have to help you with that. The rule is, you don’t let your wife figure out how not to make a fool of herself in public and she extends to you the same courtesy, and it’s partly maintenance of the sacred nature of the relationship. It has nothing to do with you or her precisely; it's broader and wider than that.

Okay, so then that’s two levels of responsibility: child, partner. Next level of responsibility: you’re asked at your workplace to undergo unconscious bias retraining. You say yes. It's like, okay, you've just admitted that you're a bigot, right? Because you're acting about, I'm a racist bigot; obviously, I need to be retrained.

You might say, well, I'm not going to make a fuss about it, right? Or I've been told to do it. Maybe you agree with it; fine. If that—if you agree with it—no problem, you can make a case for it. I think it's a weak and appalling case personally, but you can make a case for it.

You could say, well, you know, I'm interested in my biases and how to rectify them, and like fair enough. You know people are biased, but if you object to it and you don't say anything, then you're complicit, and then it's on you.

Causes A, B, and C, and B causes C and D, and so forth. The thing tends to snowball, but it has this tendency to expand and you'll come home angry and upset and you'll go to the training program and you'll think this is ridiculous because that is what you'll think in all likelihood, and you won't say anything.

But it eats at you. Well, there’s your responsibility, and so then you might say: well, that's how the community becomes corrupt; that's how the community starts to be corrupt—is that people turn a blind eye to emergent pathology when they know it's pathological. That's exactly what the Egyptian story says: Osiris is overcome by Seth because he's willfully blind.

Willfully blind means he knows but refuses to see. Okay, exactly what sort of monster is this? What does it have: wings, a tail? You cut it down into the—you cut it from the monster that it could be into the monster that it is. That's the first step.

Then you take the appropriate steps, and then you also notice the other monsters because here's something to think about. You're going to pay a price for speaking up, but you're going to pay a price for not speaking up. So it's like monsters on the right, monsters on the left: pick the ones you want to battle with. If you decide not to make your stand, you weaken yourself; if you do it a hundred times, then even if the monster was only this big, now you're this big and it's going to eat you, you know.

When it was this big, you probably could have kicked it across the room. It's too late for that; you've capitulated. What you've done—and this is a way to think about it from a Jungian perspective—this is what Jung was trying to get at when he was talking about the anima. It's like the thing that pops up to object to you is this incredibly complex entity.

It's the entire world encapsulated in the event. If you interact with it, you unpack it, you differentiate your sense of the world, and you gather new skills. Let's say there's something going on at your workplace, and you need to object to it because it's driving you crazy, and you talk it over with your wife so that you've got your head screwed on straight. You say, oh, I've got to say something.

You go there, and you say something, and you know you're stumbling and awkward and all of that. But you watch the response and maybe you get what you're aiming at. Maybe you don't, but you've learned a bunch. You've learned, well, I noticed I wasn't as coherent as I could be, and I'm not as good at putting my arguments together. My boss is more of a son of a bitch than I thought he was; this is a worse problem than I knew about.

Differentiated! Differentiated! So now the landscape is higher resolution, and so are you. Well, so good. Maybe you're a little bit next better prepared the next time you have to do that. The issue here, to some degree, is: don't lose an opportunity to grapple with something that objects to you, especially when the object of objection is rather small.

Because that's something you can say: well, I can put up with it. It's like, fair enough. You don't want to make everything into a war. I usually use a rule of three: if we're interacting and you do something that I find disruptive, I'll note it. It's like potential dragon going on, and I'll leave it be.

If you do it again, I think, oh yeah, that probably wasn't merely situational, but I'll leave it be, because that's still not enough evidence. If you do it a third time, then I'll say, hey, I just noticed this thing. You'll say, no, that didn't happen. I'll say, yeah, not only did it happen, but it happened here, and it happened here. I'm not making this up.

There's something going on here; I'm not ignoring it, and we can get to the bottom of it. Then they'll come up with a bunch of objections about why that isn't necessary, and you push those aside. They'll come up with a few more objections, and you push those aside. Then usually they’ll get mad or burst into tears, and if you push that aside, then you get to have a conversation.

Right? And then you can solve the problem, but man, you've got to be a monster because first of all, you need six arguments about why their objections aren't going to stop you. Then you have to not be intimidated by the anger, and you have to not be swamped by compassion about the tears. Then you can have a conversation. People don't do that; they won't do that.

So they don't solve the problems. Then the problems accrue, and if they accrue over 15 years of a relationship, then they end up fat, ugly, and in divorce court. That’s not a great outcome. Divorce court and cancer are similar in their seriousness—not always, but sufficiently often.

So when that error emerges, it's a glimmering. Now, you know we talked a lot about the hierarchical structure of goals, you know. Here's something to think about: the thing that announces itself as error has a two-fold nature. That's because it's chaos and order at the same time, or it's because it's all the archetypal structures at the same time.

It's the dragon of chaos; it's the great mother, positive and negative; it's the great father, positive and negative. It's the individual hero and adversary—all of that manifests itself in the moment of error. The archetypes come forward. Did you make an error because you're a bad person?

Could be. Now, so one of the things to think about with regards to that is: you know in the Mesopotamian creation story, when Tiamat comes flooding back, it's so interesting that story. You think about what she does. So she's the archetype of error, let's say. The error that can take you out, the error that can dissolve you in salt water tears. Well, she's irritated because the absolute was destroyed; the structure is gone, carelessness is destroyed; the structure up comes Tiamat, and she's not happy.

What does she do? She prepares a phalanx of monstrous monsters. It’s exactly what the story says. She produces a whole horde of monsters to come at you, and she puts Kingu at their head. Kingu is the king of the monsters. Later, so he’s the ultimate bad guy. He’s Satan for all intents and purposes in the Mesopotamian version.

It’s out of him that Marduk makes human beings, out of his blood. That’s a critical issue: in the Mesopotamian tale, imagine the worst monster you can possibly imagine; the king of all the monsters, that’s the blood of human beings. Wow! So what does that mean? Well, it means that one of the terrible things that lurk—let’s say that you’ve been in a long-term relationship and it collapses.

Let's say you had a tendency toward alcoholism. You weren't so great with regards to your drug use, you know, that conscientious, and you had four or five kind of low-rent affairs and, you know, your marriage collapses: bang! Well, who do you first meet when you fall into chaos?

You meet the king of the monsters, and he's you. It's like, why did my marriage fall apart? What did I do wrong? Bang, bang, bang, bang, I did all these things. Well, why? Because that thing inhabits me. What is it? Well, that's the most horrifying question. Well, that’s why.

So down there in the archetypal space, all these things lurk: the hero and the adversary. You've just met the adversary, right? Well, maybe your tyrant; that's certainly possible. Maybe everything around you was chaotic. So what do you encounter when things fall apart?

You encounter the adversary; you encounter the tyrant; you encounter the catastrophe of nature; and you encounter the dragon of chaos. They're all intermingled. You have to sort that out. That's what happens to Alice when she goes down the rabbit hole. Right? She meets the Red Queen, and the Red Queen is always running around saying, "Off with their heads! Off with their heads!" And she says, "In my kingdom, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place." Right?

Down the rabbit hole, you meet the archetypes. So, okay, back to responsibilities. One of the things Solzhenitsyn detailed is, we said: well, how do societies go corrupt? It's easy: one little sin at a time. You go to work; someone's lording it over you; you know that they're tyrannical; you don't have the wherewithal to stand up.

It’s like: okay, you're a slave. If you continue to agree to be a slave, you will continue to generate tyrants. Right? The only thing that can stop you from doing that is the right kind of terror. It's like careful what you give up, because that's—the logos, okay? That's the logos.

The logos is the thing that enables you to mediate between order and chaos, and maybe you have to have some faith in that. It’s like, well, what should you do if someone is harassing you? Well, you should fight back, okay? What is that? What’s the most effective way to fight back? Well, sometimes it’s physical, but that's not necessarily for the best.

Maybe it's through articulation; maybe it's through analysis. Right? You want to be sharp; you want to be able to decompose a problem; you want to be able to formulate an argument and counter-response; you want to be so good at that that people don’t mess with you to begin with. Then you're a perfectly articulate counter-monster, and you never have to take your sword out.

That's that's the place that you want to be. It's like people should know after three seconds of interacting with you that harassing you would be a seriously bad idea, and then you'll have a perfectly fine time with them. There's some utility in meeting the devil in the underworld, right? Because maybe he's got something to teach you. That's certainly possible.

One of the things that you can be taught is that your normative morality, which is basically your harmlessness and your naivety masquerading as virtue, is completely insufficient to protect you in the world, especially against the sorts of things you're talking about, which are tyrants. Tyrants will push until you push back; it's in their nature. They don't have internal controls, so they just push and push and push and push and push and push.

Even kids do that. Little kids do that all the time. They'll just push you until they hit that wall. They're actually quite happy when they hit a wall because the last thing a child wants is a universe without walls. It terrifies them. Right? They want to see while I'm in a swimming pool, there's an edge. They don't want to see, "Oh, no, this isn't a swimming pool. This is an ocean. I'm going to drown."

That's a terrible thing for children. That's why they need discipline and structure because it's consistency and predictability and routine and all the things that are extraordinarily helpful to them.

Okay, so now think of that hierarchy that we talked about. So you’re not in a story; you’re in nested stories. The nested stories round themselves in action—in actual embodied action. So if you’re going to sit if you’re going to be a good partner, maybe you help prepare the meals, and to help prepare the meals means you pick up a plate with your hand and you move it physically through space, and you put it on the table.

That's where it stops being an abstraction. So at the bottom of an ethical hierarchy of value are actions, not things, that’s the scientific world—but actions. Then you can label the actions with abstractions as you move up the hierarchy. So, you’re good at setting the table, so that means you’re good at making dinner, so that means that you've got one element of being a good partner in place.

Being a good partner is one element of being a good person. And so, you’re not so good at setting the table, and you say, well, I’m not a good person. It’s like, well, no, you should go down to the higher resolution levels of the hierarchy and start there, and that's what you do when you’re arguing with people, but there’s another thing that's really useful about conceptualizing the hierarchy in this manner.

So I think what we’ll do is we’ll stop now for ten minutes. Because I want to bring up this diagram because what I want to do next is it’s a bleak story at the moment because the story is something like: you’re going to lay out oversimplifications in the world and they're going to be prone to catastrophic error, and then you have to encounter what’s terrifying in order to progress.

What that means is that progression is always dependent on terror, something like that. There’s some truth in that, and that’s why people don’t progress, but it’s not sufficient truth, and I want to unpack that when we come back. So, let’s come back in ten minutes, and then I can unpack that.

There's this parable in the New Testament that just came to mind. I'm going to mangle it a bit because it’s not one that I have well memorized but I think—I think I’ve got it right. Christ is walking down the road and someone picks him up. The person is rich, wealthy, and they have a talk, and the wealthy man basically tells him all the things that are wrong with his life.

Then he asks him what he should do about it, and Christ says to him, you have to give up everything you own and follow me. That's often been read as a criticism of wealth, and that’s actually not what the story means. What the story means is this: this guy has a lot of wealth, but he’s still miserable.

That means that what he has is the obstacle to what he could be. That’s the message of the story: if you’re miserable with what you have, then you have to let go of what you have so that maybe you could have something else. There’s some commentary on that story.

I think other people are listening and they say, well, if that’s