2017/03/11: Strengthen the Individual: A counterpoint to Post Modern Political Correctness

[Music] Thank you. I'm supposed to be nice and loud, so I guess that's what I do. So, my name is Tammy. Um, Jordan and I have known each other, uh, for up nearly 50—nearly 50 years. Nearly 50 years. How's that? Oh, that's better.

Um, we come from Northern Alberta. He lived up the street from me. I always knew he would be a fascinating person. So in my late 20s, uh, he moved East. I was in Montreal, and I thought it's probably time to marry him because if I don't marry him, I won't know what happens. And now we're seeing what's happening.

Yeah, I mean, he's been talking about these things. He's been talking about what's going on in our society and how it's moving left and how things are destabilizing for the last 20 years. So when in September he said he came down one morning, and he was quite disturbed. He said, "You know, I've got a couple of emails that I can't deal with; I can't deal with quietly, and I'm going to have to say something. What do you think?"

I said, "Well, you've been speaking to me and my son, who was there too, for a very long time, and maybe it is time for you to tell everyone what's going on." And so he did. We didn't know what would happen; you know, we didn't have any idea. He just went up and made a video and said what he's always said and what he's always thought and what he sees coming down the pipes.

Um, it resonated with a tremendous, um, response and mostly almost, you know, 95% or more positive response. So although it was destabilizing in our family at the beginning, now it's a—it's a good thing, and we've learned a lot. You know, myself, I wasn't as learned as him, but I've sure learned a lot, and I know you guys have too, and you're going to learn a whole bunch more today. So welcome.

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So who's—you're filming this? Can I walk around? Yeah, can you hear me without the microphone? Good, then I'll be able to walk around.

So I want to tell you a story. The sound might not be as good; you're not on the mic. This is going to be broadcast. Uh, I have a mic on here. Yeah, so, okay. So I started studying the things that I have been talking about in—well, really as long back as I can remember. I think that's true. I wrote an essay when I was about 13 on the Holocaust. It wasn't a very good essay, but I was only 13, so it's not that surprising.

But I don't know exactly why it was of particular concern to me, except that, of course, it's the sort of thing that should be of concern to everyone. I'm sorry, but there—people have a hard time hearing me. Please, how about if I speak a little louder? All right, all right, no, I'll do it this way.

I think if, if you have any trouble at the back, let me know, and I'll make sure that I'm projecting. So I said when I was about 13, I wrote an essay on the Holocaust, and I was trying to understand it. Um, I think maybe I tried to understand it in a way that was somewhat different than most people who examine historical events because I was trying to understand how human beings could do that, knowing full well that I was one of them.

And that's the critical thing because generally when people examine especially something horrifying that's done by humanity, they make the assumption that it's other people doing it, and that's a big mistake in my estimation. Because if a lot of human beings have done something terrible, you can be sure that being a human being, that you're capable of it.

And you know, one of the things that we've been asked repeatedly to do as a consequence of what happened in World War II is to not forget it, but it's always been my contention that you can't remember something you don't understand. And you don't understand what happened in Nazi Germany, or in the Soviet Union for that matter, until you understand that had you been there, the probability that you would have played a role—and that wouldn't have been a positive one—is extraordinarily high.

When people do think about themselves as actors in situations like that, they have a proclivity to cast themselves in the heroic role, assuming that had they been, say, in Nazi Germany in the 1930s that they would have taken on the burden of fighting against the Nazis and defending the things that should have been defended. But that's a very foolish presupposition, especially because it's more or less self-evident from the historical perspective that that isn't what people did.

And in order for us to come to terms with that, it means that we have to understand how it happened. But more importantly, what role we still play as individuals in acting in such a way that such things are not only likely but desired.

When I was older and in university, I was plagued by nightmares, mostly about—they were apocalyptic nightmares mostly about the Third World War. And I had very large, long series of dreams about nuclear bombs. Um, I remember one of them. I was living in Edmonton at the time and on the south side, and I could remember watching out through my window in the dream and seeing a mushroom cloud form over the main core of the city.

And then the dream shifted. Lo and behold, there were a bunch of people in the wreckage, and they started to fight. And I thought, that's just exactly right. And that was exactly what my nightmares were like—no matter how tremendous the catastrophe, we don't seem to be able to derive the proper conclusions from it and start to act in a way that makes such things less rather than more likely.

When I was in graduate school at McGill, which would have been after that, I was studying political science. Before that, sorry, back when I was in Edmonton. And before that, I had even thought about going into law. But as I studied political science, I got increasingly disenchanted with the explanations that were being offered to me about motivations for human conflict.

Um, especially in the upper years of my undergraduate education. The lower years were pretty good because mostly what I studied was political philosophy and literature, and I found that very helpful. But in the upper years, the contention of the professors was that people primarily engaged in conflict for economic reasons.

That never struck me as a very deep explanation because it didn't get at the core of the issue, which was, well, okay, people fight about things of material value, but why do they value those things?

I mean, it's kind of self-evident if you think about food and shelter and so forth. But, you know, generally speaking, especially in the 20th century, it wasn't necessarily about the basics of food and shelter that people were engaging in conflict about. It was something much more subtle than that. Maybe it had more to do with national identity, with identity, that kind of thing.

And so there was a psychological element missing in the analysis of the human propensity for conflict that to me loomed larger and larger. And so I decided, at least in part for that reason, to pursue a graduate degree in psychology—in clinical psychology. And I went to McGill, and that's when I started to read very much more broadly, I suppose.

And I spent a lot of time reading. I read a lot of Freud and a lot of all the classic clinical psychologists who are extraordinarily useful: Carl Rogers, and Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Adler, and a whole host of them— all the classic thinkers I could get my hands on. And also, most particularly, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, most of whose major works I read at that point.

And Theodore Dostoevsky, who was writing very similar things to Nietzsche. Very, in fact, Nietzsche was quite influenced by Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky was like a master in the literary genre. His five great books focused on the most difficult questions that faced humanity, both socially and individually. I found those books overwhelmingly powerful and also extraordinarily useful.

Good Beyond Good and Evil, or, um, Crime and Punishment, for example, is a brilliant, brilliant piece of work outlining the motivation of someone who regards himself as above all law and who decides that to not kill when necessary is an act of cowardice. And Dostoevsky walks through his rationalizations and the murder and the aftermath of it in a way that's extraordinarily enlightening and painful simultaneously.

And at the same time, Nietzsche in Germany was writing philosophical tracts on exactly the same themes. Their lives ran in unbelievably close parallel. In fact, when Nietzsche finally went insane, he had some illness that has been very difficult to diagnose. He had seen someone beating a horse in the street and embraced it out of compassion. And there's a scene exactly like that in one of Dostoevsky's stories.

So it's—the parallels are really uncanny. And I also read a lot of neuroscience because I did my thesis on the biological predisposition to alcoholism, and that required a lot of investigation into more hardcore science—investigation into the structure and function of the brain.

And I tried to weave all of that together in a book that I published in 1999. It took me about 15 years to write. I was writing three hours a day, every day, and thinking about it all the time. Like, I was absolutely 100% obsessed by the sorts of issues that I'm discussing with you today. It took me deep. I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn and much of what he wrote at the same time.

And then, of course, I studied Carl Jung in great depth when I finally started to crack what he was talking about. It was extraordinarily difficult material. I read volume 9 of his collected works, which is called "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." The first time I read it, I didn't understand a word he was saying.

And I think that's a very common experience for people reading Jung, who's certainly persona non grata in the modern Academy. And I think the reason for that is that, well, I think when you first encounter Jung, you tend to bounce off him. And then the next thing that happens is you get very frightened, and then you just leave it the hell alone.

And it's no wonder, as far as I'm concerned, because I don't think I've ever read anyone—including Nietzsche—that was more terrifying than Jung. Um, Nietzsche was a student of Nietzsche. I don't mean technically speaking, although Nietzsche was everywhere; Nietzsche's thinking was everywhere when Jung was maturing.

People know Carl Jung primarily as a disciple, let's say, of Freud, which is true in part because Freud, of course, did the initial—you might call it, might describe it as initial excavating work. Outlining the fact that there was more going on in the human psyche than met the conscious eye. And his greatest work, likely, was "The Interpretation of Dreams," where he started to perform an archaeology of the symbolic unconscious, um, showing that much of our mental life went on—in some sense, underneath our conscious awareness—which is, of course, regarded as a truism now by psychologists but was quite revolutionary at the time.

It wasn't Freud's; it wasn't entirely an original idea with Freud. Few things are entirely original ideas, but he went farther than anyone else synthesizing it and also publicizing and promoting it and also basing a psychotherapeutic theory on it—a really remarkable set of accomplishments.

And Jung was very much influenced by Freud, but also by Nietzsche. And the reason he was influenced by Nietzsche most particularly, um, was that Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God in the late 1900s was a very striking philosophical event.

And I'll return to this, but Nietzsche believed that because God was dead, so to speak, and the value structure upon which Western civilization was constructed had God at its foundation, that that would all crumble and that people would have to become their own deities, in a sense. They would have to discover or create—for Nietzsche, to create—their own values. And before Nietzsche could outline how that might happen, he suffered the unfortunate descent into madness and then died.

And so he left this major problem behind, which is if it's the case that the ideational foundation of Western civilization was predicated on an illusion, what would we do next? And Nietzsche said, well, what we will certainly do next is descend into an unholy combination of nihilism and totalitarianism because those will be the things that will beckon most clearly in the chaotic aftermath of the dissolution of the value structure upon which our society had been predicated.

And Nietzsche, in his book "The Will to Power," prophesied very directly that millions of people would die in the 20th century specifically because of communist revolutions. And that was 40 years—roughly speaking—30 to 40 years before the Communist Revolution in the Soviet Union.

So that's an act of prophetic vision that's absolutely incomprehensible to—I mean, in the West, we didn't know that the Soviet Union was going to fall until the day it fell. And Nietzsche knew what was going to happen in the 20th century like—in like 1880. It's absolutely remarkable.

Jung was very interested in the Nietzschean problem, more interested in it than anything else because he knew that the question of where we would derive our values from and how we would ground them in some sort of underlying solid underlying reality would become, was the paramount psychological question of the age. And he spent his entire, his entire life attempting to address that.

Jung's idea was that we weren't going to be able to create our own values because human beings cannot create their own values. And you know that—you know, if you observe your own action, if you observe your own being, you can make resolutions, you can try to act in a particular way—maybe a way that you regard as better—but you'll find out very rapidly that you can't enslave yourself and tell yourself what to do so easily. Even when you're motivated to do good things, you know when you make your New Year's resolutions and say that you're going to eat properly and go to the gym, that generally lasts about a week.

And so you can't boss yourself around, as it turns out, no more than you can really boss other people around. And it's because you do have a nature. You have a nature, and you can't just arbitrarily mold and shape that nature because you, like other people, will rebel against your own will.

And so Jung's contention was that we would have to go inside ourselves. That's how he looked at it—into the symbolic background of our psychological structure and rediscover what we had lost. And so I found that's the ancient mythological motif of voyaging to the depths and rescuing your father from the belly of the beast.

And you see that idea reflected often in popular culture. Um, a very well-developed example of that is in the movie "Pinocchio." How many of you have seen that movie? Yeah, right. Well, that speaks for itself, right? I mean, there's a—why—why are you watching a puppet, an animated puppet, rescue his father from the belly of a whale? It makes absolutely no sense, but you don't care when you're watching it. You think, this is quite interesting.

And the reason it's interesting is because it speaks to you at a level that you understand but that you do not understand how you understand. And of course, any good work of art does exactly that to you. It speaks to you about things that you almost know but don't yet know, and that's what makes it profound.

And Jung knew that it would be necessary for modern people to journey to the chaotic depths and rescue their dead father from the underworld, which is a very interesting symbolic realization in the aftermath of Nietzsche's statement that God had died.

And so that's what Jung did—that's what he spent his entire life doing. And he detailed that out in a very long series of very difficult and very unsettling books, um, which people tell and not to read—and no wonder. And no wonder.

And so I read everything I could get my hands on that Jung had published at that point and a lot of work by various historians of religion, like Mircea Eliade, who's out of favor because the postmodernists don't like him. And I put this all together in this book that I published in 1999 called "Maps of Meaning." And it's also a very difficult book, and that was somewhat purposeful and somewhat inevitable.

It was purposeful because I knew that if I was going to discuss such things and I didn't make it ridiculously rigorous—at least to the degree that I was capable of doing that—that it would be easily dismissed, and um, that seemed counterproductive. But it was also because I was trying to figure out. Rather than trying to write a book, I was trying to figure something out, and I was doing that by writing because writing is a very good way of figuring things out.

And I was trying to make it as clear as I could, but that wasn't all that clear, you know? It's about 500 pages long, I think, this book, and I think I rewrote every sentence in it at least 50 times—probably too many times. By the end, it got—I think I over-edited it. I think it's—in some sense, too tight.

It's like an overworked piece of art. That might be one way of thinking about it. But then, it's taken me decades of speaking about it to continue to, what would you call it, purify and refine it so that I can discuss it without having to go through dozens of hours of explanation and to condense it down into something that's more easily comprehensible.

So that's what I'm going to try to do this afternoon. Um, I want to tell you why I think we're in the position that we're in, what that position is, and also potentially what can be done about it. And those seem—because also I believe, and still do believe, that if you actually understand a problem, you can solve it.

But—but you have—that's actually an indication of your understanding, right? If you, if you, if you haven't solved it, you actually don't understand it. There's things about it that you still don't grasp. And so when I was writing "Maps of Meaning," I wasn't so much trying to only figure out why it was that people were capable of the terribly barbaric things that they so happily did at Auschwitz, but also to figure out what could be done, if anything, to stop that from happening.

Because it was also by no means self-evident that anything in fact could be done about it, you know? Because that might just be an expression of that central human nature that I was talking about earlier and be fundamentally irreparable.

There's been no shortage of writers who've proposed that human beings are fundamentally flawed in a way that cannot be rectified and that, you know, we have a catastrophic destiny waiting for us as a consequence. I mean, in some sense, that's built right into the fabric of Christianity itself.

Because, of course, at least certain variants of it, and I'm speaking about Christianity because in many ways it's at the foundation of Western society—because certain elements of Christianity, at least, regard people as irretrievably or irreparably tainted with original sin, which emerged right at the birth of our species.

And there's something extraordinarily powerful about that idea because, of course, everybody in this room knows that they're seriously flawed and also knows that they do things that make those flaws more rather than less likely. And everyone has that sense about themselves unless they're, uh, you know, narcissistic beyond belief, in which case they also suspect it, but only at an unconscious level.

So, you know, we do carry this sense of ourselves as deeply flawed and imperfect, and maybe fatally so, and that seems to be built right into us. And so maybe there is no solution, but that seemed like a dismal hypothesis to begin with.

So I wanted to do as Nietzsche—and I wanted to investigate as deeply as I possibly could to see if I could conjure up something that vaguely represented the solution. And for a long time, you know, there were months when I was writing where I really felt quite mad, and one of the most intense periods of time where that occurred was when I think I was kind of on the cusp of figuring out what I needed to figure out.

I'd figured out two things. One was that I kind of understood finally why people had belief systems. It wasn't that the belief system was there because we have to deal with an infinitely complex world, and we have to simplify it down to proportions that we can manage because we don't have infinite cognitive or emotional or physiological resources. We're very bounded creatures living in an unbounded environment, roughly speaking. It's too much for us.

And so we have to impose structures of simplification on the world, or we get so stressed we die. That's roughly the bottom line. Um, for example, if you develop post-traumatic stress disorder, which occurs when you encounter something in your life that you cannot compute, so to speak, your body goes into emergency preparation mode, which makes it hyper—hyper-responsive to threat and ready to do anything, which is emergency preparation.

And that's so physiologically demanding that it demolishes your health. It's not merely psychological; it damages your brain. I mean, you just can't stay in high gear running flat out continually. You die. And so people need to simplify the world. They need to live within structures of simplification because that's how they protect themselves from the terrible onslaught of complexity.

But by the same token, we organize ourselves into these structures of simplification. That's what our cultures are. We negotiate them; we inhabit them jointly. And because of that, when we run into people who do that differently, the probability that we'll engage in conflict is extraordinarily high. Because I can't give up my beliefs just because you have different beliefs.

And if we don't have the same beliefs, then we can't peacefully occupy the same territory. So there seems to be nothing for that except conflict. If we can't negotiate, then we have to fight. So then I thought, well, that's—that's it. Then on the one hand, we can't abandon our belief systems because they structure our realities and protect us. But—and we can't fight because now we're so technologically powerful that if we do, we're going to destroy everything. It's like, well, that's—that's option one.

And its opposite completely exhausts the options. And so that was a horrible realization, absolutely dreadful realization. Because, you know, it's certainly possible—if you think about this from a biological or an evolutionary viewpoint—that we're kind of a peculiar species, and we've developed these terrible technologies of war.

And there's absolutely no reason to assume that we won't just use them to wipe ourselves out. And you know, maybe 30% of us as individuals and in our own psyches would be happy about that because life is pretty dreadful, and it's full of suffering, and there's lots of things that are harsh about existence. And so maybe we should just let the whole thing go.

And believe me, people are plenty motivated to do that. If you haven't observed that motivation in yourself at some point in your life, either you're not paying attention or don't want to pay attention, or something sufficiently dreadful has not yet happened to you, but it will. It will, you know, because everyone encounters catastrophic crisis in their life, and it drops the bottom out of them and makes them desperate and angry.

And that's also part of the human condition. Luckily, after about three months of thinking about that, I had a series of dreams that helped me sort out a third alternative. And that was, of course, at least in part emerged as a consequence of all the things that I was reading.

So I want to return to the Nietzschean conundrum. So Nietzsche was an extraordinarily astute critic of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He wrote a book called "The Anti-Christ," in fact, and he also said that he philosophized with a hammer. And what he meant by that was that he was taking the hardest, heaviest object he could and smashing up everything he possibly could with as much intellectual rigor as he could manage. And that was plenty because he was truly a genius.

But he wasn't a nihilistic person—quite the contrary. He had a very good reputation among those who knew him for example as a very kind man, but he was in part looking for something that he couldn't destroy, right?

Because that's partly how you find out what's real. You hit things, so to speak. You push against them. Your children do that to you, for example—they push against you to see where you won't yield. And then they think, ah, there's reality there; there's a wall there, I can't go beyond that. And that's what Nietzsche was searching for.

And he was doing it all out fundamentally. Now, his contention was that what had happened in the West was that the Judeo-Christian tradition—and even the precursors of that tradition upon which from which that tradition emerged—had insisted for millennia that the pursuit of truth was the highest moral value.

And that one of the consequences of that was that the West developed science, which was part of that pursuit of the truth. And then the tools of science, once successfully grasped and universalized, were then turned against the dogmatic structure of the church when everyone woke up as scientists, so to speak, and thought, well, we're living by a set of superstitions, and they're not true, and we have to dispense with them.

And so that was Kierkegaard, and that was Darwin, and that was Freud, and that was these repeated blows that our symbolic culture took at the hands of something that had fostered and created. And Nietzsche said something as well at the same time when he remarked on this consequence. He said one of the most terrible things about discovering that a system you believed in no longer functions or can be undermined is that it raises the specter that all such systems have the same flaws.

You know, sometimes you can jump from atheism to Christianity and from Christianity to socialism, say, in successive leaps, and then you're someone who's faithless from within the perspective of a given system, but you're faithful to the idea that there are, in fact, systems that will work. But if your system fails enough, then you can end up in a situation where you don't even have any faith in the idea that systems as such can work, and that makes you nihilistic.

And Nietzsche saw that as the origin of the specter of nihilism—hopelessness, fundamentally. Now, it's more complicated than that because there are underground reasons, so to speak, for being nihilistic that have nothing to do with the mere collapse of a rational belief system, and I'll talk about those too.

And he also talked about the inevitable rise of totalitarianism as a medication for the loss of all meaning. In some sense, you might say, well, if you're in a chaotic state because you no longer know what to believe, it's very—and someone offers you a set of certainties to guide your life by—then it's very attractive for you to reach out and grip onto those with all of your soul, so to speak, because that stops you from merely being drift. And then there's underground reasons for that, too, that I'll also return to.

So the first question is: was it necessary for the sense of truth that Nietzsche had described, as developed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, that then manifested itself in the scientific methodology, to turn against the symbolic foundation of that structure and demolish it? Was that inevitable, and was it correct? And that's the first question.

And so Jung's answer to that was the conflict between science and religion is a consequence of the immature state of both of those domains of thinking. It's not built into the structure per se; it's just that we aren't good enough at being religious or good enough at being scientific in order to see how they might be reconciled.

Now, that's a—that's a hell of a claim, and it's a frightening claim because— and this speaks to some degree to the underground reasons for being nihilistic. So the terrible thing about being nihilistic is that nothing you do has any meaning. And that's not so good because actually it's actually untrue because there are forms of meaning in life that nihilism won't protect you from or even increase your exposure to, and those are the tragic meanings of life.

I don't care how nihilistic you are; what you don't believe in, you're going to believe in your own pain. You're going to believe in your own anxiety. You're going to believe in the fact of pain and anxiety for everyone else. You're going to believe in tragedy. You can't think yourself out of the catastrophe of the world by being nihilistic, so the negative meanings remain.

You can dispense with the positive meanings, which seems to be a bad bargain. But the upside of doing that is quite straightforward. If I said to you, here's your alternatives: nothing you do matters or has any meaning—alternative one—everything you do matters and has meaning. Which one would you pick? And you might think, well, of course, I would go for the second alternative because the first one is so horrifying.

But the truth of the matter is, the second one is even more horrifying because it means that the things that you do, for better or worse, actually do matter and in some sense, you're responsible for them— not only for the effect that they have on you in the immediate circumstances of your life but for the effect that they have radiating out from you to other people that you're networked to and also as they make waves through time.

It could be that everything you do does matter—that every choice that you make matters. And I do believe that that's the case—that you're constantly making choices between good and evil, and that that determines the destiny of being. And it isn't obvious to me at all that that's something that you would wish upon yourself.

And so one of the advantages to being nihilistic is it enables you to be totally irresponsible, even though the price you pay for that is the sacrifice of all positive meaning. Well, so much for the intellectual purity of nihilism, right? And so those sorts of things have to be considered very deeply because when someone says, "Well, I'm hopeless," sometimes it's because they're suffering, and people can suffer terribly because of that.

But sometimes it's because they don't want to be responsible for anything, and no wonder. Back to Jung's point. Jung started to examine religious ideas, I would say symbolically, but it's more complicated than that because you might think that the attempt to analyze religious thinking symbolically would reduce it to nothing but psychology, but that isn't what happens precisely because as you reduce the religious ideas to psychology, you elevate the psyche.

And so they meet in the middle, and this is something Jung understood very, very well. It was for that reason that he believed that Christ was a symbol of the Self—the Self being your full totality. That might be one way of thinking about it—everything that you could conceivably be, if you were everything that you could be.

And that's that potential that rests inside you that everyone knows about. You know, we also even speak about it because we take people to task when we say you're not living up to your potential. And everyone knows what that means, but no one knows what it means because what the hell is that potential?

It's not something that's real by definition; it's something that's virtual. It's something that is yet to be and may never be. But we still treat it as if it's real, and we also treat the entire world as if it's made out of potential. And I believe that that is the correct way of viewing the world. It's not the dead matter of the 18th-century rationalist or empiricist; it's the living domain of potential that we interact with on a regular basis, from which, at least to some degree, we extract our own potential.

Here's a rough outline of the story that Jung told that I've been working on. So I'm going to tell it as I understand it. According to the selection of stories that were encapsulated in the biblical tradition, the world is roughly 6,000 years old. And of course, at one level of analysis, that's palpably absurd, I would say, um, and also narrow because I think to conceptualize the world as 15 billion years old with a developmental history that extends across that massive amount of time and to note that it extends incomprehensibly vastly outward is a much more magnificent view of the cosmos than the rather constrained cosmos that we inherited from thinkers in the Middle East, say, 10,000 years ago.

But there's something about it that's true, and the truth in it seems to be its relationship to the origin of civilization. Because it is the case that civilization everywhere in the world of the sort that we would regard as complex and technological is about 6,000 years old. And why that is is not so self-evident, although I suspect it has something to do with how long it took us to reformulate ourselves after the last ice age, which, of course, was only roughly 15,000 years ago.

It's not really that far away in time. So that's the first thing. But the second thing is what the story—the creation stories in Genesis, for example—actually mean because they actually mean something, and what they mean is absolutely remarkable in my estimation. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that story, um, because it's necessary to understand what the story means to determine if what Nietzsche said about the inevitable destruction of our symbolic religious structures by science was inevitable and necessary.

And I think the answer to that is no. We just didn't understand what the hell we were doing any more than we really understand why we put up Christmas trees at Christmas. So we do that in part because the Christmas tree is a symbol of life because the tree is a symbol of life because we inhabited trees for untold millions of years, and we put lights on the trees to symbolize the coming back into the darkness of midwinter of the sun and the light.

And so we play this symbolic game that celebrates both life and the emergence of light and consciousness, and we associate that with the birth of the Savior, but we don't know that we're doing that. But we do it anyway. And we do that sort of thing all the time because we're smarter than we know.

And that has to be the case because we don't know ourselves. We wouldn't need psychology or sociology and anthropology or any of those things if we were transparent to ourselves. We're machines, so to speak, that are far more intelligent and wise than the machines themselves can understand. And we reveal ourselves to ourselves in our action and our symbolic gestures constantly, and then have to reflect on that to try to understand what it is that we're up to.

So here's the idea that lurks at the beginning of Genesis. So, there's three elements that are involved in the creation of habitable order from chaos at the beginning of time. One of them is whatever is represented by God the Father, and one of them is whatever is represented by the chaos that exists at the same time, and the other is whatever is represented by the idea of God's word—that's the logos from a Christian perspective—which is a very, very strange idea.

So, there's this idea that was developed over the course of thousands of years that the redeeming Savior was also the thing that God used to extract habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time. It's a very strange idea. And—and to assimi- late an idea of that preposterousness and magnitude to mere rational superstition is foolish, first of all, because we don't even understand what it means.

But it means something utterly profound, and it means something that we cannot forget. We forget it at our peril. The story at the beginning of Genesis means that structure—that's the Father—that's the patriarchy, if you will—structure extracts habitable order from chaos through speech, and that's what we do.

It says in Genesis as well that human beings are made in the image of God, and that's why. Because we've observed—these are ancient ideas—they were created with so much blood and effort that it's incalculable. You cannot contemplate it. The idea is that there's something about the human being, whatever it is, that makes us conscious, that interacts with the chaotic potential that constitutes reality and extracts out from that the order within which we live, and that there's something divine about that.

And that's the value of the human being, right? That's the ineradicable value of the human being, and the idea that each individual—even criminals, even murderers, the worst and most reprehensible people—have to be treated with the respect due a divinity. Because we partake in the capacity to extract habitable order from chaos with our consciousness, with our speech, and with our capacity to communicate.

And we recognize—insofar as we each recognize the other as valuable—it's predicated on that observation. We each have something to offer each other and something vital. And you know that if you engage in a real conversation with someone—a meaningful conversation—that suspends your sense of fragile mortality for a moment, you understand that in that communication between people, something of inestimable value emerges that you have to pursue.

And you live for that. You live for that relationship with yourself. You live for that discovery of that relationship. When you're engaged in an artistic pursuit, it's the core of meaning in life, and it's not an illusion. In fact, it's a manifestation of the highest functions of your nervous system because what your nervous system does is signal to you that you're in a place and time that you cannot see when you're engaged in something meaningful.

It comes upon you, and it's the cure for the catastrophes of tragic mortality—that wonderful engagement in what's meaningful that you do. You can and do experience, and that you can get better at experiencing if you practice. And that's because your nervous system, which has evolved over billions of years, has learned to tell you when you're standing on the border between chaos and order and keeping them in balance.

And that's what manifests itself as meaningful. And that's the same phenomenon that's referred to in the creation stories in Genesis, and it's the same idea that's reflected in the strange Christian assistance that the thing that saves mankind is the same thing that draws order from chaos at the beginning of time. It's unbelievably brilliant, and we've been trying to figure it out for who knows how long—forever—and have never been able to fully articulate it because it's so complicated.

It's such a complicated idea, but there's nothing in the least that's illusory about it. The habitable order that is created at the beginning of time—that's Paradise, right? Paradise—that's a walled garden. It's a well-watered place. That's what Eden means. Paradise means "paradisa," a walled garden. And that's where Adam and Eve are first put.

And why is that? Well, it's because we do come in male and female form; that's part of it. So that's part of our eternal landscape—that's how you could think about it—is it's the landscape that transcends all landscapes. It's the landscape that is what all landscapes have in common; that's what it is. That's what makes it an archetype—it's a walled garden.

Why? Well, the walls are structure and culture, and the garden is nature, and all that says is that people live in an amalgam of nature and culture. And of course, that's precisely the case. And that's another variant of the order-chaos juxtaposition: order being culture and chaos being nature.

And so we live eternally in the balance between nature and culture. And if it's properly balanced, it's as close to Paradise as it can get, but Paradise is flawed. And why is it flawed? Because there's always something lurking in it that can turn it upside down, and that's the snake.

And the reason it's a snake is because the circuits that we use to process the things that turn our lives upside down is the same circuit that our tree-dwelling ancestors used to identify predators 60 million years ago. And so the symbolic structure has remained exactly the same—that which lies outside what you understand is predatory and dangerous.

Well, that's why you demonize others—the foreign others—because they do stand in that relationship to you. And you use extraordinarily deep circuitry to do that. But human beings, being slightly smarter than your average chimpanzee, also have noted that the terrible predator that lurks outside the domains of what you understand is also the thing that bears gold, right?

And that's the classic dragon myth: the hero goes out beyond the confines of order and culture into the chaotic unknown to confront the ultimate predator who simultaneously offers the best that can be possibly gathered. And that's what human beings are like—predator animals and prey animals simultaneously.

We've learned to represent the unknown as that thing that threatens us hideously with a multitude of paralyzing snakes in the head of Medusa, but continually also offers us precisely what we need to continue our movement forward. And everyone knows that, which is why we go to movies that tell us that over and over and over and over and over; trying to learn what it means. And that's what it means.

And that's what it means to partake in the logos. And the reason that I made the videos that I made in September in relationship to free speech is because I know that respect for the logos and respect for free speech are the same thing. And that without that respect, our societies cannot maintain their structure, differentiate, and progress.

They cannot do it. We use our free speech to face the chaotic potential of the world and its horrors, to structure it, to understand it, to communicate about it, and to reach consensus. It's the mechanism by which we adapt.

There can be no restrictions put upon that unless you want to sacrifice adaptation, and I wouldn't recommend that. Things get stale, old, decayed, dead, and dangerous with extraordinary rapidity if living people don't maintain their responsibility to update the state. And there's no difference between that and diving down into the chaotic depths and rescuing your father from the belly of the whale.

It's exactly the same idea—it's an ancient, ancient idea. And the reason that we haven't forgotten it was because everyone who forgot it died. So unless that's where we want to go, we better stop forgetting about it.

Nietzsche said that after God had died, there would be two things that would happen. One would be the emergence of nihilism as a temptation. And we already discussed nihilism—it's like, it's a logical consequence of the collapse of value systems. But it's also a place for the irresponsible to hide.

Nihilism, totalitarianism. Well, Nietzsche believed that once you had experienced the collapse of one value system, you were unlikely to put your faith in any value systems. So then why totalitarianism particularly?

Say it—it's nationalistic and communitarian forms, which are the two forms that we saw act as immense devils in the 20th century, right? With nationalism being pushed most forcefully forward by the sorts of political creeds that were exemplified by the Nazis, and with communitarianism being put forth by the sorts of creeds that were exemplified by the Soviet Union—both absolutely catastrophic evolutionary dead ends.

Well, nationalism is easier to understand, I think, because you need an identity, and it has to be collective because human beings live collectively. I mean, it's the fact that we share an identity that we can all sit here in this room peacefully because the identity is partly who you think you are, but it's also partly what you expect from the world and from others.

And because you have an identity that's similar to you, you can sit together peacefully because you expect and desire something. And so do you, and it's the same thing. And that's what it means to have a shared culture.

And so you can't—you have to defend that culture, and it has to be of sufficient, let's say, tightness or magnitude so that it makes sense for you to belong to it. It's not so diverse and chaotic that it means nothing.

And I think that part of the reason why we're seeing a return to nationalism in places like Europe is because the European identity is so amorphous that people can't establish a relationship with it. And that's not a good thing because identity is actually something you have to have a relationship with.

And so, you know, it's the identity—it's your identity, it's the identity of you within your family, it's the identity of your family within the small community, the friends that surround you, and then the broader community of the town and the somewhat broader community of the province and the state and so forth.

But as it expands, it gets vague, and it disperses. And at some point, the identity that's universal is so all-encompassing that it means nothing at all and leaves people chaotic. And so that's what's happening, at least in part, in Europe. It's happening to some degree in the United States as well because we've been pushed so quickly forward into adopting a global identity that people are shaking because that's too amorphous for them.

And so we pull back and say, "No, we need to be around people who we understand," which is, of course, absolutely true. Now, the downside of the nationalist endeavor is that you also need to be around people that you aren't alike and don't understand, partly because they exist.

And if you don't take them into account, then you're going to have a war with them, which is a very bad idea. But also because they have something to offer. And so we're trying to sort out the proper balance between differentiated identity, say at the nation-state level, and the global identity that seems to be manifesting itself partly because of our widespread electronic communication.

So, okay, nationalism beckons if you're in a chaotic state. You know, I heard the Gallup people—the pollsters—at one point. I've never seen this made public, but I remember it very well said that, uh, this was back when Quebec was still—large proportion of the population was still agitating for separatism. I'd always looked at that and I thought, well, it made perfect sense because if Catholicism collapses, it leaves a void.

What are you going to fill the void with? Well, it's either nihilism—which we've already discussed—or, well, or what? Well, nationalism, obviously. And the Gallup people said that if you were lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist. Perfect.

It's exactly what you'd expect because you have to have an identity, so you turn from church to state. Well, that's fine if you believe that the state is the ultimate identity, and that's really the story that is being sold to people who are sold a nationalist story: the state is the ultimate identity.

It's like, well, actually, that's technically wrong. That's why—that's why it's wrong. It's not wrong because it's ideologically wrong, or morally wrong, precisely. It's wrong because technically wrong. Because the problem with the state is—the state is what's uniform across people, and the thing is that we need what's actually diverse across people in order to rejuvenate the state and to keep it awake.

And so if you reduce individuals to what's homogeneous about them across all people, you eradicate the very variability that allows people to adapt to new things. And because we're constantly being presented with new things, we need to keep that individual variability paramount because it's upon that variability that the very state depends.

And that's actually what the West discovered. That's why we have always subordinated the state to the divinity of the individual. And that's expressed, as I already said, in our—in the primacy of free speech in our civilization. It's the cornerstone, the primacy of free speech.

And it's because the individual has something to offer the state. And so state identity is something that can only—it can structure, and it can reassure, but it also constrains too great a degree. And so societies that become only state immediately become old and blind, malevolent, and collapse.

And that's an ancient story. The Egyptians had this figured out 3,000 years ago in their fundamental mythologies. They had a deity named Osiris who was threatened by his evil brother Set, who later became the Christian Satan. The words are related etymologically, and Set was like Scar in "The Lion King." He was waiting in the wings for the old king to turn a blind eye so that he could chop him into pieces and rule in a malevolent way across the entire state.

The Egyptians had another deity, Horus, who was the son of Osiris and the queen of the underworld, Isis, who was the eye— the Egyptian eye—who was the falcon because falcons can see. And Horus was different than Osiris because he could see what Set was up to. He grew up outside the kingdom, like King Arthur, and came back in triumph and overcame Set, losing an eye in the process.

He overcame his evil uncle and banished him to the corners of the world, and then he took his eye and went into the underworld where his father Osiris was living a—the life of a dead ghost, that's one way of thinking about it. And he gave him his eye, and that revivified Osiris, and then Osiris and Horus went back up to the surface from the chaotic underworld, and their union was the symbol of what the Pharaoh had to manifest in order to rule Egypt properly.

The Egyptians figured that out 3,000 years ago in their great story, but it's very difficult to make something like that an articulated reality. But that's the relationship that has to obtain between the individual and the state. The state is a corpse. The state is dead. But it's a gift that the dead have given to you, and you have to provide it with vision and with speech because otherwise it can only blunder around like a zombie.

You go to university, you become educated so that you can serve as the eye and the mouth of the rejuvenated state. That's the purpose of developing, say, an education in the humanities when there was still such a thing left. But that's the purpose of that education—to turn you into the thing that ensures that the entire ship doesn't founder and sink. And that's your responsibility.

And if you're looking for meaning in your life, that's the meaning. Keep the state afloat. Why? Well, because it's better for us all to be in a ship than drowning in the icy water, and that's the alternative. You know, and if you're, if you find that the tragedy of life is too much for you to bear without becoming resentful and bitter and murderous and even genocidal, it means that you haven't picked up enough responsibility.

Because if you picked up enough responsibility for the revivification of the state and the eradication of unnecessary suffering, you'd find enough meaning in that. So the idea of meaninglessness would vanish in an instant. You'd have more meaning than you knew what to do with, and that's a terrifying thing as well.

But to fight off one terrifying thing—the specter of mortality and insanity and finitude and death—you need another monster of equivalent size, and that's one that you can find and it's one that you can bear up, and it's one that you can live.

And that's what we need to do because if we don't do that, then all hell breaks loose. Really, really eternally. That's what those stories mean. Viewed in this light, you can understand postmodernism. Because postmodernism manages—as a response—it's a response to the Nietzschean dilemma.

Right? The cornerstone of civilization has been demolished by rational critique, and no wonder. It needed to be criticized, but it needed to be more deeply understood. And criticism and deep understanding are the same thing unless the criticism is only destruction.

Because if you criticize something, what you're doing is separating the wheat from the chaff; you're not burning all of it. You're saying, well, not this, not this, but definitely this, definitely this. And that's what education should provide you with the opportunity to do as well: what should we conserve and what should we dispense with.

Well, we conserve what's centrally true, and now we need to understand it. We have to conserve the idea that the individual has an infinite responsibility to the direction of being. And we know that—you know perfectly well that you live in a relationship with your own conscience.

And when you violate the moral order that's part and parcel of your soul, you're ashamed and hide and bitter, and then you get angry. You can't show your face to other people. You can't even look at yourself in the mirror. And you know perfectly well that's true, even though you may not know what to do about it or how to get out of it.

There's a moral order built into human beings. If there wasn't, there's no way we could even communicate with one another because there'd be no rules of communication. There'd be nothing that we mutually wanted or expected from each other. You know, one of the things I figured out is that we're all appalled when we run into another person who is not yet the Redeemer; every person you ever meet, you're dissatisfied with because they're not who they could be.

And you're broadcasting that message at everyone all the time. You're not who you could be, you're not who you could be, you're not who you could be, I'm not who I could be. And we're all facing each other with our emotional displays, pleading with each other to become that which we could become.

And everyone knows it, but we won't do it. And it's no wonder. The postmodernists—they're the logical conclusion of the Nietzschean dilemma: God is dead, the value structure collapsed. The specter arises of all value structures collapsing—that's the postmodernist dogma. All value structures have collapsed; they're only there for the purposes of exclusion, they have no intrinsic value.

It's a very, very powerful argument. That's why it dominates the universities. That and the fact that allows people to dispense with their moral responsibility, which is something that's never discussed by the postmodernists. But you have to give the devil his due. What's the problem with postmodernism?

Well, if all value structures have collapsed, then there's nothing to do because in order to do something, one thing has to be better than another, because otherwise why do it? And so people who are ensconced in the postmodern tradition are undermined by their own philosophy. They can deconstruct their own deconstruction, in which case they might as well just sit there and do nothing, which would actually be preferable to what they're doing now.

So how do they extract themselves from that dilemma? They do it illogically, but they don't care because the postmodernists, first of all, don't believe in logic. That's a reflection of the logos, which they've dispensed with. Dialogue, they don't believe in because that's a reflection of the logos, which they've dispensed with. Logic and dialogue are irrelevant.

Well, that does bring up the problem of what to do. Well, the postmodernists finesse that by reverting to the Marxist doctrines from which postmodernism emerged. And so they say, well, yeah, you can't get any direction from postmodernism, but we don't—we're not going to worry about that because we don't worry about such things. What we'll do is just use sleight of hand to push forward the communitarian doctrines out of which our original hypothesis emerged.

And everyone says, well, we'll turn a blind eye to the paradox because we actually need something to do. And plus, to the degree that we're communitarian, we can take out our nihilistic resentment and arrogance and ingratitude on every single person we deem to have something more than we have.

And so if you're wondering why certain values can exist in the absence of any value, you have to look no farther than to understand that people who are desperate and chaotic will still be angry and destructive, and they can manifest that perfectly with the moral mask that says, "Well, I'm not really after what you have because you have a little more than me; I'm speaking on behalf of these people who have even less."

It's like, it's absolute nonsense. It's so funny watching Yale students complain about the privileged—they're in the top one-tenth of one percent of people who've lived in—in the entire history of the planet, much less just the people that are on the planet now. They're dominating patriarchs in training, right? They're baby representatives of the patriarchy, and all they do is complain about that tiny, tiny, infinitesimal fraction of people who have slightly more than they have. Now it's appalling, and their idiot professors pat them on the back and send them out into the world to do that instead of teaching them how to live.

They damage their mental health. They hurt our society. They're bringing things down, and that's what they're aiming at. The postmodernists manage to be nihilistic and totalitarian at the same time, which is something that not even Nietzsche had dreamed about, despite the fact that he had the greatest imagination for pathology that perhaps ever existed.

In addition, they combine the nihilism and the totalitarianism with the worst aspects of dogmatic religion because what they've essentially established is a cult into which children who attend university are now indoctrinated, at great cost, I might add, and with very little practical outcome.

What's the alternative? Given that they have a point, well, as far as I can tell, the alternative is a proper return to the past, and that is precisely to journey into the chaos—to look at the worst possible thing and to pull the dead father up from the chaotic depths.

That's how you stop being a puppet—someone whose strings are being pulled by forces they do not understand behind the scenes. You find out what's great about your culture—this thing that's provided us with everything that we see in this room, the amazing warmth that we're experiencing when it's 30 bloody below outside, the fact that the electricity is on, and that computational resources are working, that we can all sit here peacefully and that no one is hungry—in fact, we're too fat—that's our big problem.

Oh no, we have so much stuff we’re getting fat? Yeah, well, that's a good problem to have. We should have some gratitude for what's been produced that's brought us to this point, and we need to wake up and understand what we're doing. Well, that’s what—that’s what people like—that’s what the psychoanalysts were trying to do in the 20th century, that's what all the great clinicians were trying to do, and I would say above all else that was what Jung was trying to do.

He believed firmly that the idea of the divine spark within the individual was a metaphysical reality, by which he meant a reality that actually transcended, and existed superordinate to, the physical reality— a more real reality—that's whatever consciousness is. Something we understand from a scientific perspective? Not at all. That's been represented in our mythologies as far back as we can push them as an independent agent in the world giving rise to form.

That's how we treat each other; that's how we recognize ourselves; that's how we judge each other. You make your bed and then you lie in it, and everyone knows it. And that's not to say that you're not subject to random and chaotic circumstances and the tragedy of life. Just because you can do some things doesn't mean you can do everything, but you can do some things. And if you don't do them, then things fall apart.

And the problem with things falling apart is that you will be happy about it to the degree that you're not trying to repair them because to the degree that you do not manifest what's within you, then your life falls apart around you, and everything that could make you be multiplies until you're in a situation where you want the destruction, you want to bring it on.

And it's not surprising because life can be so terrible that the question of whether or not it should exist at all can be a real question. But the answer to that is, is life so terrible that it shouldn't exist? Well, the answer is it depends on how you live it. And if your life is so terrible that you can't bear it, then it raises the question of whether or not you're living it properly.

And that's not to say that people don't suffer under burdens that are too great for them to bear. They certainly do. It doesn't matter because if you let that embitter you—if you let that destroy your allegiance to the proper path—all it does is make that worse and everything else.

So what did I learn from studying the terrible situation that obtained in the mid-1980s when the Soviets and the West had tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs pointed at each other, ready to go at a moment's notice? Why did that happen? What did I learn? It was simple. The reason that that situation existed was because I was not good enough.

I was not good enough. The reason that the terrible situations in the world exist now is because you're not good enough. You're not good enough. You're not good enough. We could solve any problem! We can solve any problem! If we used all the resources that were available to us, if we lived properly, we have no idea what we could turn what we're in into.

So I would say you support free speech because it's the mechanism that maintains the sanity of the individual and society, and you live in relationship with the spoken truth to the best of your ability because the alternative is hell. And if hell is what you want, then you can remain arrogant and resentful and deceitful.

But if you want to work to better the world, to bring it up to what it might be, then you speak forthrightly, you clarify yourself, and you act properly in the world, and then you see what happens.

And this is the final thing I'll say. I spend a long time studying the Sermon on the Mount. It's a key document; it's Christ's commentary on the Ten Commandments, in a sense, the question being if you codify the rules by which a society might function, is there something within the structure of the rules that rises above them that acts as the fundamental principle from which they're all derived?

It's the ultimate question of human ethics. What is the highest principle? And the answer that's put forth in the Sermon on the Mount is quite straightforward: aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive of, whatever that is that you can conceive of—that serves as your God for all intents and purposes—having aligned yourself with that good, speak the truth and see what happens.

That's the act of faith. The act of faith is whatever the truth reveals is the best of all possible worlds, regardless of how it appears to you now. It's a guess, right? It's something you stake a bet on. Well, what do you think? The best of all possible worlds will be brought into being by deceit. It seems unlikely.

You know that doesn't work in your own life. You tangle yourself up in your own lies, right? One lie breeds ten, and ten breeds a hundred, and maybe you put the consequences on down the road, and you don't fall into the pit for five or six years. Maybe you've even forgotten why you fell in when you finally do fall in, but everyone knows that.

Everyone knows that you don't get away with anything. And so the issue is, well, what would happen if you just said what you thought, stupid as it is, inaccurate as it is, and listen to people criticize you in response to shape you and make you more articulate? What would your life be like?

And the answer to that is, and I know this to be true—I've worked with many, many people on precisely this problem—your life gets better and better and better and richer and deeper. But that comes with a heavier, heavier burden of responsibility. Well, that's okay. You use the observation of your own capability to bear responsibility to buttress yourself against the terrors of being finite.

You say, weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life and prevail. And that's good enough. Thank you.

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