004 Maps of Meaning: 4 Games People Must Play (TVO)

Maybe you’re 35-years-old and you’ve never had a job. And one of the things that’s stopping you is that you’re so damned nervous that you can’t pick up a phone and use it, because if anything unexpected happens while you’re talking, you get scared so badly you have to hang up. And so, that would be characteristic of somebody with a severe anxiety disorder.

So, what do you do with that person? So, you say: Oh, are they afraid of the phone? Well, no. What are they afraid of? Well, they’re afraid of anomalies in human interaction, right? And they’re afraid of something unexpected happening while they’re trying to impose a structure. And the reason they’re afraid of that is ‘cause they never learned that they were capable of dealing with the emergence of something new on an ongoing basis, which meant that… Well, which meant in all likelihood that, when they were children, they were so sheltered from any contact with those aspects of being that transcend knowledge that they never learned that there was something inside of them that would reveal itself if they were allowed the opportunity to encounter the unknown; to encounter fear, then to master it, then to extract out something of value.

So, they can’t get a job because they can’t use the phone. And it isn’t because they can’t use the phone, right? It’s a deeper story than that. It’s because they’re terrified of this and they have no idea that they have some resource they could draw on to combat it. And you could say: Well, we can teach them to use the phone, right? Say: Well, you know, here’s a repertoire of stock lines that you might use, you know, like small talk at a party. And that would increase what they know and enable them to deal with the unknown. Or you could say: Look, you know, relax a little bit. When the person says something on the phone that you don’t understand, pause a little bit. Think about what they’re saying. Pay attention to them. Allow yourself the luxury of formulating a response. You’ll do fine.

And even if you do it badly the first half a dozen times, well, you’ll learn eventually. And the person derives from that the notion that, not only can they cope on the phone, but that possibly, there’s more to them that originally met the eye. We come into the world equipped with an array of… possibilities and limitations. And those possibilities and limitations are expressed most particularly in our physical form; the fact that we have a specific kind of embodied form that allows us to do certain things, and it also doesn’t allow us to do certain other things.

Lao Tzu has pointed out that it’s the space inside a pot that makes the pot worthwhile. And… what he means by that is that… those things that limit you give you as much form and possibility, as those things that enable you. What that means, more broadly, is the fact that you’ve come to a given circumstance with a set of possibilities and a set of limitations. It’s that, that allows you to impose form on what you encounter, so that the whole notion of form is a tenet in some peculiar way that we don’t really understand yet on the necessity of limitation.

And I think the best way to understand that, or to begin to understand that, is to give some consideration to the notion of a game. So, for example, if you’re playing chess, there’s a virtually unlimited number of things you can’t do, and only a very narrow number of things that you can do. Yet, when you’re playing chess, the arbitrary limitations that are imposed on each piece don’t seem to be unfair in any sort of cosmic sense. They seem to be part of the structure that enables you to actually play the game. Without the imposition of those rules, which are of course relatively arbitrary in the structure, there wouldn’t be a game at all.

Now, it’s clear that, for human beings, games and fantasy for that matter shade up into reality, so that the game structures that we engage in and the fantasy structures that we use to undergird our stories and our pretend play, say when we’re children, shade imperceptibly into real life. We play games because there’s something about games that make them deeply analogous to what we do in day-to-day situations. And that means, the observation that the rules of a game actually make the game possible is an observation that’s broadly applicable to consideration of your own limitation.

Some of those limitations and possibilities take the form of emotions and motivations, and we know, I think, incontrovertibly regardless of the claims of social scientists who are more relativist in their orientation, that human beings come into the world with a standard set of biological predispositions – emotions and motivations. And furthermore, I think we know that it’s the fact of those shared emotions and motivations that allow us to communicate at all.

And then, imagine further that a consequence of that… lengthy process of interpersonal negotiation is the emergence of a tremendously complicated game, and not one that’s arbitrary, because the game has to have certain rules in order for it to be played at all. So, for example, we know that even with rats, if rats – they like to engage in rough-and-tumble play, and if you put two rats together – juvenile rats – one rat almost always dominates the other. It only takes about a 10% gain in weight on the part of one rat for it to be pretty much stability dominant. And it’s always the subordinate rat that introduces play, or-or-or uh, asks for play.

But it turns out that even among rats, if the dominant rat pins, or… or-or obtains victory over the subordinate rat more than 70% of the time, the subordinate rat will no longer play. So then, you could imagine likewise that if you’re going to play a game with some other person, whether it’s a game of fantasy or the actual chance to engage in some cooperative real-world activity, unless that person allows you a certain amount of space for the manifestation of your own emotional and motivational needs, you’re not going to play the game with them, right? You’re going to look for another game.

And that means that there’s a certain set of difficult-to-describe constraints for all of you on games that you’re willing to play before you’ll look for another game. Well, and then, you could start to conceive of revolutionary tendencies in that sense, right? Imagine a human society that’s got so unstable that the vast majority of the citizens within that society are subjugated to starvation. So, the society never—no longer provides their basic needs. And constant tyranny, you could imagine as well, that there’s going to be an innate tendency among the members of that society to start hypothesizing about what alternatives might be possible, right; to start dreaming about alternative societies, and then also, to take action if the situation becomes too extreme.

And I think this is part of the reason why you see stable mythological motifs across different cultures. It’s not so much like Jung said that we have archetypes of what might constitute social order, deeply embedded in our unconscious. I think this situation is more externalized than that in that, what’s biological is what we bring to the situation – our hopes and our desires, and the fact that we have hopes and desires.

Now, I think what happens with stories is something like this; is that, as human societies increase in complexity and numbers – so, they become bigger and bigger – and more and more people engage in the negotiating process, exchanging emotional and motivation information, the pattern that this society takes, if it’s going to be stable across long periods of time, starts to become encoded in the stories.

So imagine, you got your emotions and your motivations. You make your case known. Ten thousand other people do that over a thousand years, and structure starts to emerge that satisfies, more or less, all of these emotions and motivational states, and is also recognizable as a pattern. So then, you could say, for example, considering a story like Moses and the imposition of the Ten Commandments on the ancient Hebrews, prior to his imposition of those Ten Commandments – of course, there were actually many more than ten, Moses - according to the mythological story – Moses spent years, literally years, adjudicating conflict between the people that he was leading.

Eighteen hours a day, they’d come to him with their various problems, saying: We have a dispute. How should it be settled? And he’d settle it. Well, imagine doing that for ten years, right; becoming an expert at evaluating what constitutes an appropriate solution to an emotional problem between two people. Imagine, as well, that as a consequence of doing that for such a long period of time, you start to abstract out lawful regularities in the manner in which people have to interact in order for peace to be maintained.

Imagine further that those could be codified in stories but, even more, codified as law eventually when consciousness became capable of grasping, explicitly, the nature of the interactions. So, my point is a point very much like Nietzsche’s – because Nietzsche said at the end of the 19th Century that it’s a mistake to presume that most of our philosophies are rational in nature. And I think that’s a mistake that characterizes Western philosophical thinking, at least since the Enlightenment. It’s a mistake to assume that there was a chaotic social state upon which a rational order was imposed as a consequence of rational action.

It’s much more reasonable to presuppose that the order emerged naturally, over lengthy periods of time, and then was interpreted and codified and given structure in a secondary manner. And so, what I’m trying to outline for you in large part is the processes by which that order comes to be. So, you say, first, it’s behavioural, emotional, motivational. People, and even animals, communicate in a way that makes their motivational and emotional needs known to one another.

So, even among wolves and chimpanzees and any kind of lower-order social animal, you have the emergence of dominance hierarchies, fundamentally, which are stable solutions to the entire set of emotional and motivational problems that besets the group. And no one would ever say that the emergence of a chimpanzee dominance hierarchy is a consequence of rational deliberation. So then, imagine that chimpanzees get the power to watch what they’re doing and to start to represent it.

And then, imagine furthermore that that representation takes the form of stories and, then, laws. And then, you have some idea about how human social order comes to be. And this is an exciting possibility for me because it offers—the potential solution to one major question, which is: How is it that people should act? And because we’re essentially rationalist in our presuppositions, we believe that there are rationalist solutions to that.

But the solutions may be something that are much more akin to biological solutions. So, first, I want you to consider the following hypothesis. OK, so, we’re going to make the presupposition – a couple of presuppositions that I don’t think are unreasonable – first, is that we are essentially animals, that we’ve evolved in a Darwinian fashion; and second, that the consequence of that evolution - much of which was precognitive, right – uh, that we were around as creatures before we were capable of thinking in words, to say, much of that evolutionary history has conditioned the manner in which we think.

So, we think more like biological entities than we think like computers. Or, we think more like biological entities than we think like rational machines. But of course, we already know that rational machines cannot think very well, except in very bounded environments, ‘cause they don’t have access to an embodied structure or to emotions and motivations. So, let’s… So then, you might say: Well, why is it that, like, in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths, our most fundamental representations of the world tend to take story form and that, not only do they take story form, but they tend to utilize certain kinds of categories.

Now, I’ve showed you this diagram before. Uhm, this represents what I think are the three cardinal categories of experience. So, there’s the great mother who’s holding the world in her hand here. And inside her subordinate – in a sense – is the great father. This is a Christian representation obviously. And then, the tragic son of course, in the crowd here representing society, is adoring the figure of the tragic hero here because they regard his mode of being as necessary to their own salvation so to speak – their own proper mode of living.

OK, so then, you think: Well, why these characters? And I’d offer you this possibility is, first of all, every human being that’s ever lived has lived in an environment characterized by the presence of these three entities, right? We have mothers. We have fathers. And we exist as individuals. And then, you think: Well, when you’re a child and you begin to comprehend the world, the outside world, everything outside of the family is of course vague and ill-defined, right, non-existent in a sense.

And all there is for you to observe is the mother, who for you really is the whole world, and the father, a-a secondary source of comfort and trouble perhaps, and the fact of your own individuality. And so, you say: Well, that’s true from the perspective of individual development. But then, if you go way, way back in history – maybe 500,000 years when our cognitive capacities were first starting to develop – and we were trying to figure out what the world was really like, what categories would we have at our disposal to start to modify and change in order to represent the outside world.

And then, you might think: You can only talk about what you don’t know in terms that you know. And since, for the child, the mother is the world. It isn’t absurd to presume that for the human being, the world is the mother, first, as a projection, right, as an a priori, cognitive schema. The hypothesis being: The natural world which of course manifests itself in truth in the mother – partakes in many ways of the same properties as the mother. It’s a working hypothesis, just like you might presume if you date a new woman, that she has aspects of your sister – all things considered – aspects of your mother, given that they were also female.

You take what you know to represent what you don’t know. So, we use our fundamental, social cognitive categories initially to portray the world. And the world’s nature is portrayed and personified, or metaphorical form. And so then, the question is: What are the primary categories? Well, we have three of them here. But they’re not the only three because this is all good, this category system – the benevolent mother, the benevolent father, and the hero.

Well, we know the world is not only benevolent, it’s also malevolent. Or at least, we can say that because we’re equipped with certain emotional possibilities and certain motivational possibilities the probability that we will encounter despair and frustration and disappointment, and anxiety is just as real as the possibility that we will encounter and hope, and satisfaction. So, for us, the world is bivalent. It takes with one and it gives with the other.

And that’s true for the natural world, which produces us and destroys; as it is for the social world, which fosters our development and crushes our individuality; and as well for the individual, who in many regards is as admirable a creature as you can hope ever to propose and, at the same time, someone who’s capable of unbelievable depths of depravity. So… a world that’s not only divided into three fundamental categories, but each category divided into a structure that’s essentially ambivalent in its fundamental element.

And of course, that poses the central existential problem for human existence, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re faced with the vagaries of the natural world and what we don’t understand; the vagaries of the social world and its often arbitrary and unreasonable demands on us; and the fact of our capacity for transcendence, tied to our own vulnerability. And you could say perfectly reasonably that, regardless of where you’re situated in time and space, those are basically your problems.

And your goal through life – your path through life – is going to be characterized by the solutions you either come up with or don’t come up with to that set of problems. OK, so, there’s one more categorical element that complicates this picture. And I think, in many ways, it’s the most difficult thing there is to grasp. So, we’ll take a shot at it first. And I’ve showed you this representation before. This is the dragon of chaos, and you can think of the dragon of chaos as a symbol of totality.

And furthermore, you can think of it in relationship to this structure… as the source of this structure… or even as the source of all structure. So, you see in the Sumerian creation myth, for example, the character of Tiamat, right? And I told you that the world Tiamat is associated with the later Hebrew word “Taom”, which means chaos. And Taom is the chaos that Yahweh makes order out of; makes the world out of.

So, the idea lurking behind the Sumerian creation myth - and then, later, lurking behind the entire edifice of Judaism-Christianity and Islam for that matter - is that something that can be best represented by this figure is best conceptualized as the ground of everything that exists. Now, what in the world can that mean? Well, it means something like this.

Let’s look at the concrete metaphorical representation. And first of all, you have a kind of totality here, right? You have a thing that can live by devouring itself. So, it has no need of anything outside of it. In fact, there is nothing outside of it. It’s a figure of absolute totality. And it’s characterized by a strange intermixture of metaphorical representations of matter – because a snake is something that crawls on the ground – and spirit – because a winged serpent is something that can fly and, therefore, partakes of the metaphorical realm of heaven - heaven and earth, right? Totality--Yin and Yang, from the Daoist perspective.

That’s the entire world. And it’s also something that’s characterized by the capacity for transformation because a snake can shed its skin and be reborn. So, it’s something that’s constantly renewing itself, despite its absolutely archaic age. And it’s also something that presents a terrible danger and tremendous opportunity, because a dragon is something that will burn you if you get anywhere near it, but also hordes a treasure that’s more valuable than anything else.

Eliade has pointed out that in traditional, classic creation myths - the Sumerian myth being one example, the hero when he encounters the first the great dragon of chaos he first either runs away or is paralyzed by fright. The world in itself is a complex array of patterns. And those patterns manifest themselves in space, and they manifest themselves in time.

And I think the best way to get a grip on what those patterns might be like is to think of them in terms of music. And I think that’s what music represents. Music is this complex three-dimensional structure, full of interwoven patterns of different dimensions and length that expends itself over time. And if you listen to a piece of music, you can concentrate on one instrument or another, or you can concentrate on a phrase, or you can concentrate on the entire melody or the voice.

You can parse out different elements from the complex background. And that’s especially the case with very sophisticated orchestral music, right, which is susceptible to multiple reinterpretations, and multiple encounters, because of its complexity. And this is to say only that what you look at is far more complicated than what you see. Or to say, alternatively, that there’s more information in anything you perceive than you can ever get complete access to.

And that’s partly because, it’s partly because your perceptual systems delude you. So, we think you look with your eyes or with your other senses. But that’s only true when you’re looking at what you already know what to look at, right? When you’ve already built perceptual machinery that enables you to detect a particular object. But when you’re looking at what you don’t know what to look at, the way you look is by getting nervous, right? It’s not-- It’s not precisely a perceptual function. It’s something much deeper and primordial than that.

And it’s more like: Oh no. Something that I cannot categorize – either perceptually or cognitively – something that I do not know how to respond to has just occurred. And the first categorization is this: That’s it. There’s—There’s nothing under that. It’s merely fear plus heightened attention. And that prepares the ground for constructing a more detailed representation. But that first encounter, that’s the encounter with the dragon of chaos.

So then, you take this figure – the source of all things, the… the Dao in some ways – and you say: Well, how does it manifest itself? And the answer to that is something like this: And, we see this both in the-- in-in the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian myths that I described to you. The first division of the great dragon of chaos, or the primordial egg is always into two subordinate elements: The great father, and the great mother.

Why is that? Well, it’s illustrative of a fundamental-- of the fundamental binary nature of existence, I guess; partly, you could say: If you’re a cognizant being – a defined delimited being – what you perceive always has a binary structure. There’s the aspect of you that structured enough to allow the perceiving. That’s what you know. That’s-That’s the manner in which you’re structured so that you can even… so that you can even formulate a perception – something a child builds up over time from the primordial aspect, say, of his visual system or his auditory system; learns to parse up the world by generating machinery that allows the complex patterns that make up the world to be turned into objects.

So, there’s the thing - the structure that allows the perceiving and then, there’s the thing that’s being perceived or the thing behind that. And this is a very complicated distinction. You can say: Well, what’s the difference between the dragon of chaos - say, the representation of the cosmos as such - and the great mother? And I would say, it’s something like this… The unknown that appears in relationship to a perceiver is different than the unknown as such.

So, I would say this, for example: There are going to be things that surprise you that wouldn’t surprise me, and vice versa. And the things that would surprise you have to be construed in relationship to what you-- to what you already know, ‘cause you’re only going to be surprised by things you don’t know. And likewise for me, I’m only going to be surprised by things I don’t know. But what we know is going to vary somewhat.

So, the unknown for you is going to be different than the unknown for me. And the great mother is a representation of the unknown for you, for the unknown for me. Different for everyone in some sense, because we’re all going to be… We’re all… all-all going to be stymied and stalked by different aspects of being; but the same, as well, in that when you encounter things you don’t understand, and you encounter things you don’t understand, in many, many ways, you’re going to react to those different things the same way.

And I can give you a narrative illustration of this. King Arthur’s knights-- They sit around the round table. They’re all equals, that’s why they sit around the round table, right? They have a king. The king determines their destinies, like Marduk does. But they’re still all equal. They determine they’re going to go look for the Holy Grail. It’s the symbol of redemption. So, they’re off to find the highest value, like, Pinocchio wishing on a star - the highest value. And they all enter the forest to begin their quest, but they each enter it at the place that appears darkest to each of them, right?

So, that means they all go on different-- They all go in different directions; even though they’re on the same quest that theoretically, they’re inhabiting the same space. So… so, it’s only to say that every person has their demons, so to speak, and that those demons differ from person to person, even though there are things you can say about the demons that are common across people.

So we know, for example, from clinical work – from endless clinical work – that if you want to help someone, you identify: OK, what do you want to do? ‘cause they need to know that, right? And that’s this. What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What kind of structure do you want to impose on your world? And then, you identify: OK, well, what things are stopping you? What things are stopping you?

So, then, you look back at the Sumerian creation myth and you think: Well, there’s Absu, right? God of the Known, Tiamet’s Consort, right? Culture, but there’s also Marduk, and Marduk is the power – the spirit, the entity – a representation of the Sumerian saviour who goes out to confront this and to make the world. Well, that’s what you teach people in behavioural therapy. You teach them not so much that. You don’t teach them habituation. You don’t teach them to get used to things that they’re afraid of.

You teach them that there’s something within them that can respond to the things that they’re afraid of - that’s of as great a magnitude as the fears themselves.