Lecture: 2017 Maps of Meaning 01: Context and Background

I should tell you first about the genesis of this theory. I suppose it is the right way of putting it when I was about your age; that was back in the early 80’s or thereabouts, and this was particularly true around 1984. But it was true before that too. Every generation has its worries, real or imagined. The primary worry for people of my generation was nuclear war, and you know it was a genuine worry at one point.

Many years later, I went down to Arizona to visit a decommissioned ICBM nuclear missile silo. An ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile, were very large rockets. Right? They flew at... they could fly halfway around the world. It was deep underground and behind very thick steel doors. It was light green, you know, that pastel green that everyone seemed to like in the 1950’s. It was like a pastel green Star Trek console— that’s what it looked like.

So we went down, out in the yard. It was in the desert. Out in the yard, there was a very, I would say, magical object, for lack of a better word, and that was the nose cone for the ICBM. It was quite big, about that big, about that high, pointed like the point of a bullet, about ¾’s of an inch thick, plastic you know, kind of a resin. It was designed to melt on re-entry, so that was just sitting there. That was fairly thought-provoking, let’s put it that way.

Then we went into the missile silo. Interestingly enough, appended to the front of it, it had been decommissioned under Reagan. By the way, in the front of it, there was a museum with artifacts from the 1980’s featuring Reagan and Gorbachev meeting multiple times. It was staffed by these Southern Americans from the South who were grandparent age, and they were just super friendly. You know, they were happy to be in the museum. It was like going to visit your grandma’s nuclear missile silo.

So it was jarring, you know, because it was obviously a portentous place, and yet it was conjoined with hospitality and welcoming. It was surreal in that manner. Anyways, we went into the silo and they ran us through a simulated launch. So, imagine a panel like this made out of metal, except twice as long with another one of these things at the other end, 16 feet across or so. Basically, 1950’s technology but updated.

Then imagine what you had to do to launch. There was a guy with a key and there was another guy with a key. If I remember correctly, the keys were around their necks, although I don’t think that they were stored around their necks permanently. And so to launch the missile, you had to put the key in the lock, both of you. That was the safety precaution; it had to be two of you, put the key in the lock and hold it for 10 seconds, and then away the missile goes. It wasn’t as big, the missile wasn’t as big as the rockets that went to the moon. But it was plenty big; you know, the silo itself would have easily been as wide as this room is and perhaps larger, and many, many stories tall, you know, because it was nested underground.

So they ran us through a simulated launch, which was surreal, I would say. Then they told us that someone asked if the keys were in once. Now, they wouldn’t tell us when, but you know that would have been during the Cuban missile crisis because we were that close. And we were close again at other times, although perhaps not that close. There seemed to be another peak of conflict in 1984 when there was a movie shown at that time called “The Day After,” which garnered more views than any movie ever had on TV. It was a story about the aftermath of a nuclear war and the people that were left.

It was pretty realistic and frightening. As I found out later, that movie was one of the things that influenced Ronald Reagan to put pressure on or negotiate with the Soviets, depending on how you look at it. Five years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. No one saw that coming.

It really didn’t collapse in 1989 in some sense. You know, like a huge machine like that doesn’t fall apart all at once; it falls apart over time. Then at some point it just becomes unsustainable and topples. You know, it’s like they lost faith in their doctrine, and for good reason. The system in Russia, the Soviet Union, was a collection of states, an empire, and the system that Mao established in China and the system that still exists in Korea as a remnant of the Cold War, and systems in Southeast Asia and Africa were all predicated on Marxist presuppositions.

Presuppositions that were utopian in nature and that posited a utopian future where property was held in common and everyone had enough, and everyone was called upon to do what they could: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Which is a lovely sentiment. You can imagine how it would be attractive, even intellectually, because, of course, other systems, all other systems produce vast disparities in income.

It’s like a natural law that’s actually governed by—you can model it with a distribution called the Pareto distribution. The Pareto distribution looks like this. It doesn’t look like a normal distribution, a lot of you guys have been told about normal distributions and how many things follow a normal distribution, most things. But that’s really a limited case. You can understand a Pareto distribution if you’ve all played Monopoly, I presume. At the beginning, everyone has the same amount of money. We will include property, the same amount of wealth.

Then what happens as the game progresses? Really, as a function of chance. I mean, I know that you have to use your head a little bit in Monopoly. But the basic rule is just to buy everything you can get your hands on and then trade meanly, something like that. So at the beginning, everybody has the same amount. Then, as you begin to play, if you had enough players, you would develop a normal distribution because some people would win relatively consistently and some players lose relatively consistently.

So the money starts to be distributed in a normal distribution. But the thing about money, and the thing about lots of things, is that zero is involved. Zero is a weird place because if you are playing a trading game and you hit zero, then you’re done. It is very hard to recover from zero. You know, it’s really hard to recover—you know when you are doomed in Monopoly. You can tell; you’ve got some resources. But there is going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel, and you are going to get wiped out. You know it.

So there is a point at which you’re headed for zero, even if you have something, you know. You might be rescued by luck, but you know when you are doomed. So what happens as you continue to play Monopoly? More and more people stack up at zero, and fewer and fewer people have more and more money. When the game is over, every person has no money, and one person has all of it.

Now, the funny thing about that is, in some sense, that is how trading games work. You know, you might wonder why there is inequality in society. It is easy to consider that it’s because the society is corrupt. Perhaps, you know, society is somewhat or horribly corrupt; that’s the variation. There is no society that is devoid of its criminal element, its fixed element.

Anyways, trading games tend to produce a Pareto distribution so that very many have very little while a tiny minority have a tremendous amount—that’s the 1% that you hear about, right? And the thing about the 1% is that it has happened in every society that has ever been studied. It doesn’t really matter what the governmental system is; it certainly happened under the Soviets, that’s for sure. There were enough people that had enough zero that they just died.

So, you know, the utopian dream was completely unimplementable for a variety of very complex reasons. One is that it is very hard to fight against that distribution pattern when people are trading because mere statistics will do that. And then there are other things. I should tell you as well that the Pareto distribution governs a lot of things.

So, if you look at books, if I remember properly, last year there were something like a million English-language books published, and I think that 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies. That’s none, right? That’s none. And of that 500, you can be sure that one of them was by Stephen King, and he took half the money because there are like five authors in the English language who are on every airport paperback stand occupying the top rung, and that’s massive real estate, right?

Because it is replicated everywhere. And because they are so prominent—and because they are no names, when people are in a hurry and want something to read, they just grab that. More money goes to those people. So, you know, success breeds success and failure breeds failure. It’s not necessarily linear, and that’s a really difficult thing to deal with. It’s hard on societies because, one of the things we do know is that, you know, as you stretch out the inequality, you make men, particularly, on the lower end of the distribution, more and more likely to be aggressive.

It’s sort of like... you can imagine every man has a threshold for violence. Status is important to men, not that it isn’t important to women, but it’s different; it’s a different kind of status. It’s status that is important to men because it’s one of the things that makes them marketable as partners to women.

So it actually turns out to be quite important to men. Men tend to compete with one another for status, hierarchy position, and in a really unequal society, if you are like a low rung guy and you don’t have any opportunity to rise because the society isn’t structured so that there’s mobility, then the more aggressive guys tend to turn to criminality.

You know, you could say there is a threshold for criminality. The more inequity pressure you put on a particular area, geographic or political area, the more inequity pressure you put on it, the more men slip past that threshold and into criminality.

You know, there have been some pretty good studies done of drug gangs in Chicago. That was the best one. A sociologist actually went out and hung out with a drug gang. He got into it. I guess the drug gang leader was, you know, I wouldn’t say necessarily narcissistic; that might be a reasonable way of thinking about it. He was kind of happy with the idea of maybe being the subject of a book, and so this guy was able to associate with them.

He got to know them quite well, and then the housing project in which the gang was housed was slated for demolition and the gang broke up. He got the books because they kept books. What he found was the average street drug dealer, first of all, was employed in another job as well and was making far less than minimum wage.

Now, guys further up the chain, of course, followed the Pareto distribution, so there was a tiny minority of them that were raking in a tremendous amount of loot, and the guys at the bottom were just waiting around for the possibility that they could rise up the hierarchy. And you know, it’s a pretty violent game, so the chance that someone is going to be taken out is pretty high, and so then a slot opens up for some opportunistic second rater, and perhaps he can move up the hierarchy.

So the Pareto distribution governs all sorts of other things too. I mentioned it governs the popularity of books, the sales of books. But it also characterizes the distribution of everything that people produce. So if you think of creative production of any sort, artistic production, industrial production—doesn’t matter, almost everything fails and a few things succeed beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

Apple’s a good example of that; you know, I mean, the iPhone, they have their competitors, but it is an extraordinarily dominant product, and they rake in billions of dollars. I don’t know if Apple is valued at a trillion dollars, but it’s close to that, and that is a lot of money. I think, if I remember correctly, the top 40 people, the richest 40 people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2 billion now.

You know, it’s not like they are stuffing their mattresses with that money, or they have a skyscraper full of cash; that money is out in the economy doing whatever money does. So you can’t spend 28 billion dollars. Sometimes you can even do some good with it, you know. Bill Gates seems to be doing something reasonable with his money.

But the reason I am telling you this is because one of the things you should know is that this proclivity for inequality is pervasive among the products of human beings. It is the case with the goals scored in hockey. My son told me, and he is a reliable source on hockey statistics, that if Wayne Gretzky—if you don’t count any of the points that Wayne Gretzky managed with scoring—he still had enough points just with assists to have more points than any hockey player that ever played.

So, you know, even at the upper end of the distribution there is some person who is, ah, that is so good at what they do, and then there is another person that is so much better than them that it is not even comparable and so, and the benefits flow to people who are in that position. You can understand why, I would say, because, you know, say you start writing, and you get a book—a rare thing, very rare things to have happen.

Some people read it, and they like it, and then of course it is much more likely that you’ll get a next book, and if people like that, then it is even more likely that you will get a third book, and then people start to know who you are. Because they know who you are, they phone you up and offer you opportunities, and your network grows. It’s like this exponential increase in your reach and your capacity for production, and more and more flows to you.

Then on the other hand, if you start to fail—and you know, why would someone fail? Well, God, one idea that is very common in our culture is that poverty is caused by lack of money, and that’s a very stupid idea. Because money is very difficult to handle— I had clients who were drug addicts, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them is that they got some money; they’re just done.

First of all, they were hanging around with people who were a little on the sociopathic side, and so, especially if they weren’t that bright and couldn’t defend themselves very well, as soon as they got money, well, it was off to the bar with all the friends. You know, one guy I remember in particular, you know, every time he got his disability cheque, he was gone for 5 days; you would find him in a ditch, you know, because he would go to the bar, spend every cent he had on alcohol and cocaine, and wake up in a ditch ¾’s dead.

Well, eventually completely dead. You know, then he was ashamed and horrified and repentant, and he would straighten himself out again, and then that was all well and good—until, as long he was broke—until the next cheque showed up, and then bang! The same thing.

So, you know, it’s not like money is necessarily a good for everyone; it’s hard to manage money— it’s really easy for it to disappear. I mean, elderly people have a hell of a time now because, you know, crooks are contacting them on the Internet nonstop.

Just giving people money, it’s like pouring water in their hands; it’s not that helpful— not necessarily that helpful. And then of course, contributors to poverty are, well, it’s not that helpful to have a low IQ, you know? People don’t like the idea of IQ because it seems so arbitrary.

You know, having a high IQ... well, it’s not like you deserve it exactly; you are set up that way pretty much right from the beginning. It’s a very, very, very, very stable... You can make a high IQ person stupider by not educating them up to the level of their possibility.

But taking someone who has a low IQ and trying to raise that, it’s like if you can figure out how to do that, well, you know, it’s Nobel Prize time for you because people have tried that a lot. Most recently, with those, you know, Luminosity games and that sort of thing, the evidence that those produce anything other than brilliant performances on the Luminosity game itself is basically zero.

We haven’t been able to figure out how to see... ‘cause, intelligence is a cross-domain phenomenon, and you can get really good in a single domain by practicing like mad. What you want is to practice like mad in a single domain and hope that it generalizes to other domains—that’s the holy grail of intelligence increase. No, no one has done it. People claim it, but the claims never hold up, and people have been trying for a long time to do it, and then haven’t been able to do it, and differences in IQ really make a difference, you know?

I mean, you guys’ average IQ is probably 125, 130. At 115, you are at the 85th percentile, and 115 would barely get you going for a hard university. At 130, you are probably graduate school material; you know, 145 you are up there at the range probably where you can pretty much do whatever you want. But as you get smarter, the scatter between your abilities increases.

So you might have a very high verbal IQ, but not be so good at mathematics, or the other way around. But it’s a massive contributor to lifetime success, and I don’t know what to do about that.

Why do smart people make more money? Well, they get to where the edge of production is faster. So if you have a thousand people and you rank order them by IQ, the smart people are going to come up with the new ideas first, and they are going to have more ideas, and they are going to strategize better. You know, with an IQ of 90, which is 15% of the population—think about that, 15% of the population—that is pretty much the threshold for reading instructions and being able to follow them.

So, you know, and our society is increasingly sophisticated. So it is by no means obvious; you know, the liberals think, well that society is unfair because there is unemployment, and conservatives think that, well there is a job for everyone. But none of them think, well, there are massive, massive, massive differences in people’s ability, far greater than anyone realizes, and that poses a structural problem.

I had a client, and I got him a volunteer job, which is way harder than you think. You need a police check, for example; it’s harder to get a volunteer job than a real job. But we got him in a volunteer job, and he had to fold pieces of paper, letters—he worked at a charity.

He had to fold pieces of paper in three so that he could put them inside envelopes, and the letters, which were in a pile, had to match with the proper envelopes, which were also in a pile. Some of them were French and some of them were English, so the French ones had to be carefully matched to the French envelopes. If, you know, if there was one envelope out of order, well then he had to figure out whether it was the papers that were out of order or the letters that were out of order.

Then, some of the letters had photographs attached to them, and you weren't supposed to bend the photographs, but they weren't all in the same place—so that meant you had to figure out how to fold the paper in three a bunch of different ways without creasing the photograph.

The other thing is, and I never realized how difficult it is to put a piece of paper in an envelope until I watched someone that couldn’t do it. He probably had an IQ of about 80; you know, if you met him on the street, you wouldn't think anything different of him. He was a normal-looking guy, had some other problems. I trained to fold those damn papers for like 30 hours, and he got reasonably good at it.

But you know, if you are good at it, and you probably all are, you fold it, and the edges line up exactly, like really exactly; the tolerance is probably ½ a millimeter or something like that. Then you do the second fold, and the tolerance is the same. But let’s imagine the first fold you are out by an 1/8th of an inch, and the second fold you are out by an 1/8th of an inch, so it’s a little crooked.

That means in total you are out by a ¼ of an inch, then it won't fit in the damn envelope. So then you kind of crumple the envelope when you put it there, and then it gets stuck in the sorting machine. He sweated blood trying to do that job, and eventually they planned to fire him.

So imagine what that's like, eh? You know, you can't get a job, and then so you get a job at a charity, and a charity decides to fire you. I mean, really, that’s just...

So I talked to the woman who was running it and suggested that that might be a little on the devastating side. I mean, she had her reasons, you know; he was always asking people questions about how to do his job, and you know, so that meant he was interfering with the productivity of other people—and it was genuine interference.

I mean, she wasn't being mean, and it was her job to make sure that the place did what it was supposed to. She was between a rock and a hard place. He eventually decided that the job wasn't for him relatively soon after that—I think it was too stressful and he quit.

So that solved that problem, except then he didn't have a job, which of course is a problem. It has a happy ending this story as far as I know. He got a dog because he was very lonesome, and that dog, man, having that guy train that dog— that was something else.

That dog just I think he lost thirty pounds while he was training that dog because dogs, you know, they are dominant. He had to have a tussle with the dog to figure out who was in charge. It’s a lot of responsibility to have a dog, but he was pretty damn committed to that dog, and he managed it.

The things he went through to keep that dog you cannot possibly imagine. It was surreal—just like the nuclear missile silo. I mean, he had people following him around informing on him because they thought he was abusing the dog when in fact, because I watched, the dog was clearly abusing him.

So, he got a job helping a woman who trained dogs, and then he had a job, so hurray, you know? But it was like a miracle fundamentally.

Anyways, the reason I am telling you all this is because there was a reason for the Cold War. The reason was that there is inequality, and there are different theories on how to address that inequality and different theories as to why it exists. There was a Marxist theory about why it exists, which was roughly something like property equals theft, and those who have more have taken it from those who have less.

It seems to me to eliminate any conceptualization that there isn't a fixed pot of money; you know money expands actually as we become more technologically proficient. Lots of people who have money have it because they generated a lot of wealth. Bill Gates is a great example of that, right? He popularized computing; he made it possible for everybody to have access to computing.

It seems like a good thing for him, you know, and you could say the same thing about Steve Jobs, and maybe you will be able to say the same thing about Elon Musk. You know, these guys have tremendous resources at their disposal, but you know, they’re not like bathing in banknotes.

You know, they’re trying to continue to do things. They use their money to do things. Anyways, the Russians set themselves up under Marxist presuppositions and tried to equalize the distribution of property. To call that catastrophic barely scratches the surface.

I know that you guys probably don't learn much about this because for some reason people aren't taught about it, but good estimates are that the Russians killed about 30 million of their own people between 1919 and 1959. You know, it's brutal; a lot of that was through starvation.

I saw a photograph the other day, which I tweeted, which is the worst photograph I have ever seen in my life, and that is actually saying a lot because I have seen a lot of really terrible photographs because I've done so much investigation into totalitarianism.

This was a photograph taken during one of the early starvation periods in the Soviet Union, where about three million peasants died. It was a picture of a peasant couple standing behind a table at a market selling human body parts for food.

You know, I have this weird quirk, which I don't think does me much good, but maybe helps me understand things better. When I see that someone has done something extreme, I learned to do this a long time ago when I worked briefly in a maximum-security prison. I try to imagine what I would have to... like, what kind of situation, what sort of situation would I have to find myself in to do that?

Believe me, man, that’s a horrifying enterprise because it is actually possible, no matter what you read about someone doing, and no matter how unlikely you think that you would do that, it’s possible to imagine yourself in that situation. And that, well, that’s enlightening, that’s what I would say; that’s enlightening.

You know, because one of the things about enlightenment is that you get enlightened by doing things that are necessary that you really, really, really do not want to know, don’t want to do. Imagining yourself as a perpetrator of that sort tells you something about the world, and it tells you something about human beings.

But it’s a hell of a thing to swallow, you know? In a very well-structured society such as ours, where we are so peaceful—well, because we have the heat and it always works and we have electricity, and it always works, and we have plumbing, which is a bloody miracle, and it always works.

You know, one of the things that this imagination process has done for me is keep me alert to the absolute miracle that my life is every day. It’s horribly cold out there; you can't grow any food. You’d die if you were out there for 24 hours. If any of the infrastructure was unreliable for any length of time, we would be in serious trouble.

It’s never unreliable. It’s so unlikely. We are, with all this reliable infrastructure, and because of that, we don’t have to compete with each other much. I mean, some people do compete for food, some people do compete for shelter—but not many.

So, it’s really easy to think of yourself as good because you’re not doing anything nasty to anyone. But, you know, a cynic might say, well, that’s just because you don’t have any reason to.

But those reasons have arisen many times in the past. In fact, they’re the norm; we’re the exception. This insanely functional society that we have somehow managed to generate... it is incomprehensible to me that it exists.

So, anyways, back in the industrial... the end of the industrial revolution, the conditions of the worker were pretty brutal. I mean, George Orwell wrote a book called "Road to Wigan Pier," which I highly recommend. It’s a great book.

He went up in the ‘30s, I think it was the ‘30s, to work, to live with the coal miners up in Northern U.K. Those poor guys, you know, they had to crawl to work for two miles down a tunnel that they couldn’t stand up in just to start their shift.

And after their 8 hours of hacking away at the coal walls, which is rather difficult, dirty, and dangerous—and of course, you get black lung from it (fatal)—and of course, they didn’t get paid very much. So after doing that for 8 hours, then you crawled back your two miles, and you didn’t get paid for that. That was just the commute.

The housing for those people wasn’t good; the food wasn’t good. Most of them had no teeth by the time they were 30, you know? I mean, being poor was no joke, even in a place like the U.K., which was relatively well off.

So there was every reason to be concerned with the disparity between rich and poor, and poor is the natural state. You know, in the Western world, in 1895, the typical person lived on a dollar a day in today’s dollars.

That’s not uncommon in many places in the world now. So there are reasons to be concerned with inequality. You know, the Russians took one pathway inspired by Marx, and we took another pathway inspired by John Stuart Mill and John Locke; the English tradition, I would say.

Democracy competed for 70 years, and things seem to have worked out better here. But it was a hell of a competition, and there were real differences of opinion at the bottom of it. Those two systems turned into armed camps, and that’s not over, exactly.

There are Chinese, although they're a hybrid now between communism and capitalism, and hopefully they are more interested in getting rich than they are in, you know, having a war. Greed is a good motivator, surprisingly enough; it is kind of reliable.

By 1989, the jig was up; it was obvious that the Soviet system could not function. There were no consumer goods, that’s for sure. Even in the main department stores in Moscow, people just kind of lost faith in the whole project.

You know, it became—huh!—for a while, I don’t know if you know about the show Dallas. Dallas was a soap opera that ran at night, a serial, and it was about these rich Texans who lived, you know, a 1% lifestyle. It was the most popular show in East Germany; the streets would empty so people could watch Dallas.

Well, when you are sitting in your horrible Soviet architectural flat that, you know, you had to struggle to get with your informing relatives—because 1 out of 3 people in East Germany was an informer, a government informer—and you watch Dallas, you know, there is a little cognitive dissonance occurring.

It all fell apart and quite peacefully, actually. You know, there was a war in there; there was a bit of a war in Eastern Europe, but it fell apart remarkably peacefully. And so, here we are, and we don’t know what to do with the pesky Russians, but at least there is no evidence that they are our mortal enemies for fundamental reasons of axiomatic presupposition.

And things are a lot better in the world, despite what everyone tells you, than they were 40 years ago, and they are so much better than they were 50 years ago that it is absolutely staggering. We have lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than have been lifted out of poverty in the entire history of the world before then.

People are gathering economic resources at a rate that even the wildest optimist really couldn’t dream of speeding up. So, it's not like we are not without our problems.

During that period of time, I was obsessed—would be a good word—with a question, and the question was: Why would human beings produce two camps and then produce a massive arsenal of hydrogen bombs?

I don’t know what you know about hydrogen bombs, but they have atom bombs for triggers, and you know that’s worth something because an atom bomb, you know, hey, that’s something. But a hydrogen bomb? That’s the sun; that’s really something!

At the peak of the Cold War, and this is still true to some degree, there were literally tens of thousands of these weapons aimed at the Soviet Union and at the West, and that was enough pretty much to put an end to everything. That’s a dangerous game, man, you know? Not only because of intent, but also because of the possibility of accidental... just an accident, you know? Just a mistake, or just someone who is a little crazier than you might want them to be, you know?

You might think, well, no one would want to bring about the destruction of the world, but that just means you don’t know very much about Stalin. Because of all the people who lived in the 20th century who had power, Stalin was the most motivated to bring everything to an end.

There is some evidence that he was murdered by Khrushchev and his crew, and Khrushchev was the next leader. If he was not murdered, he was at least not provided with medical attention when he was dying.

There is reasonable evidence that he was gearing to invade Western Europe, and he really didn’t care how much destruction would go along with that. I mean, he had already killed tens of millions of people; he had a lot of practice. It didn’t really bother him; maybe even enjoyed it.

So what the hell? That’s what I thought. How can it be that you are doing this? It’s so insane.

So then I started to think about belief systems, you know? Because you could say that each camp had its own belief system. The one in the West was derived and had a very lengthy history derived from the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews and the Christians and from various schools of philosophy and from the Enlightenment and all that.

Then the Soviet Union was basically predicated on a rational philosophy that opposed the axioms that the West had evolved, and each group organized their societies around that.

Now, I took political science for quite a long time, and the political scientists and the economists, they basically thought that people competed over resources. But that wasn’t a very good answer as far as I was concerned because it wasn’t obvious to me why people valued the resources they valued.

The economists just assumed that there were resources that you valued. But, you know, people can value a lot of different things; it’s not exactly fixed. I mean, you tend to value food very highly if you are hungry, obviously, but there are lots of things that we value and that we want that seem somewhat arbitrary, somewhat like a decision.

So I got more interested in why people valued things and what it meant to value something and then what it meant to believe something and then how it could be that someone could believe something so deeply that they would risk their own death to protect it, or at least risk the death of other people and maybe on a massive scale. Like, man, people are committed to their system now.

You know, a system of belief is not just a system of belief—that's one of the things I came to understand. It’s not appropriate to make this too psychological; people defend their belief systems, but that’s not exactly right. You know, we have a shared belief system. Well, it’s sufficiently shared so that here we are.

We don’t know each other; we are a bunch of primates; we are in this room, and it’s peaceful, and no one’s scared, and that’s pretty amazing. And that means we are all acting out our roles. So, we are acting out our roles and we have an expectation with regard to those roles, and those two things match, and that’s the important thing.

We will talk about that a lot. It isn’t the belief system or the integrity of the belief system, even; it’s the match between the belief system and the actions of the other people within the belief system.

What you want to maintain is that match. You want to act out your beliefs in the world, and you want what you want to happen; that’s a good thing. You get what you want, and you validate your belief system. Great, perfect security. But a lot of that is—we are interacting, even right now. There is a whole set of expectations that are governing what we are doing.

Like, you don’t want me to take your little tablet there and smash it; that would be shocking, right? You wouldn’t know what the hell to do, right? You would be somewhere different if I did that, and you wouldn’t know where you were.

That is another thing to know because that is a fundamental difference. There is a fundamental difference between knowing where you are and not knowing where you are. I think that it’s, in some sense, the fundamental difference. You can think about it as the distinction between explored and unexplored territory.

But you have to, I don’t know if you have taken a cat to a new house—cats hate that. Because in their old house, and maybe in their old neighborhood, they've slunk around, you know, at the edges, checking everything out. They start out afraid; they check everything out. They know where to hide; they know what's safe. They know that because they go somewhere and nothing happens.

So then they assume that it is safe, and they slowly build up a neighborhood that they are comfortable with. My dad used to take the dog for a walk, and the cat got lonesome. It started to follow him, and first of all, it would go along the buildings—the houses on their route—hiding really from predators.

After a while, it got kind of comfortable with that. Then it followed right behind the dog, but it had a border. If my dad took the dog over one street too many for the cat, the cat would just sit on the corner and, you know, cry, like a cat cries.

It was like, “That's it for me, man; I am not going any further out into the unknown.” So the distinction between the territory that you have mastered and the territory that you haven’t mastered is a fundamental distinction. It is the distinction between home and the strange land.

The thing about familiar territory for people is that most of the familiar territory that we inhabit is other people because we are so social. You can’t really think. It’s a weird way of thinking about territory. It’s not exactly geographical, objective territory; it’s territory with a dominance hierarchy in it, and the dominance hierarchy has a predictable structure, and you know where you fit in it most of the time.

So when you act out in that territory surrounded by your people, then often you get what you want, and you are so thrilled about that because you just don’t want someone acting erratically around you.

You know that, so you walk down Bloor, and there are people there that really should be institutionalized. But we de-institutionalized them all so that they could be free and free to be, you know, suffering and malfunctioning and out on the street. That’s what the freedom ended up being.

But, you know, you’ll walk by someone like that who’s muttering away to the voices in his head, and, you know, maybe striking out against whatever it is that’s plaguing him. You’ll make eye contact; you might even go across the street. You’re certainly going to give him a wide berth. You are going to keep a distance between him and you, and you are going to hope that you don’t attract his attention because he’s not in the dominance hierarchy, and you don’t know what the hell he might do—and that’s unexplored territory, too.

And that’s another way of thinking about it. We inhabit time and space, not just space and not just time. We inhabit time and space, and our territories are spatio-temporal. We are here now, and this is safe, now, and it’s safe partly because of the physical structure, and it’s working, but it’s also because none of you are manifesting peculiar behavior.

But if you started to manifest peculiar behavior—if you stood up and started muttering or yelling or maybe attacking someone next to you, all the rest of you freeze first. Because all of a sudden, this would be unexplored territory.

The match between what you want, which is a peaceful lecture that you hope has some content, the match between what you want and what is happening, has vanished. And so then, you don’t know where you are.

What do you do when you don’t know where you are? What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Well, if you are a computer, then you just crash. But you know, what good is that to you? You are just going to die; that isn’t helpful. You freeze first, and then you maybe cautiously attend, or maybe you don’t; maybe you just keep your damn eyes averted and you sit there and you hope that no one notices you.

That’s a prey response, right? That’s like a rabbit frozen when it thinks a fox is looking at it. We were prey animals for a long time. There was a cat that they recently discovered, a prehistoric cat, that had this bottom single tooth, and they found out that a human skull fit right inside its mouth.

It could grab you here and pierce the back of your skull with its single tooth, and that is what it was evolved for. So, you know, it’s under such conditions we evolved. We are predators, obviously, but we are tasty predators. Other things were perfectly happy to eat us.

So where you are, you don’t know what to do—you act like a prey animal. That is probably what you should do because maybe if you keep your head down and shut the hell up, there won’t be any attention attracted to you, and maybe you will get through it.

You might decide, unlikely, to intervene and take the guy down, but you would be the exception rather than the norm, and it’s unsurprising.

OK, so what I came to understand is that belief systems regulated emotions, but not exactly psychologically. Like, it isn’t exactly... and this is sort of like the terror management theories. It’s not exactly like you have a theory in your head, and because the theory explains the world, the theory is what is making you secure.

It’s kind of like that; it’s like you have a theory in your head, and the theory makes you feel secure because it explains the world. But the reason it explains the world is because other people have the theory in their head. When you both act out the theory, you both get what you want.

It’s the coming together of the theory and the outcome that makes it. It’s life; not only does it stop you from being anxious, and often makes you happy because you get what you want, but it’s not just psychological.

You know, the fact that we do this, that we cooperate within our societies, we match our belief systems and then act them out—that’s the predicate of a productive society. So it’s actually... it isn’t that it just saves you from death anxiety, like the terror management theorists have it; it saves you from death. And that’s good; I mean being protected from death anxiety, yay, well, good—that’s great too, man.

But actually not dying—that’s sort of the fundamental thing that you are after. People have reason to defend their territory. If you think of territory that way, if you think about it as a domain where the fundamental presuppositions of each citizen are matched by the behavior of their co-citizens, they have every reason to defend that.

If it falls apart, it can have mortally serious consequences. It’s chaos, you know? Chaos just doesn’t destabilize everybody psychologically; it destabilizes everything; it can destabilize the currency, it can destabilize the industrial economy. The lights can go off; it’s not good. So, hey, no wonder people protect it.

So then I started thinking about what a belief system was, and I realized that a belief system was actually a set of moral guidelines. Moral guidelines are guidelines about how you should behave; also, how you should perceive.

The reason that a moral guideline is necessary for you to perceive is that you can’t look at anything without a hierarchy of value. Right? Think about it. How many things in this room could you look at? There is an innumerable number of things in this room to look at.

There are just all the squares, the little tiny squares in this fabric; you could look at those things for the end of time, one at a time. But you don’t do that. In fact, if I took most of you out of this room, there is a very low probability that you would be able to tell me what color the walls were or even if those things were on the walls.

The reason for that is that who cares? As long as the walls don’t move, color is irrelevant, and there is no reason for you to remember it. It has no emotional significance; it has no value.

So what you do instead is—well, this is what you’re doing. So why are you here? I don’t mean in the broad metaphysical sense; I mean specifically, why are you here right now? I would say that you are students, obviously, and you are trying to get a degree.

You know, you believe that will have some functional utility—maybe you will be a little wiser, and a little more literate, and be able to think a little better, and be able to write a little better. So you will actually be more functional in the world; that would be good, you know?

Maybe you are interested, but anyways. You’re in this particular lecture so that you can take this particular class so that you can get a particular kind of degree so that you can launch your life, and then in your life you are probably going to meet someone that you have a long-term relationship with, and you are going to have children, and you are going to partake in society, and that’s why you are here—all of those reasons simultaneously are why you are here.

And so then that helps you decide what to look at. And so what you look at, at the moment, or listen to is me because, in principle, I am the gateway to that set of accomplishments at this moment.

You focus on me, and that’s because you value that. And so what that means is that you can’t even look at the world without a value structure. You know, it’s chaos if everything is equally unimportant or if everything is equally important; it’s chaos.

So a value system structures the very way that you perceive the world, and I don’t mean that metaphysically, there are plenty of experiments that have demonstrated that. Like the invisible gorilla experiment. How many of you know about the invisible gorilla experiment? How many don’t? Well, roughly speaking, what happens is that there are two teams—a white team dressed in white and a team dressed in black—and there is a video of them, and the black team is passing a basketball back and forth.

The white team is passing a basketball back and forth, and you are supposed to count the times the basketball gets passed back and forth. There is only one basketball. So, you know, you’re diligent for whatever reason—you do what the experimenter asks you, and you count the basketball tosses.

You think, well that’s not so hard. It’s like 16. So you tell them 16, and they say, “Did you see the gorilla?” and half of you say, “What are you talking about?” The experimenter says, “Let’s watch again, but this time, don’t count.”

Well, sure enough, like 30 seconds into the video—and you know, the players fill the video screen. It’s not like they are 300 yards in the distance, you know, like little ants playing basketball; they’re right in front of you, filling the screen. You can see their faces.

Sure enough, a minute into the video, this guy in a gorilla suit comes out, bangs his chest right in the middle of the screen for five seconds and then disappears, and more than half, actually, of people don’t see that.

It’s even worse; Dan Simon did another experiment where you’re at a counter, you know, at a store, and there is a clerk there and you are talking to the clerk. The clerk goes down hypothetically to get something, and then a different clerk pops up. You think, “Hey! I would notice that!” but you don’t.

You can even vary the clerk quite a bit, and people don’t notice. So, we focus on very particular things, and the reason we don’t notice is because it doesn’t actually matter in terms of our ongoing action at that point; the clerk is interchangeable. As long as the entity there acts like a clerk, that’s sufficient.

Belief systems structure your perceptions, value systems—we are going to call them value systems—they structure your perceptions and they also guide your actions because you act in accordance with your values, conscious or unconscious.

You have values that you don't know about because you don't know yourself very well. You can tell that you have values that you don't know very well because sometimes you get attracted to people that you know perfectly well—that's a mistake—or you are trying to tell yourself to study, and you don't.

You know, so you are not in control of yourself to any great degree. And the more integrated you are, the more control you have; but you are kind of a loose collection of arguing sub-personalities, and they are more or less directed towards a single goal.

But it depends on how committed you are to that goal, how much you have thought it through, how much you buy into it, and how many of the contradictions in your world representation you have managed to iron out, and all of that.

But in any case, it’s value systems that govern action and perception. And so, we are going to take an existential perspective, a phenomenological and an existential perspective in this course.

Phenomenological means that we are going to base our presuppositions on the idea that what you experience is real— all of it. We are not really dividing the world into object and subject; that isn’t how this particular approach works.

It’s more like you have a field of experience. It includes things like pain, which is not really something objective. I mean, but it’s real. One of the things I've come to understand is... don’t... You are not required to believe what I am telling you, by the way.

If you have an argument about why some of this doesn't make sense, then, you know, follow that sucker because I am trying to tell you what I have reached with regards to bedrock presuppositions, and I haven’t been able to put pry bars underneath them. But that doesn’t mean you won’t, and you know you should try, anyways.

A moral system tells you how to act, what to see, and a shared moral system keeps your emotions under control and fulfills your motivational needs. Now, there is this old idea of David Hume’s, and David Hume famously posited that you cannot derive an ought from an is.

What he meant by that was merely knowing the objective facts about something does not tell you how to implement those facts in your life, and that’s actually a gap. Now you could say, and I think that this is the case, that is a necessary consequence of the scientific endeavor because one of the things you are trying to do as a scientist is to strip away the value of the object, right?

I don’t care what your idiosyncratic notion of the object is. I want to know how you perceive the object such that everyone else will perceive it at least that way, and so that takes the subjectivity completely out of it.

It might just be a necessary consequence of the scientific method that it doesn’t have a morality implicit in it. People argue about that. Sam Harris, for example, argues; he believes that we can come up with a scientific morality. I don’t believe that because I don’t think that you can make rational judgments about value. It’s too complicated; it’s far too complicated.

It’s something that has to emerge; it can’t be... I mean, Marxism was supposed to be a scientific utopia predicated on scientific principles and all that, and you know, it just didn’t work.

Anyways, I kind of buy Hume’s argument that you cannot derive an ought from an is. Now that’s a problem; first of all, it’s a problem because you have factual knowledge, but you don’t know how to implement it.

You know, it’s like should you spend money on AIDS, or should you spend money on cancer, or should you spend money on higher education? How the hell are you going to calculate that rationally? You can’t because you just don’t have the information at hand.

It’s not possible. I worked for a U.N. committee at one point, and the U.N. committee had like a hundred proposals for how the world could be improved but there was no order to them. It wasn’t, this is more important than this.

It’s like, well that’s the end of that. You know, you have got to start with something. And so that means you have to make something more important than other things, obviously, in your life. If everything is of equal importance, then you are paralyzed.

Now, you know, it’s a truism and probably an oversimplified one that since the dawn of the scientific revolution, a wedge has been driven through the heart of our societies, such that the moral systems that we use to unite us—those would be religious systems—fundamentally have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists.

It’s a pretty effective critique; even if you have maintained a traditional faith, it’s like the scientific onslaught is no joke, and that’s a problem as far as I can tell. Because the problem is that you are still left with the problem of how you should act.

Nietzsche, the philosopher, would say we are running on the fumes of Christianity in the West because over its thousand years of domination, let’s say 1500 years of absolute domination, it produced a consensus of morality that was predicated on metaphysical presuppositions and that organized societies.

Those societies are predicated on certain beliefs like the belief in—really, I would say in something divine inhabiting each individual, you know. That’s sort of the presumption that is embedded in law—that there is something about you that is so valuable that even the law has to bow to it, even if you are reprehensible, even if you are convicted and reprehensible.

Now that’s, man, the idea that people came up with that idea—that’s a bloody miracle, you know. Generally speaking, your proclivity is that if someone is even accused of doing something, the general human proclivity is that if someone is just accused of doing something terrible, that’s enough so that you can stone them to death or do whatever you are going to do with them.

The presumption of innocence before guilt—good God, of all the things that aren’t automatic, that’s got to top the list, you know? It’s unbelievable that it occurs. It is interesting to me because it seems to me that that presupposition that there is something valuable, transcendent about each individual—I wouldn’t call that a scientific presupposition, but it seems to be a highly functional presupposition.

Right? I think that it isn’t unreasonable to notice that societies that have valued the individual and made the law subject to the individual, even with regard to voting, because that’s basically what voting does, it puts sovereignty in the hands of the people—those societies actually seem to work.

Now, whether they will work for the next 300 years? Who the hell knows, but they worked pretty well for the last 500 years, let’s say. We’ve got it pretty good right now.

And you know, I suspect most of you are rather pleased that the law recognizes your value as individuals, and you take that for granted. Right? You think you have rights, and of course the rights you have—natural rights—are logical consequences of your transcendent value, and that is nested in—that this is Nietzsche’s observation—that is nested in a set of metaphysical beliefs.

His idea was that if you wiped out the metaphysical beliefs, eventually you wipe out the whole system because you knocked out the cornerstone.

It might take a long time for the thing to shake and fall, but it will. Now, whether he was right or not is hard to say. It looks to me like what has happened since Nietzsche announced the death of God in the late 1800s is that Western society has oscillated between extremes.

You know, extremes on the right, Germany; extremes on the left. And, you know, with the democracies, at least the other democracies, the democracies managing to stay the course somewhere down the middle.

But it is not obvious to me that that can be maintained without the underlying metaphysics, and that is a problem because whatever you might say about the underlying metaphysics, it is not true the way that science is true.

And that could be OK because there might be more than one form of truth. In fact, I think there is. I think that there is pragmatic truth, and I think that pragmatic truth is actually deeper than scientific truth.

Pragmatic truth is the truths that enable you to act in a manner that best improves the probability, roughly speaking, of your existence and reproduction maximally. That is a Darwinian idea.

One of the things about the Darwinian theory—this kind of puts it in opposition to scientific materialism, I would say—is that the Darwinian theory is that you do not have privileged knowledge of the world. You can actually tell that because you die.

If you knew enough about the world, you would not die. And you do die, and so you are an embodied theory of sorts. And that theory is good enough to get you along about 80 years and produce some reasonable probability that you'll have children and that they will survive.

That’s it, man—that’s what you have managed after 3 billion years of evolution. It’s a good enough solution. It’s a good enough way of acting, and we don’t know a better way of acting.

Our world conceptions are actually nested inside the Darwinian system, and they might be predicated on pragmatic truths rather than objective truths. Pragmatic truths are truths that have functional utility, and we are alive; we care about being alive.

We tend to use our theories as tools; it’s possible that our theories are tools and that they are tools to help us stay alive. Now, I was reading a bit about Camille Paglia the other day, and I have noticed some similarities between—she's a famous gadfly, I would say, of feminists, classic modern feminists, although she would regard herself as a feminist.

Unbelievably smart. Like, if you want to watch someone whose verbally—who has verbal mastery beyond belief—you could watch Camille Paglia. She seems a little manic to me. She can rap off an argument at a rate that’s just mind-boggling, and is very coherent, and she tends to shred her opponents in arguments.

She is so brilliant! She said something interesting, and she has been influenced by some of the same people I have been influenced by. She liked this book by Erich Neumann called "The Origins and History of Consciousness," which I would recommend if you are interested in Jungian theory, Carl Jung.

It’s a good introduction to Jungian theory and it’s about the development of consciousness. It’s predicated like Jung’s work and Joseph Campbell’s work and Mircea Eliade’s work, all of which has been criticized or ignored by the post-modernists.

It is predicated on the idea that human beings have a central narrative and that that central narrative is the dramatic expression of the necessary human system of values. That is built into us; it’s part of our nature.

We have a nature as human beings; we’re not infinitely malleable by culture, which is a post-modernist claim, and a dangerous one. It’s dangerous if we have a nature. Paglia has this idea that the reason that you come to university and you study the humanities, or the proper reason if you do that is not to engage in premature and destructive criticism of something that you don’t even yet understand, but to learn as much as you can about art and literature and poetry and drama and fiction and religious thinking.

This is all kind of a... you can think about it as a—what is that? What is all that? It’s art, it’s culture. Music belongs in that category. And like, what the hell? What about music? It’s like everyone loves it—or almost everyone.

It’s a mystery! You listen to music and it is very meaningful. I mean music gets people through some pretty dark times. Why? It’s not obvious, that’s for sure. You know, in most cultures, music plays a very central role in identity formation, and you guys, I think you will probably find as you age that your favorite music will be the music that you listened to between the ages of 16 and 20.

It’s kind of like it imprints on you and it defines a—maybe it defines a generation. Maybe, in our tribal past—and this is highly likely—when you were being inculcated into the tribal culture, that was inculcated with dance and with masks and with music, all at the same time.

So you are invited to participate in this drama and to take your place in this drama. To think of that as a representation of the objective world is just not right; that isn’t what it is. It’s an invitation to a drama.

Now then the question might be, well, is the drama real? And the answer to that is—it depends on what you mean by real. I think that great dramas are more real than real; they’re hyper-real.

They’re hyper real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic, but applicable across an extraordinary broad range of situations.

So imagine this. You know, you get up in the morning; you do a bunch of things. Someone asks you what you are doing, what you did, and you, you know, you tell them, “Well, the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes. The second thing was think about whether or not I wanted to go back to sleep. Then you know, I took off my blankets, and then I put my feet on the floor and I stood up, and I was blinking while I was doing all this, and I was also breathing. Then, you know, I looked for my clothes.”

Do you really want to listen to that guy? You don’t want to listen to that guy. It’s like, why are you telling me that? I want you to tell me something interesting.

What is it that is interesting? And why isn't that interesting? It’s not obvious. So then imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty good story—a little adventure.

Probably, he was doing something normal, and something unexpected happened. He had to conjure up some new responses; he either settled the problem, or he didn't settle the problem. Yeah, you’re interested in that, especially if he settled the problem.

Because if he can tell you how when he encountered some unexplored territory he was able to sew it back together, then maybe you can do that thing happens, and that’s pretty cheap wisdom for you. He had to go through all the aggravation of figuring it out, and all you have to do is listen, you know?

That’s kind of a classic story; the classic story, roughly speaking, is: There is a guy, woman, it doesn’t matter, going about their life relatively normally, something blindsides them, and they are in a state of chaos. Chaos is a place. Chaos is the place that you end up when what you are doing and the world stop matching, and the chaos can be of different degrees.

You know, you could wake up and find that your house was burgled. You could wake up and find that a parent has Alzheimer’s or some fatal disease, or that you do, or that your whole family was murdered, or that there is a war starting. You know there are different degrees of chaos.

I think that you can quantify the chaos by calculating how much of what you do and expect is likely to be disrupted by the event. The more disruption, the more destabilized you are going to be, which is why if someone tells you that you are going to perish painfully in three months, it’s like, “That’s a bad one.”

You’re really in an unexpected territory there; nothing that you assumed that was real, roughly speaking, in the world is real anymore.

We like to watch people in their normal life blindsided by something experiencing this interregnum of chaos where they explore and gather new information, retool their character, or retool the world because either of those would work as a solution. Then come out the other side, and things are better than they were to begin with, or at least as good. But better is better; that's a happy ending, right?

That’s a happy ending; that’s a comedy, technically speaking. And so, what you want is your life to be a comedy—not that it’s supposed to be funny because comedy doesn’t have to be funny, technically speaking. It’s just the opposite of tragedy.

Tragedy is when you are going along pretty well and you get blindsided, and that’s that. You know that can certainly happen; it happens to people all the time.

It’s a comedy that you want. Now, what I hope to provide you with is a magic code. You know, there was a book published a while back. Tom Hanks was in the movie—he was a Harvard professor who went around solving symbolic mysteries.

Do you remember what it was called? The Da Vinci Code. Everyone liked that. It sold a lot, and it was full of little mysteries. It was full of hints that there was more to the world than you think.

Which is definitely true; and that you know, there is a way of getting access to that knowledge and it would be really worthwhile. People like that idea, and the reason for that is because it is actually true. It’s true like fiction is true.

So, OK, let’s go back to the guy who is telling you about his morning. Well, he tells you something exciting. Well then, imagine that 10 people tell you exciting stories, and then you extract out the pattern of them dealing with this problem from that.

Then you have a—that’s what you do when you are an author, right? Because in a book, you don’t want the book exactly to be about what ordinary people do in ordinary times in their life.

You already know how to be ordinary during ordinary times of your life. What? That’s not useful; you know, you wouldn’t watch a videotape of yourself. Imagine you videotaped yourself during a day, and then the next day you watched that.

It’s like, God, who would want to do that? So, what seems to happen in stories is that they distill. They distill. They watch people. People watch people, and then they tell stories about what they see. But they leave a lot out of those stories—everything that is boring, hopefully.

More and more stories about exciting things get sort of aggregated, and then maybe a great writer comes along and writes something really, really interesting: profound character transformations. Then, well, you say “That’s fiction,” and then you say “That’s not true.”

Because it’s fiction, but then maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s more than true because who wants the truth? The truth is mundane reality, and you have already got that mastered.

What you want is the distillation of interesting experience. You might think, well, why is it interesting? Well, that’s a really good question because you don’t actually know.

Believe me, you really don’t know because you will be interested in things that just don’t make any sense at all. I am going to walk a bit today through Pinocchio, and we will do that more the next time too.

You know, but I want to tell you a little bit about that movie to begin with just so you know how crazy you are. So, you know the plot. How many people have seen the Disney movie Pinocchio? So, lots of people.

That’s strange enough in itself that so many people have seen it. It’s worth thinking about. You know, you tend to show your kids that movie, but if you think about the movie, it’s— you are doing some pretty weird things when you are sitting there watching that movie, man.

First of all, it’s drawings, right? And they are low resolution drawings. You don’t care. You watch the Simpsons or maybe, what’s that called—the one that’s been concentrating on political correctness so much?

[Students]: South Park.

South Park! God, that animation, man, it’s just awful, right? It is just horrible; it couldn’t be worse, you don’t care. Round heads, smile a little bit of shuffling—that’s a person as far as you’re concerned; it’s just irrelevant.

If it was higher resolution, it wouldn’t help. You just need the bare bones, right, to hang your perceptions on. So, you watch this drawing; that’s Pinocchio—beautiful drawings animated in a sequence.

You are not watching something real; you are watching a pure construction. And then you think about the plot—it’s completely absurd! Everything about it is absurd.

It’s like, well one of the characters is a bug, and he turns out to be like the conscience. So what the hell is with that? And then, another character is this puppet, marionette.

And you know, somehow he gets free of his strings and then goes on this adventure, and then, you know, he gets enticed into various nefarious places by a fox and a cat. And then he rescues his father from a whale, and you don’t even know how his father got into the whale, it’s like the last time you see his father he was in a rainstorm, and the next thing that happens is he is in a whale?

And you are sitting there thinking, “Hey, no problem; this all makes sense.” It’s like, what? Really? Why? How does that make sense? Well, the answer is, you don’t know. That’s the thing that is so cool; you don’t know.

You don’t even know what you are watching, but it doesn’t matter. You watch it, and you are interested in it. You want to see what the hell happens to this puppet. You want to see if he ends up becoming a real boy.

Because it seems important. Well, you say, “Is Pinocchio true?” Well, that’s a stupid question. It’s partly a stupid question because the answer is it depends on what you mean by true, and it isn’t obvious to me what you should mean when you say that something is true.

And the reason it is not obvious is because we have this idea in our society, and it’s a very profound idea, and that idea is that the ultimate truth is scientific truth—that that tells us about the nature of the world, and it does that in a final way in some sense.

There is no brooking any arguments about it. The physicists have got it right, and that’s why they can make hydrogen bombs, and that’s a pretty good demonstration of their being right. But you don’t act as if that’s true.

You don’t watch things, pay attention to things, and are captivated by things that aren’t predicated on those assumptions. It seems to me that there is a problem of what the world is made out of, but there is a bigger problem, and that is the problem of how you should conduct yourself in the world.

And that is what you really want to know. People want to know that more than anything because you need to know. It’s like here you guys are in university; you don’t know what you are doing. I mean, some of you know more than others, but you are at the beginning of your life, and life is very complex and chaotic.

It isn’t exactly obvious, you know, what kind of relationships you should form or what sort of character you should develop or what you are going to do for a job or what’s the meaning of life. That’s a good one: What’s the meaning of life?

Well, you know, people come to university, at least many of them, and that’s kind of what they want to find out. Now Paglia, her notion is that you could think about it this way. Is that articulated knowledge is embedded in inarticulate knowledge.

Inarticulate knowledge is a domain of literature and art—high culture, let’s say. We sort of know what it means, but we don’t know exactly what it means. It means more than we know, and then outside of that is what we don’t know at all.

That’s an idea that Jung developed as well. Maybe Paglia picked it up from Jung because Jung believed that, you know, there was this domain that we had mastered in every domain, and then there was a domain outside of that.

You could think of it as unexplored territory, and what we met unexplored territory with was our creative imagination. What we were trying to do with our creative imagination is to figure out how to deal with that unexplored territory; we are producing dramas that we could act out that would help us deal with what we still hadn’t mastered.

Outside of that, there is just what we don’t know at all, and Paglia’s idea—and this was Jung’s idea—was that without understanding that surround you are too atomized. You are not part of your historical tradition; you haven’t incorporated the spirit of your ancestors who built all this. You’re just here now, and you don’t know what to do either.

You don’t know how to maintain your culture, and you don’t know how to serve it. You know, you might say, “Why should you serve your culture?” Well, I have a hypothesis about that; you can think about this.

I don’t know if it’s true, but people ask what the meaning of life is, and it seems to me that meaning is proportionate to the adoption of responsibility. You know, like let’s say you have a little sister who’s like three; you are going to take care of her. Questioning whether that is a good idea seems stupid.

You know what I mean? It just doesn’t seem like the right kind of question. It’s like, well obviously, self-evidently, let's say that’s what you do. And do you find it meaningful? It’s probably; you know interacting with a little kid.

When I had little kids, you know, when they were like two and under, we took them out to see their relatives, and they were older people. You know, they watched that two-year-old like it was a fire, you know? Every second that that little kid was in the room, every single adult was focused on him or her.

That is something that people attend to, and that’s a source of meaning. And, what else is meaningful? Well, your family relationships are meaningful to you.

Maybe the responsibility that you adopt as a friend, that seems meaningful. Maybe your decision to pursue a particular career and be of some utility in society; part of that’s governed by your desire to establish some security and get ahead—it’s fine. But you are also playing an integral role in the maintenance of the structure that supports you.

My observation has been that in my clinical practice, people just have a hell of a time if they don’t have... if they don’t slot in somewhere. You know? I have to go to work at 9:00 in the morning, and you know I have got this rigid schedule. It’s probably a good idea to be grateful for that because what I have noticed is that if people pull out from those externally scaffolded systems, they drift.

They get depressed; they get anxious; they don’t know what to do with themselves. You know, they are kind of like sled dogs with no sled. And we are kind of like sled dogs, as far