Maps of Meaning 06 (Harvard Lectures)

Right, so you're all wondering about your papers, no doubt. They are marked. Do I have the marks with me? No. I'll leave the papers outside my office on my bench hopefully tomorrow morning.

I hypothesize about the relative value of things, including myself and others. This might not make much sense; it's a pretty complicated idea. Page... what page is it on? Don't you have that memorized? The end of the SE, somewhere around 128 or 129, I think. Anyways, it's in there somewhere—130, middle of the first paragraph.

Oh yes, okay, okay. So we haven't... well, things get complex here rapidly. So that's what we're going to do first, a little bit is do some recapitulation so that everyone knows where we are before we go somewhere new. I've been trying to convince you of the notion that when we model our experience, we're coming up with two different kinds of models, which are usually conflated.

We're not really clear about the difference between them. One is a map of facts, and that map and its construction has—construction of that map is being formalized as the scientific endeavor. The map itself is the sum total of scientific knowledge. Science is how we generate our knowledge about facts, and I would say that a fact is a consensually apprehensible phenomenon or its pattern of transformation.

Because science is not only interested in clarifying the nature of objects, but also wants to be able to tell how one object—how an object changes into something else over time. Right? And, as Einstein pointed out in the quote that I provided by him, we're generally used to regarding that sort of phenomena as real.

Einstein wasn't a philosopher of science, but he was obviously a great scientist, and at the very least his quotation, which talks about the consensually validatable properties of things, describes the manner in which people conduct science. Under normal circumstances, that's what we think we're doing.

And there's a different kind of map, and that's a map not of facts about things, but about what those things signify for behavior. And I mean for motor output—what they signify for what you should do when you're around them, when you encounter them. And we don't really understand that map very well.

We don't naturally—I don't think we naturally think of it as sort of a separable phenomenon. It strikes me that you can make a reasonable case that it's actually the type of map that preceded the formal development of science because we, like animals, are primarily concerned with how to act rather than with what is in fact.

And if you understand that, then you can answer some questions that otherwise remain somewhat mysterious. I mean, for example, how do you know when you're right about something? You know, at a fundamental basis, you're never right about anything because wherever you look, there’s an infinite number of mysteries. At least from the factual perspective, they tend not to disturb you.

And it is the case that we have placed implicit faith in the notion that we know things, and that what we know is sufficient, even though we know that what we know isn't sufficient. In the final analysis, not only is it wrong, but it's sufficiently wrong so that, over the course of centuries, it transforms itself into something that's often even unrecognizable, but it still strikes us as knowledge.

And that's because I think we think we know something when, acting on that knowledge, we produce results that we want. And that's sufficient. If you get from point A to point B using procedure C, then you're convinced that you're right because—that's it, that's right enough, and that's our criteria.

Antonio Damasio, for example, he just wrote a new book called "Descartes' Error." Descartes' error being "I think, therefore I am." Damasio is pointing out that people with damage to their prefrontal cortex start to lose the ability to make decisions—to decide between trivial things, like when or to decide trivial things—not necessarily just between them, like when you throw out old newspapers or which restaurant to go to.

You don't sum total all the facts about a given restaurant and everything you can think about it, and then contrast that restaurant with all conceivable restaurants when you go out to eat. The process is pretty automatic, and Damasio argues that we do it by recourse to emotion.

The frontal lobes help us determine what our emotions are signifying, and as a consequence, we can eliminate vast swaths of material that would just sort of clog up our cognitive faculties otherwise. But the thing is knowing a little bit about how stories work, about how we posit our ideal futures and how we move towards them instantly gives you some insight into how it is that we determine that we actually know something.

And when we say we know something, we basically mean our knowledge is sufficient to get us from point A to point B, and that's enough. That keeps us in the expected world; it keeps our emotions regulated. And I would say that the purpose of knowledge is to regulate emotion. That's what you have it for.

So I mean, you're always engaged in the endeavor to increase... well, this is kind of a behaviorist way of looking at it, but it's sufficiently accurate so that it's useful. You want to live in a world where there's lots of hope for the future and where you're satisfied all in all, or at least you're working to maximize your satisfaction.

You also want to avoid anxiety to the degree that that's possible within the context of maximizing hope and satisfaction. The same goes for pain; you're always trying to regulate your emotions. In fact, the reason we modify the external world is to regulate our emotions.

Like we tend to think that emotional regulation is actually a psychological process— that's right, calm down, you know, bring yourself under control. That's only true in the most trivial of circumstances. Almost all the time, what we do to regulate our emotions is to change things around us with our behavior so that we're satisfied more or less with the manner in which our limbic system is conducting itself.

That motivates our behavior—the kind of knowledge that you have that enables you to act so that what you want appears. I would call that wisdom—that's what we're contrasting in this class, I guess, the domain of mythology. That's how wisdom is transmitted, not factual knowledge.

Wisdom is how to act so that you get—not only, it's not really so that you get what you want; that's a really simple way of looking at it—it's so that your emotions remain regulated stably over time in a situation that's primarily composed of others who are doing the same thing, who all have to act, including you, in a manner so that that stable regulation is flexible enough so that it can update itself when necessary across time.

So there's a lot of constraints that have to be satisfied in order for your solution to the regulation of your emotions to be considered optimal. When you talk about how to act in a given situation, it sounds as if we're—I only think of social situations. That's primarily what I'm talking about because most of our environment is a social environment.

Most of what I consider my environment is you and everyone else that I encounter. What about when you pop the disc into the computer and it says the drive is not working and you want to know how to act? Is that wisdom also, or is that some...

Well, I would say—look, okay, that’s a perfectly reasonable question. I would say wisdom is an abstraction of behavioral knowledge. So I wouldn't say necessarily that knowing how to open up the box of the computer and fix whatever particular electronic part happens to be fed up constitutes wisdom. But I would say that, usually what happens if your computer falls up is that you don't know what to do.

But what you do know is how to figure out what to do. And basically, what you do when you're trying to fix a computer—well, based on the presumption that you can fix it, which is like the presumption that leads the whole behaviorist to hold everything constant and vary one thing, right? You engage in a process of trial and error—that's devoted toward solving the problem.

And I would say being able to engage in the maneuvers that allow you to generate the specific answer to the problem, that's pretty much akin to wisdom. So, I mean that's with the computer. It's a little different because the computer's a... the computer's a bit peculiar, though, because it's an artificial environment in that it isn't something of infinite complexity in a sense, at least at the level at which you want to interact with it. It’s a finite domain, so a real standard set of problem-solving techniques can be applied to it.

Right, scientific, yeah. So the computer... well, the computer is probably the only part of the universe that actually works exactly as you predict it would from the scientific perspective, so there’s not a lot of remaining mystery in it. So, but if it says system error, you freeze. The first thing, especially if you're doing something... yeah, and then you sort of figure—then don't you need a strategy to allay your anxiety, such as calling the help number?

Right, right, that’s recourse to authority. Yeah, that’s a common mode of problem-solving. I’d say the computer has plenty of unknown in it for most of us.

Yeah, yeah, with things... no, no, that’s true, that’s true. I would still say the process of generating solutions is more akin to wisdom than knowing any specific solution. And that sort of actually serves as a good introduction to the kind of things we want to talk about today.

Okay, so anyway, so I was—I was summing up. I’m reiterating the distinction between the domain of myth and the domain of science, making the additional point that mythology is both it’s the story we tell about our wisdom and it’s also our means of transmitting it. Basically, and the same can be said about narratives in general—they're sort of specific examples of more general myths, I would say.

So, okay, well then... okay, the next question that pops up is—one second—the next question that pops up is that, well, if you can conceive of the world as a collection of objects and other transformations, but we're not doing that. We're conceiving of the world as a place to conduct action in.

And so then the next question is, if you conceive of the world as a place in which to act, what's the structure of it? And it strikes me that you can determine the structure by contrasting myths and seeing—picking out their commonalities.

There's a bit more to it than that because there are creation myths, and creation myths explicitly state that what they're dealing with is a description of the Genesis of the world. So it’s also a natural field of inquiry for mythology, and what I have been attempting to describe is my summary, I guess, of these various myths and the world that they portray.

The mythological world basically has three constituent elements, you could say four. There’s the chaos that precedes the construction of anything, and that's represented as Theos. That's the dragon that eats its own tail, and it’s the winged serpent.

And the winged serpent is simultaneously a creature of spirit—that’s the masculine world—and a creature of matter—that's the feminine world. The masculine world has two aspects; one is more akin to spirit, speaking traditionally, and the other is more akin to the patriarchal structure, to the great father.

The masculine world is both the process by which knowledge is generated and that knowledge. That’s why, for example, in the Egyptian mythology that surrounds the Pharaoh, the live Pharaoh is simultaneously Osiris and Horus. Osiris stands for the state as a historical entity—that's one way of looking at it—and Horus stands for the process by which that state is updated and generated.

The live Pharaoh, insofar as he’s doing his job, is both the dead state and the process by which the dead state is regenerated. Remember when Horus goes to the underworld to find his father who’s blind and living a sort of a semi-vegetative life? After he overcomes Seth, by the way, he gives him his eye, and that brings him back up to the surface, so to speak.

Well, now you know what that story means. That’s a very common story—that’s the myth of the rebirth of the king, basically part of the hero’s journey. You saw a little bit of that echoed in Pinocchio. It’s really kind of a peculiar place to find Osiris and Horus, I think, if you think about it. It’s kind of hard to figure out how that might have come about unless you're willing to entertain the hypothesis that some of these images really do get saved and passed around in all sorts of bizarre forms.

So remember, Pinocchio—to be the true hero—which meant to be real—which meant to be born again, he not only had to go into the belly of the whale—that’s the unknown, the buros—but he had to save his father. He couldn’t just abandon him and save himself; he had to bring the culture along with him because that’s a really potent story, if you think about it.

I mean, and obviously true; since your culture protects you, to abandon it or to fail it when it needs help, so to speak, means to turn your back on precisely the thing that protects you from things that you understand so poorly that you don’t even know they’re there.

So I remember in The Hobbit—this isn’t The Hobbit, was very popular in the 60s. I mean it's a myth. The hobbits live in a kingdom that's threatened by vague forces from the outside. They're little people among—there are large people, who they call the Striders, and the Striders look like vagabonds, and they control the perimeter of the hobbits' kingdom sort of unknown to the hobbits, but they're the mythical ancestors.

Like the hobbits have a fair amount of contempt for them, actually thinking of them as tramps, but they’re actually the forces that keep the unknown, the vague unknown, at bay so thoroughly that the hobbits don’t even know that it's there. Really, well, that’s the position that we’re in.

I mean, that’s one of the things I want to convince you of, so to speak, in the course of this class—they’re the remnants of the old kingdom, right? They’re the remnants of the old kingdom, absolutely. They’re the ancestral powers; lots of cultures worship their ancestors.

They erect stone monuments to them, for example, so they don’t forget them. And, well, the ancestors—it’s easy for ancestors as well to turn into gods. In fact, that’s what ancestors do over time, is that they turn into gods.

Iotti points out, for example, that among archaic people—and that, in this context means people without a written tradition—among people who only transmit information orally, historical events get transformed into mythological events when they pass out of living memory.

Which is to say, when the last person who’s alive that remembers the event dies, then that event is immediately, in a sense, remembered as an event that took place in the unspecified time that preceded the construction of the world. And I think the reason for that is that you don’t want to burden your memory; all you want to remember is the things that are important.

And we’re talking about remembering things, say, over the course of 25,000 years—all the unnecessary information that gets burned away, and all that's left is the core pattern of information that any historical event worthy of note necessarily contains.

So when we consider an event historical, this is part of the reason why history sort of sits on the boundary between mythology and science, in a sense. To consider an event worthy of historical note, it necessarily has to contain elements of hero mythology because otherwise, if it didn't contain an element of conquering the unknown, for example, we would never regard it as sufficiently valuable to even relegate to the domain of necessary fact.

This is troublesome for history because the study of history is supposed to be formalizable. In a sense, this is a big, big problem in history in general. Historical stories are told from within cultural perspectives.

I mean, the classic example of that is how do you conceive of Columbus? If you're a European, say a traditional European, the standard story 40 years ago was, you know, Columbus was a hero, conquered new territory. Columbus, by the way—this is a historical fact—Columbus was, in fact, looking for paradise when he went out on his missions. That was his express motivation.

He thought, like many people of his time, that the paradise described in the Old Testament was an actual location on Earth that perhaps could still be found somewhere. Columbus hypothesized that paradise could be found in the domain of the unknown.

You remember the medieval maps; there’s a vaguely defined territory with terrible monsters surrounding it. While Columbus presumed that paradise could be found in the domain of the unknown, and out he went, conflating a mythological viewpoint of the world with the actual world.

But it’s very peculiar because, of course, even from the perspective of pure fact, even though we wouldn’t regard that as an accurate description, it is the case from the mythological perspective that paradise still does reside out in the unknown because the only way you can ever get there is to explore and constantly regenerate new information.

So in a sense, he was wrong, but he was also... he was also right, depends on your framework of interpretation. Anyways, the problem is that reading of Columbus is necessarily in contrast with the reading of Columbus, for example, that might appear more natural to the North American Indians.

So, uh, it’s hard to figure out the appropriate historical perspective or to—and if you separate all the facts from the fiction, so to speak, the problem then becomes that the facts are dead, and you end up in the position of having to memorize endless states and lists of places that will not embed themselves in your memory because they have no significance for behavioral output, which is what students mean when they say, “Why is it necessary for us to learn this?”

The student is then saying, “For me, this holds no intrinsic interest,” and they’re saying because my limbic system is intelligent enough to discriminate between information that has the potential to impact my behavioral output or the way I frame the world and that which does not have that capacity.

And since I only have a limited time, I should probably attend to what's important, and generally what we mean by what is important is what will actually change the way we conduct ourselves if we learn it. This is something that we seem to have either never quite figured out or forgotten.

I think much of education is that the purpose of education, the purpose of facts even, is to aid the generation of wisdom. And if it fails to produce that end, then it’s useless. It’s worse than useless; it’s just... it’s noise. That’s all.

So, but we don’t have a formalized method for the transmission of wisdom, but we’ve forgotten the domain in which it’s transmitted, and we know a lot about facts. If in any given story, one person's hero is like another person's worst nightmare, like for the Indians, Columbus wasn’t the hero; he was the worst nightmare.

And different cultures share different stories to such an extent that one person can be seen as the opposite role by two different cultures. Then why aren’t more cultures constantly at war with each other every day? Like, has it—the whole thing just become so diluted that we all recognize one basic story?

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “every day.” I mean, there’s been more than 150 wars since the end of World War II, which we consider, in a sense, the last war, well, with certain exceptions, obviously Korea and Vietnam certainly, large.

But conflicts of the sort you described do occur all the time, and the other thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that wars can be conducted at many levels of analysis. One of the advantages to be able to abstract ideas is that we can have a war that proceeds at the abstract domain without it necessarily degenerating into physical conflict, which means that there’s at least the possibility that if you hold one ideological stance—which means that you ascribe one meaning to an object and I ascribe another meaning—that we can discuss it and fight and conduct the war in words and, as a consequence, come to an agreement, which I suppose might be considered the construction of a new ideology or new mythology without necessarily having to allow the process to cascade back down to behavior, where force determines the outcome.

So, what is peace then? Like, what is—like, it’s just like a lack of social aggression, like out and out battling, out with fists? Is that like peace, or is like, just contending ourselves to just be verbally at each other’s throats? Is that the best we can do?

Well, that’s... you know, that’s a perfectly reasonable question. I guess the question is what attitude most essentially characterizes the attitude of peace. I saw one time when I was in Montreal, I saw a 19-year-old guy standing on the street in an outdoor shopping mall. He’s a big character, tough-looking—he had a punk haircut and a leather jacket—and he was standing on the corner holding a pink shopping bag full of something, right?

And I thought, I thought he looked somewhat idiotic, and I suspect that he thought he looked the same way holding this. And I thought, you look at someone like that. You know, they wear their capacity for aggression on the outside of their skin where everyone can see it, but there’s no domain for its proper expression.

So people in that situation end up doing things that are essentially observed, like working in a 7-Eleven, for example, or standing on the corner of a shopping mall with a pink shopping bag in their hands. And one of the things that you might wonder under those circumstances is that, is there any way that you could construct an attitude towards peace that was sufficiently difficult and aggressive that it would satisfy someone who’s in that particular position?

We tend to think of peace as a state of a default condition, I suppose—as the state that reigns when nothing is necessarily happening. It strikes me that in order to make peace an attractive proposition, it has to be demonstrated incontrovertibly, in a sense that it’s actually a more dangerous and interesting enterprise than war.

I’m just trying to clarify, um, war, I think, understand to me now, different perceptions of wisdom meaning—like different ways of regulating emotions—and the fact that cultures regulate emotions differently.

The point of the society is to maintain order and, you know, regulate the emotions of the people. Well then, because I was thinking about wisdom and I was thinking, “Well, that’s kind of a subjective term.” Like, you may think of your wisdom as dysfunctional, you know, whereas I think of mine as functional; you know, you may handle things to regulate your emotions. It may not be the truth, or I may think it’s not the truth, so it's a war being fought because of different opinions of wisdom, right? That’s why, right?

Okay, and you—I mean, you can push the argument down a level of analysis even and say, which is basically the point of this particular quote—that our maps determine the meaning of objects in our experiential field, so to speak.

And wherever there’s a difference, wherever you presume that this object has a different implication for your behavioral output than I do, or for our mutual behavioral outputs in its presence, then there’s an unknown right there, and there’s also instant room for conflict because you can only do—well, this is not always the case, but it’s frequently the case— that only one set of behavioral outputs can be manifested in any particular situation.

That’s certainly the case for an individual. I mean, that’s why you have to solve your problems is because you can’t do two things at the same time. You can only do one thing. So, um, this is going back a little way; I’m curious that you tend to refer to the domain of myth as the domain that we have forgotten because it seems to me that if we were to know it—if we were to know it now, we would know it in a way that we never could have known it before.

Yes, unless it’s not exactly forgotten. It was that it was—we now live in a whole... It was the whole way in which we now know was built out of that and left it behind, so it didn’t forget it because it never knew it.

Oh, well, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, except I would say that there’s one more twist to that, and that is that at a defined time in the past—and I would say starting approximately 500 years ago when the scientific methodology really came into its own—we made the misattribution that we did in fact understand what we had never understood.

And not only that, we did understand it, but that we understood it thoroughly enough to know that it was no longer a valid form of knowledge and that we could safely discard it as superstition or as a primitive form of science and move into the future.

But it seems to me that there was never a point at which we said what, at which we said what we were doing then was silliness and what we were doing now is the is the road to understand that. Sorry, I have a problem, and Jer needs the over.

Your class goes on for a little while—it’s just to object. You see, as soon as you mess with the object because it’s mapped in accordance with this mythological structure, you instantly start to wreak havoc on the whole structure that determines your appropriate behavioral output.

And we know already what that structure inhibits. It inhibits—well, one of the things that inhibits is anxiety. One of the things that you may have found yourself doing, by the way, when this unexpected occurrence arose was doing something that children do when they don’t know what to do, which is called referencing.

How—if a child does something unexpected, say it drops a glass of milk on the floor, the first thing it will do is look at its mother or whichever adult happens to be present because the unexpected has just revealed itself— which is to say that an event that occurred contrary to plan emerged; it's indeterminant significance.

Although it evokes anxiety, the fastest way to get rid of the anxiety is to reference, which is that you look at your parent and you watch your parent's actions, and the parent determines the actual significance of the event, thus reducing its infinite significance, so to speak, to a definable category.

And what you have to understand for children is—and I think this is true, anyways—that even if the parent is angry, the definite anger is better than the indeterminate significance. And, well, children—that’s why children prefer order to chaos, even if it’s relatively strict order.

And that's, anyways, um... question. So your dominance hierarchy—I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’re talking about the meaning of the projector to you as opposed to the meaning of the projector to him that had a conflict?

Absolutely, okay, no, but not only the meaning of the projector, so to speak, but everything that the dispute implied, say, about relative importance of pursuit. Like, in an institution like this, there’s at least a, uh, what would you say—there’s at least the theory of equality of access to certain things at any number of levels, like access to audio-visual equipment.

You know, the fact that someone’s been around here longer than me, for example, has no bearing in theory and in actuality, under almost all conditions, on their access to things like audio-visual equipment. So when Dean comes in here and says, “You know, despite what you're doing and the fact that you follow the rules, someone who's senior, so to speak, wants this,” that’s that.

So there's a lot of information in that sort of interaction about relative importance—not just the relative importance of the projector, but of the parties who were engaged in negotiation for the projector.

Anyways, with regards to referencing, I was wondering—like, can you think back about your own reactions? Did you look around when that was going on to see how other people were responding? Because that's a way of coming up—that's a way of trying to instantly acquire consensus—is right, what the hell's going on? I don't know, maybe some of these other people know, I'll look at them, I can tell by their facial reactions or their patterns of behavior what this event might signify.

That's exploratory behavior; you’re exploring the environment. But the environment, in many cases, is composed of other people. In fact, the most important part of the environment is composed of other people. And when we have a map of the environment, who we’re mapping is other people in relationship to ourselves and vice versa, so that's reference.

You approach—then you approach them. Like you wouldn’t back up. I thought—I mean, you could have easily gotten a fight.

Well, you see, but that's the other purpose for the demonstration. If I have a map and you have a map, and they conflict with regards to a particular object—then, which happens very frequently—then one of the things that's interesting to do is to consider the options for eliminating the conflict. One option is to eliminate one of the conflicting parties.

I mean, that’s an option that’s very commonly held. But what people generally do is they start to negotiate verbally, which basically means that they’re using their verbal behavior to put their plan back into action—to get what they want. And as that’s blocked, say it doesn't work, more and more emotion builds up and other strategies that are sort of lower on the access hierarchy get brought into play, culminating possibly what I wanted to get Dean to do.

He was a little bit nervous, I think, doing this because it’s not part of his character, really. I wanted him to take the projector. I was going to hold it and see if I could get someone to help and pull it away to illustrate this.

Now one of the things that we want to figure out is given the maps of meaning are going to conflict with regards to the importance of objects—including in this notion of object—including ourselves and other people—what’s the appropriate strategy to adopt in the process of negotiation? Which is very much related to your question. You said, “Well, what constitutes, say, the essential aspects of peace?”

Well, one of the things you have to figure out is when you're in unknown territory and you've been put there by someone else who's also there because of you—what do you do? How is it that you should act so that you’re acting optimally, so to speak, to resolve the problem in the most positive conceivable ways?

Which is to say, we need to figure out a set of rules that everyone can agree on for operating in the domain where there aren’t any rules. Excuse me, Professor, we could have blackmailed him! I have him on tape, going like talking about the other professor. Leave the projector? Blackmail?

Yeah, so we know that between—you know, if culture A has this story and culture B has this story, and they meet, as soon as they meet, the members of both cultures are no longer in these stories; they’re in some domain in between them. And the rules that apply here and the rules that apply here do not apply here.

So then, of course, the question is what rules apply here? And, well, the other diagram that I keep showing you—somebody described it as the bouncing ball, which is kind of a good way of describing it. The rules that apply outside of the domain here are the rules that constitute the way—that’s the hero's path.

So you would say that the hero—this is interesting. I think this is why you get archetypal hero figures; they’re really the ideal figures for a culture and they're also, as a general rule, representatives of peace. That’s right.

This is very, very common. Buddha, for example, is sort of the embodiment of peace, and the same thing is true for Christ. It’s because their patterns of behavior characterize the optimal form of action that is to be undertaken in the domain that’s between two specified domains.

Um, I guess he came into our territory, and though we’re part of your culture, all of us sat down. I was just wondering, in terms of general meaning, what do you think would happen—maybe significance—if instead of just your map against his, all of us stood up? All of us privately stated its crucial meaning for us?

Well, Danielle did toss an insult out at him as he left. So, well, but this is something that you have to, like—you know, as clearly as you can is just what were your responses during the interruption? Because this was the entrance of the stranger, so to speak—the hostile stranger. I mean, he had his own agenda.

It actually—it wasn’t really even his agenda; it was an agenda that he was acting out for someone else, so he’s kind of, in a sense, just the harbinger of bad news. But you want—this is a pretty minor example of hierarchy disruption.

But you think, for example, had it been real, there’s a... well, one of the things that I was told before I came to Harvard was that there was a certain amount of tension between junior and senior faculty members. This is not nearly as true as I was led to believe before I got here.

Much of the distance that exists is a function of age, and, well, in large part anyways. But one of the things that this sort of disruption would do to me if it really happened would be to undermine my confidence in my position here. And since I've devoted a lot of my life to attaining this particular position—or at least that's how it's worked out—that sort of objectively minor intervention could have, you know, all sorts of highly negative consequences.

In this case, though, would it really have had such consequences? Because what really made me think that this must be staged was you were taking it too poorly.

Yeah, well, that’s okay, that’s a good point. That’s partly because Dean wasn’t as forceful as I would have liked him to have been. Like I actually asked him to come in here because his natural politeness overcame his acting ability, unfortunately.

I wanted him to come in here and just tell me what was happening, you know, more abruptly, and just take it. On the other hand, it made it fairly believable.

I mean, that’s true, true. Yeah, we were all anxious, but we’re not anxious anymore because we’ve redefined what it means now. We’ve... right, and even before it was clear to everyone in the room that it was staged, like as soon as he left—well, as soon as he left, we started talking about it as an example.

So now everyone got what they wanted. Me going with his story; he got the projector, and we took the event of having the projectors taken from us to mean, well, great, now we have an example to talk about for a while. So, kind of changed our sort of like revisionist history.

Even before I realized it was staged, we started talking about what a perfect example... I thought it was inappropriate, though, so I was pretty sure it was staged because I thought it would be highly inappropriate for him to come in front of all of us, absolutely—or like down here when you all are up there and have that—like, right?

No, no, absolutely, absolutely. If that was the real situation that some professor was in the lecture of 300 people and had to have this machine and this was the only one, I don't think that wouldn't be— that wouldn't be an unreasonable situation.

Well, no but the—wouldn't more appropri... right, exactly, never would have done that. He should have asked me to step out of the room. That more equipment, what does this mean?

I’m just trying to clarify. Why do you think it took you such a long time?

Um, yeah, I probably will to piece it together. So, so, somebody else asks a question. Why do you think it took you such a long time to—so, like, at first the issue was you needed to finish the class.

Well, that was at least that was my cover story. I mean the real issue is what the hell are you doing barging in here in front of my whole class taking this damn projector and making me look like an idiot? But the cover story is I need this projector to finish my class, you know.

There’s... anyways, that’s how it would work out in reality, I think.

Yes, okay, we’re coming back in. Okay, you know this?

You know this is HOA? This is... yeah.

What is that?

Um, well, I don’t remember. When did you leave?

Immediately after, after... okay, that was staged? That was staged, yes.

Yeah, okay. I just saw Jered Kagan in the basement using the overhead projector. Did you? Yes, large lecture class.

Oh well, I asked Dean to come in here. Do you have a dispute with me about the meaning of an object?

Yeah, so thinks you’re like, “Oh, I’m not really that...” unemployed? Jerry, staged? Never take, right?

Well, that’s now—that’s a classic example of denial. That’s right. That’s when the ugly anomalous event rears its head. Then you—yeah, that’s right! You’re back in—that’s right.

You’re back to the most appropriate fantasy, and the fantasy being an alternative story where the motivational significance of things is the way that you wish they would be.

Yeah, I found myself sort of entertained by it because I was actually seeing if you would act the same way, you know, that you’ve been telling us that you would act.

And seeing if you would actually go through—like it was cool to see—like, like, so I don’t know.

Yeah, but I don’t think... he would have given could... like, unpr... like, if you could never have done that in real life, you would have had been like, okay, here’s your... like, sir, sorry, what are you going to do?

No, I think it would just be a matter of politeness. You’d say okay, I mean—it depends on how you’re approached, of course.

If the cover story is plausible and the emergency seems to justify the in... yeah, well that... no, it depends. Well that’s another one of the things I’ve been trying to point out too is that the meaning of an event depends on the behavioral strategy that you use in the presence of the event.

So even with Dean, for example, in his intervention, it’s the strategy that he used to offer me the anomalous information that’s going to determine the phenomenon that I am in in that particular context.

So, if he—like if he would have called me outside and said, “Look, you know, excuse me, but here’s the situation, and it’s a large context situation.” You know, like, let’s say Kagan needed the projector because he was involved in some major fundraising episode for the department and it had broken down suddenly, etc., etc.

Well, then, basically what you’re doing under those circumstances is, if I can erase this now, is remember this idea, right? Little story, inside this is a dominance hierarchy, by the way. Hi Dean, thanks a lot!

Just [Applause]. After all, he... good things.

So anyways, what Dean would have to do in order to... we got a whole stuff here... what Dean would have to do in order to convince me that that his intrusion into my story was justified, say my story being at this level of analysis, would be to make—would be to make reference to a larger story of which I was also a part that I considered, as well as him, superordinate to the things that were going on now.

So he would say, “Yes, I know that this event has meaning from the frame of reference of this ongoing class, but from frame of reference B, which you also share, it has this alternative meaning.” We’ll contrast the meanings and come to some sort of agreement about them.

And I’d say, “Well, you know, if I found his story convincing, I’d subordinate—I’d alter this story because it would be less motivationally challenging than for me to engage in altering the superordinate story, assuming I shared it.”

So that’s—that’s the kind of decisions you’re always making. If you’re negotiating with someone, for example, you do the same thing. I mean, what if I want something from you that you don’t want to give me?

I have to offer something to you that is sufficiently important to counterbalance your loss or offer you the possibility of that in the future or... anyways, that’s okay.

Okay, so yeah, just there were two things right after he left, yeah? Turning the incident into you talking beginning to talk about it as an experiment sort of changed the whole veillance of the thing right away.

Yeah, and the humor was also part of that too; it became a source of humor. At the same time, it was just interesting to watch whether everyone immediately saw that it had been a hoax or not. Treating it as if it had been... um, treating it as an experiment took away all the anxiety and negative attached to it and neutralized it and put it in this new...

Right, so that is the instant provision of a story. Yeah, exactly right! And that’s the classic demonstration of the fact that the story is in fact what regulates your emotions.

And you’re always trying to regulate your emotions in the face of the unknown, so to speak. So the humor is interesting too because one of the mythological precursors of the figure of the savior, which is sort of the archetype of the hero, is the trickster.

Trickster? Right, right, right! The trickster is like Bugs Bunny, for example. That’s his classic role in Warner Brothers cartoons; he always has a—he always gives events a twist, negative events a twist, that make them turn out right.

And the twist may not look exactly on the straight and narrow when it occurs, but as the story unfolds, it appears to be the right thing. Trickster figures are very common figures in mythology, especially, apparently, at the stage of cultural development where the figure of the hero is really being elaborated into something identifiable.

So he’s sort of a transition figure, an adolescent you might say in a sense. So, the irony—but so, so there's an ironic distance, right? I mean, the humor is in a kind of an ironic distance, isn’t it? I mean, you know, because it’s something that turns out to be not what it seemed to be, right?

I mean, because the trickster seems to be... but it turns out it’s that, and so there’s a kind of double meaning.

Well, I think we also find things humorous when we become spontaneously aware that once again we’ve transcended a set of arbitrary limitations. So I think humor occurs, at least in some instances, when you move from a bounded domain to outside the domain, and then back into another one.

Because you have a fleeting moment there where you recognize yourself as sort of a transcendent figure. And people find that—well, they find that... the word empowering springs to mind; it’s a word I particularly hate, but we’ll use it.

What I don’t really understand is that my feeling in the scene, which I didn’t realize until the end—one stage—which is great embarrassment for you.

Okay, why were you embarrassed for me? See, that’s an issue because I think, similar to what she said, was that instead of like, we sit here and we listen to you as a professor, and you were then placed in the position of a bickering little boy, right?

Right, and just being like, your credibility was seriously on the line.

Right, right. And so feeling like it was... yes, you see that? Like the phenomenon of embarrassment is one of those things that occurs when you watch rapid movement down a dominance hierarchy.

Like sometimes, in your own case, for example, if you feel ashamed about something, say you turn red. Well, that’s because you’ve just manifested a behavior which you know full well is in very poor accord with the way you conceptualize your position in a given dominance hierarchy, which basically means that you’ve acted below yourself, and that makes you self-conscious.

It also puts you out... The other thing that happens under those circumstances is that, like, if you've adopted a story and it protects you—the story has certain rules that you have to follow, right?

And if you don’t follow the rules, then you immediately forfeit the protection of the story. So if you’re like high up in the story, so to speak, climbing up the dominance hierarchy, that’s associated with a particular story, and you pull off a behavior that’s, you know, it’s tricky and it works, but it’s really immoral from your own perspective, then you get self-conscious.

And you’ve also exposed yourself to the unknown there in a big way because you’ve just broken your own rules. And the problem with breaking your own rules is your rules are what protect you.

So it’s easy—that’s a good trick on yourself, from others. Well, and from the unknown in general. I mean, no matter where it manifests itself, right? Including inside yourself, that’s right, because the story that you act out is how you ensure that you remain predictable to yourself.

Which, that’s another thing that you don’t want to underestimate the significance of is that one of the reasons for the shared story is so that we don’t have to have fights about the projector, and we have—and that is dominance, our determined by a dominance hierarchy.

It’s also so that we don’t reveal any of our own mysteries to ourselves unexpectedly. It’s not just to keep other people in line; it’s also so that we can, I think, so we can tolerate looking at ourselves in the mirror—not in any sort of horrific sense, but just as well, it’s comforting to consider yourself a predictable entity, even when, in many ways, that’s an illusion.

There’s because there’s way more to you than you know about, and you don’t exhaust your possibilities when you’re participating in most stories. I mean, that’s why if the context shifts—well, if the context shifts, your personality shifts because much of what you consider your personality is the story you’re acting out.

Say, like if things really fall apart. And you mentioned the small possibility for physical altercation here. I mean, you could see how it would develop be an argument, and then there’d be a little physical dispute; maybe I’d grab the projector and so would Dean, and he’d pull it, and that would embarrass me more, and that would make me angry, and maybe I’d give it a push, and he’d fall over by accident, and that would hurt him.

And then, you know, it’s just like the whole system spirals out of control because of this one entry point. And so then you say, well, you have grounds for the beginning of a small war.

And the problem is that as soon as you’re outside the bounded domain where your emotions are regulated and controlled, you’re literally in the grip of forces that you poorly understand. I mean, this regulates your aggression, for example—the predictability that’s implicit in shared participation in this story.

As soon as you step out here, it’s like there are all the gods of the unknown waiting for you. It’s like you’re now controlled by anxiety to what degree depends on how much of your story has been disrupted.

The same thing goes for regression and emotions; that under normal circumstances you don’t feel—you don’t have a personality built up for them because they just—they're not part of your environment, even though they’re part of you.

So, okay, so the goal, I guess, of all our adaptation is to have our emotions regulated, right? But that gets disrupted by—when something anomalous comes in, and there’s always something anomalous.

However, I like—should we exist until the anomalous information comes and hits us, or because I sometimes feel myself just going for things that I’m afraid of just because I want like a thrill or whatever, and that is my searching for it and deregulating my emotions?

I can... well, one of the things that sort of complicates the idea that novelty is threatening on first exposure is magnitude. It’s like, because it’s not always true is that there’s an optimal level of novelty, where the magnitude of the event is sufficiently small so that what’s activated primarily is your incentive-reward systems.

And that’s the sort of thing that—I mean, if you’re operating optimally, so to speak, you’re consuming novelty at the rate that’s precisely appropriate for your particular temperament. That’s—when people say I’m following my interest or I’m interested in this, what they mean is there’s an appropriate amount of novelty in this in this area of my experiential field, and I'm feasting on it, so to speak, at my own rate.

Then you’re aroused, and well, you're optimally adapted at that point in the sense because you’re updating your models of adaptation and perhaps everyone else’s as well, while at the same time remaining relatively secure.

See, one foot—remember this—I’ll get to you right away—remember this diagram? That’s Dao, right? The world, the cosmos is constructed of chaos and order. Too much of either is deadening; your place is right here on the line.

That’s the razor’s edge, so to speak, a very narrow line halfway between chaos and order, where one is being transformed into the other, but neither predominates. And there are two translations for Dao. One is the way, which is the path of life, and that's the bouncing ball diagram.

The other is meaning, and that’s because if you all move the path, then your life has meaning, and the meaning is contact with novelty at the rate—so it’s something you feed on. That’s the source of—that’s spiritual bread, that’s what that is.

You know, I was just thinking about this kind of thing the other day, and I can’t remember in exactly what context, but it seems that there are instances all over our lives where there is— where we encounter novelty or where novelty is actually a predictable part of our lives.

And I think, and what I just thought was the part of the manuscript here you’re talking about chaos, which there can be a bounded region of unpredictability so that you know everything in there—or everything in there is unpredictable, and nevertheless, it has very well-defined boundaries so that you can—

There are whole classes of phenomena that are completely unpredictable in and of themselves. Nonetheless, you know what their effects can be and cannot be; they can have no risk.

Somebody wrote an essay in this class, I believe this time, on games. And games are another example of exactly that—they’re bounded domain in which novel events can nonetheless take place.

So it—I mean when your emotional response to novelty depends on a number of things—it’s not necessarily terror a priori. One of the things that hero myths tend to point out is because there are sort of two classes of hero myths.

There's the hero myth that describes the successful hero, and there’s the hero myth that describes the unsuccessful hero, like the edleman. And the unsuccessful hero is someone who encounters the unknown accidentally.

So one of the things that transforms, yeah, and he’s the one who gets devoured and never comes back. That’s right, that’s what happened to Edus, by the way. He accidentally slept with his mother, right? His mother—she's the great mother. That’s incest; that's the incest motif.

Now Freud read that sexually, but really what the incest motif refers to is the possibility of creative union between the hero and the great mother, which is between the explorer and the source of all new information.

But the problem is, if it’s accidental, well, then it might kill you, and Edus blinds himself. Right, his consciousness is destroyed because of this accidental encounter.

And Freud thought that was the core story that underlied the development of humanity. It’s a very—well, it’s a very... depends on your level of analysis.

But if you know what that story means, it’s very pessimistic. It’s a failed hero myth; if you think of Freudian psychoanalysis as a form of religion, which is a perfectly reasonable supposition because Freud tried to provide people with a map of meaning, it was one of the few religions that I know of where the central hero is a failure, not a success.

Because almost all religions organize themselves around successful heroes; I mean that’s why they’re useful. That’s why he’s talking about substituting ordinary misery for—yes.

Well it’s also the case that Freud re—like Freud explicitly presumed that the domain of culture associated with religion, which is a broad domain, and for Freud also included literature and art, was a defense mechanism—an illusion.

A defense mechanism erected against death anxiety; it was an illusion. Well, in a way, that’s true. Well, it can be true, but it doesn’t have to be true. Dogma—to protect the known serves to protect you from the other.

Right, right, look, there’s nothing trivial about Freud’s objection. It’s also the case that people hide in inside rigid ideologies precisely in order to protect themselves from not just death but from all those things they don’t understand.

But the fact that something can be true doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true or that it’s true in all cases. Oh, last week you had mentioned positive delusion and how there was literature that it was healthy to have some positive illusions, but that that is being debunked at this point.

Well, there’s a big debate about it, but, alright, well just thinking about... okay, what if your way—what if your path to get from, you know, the unbearable present to your future goal included thinking of the unknown or intrusions from the unknown as lessons?

So in other words, you were looking at them as a positive. Every time anomalous information came to you, you said, “This has been brought to me to teach me a lesson. I will learn something.”

This and that take the anxiety away from it. Well, still be a positive delusion?

Well, not necessary... okay, that’s a perfectly interesting argument. The last part of it, I think—I don’t think you have to classify that as a positive illusion.

Um, I think that the transition in Western culture from Old Testament morality to New Testament morality is a transition of exactly that sort.

Because the message that’s sort of implicit in the Old Testament God is a pretty horrible figure— I mean, very powerful but quite frightening and constantly displayed in that manner.

The god that’s in the New Testament is theoretically a god of love, at least that’s the attitude that you’re supposed to have. And why is that?

Well, it’s for the reasons that you just pointed out, is that contact with unknown is inevitable. The only thing you can do about it is change your attitude to it.

And hero myths tend to point out that if you approach it voluntarily, it's the source of new information. If you run from it, it kills you.

Well, those are your options; like, your option isn’t to not have it. If things didn’t change, there wouldn’t be any life, but you do have an option of how to face it.

And it does work. I mean, if you’re engaged in an argument with somebody, like somebody that you have to argue with and that you have to come to a solution with, say someone you’re married to or someone in your family—it’s like you have to solve the problem or not.

You can just fight about it for the rest of your life; that’s the other option—fight about it futilely for the rest of your life. If you actually have to address it, then when they present you with anomalous information, which is essentially like a poisoned apple and something that’s undigestible in its present form, your only option is to sit and think, “What is there in this that I can—that actually constitutes usable information for me?”

So you might say someone’s objecting to the way you conduct yourself. You think that they’re being hostile and unfair, but you’ve laid down some ground rules, so you more or less trust each other.

Your only option under those circumstances is to remove yourself from the argument, symbolically or in actuality, and think, “Is there any truth in the information I’m getting? And if so, how do I have to adjust my behavior or my scheme of interpretation to take that information into account?”

That's presuming that what you want from the argument is the reestablishment of harmony and the capacity to continue to move forward. So that is the attitude that you...

I don’t think that’s a positive illusion at all because the way things manifest themselves is dependent on your attitude towards them in a non-trivial way.

It’s like you in a major way—you determine the valence of phenomena by your approach to them, and we don’t know the limits of that.

Okay, so you’re saying basically then, before the hero can venture out into the unknown, he has to take care of the anxiety.

Right? Before he can do the exploratory behavior?

Well, no, not necessarily, he—but no, I wouldn’t say that because the anxiety might accompany the exploratory behavior; it often does.

I would just say what that what the hero posits—this goes back to your point about last week about, what’s the transference in Jungian psychoanalysis. What the hero has to do implicitly or explicitly is posit his or what the individual has to do implicitly or explicitly is posit his identity with the hero as a potential fact whose validity can only be tested as a consequence of actual action.

Which is to say you have a schema, some anomalous information comes in, you have a choice to act on it or not. If you decide to act on it, what you’ve done implicitly is identify with the hero.

So that’s an act of faith, and the act of faith is that despite the way the anomalous information appears in its destructive context, there’s something within me that I don’t know about that will enable me to cope with it if I make the effort.

Now, it has to be faith because it’s a normalist; you don’t know the outcome! You can’t know the outcome.

Now, you made a—when you talked about, uh, the rate of unknown being related to temperament?

Yeah, um, what temperament do you think the ideal hero would have?

I don’t think it matters. It doesn’t matter because it’s a subjective phenomenon.

It’s like, it’s the same with intelligence. You could say for someone who’s profoundly learning how to tie their shoes, that might be regarded as a heroic act, and justly so from the perspective of morality because they had to overcome what were innumerable subjective obstacles.

So temperament or intelligence or ability—it’s a level playing field; it doesn’t determine that a person can be a hero.

However, you might say that there are different kinds of heroes. There could be a hero that ties his shoes or a hero that brings, um, you know, that takes America to a different place.

Whatever the Mes Americans believe that shamans had stronger temperaments, and they were seen as basically the heroes, right? And you know, they could go into their— they were more passionate, so it seems to me that there is a difference between...

Okay, I want to read you something. Just hang on a minute because it’s something that I... this is really interesting and it’s very relevant to your question about, like, levels of heroism, so to speak.

Okay, this is an Indian doctrine of cosmic cycles. Okay, I want you to think about it with regards to this diagram.

Alright, now we know already that this is a kind of a schematic representation of a story with all these other stories embedded within it. Right? And they organize themselves over time; it’s a dominance hierarchy because the most dominant story, so to speak, occupies superordinate territory.

So if you’re in a dominance hierarchy, the most powerful person determines the story that has the greatest story domain. And it is the case—I’ll read you some examples of this soon—that the story of dominance disputes between the gods are very common in mythological tales about the movement towards monotheism, for example.

The gods are very often portrayed as at war, and it's the victorious god that becomes the supreme god. And I think that’s a mythological representation of the fact that those processes actually occur in time on Earth.

We dispute—we dispute constantly the meaning of things, the relative meaning of things, and over time, at least within cultures, we come to agreement about them. That means that some positions win and other positions lose; that’s a darwinian competition of ideas, although sometimes it’s cooperatively induced as well.

Anyways, these are stories. We know that stories, too, when they transform themselves, they go through this cycle of dissolution and reconstruction. So you could say that if this is the arrangement of stories, at every level of the analysis, each of these separate stories is constantly undergoing dissolution and reconstruction.

So that’s happening all the way up the chain. Oh, listen to this. This is really interesting.

Uh, the doctrine of cosmic cycles from India—a complete cycle, a Mahayuga, comprises 12,000 years. It ends with the dissolution of which is repeated more drastically—maha, the great dissolution—at the end of the thousandth cycle.

For the paradigmatic schema, creation, destruction, creation, etc., is reproduced at infinitum. The 12,000 years of aah Yuga were regarded as divine years, each with a duration of 360 years, which gives a total of 4,320,000 years for a single cosmic cycle.

A thousand such mugas makes up a kalpa; 14 kalpas make up a manvantar. V, so named because each manvantar is supposed to be ruled by Manu, who’s the mythical ancestor king.

Okay, so one of the implications of this is that the cyclical, or if you pick a domain of this cyclical process, you can ascribe its establishment to the mythic ancestral king.

Okay, a kalpa is equivalent to a day in the life of Brahma; a second kalpa to a night. One hundred of these years of Brahma—in other words, 311 million, 311 thousand millions of human years constitutes the life of Brahma.

But even this duration of the God's life does not exhaust time, for the gods are not eternal, and the cosmic creations and destructions succeed each other forever.

So the Indian notion is that this is kind of an infinite—this thing is infinite in structure, all the way up as far as you can go and all the way down as far as you can go in every level of analysis, there are these constant cycles of creation and destruction.

That sounds almost like alchemy. I mean, it’s sort of a very—it’s a way of playing with science with symbols in a way that—sort of scientific sounding way, yeah?

Yeah, well, you know, people had scientific intuitions prior to the onset of science as a formal enterprise, as well as mythological intuitions. This doctrine, I think, is obviously representing something like this.

So, you mentioned earlier that the dominance hierarchies are this way, and for some reason that doesn't make sense in my head because it would seem to me that that they go— instead of going up, they are within each other.

So, if Shan came in and he gave you one of the three right there, the little ones right there, you both had a story there, but he gave you a bigger story, then that would change—that would change yours.

Instead of looking at it as going up, I would look at it as Jose’s being different, and he has to give you one that encompasses you.

Yeah, but I would say that’s a more dominant story; it contains more territory; it rules more territory. That’s the notion literally—it rules more territory.

So I’d be willing to subordinate my story to this larger story; say, for the Mesopotamians, that’s ruled by Marduk.

So you see there’s a real neat twist in this. I think it’s really something else. So it's like you have a real paradox.

Is that you need known territory to protect yourself from chaos. But the problem with that is that known territory has really disadvantages, right? It gets rigid, that’s one thing, and it makes you have conflicts with other people who have known territories that are different.

Well, the way the Mesopotamians solved this was by saying that the thing that makes the superordinate story, which is mic, right, is actually the process that transforms all stories, right?

So they put a paradoxical loop into this process. It’s absolutely brilliant; I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant to say well all your conditional stories have to be dependent—have to always remain dependent on your ultimate subordination to the process by which all conditional stories are generated.

So that’s an amazing idea!

So, so I don’t understand how—that’s what you mean.

Okay, so I understand that the bigger the territory, the more powerful the story. But how can on the level where they don't encompass the same territory, how can one be above another? I graphically—it's not up; it's up in terms of power—it’s we’re talking about an abstract—

I mean, right, but is it power? Like the bottom one is lower in power than the top one?

Yes, the middle one is lower in power than the outside one. It goes from in to out. It goes from in to out.

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. When we’re talking—we’re talking about—look, here’s an example: You’re working for a corporation, you’re not the chief executive officer, you’re a vice president.

Okay, this is your story; there are three vice presidents; there’s one chief executive officer. Okay, you’re going to be concerned—one of your domains of concern is the viability of your position and of everything that’s like in because you’re also the head of a whole set of other subordinates who are beneath you, so to speak.

So that’s your particular domain of concern. But it would be rational, so to speak, under most conditions to subordinate your desire to maintain this territory in favor of maintaining the entire territory whenever there’s a conflict.

I mean, generally speaking, you can envision perhaps some cases where that wouldn’t be the case.

I understand. Okay, so my—my question is really do the vice presidents, is there a hierarchy amongst them?

You mean this way?

Yeah!

Yeah, yeah, that’s what I’m asking.

Oh, um, well, there would be if—there would be if they were ever engaged in a task that would require them to arrange themselves.

I’m not really...this isn’t a fixed picture of like there’s not necessarily three of these subsystems if you place them that way.

Does that mean that... well, it is possible in a dominance hierarchy for there to be relative equality of position.

Although that, I think, would necessarily break down if those say if there’s three vice presidents, they have to organize themselves to do a job, there’s going to be a dominance hierarchy that actually is hierarchical emerge in the course of their cooperation—

Into another story! That’s right, then they’re tied into another story. It’s also the case that the gear position in the dominance hierarchy shifts across stories.

It’s like, well, you might be a senior at Harvard, and you know, so that you’re at the top of at least one part of the dominance hierarchy there.

But then when you go into the workforce, it’s like whack! You’re at the bottom of another dominance hierarchy! Or you can just shift in and out of them during the day. Even—and that’s partly because we've been able to abstract our dominance hierarchies up to such a degree that you can participate in innumerable some of them, even symbolic.

I mean, you can change the valence of a phenomenon just by shifting your reference point, you know? So it depends on what you contrast it with, like, you say the big picture of things.

Right, that’s the big picture exactly!

Take the big...

Something terrible happens to you; take the big picture. If the picture's too big, then everything becomes worthless. But this goes back a little ways to what you said about when anomalous information is promising as opposed to threatening.

Yeah, yeah.

And it sounded like you were saying that it relates to the feelings of efficacy of the hero or of the confronter.

Yeah, um, what you described as an act of faith?

Yeah, this— I’m curious about that. I mean, what creates... I mean, is that what you—did you mean to say feelings of personal efficacy? You mean instead of an act of faith?

Well, or how would you relate the two, I guess? What I was think?

Well I would say that if you undertake to voluntarily expose yourself to an aspect of the unknown, that is an act of faith. And whether you know it or not, you are emulating this heroic model.

So one of the things that Jung attempted to point out was that since you’re doing that, you might as well know it. Because as soon as you know it, then you have access to this inedible wealth of information that sort of details the structure of that process, and that can provide you with more explicit knowledge about what it might mean.

Say, because you’re—if you say, well, I wrote down what I think of the his as the historical hypothesis.

Let me see if I can find it here. Oh, yes. “Revolutions in procedure bring about revolutions in experience.”

That’s the hypothesis of historical man fundamentally, which is to say that you can posit that through your actions, you can transform your environment.

That’s an act of faith, and it’s the act of faith that precedes the construction of culture because by doing that, what you are saying is that the individual, despite the immense power imbalance that appears between the individual and the unknown, the individual is, in fact, part of a process that’s of equal magnitude, equal size.

Remember I showed you these pictures? Yeah, this is a good one; look, okay, yeah, I know this.

Yeah, that’s weird.

Anyways, you know, I would regard this as pre-Columbian. I would regard this as an image constructed by the member of a culture for whom the hypothesis that the individual was of equivalent potency in comparison with the great mother is not true, or just barely dawning on consciousness.

You see there’s the hero—I mean, there’s a huge difference in terms of perceived relative power. And then you see, well, here, this is a much more modern issue. See, there’s much more indication of equality by this point.

Yeah, so the notion of the divine individual—like that’s what I think; I think that idea is a mythological idea because it has to do with meaning that’s at the core of the democratic notion that everybody's equal before the law, which has its roots in the idea that everyone’s equal before God.

But what that means by, well by equal, what equal means is that your capacity for heroism is not limited by your abilities.

Which I think is really interesting because it’s very difficult for us to think of anything that you can do for—that there really is an equal playing field for.

Like most things are dependent, say, on your intelligence. That’s heritable to at least a substantial degree, or your physical ability, or your gender, your race—these things that are really built in.

But your capacity to face things that are anomalous—that's really a part of your character, I think. That's above those biological constraints in a way because what's anomalous to you is very much dependent on your personal nature.

So you get the—you get problems that are exactly the same size that you are.

So that’s—that’s another part of the reason why you get this weird notion of equality before God. I wrote a story about that later in the manuscript to try to make that clear.

In the story, I met this woman when I was a behavior therapist, and this was a devastating woman. I mean, she had every problem that you could imagine, essentially, and then a bunch more.

She was so pathologically shot that she could not look at anybody that she thought was up higher in the dominant heart, and that meant anybody. I mean literally, she was at the be—and when she approached people, say, who were doing therapy in this one unit, she’d go like this—just like an archaic figure approaching an emperor.

She couldn’t bear to look at the person, and part of the behavioral treatment was to help her stop doing this because she would do it in public as well. And, of course, people who act oddly in public tend to have a lot of social trouble so we were hoping to get rid of this particular symptom.

But she was also... she was not an intelligent person by any stretch of the imagination. She probably had an IQ somewhere in the neighborhood of 70, which is about two standard deviations below the mean, or about four standard deviations below the average in this room.

So, like, she’s not a smart person, and unless you've tested people with IQ tests, you really have no idea how much difference there is—how much difference Four standard deviations means. It means a lot.

She had very poor personal hygiene because, I think probably, she was raised as badly as you could possibly be raised. She wasn’t particularly attractive as a person either.

She was... well, okay, what else? Well, her boyfriend was a schizophrenic, and he was also alcoholic and he was violent, and he used to accuse her of being possessed by the devil, and he beat her.

She lived with her mother, who was like old and sick, and an aunt who was bedridden, and they were on welfare, and she had no education to speak of and really no hope for a job. Like, when I saw her, she was probably close to 40.

Anyways, like this woman—the cards were stacked against her, you know, in every way you could possibly imagine. But what her primary con—this was interesting, you know—her primary concern in therapy was not really what could be done for her.

Like she'd gone through behavioral treatment; it kind of worked, but she reverted to her old habits very, very, very soon. What she really wanted from me was to help her sort of make a dent in the... she was an outpatient in the hospital administration, so that she could find an inpatient.

And these—in like the inpatients that are left in mental hospitals now, like, these people are seriously troubled because anybody that could possibly be let out has been let out.

So, like I used to go into the basement of the Douglas Hospital in Montreal. It was like... it was like something out of Dante's Inferno. It was an old building, and the people were—like, there was a Coke room in the basement, and the people that were in there were just, well, you know those medieval paintings of disfigured people? They’re very common.

Well, that’s what it was like down there. And that’s what most of the inpatients were like. They were just— they were just totally destroyed and some of them had been that way for like 30 years.

So anyways, what she wanted was not help for her. And she didn’t come in to complain about her situation even though there was lots of reason to complain about it.

She wanted to find somebody in the hospital grounds that she could take out for walks.

So, yeah, and she had a dog that she used to take care of, you know, take it out for walks. She was—I thought she was remarkable, this person, because from the deterministic standpoint, so to speak, there’s no reason at all that she should have been anything but hostile and bitter.

But her problems—for whatever reasons—were not her primary focus of concern. And, well, I thought that was just a good example of how, you know, regardless of your particular circumstances, it is