Lecture: Who Dares Say He Believes in God?

[Music] [Applause] Well, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here in this massive hall. I can't believe that all of you decided that coming to talk about the topics we're going to talk about tonight was the top priority in your life. But let's see if we can justify that. You know, that might be a good aim, see if we could make it worthwhile, so make your decision correct.

So you may know, or not, that I was on a television show last night, Q&A. Apparently, you know that, some of you anyways. I can't say I enjoyed it, really. It's funny, you know, like I think, as I've got farther along in doing whatever it is that I happen to be doing, I find those events more and more stressful. I don't know exactly what it is. I think it's the proclivity of everything; everything has to be mangled in some sense into a preset format, you know. And the fundamental format, really, is that everything has to be political, you know, and everything isn't political. So that's not helpful when you're trying to discuss things that aren't political.

And I mean, I'm not complaining about it. Well, I suppose I am. It's just, it's surprising to me how, how much it takes out of me, say, compared to doing an event like this, which I really enjoy doing. Like, I spent a lot of time preparing, and there's a lot of you, and I really want it to go well and all that. But this is much less dreadful, haha, I guess that's right.

And you know, and then there's the strange constraints on format. You know, people ask very complex questions, and then you have a minute to answer. And you know, there's something downright sinful about answering a really complicated question in a minute because it sort of suggests that complex questions have answers that take one minute, and they don't. They have answers that take—God, sometimes they take decades; sometimes they take thousands of years, you know. But of course, I can't expect a television show to allow for a thousand years. But the format itself works against the kind of thought that's necessary to actually have discussions that are necessary.

And so anyways, having said all that, it went, it went—oh, it went all right, I would say. There were no nasty surprises, and particularly, it was a civil discussion. Whether it was a productive discussion or not is a different matter, but it wasn't an unproductive discussion, and so that's something.

But there was one question that came up, and I thought I would actually start talking about that question tonight because I've never been happy. I've been asked this question a lot, and I've never been happy with the answer that I've given to it. And I've never really been able to exactly get my—I've never been able to figure out exactly why I haven't been happy with the question. And so I'm gonna try to answer it properly tonight, and then I'm going to talk more generally about 12 rules about the book.

Now, it's fine; this question is directly relevant to the book, and so it should make for a good lead-in. But it'll enable us to talk about something that I think is really very much worth talking about, and I hope I can formulate the problem properly, and then formulate the proper answer, at least more coherently than I've managed it.

See, I have this—I followed this rule for a very long time, which I actually found was a Socratic rule. I didn't know this until really quite recently until I wrote 12 rules for life. Socrates said that he had a daemon, and by which he meant an internal voice. And he said that he always listened to it, and then that was what made him different from other people—that he always listened to this voice. And the voice didn't tell him what to do; it told him what not to do.

And when the Delphic Oracle proclaimed that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece, in Athens and in Greece, one of the reasons Socrates attributed her decision to deem him the wisest man was because, while she said he knew, he knew nothing, but he knew in part that he knew nothing, at least in part because he was always listening to the voice of his daemon, his internal conscience. And then I just found out the other day that the word democracy comes from the same root, which is really interesting. Like I had no idea that that was the case because what it suggests—it's so fascinating looking at how words are related to one another historically because you find strange connections between ideas that you would never imagine, and sometimes they're unbelievably profound.

And so the basic, what happened historically is that, well, so there was a concept of the Socratic daemon. Now, it was the daemon that Socrates listened to when he decided that he was not going to run when the Athenians decided that they were going to put him to death—the Athenian aristocrats, right? Because they thought that he was corrupting the youth by, you know, talking to them and telling them the truth. And I suppose that's certainly grounds for chasing someone out of your town.

Anyways, they gave him plenty of notice because they didn't really want to kill him. They just wanted to get the old goat the hell out to some other city where he could cause trouble there, and his friends were, you know, making plans to scurry him away from Athens, and he went out, consulted his daemon, and it told him not to leave. And that was a big shock to Socrates because, of course, he didn't want to die. And but yet, he had decided that he was always going to follow the dictates of the daemon. And he, so he did something that only a philosopher would do: he reversed his assumptions.

He thought, "Oh well, I was afraid of dying, and my daemon said stick around, and so I must be wrong; it must be worse to risk not following that internal voice than to risk this form of death." You know, which is a question you have to really wrestle with. And when his friends weren't very happy about it, but in any case, he didn't run, and we have two good court-like documents attesting to that—one written by someone named Xenophon and the other by Plato. They're very interesting documents; I would highly recommend reading them. They're very short.

And the reason one of the reasons I would recommend reading them, apart from the fact that they're fascinating and short, is that you also get the sense from what Socrates wrote, that because he had lived his life fully, you know, no holds barred in some sense, that he could let it go when the time came. And that's an interesting thing, you know, because, well, it's a question I think that we all wrestle with. We should—is like, well, is there a purpose to our life? And well, that's a hard question. And then if there is a purpose, well how is it expressed?

And then if there is a purpose and our lives are truncated, as they are, by death, then how can that purpose have significance? And those are hard questions. But Socrates' experience seemed to be that he had lived enough in his life so that when push came to shove—which it certainly did—he was able to gracefully let it go. And that's—and you know, he attested to that with his death, and that's fairly convincing, you know? I mean, that's a fairly convincing argument, and it's one that I find—well, it's hard to tell if I find it exactly credible, but I don't find it incredible.

I mean, I certainly have noticed that as I've got older and I've done things, various—what would you say? Accomplished isn't exactly the right word. I've participated in many things that I'm pleased to have participated in them but wouldn't necessarily go back and participate in them again. It's sort of as if when you do something, and you finish it, it's as if it's done; you don't have to do it again. And maybe it's possible—who knows?—that if you finish your life, whatever that might mean, if you exhaust your life, then that's enough life, you know, that you've had enough.

And I mean that doesn't mean that I try not to keep myself healthy and that I want to die tomorrow. It doesn't mean any of that. I'm trying to stick around as long as I can. But there’s still that curiosity about the relationship between life and mortality and the possibility that a life well-lived exhausts itself in some fundamental sense so that you can be satisfied, let’s say, with what you were.

There is some psychological evidence that bears on this. If you ask people what they regret, especially as they get older, what they generally report is things not done. So they don't regret so much mistakes they've made, although, of course, people obviously regret mistakes they've made as well. So they don't exactly regret sins of commission, right? Errors that they've actively made, they torment themselves for opportunities that had presented themselves that they did not, let’s say, exploit or engage in.

And I think that's worth thinking about too because one thing that I have become convinced about with regards to human consciousness, which I think is equivalent to the spark of divinity in some sense—that our fundamental stories insist as being placed within us—is that human consciousness is that faculty that confronts potential itself. I think there's good neurological evidence for this, by the way, for those of you who are scientifically minded because we build circuits within us for habitual action that we've practiced many times that seem to run in a very deterministic fashion. And we are a strange combination of deterministic and non-deterministic as far as I can tell.

But what our consciousness seems to be for is to encounter those things that we have not yet encountered. And those things that we have not yet encountered seem to me to be those things that have not yet been brought into being. And so you could say that what our consciousness is for is for the encounter with potential; you know, that our consciousness is further—it’s not for the past; it’s not even for the present; it’s to transform the future into the present.

And really, that's what our consciousness does. When you wake up in the morning, you have a new day ahead of you, and the day could take you in very many directions. And the weeks and the years, all of that can take you in very many directions; and you have some apprehension about what those directions might be. You have some apprehension about what role your choices might make in transforming that potential into one form of actuality or another.

I mean, you certainly know that there are dreadful mistakes that you might be very tempted to make that would produce all manner of hell around you and still be tempted to do it. It seems like it's sitting there right in front of you as a possibility. You also know that you could haul yourself up out of bed and attend to your duties and do the sorts of things that you're supposed to—a few things right that day and that weekend—that likely things would at least not be worse, and they would probably be better.

And I believe that. I do believe that. I don't understand how this can be the case. I don't understand how it is that consciousness can function in that way because I think to understand that we would have to understand what it means for the future to be only potential rather than actuality. And who the hell understands that? I mean, no one. And then we’d have to understand how it is that our conscious choices and our conscious ethical choices transform that potentiality into actuality, into reality, into the present, into the past.

And we certainly act as if we believe that that's what we do. We upgrade ourselves, for example. When we do a bad job of it, we're upset with our children and those we love if we don't believe that they're living up to their potential. We're guilty and ashamed when we make choices that we feel are inappropriate. We understand to some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something to do with the ethics of our choice, and again I would say that's a very deep idea. I think it's the most true idea I know.

That's very emphasized—that idea emphasized in ancient religious stories such as those that are outlined in Genesis. Or in Genesis with its strange insistence that, you know, God is that which brings order out of chaos. Formless potential generates the world out of formless potential, and that we're somehow made in that image, which seems to me to be the case.

And at the proper way, by the way, to go about acting in that image is to act in relationship to the potential that confronts you with truth and with courage, with careful articulation. That's the logos. And that if you do that, then what you bring forth is good.

So those are all background ideas that are associated with 12 rules for life, and they have a bearing on this question that I want to answer tonight. And so I'm going to sit—I have some notes, which I don't usually use—but I'm gonna use them tonight because I haven't got everything about this particular notion memorized in some sense yet because I'm still working it out. But that should work out okay. So we'll see, we'll see what happens.

So, yeah, yeah, well, good. So Windows work; that's always good seeing. I've seen it not work sometimes when Bill Gates demonstrates it, and that's got to be very, very embarrassing. Although I would say, you know, all things considered, he seems to have done quite well.

Alright, so here's the question that came up last night. And this is a strange question for what is essentially a political show. Near the end, a gentleman on videotape came up and he discussed the topic of human dignity. Not, it's not a topic you hear a lot about. There's a lot of topics that are sort of related to human beings that you don't hear a lot about anymore. You don't hear a lot about nobility. You don't hear a lot about endurance, let’s say, stalwartness, courage, dignity. Those aren't values that we discuss much. Responsibility being another one, which is one I'm quite thrilled about, all things considered, because I think it's the pathway to meaning itself.

But so his was the topic of human dignity, and he asked us a question: “Do you believe in God?” And then he said, “As a Catholic, I don't see any other way that we can have a universe with dignity.” And so I'm not so concerned about the second part of his commentary, although I might get to that. But the first part: “Do you believe in God?” is a question that's been leveled at me many times. And I'm going to come—other people on the panel and I'm going to just review what they said briefly, and then I'm going to talk about what I said, and then I'm going to fix what I said, I hope, so that it's better. At least that's the plan.

So Terry Butler, who's a labor frontbencher, said “I'm agnostic. People are inherently valuable because they are people.” And no, that doesn't work out very—it's, it's um, it's one of those one-minute answers except it's actually only ten seconds because you can make the opposite argument, and people do all the time. You know, like the Club of Rome, for example, which was an organization in Rome—logically enough—formed in the 60s, it was very much concerned about the terribly detrimental effect that human beings were having on the planet.

And I believe it was one of the Club of Rome members who coined the idea—and if it wasn't, it was someone who was thinking exactly the same way. So it works out either way—that human beings were something approximating a cancer on the planet, you know, because of all the terrible things we were doing ecologically and so forth. That was back when people believed we were going to overpopulate the planet to such a degree by the year 2000 that there would be widespread privation and starvation, which, by the way, if you haven't noticed, there isn't.

And you know, if you look at the terrible things that people do apart from the despoiling of the natural environment, let’s say, there's all the, you know, malevolence that's associated with human interactions and also human social systems. And it isn't so obvious as a consequence of that that you can make a straightforward case that human beings are inherently valuable merely because they're human beings because you can make an equally logical case from first principles that they're inherently well destructive or that they should be perhaps limited in their ability to procreate or that they are a catastrophe for the planet as a whole or that our entire history is nothing but a sequence of, um, what would you call unrequited malevolence and that people generally can't be trusted.

And so I don't find that answer particularly satisfying. I think it's a—it’s just self-referential: people are inherently valuable because they're people. It's like, well, you don't really get anywhere with an answer like that. So she's agnostic. And then, but then she has this idea, despite her agnosticism, that you can make the case a priori with nothing but reason, and it seems to me that that requires a little more depth and a little more explanation for it to actually be convincing, you know? It's like it's not obvious to me that people themselves think that they're valuable all the time. Often they don't think that at all.

They don't certainly think that often when they're depressed; they certainly don't think that when they're suicidal. They don't really think that when they're ashamed or guilty or frustrated or disappointed or angry or waking up at 3:00 in the morning and tormenting themselves with their consciences. They don't necessarily think that when they're fighting with their family or when they're upset at work or, you know, when things go wrong in life. And so it's not so bloody obvious that people are inherently valuable.

And then you might also notice that it's kind of easy to think that some people are more valuable than others, sort of like in Animal Farm, you know, where the animals were all equal except that some animals were more equal than others. But it's very easy for human beings to think that about other human beings because, no matter where you look in human societies, there are rank orders of value. Right? In any hierarchy that we produce that's associated with some ability, we find that some people are so much better at whatever it is that they're doing that it's an absolute miracle—and most people are absolutely dreadful at it.

And so, you know, if you were thinking about inherent value as something associated with something with an approximation of skill or competence, then it wouldn't be obvious from the structure of the world that people were inherently valuable in that manner either because there's such a rank order difference in our ability to do things, you know?

And you might say, well, that kind of averages out across things; but I don't think that's a very strong argument either. So, so it's not, it's bloody well not obvious. I'll tell you it's not obvious where this idea that people are inherently valuable came from. That's a tough one, you know? And in aristocratic states or tyrannical states, it's certainly not obvious at all that there's any acceptance of the notion that people are inherently valuable.

It's like there's no necessary presumption of innocence, for example, and you don't have any sovereign right to your own destiny. Like, you're not granted the rights—not granted, because that's the wrong way of thinking about it—your rights as a sovereign individual who has the responsibility and the capability to determine the destiny of the state itself don't exist. That doesn't exist as a concept, and so I don't see that there's anything there that speaks of inherent value either.

So it's by no means an obvious concept. In fact, I think it's one of the least obvious concepts that human beings have ever come up with—that each of us, in some strange manner, is to be attributed some divine spark, let’s say, that makes us equal in some fundamental way before God, you know, before the reality of the universe itself.

Even in relationship to our own laws, I mean, if you want a miracle for an idea, that's—I can't think of one that's more unlikely than that. So I've been puzzling over that for a very long time because I cannot understand why in the world that idea ever came to be or how in the world we ever agreed to act as if it was true. It's really something, and we should let that go—if we let that idea go, to our great peril, it's a fundamental remarkable fundamental idea.

And what's so interesting about it too is that once you have that idea—weird as it is and improbable as it is—and you start to organize your social relationships in accordance with it, well then they work, you know?

So my rule two is treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping. And it's sort of predicated on the idea that regardless of your inadequacies and your malevolence—which, you know, I'm sure you have many inadequacies and no shortage of malevolence just like everyone else—regardless of that, you have a moral obligation. So that would be a responsibility—to assume that despite all evidence, that there’s actually something of intrinsic worth about you and that as a consequence, you're duty-bound to treat yourself like that is true.

And then it turns out that if you do that, well then your life gets better. And I don't mean happier exactly, although I would say it gets happier. I mean it gets richer and more meaningful and deeper and more worthwhile. And you become more educated and you become wiser and you treat yourself with more respect, and you're a better model for other people and you're a better father or a better sister or a better mother, whatever it happens to be. And you're less ridden by that guilt that gnaws at you and shame that's there otherwise saying you're not what you could be. You're not what you could be, and that's a hell of a voice to get rid of, and it’s certainly not one that's easy to ignore.

So that's a pretty good—that idea that there's something divine, let's say, that resides within you of ultimate worth—even as a philosophical statement or a psychological statement rather than a metaphysical statement, it seems to be a precondition for establishing properly harmonious relationships with yourself. And that's, man, that's worth thinking about a lot, you know, that you have—because you think you couldn't think that in some sense you just own yourself, you know?

Because people do kind of make that claim, especially when they're trying to justify, for example, their right to suicide. But you know, it's your life; it’s your body; you're yours to do what you will with. And if that was true, well then it would seem to me that life would be a lot more straightforward because you would just tell yourself things that you would instantly obey and believe.

So first of all, you tell yourself all the things that you were going to do, and then you just run off and do them, which you don't, obviously, because it's much more difficult at that. And then you'd also say, well enough of the guilt and the shame and the negative emotion and the disillusionment and the vengefulness and all those things that make life hard has spread the self-recrimination. It's like, what the hell do we need that for? And if we're our masters of our own destiny and owners of our own fate, why can't we just command to ourselves that that be dispensed with? And like that doesn't work. I've never seen anybody able to do that.

So I mean, you can fool yourself for very brief periods of time into thinking that that might work, but it doesn't work, and that's strange. That's one of the reasons I love the psychoanalysts, say, because they were really the people, apart from the religious types, who figured out that whatever you are, you're not a unitary spirit that's under your own dominion, you know? You're something like a loose unity of a multiplicity of spirits, many of which are doing their own thing, which you're striving to bring into some form of unity. But even that unity isn't something that's under your control in any real sense; it's a unity that has its own nature that you have to exist in relationship to.

And I would also say that that's one of the things that keeps people’s feet firmly on the ground because otherwise it's easy to become egotistical and narcissistic. You know, if you think that you're the center of your own being, you know, in some fundamental sense, then you're only beholding to yourself. You're sort of a self-created creature, perhaps you could think about it that way. But it doesn't work like that. It's like the ideal that constitutes the unity that you might become then sort of manifests itself as something that you could strive toward but aren’t.

And it also serves as a judge. It's the thing that keeps you up at night saying, you know, there are some things you're just not attending to, and you should get at it because life is short, and there's no shortage of trouble that you might end up in, and a wise person would attend to the dictates of conscience and lay out his actions in the world according to what he knows to be true and correct.

And that is how people think, and it isn't obvious that we—why we think that way. That this is part of the reason that it seems to me so obvious that we have a religious instinct because I can't think of what else you would possibly call that other than a religious instinct, you know? Nietzsche, when he proclaimed the death of God—which, by the way, was no triumphant proclamation because he also mentioned that we would never find enough water to wash away the blood, which was his, what would you call it, prognostication for the 20th century, and a very accurate one at that—he believed that we would, in some sense, have to become as gods, you know, in ourselves, in order to replace what we had lost. He thought that the collapse of the Judeo-Christian structure would be absolutely catastrophic for the West, and I believe that he was correct.

And that the way out of that would be that we would have to create our own values—we'd have to take the place of what was once, let’s say, externalized and divine onto ourselves. And you know, it's a hell of a theory, and Nietzsche is not an easy person to criticize because you have to do a lot of reading before you find someone who's one-tenth as smart as Nietzsche.

He has this funny line about his books; it's really quite comical. He said it takes most writers a whole book to write what I can write in a sentence. Then he said no, they can't even manage it in a book. And that's actually true. I mean if you read Nietzsche—be one good and evil, for example—you see that his thought is so powerful that it's really, it's really a kind of miracle.

What the psychoanalysts realized, though, this was particularly Jung's contribution, I would say—Carl Jung's contribution—he was a great student of Nietzsche, a real admirer of Nietzsche, and really someone who was trying to solve the problem that Nietzsche had put forward, which was, well, our underlying metaphysics, our religious structure had collapsed. And that was the story upon which our entire culture was based, for better or worse, it had collapsed, and we needed to do something about that.

And we were doing various things, we were turning to fascism let’s say, or we were turning to communism—both ideological replacements for more fundamental religious beliefs—but that Nietzsche's suggestion that we turn to ourselves to extract out our own values—to create our own values, let me be more accurate about that—happened to be untrue because we weren't the sort of creatures who were actually capable of doing that.

And that's such—what's one of the reasons I love Jung and his biological take, in some sense, towards human beings because he firmly believed, and I think all of the evidence supports him, believed that human beings actually had a nature. You know that we— that we weren't merely social constructions, which we certainly aren't despite what the social constructionists insist upon forcing us to think increasingly through legislative means— and that we had to wrestle with what it was that we were, you know?

Even though we're our own creatures in some sense, we also have to wrestle with our intrinsic nature. And we know that, about the nature part of that more and more. I mean we know more about our neural circuitry, for example. We know that there's a circuit for rage, and there's a circuit for fear, and there's a biological system for jealousy, and there's a system for altruism, and there's a circuit for play, and there's another one for pleasure, and there's a complex circuit for negative emotion, pain and anxiety and frustration, disappointment, guilt and shame.

And we know that human beings share that motivational structure not only with all other human beings but with certainly with all mammals and almost all animals. And so that biological component of us is unbelievably right; it's mill tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions of years old. I read an interesting paper just the other day; you know I tend to talk about lobsters more than the average person.

And one of the points I made in 12 rules for life was that our neural chemistry, at least some of it, is so similar, it's been conserved so completely throughout the immense duration of evolution, hundreds of millions of years, that lobsters, like human beings, appear to become the lobster equivalent of depressed if they suffer a hierarchy defeat. And that if you give them chemicals that are roughly analogous to human antidepressants, it perks them right back up; their posture improves, and they'll go off and fight.

And you know, when I first discovered that, it just, well, it just blew me away. I never recovered from it. I thought, “My God, really? The continuum is 350 million years of continuity in the structure of those systems?” And you know, we know the serotonin system—which is the system I'm talking about—does govern your observation of where you sit in a social hierarchy, like it does for many, many animal species. And as one consequence of that, it regulates your emotion so that if it sees that you're a relatively high-status creature in your local environment, then it tends to allow you to feel more positive emotion and less negative emotion.

And if it sees you as a low-status creature in your local comparative environment, that it does the opposite. It overwhelms you with negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion. And so, you know, and that's really bad; no one likes that. It's fundamentally—there's really nothing worse that can happen to you than that—to have those emotions readjusted in that manner so that the incentive, reward, and the motivation and the positive emotion vanishes from your life, so there's nothing to be enthusiastic or excited about, and all of the negative emotions—pain, disappointment, frustration, grief—all of those terrible negative emotions are mightily magnified.

No one wants that; it's the last thing you want. Perhaps it's the last thing you want. And you know, that's partly why people are very—let's call it what would you say—they're tightly, they're willing to fight for their position in their status hierarchy and even for the existence of the hierarchies themselves.

So anyways, it is the case that human beings have a nature, and we have to contend with that nature, and so we can't just create our own values. And what Jung especially—Freud started it—but especially Jung believed that, well, in some sense what had happened was that we had lost the externalized religious narrative that had been projected by our imagination out onto the world. You know, you think about the constellations and the names of the constellations and the idea that the skies were populated by gods, you know, that was an externalization of our imagination, right? Projected out into the world; we were seeing the world through our imagination, and which is exactly how we do see the world.

And as we proceed, we're better able to distinguish, let’s say, what's imagination from what subjective world. But that doesn't mean the imagination disappears or that it's without value because the imagination is part of what helps us let’s say confront the future because we do that with our imagination and to compose things in impossibility before we realize them in actuality.

So for Jung, the world of gods just collapsed within—back into the imagination. And it was into the imagination that we had to go again to discover what we had lost, to discover these lost values; and that's akin, in some sense, I suppose, to rescuing your father from the belly of the whale. A very brilliant, brilliant toré tour-de-force to manage that supposition, especially back when he did it. And I think I see no evidence whatsoever that he was wrong, given, as I said, our radical inability to command ourselves as we are our own in some fundamental way.

We seem subject to now—we seem subject to intractable moral laws, and I'm not trying to make a case for the accuracy of those laws necessarily or for their metaphysical origin, but I am trying to make a case for their psychological and phenomenological reality. You definitely experience them in so far as you suffer, let’s say, from them, from them pricks and arrows of your own conscience. And I doubt if there's a single person in this room who doesn't regularly suffer in that manner. Some of you suffer like that virtually all the time, which can also be a problem.

In any case, you know, it's interesting to note that we're not exactly masters in our own houses. And that's such an interesting thing to note because you think, well, if we're not masters in our own houses, well what is it? Is it just—is it just a chaotic internal structure? Is it merely the voice of nature and nature's various instinctual subsystems? That doesn't seem to be correct because we do integrate them into something approximating unity. There's more than just the basics of nature. We have language, we have communication, we have culture; we build up above nature something that's more than nature, but we're still beholden to it. The question is, well, what are we beholden to? What is this that we're beholding to?

And socially, politically, and individually, that we cannot escape from. Well so that's part of the question. Do you believe in God? Well this part of the answer actually. And you know, it's no bleak answer; but the first thing I'm trying to say is try controlling yourself. Try acting as if you're the fundamental source of your own values, independent of any, what would you call, a transcendent ethical structure to see if you can do that. But try it for a week; try it for a month. I've never met anybody that could do it!

Now, not even for a moment. I mean I don't know how many of you have read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I would highly recommend that if you're interested in this sort of thing because it's the definitive study of this idea. Because in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist commits the perfect murder and he has his reasons for it—many reasons, because Dostoyevsky didn’t mess around when he wanted to give someone reasons. He gave them reasons.

And Raskolnikov, the main character, had reasons for murder, and then he commits his murder, and he gets away with it. But things don't go well for Raskolnikov because one of the things he finds out is that the Raskolnikov that you were before you committed the murder is not the same as the Raskolnikov you are after you've committed the murder. And there's a dividing line there that you don’t—it’s like the red pill, I guess, right? It’s like, that's the matrix, correct? The red pill.

And once there are certain actions, once you take them, there's no going back, and so that's what Crime and Punishment is about. And Raskolnikov tortures himself to death—well, not literally, but metaphysically, psychologically—because he cannot tolerate breaking the great moral code. And so it’s what's a great book. It's truly a great book, and it's also extraordinarily—like it’s a murder mystery thriller as well as being a deep philosophical book.

So if you’re in the mood for, you know, a murder mystery thriller that's also a deep philosophical book, then that's the one for you. So now one of the other speakers on the panel, Van Badham, who was described, not by me, as a writer, activist, and Twitter Queen, which is, I think, like being the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, something like that—I went on her Twitter site today to find out how many followers she has, but apparently, I'm not one of them because I'm blocked.

And it kind of surprises me because I didn't know that I'd ever tried to follow her. But anyways, she said, and this was interesting, she said: “I'm a Christian and a Marxist.” And I thought, “No, you can only be a Christian and a Marxist if—well, there are a couple of ways. One is that you just want to be all things that are good at once regardless of their internal contradictions, and so that would be one reason. And another reason would be that you don't know anything about Christianity or Marxism. And then the next would be that you're just compartmentalized.

You know, like there's this idea that people can't hold two contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time? Well, that idea was formulated by someone who’s never met a human being because you can hold like fifty contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time, as you know, whenever you argue with someone that you love because you love them and maybe you even like them, but you also hate them and you wish that you could just crush them right there and then, and so like that's a lot of contradictory ideas, and that's probably only like half the contradictory ideas that are running through your mind at the moment, you know?

So, man, you're so full of contradictions that it's just beyond belief. And the only time—I mean I know this because I read undergraduate essays. And what's interesting about undergraduate essays is—it's so interesting because the undergraduate will make a claim in paragraph one and then in paragraph seven will make the opposite claim, and they won't notice that they're intellectually incommensurate.

And you know, that might happen thirty times in the essay. And the reason that that works is because, well, they haven't been called on paradoxes, but also because they haven't had to live the paradoxes through because you—you—the only straight note you thought when you have like impulse A and impulse B, and they conflict at the same time, right? And you can either do one or the other but not both. You know, if it's A today and B tomorrow, well then you can hold those ideas simultaneously.

But if it's A or B right now, then you have to decide: is A more important or is B more important? You have to put them in a hierarchy, and then you have to act them out, and you have to see what happens. And so then you find out if you're full of contradictions. And part of the way that you iron out your contradictions, which is very, very hard to do, is that you walk and you do a whole bunch of things in the world like Socrates did. You go, you have your adventure in the world and you put your ideas to the test, and those that work out in a paradoxical or counterproductive manner you dispense with or put lower on the priority list or something like that.

And that's how you discover that you know you can't hold incommensurate views simultaneously. Carl Jung said that something like paradoxical views that are not made conscious will be played out in the world as fate. And that's really worth thinking about too. So if you have your, let’s call it your typical negative experience, you know, this thing that just keeps seems to just keep happening to you—bad luck, let’s call it—it’s highly probable that there's a set of ideas that are occupying you, preoccupying you, possessing you, that are driving you in this direction continually and that you can't or won't work out the contradiction.

And as a consequence, you know, maybe you think every woman is your mother, and you haven't noticed that you think that. And that, you know—and it is something that people think because women are mothers and women, and it's not a bad initial template, but you know, you gotta modify it to some degree. And you know if that's an unconscious idea that you have and you continue to play it out, you may run into your continual habitual negative experience with women, and you wonder what the hell is wrong with women.

But there it isn't the women that has the problem; it's you. And you know if you run into problems with women all the time, then it's highly probable that the problem is you—so not always, but generally.

So let's go into this Marxist and Christian idea here just for a minute. So, we'll start with—let's start with some of the ideas of Marx. Well, Marx believed that people were basically socially constructed, so that we were blank slates, and that whatever our nature was was given to us essentially by our surroundings—but even more importantly by our social class, right? Because Marx was a theorist of social class and believed that the primary dispute, let’s say, the primary motivator of human history, the primary driver of human history was something like the rich versus the poor, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.

And that was a consequence of your social upbringing, and that your group identity was paramount. Okay, so there's nothing about that that's vaguely Christian. That's not how the Christian worldview works! No, how the Judeo-Christian worldview works, because in that world, you're fundamentally an individual. Your nature is fundamentally attributable to you by God; you're fundamentally responsible to God, and history itself is something like the playing out of your relationship to the transcendent.

So those things aren't even—they aren't the same. They're not commensurate. You can't believe both of them at the same time. Marxism is a materialistic philosophy; it's predicated on the idea that—essentially an idea that Dostoyevsky criticized in great depth was that if you just made people rich enough, let’s say, if you deprived them of their privation, if you equalize their economic status, let's say, that the Utopia would come to light upon earth.

And you know, I have a certain amount of sympathy for a viewpoint like that because, you know, who likes starvation and misery? You know, there's nothing positive to be said about that. But I think Dostoyevsky was right too in his criticism of Marxism, although he wasn't directly aiming this at Marx in Notes from Underground, where he noted that, you know, if you gave people what they wanted in terms of, let's say, bread and circuses, they had, as he said, nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species—which is kind of a nice phrase.

That the first thing they would do is take a hammer and smash things just so that something improbable and strange would happen, just so that we could have our way, you know? And it's kind of a recapitulation of the idea of original sin in Dostoyevsky's subtle manner is that we’re the sorts of creatures that, you know, what did he say? We’re ungrateful. That’s the thing that primarily distinguishes us from animals—is we’re ungrateful. And that we can curse—that was what he thought made us different than animals.

And that even if we got what we wanted materially, that wouldn't satisfy us because we're not the sorts of creatures that can be satisfied with material possessions. Let’s err—material comfort. Because it isn't even obvious that we're after comfort. I mean, what do you want? You want—you want to just lay in a feather bed and eat peeled grapes all day? I mean, maybe for an hour or so, that might not be a bad idea. But, you know, it's gonna get dull pretty quick.

You're going to go out looking for trouble. And it's certainly possible that the more material resources and the easier they were to get that you have at your disposal, the more creative ways you're going to find to cause yourself trouble when you go out and look for trouble. And so—and that's a testament to the human spirit! And Dostoyevsky knew this: it's like, well, whatever we're here for, it isn't the Utopia of equal material distribution. That's not—we're not—we're not looking to be fed and asleep, you know?

And I don't know what it is that we're looking for; God only knows. Maybe what we're looking for is to continually keep looking, something like that. I mean that's the sorts of creatures that we are. But the materialist philosophy is that, well, if you just provide for people economically, problem over. No! Wrong! I mean, most of you are as given that you're, you know, you're going to be ill in one way or another and that you're still subject to mortality and all of the terrible natural limitations that human beings are characterized by.

Your mode is well off as you're gonna get, you know, the economic data already show that once you have enough money so that bill collectors aren't chasing you, which basically puts you, say, at the kind of in the upper reaches of the working class or maybe the lower end of the middle class, something like that—that additional money has absolutely no effect whatsoever on your self-reported well-being, which is something like a combination of positive emotion and absence of negative emotion.

So you might like to think that, you know, if you were rich, your life would be better, and maybe it would be somewhat better, but it wouldn't be as much better as you might hope. And that's because you'd still have most of the problems that people have. You know, you still maybe wouldn't get along with your sister, and you'd still get divorced, and maybe you'd even be more likely to, and there'd still be illness as that would set you.

You'd be able to deal with them perhaps with some degree of urgency, but you'd still have the problem with what the hell your life is for and what you're doing on the planet and how to conduct yourself in the proper way. And so we don't want to be too naive about materialism even though we don't want to be ungrateful for its advantages.

Marx also believed—well, I said this already—that, you know, history was basically characterized by the war of socioeconomic groups. That's being transformed more recently into the war of identity groups, which is the same damn thing, and it's the same old wolf in new sheep's clothing as far as I'm concerned. That, you know, the best way to conceptualize human beings is, well, I don't know, whatever your damn identity is. Maybe it's sex for you and it's ethnicity for you and it's gender for you—and God only knows what it is for you—and you know, and that's who you identify with.

And then all there is in the world—and this is the postmodernist view—is hierarchies of people in these identity groups struggling for dominion, you know? And that's a quasi-Marxist viewpoint; it's just a variant of the bourgeoisie versus proletariat theory of history, which is a foolish theory, as far as I'm concerned, and certainly not one that we need to take forward into the 21st century, although we seem, you know, destined to insist that we do.

So he believed that the revolutionary overthrow of the oppressor class was necessary and morally demanded. And that turns out to be a little bloodier than I would say the typical Judeo-Christian ethic might require because it doesn't require you to take up arms against your evil overlords and, well, put them in gulags and kill them by the millions, for example. And that, to me, seems to be an important difference.

There's no—in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there's no guilt. There's no group guilt, right? You're guilty, and you're guilty of different things, right? I presume, and, and that's your problem! But maybe you're also innocent—who knows? You know, but whatever, it’s on you. It’s not a consequence of your racial heritage or your ethnicity or your gender or any of those things—it's between you and God, let's say; or between you and the state even—but at least it's between you and the state or God. It's not like, well, you know, your father was a factory owner, let’s say, your grandfather, and so it was perfectly reasonable during the Russian Revolution and the Red Terror to vacuum you up, along with your whole family, and do away with you because you'd be irredeemably tainted by your bourgeois past.

So that's another place where Marxism and Judeo-Christianity are—they're not just different like they're opposite. You know, it's not just variant one, invariant two; these are like seriously different ideas. And so there's another reason you can't be a Marxist and a Christian as if you— and then there's the idea that, you know, that Marx had that religion was the opiate of the masses, which doesn’t exactly sound like—I've always thought religion was the opiate of the masses, but communism—Marxism was the methamphetamine of the masses, let's say.

Yeah, the meth of the masses. We had no idea with regards to opiates. So here’s what Marx has to say about religion: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for the real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

It’s interesting to me because it's not like the Judeo-Christian story was really a happy one, as far as I can tell. You know, I mean there was heaven but Genesis, too; you were gonna get in, man—that was low and, and mostly it was a fair bit of original sin, you know, and a fair bit of you wrestling with all of your inadequacies and your proclivity towards malevolence. To pick up your cross, to bear your suffering, to understand that, you know, there is a war in your soul between the forces of good and evil. It's like how that's an opiate is beyond me. I mean, if I was going to design an opiate that made people feel better, I'd certainly dispense with a fair bit of that. It's like whatever you do is okay; we could start with that.

There's certainly no hell; that's something we're gonna get rid of right away. Little less guilt and shame would be— it could be like a hippie cult in the 1960s, you know, with a little more marijuana and some free sex. Something like that. So I don't really understand the illusion idea there as Marxist criticism, I suppose, of the belief of, you know, the great— the Great Father in the sky, hoo-hoo-hoo. Still, it doesn't seem to me to be that; like he's sort of still kind of a nightmarish creature, all things considered, since at least in principle, he's keeping track of everything you do, even more than you are, and that's not such a good thing.

But whatever, so it's a foolish criticism as far as I can tell. It doesn't matter; he still criticized it. The criticism of religion is therefore in brio, the criticism of that veil of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism meaning has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

That's something that plenty of Marxists did, I can tell you. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses so that he will move around himself as his own true son—s-u-n.

Yeah, well that's Marxism in a nutshell, alright? I mean, that's like, that's the fundamental definition of pathological merit narcissism—so that he will move around himself as his own true son, right? Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

And you know generally, we don't use that as an insult, “He only revolves around himself.” Isn't that an insult? And isn't this the reason for that? Don't we assume that there's something that you should be revolving around that isn't just yourself? You know, it's—it could be many things. You know, it could be, well, someone you love; that would be a start. It could be a child; it could be your partner in life; it could be your family in extension; it could be your community; it could be some noble ideal that you're trying to serve—should be something other than you as the primary center of the universe around which, well, you and presumably everything else revolves.

So I don't really see that as a particularly wise, what would you call it, philosophy. And as it manifested itself in the world, you know, I would say Stalin probably revolved around himself quite nicely since—and don't you think? I mean if you had to pick someone who was revolving around himself, it would be a pretty decent competition between Mao and Stalin, and that didn't seem to be for the best.

So that's something to consider as well. The Marxists believed that religion hindered human development, and the Soviets and the Maoists instituted state atheism, apart from the worship of their leaders, of course. And then I'm gonna read you a poem by Marx. This is a good one; I found this a while back. God, it's a rough poem. And you know, you want it—you want to let your imagination sort of—I would say let your imagination loose with this poem, which is what you should do with a poem—and imagine the sort of state of mind that you have to be in to write a poem like this.

And then also imagine, as you should, that poetry like dreams are the birth—its birthplace of thought. With my undergraduates often, especially ones that are really obsessed with ideas, they'll often put really bad poetry in their essays. And I'm not saying that in a cynical way because bad poetry can have good ideas in it. It's hard to write good poetry, you know?

But the thing is often an idea that's extraordinarily emotional in content will manifest itself as a poem before it is able to articulate itself out into a fully expressed philosophy. And so I see this with my undergraduates. They'll really be obsessed with something that's bothering them, then they write some poem often about a personal experience. And then as I help them shape the essay, they kind of unfold the poem into an articulated statement about the structure of reality.

And so you could say, well, you know, we're all embedded in the dream; we know that. You go to sleep every night and you dream; you're embedded in your imagination. If you're forbidden to dream, if you're deprived of your dreams, you will lose your mind. That's been experimentally demonstrated quite nicely on animals but also on human beings. You have to dream. You have to enter that realm of incoherent imagination and possibility in order to maintain your sanity, which is extraordinarily interesting and very strange.

And I would say poetry exists on the border between the dream and the fully articulate wakefulness. It's the place where the image of the dream meets the articulated speech, full consciousness. And so you can think about that with regards to this poem, "Invocation of One in Despair":

So—
A God has snatched from me all my all In the curse and rack of Destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond recall; Nothing but revenge is left to me. On myself, revenge I'll proudly wreak On that being that enthroned Lord.

Make my strength a patchwork of what's weak; Leave my better self without reward. I shall build my throne high overhead; Cold, tremendous, shall its summit be; For its bulwark, superstitious dread, For its marshal, blackest agony.

Who looks upon it with a healthy eye Shall turn back struck, deathly pale and dumb; Clutched by blind and chilled mortality; May his happiness prepare its tomb.

And the Almighty's lightning shall rebound From that massive Iron Giant; If he brings my walls and towers down, Eternity shall raise them up defiant.

Well, I would say that's the sort of poem that would be written by someone who revolved around himself as his own true son. And I would also say that given what we know about what happened as a consequence of the instantiation of Marxist doctrine, that this is a truly horrifying piece of literature to contemplate, written by the way when Marx was rather young.

So then the question came to me: do I believe in God? And I don't like that question, and people have complained at me a lot, and I'm sure they have their reasons because they don't like my answers. You know, I have two answers; they've kind of become stuck, which is not a good thing, but they're the best approximate—exactly. I've got three—I had three sort of burgeoning hypotheses. One was: it's none of your damn business. That's the first one.

So it's like a privacy issue; like it seemed to me to be a question that was too private to be answered properly. And you know, you could consider that a cop-out, and maybe it is. And then another one was, well what do you mean by believe? Like do you mean the words? Do you mean to say the words “I believe in God?” Does that indicate that you believe in God? Like I don't know what you mean by believe exactly, because—and that's got me in trouble too because, you know, people think that attempting to clarify the meaning of words is an attempt to escape from the question when it's actually an attempt to specify the question.

I mean, is what you believe what you say or what you act out? Now, I would say to some degree it's both, but if push comes to shove, as far as I'm concerned, what you believe is what you act out, not what you say. And then, you know, and if you're an integrated person, then what you act out and what you say are the same thing. And then you're a person whose word can be trusted, right? Because what you say and what you do is isomorphic; they're the same thing, but belief is instantiated in action.

So I have also suggested that I act as if I believe in God or to the best of my ability. And people aren't very happy with that either. But—and then I was thinking about this today when I was thinking about what I might talk to you guys about, and I thought, well, let’s go into this a little bit more. Let's say you say you do believe in God. Say, “I believe in God.” It's like, okay, well that's hypothetically pretty impressive, I would say. It's like you believe that there's a divine power that oversees everything that is fundamentally ethical, that's watching everything you do, and you believe that.

And so what effect does that have on your behavior? If you believe it, does that mean that you're—well are you all in on your beliefs? Are you sacrificing everything to this transcendent entity that you proclaim belief in? Have you cleansed yourself of all your sin, let’s say? Are you making all the sacrifices that you need to make? Like have you taken the mote out of your eye?

I know, or are you in the same situation, let’s say, that the Catholic Church seems to be in right now? Just out of curiosity, I'll bring that up since the Pope seems to be concerned with what's been happening with the Catholic Church, given the endless pedophilic scandals, let’s say, which seem rather serious in my estimation and might have been something that was cleaned up perhaps a hundred or a thousand years ago and it's being taken seriously, perhaps now and perhaps not, because it's not so easy to determine exactly what it would mean to take that seriously.

And you might say, well, are all the people who are committing these heinous actions and then covering them up, or if you ask them, well, do you believe in God? What's the—what are they going to say? Well, you think the answer would be yes, given that they're like priests. And yet— and yet what's the evidence? Well, the evidence isn't exactly so clear that the mere statement, let’s say, or the mere acting out of the ritual, let’s say—and I'm not trying to denigrate the statement or the ritual, but I'm pointing out that that's no indication of your right to say that you believe.

Because you got it, and I think this is why it’s more than me to answer this question. It's like, what right do I have to say that—to make that claim? I believe in God, well what's the claim? Is that the claim that I'm a good person somehow because you think that if you believed in God actually, like seriously, that you'd be a good person like right now? Because, well, for obvious reasons, I would think.

And so if that hasn't happened in some sort of miraculous sense so that you're the best person you could possibly imagine being on an ongoing basis and then terrified of deviating from that path in a serious manner, then I don't see why you have the right to say that you believe in God. You know, one of the things Nietzsche said about Christianity—he was a great critic of Christianity although also a great friend in a very peculiar way—in that sometimes your best friend is the one who points out your weakest properties, let's say—he said as far as he was concerned there was only one Christian and he died on the cross.

And that's a—you know, perhaps an extreme statement, but one worth giving some consideration to. It's like, well then you look at, what if—what are you called upon, let’s say, if you're going to proclaim yourself as a believer? You know, and I thought about this a lot as I've gone through the Old Testament; I did a bunch of lectures last year. And so what are you called upon? Well, you're called upon initially to act out the spark of divinity that's within you by confronting potential with the logos that's within you, which means to take the opportunities that are in front of you, the potential future, and to transform it into the present in the best possible way using truth and courage and careful articulation as your guide.

So that's the first thing you're called on to do. Now that's a major deal there, that's a tough one. And then the second is to make the proper sacrifices—that's the Cain and Abel story. It's like, you want something, you genuinely want it. You want to set the world straight, then you let go of what's necessary and you pursue, you let go of what isn't necessary no matter what it is, no matter what it is.

And then you pursue what's necessary. And then maybe you sacrifice your children to God—that was the story. That’s the next stories that come up. Of course you think, well that's pretty damn barbaric, and the way the story's laid out, of course it is. But that isn't exactly what it means. It means that what you try to do when you raise children is that you try to do everything you can to impress upon them by imitation and by instruction and by love and by encouragement that they are crucial beings in the world whose ethical decisions play an important role in shaping the structure of reality itself—and that they have the moral responsibility to do that.

And you get your Ark in order—that's your family, let's say—so that when the storms come, you can stay above water for the 40 days of flooding, and you're capable of leading your people through the desert when the desert makes itself manifest.

And you can escape from tyranny properly because you're wise enough to see it, and you take the full burden of being on yourself—all the suffering that's part and parcel of that. You accept that voluntarily, let’s say, and you do everything you can to confront the malevolence that's part of you and that's part of the state and it's part of the world, and you make a garden around you—that's the paradise, a walled garden. It's a walled, well-watered place so the forces of nature and society exist together in harmony, and you place your family in that so that they can live properly, and you treat your enemy as if he's yourself and the same with your brother.

And well then you can say, then maybe you can say maybe then you have the right to say that you believe in God. And since I'm not like that 100% of the time or even approximating the percent of the time that I would like to be like that, you know, despite my best efforts, then when people ask me, I'm not going to say something virtuous like I'm a believer because there's plenty wrong with me that needs to be fixed before I would dare utter words like that.

Thank you. [Applause]

Well, so that's a better answer to that question. So thank you very much for walking through that with me, let’s say. Now you have all—not all, but many of you have asked some questions tonight using this nifty little device called Slido, which I really like. And so now what I'm going to do is spend 20 minutes or so looking through the questions that you asked and seeing if I have anything that isn't completely incomprehensible and embarrassing to say about them. So let’s try that.

Hmm, well this is a strange one—I don’t know about you people from Sydney. So, it’s from Kathy Newman, which strikes me as somewhat unlikely. And it’s got a hundred sixty-four upvotes, so, which is quite a few upvotes. “It hurt when you destroyed me on ABC.” Now I don't know if that's referring to last night or so many months ago. But I have enrolled in university to get my facts right.

Yeah, well that probably won't work. Thank you for enlightening my soul; the burns are still healing. Yeah, well that's, it's not exactly a question. It's four sentences that are quite the strange combination I would say. Something about the burns are still healing, you know?

I mean, Nietzsche said that you could tell much about a man's character by how much truth he could tolerate, which is very interesting. You know, there’s not an idea in the great Western tradition that the truth is the way and the path of life and that no one comes to the Father except through the truth. And I believe that to be the case because I don't think that you can manifest who you are without the truth. And so I think it's literally and metaphorically truth that the pathway to who you could be if you were completely who you were is through the truth.

And so I think—and so the truth does set you free—but the problem is, is that it destroys everything that isn't worthy in you as it sets you free. And that's—that's a process of burning, and it's, it's painful because you cling to what you shouldn't be, partly out of pride and partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness. And so then you encounter something true, and you all know this. You all know this well because, when was the last time that you learned something important that wasn't a blow of some sort?

You know, it's often—you look back at your life and you think, oh God, I really learned something there. I wouldn't want to do that again, but it really changed my life. I mean sometimes it can really destroy you, you know, an encounter with the truth, and you never really recover. But now and then, something comes along and straightens you out. And a lot of you has to go—a lot of you has to burn away, you know?

And I suppose in some sense the idea is that everything about you that isn't worthy is to be put into the flames, and that's—that's another reason to be not so casual about claiming what you believe, because it isn't something that you undertake with, oh, do caution! You know, I learned when I was a kid, about 25 or so, a little older than a kid, that almost everything that I said was one form of lie or another, and I wasn't any worse, I would say, than the people that I was associating with or any better.

And the lies were manifold, you know? They were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning the argument—that might be one. Attempts to indicate my intellectual prowess when there were competitions of that sort, maybe just the sheer pleasure of engaging in an intact intellectual argument and winning.

My inability to distinguish between ideas that I had read and incorporated because I had read but had realized that I hadn't yet earned the right to use all of that, and you know, I had this experience that lasted a long time—while I would say it's really never gone away—that, and I think this was the awakening of my conscience essentially. And I didn't realize that this until much later when I was reading Socrates’ Apology.

This voice, for lack of a better word, made itself manifest inside me, and it said every time I said something that wasn't true—and that's usually what it said: that's not true; you don't believe that. Or there was a sensation that was associated with it. I don't think this is that uncommon, you know? I ask my psychology classes for many years in a row if they hadn't experienced this—this experience that they had a voice in their head, let’s say, it's a metaphor or a feeling that communicated to them when they were about to do something wrong.

And it was universally the case that people agreed with one of those statements or another. And the other thing I would ask is, well, do you always listen to it? And of course, the answer to that was definitely no. But that's also very interesting, you know that you can have this faculty. This conscience, this seems to me to be very tightly associated with the idea of free will, is that you can have this internal voice, this daemon—the root word for democracy.

Oh yes, I didn't finish that story, so the—yes, well it's important—well, so Socrates' daemon told him it was his moral guide, and democracy appears to be predicated on the idea that the polity will function if people attend to their consciousness. That's the overlap of those conceptualizations, and that, well, first of all, I think that's the case, you know, and it makes a certain amount of logical sense. I mean if we assume that the political state is something like the emergent consequence of the decisions of all its citizens, we would assume that the wiser the decisions of the citizens, the more upright and functional the state.

I can't see how it could be any other way. And perhaps those who are the most upright—who listen to their consciousnesses more carefully—even play a disproportionately powerful role; it's certainly possible. So anyways, back to truth.

Well, you know, I learned that so much of what I was doing was false, and I think I learned this—there was a reason that this came to me so clearly. I was trying to understand why people did terrible things, and I was really concentrating on the terrible, terrible things that people do, and I was interested in Auschwitz, for example, and how now known as a political phenomenon but as a psychological phenomenon.

I was curious about how you could be a Auschwitz guard, and I wasn’t really curious about how you could be one because, well, you could be one—not of course I was more curious about how I could be one being such a good person as I thought I was. And but I also knew that many people did many terrible things during the 20th century, and the idea that I was somehow better than them or that I should assume a priori that I was better than them and that I wouldn't have made the same choices or worse had I been in the same situation was a very, very, very dangerous supposition.

And in fact, a sufficiently dangerous supposition to bring about the very danger that I assumed was worth avoiding. I had this idea, you know, that what had happened, especially in Nazi Germany, but also in the Soviet Union, shouldn’t happen again. That what we needed to do because of what happened in the 20th century, especially because we also managed to create hydrogen bombs, that it was in that—and that we had become so technologically powerful that there wasn’t time for that anymore; that time for that was over.

And that we really needed to understand why it happened, and that perhaps we could go deep enough in that understanding—which is I think what happens when you go deep in understanding—so that you could stop it. Because if you understand the problem, maybe you can solve it, you know?

And at least in part I came to believe that the problem was, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the problem is is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart, and I was reading Jung at the same time, you know, and he believed that the human soul was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell. And believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche, was that it was bottomless essentially—that that it was like an experience of hell. And that also struck me as true.

And that the way to stop those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it, who would even start to do it. Because the other thing you learn when you learn about atrocities of that sort—you could read Ordinary Men, by the way, which is an unbelievably great study of exactly this sort of phenomena—it's on my book list on my website. It's about a group of German policemen who were turned into brutal murderers over a period of months when they went behind, when they went into Poland after the Germans had marched in.

And they were just ordinary middle-class men, and they weren't forced into this by their leadership, by the way either, which was one of the things that makes the book so interesting. So for me, it was a matter of understanding that if we want this sort of thing to not happen anymore, then we have to start to become the sort of people who wouldn't do it, which seems rather self-evident all things considered, unless you know you believe that we're the pawns of social forces, for example, like the Marxists do.

And I don’t believe that because we're also the creators of social forces, and we're also capable of standing up to social forces because I would say the individual is more powerful than the social force, all things considered. Interestingly enough, that the way to stop such things from happening, the way to remember properly, is to understand that you could do it, that you could do those terrible things because the people who did them were like you.

And that the way out of that is to stop being like that. And the way you stop being like that is, well at least in part, by stop—by ceasing to tell yourself lies that you don’t believe in and that you know you shouldn't act out. And you know, and that's made a huge difference in my life, for better or for worse.

I mean, it was a very uncanny experience, I would say, because it's very discombobulating to experience yourself as fragmented enough so that much of what you do and say is actually false. It’s a lot of work to clean that up, a lot. But the consequences are in principle worthwhile, and so that was part of what understanding—that was part of what drove me towards clinical psychology, saying away from political science and law and from politics in general, because I started to believe that, and I think this is the great Western idea, which people were quite irritated about, by the way, on Q&A last night as well.

That the proper route forward for the redemption of the individual and for mankind as a whole is as a consequence of the redemption of each individual, and I truly believe that. And I believe that that occurs as a consequence of adherence to the truth and courage in the face of being—that’s rule one, right? To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to take on the onslaught and to enter the contentious ring and to do your—to do more than your best because your best isn't enough because your best isn't as good as you could be.

You have to push yourself past that. And that’s as far as I can tell where you find what you need in life; you find the meaning that sustains you in life, and you find the patterns of action that redeem the world, both at the same time. I mean life is a very difficult business, you know? It's fatal, and it's full of suffering, and it's, and it's full of betrayal and malevolence. There's nothing about it that's trivial; it's all profound.

And in order to find your way through all of that, that capacity for hellish experience, let’s say, you need to develop a relationship with something that's profound. And you can—you have that capacity. And what could be more profound than the truth? And what would you rather have on your side? And you might say, well that's obvious, and of course everyone should do that, and then you need to know why you don't.

And the answer is, well it's sort of encapsulated in this first amusing question: “You don't.” Thank you for enlightening my soul; the burns are still healing. It's like, well, you know, there's no shortage of deadwood to burn off and there's no shortage of pain when the deadwood burns off, and that's what makes people afraid of the truth, you know?

Maybe that's why Moses encountered God in the burning bush, who the hell knows? But there's something about that idea that seems to me to be the case and so what's the decision that you make? You know, you decide to believe, you know? It's a risk, an