2015 Maps of Meaning 08a: Mythology: The Great Mother / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)

I've become aware over the last five years or so that maybe longer that there's a significant overlap between the concepts that I'm telling you about and hiig work. I didn't know that you know ideas come from lots of different places; it's hard to track them down. But when Haider was trying to, what Haider's philosophical program essentially consisted of was the rediscovery of being.

Now, he believed that prior to the ancient Greeks, who were quite rational and modern in their approach to the world, that people lived in a relationship with being that was much less mediated by interpretive structures, I suppose, as one way of thinking about it. He thought of being as something that was enfolded, and the framing—which is also a term that I use—restricts the manner in which being is able to manifest itself. So it's like a reduction of being to something specific.

Now, it's pretty obvious in Haider—obviously he knew this—that in order to interact with something, you have to simultaneously not interact with everything. So you have to reduce the phenomena to a pinpoint before you can actually interact with it in any immediately useful manner. But one of Haider's points was that that also restricts our ability to be in direct contact with being, and he thought of that as like the ground of meaning.

Now, I think there's different sorts of meaning, and perhaps I agree too. There's the meaning of the thing that reveals itself to you, so that would be the mean of an anomaly in some sense. Then there's the meaning of the framework that you use to interpret the situation, and then there's the meaning that you experience when you transform the framework that you use to look at things. Those are all forms of meaning, and they're all interrelated.

But it has struck me, Haider's approach to this, because in some sense he was also reacting to Nietzsche's ideas about the death of God. It was an attempt to help people reorient themselves in the world in the novel historical situation where we had become detached, in some ways, from our traditional religious beliefs, which were in some sense a form of framing.

You know, one of the things Jung said about religions, he said the purpose of a religion was to stop you from having religious experiences. It's quite an interesting way of thinking about it, you know? Because what Jung was claiming was that the purpose of a religious system was to filter the overwhelming power of being down to a point where you could tolerate conceptualizing it. But you know, the price you paid for that was a certain kind of arbitrary limitation.

Well, you're always paying the price for arbitrary limitation, but it would be nice if you could also transcend that from time to time and realize that there's meaning outside of the frameworks that you generally inhabit, and that you can narrow those frameworks so much that you don't get any of the revivifying form of meaning.

And Jung would think of that, when he was thinking about it symbolically, he would think about that as the absence of the Water of Life, for example, which is a very common motif in fairy tales. You know, the king is old and desperate from dying, and the only thing that will save him is the Water of Life. There's a great Grim Brother fairy tale called the Water of Life that has exactly that theme; it's the perfect mythological structure.

Now, I think I showed you guys this last time, is that correct? Do do you recognize that?

Okay, so that kind of summed up our discussion about the dragon of chaos. What I was trying to communicate, which I think is a very, very difficult thing, is that there are many different ways of conceptualizing the ground of being. And you can do it from an objective perspective, but—and that's a very useful tool—but I think that is a form of framing. It's not so much a description of the nature of being per se.

And the being that we were speaking of, I think is properly conceptualized at least for some purposes in relationship to this diagram which says, well, being is a field of information from which you derive the common objects and entities that you interact with, but also from which you derive your own structure, your own experience, and your own mechanisms of framing.

And so you can think of reality as that which allows for the derivation of those two things. And I also made the case to you that I think you can make a strong case that that's actually how your brain works. Like your brain acts like that's the way the world is.

And then a secondary case that if that's how your brain acts, and you're a Darwinian, you're faced with quite a problem if you are attempting to make the claim that the objective world is the ultimate reality, because that isn't how your brain is set up, and at least in principle it evolved so that you wouldn't die because of your foolish ideas, embodied or otherwise.

Anyways, you can wrestle through that in your own minds. It's a very difficult thing to conceptualize.

Now, one of the things that's characteristic of this particular diagram is that—and you've seen this in the book—this is a bit of an elaboration of the idea of what happens to you when you encounter anomaly. You know, and what happens is fundamentally that your body prepares to do all manners of things.

Some of those are negative; like they're experienced as negative emotions because they're fundamentally defensive and protective. So they can involve pain and frustration and disappointment and shame and guilt and all of those sorts of things, as well as fear. But then the other side of that is, well, you know, there's riches to be had when you encounter something novel.

And so the parts of your mind that are associated with creative exploration and the reconfiguring of ideas should also be put on alert. And that is what seems to happen. So basically, your response to anomaly is to prepare to do everything, and that's—that can be very exciting.

It can be extremely compelling. So one of the things that I think is really worth thinking about, and this is something we'll cover a lot in class, comes to a halt. Because this is one of the only optimistic ideas I've ever been able to derive from psychology that I actually think might be true, and it's a really optimistic idea.

Like if you accept the idea that it's reasonable to construe the ground of reality in this manner, and then you take seriously the two things—the fact of your motivational, your embodied, motivational and emotional response—that's one thing. And then the fact of the hierarchy of anomaly, so that some things are anomalous, you know, in a kind of trivial manner, and then some things are anomalous in an absolutely terrifying manner.

But so if you accept that, you can draw a further inference, which is, well maybe sometimes things are anomalous in an optimal manner now.

And then I would say, well what would define that optimality? Well let's assume that there is a meaningful ground of reality, and then let's assume that there's a framing system that you have to use to deal with that. And that's partly biological, but it's also partly a consequence of inculturation.

And then let's assume that that framing system can get outdated, so that's all associated with the stories that we've been talking about so far. So then let's assume that the fact that it can be outdated is also an existential problem.

So it's a constant problem, so that not only do you need to have a framing system, but you need to have a mechanism that you can engage in to update the framing system optimally. And then we can take that one step further and say that's built right into you—it's part of your nature, it's part of your biology, it's part of the structure of your consciousness.

And then we could say, well here's a hypothesis: what if that's what's happening when you get engaged with something? You know, so imagine what your brain is trying to do, roughly speaking, is to situate you in relationship to being so that you can both tolerate it, you can appreciate it, frame it, and stay on top of it.

And that your mind has to be able to signal to you when you're doing that. And I think that's what happens when you're captured by something and you get engaged in it. It's what's happening: your mind is telling you your experience is telling you you're exactly situated in the right place, you're stable enough so you're not going to fall apart, but you're fluid enough so that you're not going to fall prey to excess stability.

And then the experience of that is an experience of engaged meaning. But there are phenomena that are associated with that too, like it's easy to pay attention. It's just straightforward; it's easy to pay attention to things that you're engaged by.

And I think that that's because your mind, roughly speaking, your brain knows that that information flow is maximized there. So you're not going to be terrified, and you're not going to be bored; you're going to be engaged, you don't fall apart, and you stay updated.

And so the way you experience that is that the meaning is optimized under those conditions. You're deep into the material, so to speak, and it's meaningful—it's directly meaningful.

Yes, so would this be a framework to explain why, by, say, novel music or stories or like an engrossing video game even would induce that kind of?

Sure, you know, it's another world, so you're safe. But also it's like an unfolding experience with both of those at the same time because it's—you don't want to play a video game where there are no rules.

Yeah, and you don't want to play a video game where the rules transform so rapidly and erratically that there's no way you can model them. You want to play a video game where you can suspend disbelief.

You know, there's some play with the axioms, so maybe there's some things about the model reality that aren't exactly like real reality, but once that framework is established, once the rule-governed framework is established, there's play inside of it.

And that's very engrossing, and I think part of the reason it's engrossing is one, you actually learn things from playing games because in some sense you're always playing a game, right? Because you're always inside a reality that's bounded by a certain set of assumptions, and it's not the total reality; it's like a game-like representation of the total reality.

And you know, hopefully, it's a good enough game-like representation. You know, one of the things I was thinking about in relationship to video games was, you know, I've read critiques of video games where people complain about young people generally being engaged in video games to the expense of having a real life.

And then I was thinking, I don't know if you know about Edward... I think his name is Ed... Edward Castr... NOA now, he's an economist who studied video games, and he did this quite a while ago. I think it's got to be more than 10 years ago now, but he made the claim at that point that one of the big massive online player games, I think it was World of Warcraft, but that might be wrong, was like the 20th largest economy in the world.

Really? Not in any fake way, partly because you could sell artifacts that you were producing on eBay, for example, but also partly because people traded within it. And like there was no reason to assume that the additional level of abstraction that that video game represented was necessarily any more abstract than what we were already doing in economies.

So then you could ask yourself, for example, think about this: is it more real to lead a band of adventurers through a complex mythological reality in an online game or to work at McDonald's?

Now, you'd say, well, well to work at McDonald's 'cause that's real, but let's think about that for a minute, so exactly why is it real? I mean, first of all, McDonald's couldn't exist unless it was nested in a whole bunch of other things, right?

So it has to be nested in a functional capitalist economy, and that has to be nested inside a functional political system, and then there's all sorts of other preconditions in terms of material supply and so forth that have to be in place before you to, before you're able to work there and receive tokens for your labor.

Okay, so the same thing applies to the video game, and you might say, well, how do you determine which of those is real? And I would say, well, maybe one of the ways of determining whether a game is real is to what degree do you practice a wide range of the subsets of skills that would be transferable to other games while you're playing that game.

And I think you could make a case that if you're playing a very complex video game that the activities that you're engaging in, which involve leadership and cooperation and communication and problem-solving, are actually a more comprehensive subset of the skills that you would have to develop to work in the world as a complex place than what you would pick up at McDonald's.

Now, you know, obviously you can argue about that, but it's not self-evident. So back to framing, well, you know, one of the things the video game—one of the types of meaning—one of the things that the video game designers really try to do is put you in the zone of proximal development.

Now that's a term from Vygotsky, who was a Russian developmental psychologist who was probably the most influential developmental psychologist apart from Piaget. Now, what Vygotsky noticed was that when parents talk to their children, they talk to them constantly at a level that slightly exceeded what they could comprehend.

And you'd think that's so cool because on the one hand, they're communicating with their children because the children can understand what they're saying, but on the other hand, they’re teaching them to communicate to understand more things at the same time, they're doing that at exactly the same time.

And he thought of that as the zone of proximal development because it was sort of dragging the kids past their current state of comprehension and understanding and enfolding into the next set.

And it's sort of analogous to the principle that I mentioned to you earlier about playing a game in a manner that not only helps you win that game but helps you win all the other games that you're going to play after you play that game.

And that's playing the game at the zone of proximal development because it involves generalization. And I would say that, you know, one of the real debates in psychology, it's an appalling debate as far as I'm concerned, is what's what is it that you can use to buttress yourself against the undeniable catastrophes of existence?

You know, because it's obvious to everyone that existence is tragic in its fundamental essence, right? Because people are limited and flawed and mortal. It's like that's a big problem. Now hypothetically that was addressed quite well by traditional religious structures, but then our ability to assume that they were reasonable ways of framing existence is being badly damaged or called into question by the rise of scientific materialistic and objective thinking.

So the psychological, like the academic psychological response to that has been in many ways that well, you're enfolding only shields you from the tragedy of being and that's what it is; it's a defense mechanism.

And that's the terror management, guys, it's right. Fundamentally, your basic problem is that you're terrified of dying and there's not a bloody thing that can be done about that. So, you have to, you know, put up shields of various sorts so that you're not constantly assaulted by that problem as you go through your life.

And it's a variant of Freudian theory, so that's one theory. And then there's a variant theory, which is positive illusions, you know, which is the idea that—it's closely related—is that you can just delude yourself in an optimal way about the structure of being so that you can pretend that things are going to work out better for you than they probably are.

And then you don't have to be worried about the fact that it's tragic because you just concentrate on your simplistic optimistic illusions. It's like those are damn dismal theories because they basically say that if you woke up and opened your eyes, what you see would be so terrible that you would die or that you would want to die.

That it would drive you to suicide, you know? That's, you've got to be careful before you tell people that that sort of thing is true because you're undermining their capacity to live a genuine existence. And you're also saying, well you can't live a genuine existence because the weight of it would be so heavy that it would destroy you or it would drive you into a position where you wanted to be destroyed.

It's like, well, before we get so damn pessimistic about it, we might start thinking about whether there are other phenomena that aren't illusory or delusional or defense mechanisms that actually are characterized by meaning.

And so one of the things I suggested to you at the beginning of this class was that you watch what you said to find out if what you said was making you stronger or weaker and that you can actually feel that. That's kind of a key idea because Rogers would say that if what you're saying wasn't in sync with your embodied being, roughly speaking—because Rogers was really an embodied theorist—that you would feel that as a kind of discordance and that would weaken you.

And so it's a much older and deeper idea than that, but Rogers articulated it very well. Well, there's another experiment that you can run that's also very much worth attending to, which is watch and see what's meaningful. Don't think about it; just notice, notice when you're engaged in something enough so that the fact of you doing it is sufficient for the task.

You know, because you could say, so think about it this way, okay? Well, you're a bounded creature, and so you're beset on all sides by tragedy and limitation. You know, now that might be necessary, there may be a reason why that's the case, but we won't bother with that at the moment, we'll talk about that later.

The question then is are there conditions under which you would regard that as acceptable? And the answer isn't, well I'll think about it—that's the wrong answer. The right answer is I'll pay attention and notice if there are times like that.

And I think that's the—that's horrifically noticing, that's the eye—it's not thinking, because it's not the framing process; it's something outside of that, it's something that's watching. And I think if you notice, you'll see if you go through your week, you'll notice because you have to sort of stand outside yourself and think, "Aha! I was really into that, I was pulled right inside it."

And then you see phenomena that occur along with that, which Csikszentmihalyi has detailed reasonably in his work on flow. You don't notice the passing of time, you're not self-conscious, and the activity is sustaining. You experience it as sustaining even though it might be difficult, you know?

So it's not a matter of just taking the easy way out and doing something fun. It's not that at all, though it can be that. It's often you feel that way when you're doing something that's exceptionally challenging and difficult.

And usually, I think it's those things that are real in relationship to your goal hierarchy, you know? So they're moving you forward in the way that you've determined that moving forward is appropriate insofar as you've sorted that out.

So you know, A implies B, and B implies C, and C implies D, and so forth, and you've sort that all out. You know, so maybe you're working on an essay in a class that you find meaningful because you want to derive something useful from your education, so that you're a good citizen, so that you can live a proper life.

You know, and so the chaining of all those things makes the local activity quite richly meaningful because it's properly contextualized. But then there's the other element, which is when you're pushing yourself beyond that, not only do you experience the meaning of what you're doing in relationship to your goal hierarchy, you also transcend the goal hierarchy at the same time so that while you're working towards realizing it, you're also working towards transforming it and improving it all at the same time.

And I think that you're set up to experience that as the highest form of being. And then there's a corollary to that, which is maybe if you spent the bulk of your time doing that, you know, so you got practiced at it so you were doing it.

Maybe you do— I don't know, you could figure it out for yourself, but my suspicions are that for many of you that's probably 5% of your weekly life. Maybe I'm wrong about that, because it's been a long time since I was your age; I can't remember what it was like, you know? But I do know, you know, when I survey undergraduates and I ask them how much time they waste, you know, they're telling me generally speaking, it's four to six hours a day.

And I actually think it's probably more than that, and so that's time not spent in this particular state of mind, you know? And it's wasted time, well you even recognize it as wasted time because when someone asks you if it's wasted time, you say yes. And it's like, well wasted—if it's wasted and you know it, you're obviously comparing that to some other sort of time that isn't wasted, right?

That you regard as valuable and meaningful and worth engaging in even though it might be difficult and require discipline and all those sorts of things. So you might ask yourself, you know, if you have times during the week where you're engaged enough in what you're doing so that you find that intrinsically meaningful and it removes the burden of tragedy.

And I don't mean because you're preoccupied, I mean because you're experiencing what you're doing as intrinsically worth the price. That's a different thing. You might think, okay, well what if you are in that state of mind 80% of the time or 85% of the time or 90% of the time, you know?

And that requires a tremendous amount of discipline and organization and clarity of purpose, and it also requires a tremendous amount of truth. Because the enemy of setting yourself up so that you can do that is untruth, because what happens is to the degree that you engage in untruth, you contaminate your frames fundamentally.

And then you're in real trouble because you won't be oriented properly if your frames are contaminated, and they're contaminated to the degree that you build them out of nonsense and delusion.

So yes, question.

[Audience member:] I think—imagine if you think that like I absolutely agree that that's an important state and probably a natural state, but do you think that it's natural for it to be that much of your time? That there's sort of like the reciprocal...

No, I think it's natural to be a chimpanzee sitting in the jungle, spending eight hours a day eating leaves because, you know, you're not smart enough to do any better than that. You know what I mean? So natural is a tough conception.

[Audience member:] Do you think—I guess what I mean—do you think there's a counterpart of like rest time? I mean, you could argue that that's part of—

Oh absolutely, you know, sometimes you have to fall asleep, and sometimes the right thing to do is to have leisure time. But I can tell you, you know, I know this from my own experience, that an hour of actual leisure time beats a month of undeserved holiday.

And so I would say, well what constitutes, you know, actual leisure time? It's like you don't have anything that you should be doing at that moment that's more important than having a break. And there's nothing about that that's self-deceptive, you know?

Like you're not trying to escape from your responsibilities by watching a YouTube video about joggers falling on the ice or something like that, which apparently is quite a popular one at the moment. So, you know, and you know perfectly well that when you spend time like that, especially if you're avoiding doing something that you know you should be doing using your own standards of judgment, that all it does is make you sick.

You know, like there's a physical revulsion that goes along with that, and I think what that is, it's your body telling you that you're contaminating your being by engaging in such low-quality activity, especially when there's something else that you know you should be doing.

And that’s not restful; I think that's extremely stressful because what happens is you basically tear yourself in two and one is a tyrant saying, "You're useless," and the other is like a cringing melt soft saying, "Yeah, but I can't help it," you know?

And it's a terrible state of being to be in because you're a tyrant and a slave at the same time, and it's very, very stressful. It's not restful.

[Audience member:] So I'm just going to say like we were talking, it's like you're describing a student because I definitely need to take a break and watch the show, but the whole time I'm like, "Oh my gosh, like I should be doing that essay."

And then you're constantly like—

Yeah, yeah, it's a hard thing to balance. But you know, and I think it takes real practice over years, you know? And part of what you've been reading about in the book, hypothetically, is the necessity of adopting an apprenticeship, you know?

Because you have to focus yourself in on something and really—you have to focus in hard, and you have to do it for quite a long time before you hammer yourself into a good enough shape so that you can even start telling the difference between reasonable use of leisure time and, you know, pathological time wasted, which are by no means the same thing.

And it's hard to get it right; it's very hard to get it right. I think you have to attend a lot to internal cues, you know?

So if you're sitting in front of the screen and you're feeling somewhat uneasy and disgusted by yourself, then you have to think, okay just exactly what's going on here? Am I being too hard on myself? I actually need a break, and I won't allow that because I'm a tyrant, and so I'm sneaking one even though I'm tired and should have a break?

That's hard to get because then that would be an attitudinal issue, right? Have you conceptualized the necessity for leisure properly?

And then the other possibility is, well, you're just being useless and you know it, you know? And then that shouldn't be happening; something else should be happening. But it's by no means a straightforward thing to get those things right; it's hard.

Now, I have a hint about that, you know? Because I've worked with lots of people who—they're not wasting time; like they're not wasting five minutes. And it's sometimes because the demand—like it’s usually because the demands on them, they put themselves in a position where the demands on them are so high that if they waste any time they will fail.

And so a typical person like that—a lot of you are going to end up in those situations if you're lucky, you know? So a typical person like that has a challenging job, so it's a complex job. They have to manipulate a lot of variables constantly.

They have to be attentive, alert, focused, and conscientious, and they have to do that for long periods of time. Like what depends on the level of attainment you're after, but if you want to attain at the peak of your chosen discipline, it's 60 to 80 hours a week, and those are concentrated, useful hours.

Now some are more useful than others because you're going to get tired, but that's what you're aiming at. And then, you know, well, do you want to have kids? That's a big issue too. And if you want to do both of those, it's like you don't get—you don't have time to waste; you don't have any time to waste.

You know, and so then you have to get hyper-efficient. And then you have to ask yourself, yeah, but how much work should I do? You know, what's the limit? Should I, you know, where is the right limit?

Well, the answer to that is quite straightforward: you can't work any harder than you can sustain across weeks, months, and years. You know, so some of the people that I've seen who are hyper-efficient, one of the holes they fall into is they work so hard they start getting inefficient.

And part of that is they're not paying attention to their family; they're guilty about their children. Maybe their relationship is becoming unstable, and that's going to cost them time. Man, like once you're married, if you let that go and you get into a divorce battle and it's a custody battle, you are screwed.

So like you have to really watch that and make sure it doesn't happen because it's like a major illness to have that happen; it's not good. And you know, you never really recover from it in some sense because you end up with a fractured—you know, your close intimate relationships are fractured, very difficult thing to sew up.

You're much more likely to get divorced in your second marriage than you were in your first. So it's not like you could hop out of one into a solution, you know? And then also people tire themselves out, you know?

So often with the more hyper-efficient people—and a lot of these people were women—and I think the reason for that is, you know, once they have kids in particular, they're really torn between two sets of fundamental obligations, especially for the first three years of the kid's life, you know?

And so it's really hard for them to get the balance ready to figure out what that balance is. But one rule is you got to treat yourself well enough so you can iterate your activities. You can't be playing a degenerating game, and it's a variant of the piagetian idea of the equilibrated state, right?

An equilibrated state will maintain itself, and that can be within you, or it can be within a group of people, or it can be either in you or within a group of people across a long span of time, and that's really well equilibrated.

So a lot of the people that I dealt with who were working themselves too hard, we figured out ways they could take vacations. They couldn’t usually decrease the number of hours they worked per week; it wasn't possible just the demands of the job, like in a law firm or something like that.

You might think, well, can't they just lighten up? The answer to that is you don't get paid $750 an hour for lightening up. It's like you're on call right now whenever your client wants you, and the answer isn't, well you know, I need to take a break. It's like then you don’t get the pay because that's what they're paying you for.

But one of the things I noticed quite quickly was that if people scheduled their time so they took more vacations, the number of hours they could work productively actually went up, not down. So you can get the balance right, but it's not a simple thing to do.

But, um, so it isn't that you're only going to find engagement in sheer physical productive activity. There's lots of places where you can be engaged. You can be engaged in art; you can be engaged in literature; you can be engaged in relationships; you can be engaged in your children.

Like there's no shortage of places of meaning, but you have to interact with those places of meaning properly, and you have to organize the multiple places where you derive meaning in a manner that's sustaining to all of them, and that's when you've got your frame rate.

But getting your frame rate isn't enough because you have to get your frame rate in a way that allows you to update your frame as you continue moving forward with it. And I do believe, because I do believe that the world that we're adapted to as biological organisms is the world where reality is information.

I believe that when your nervous system signals to you that all's well, all's well—it's true, you're in the right place at the right time, you're bearing exactly the right amount of load, and the right amount of load is enough to keep you taut and ready and improving.

And when you slip into that slot, I think all of the existential problems that arise to push people towards nihilism and hopelessness—or sometimes towards totalitarianism and rigidity—that problem just goes away. And it's because you've solved it; it's not because it's not a problem.

It's a bloody problem, but that doesn't mean that, you know—because one of the things that modern people do is they conceptualize themselves as defeated a priori. You know that the fact that life is tragic and that you're not all you could be and that everything will come to an end means that you're not, by definition, you're not up to the task.

It's like that's by no means obvious, man. People are tough! Like they're so tough, it's unbelievable. Well, you know, you see that on YouTube. 'Cause I know I look at YouTube now and then, feel terrible about it. One of the things I do like looking at are the extreme sports that people engage in.

You know, and I mean people can do unbelievable things; they're completely—they're completely off the rocker. You know, they can do things with their bodies that you just can't possibly imagine. I was looking, for example, at—there was a video that went around a while ago about, it was a videotape of the woman who won the 1956, um, hurling, you know, you bounce off one of those horses for gymnastics and so she did her winning routine, was videotaped, and then the next videotape was of the person who won the gold in the Olympics at the last Olympics.

And it was like the first woman did this really cool roll off the horse; it was quite spectacular. It's like the second one was like 20 feet in the air with four flips end-over-end, you know, vertically. It wasn't like they were—like they weren't even the same creatures.

One looked like some kind of Android kangaroo, and the other looked like a pretty confident gym teacher. So, you know, I mean, God only knows what the limits of human ability are, but we certainly haven't touched them. And you guys, most of you, have no idea what you'd be capable of if you really got your act together, you know, and you were a force.

Because another thing you might think about is maybe the existential misery that you experience in your life is directly proportional to the amount of time you waste. Because if the dragon guards a treasure, you know, and your job is to get the damn treasure and you need it, you need it. It's not optional; without the treasure, you don’t have the riches necessary to live. All the time you're wasting is time that you're not spending in the treasure room fundamentally.

And so, you know, if you're not spending all your time in the treasure room, you can't complain about being poor. So it's a good thing to think about, you know? Because this is what makes it optimistic. It's possible that if you utilize what was in front of you, and so that would be the ground of being, let's say, if you utilized that, that would be enough. Or maybe you could get really lucky, and if you utilized it properly, it wouldn't just be enough; it would be more than enough, you know?

So you could go from saying, "Well, it's okay to be a limited and mortal being," to saying, "Hey, this is a pretty damn good deal." And if I could, I'd sign on for it again. That was actually Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return, you know? So when he was trying to figure out what people should do as a consequence of the collapse of the ethical systems that constituted classical religious belief, he conjured up the idea of the eternal return.

And it was roughly this: you should live in such a way so that if you had to repeat what you were doing forever into infinity, you would say yes to that. And that's an idea like Piaget's equilibrated state, except obviously it's stretched into huge expanses of time. That's a high-level thing to aim at.

But you know, so here's another example. Like I've seen people who get stuck in very bureaucratic organizations, you know, and they just get bloody well tortured to death by them because it's mindless tyranny, stupid rules, and arbitrary decisions, counterproductive management advice, and jealousy and punishment for doing well.

And you know, everything you can do to possibly set up a situation where the person who's got the job is just crushed by it. That people won't say anything. It's like, well what would happen if you said something? Like why do you want me to do this? It looks stupid.

And they might be thinking, oh I kind of thought it was stupid too, you know? But someone else told me to do it. Highly probable that they would be thinking that. It's like what happens if you just refuse to do stupid, useless, meaningless things? It's like that's a rule: I don't do stupid, useless, meaningless.

Well, you know, one of the things that happens in corporations—and I've seen this happen many times—is that the corporation gets, it's like an elephant that gets loaded with intestinal parasites. And I mean that—I mean that as a biological analogy. I really do because a corporation is a body in some sense that has a tremendous amount of built-in value.

And what can happen as the corporation develops is it gets full of people who just pull out the value; they don't actually do anything. They rape the brand is what they do because the brand has value. You know, like the Disney brand has value because it's associated with quality, you know?

And if you wanted to destroy that, you'd take over the company and you'd put out Snow White 2, and Snow White 3, and Snow White 5, and Snow White 12 until—everybody would buy it until like Snow White 20, when they wouldn't trust you anymore. And then you've sucked all the value out of the company, and it's dead, you know?

Or you get people who come into the corporation, and all they want to do is maneuver up to the top. They don't give a damn about what the thing is supposed to be producing or about how they're structuring their relationships with other people or about anything that has to do with the truth.

They use language instrumentally to reach their goals, and you get enough people like that in your company, and it's like it's dead; it's gone. And that happens to companies all the time because they don't last, right?

This is why Marx was wrong. You know, he said power and money accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people. What he didn't say is it's always different people, you know? It's like there's a 1%, but it's not the same people.

You know, most family fortunes don't last three generations, and neither do most large companies, so there's a lot of dynamic turnover. But you know, you guys are going to be working in companies, a lot of you, at least at some point, at pretty damn significant levels. And even at an entry level, you have more power than you think.

You know, it is not necessary to do things you know are stupid and meaningless. And if your—if the situation that you’re in is demanding that, then you might ask yourself, "Hmmm, maybe I should be somewhere else."

And then you might say, "Well I can't be," and what I would say to that is prepare yourself to be. Like if you're going to go into a company and you want to live ethically, you need an escape strategy. And you need to have that along with you all the time.

So you need an updated resume, and you need to be keeping your eye on the job market so that you can see where the other opportunities lie for you, and so you're not afraid to pursue them, you know?

So you've got to hone your interview skills, you've got to keep your damn resume polished up, you've got to make sure you have a broad social network, and you have to do it consciously so that if some dingbat tells you to do something counterproductive, meaningless, and—let's push it one step farther—clearly unethical, you can say no, and you can mean it!

Because no means I'm not doing that! And if you push me, we'll either have a war or I'll go somewhere else! It's like that's what no means, that’s what it means. It means I'm not doing this!

And you can't say no till you have an alternative, right? You have to set yourself up so that no doesn't kill you because obviously then you won't say it. These are important things to consider because the actions that you take at the level of your individual career are going to have far more impact on the ethics and the productivity of the place that you work than you can imagine, especially if you're someone who's straight and sees what's right in front of their face.

Because those are the people that keep the damn companies running, and there's not necessarily that many of them, you know? The Price's law rule is that the square root of the number of people who are doing a job do half the work.

So you could say that in a company of a thousand people, 30 people are doing half the work, you know? And you could be one of them, and then if you are one of them, you can bloody well say no! Because they actually need you, and so your loss would be—can be a catastrophe.

And that's what you want to aim for. It's like you want to be the person whose loss would be a catastrophe because then you've got some power, and then you can bargain, and then you don't have to do stupid, useless, crooked things, and you'll have a much better life if you don't have to do those things.

So very, very practical advice.

[Audience member:] So is now a good time to ask a question?

[Instructor:] Sure!

[Audience member:] When you were talking about how like divorce and like if you have a family and you have like a divorce battle, how people sometimes never come out of that and I remember you saying that in a class before too. So what do you think about that is so horrible and what allows people to come out of that?

Okay, well let’s think about this for a minute, okay? And then we’ll go back to the symbolic stuff. Yeah, how many chances do you think you'll have in your life for a serious high-quality intimate relationship? What do you guys think?

[Audience member:] Four.

Okay, that's good. That's good! Yeah, I would say you probably top out at about five. Okay, so you know that's not that many chances. Plus, you get old quick. You know, by the time you're 45, you're not going to have a family.

And well, you can do that sometimes if you're male. If you're female, maybe, but it gets pretty rough, and you're looking probably at that point at a fair bit of in vitro and that sort of interaction.

It's tough. It's hard on people. So you know, not only do you not have that many chances, you don't have that much time, so you got to get it right.

So if you get it wrong, it costs you—like maybe it'll cost you five years. Five years is a long time. And three five-year costs is like you've lost things there that you can't replace.

Okay, so that's one part of it, is you don't have that many chances and it's costly to burn up the time. Okay, the second thing is a divorce is very complicated.

Like it's not so bad if you get divorced to someone who's reasonable. But often the reason that you're getting divorced is that one or the other or both of you aren't that reasonable.

And what that might mean is that you might be negotiating with someone whose basic goal is to make sure that you don't have another day of success in the next 20 years. And if that's their goal, they will attain it.

So—and there's lots of ways people do that, and they usually do it by holding their children hostage, and people will definitely do that. They do it all the time, you know? So you want to avoid that.

And then, you know, then of course it's hard on the relationship you have with your children, and like that's—those are probably the most important relationships you have in your life. You know, it might be parents, might be siblings, might be your partner, might be your kids.

But I think when it comes right down to it, your parents are old, and so are you, but your kids aren't. And they're just as close; plus they need you. And so you start twisting and messing that about, boy, it's hard on your psyche.

It's hard on the kids too. So, you know, so then I'm just thinking about that, and what you said about how that's a cost if you mess it up—that's like a five-year cost. That's—that costs you, right?

Oh, and it might be a 15-year cost if you're in a custody battle, and it'll cost you a quarter of a million dollars, right? Or let's say...

[Audience member:] But like is it then would you say like, being a psychologist, that it's better for people to stay in a relationship that's like not good, they continue to do that and possibly incur further costs than it is just to cut it off because it wouldn't be—?

Okay, it's a complicated question. What I would say is don't make the kind of mistakes that get you into such a stupid relationship to begin with, okay?

Because that's the answer to that question. And the way you do that is by trying not to delude yourself any more than is absolutely necessary. And that means when you're in the damn relationship, tell the person the truth.

And try to figure out what the truth is for you, and don't put up with any nonsense, and stand up for yourself, and also aim towards the good. You know, if you do all those things, then your relationship is probably going to work.

If you're trying to do all those things really, and you have a partner that will not do that, then leave. But it's a rare person who won't do that if they're stepped along the way properly and they learn how to do it.

Now, not everyone's like that because you do run into some people who are basically devoted towards mayhem and trouble, you know? But usually, you know, a person is a balance of striving for the good and, you know, messing about in hell.

And you know, you're both like that when you start a relationship, and you try to tilt it towards the good, and then you won't run into that problem.

So, but you have to do that right from the beginning of the relationship, you know? It doesn't take that much to corrupt a relationship so that it's not really salvageable; enough mistakes, three or four acts of infidelity, you're done.

You're not going to come back from that because the fundamental element of trust has been removed, and then you can't communicate with the person because you don't know if they're telling you the truth, and then you don't know if you're dealing with reality.

And if you're not dealing with reality with your partner, it's like good luck fixing that. It's like you're working on a ghost car while the real one is sitting in the shop with the motor out. You know, it's not going to get you anywhere.

So a lot of the issue is don’t get into trouble to begin with. If you are in the trouble, well then you try to straighten yourself out and see if you can fix it.

Well, if you can't, your options aren't great, and it depends on the particularities of the situation. Now, I have people that I counsel, and it's like leave that person. And the rule is they're lying to you; they aren't aiming up and you won't be able to tolerate being with them for 10 years without becoming resentful, alcoholic, and homicidal.

So that's a bad outcome; there's nothing you can do to avoid it so you might as well leave. But you know, you have to have that sorted out. It has to be the truth because it's no fun—it's no good to leave someone who's struggling in the lurch, you know?

And you think, well, I'm with this person; they're not going anywhere. You know, maybe they have an alcohol problem and they're resentful. It's like, but I'm all they've got. Well, they better want to fix that because you're not going to be able to fix it; all that'll happen is you'll end up in the same place.

Now if they really want to fix it more than anything and they're willing to tell the truth about it and willing to interact with you, then there's a ghost of a chance you might pull through it.

But it's very hard to fix someone, and it's really hard to fix someone who does not want to be fixed, and there's lots of people like that.

So I'm just going to, like, a personal anecdote with my parents. Their divorce was rough. So I know that a lot of people say, like, you're harming the kids if you get divorced. And I've had to deal with a lot of, like, the tension between like choosing your parent and which one to agree with.

But when everyone asks, like, do you like, are you upset that they got divorced? I'm like, I see how much they fight now, and I can't imagine having that happen like 24/7 and being in that school.

Yeah, well, this is why the reason to answer to the question, there’s—that depends on the particularities of the situation. And so a lot there's lots of situations where general answer doesn't suffice.

But I would say it is—this is a tough one. I can tell you what's happened since the divorce laws got liberalized. The first thing that happens is that all of you are going to be divorced at about the same rate as people would have 30 years ago because rich people still get married and they generally don't get divorced.

Poor people do not get married, and that's like 60% of the population, and it's ramping up quick. And there's no evidence whatsoever that that's anything but catastrophic.

So children who are raised by single parents do not do as well. Now that doesn't mean there aren't some single parents who are doing a stellar job; obviously, there are. And there's some married parents that do a terrible job; that's not the issue.

The issue is the bulk of the evidence, and the bulk of the evidence strongly suggests that children who are raised with two parents do better. Well, duh, why?

Well, why? It's impossible to raise children. Jesus, they're expensive; they're troublesome; they're smart and they're useless. You know, so and you've got them for 20 years. It's like you’re going to do that by yourself? Sure you are!

You know, you're going to be working at a horrible job 40 hours a week or more, like a retail job, for example, where they just cheat you like a slave, and then you're going to go home to your miserable kids exhausted; it's like that’s not fun.

And you know, it's increasingly the norm for huge chunks of our population, like elitist liberal types like all of you, for example—don't pay much attention to what happens to people who are actually poor—but as far as I can tell, it's been a bloody catastrophe for them.

You know, there's an old saying: when the upper class gets a cold, the lower class gets pneumonia, and you know the thing about that saying, it’s true. It’s like it’s not a metaphor; it’s literally the case. If an epidemic sweeps through a population, the population dies from the poor people upward because they’re under so much stress.

So, you know, I would say with regards to marriage, I've been married a long time; it’s just about 26 years now. You know, and I've noticed a bunch of things about marriage. One is two brains are better than one, and so if you actually communicate with your partner, 'cause they're not like you, it's like you have a corpus callosum between you, you know?

And they'll tell you things that you don't understand, you know? Like when you're being stupid, you know, in a typically feminine way, say, or a typically masculine way or in whatever stupid way you manage to be stupid, they'll point that out to you.

You know, and that can be really helpful—even though it's extremely annoying—you know? And they can help you make decisions, and they're a good place to confess to, you know? And it's really helpful when you're trying to figure out how to discipline children so that you're not a pathetic milk-soap who lets them run all over you, or some tyrant who, you know, likes to beat them with a stick when they sneeze, you know?

Hopefully, you kind of find some pleasant middle ground in there, and it's a lot easier to do that with two people than with one. And then they can spell you off when you're exhausted, particularly useful if you have small children because you will be exhausted when you have small children.

You know, plus the narrative of your life has continuity—and that's, that's nice, you know? And if your home is set up properly, it's actually a pleasure to go to it, you know? It is a buttress against the chaotic and uncaring external world because the external world in many ways doesn't give a damn about you, you know?

So if you go home and it's set up reasonably well, it's like, hey, you've got somewhere to belong; that's not so bad.

Um, just a related situation that has personal relevance for me and for others—that in many situations, like when something bad happens, you know, okay, yeah, I've got to do some kind of reparative thing, right?

And so say it's like a health scare, you go, okay I got to work on my diet. And then it's a divorce, it's like all right, well I got to work through why I didn't think I was headed for a divorce for the last 20 years, but now it just happened.

But in some situations people know they got to repair, but they don’t want to get something that would actually be repairing, so they go to people who are specialists in like other areas of like personal psychological dealings and stuff like that, anything but divorce—like attention deficit, work on your attention skills or like work on these or like assertiveness training or something like that.

But like they're—not—like they're diligently avoiding the heart of the matter, and what would you make of that? And if you were in a family with somebody like that, is there something you can do?

Well, you know, some situations are like Humpty Dumpty, right? There's no putting it back together. Now, but again, in terms of avoidance of those situations, it’s like you think about that hierarchy again—well divorce is a low-resolution, high-impact solution because it just tears a chunk of that hierarchy out and throws it away.

That's a lot, and it's costly, it's going to hurt you. Okay, so then you think, well what might you do instead of that? And the real answer is solve the damn problems as they arise, you know?

And that’s hard; and it requires drilling down, it really requires drilling down. So one of the things I want to build, for example—which I haven't built yet—it's kind of like going to be like this future authoring thing that you guys do.

I want to build a problem-solving matrix for couples because here's how not to get divorced from your wife: figure out how to set the table properly.

Now what does that mean? It's really, really complicated. It's like who's going to cook, when are they going to cook, why are they cooking, how should you respond to it, who buys groceries, what are the groceries going to be, who's going to put them away, how do you say thanks when someone does something for you in the domestic environment?

And what's happened—and this is part of the death of God, roughly speaking—is that the roles are gone, okay? And what that means is you better be awake because it turns out that running a kitchen in a house is unbelievably complicated and difficult.

And so you have to negotiate how to do it, and you're a terrible negotiator. You don't know how to decompose the damn problem to the point where you could solve it. You won't admit what you want; you won't admit what you're like; you won't pay any attention to what actually irritates you.

You know, so you like to think that you're nice and easy to get along with, but you're not; you're basically Hitler, you know? And so until you realize that, you can't even tell your partner what you want, and so this is where philosophy hits the road or hits the ground, you know? It's like trying to negotiate out a stable solution to how you're going to run the kitchen because that's where the battle between the sexes lies.

By the way, there's two places where it really hits: one, who's going to take care of the little kids; two, who's going to work in the kitchen and under what circumstances? It's like you figure those two things out, you can consider yourself a philosopher. Very, very difficult, you know?

And the cost for not doing it is low-quality food in a hostile environment, bratty children that you hate, resentment, hostility, the accumulation of insults and assaults, and either a divorce or a really unhappy marriage.

So, but what do you—but just take it back to my question, like what do you do when somebody has like, to use that metaphor, like has a health scare, and then, like say they develop cancer and then instead of quitting smoking, they just started taking multivitamins in the morning?

It’s like what do you do if you're watching somebody treat their smoking with an anti—something with a multivitamin rather than then go to war really? I'm not kidding, fight them into doing it!

Yeah, but you have—but— but a war isn't just like you fly into a rage and throw dishes. It's like that's not helpful, you know? A war is okay; you are not going to smoke anymore. And so then you think, okay, what do you have to do to do that?

So maybe it's your father. Think, um, I'm going to call you every day and harass you, and if that doesn't work, then I'm going to come over and harass you and I'm going to burn up all your cigarettes.

And then I'm going to get your friends to come over and tell you that you're a bloody idiot and I'm going to put pressure on you, and your mom's going to help too. And if you don't quit smoking, she's going to leave. It's like it's life or death! What’s it gonna be?

Now, you know, you may say you don't want to go to war; you might also say that it's not even your right to go to war. But if you're faced with a situation where someone you love is engaging in a behavior that's seriously counterproductive, it's like you ratchet up the pressure until they stop, or you can't stand it anymore.

And if you can't stand it anymore, you lose, you know? And lots of things are a war, and you have to be prepared for a war, like because that's also a variant of being able to say no.

Yeah, you know? But you also got to f'in... in a way, to take it back to your game thing, it’s like you got to fight it in a way that you can continue to have these battles so that it doesn't just become a failed enterprise in the first conversation, right? You can blow apart the whole relationship.

You know, and the person will do that to you too, though. They'll often say, well if you quit—if you don't start bugging me, I'm never going to talk to you again! That's highly unlikely, man.

So well, you can't be afraid of that sort of thing. And you can also tell them that, look, that's an inappropriate move. Yeah, that's like a nuclear—it is; it's a nuclear bomb!

It's like don't bring out the nuclear yet, or for instance a child saying to a parent— A parent will say, Look, I don't need to get health tips from you, I'm the parent; I tell you what's healthy food to eat or whatever.

Well, Jesus, you should be able to respond to that! That's just—that's just an entry-level volley! It's like you're the parent. Well, hey, that's a brilliant observation.

Would say they would say, "well these issues are concerning my personal romantic sexual life that I'm not comfortable sharing things with you."

So you can tell me you're not comfortable living with the consequences of their stupid decisions, and you're stuck with it too because you know the person will say, "well, it's this is me."

Well yeah, right, except you're connected to—he's connected to your mother let's say and they're both connected to you, and they're all connected to their friends. It's like, sorry, this isn't just about you, you know?

If you were on an island, even then it wouldn't just be about you, but it would be more about you. So that's just weak argumentation, you know?

And what people will do when you're having a war with them is they'll have like 10 or 11 pre-prepared responses. They're always clichés, you know?

And so you can just back them away; they're just clichés. It's like, okay, first of all, we're going to get through the clichés. Well then what happens?

Then they get mad, then they'll stomp away, then they'll cry. It's like if you can get through all that, well then maybe you can have a discussion, you know?

And then—then, but you got to think it through. You actually care if your part—if your person is smoking themselves to death, you know, of course I love them!

It's like yeah, yeah, sure you do; maybe it’s like why is it important to you? Why is it work? Why does it matter? Why is it worth going to war about? And you need to know that!

You need to know it, and you have to be able to tell the person you know. And if you can tell them that, if you can really figure it out and you can really tell them, then they sometimes they'll listen.

CU they don't—they don't want to know that they're tearing you apart, you know? And they're going to do everything not to see that!

It's my problem; it's like yeah, well I wish it was your problem because then I wouldn't have to worry about it. But unfortunately, you know, or fortunately, we're tied together at the bottom of a barrel, so you know, we better figure out how to deal with this.

So it's a very hard thing to do, you know? And it's way better to address those things before they become catastrophic because by the time they've got to the point where it's a 15-year problem, it's like Jesus, you're dealing with a very large, Tiamat at that point, you know?

So one of the things I really liked about the Mesopotamian creation myth is that it tells you what happens if you muck around, you know? It says—'cause remember that Mesopotamian gods, they kill Absu, right? That's the structure they all rest on.

So it's just a sort of a hollow, stale shell now, and then nothing’s alive, and being fixed, no one's paying attention. What comes? What happens? Well, the longer that goes on, the bigger the monster that makes its appearance, you know?

And you can easily be in a situation where the monster that people are hiding from is so damn big, you may not have the skills to kill it.

So you know even, remember Horus when he goes off after Seth, he loses an eye! It's like it's no joke! You know and he's a god and he wins and he still loses an eye. So you know with someone who's smoking, you know, one of the things you may have to confront is their absolute cynicism about life.

Seriously thought through, and there's plenty of reasons to be cynical about life and resentful and full of hate and all of those things, you know? So the bigger the war, the clearer the head, you know, ‘cause you're going to find the monsters underneath the problem, and they're usually archetypal, you know?

I've been in lots of situations with my clients where the only language that could be used to describe what was going on was religious because the problems were so deep, like they were so good against evil that there isn't any other language that's even close to powerful enough.

And that's usually what happens in households where there's a truly homicidal battle going on, like a deep Oedipal problem, for example. Were you in my personality class?

No, I wasn't, but I watched the— You watched Crumb?

That if you... oh yeah, that's intense! If you want to see psychological reality of the kind you wouldn't see normally unless you were a clinician, and like a clinician who was really into the situation, Crumb will tell you—it’s available online!

You probably have to rent it, okay? But it's the pathology in that family; it's ARP and it's rough. I’m ready to—yll I was like oh my goodness!

Oh yeah, yeah, it’s a brilliant documentary. Well, the guy that made the documentary knew the family...

Oh yes, beforehand. So they land them in, you know?

And they were also narcissistic, crushing for a really long time.

Yeah, that's kind of like what a monstrous anima looks like, right, in a way? Yeah, like he had like this very large clingy mother.

I don't know, it's like his mother—she was quite the creature.

Yeah, she was sort of like this monstrous creature. And so all of his refer—she wasn't sort of like it.

And so all of his drawings were like of these monstrous women, yeah, with him as a parasitical appendage, right?

That's the Freudian story; boy, you don't think that's real, you haven't looked at any pathological families 'cause it's real. You know, Freud's claim was that's the first battle that people fight. If you lose that, there's a—think about it.

Here's some battles you've got to get away from your mother and get to kindergarten, right? That's battle number one. And then you got to make friends; that's battle number two.

And then you got to get away from your family. It's like in the Oedipal situation, you don't win the first battle, you're screwed!

And it's worse even because the reason you don't win is because there’s something about one or both parents that is bloody well doing everything it possibly can to make sure that you don't win.

And you think, well, that's pretty dark—who would ever believe that? It's like if you failed in your life in a serious way, you know, and you're resentful and irritable and miserable about it, what makes you think you're going to facilitate your child's success?

What makes you think you're going to be able to stand to see someone thrive where you failed? It's like yeah, right! If you were that kind of saint, you wouldn't have failed to begin with! Not in that particular way!

So you know families can be just—Freud was a smart man. And you know, if you watch Crumb, you can see exactly what he was talking about. It's a very, very difficult thing to get access to that kind of experience unless you happen to be in that situation or, you know, you're helping someone cope with it and you're really tied in.

So and that's a perfect segue to the symbolism of the great mother. Now, the hypothesis here is that there's—what's a complex hypothesis, but the hypothesis fundamentally is that your the basic ways that you break down being as such which I would say is represented symbolically by these serpentine forms that have the capacity to be spiritual or to be—to reveal a treasure because you're a social primate and you're sort of a nuclear family social primate.

Your primary cognitive categories are male, female. I think it's male, female, and child, and the child tends to take on the aspect of the son like the male child for reasons that we’ll go into.

But and I think it’s because the overwhelming reality of the feminine throughout history has been the feminine in relationship to procreation. It's the defining character of the feminine, and so you can define the feminine with femininity, but if you're going to define the child whose relationship isn't primarily procreative, not as a child, you don't use feminine symbolism to do that.

So it makes it complicated, doesn't matter. So here's an example of that. So you see that's a-ove with a little chicken, which is interesting.

I have one of these up in my office. When any of you guys come up and see what I found, one in Mexico—or actually someone found it, and I bought it from them, maybe I might have bought it in Mexico too, but whatever, it's exactly one of these things; it's so cool except it's got legs at the bottom and it stands up.

It's this, except it's a chicken with a snake wrapped around its neck. You know, it's got these wings off to the side, and on each wing is a spider web, which I really love; it's absolutely perfect.

And so, you know, it's an archetypal image, and the image is something like—you see it in the U.S. too with the snake. The U.S. often used—or the Americans often used a flag—it's like an eagle with a snake in its tons; that's another variant of the same sort of symbol.

And it's this combination of matter and spirit, bird and bird and reptile. And it does represent the ground of being, all things considered.

And then out of that springs these primary phenomena, and that’s father, mother, child, roughly speaking, and those correspond to nature, roughly speaking, culture, roughly speaking, and the things that mediate between the two of them, and that's the hero.

Now it's not just the hero because it's also the adversary because the adversary is the thing that refuses to mediate between those two, and that's just as much part of the individual as the part that will do it, and those are locked in internal combat, so to speak, you know.

But that's the first differentiation, and I think the reason for that is that that is how we differentiate the world as we spring into consciousness and existence. It's like first of all it's chaos, it's like formless chaos; that's where you come from, whatever that means.

And then poof! You've got a mother; that's for sure. That's a primary reality.

And you have a father, and you know, even if you don't have a father there because you're a human being, you have a father because the father is the patriarchal structure or the framing, you know?

It's the inculturation—it's the embodiment inculturation, and that's going to be in you as you get enculturated, but it's distributed everywhere in everyone. Those are the rules by which people live—like not even just the rules, but the behavioral rituals that govern our interactions.

And if you don't incorporate—if you don't become enculturated by the time you're four, you're either an edible catastrophy or you're antisocial and criminal; that's the basic rule.

And we know the literature on antisocial behavior. It's like basically what happens is there's about 10%, five to 10% of boys who are very aggressive and assertive and selfish, roughly speaking, self-oriented when they're two, and you can find them—you just put them together with other two-year-olds, and there's a subset of them who are almost always boys, but not always, who bite, kick, hit and steal.

And they just do that, and the reason is they're like tough little monsters. And you know they're out there asserting themselves. It's just the tail end of a continuum; it's mostly agreeableness.

They're disagreeable kids; they're tough as boots, you know. And they'll basically stand up to you, and they're not that easy to scare, especially if they're low in neuroticism.

And so with them, it's like why the hell should I listen to you? And you know my son was like that, and he was like that when he was nine months old; like he’d stare me down—it’s like so impressive—it’s like you're this big and you're really soft.

It's like what makes you think you're so tough? So anyways, you know with the kids that are like that, if you don’t socialize them by the time they’re four, then they can’t make friends 'cause they don’t know how to play and share and all those things, and then they end up outcasts.

And you know, puberty hits and the testosterone rises, and poof, they’re in jail. So you know, whatever; you got to be enculturated, and that’s the incorporation of the great father.

And some of that—that's the superego from the Freudian perspective, and some of that’s positive because you bloody well better know how to share and play games.

And some of it’s negative because one of the things that's so weird about having little kids is that you know what you give them hell mostly for is having fun. It's horrible!

You know, ‘cause you think you're always punishing kids if you do for breaking rules and so on.

No, that isn’t what you do; it's like they're running around screaming at the top of their lungs—they're completely having a blast! You know, and they're destroying the house in the process, but they're really having fun.

And you know, you're like, you guys settle down right now. It’s like you’re doing that all the time.

You’re not only bringing the negative emotion—you know, the tears and the pain and the frustration and the anger and hostility—under control, so they stop having temper tantrums and they don’t hit you when they’re mad or themselves. You got to get that all under control! Jesus!

You regulate the positive emotion! You just dampen it right down until they can go sit with their 80-year-old grandmother quietly, you know?

So it's a real restricting process, and that's why half of the great father is a tyrant. There’s no way out of that, you know? Like you hope that the whole damn thing isn't a tyrant because obviously by socializing your children, you're doing them a great favor, right?

You're, first of all, they learn how to talk—that's very useful—they learn how to read, they learn how to play with other kids. So at the same time that you're constraining the hell out of them and making them less than they were in some ways, you're also opening up vistas to them that they would otherwise not have access to, you know?

And one of the things that's very much worth thinking about is that you basically die into your personality, you know?

So what happens? It's a Darwinian issue fundamentally. When you're first born, your neurons have more connections than you can shake a stick out—like more than they’ll ever have in your entire life. And then all the ones you don't use die.

And so what that is, it's a collapse of potential into actuality. But let's make no mistake about it, it's costly because you become what you are instead of all the things that you could have been.

And people experience that as a cost; that's the story of Peter Pan. I don’t want to grow up because I don’t want to become one thing instead of the many things I could be.

Now, the problem with that theory is you get old, right? So you don't sustain your potential; even if you don't develop it, it doesn't just sit around. It goes stale and curdles and gets sour, and so it's not an acceptable choice.

But people make that choice all the time, especially if they think the great father isn't anything but Captain Hook, right? A terrible pirate tyrant who's terrified of death.

On right with the clock in his stomach, it's already got a piece of him, and that's the great dragon of chaos. He's being chased by the dragon of chaos. And like, if you're terrified of the dragon of chaos and you're in the patriarchal role, you're going to be a tyrant, and then why the hell would anyone grow up to be want to be like you?

One of the things I see in my clients very, very often—this is more characteristic of the males than the females—is that many of them will not allow themselves to experience anger or aggression or to express it because they have tyrannical fathers.

And so one of the things they decided when they were like four was I'm never going to be like that. It's like, well, that doesn't work out because you know you need the capacity for anger and hostility and aggression and all that; you have to have that at hand.

And you don't fix it by refusing to manifest it; all that does is screw you because you're missing half of your emotional dynamism and a whole chunk of your power, you know?

You don't have that many sources of power; you've got enthusiasm, that's a good one, curiosity, interest, appreciation for beauty.

You know, anger is unbelievably useful; it's a tremendous reservoir of power, you know? And you don't want to suppress that; you want to harness it so it's at hand, so that people don't mess with you because they will, you know.

People will push, especially pushing people, and if you can't well if you push back, they’re going to walk all over you, they won’t even notice, you know?

So you’ll go home; you’ll be all resentful and irritated and brooding on it for a month, and it’s like they didn’t even notice anything happened.

So and you