2015 Maps of Meaning 05b: Narrative, Neuropsychology & Mythology III / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)

Okay, so we talked a lot about the brain last time, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that. Then we're going to talk about organization of hierarchical systems, and then we're going to talk about their representation in mythology.

So this is from a paper by, um, Swanson. Swanson has been studying the hypothalamus for a very long time and brain organization in general, and the way he conceptualizes it is in a rather pedian sense. The essential outputs of the nervous system are basically patterns of motor behavior, and those are controlled by patterns of spinal cord activity. Those are controlled by patterns at higher brain levels, including the hypothalamus, and then those are controlled by emotional systems. There's patterned responses at the emotional level, and then those are controlled by patterned responses at the level of the cortex.

The body sort of builds itself from the bottom up. As it builds itself from the bottom up, it's trying to integrate the function of all the systems that are necessary for the maintenance of the biological maintenance of life in the medium-term, short-term, and long-term. And in a social context, that works for the social context and also works for the individual context.

So, you could imagine, that's a rather, it's hypothetically possible that there's only a certain set of solutions to a problem that complex. If that's the case, then that would account for the emergence of something approximating a universal morality, and it would also explain why every possible political system won't work.

Now, this is Swanson's map of the hypothalamus. Now you'll note that the hypothalamic structure, they're the ones with little circles and so on on the left. Like every other element of the brain, the hypothalamus isn't a homogeneous structure, right?

Generally, when you name something, if you think about it, the name presumes a homogeneous structure, because otherwise, you would differentiate the name and you would call it a bunch of names instead of just one. So what happens, for example, is that as people learn more about the brain, you'll notice this as you learn more about the brain: you stop thinking about it necessarily as the brain, which is like a homogeneous mass of neurons, and you start thinking about it in terms of its functional subsystems.

Then once you learn more about those, you think about those functional subsystems in terms of their functional subsystems, and you can keep differentiating all the way down. You can differentiate all the way down to the molecular level. So as your knowledge improves, your level of resolution improves, and you can use more and more precise terminology.

What you see is that the hypothalamus is composed of a number of systems. One of the things that Swanson has done with this particular diagram is indicate which parts of the hypothalamus, this is in a rat's brain, are basically responsible for reproductive behaviors and which are responsible for defensive behaviors.

That's part of the hypothalamus. Now, the other part, so there's a very archaic system way down in the bottom of the brain, older than emotions, about as old as pain, that's responsible for these very fundamental motivational drives. You can think about the hypothalamus, if you want to think about it this way, as the part of the biological basis of what Freud would have called the ID.

Now, we don't have to think about it in terms of relatively vague statements like the ID anymore because we know more about the underlying circuitry. We know that it's quite standard across mammalian species and even farther back in the phylogenetic chain than just mammals.

So, woulded, yeah, well, you know systems develop in an evolutionary chain, right? Some systems are more primordial than others. So the hypothalamic systems are more primordial than the hippocampal and the higher systems.

You can think of pain as an emotion; people usually don't. They usually think about it as a motivational system, but the distinction between those terms is vague anyways. Pain has an emotion-like component and a motivation-like component, like anger does. All I mean by older is that it was there first.

Anxiety, for example, seems to be an elaboration of pain. Pain represents, indicates damage to the system that's being stimulated, basically something like that. Pleasure wouldn't constit...

Well, let me get to that because I will get to that because that's another problem for all of them.

So, this governs reproductive behavior. There would be outputs from the reproductive system to other systems that mediate positive emotion, but they're old too. So part of the hypothalamus is devoted to these motivation-like processes, I think they are motivation-like personalities, and part of it is actually devoted...

The other part of it, the other half of it, is devoted toward exploration. The exploration system is the source, the roots of the exploration system in the hypothalamus are the bottom part of the structure that produces the kind of positive emotion that's associated with approach and joy.

And it's also extremely old because it has its roots in the hypothalamus. So that's the dopaminergic system. So half the hypothalamus, roughly speaking, is devoted towards the regulation of fundamentally motivated behaviors, like sexuality and defensive aggression, say.

The other half of it is devoted towards exploration. And that's quite interesting because one of the things it means is that the exploration, the tendency, the proclivity towards exploration is also unbelievably archaic. It's really, really old.

As I mentioned, I think I told you this before, if you study the behavior of a decorticate cat, which is a cat that really has almost no brain left except the hypothalamus and the spinal structures, that cat is hypo-exploratory... hyper-exploratory, sorry!

It explores more than a normal cat, which is quite strange given that it doesn't have much of a brain. But part of the reason it explores more is because it can't form the memory structures that would inhibit the exploration as a consequence of learning.

So basically what happens is you're curious about something until you figure it out, and then you've built a representation of it, which is in some sense a representation of what to do around that thing. Once you've built that representation, it's not necessary to be curious about that thing anymore because you've figured it out, and you might as well go on to some other thing that you don't understand.

But if you don't have much of a brain, you can't store the consequences of your exploratory activity, and so you can't inhibit it. So that's why a cat without a brain is hyper-exploratory.

So what I think is really interesting about the hypothalamic work is that we're going to talk a lot about the representation of exploration in mythology.

It was very interesting for me to learn that the proclivity towards exploration and the positive emotion that's associated with that is so ancient that it's grounded in the hypothalamus.

It's as old, so to speak, as hunger and sex. Those are very, very old things.

So now you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can do all this, why do you need the rest of the brain? That's a perfectly good question. Some animals don't have much more brain than that.

It seems to me that the reason that you need it is because when you have motivational system A and motivational system B and motivational system C and motivational system D, there are conflicts. There are potential conflicts between their operations across spans of time. One can interfere with another, and the optimal arrangement is such that the operations of each of these systems are sequenced in such a manner that each of them gets what they need on an ongoing basis.

So part of the reason that you need the rest of your brain is to do the proper sequencing. It's to figure out when you should do what.

So the rest of the brain, in part, is there to take time into account. But it's not only there to take time into account; it's also there to take context into account.

For example, reproductive behavior has to be context-sensitive even though it's a fundamental motivation. It has to be context-sensitive because every situation is not the same as every other situation, especially among animals that become increasingly complex.

So part of the reason that you need more brain, or that it might be worthwhile under some conditions to have more brain, is to solve the problem of how to organize multiple fundamental motivational systems working simultaneously.

That's a lot of the problems that you're trying to solve on a day-to-day basis. You're precisely that. You know, you have to add emotional regulation to that, and because we're social animals, you have to add the problem of the fact that there are all sorts of other people who are trying to do exactly the same thing cooperatively and competitively in the same environment across different spans of time.

So it's a very complex optimization problem. It doesn't seem like it's precisely computable; a lot of it seems to have to do with ongoing negotiation.

You know, because you might say, well what's the answer to the proper hierarchical arrangement of motivational necessities?

I think that the past can offer hints in that direction and also can probably inform us about what won't work. But those are sort of vague and broad. In order to determine how to update that and bring it into the present, there has to be continual ongoing communication and negotiation.

So, okay, so then you can think about the relationship between what we were thinking about as the fundamental unit of personality. Because I think of this not only as the fundamental unit of narrative but also the fundamental unit of personality.

The basic motivational systems, which I've sort of outlined here in schematic format, I'm not claiming that these are precisely accurate or scientific categories, but you can think of them as the basic motivational states.

Basically, they are associated with self-propagation and self-maintenance. Those are the two big problems that a living creature has to solve, and then those problems are broken down into the operation of more specialized subsystems, like the desire for affiliation, which seems to be a basic motivation among people, sexual desire.

Those are all self-propagation motivations, thermal regulation, thirst, hunger, elimination - all the sorts of things that you think of as basic biological necessities. So each of those has the capacity to pop up something that's approximating a personality when it needs to.

So it's not a drive, which is an important thing to realize. There's a drive-like element to the degree that that process has become habitual or that it's based in instinct.

So the drive, like the more drive-like something is, the more likely it is that lower levels in the nervous system are taking care of it. And so maybe spinal systems, for example.

So, you know, if you put your hand on a hot stove, you'll jerk it back fast before you feel the pain, and that's because there's a reflex loop between the sensory receptors on your hand and your spinal cord. It's very fast; it just goes like that.

It's a sensory-motor loop, and it's basically deterministic. So things at extremely high resolution become increasingly deterministic. So the pain comes in after you've pulled your hand away.

That seems to be something like, it's teaching you in some sense. Your body is teaching you. That's one way of thinking about it - not to do that stupid thing again.

People also think maybe that pain immobilizes us so that we're more likely to heal and/or less likely to keep engaging in the behavior that caused the damage.

So, all right, so our motivational systems are popping up these little personalities all the time. One of the dictums of psychoanalytic thought is that those little motivational personalities can more or less have a life of their own because they're subsets of you. If they're not integrated into the complete personality, well, then when they emerge, they're going to be rather primordial and unsophisticated.

You see this in people, for example, who have outbursts of anger. You know, it isn't exactly reasonable to say that they've become disinhibited, although that's one way of thinking about it.

It's actually more reasonable to assume that they haven't developed enough sophistication to integrate that motivational system, that capacity for anger, for example, into their personality as a whole. One of the dictums of Jungian psychotherapy, in particular, is that it's extraordinarily useful to integrate those elements of your personality that might have like a fiery nature, a potentially dangerous nature.

Anger and aggression is a really good example of that, but sexual desire is also a really good example of that. If you're sophisticated, you have that system at hand when you need it, but you don't use it in a manner that's destructive to your operations as a whole across time.

You don't use it in a manner that disrupts the relationship that you've established socially with your family and broader Society. So it's all integrated.

It's like it's integrated into a game. One of the things you might think about is that a lot of the games that people do play and that people like to watch are games of aggression integration. You know, so football is a really good example of that. I mean, those guys are massive, and they're strong, and they're aggressive.

But, you know, by and large, when they're in the football game, they use that to further the game. Now they're trying to win individually, and their team's trying to win, but at the same time, both teams are competing within a framework of rules, and that's in a broader framework that encompasses the entire audience, which is also continually giving them feedback on the quality of their play.

If somebody does something particularly brutal and unnecessary, the whole audience is going to complain about that. You know, that's one of the ways by which the players determine how much force can be used and how much force can't be used because as the game continues, it's not easy to tell when you're being too aggressive or not too aggressive.

You know, it's funny, but I was reading a little while ago about the Canada-Russia hockey series in 1972. If I remember correctly, the Canadians played by European rules, which meant that there was no body checking.

So that was kind of hard on them because the Europeans don't check. But the Canadians claimed that in games they played where there was no checking, there was a lot more hitting with the ends of sticks and a lot more slashing.

There were still all sorts of aggression, but it was never able to get up to the point where you could give someone a solid hit. The Canadians' take on that was that the game wasn't necessarily less dangerous or less rough without checking; it's just that the aggression got subordinated.

You know, it's not an easy thing to figure out exactly what level of force is necessary to push any given thing forward, but none is definitely the wrong answer.

You know, if you're ever involved, which you will be and no doubt are now, if you're involved in difficult negotiations, as you move forward, salary negotiations or negotiations about a given project or even complaints, attempts on your part to solve problems at work, like being subject to arbitrary tyranny or being bored to death by a useless project or something like that.

If you don't have that capacity for force at hand, you're not going to win. You're not going to win. You're just going to get walked over. And how much force you need, that's part of the ongoing dialogue.

That's really worth thinking about. A lot of what happens in psychotherapy as well is exposure to things that people are afraid of and the development of new micro skills.

For example, if I have a client who isn't very socially skilled, you know, we might practice things like shaking hands and telling each other who we are because if you don't have that down as a routine, it's difficult to make a foray into a broader social environment.

Sometimes people are stopped socially because they lack micro skills, and sometimes it's because they're afraid, and those two things interplay. But another thing that happens in therapy a lot is that people come in for assertiveness training. You know, there are people who've usually— they're usually agreeable in temperament, but there are also people who have failed to integrate that capacity for aggression into their personality for one reason or another.

Maybe they weren't taught to, that's certainly possible. Maybe when they manifested aggression, they were punished for it. Maybe they observed other people who were too aggressive and decided they were never going to be like that.

That's a common response, but it doesn't really matter because once you're an adult and you're working in a competitive world, which you will definitely be, you have to have that capacity. Because otherwise, you get pushed to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and exploited.

It's not necessarily because of malevolence; partly it can be that, but often it's just the consequence of the fact that generally if you're negotiating for something, there are forces pulling on that from all directions, and the obvious outcome is obviously right, is not obvious at all.

It's a matter of negotiation, so you have to be able to put your position forward with some force and not be timid about it, and be articulate about it.

All that is a consequence of integrating these systems that can be very dangerous if they're not working properly into your personality rather than ignoring them and letting them run in an underground fashion, which is what they would do.

Yes, talk.

Yeah, well, the thing about Freud - so, the comment was that it's reminiscent of Freudian sublimation. Freud more or less had an inhibitory model of socialization, you know, because he thought of people as pushed by the ID, so that the ego was pushed by the ID and inhibited by the superego. There's some truth in that to the degree that you're subject to quasi-tyrannical pressure by a society that isn't well integrated.

A lot of what's going to happen to you is "Don't do that." The capacity to not do something that you're motivated to do, like an impulsive thing, is obviously necessary. But sublimation, in a sense, is the basis of piadian theory.

P’s alternative to Freudian thinking is that it's not inhibitory, especially not if your personality is properly integrated. What it is instead is integration into a game-like structure.

We're going to talk more about that. The point is that you're starting at high levels of resolution with your body, and you're building the structures out of your capacity to move and your capacity to perceive and these motivational systems that are driving you.

As you become socialized and as you bring more and more people into the conversation, the hierarchy gets more and more complex and sophisticated, and then it's the whole thing that's regulating. It's not inhibitory; you know, so you don't want to inhibit your aggression; you want to harness it so it serves the purposes of the greater, the individual, and the greater good if you can figure out how to do that.

It's better that way because you have more power. Now, it might be better for you to be cowardly and retreating if the alternative is to be impulsively aggressive and destructive, but that's not nearly as good as having the capacity for aggression at your hand and being able to use it in a sophisticated manner.

So, all right, this is a way of thinking about how...

Yes, I don't think it's... I don't think you can say that it's that simple. I mean, I think that happens, but how it happens, we don't know. And the thing too is that this organization does not only take place in your brain.

That's another thing that the psychoanalysts, I think, overestimated because they tended to think of psychic regulation as internal, but it's not. For example, as long as you're acceptable to your peers, you seldom have to regulate your own behavior because they'll regulate it for you.

When you're out in the world, I mean, you guys are all sitting there in a particular way, partly because if you deviated from the appropriate way to sit there, whatever that is, if you deviated from that sufficiently, the group would turn on you right away.

As long as you're awake enough to respond to the subtle cues that people are giving you, you don't even have to worry about the internal inhibitory problem.

Now what you want is you want your nervous system organized in a way so that it fits well into the overall organization of the society, and there has to be cross-talk between those, but society exists, right? So anything society will do to regulate you, you don't have to do, and that's really useful; it's an outsourcing problem.

You know, there's lots of things you outsource. So one of the things is think about something like self-esteem. Now self-esteem is a very... I don't like the word because self-esteem is really something like extroversion minus neuroticism.

It's close to that, but let's look at it in a slightly different way. Let's say, well, how valuable should you regard yourself?

Then you think, well, that might have something to do with competence. Okay, well, how competent are you? Well, the answer to that is you really don't know, and there's actually no way of telling. So your nervous system has to guess, and the way it does that is that first you're put on a normal distribution for negative emotion, and you're just sort of given that at birth; that's your temperament.

Then socialization can pull that one way or another. It can make you more stable or less stable, depending on how you interact with your parents and the immediate environment, and how dangerous the environment is.

Then the next thing you do is you observe yourself operating in the world, and you see how good you are at solving problems, and that adjusts it. Then everyone else is broadcasting to you all the time about your comparative value.

That's really how you establish an estimate of your competence, and it's almost always comparative competence because the question in most groups isn't "Can you do something?" It is, but the real question is "Can you do something as well or better than anyone else in this particular group?"

Because there's no absolute standard for being able to do things precisely. You know, everyone is insufficient when you think of the ultimate task, right? Because people's knowledge has limits. So the question is, "Well, are you up for the challenge compared to the people around you?"

So, it's a very complex calibration process, and it certainly doesn't all take place inside. It can't; you're not complex enough to do that, and it's foolish anyway.

Partly what the stock market does—the stock market is a massive conversation about the relative value of property, roughly speaking. It moves around a lot because you think about all the variables that are being taken into account at the same time.

It's not only every company and every commodity in relationship to every other company and every other commodity; it's also all that in relationship to the price of all the currencies, and that takes into account political stability or instability and disease and catastrophe and hurricanes and so on and so forth.

There has to be something dynamic and ongoing that enables those calculations to be made because it's incalculable otherwise, and the same thing is true in some sense of your competence. You can't calculate that on your own; you have to have help.

That's partly why the group also decides where you are in the dominance hierarchy. Now, the group can also under or overshoot; that happens lots of times.

You know, because maybe the local environment that you're in isn't a very good representative of the broader environment. This happens to lots of smart people in high school, for example, or junior high, where if they're intelligent, that is not necessarily socially valuable for a number of years.

If the person who's intelligent doesn't get out of that environment into an environment where intelligence is valued—hopefully that's a university—then their actual potential isn't going to be valued by the dominance hierarchy in proper keeping with its actual real-world value.

So, anyways, okay, so the issue is, and this is the ethical issue, is how do you hierarchically organize these subpersonalities?

Because you might think, well, why do you have to hierarchically organize them to begin with? Now, there's an element here for the postmodernists; you can think of this. So, 130 years ago, Nietzsche announced that God was dead, right?

That was a reflection of the collapse, in some sense, of the believability of traditional religions, and you can think of traditional religions as a coherent overarching narrative.

Now, you might argue about how coherent it is, but they're pretty coherent; that doesn't necessarily mean that they're accurate, but they're pretty coherent. So the slats were pulled out from underneath those structures.

Now, what happened during the 20th century was two things. One was some of those religious narratives were replaced by ideological narratives, and that turned out to be a really bad idea.

That was one stream of thought, in some sense stemming from Nietzsche or at least from his observation. There was another stream of thought which basically said if religious structures have collapsed, and they had to, that means all grand narratives have collapsed, and that's really a postmodernist claim.

But the problem with that claim is you can't act unless you have a hierarchy of values because you can't figure out what to do next. Also, you can't even figure out if you should do anything, but you certainly can't figure out what to do next because in order to organize your behavior and move forward, you have to say that one thing is more important than many other things, right?

Every time you act, you're making that decision. Now, you might say, "Well, you can only make that decision at a micro level, like what's best now?" But people who do that are impulsive; that's how we define them, and that doesn't work out well across time.

You know, what they're doing is responding to, in some sense, instinctual whims moment by moment. That doesn't seem very sophisticated. You don't want someone around like that; you can't predict what they're going to do, you can't cooperate with them, they can't follow rules, you can't have a project with them, you can't trust them.

That isn't going to work. So the idea that grand narratives are obsolete is based on a misunderstanding of exactly what the narratives are, and it's also based on the absence of the realization that a narrative is primarily something you act out before you represent.

So a narrative can be latent. So let me give you an example of that. I thought puzzled about this for a long time. Let's say you go out and watch a chimpanzee troop.

Now we know that chimps are organized in a dominance hierarchy, and we know that the dominance hierarchy among chimps is male-dominated. The females have a dominance hierarchy too, but the fundamental dominance is male-dominated.

It's not like that so much with bonobos, by the way, which are very much like chimps. But you can watch the chimps, and you can see that chimp A knows that chimp B is higher up in the dominance hierarchy, and chimp D knows that chimp C is higher up in the dominance hierarchy, and you can even see that the offspring—like if you have a high dominant female and she has offspring—all the other chimps know that you don't mess around with her offspring because she's a dominant female.

So the mapping of the dominance hierarchy is quite sophisticated. So then you might say, "Well, the chimps are following rules." But then you think, "No, they're not, because they don't actually know rules."

Because you've got to ask, "What exactly is a rule?" Right? Well, that's a good question. A rule seems to be the articulation of a principle, but it seems to be something that you have to represent.

Like you say, "Well, a rule is chimp B always submits to chimp A." That's the rule that the chimp is following, but the chimp isn't following rules because the chimp doesn't have rules.

What those really are are behavioral patterns; they're not rules. Now, understanding that is extremely useful because what you can understand is that regularities in complex social behavior can emerge in the absence of any consciously articulated representation of those rules.

You could ask, "Where do moral presuppositions come from?" Assuming that, say, religious systems, for example, are concerned with moral presuppositions and that social systems are concerned with those too, where do they come from?

Well, there's lots of theories about that, right? The Marxists would say, "Well, it's all about exploitation and economic advantage," and the postmodernists would say, "It's all about exclusion and power." Because they're sort of quasi-Marxist, sort of... they're quasi-Marxist, anyways.

There's always this there. And, you know, Karl Marx for Karl Marx, religion was the opiate of the people, and he thought about it as a structure that had emerged because the power elites wanted to dominate the people who weren't empowering to extract out value from them.

There's no doubt that there can be an element of exploitation in any social system, and there's no doubt that social systems are hierarchical, so that there are people on the top and people on the bottom.

But in human society, there's lots of dominance hierarchies. There's not just one, and we value lots of different things from people. It's by no means obvious that the dominance hierarchies were set up consciously through conscious thought by any group of people over any span of time for any purpose whatsoever.

It's particularly obvious when you also understand that—well, we are not the only things that have dominance hierarchies. Chimps have them; wolves have them.

That's why you can have a pet dog; you understand? A dog doesn't even want to be the boss in the house. That's a nervous and upset dog; it wants to have its position as a valued low-level entity in the dominance hierarchy, and a dog is just absolutely happy when that happens.

What is a dog going to do? Buy groceries? It's like no, it's not. So it has to be low in the dominance hierarchy because it doesn't have the competence. One of the things that's very, very bizarre about Marxist and postmodernist thinking is that there doesn't seem to be any recognition that dominance hierarchies are often structured based on competence, not on, like, arbitrary distribution of power.

I mean, if you want to go have your appendix out, what are you going to look for? Are you going to look for the most powerful doctor, or are you going to look for the most competent doctor?

Well, you hope that there's a rough relationship between power and status and competence, right? Because otherwise, how are you going to figure it out? But if it's a good hierarchy, it's based on competence, not on arbitrary power.

So we might say that when a dominance hierarchy starts to be based on arbitrary power or purely on economic terms, then it's actually turned into a tyranny. It's no longer a functional hierarchy. It's already stultified and twisted into a form that can't be sustained.

Then people are going to get upset about that and start talking about it. Or, worse, they're going to start doing things that are quite disruptive. The idea that the hierarchical structure per se is pathological or that it's consciously imposed or that it's not necessary or that it has nothing to do with competence, it's like no, that's—better not be the case because we would be in serious trouble if it was the case.

So I would say the more functional the society, the more the power hierarchy is based on competence in relationship to what the society deems as actually valuable.

Not obviously no society meets those criteria perfectly because you can't; it's part of a dialogue and a continual processing of information. You can't hit the target; it's always moving.

But you can hope that the dialogue continues. Here's a little vision I had of how things work, like how a democratic society works, okay?

Because people often think, if they're conservative, low in openness, and high in orderliness, then they think the conservatives are right. If they're more on the liberal or on the left side, high and openness, low and orderliness, then they think that the left is correct.

But the left and the right aren't correct; they represent different systems of values, and the values that they represent are valid sometimes in some situations.

The question is, "Well, when and in what situations?" And the answer to that is—you not only don't know; you can't tell.

So it's like this: Imagine that people are on a cliff. It's like they're on a flat plateau, and it's a cliff on both sides, and down at the bottom of the cliff are fire and rocks. You want to stay on top of that cliff, and it's quite narrow, and there's a line you should walk down, right down the middle.

But you can't tell where it is, so what do you do? You put all the lefties here, and you put all the right-wingers here, and you put a rope between them, and you tie the rope to you.

The right pulls this way, and the left pulls that way, and if they're pulling properly, then you can walk right down the middle. But the only way they can properly is if they keep talking to one another, you know?

If the left disappears, then the right pulls everything over the cliff down into the flaming rocks. If the left disappears, then the right pulls everything off the cliff down onto the rocks. And we know that; there's been good personality models developed recently that show that if you push a virtue to its extreme, it turns into a vice.

All the vices that basically end up in the same place. Yes, um, what would you say happens if both sides are talking a lot but not to one another? Like there's a lot of preaching to the choir on either side?

Well, it's dysfunction. It's dysfunction. I was thinking about modern American politics, where they can actually show with data that it's increasingly polarized—like just increasingly left and right subcultures.

What that means is that people can't get along. That's what it means. You can say, well, part of getting along is following a shared set of rules, and that's true, but the rules are kind of low resolution.

But to get along, think about your family. If your family is structured so that it's just a bunch of rules and you better damn follow them or there’ll be punishment, you know, that can be better than just sheer chaos, but it's not as good as general principles encompassing continual dialogue.

That works best. You might think, well, what are the general principles? What we'd hope are, well, we can look at what people have done in the past; we can look at our history and our culture, and we can think, okay, we're going to try to not do the stupid things that people have done in the past that are evidently stupid.

Like maybe Nazism isn't the way to go, for example. So we're going to try not to do that. We can extract out those general principles, but then we have to talk continually in the present because the present keeps moving around.

There's no way of mapping it using a structure from the past. You can only approximate it. It's like, you know, if you took a Google map of Toronto from 10 years ago and you said, "Well, this is the map, it's not going to be updated," it's like you'd have a real rough time driving around the waterfront because you'd keep running into skyscrapers that you know aren’t supposed to be there.

The map is obviously useful, but the update process is also unbelievably useful. You can also say if you look at left and right, you can roughly say that the left is on the side of update and the right is on the side of structure.

And you might say, well, how much update and how much structure? It’s like, enough to solve the problem; that's the answer. What's the problem? It keeps changing. How do we keep up? We talk.

Part of that also is, like, if you're talking, most of you guys are lefties because most of you are open and not very orderly. Now, there are going to be exceptions in here, but you're young because youth is often associated with political beliefs that are more on the left.

I think that's because you're in a more plastic state of development, right? There are still a lot of things open to you.

But the thing about it is that you have to get along with the right. That's partly because the right represents what's already there. So how do you do that? Well, that's hard, but the one thing you definitely do is listen.

You try to figure out what the hell they're up to and why and what they stand for and the value of that and where it's too extreme. It's not easy, but that's why democracy is a dialogue.

That's how it regulates itself is through the dialogue. Okay, so what you're basically trying to do is integrate your abilities, your subpersonalities, which is how I'm going to represent it, into a functional hierarchy.

A functional hierarchy is one where the subsidiary parts of the hierarchy don't conflict. So let me give you an example. You can tell me what.

I based this on the Piani notion of the equilibrated state. P had this idea that there are two ways you might be able to run an organization.

Say you're moving towards a collectively defined goal. One would be to put someone at the top of it and kind of give them complete control, tyrannical power. That meant you were going to do what that person said or else.

Now the problem with that is that that person isn't always going to be right, and that you're not always going to be happy about doing what they say. The fact that you're not happy means you're not going to be as productive, and it also means that the organization is going to have to expend quite a lot of energy keeping you in line.

So here's an alternative. The alternative is here's the goal: let's agree on some general principles in relationship to the goal, and then let's negotiate.

One of the things I did with my kids when they were teenagers was, you know, there are a certain set of procedures that have to be undertaken in a household in order for that household to function.

Roughly speaking, people need to eat; it should be clean enough so that contamination isn't a problem; it shouldn't be so messy that it's impossible to do anything that you want to do in a house, you know? Etc.

There are guidelines that we all basically implicitly understand that that constitute a well-regulated familial environment. Well, so then how do you obtain that? One of the processes that I put into place was we would meet and parse up the jobs and come to a solution, and the rule was you can't leave the discussion until the solution is found.

You have to accept the solution unless you can come up with a better one, and that we'll implement it over a period of time and see how it works. And that worked.

I wouldn't say it worked perfectly because nothing works perfectly, but it's a good process because it brings everyone into the game. They get to define the end, they get to define the game, they get to define the rules, they get to define the processes by which those rules will be enforced, and they get to run it as a simulation and see how it works.

Then at some point later, they get to have another discussion about it, but you don't want to be discussing it every time there's dishes to be done.

You won't want to discuss the entire moral substructure of the whole household. Dishes are a big deal because dishes and cooking are a big deal because they're part of—the tremendous conflict in that area because of the role, rapid role transformation that characterized men and women since the pill was invented.

It's a place where, you know, massive social transformations manifest themselves in local landscapes, and that's also why solving the problems in your local landscape is also the way of solving the big problems.

It's like who does the dishes, when, and why, and what are the rewards and punishments associated with that? Solve that, and you’ve solved like 30% of the tension between men and women.

That means it's really hard to solve; it's not obvious how you do that and how you do that over the long run, and what the reward should be, and how valuable it is, etc., etc.

It takes an awful lot of negotiation, but if you don't get it right, then you have a continual war in your household, and you pay for that. Because if you're having a war in your household, then you're going to be stressed to death, and that will kill you.

So it's no joke to get these things right, and when you're doing it, it's applied philosophy—it's sophisticated and applied philosophy because that's all you have if you don't have roles.

Right? Roles—you don't negotiate, and that's good because you don't know how to negotiate. No rules, it's negotiation, slavery, or tyranny—those are your options.

These are very complicated problems. That's also, though, why when you work hard to solve them in the domain that you have in your hands, you're also doing the best you can possibly do to figure out how that might scale up in a broader way.

Right? I read a great book once called "Systematics" written by a guy named John G. It's a really fantastic book.

Yeah, I know John G. Weird enough, man. It was actually his name. John G.T. is the name of a fictional character in an Ayn Rand book, and he's one person who stops the world because, for a variety of reasons, he stops the industrial world because he's thinking he's getting exploited.

It's had a huge effect on modern American monetary policy, by the way.

So, anyways, this guy John G.T. has written a whole bunch of axioms about organizational structure which are quite brilliant, and there's a couple I really remembered. One is that the organization does not do what its name says it does.

I love that one; it's so smart. So, and the second one was large functional organizations grow out of small functional organizations.

So if you want to build something big, you have to start small and local, and then figure out how to make it scale. In some sense, that's what you're doing. That's what you're doing in your relationships with other people and that's what you're doing in your familial situation, that's what you're doing in your intimate relationships— you solve those problems.

You develop a template, like a skilled template of perception and action that you can then bring out into the broader world. It's really important.

So partly, you know, you inherit a hierarchical structure, and you might think about that as whatever principles bind your culture together. Then some of that's rigid and pathological and half-dead and needs to be destroyed and re-updated, and some of it isn't.

You have to figure that out by negotiation, and that's hard, but you don't want to blow the whole damn thing down in one gust like the big bad wolf in the straw house. It's like then you have nothing to live in.

You want to make modifications in a culturally determined structure with caution and care because that is all that stops you. That's all that protects you from chaos apart from your ability to update your models.

If you blow that over, you find out what's behind it. Part of what's behind it is the dragon of chaos and the terrible mother. It's not good.

You saw what happened to Iraq when the Americans knocked over the hierarchy, right? It wasn't good. Now, it wasn't good before because it was a tyranny, but it's clearly not obvious that it's better now, you know?

It's also possible that what's going to happen is it's going to be replaced by a way worse tyranny. So knock over a structure; the water comes flooding in. It's just like a dyke or a dam.

So, all right, so that's your problem. Now, I set that up as part of a moral hierarchy. So at the bottom of any process, you say, "Well, maybe you're trying to be a good person." We might as well assume that.

You might say, "Why?" But my answer to that would be, because it's better than not being a good person. You're going to run into a lot less pain and misery, and you're going to be a lot less destructive.

You're going to hurt a lot fewer people, and you might leave everything better than you found it, and that's not so bad. It's certainly better than doing the reverse of all of those things, unless you think there's something particularly positively valuable about pain and misery.

That seems to be... you could make that case, but if I put you in pain and misery, you do everything you could to get out. So even if you thought that was a reasonable solution, if I imposed it on you, you would do everything you possibly could to escape.

So all that means is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Because what you act out is more representative of who you are than what you say. What the hell do you know about yourself? You have a vague model of who you are and a vague model of society.

So you can wrap off some articulated representations, but the probability that they're going to really map the underlying structure is low.

So, okay, so we'll assume you're going to be a good person; that's what you're striving for. Then we can decompose that, and you can decompose it all the way down to micro-behaviors.

The issue is you try to build a hierarchy. At the bottom, it has all your micro-behaviors, you know, the things you can do with your hands and your eyes and your mouth and your body. That's the highest resolution level.

Then you're trying to organize those into higher and higher, into more and more abstract and powerful structures in some sense that are also homogeneous inside. They're not full of internal contradictions; so that's how you establish peace.

That's how you establish psychological stability, and there has to be negotiations at all of those levels. Roughly speaking, it's better to negotiate at the low levels if you can do it.

You know, so I use this example fairly frequently. It's like so you've got a four-year-old kid, and their room is a mess because they've been playing, and you think, "Well, that room can't be a mess." Why? Well, it's hard to play in a messy room. That might be one answer, so you have to restructure it so that you can play again—that's part of why it should be clean.

So then you tell the four-year-old, "Clean up this room," and then you leave. Then you come back, and it's like nothing's happened.

The reason for that, in part, perhaps, is because that's the wrong level of resolution to solve the problem at with regards to the four-year-old. You could only say, "Clean up your room," which would be maybe at the same level as, say, family care there to someone who has the underlying structures already in place.

So you might say to the child, "See your shelf?" And they can do that because they know how to follow pointing and they know how to specify an absence, and they know how to link that to language.

So they'll do that. "See that hole?" Yes? Okay, so you know the person has enough skill underneath that abstraction to implement it. Fine, then you say, "See that bear?" And you know they can manage that, so they look at the bear, you say, "Well, pick up the bear."

You know they can do that, so they pick up the bear, and you give them a pat. Then you say, "Put the bear in the space," and they do that, and they look at you and give them a pat.

It's like if you do that with a child for the whole room three or four times, what you're doing is building the structures right from the bottom up, and then you can say, "Clean up your room."

If the child—so, for example, you come back, and the room isn't clean, you might think, "Well, what do you do about a child who's being intransigent and won't clean up the room?"

The answer is, well, the first thing you do is make sure that that's the right level of instruction. And that's the case also if you're negotiating with a partner or an intimate partner; the first thing you should assume, if they do something stupid, which they certainly will, is that they're stupid.

You know, that you have to help them out, building the micro-structures of whatever it is that you're asking them to do. Because people are full of gaping holes and they lack social skills of all sorts, it's like, and it's a huge part of the tension between friends and between couples.

It's the absence of ability. You do your person a great favor if you say, "You know you forgot my birthday." Okay, well, what am I supposed to do about that? Well, you might say, "Well, that's up to you to figure it out."

I know, assume I'm stupid and tell me exactly what you want, and then you'll say, "Well, that doesn't really mean anything," and I'll say, "Yeah, but we're going to be together for 30 years, so if you teach me this one time and it's kind of awkward and stupid, then maybe the next time it'll be 50% better."

You know, because you're looking at a trajectory, right? You can build—'cause one of the things you could think about, for example, is—let's say you make a meal. Okay, now let's say your goal is to make a really good meal in an efficient way so that everybody is really happy about it, including you, so that the probability that you'll eat lots of really good meals across your whole life goes up. That's a good solution.

Then you might think, okay, I made this meal and it was a costly expenditure of time, and I have to be paid for that in some way in order to be happy about it. So let's think about that for a minute because it's a concrete problem. So let's say you spent a bunch of time making a good meal.

Okay, what do you not want people to do? "Yeah, okay, okay, so they're not supposed to say, 'What's this?'" Okay, that's a bad response. What else do you not want them to do? "Not enjoy it." Right, right, right, okay.

So there's not going to be a lot of bickering at the table, right? Because then you're going to think, what kind of stupid idiot would make a nice meal for this lot of insane chimpanzees, right? You're not going to want to replicate that.

What else would you want them not to do? "Not finish it." Yep, okay. What else? "Not help clean up." Yeah, right. "Not be grateful."

Not notice that you put a lot of time and effort into it? Not notice that it's above the normal standards, that you sort of went above and beyond the call of duty, right?

Maybe show a little bit of thankfulness? Yeah, so then you think, okay, well, I want to set up my life so that I get to eat really good meals for the rest of my life and be happy about making them.

You think, okay, well, what are the preconditions for that? Well, then you have to fight for the preconditions because the alternative is you cook slop miserably, and you fight.

One of the things that's interesting about one of the things I often do with my clients is we do some arithmetic because people have a weird idea about what's important in their life.

You might think you've got 16 hours a day of awake time, right? You're going to spend four of those hours—three of those hours—interacting with food. Okay, so that's, let's say four, let's say three, it's 1/5 of your life, 20% of your life.

Okay, got it? Get it right—get it right, it's 20% of your life! You got it taken care of! Wow, perfect! You know, you think, "Well, who's going to think about thinking through those things?"

It's like, well, do the math. It's not a math; it's arithmetic. It's like, you know, and so sometimes people will come to me and they'll say, "I have to fight with my child for an hour a night to get them to go to bed."

I think, okay, let's do the arithmetic. So how long have you been fighting with them? Six months? How long do you think this will continue? Indefinitely? Two years?

Okay, so let's say it's two years. Okay, so that's—we're going to say that's 800 days for the sake of simplicity in math. Let's say, yeah, we'll say 800.

So that's 800 hours, and so that's 20 work weeks. So in the next two years, you're going to spend five months of work weeks fighting with your child, okay?

You expect to like them at the end of that, do you? It's like you're going to fight with someone for like five months, and you're going to like them? No, that isn't going to happen.

So you might think, "Well, how important is it to solve that problem?" Well, it's five months of work weeks worth of importance. You could put a week into it, and you know it might be helpful.

I'm trying to make a case that you have to look at the hierarchy, the hierarchical structure of your values, you know? The best way to do that often is by paying close attention to things that are normally invisible.

Normally, they're invisible, and that's not good. You have to fix them. If you fix all those things, those little tiny things—if you fix them, which is hard, you know? It takes negotiation, but it's not impossible.

You know, because the first thing you want to ask your partner or your family is, "Well, how would we like to have a meal?" You want wretched, nasty food that someone just threw together and it's burnt and we're going to fight about it all the time and it's really erratic and it's not predictable and the person who's making it is unhappy and the kitchen is a disaster afterwards and everybody's angry about that, so that's like one solution.

Do you want that? If they all are sensible enough to say no, then you can say to them, "Okay, well, what's the alternative?"

And then you can think, well we could imagine what the alternative would be, and then we can work on laying out the micro-processes that would lead to that outcome, and we can practice them over time.

We can assume that if we don't get it right in three months, that doesn't mean it's hopeless.

So when Freud—let me give you an example. I was reading a Gottman study the other day on marital stability. Gottman has done some really good analysis of couple's behavior. He has set up a lab that's basically a bed and breakfast, and he brings couples in there for a weekend, and he wires them up physiologically and monitors their reactivity.

He can predict whether a couple's going to divorce with 95% or 94% accuracy. It's impressive. So what has he found? He's found two categories of—he's identified two phenomena that are very much worth knowing.

The first is that the couples who are going to get divorced come into the bed and breakfast, and they speak with each other quite calmly, but it's more like walking on eggs calm, and while they're speaking with each other calmly, their physiology is like they're very aroused.

So they're sort of aroused like someone who's facing a predator. You might think of an unhappy couple as predator and prey to each other, and so the words are there mostly to stop predatory activity, not to actually communicate anything.

It's just to keep the surface calm. So then you might think, well, what's under the surface? What's under the surface? So Freud would say it's what's under the surface is unconscious. But you can say, well, what's under the surface is one of these hierarchies that's all banged up and twisted and not in reasonable shape, and so people don't want to open the door to that.

But they do, this is a Freudian slip, so let's say this goes to the second part of Gottman's observations. So the woman goes over to the window, and she says, "Oh look, there's a cardinal outside." You know a cardinal is that bright red bird— they're kind of cool looking, you know?

It's kind of a trivial thing in some sense, but by the same token, it's like it's a little positive thing. Twenty of them in a day is a good thing.

So then the partner, the husband in this example, has a two-by-two matrix of choices. One is, "Who the hell cares about your stupid bird?" Okay, so that's one. The second one is, then you go over and look at the bird, right?

The third one is you don't make the content noise but you act it out. The fourth one is um, you go over there like a civilized human being and you know, and that you're interacting with someone that you care for, and you take a look at the damn bird, and you're happy about it, and that's as truthful and real as you can manage.

Okay so that option is a Freudian slip, right? Because what it says is there's a whole monster underneath that, and the monster is all the disorganization in this entire structure.

It's like there might be tormenting each other about various things for the last ten years, and none of them are resolved, and I'm not very happy about you for so many reasons I can't even remember all of them, and I can't enumerate them right now because that would take forever, and maybe we would have a huge fight.

But by the same token, I'm not going to come over there and make you happy with your stupid bird, and I'm going to indicate that subtly so you can't call me a son of a bitch because I'm just sighing.

That's what I'll say if you do ask me, but I'm going to load all that up, and I'm going to deliver it to you, and what's going to happen to you is because you're smart is your heart rate is going to go way up like you're being attacked.

The reason for that is you—you are. What the good couples do, the couples that stay together is they respond to each other's bids—he calls them bids.

If one person wants to share some little trivial daily positive thing with the other, the other, you know, isn't carrying around a bloody cartload of resentment and is able to respond to that in a positive way.

That way, the general interactions between the couples stay positive, but that's also because they've worked this out. Now, you know, it's got to be because they work it out because the couples who are physiologically reactive to each other are communicating, but there's all sorts of horror underneath the surface.

They’re trying to figure out, well, what is it that's underneath the surface? What's the structure of the unconscious? Well, that's the structure of the unconscious, and it's either well-structured and functional and mutually agreed upon and as explicit as possible or it's this constant.

Then when the couples fight about it because they're not very sophisticated, and they're not very awake, and they're not very aware, and they don't know how to do microanalysis and they're tired and unhappy, they don't say, "I would rather that you use cloth napkins when we have a formal dinner than paper napkins." They say, "You do a bad job of entertaining."

Well, that's not helpful, right? It's like you're wiping out the person at "bad job of entertaining" that would be probably about at the level of family care in the hierarchy, and so what you're doing is you're hitting them in a place that, if they listen to you, would knock out maybe 10% of their entire behavioral and perceptual structure.

It's like you really want to do that to someone? You only want to do that to someone under extreme conditions, right? Extreme conditions.

That would be something like maybe a warning to a child who's gone astray very badly but, you know, has the skills. You'd say, well, the kind of mistakes that you're making are sufficiently catastrophic so that your life is going to go off course.

You know, and then you might have a conversation with them about that. Often for kids, for young people that are between 15 and 25—I know they're not kids really, but my kids are that age—part of that might be what the hell are you going to do for a career, right?

And if that's unspecified, the person just goes all over the place.

So, okay, so here are some signs that represent that, right? So you see the progression of that, and if you're operating at the top of the hierarchy that means you've mastered all the subsidiary elements, and you've built them not only from the bottom up.

Because the levels cross-talk, right? You know, so you can use—and that's the next thing we're going to talk about because you're not just a behavioral creature; you're not just an animal like a chimp.

You're capable—there are things you can do that animals can't do. What that is is that not only can you act things out in a manner that through action will organize your hierarchy, because that's what animals do, but you can also represent that hierarchy.

You can think about the hierarchy, you can articulate the hierarchy, and you can play with it abstractly, and that's what you're doing when you're engaging in philosophy. That's also what you're doing when you're negotiating, and that's a really good thing because it means that you can not only conceptualize changes and then implement them, and you can conceptualize a broad range of potential changes and improvements, and you can implement them, and you can observe what happens, but you can also communicate that to all sorts of other people.

So it's a great thing to be able to do. The problem with it is, obviously, that because you can abstractly represent and question, you can also knock the hell out of your belief in the top elements of the hierarchy.

It's like, well, what does it mean to be a good person anyway, you know? Or why should I be a good person? Or is there any utility or meaning in being a good person, or is there even any— is it even reasonable to say that there's such a thing as a good person?

It's like, I think all of those questions in some sense are ill-posed, and the reason I think that is because they're at the wrong level of resolution. You know, you don't throw the damn baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

If you're going to critique something, don't start at the highest level of abstraction. I think that's a big part of what's wrong with what people are taught in universities today, because you're often taught to criticize systems at the highest level of abstraction.

It's like, well, there's something wrong with capitalism. It's like, really? Really? You're going to do something about that, are you? And it's going to work better in your lifetime.

That's what's going to happen. It's like no, it's not going to happen. You know, if you stick a stick in in a functioning machine, even if you think the machine is all rattly and it's like pulling people's arms in and it's got all sorts of catastrophic problems, you come along and like hit it with a stick.

It's like it's not going to run better. It's the wrong level of analysis. Just because you have a stick and you can see that the machine doesn't work very well doesn't mean that you're very bright.

It's like, obviously it doesn't work very well, you know? It's like that's not the issue. The issue is, could you improve it without making it worse?

That's a big problem; it's a big problem. So, you know, you have a wheelchair, you know, and the bearings are gone, so the bloody thing just grinds away.

You know, maybe it's wobbly; it doesn't work very well on the ice, you know? And you think, well, that's a horrible wheelchair, and you just take it from the person.

It's like then they're lying there on the ice, you know? It's like, oh, that's helpful. Well, you don't have that horrible old wheelchair anymore.

It's like, yeah, brilliant. It’s like so a rattletrap thing that works is better than nothing. So if you're going to fix something, well, then you have to be... I would think about it more like what you would do if you had to fix a helicopter.

You know, you're not going to critique the whole helicopter. That's not going to be helpful. It's like, well, that's not a good helicopter. It's like, right. We can tell that because it's not working very well.

Well, what are you going to do? Well, then you have to learn a lot about the helicopter and all of its parts and how they function, and then you have to figure out which part isn't working properly, and then you have to take that part out, and then you have to find a better part, and you have to put it back in, and then maybe the bloody thing will work.

But like a high-level abstract solution to that, like helicopters aren't useful. It's like, not helpful.

And I use the helicopter example because with a military helicopter, if I remember correctly, you have to perform about 30 hours of maintenance for each hour the thing is in the air. Because what's a helicopter? It's a big lump of metal.

It's really hard to get those things to stay in the air. Everything we do is like that. You know, the fact that the electricity is working in this room is a bloody miracle.

Like, it's unbelievable that it works, and there it is working. We don't even have to pay any attention to it, and it always works.

It's like, don't fix that. That's kind of like a bit of a response to nihilism.

Yeah, because that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to figure out the...

Yes, that's the big talk on Thursday. Right, right. Well, you should—so that's also part of what people talk about when they talk about humility.

Because if you look at classic religious virtues, and this is true, I believe, it's true of virtually every religious system that I've been able to study. You know, it's like humility. Okay, so what does that mean? Start at the bottom.

You know, it's like fix the little things. But then the other thing is little things aren't little. You just, you know, they're not little.

We already went through that with the example of mealtime. It's like, well how much fuss should you make about meals? Well, it's 20% of your life.

So how much fuss should you make about that? Well, you should expend 20% of your energy getting that right.

And if you get it right, it's like an art, right? Because meal preparation is—people are highly social. They're highly social eaters. If they're not eating socially, their eating goes backslide right away; they can't regulate their intake, and you see this with isolated people all the time.

They don't even eat, or if they do eat, it's like popcorn and gummy worms or something, it's really not good. And so it's very—eating behavior among human beings is very, very complex.

We're omnivores, so we have way too much choice. Plus we're social eaters, you know, so it's hard to get that right.

If you don't get it right, everyone's sick and miserable and unhappy and irritable. So, and if you get it right, it's like you bring it right up to the level of aesthetics and art.

It's like that's way better. So, you know, when also when you're thinking about things like the meaning of life, life has all sorts of meanings, many, many meanings.

Then the meanings are arranged in a hierarchy. So whether there's a meaning or many meanings depend on where you look in the hierarchy, but if you want your life to be better, which might be some element of meaningful life.

One of the things you can start doing is start doing all the things that you actually do right. Well, that'll improve things a lot.

Then, once you improve those things, then the way you're looking at the problem isn't even going to be the same. Fix the micro-routines and then see what happens.

It's like you might find that if you get all the micro-routines running properly, the whole problem of nihilism just vanishes. So at least it's worth a shot.

So, okay, now here's the next thing we're going to figure out. It's like how does that hierarchy come into being? Now for a long time, and this is also a Nietzschean observation, for a long time—and this is also the basis of conspiracy theory sociology, I would say roughly speaking—it’s like Freud critiqued religion. He said that it was a defense against death anxiety.

There's a couple of problems with a critique like that. It's like it's partly a defense against death anxiety. One of the things that you really want to watch when you're listening to thinkers and when you're trying to figure out how to organize your thought is you really want to be skeptical of people who boil things down to one principle.

For example, Marx, it's economics and class struggle. It's like, well, is that relevant to the study of societies? Yes, we’re structured in dominance hierarchies and we trade. It's a big deal.

It's not the problem; it's one of many complex problems. If you take a Marxist view of history, what you basically do is you take a look at history and you interpret it through a prior set of axioms which is that everything that happened was determined by economic causes.

Well, the thing is, you can do that because every single thing that ever happened is determined in part by economic consequences. All you have to do is ignore all the other causes and come up with a really coherent narrative that you can do.

And anybody who's a Marxist can do that in like 310 of a second because it's like a machine. You know, it's like what was—it's funny; I was talking to a guy the other day, and he's an ideologue, and I asked him a question. This has been bugging me for a long time.

It's like I thought, you know, if everybody cheats on their income tax, right, and so that's not so good because the government can't work, and then the economy fails, and then everyone starves. So you might say, "Why shouldn't you cheat on your income tax?"

The answer is, "Well, then the government won't work, and the economy will collapse, and everyone will starve."

So don't cheat on your income tax, you know? You think, "Well, I can cheat, and that won't really matter." It's like, "No, it matters; here's why."

So let's say you're doing your income tax, and you're pissed off about it because, like, you know, you're giving away your money, and you don't know it's if it's being well-spent. Of course, mostly it's not because mostly nothing works very well, and so you think, "Well, I can cheat because I'm only one person, and you know how—how does it matter?"

But then you think, imagine we were all supposed to put money into a pool and then take money out, and I knew that one of you wasn't putting money in the pool but that you were going to take it out.

I'd think, "Ah, well, whatever, one person, you know, crooked psychopath. We'll just—we don't have to worry about that person."

Then it's like three people, and then it's like eight, and then it's 10, and then it's—you know, 10% of the room.

10% seems to be something like a tipping point. At some point, certainly if you're the only person putting money in that pot and everyone else is taking it out, anybody with any sense is going to think that they’re a complete blithering idiot, and they're going to stop playing that game.

So the question is, at what point do you collect enough cheaters so that the people who are basically honest start feeling like the game is crooked and quit playing?

Well, the answer is probably something like 10%.

So, all right, back to the Freudian. Now I don't remember why I told you that story. It had to do with economic determination.

Oh, right, thank you. Thank you. So this is the story. So I'm thinking, well, if that's the case, if like 10% is a tipping point or 30%, I don't care—whatever it is, 50%, I don't care—there's a tipping point.

At some point, if it's a minority of people, if they're corrupt, they can bring down the whole system. How in the world do you ever create a system that isn't corrupt?

Because all everybody almost has to play it honestly before the thing will work. How do people get from the point where it's chaotic and corrupt, which is the case in most of the world, by the way, right? Most places are in insanely corrupt; some places aren't.

It's like, how the hell did that happen? I don't get it. It doesn't seem possible to me that that happened. I can't understand it because the default is obviously chaos and corruption; that's easy.

So anybody can do that. Sometimes systems work, and they're more or less honest—like eBay is a really good example of that.

It's like, poof—up—props, eBay; what's the average level of cheating? It's like zero.

You know, it's unbelievably honest, and it's a miracle—nobody thought that would happen. So how the hell does that happen?

So I was asking a friend of mine and this guy too, and I laid this out, and like I didn't even get finished with the question, and he said, "Government."

I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Oh, it's those places that don't have too much government that are honest."

It's like, well, thank you! I mean, I thought that was a complicated problem, you know? And here are you, you didn't even have to listen to the whole damn question before you had an answer.

It's government! Oh, well, I'll stop thinking about that right now.

It's like, "God, really? Really? Come on!" You know, one single causal answer to complex questions is like all that happening there is that the person is playing an intellectual game.

That's all that's happening. They've got the set of axioms they've learned how to manipulate. It's like a chess game, basically, and no matter what the problem is that you throw at them, they can run them through the algorithm and pop out an answer.

It's not helpful. Because for me, for example, that question only sets even if he's right, it only sets the problem back one step.

It's okay, if government is the cause of corruption, which it isn't, it's a cause of corruption; it's also the solution to corruption.

But if it is the cause of corruption, then how come some places have more government than others? It's like there's no information in that statement.

All there is is a rephrasing of the problem. It looks like an answer; it's got nothing to do with an answer.

So, and one of the things that really disturbs me about modern university education is that, you know, a quarter of the people who are in the humanities end of the distribution are being taught to think this way.

It's like, "Well, here's a little rubric." Power, that would be the postmodernist deconstructionist routine, courtesy of Derrida, who was a Marxist. You take his propositions, and you can apply them to everything.

It's not helpful, and it's not thinking. It doesn't do anything; it just gives you the illusion of thinking.

So, okay, so let me just think here now for a minute. So we were talking about ideological propositions.

Yes, yes. Okay, so what seemed to happen once the slots were knocked out—the assumption that there were fundamental assumptions that you could rely on.

So let's say, like, the existence of God and that your relationship to God was an indication of the greater good and that the greater good was an actual concrete thing in some sense.

Once the intellectual slots were knocked out from underneath that, then, as Nietzsche pointed out, the power of organized religion started to decline.

Now, it hasn't declined as rapidly or as thoroughly as everyone thought it might in the 20th century, right? Because the Americans have a pretty thriving Christianity on the right wing.

Then, of course, there are all sorts of fundamentalist movements all over the world, but we'll just put that aside for now. It doesn't really have anything to do with the main issue in some sense.

Okay, so then what is a consequence of not having the great cultural narratives anymore?

Well, there seems to be two. One is everything's up in the air, and no one knows what to do, and everybody has a question about every single level of the hierarchy—like why are we doing this?

What's the meaning of life? Should we bother doing anything at all? Are we running around destroying the planet? You know, so on and so forth. So it's chaotic.

The other one is people just transmute their religious beliefs into another kind of monotheistic explanation that's based on some intellectual proposition.

With the Marxists, for example, it would be economic relationships with people. For Freud, Freud was not an unsophisticated thinker, but he did try to boil everything down to sex and aggression, mostly sex, and he had his reasons.

He said, "Without sex, you don't propagate, and propagation is obviously necessary for the continuation of life, and therefore sexuality must be a main function."

It's a powerful claim, but we do know, if you look at biological systems, we know that your motivational systems are disparate. They don't seem to unite themselves into a single motivational system