2016 Lecture 08 Maps of Meaning: Part I: Hierarchies and chaos

Alright, so I was thinking today about how to explain this a little bit further. So let’s say you’re going for a job interview. And you’re nervous about it. And you go into the job interview and there are some people there, and some chairs and tables, and a room that’s like this, maybe not quite this ugly, but something like this.

What’s in the room? You’re nervous. You’ve seen chairs and tables before, you’ve seen people. What’s in the room? How about a set of alternate futures? Right? You know, that isn’t how we think. It’s how we act. And you know, if you talk about it, I was nervous about going to this job interview. Why? Well I thought I might be evaluated. Okay, well why does that matter? Well, we know partly why it matters if we look at this figure again.

I’m pretty happy with this figure, all things considered. You know, and you might say, well if I… maybe it’ll shape my faith and my belief that I’m a good person. That would be a little silly for an interview. So if you’re thinking that way I would say you’re not thinking specifically enough. Because there’s lots of reasons you might not do well at the job interview, including the fact that they might have already given the job to someone else, for all you know.

So you don’t want to leap to the top of the hierarchy without cause. So one of the things you might say is that in the room there, there are threats that might be posed to any level of the hierarchy of beliefs and behaviours that you use to interact with the world. Now the terror management people would tell you… let’s assume that this [points to figure on board] is a belief structure. I don’t care whether you agree with the way it’s represented graphically or not, for the time being, but let’s just assume that what we’re talking about is a belief structure.

Now the terror management people would tell you that you have that belief structure, in large part to protect you from the fear of death, from death anxiety. But there’s a bunch of problems with that idea, not least that it actually side-steps the issue of the function of the belief system. It’s like, you don’t exactly have a belief system to make philosophical sense out of the world. You have a system of tools, that are embodied, that allow you to actually act in the world.

Now you might also have an articulated representation of that on top that’s more or less accurate. Probably less, all things considered. And you know, maybe if your faith in that is shaken, your faith in what you do will also be shaken, because the two things are associated. But we should always remember that a belief system doesn’t just protect you from the fear of death, it protects you from death. And that’s a lot different, you know.

I mean, this whole thing is your set of skills, and the perceptions and thoughts and emotions that go along with those skills, and then it’s an integrated structure consisting of the particular manner in which you’ve integrated all your own little sub-parts and then in relationship to the whole community. You could also think about it, in some sense, as a holographic representation of the culture.

Now, I don’t know how much you guys know about holographs. I don’t know very much about them either. But there are some things I know about them… so if you shine a light on a holograph, you’ll get a 3D image of whatever was there when the holograph was created; it’s created by lasers. And if you take a holograph and you break it into pieces, and then you shine a light on the pieces, you get the object in each piece. But it’s low resolution. It’s a nice way of thinking about a person. Like if your brain is damaged you’ll be there, but as a lower resolution representation of yourself.

But it’s also a really nice way of thinking about what culture is. You know, culture is this massive structure of multiple levels and domains, but it’s reflected in each of us. Like, we’re each partial carriers of it. So we embody a partial representation of the structure. I mean literally, we embody it. And then we also represent it abstractly. And you know, part of the reason that you go to a university is to, in some sense, improve your capacity to articulate your structure.

Right, because you’re a cultural creature… it’s like, why are you the way you are? Well, some of it is psychological, some of it is sociological, some of it is historical. Like a lot of it is historical. So when you go and you study a social science or a humanity, you’re studying your own personality. Now, I wrote a paper a while back with a couple of my graduate students, and I think it was called The Entropy… God, you’d think I would remember this… The Entropy… doesn’t matter.

The hypothesis was, and this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, that the world is very, very complex, and so what that means is that the act of getting from one place to another is often very, very difficult. And part of what you’re doing when you put together a functional sub-module is you’re putting together a little routine that will enable you to transform some part of time and space from what it is into what you want it to be.

And in some sense what you’re doing is reducing the complexity of that situation. So imagine this, you’re going for your job interview. And you’re knocking ‘em dead. What happens? Well, a whole bunch of possibilities, all that set of possibilities that was concerning you, starts to collapse towards a single solution. And that single solution is, if you’re doing very well in the interview, it’s a positive solution. So your anxiety disappears and it’s replaced with positive emotion.

You get enthusiastic and excited, because what’s happening in that room is that the path to a desirable future is opening. Now you can’t see any of this, you know, because we’re so blinded by the idea that we see objects… we fail to perceive, in any articulated sense, what it is that we’re actually dealing with. And I think that one way of thinking about it is that you’re always on the edge of something that’s potential, and that’s where you exist.

You exist on this moving boundary of potential. And you can interact with it such that you form it and it passes by you into the past. And hopefully you’re forming it in a way that is in concordance with your better health and perhaps with the better health of the people around you, that would be optimal. So you’re realizing the potential in a genuine, non-metaphorical sense. And that’s the thing about these representations, you know. They’re often described as mythical, or mythological, or metaphorical.

But you know, they’re really not metaphorical. Well, that’s not exactly right, because the Great Mother, the Great Father, they’re partially metaphorical but the thing that they stand for as metaphors is something other than the things that we conceptualize when we look at the world from an objective perspective. Now, we’ve talked a little bit about the figure of the Dragon of Chaos, and I think that out of all the metaphorical images, it’s the most difficult to grasp, because it’s that which has not yet been encountered, so it’s neither unknown nor known.

And you think, well you can’t even describe that. Yeah, but you can encounter it, and you can encounter it when you go into a situation that’s radically new. Let’s say it’s just the second before you walk into a high-stakes interview, you know, just before you open the door. I would say that’s as close as you get, in a normal day, to a direct encounter with the dragon of chaos, because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

And to say, well, you’re in a room and there’s a door in front of you, you know it’s almost moronic to think of it that way, right? Because what the hell does that have to do with anything? It’s… what’s in there is unbelievably… like it’s the localization of unbelievably complex webs of causality. That’s what’s waiting for you inside that room. And then you might say, well is it structured in any real way, and the answer to that is not really. It’s no more structured than… it’s even less structured than a book you’re reading.

You know, if you’re reading a book you might say, well where’s the meaning in this book? And the answer to that is, well it’s not in the book. Like it’s partly there, because you need the words and the sentences and the paragraphs and all that, but you need the whole cultural context around it in order to interpret it. So you’re not reading it blank. You come to it with a set of, a very large set of presuppositions. Enough of them so that you can understand the author.

Now maybe you can’t, and the book’s over your head, or it’s badly written, but typically, you come at it with the machinery in place, so that when you interact with the words and the phrases and the sentences and so forth, revelations of new meaning pour forth. And so, I don’t know how to say it any clearer than that, that’s what the meaning of the book is. And it’s in the dialectical interaction between you and the book.

Well, if you walk into an interview room, it’s even less given, in some sense, than the book, right. Because what’s going to happen in there, which really means which of the many futures that that room contains is going to manifest itself, depends very much on how you act. So, it’s in that way that you collapse the potential that’s in a particular place and you extract something out of it that’s… well, and that’s when it gets tricky… neutral, positive, or negative? Maybe you bomb the interview, right?

And then you might say, well what’s happened? What happened? Well that’s a very complicated question. Then you’re stuck with this hierarchy, right. And that’s what you’re going to do when you go home. You’re going to say “well maybe I didn’t dress properly, or maybe I didn’t get to the interview on time, or they asked me a bunch of questions I wasn’t prepared for, or Jesus, I didn’t know anything about what’s going on, my whole education was a waste of time, and what the hell am I doing”?

And then you might go “I’m never going to get a job”. And you know, you could say in some sense that all of those hypotheses, as you move up and down the hierarchy, you move from trivial trouble to really not good trouble, as you bounce, and all of that is an attempt to specify, in some sense, what that room contained. And it’s not easy. It’s weird too, because the room can contain things that alter your past. Because maybe you say, well maybe you’re going for a computer science job, maybe you’re not, whatever.

You go in there and you think you’re the top person in your class, and maybe you were, but you know the people in there are so far ahead of you that you can’t even imagine ever catching up. And you know, when you come out of there, the manner in which you construe your educational history is going to be radically transformed. So there’s a lot of trouble in that room. There’s a lot. Now one of the things we thought in this paper… you can think of each of those little eggs, they’re really eggs, as a container, and what they contain is entropy, trouble.

And the smaller ones contain smaller amounts of entropy and the bigger ones contain bigger amounts of entropy. And so, here’s another example. You’re driving down the highway and your car sputters and grinds to a halt. Maybe it makes a nice radical noise while it’s doing it. So okay, well, what happened? Well the answer is, the simple answer is, your car malfunctioned and you had to pull off the road. That’s a really object-oriented analysis. But what’s actually happened is that you had a conceptualization of the car as a pragmatic tool, because what do you know about the damn car?

The car was an affordance, that’s the right word, that would get you from point A to point B, and you could have a very low-resolution model of it, right? It can just look like a plastic shell, which is sort of what a car looks like. And as long as you see how low-resolution that is, you could replace it with a cartoon and you wouldn’t even notice. That’s good enough representation as long as the thing is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. But as soon as it stops doing what it’s supposed to be doing then it could be any old thing.

And you think, well what does any old thing mean? Well maybe you’re on a deserted highway and it’s one o’clock in the morning. And you know, someone pulls over to help you. Okay, well, what’s that? Well, you know, believe me, your imagination will rapidly span the world of possibility from “oh good, someone’s come to help” to “I’m going to be dragged off in the bush and killed”. And that’s all contained in that sequence of events.

And then even if no one does stop, and you have to worry about exactly what’s gone wrong, and you have to worry about how you’re going to fix it and you have to worry about the mechanic that might help you, and you have to concern yourself with whether or not you’re going to need a new car, and then you have to think about your finances. It’s like, the idea that that car is a bounded entity, like it looks, is only true when it works. And as soon as it doesn’t work, then God, it’s any old thing.

And that, in some sense, is the dragon of chaos. Now, what seems to me to have happened… because you might think, well how did people come to conceptualize such a thing, because I would think that, of all the things that are difficult to conceptualize, the category of all things that you have not yet encountered is the most difficult thing to discover, right? It’s kind of like zero. It took people a long time to figure out zero, and no wonder. We need a symbol for nothing. Well, this is even worse. We need a representation for potential.

Well, you think, why? Well it’s because it’s actually potential that you’re interacting with all the time. Now what seems to me to have happened was that… you know, this is an evolutionary just-so story, so I’m not assuming that it worked precisely this way, but it doesn’t matter. Because I’m going to touch on the appropriate features. Well one of the things we know about social animals, generally speaking, and animals in general, is that they have a territory, right? And so you think, well what is their territory exactly?

And you might say, well you can mark it out. Here’s a… oh, what would have a territory? Like a tiger, they’re pretty solitary, so it’ll be simple. They have a big territory, right? And it’s hundreds of square miles. And the reason for that is, well they’re tigers. You can’t have like fifty of them, because they’ll just eat everything that’s there. You know, you have to have a big territory to support one apex predator. So then you might say, well what exactly is the territory of the tiger? And you’d say well here are its boundaries.

This is where it roams. But that’s not the right way of thinking about the territory of the tiger. Because the territory of the tiger is actually all the places where, when the tiger does its thing, the things that the tiger wants or expects, happen. That’s the tiger’s territory. It’s the same with you. You’re at home wherever you know what to do. And what you’re doing when you know what to do is you know how to match this hierarchy, which is partly action-oriented, you know how to match the hierarchy with the situation.

So that when you put it into practice, the potential that’s there transforms itself into what you’re aiming at. And that’s your territory. And you need to think about it that way because your territory can shift very rapidly on you, and if you think about it geographically, it’s kind of confusing. So let’s say you’re on the subway that you always take. And then someone sits down beside you and they’re muttering away madly and they have a pretty malevolent look on their face. And you get a glimpse inside their coat and there’s a knife.

It’s like, you’re not in your territory anymore! And the fact that all of the objective entities are still there arrayed around you is just a… it’s nothing more than a… it’s a delusion at that point to think that those things characterize where you are. Okay so, if you’re willing to consider territory as that… it’s a space-time continuum, okay? And the reason I’m stressing that… I mean, first of all, whatever reality is, is a space-time continuum, right? It’s got three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

And everyone knows that, as we sit here, more or less stable in three dimensions, time flows past us, in some sense. And so the three-dimensional reality is transforming all by itself, just because of time. Okay, and so when we’re mapping out our territories, we map out space-time territories. And so, that means that not only do you know where you are, you know when you are. And if you’re in your territory you know how to act through that place and that time so that you transform the potential that’s there into whatever it is that you’re aiming at.

Okay, so that’s your territory. Now, that territory is isomorphic evolutionarily with lots of things, which you could also confuse geographically. So you might think of a human territory as something like… it’s probably, the fundamental human territory is probably a fire. And so the fire is a place of light in the darkness and then you could think of rings, concentric rings of relative safety surrounding the fire. So right beside the fire, where it’s warm and light and there’s lots of other people, man that’s explored territory, you know?

But then if you start wandering away from the fire into the bush, especially if you’re in a very biologically active area, then the farther away you get from the fire the more you’re going outside your territory. And you can tell that’s happening because your whole nervous system starts to function differently. What happens is that the nervous system parts that you were using while you were in known territory, they just shut down, and then other nervous system elements that you used in unknown territory start to turn on.

And generally you’re not very happy about that. Because when you’re aware you’ve mastered the territory, you can presume that neutral or moderately good things are going to happen, with the possibility of something great now and then. But as you move away from that, it flips in some sense to “I don’t know what’s going on here and I might fall” to “something’s going to bite me” to “I’m going to die a painful death”, you know, and you don’t use the same circuits to process the first situation to process the first situation as you do to process the second. You don’t even like having the second one on.

So you know what it’s like… maybe you’ve been feeling a bit down, because that always helps, and you wake up at three in the morning and you’re worrying about six things and you hear some random noise somewhere there shouldn’t be a random noise. Well, how you feel right then, that’s what it is like to have the system that deals with the unexpected ‘on’. You’re like a prey animal. Really, really, exactly like one, because that’s what you actually are in many ways. So you know, your whole biology transforms so that you’re prepared for God only knows what.

Well, what seemed to have happened in the course of evolution was that, when we were smaller creatures, and far after that, before let’s say we figured out how to use throwing sticks and slings, and then later maybe bows and arrows, or maybe even sticks, like, we were getting eaten a lot. I think I told you guys last week that they just discovered this damn cat in Africa that looks like it preyed on our fore-bearers. And we have pretty hard skulls so the normal cat can’t really gnaw through them, but this cat had a special set of teeth, and if it grabbed the front of your head it would drive one of its teeth right through the back of your skull.

So you know, the hominids were preyed on enough so that they had their own predators. Well, so you know, that’s just not very pleasant. And then, that’s by the time we were hominids. You can go back farther than that to when we were little tree rats, roughly speaking, and then all sorts of things were eating us. There were a lot of reptiles back then, sixty million years ago, and they weren’t pleasant. There were still dinosaurs around sixty million years ago. You know, that’s a lot of evolutionary time for us to have developed biological systems that distinguish between places we’re safe and places we’re not safe.

Well, you roughly have one set of neuropsychological, neuropsychophysiological functions for familiar territory and another set for unfamiliar territory. Now what I would say… this is where this becomes, I think, radically different to terror management theory, what these hierarchy is doing when it’s functioning is shutting off… is keeping a system that operates in unexplored territory shut off. And you like that. And that’s when you’re calm.

Like you are in here, you’re relatively at home here, because you assume that you know how to act here, as long as you sit and ask questions more or less appropriately and you don’t bother people and you don’t talk on your phone, and various other things, the probability that you’re going to be confronted by an angry primate or some other predator is very, very low. And so, you’d say, well you’re normal. You feel like you do normally here. But I would say the only reason you feel that way normally to begin with is because you don’t go places where you feel not normal. You stay away from them.

And everyone knows what those places are like. I saw a real cool example of this once. I was down by OCAD at about midnight on a Saturday night. You know, it was in the summer so there were all these kids, really, wandering around in their party clothes and going to the clubs. And I was standing there watching and I looked through a park at this street that runs by near OCAD and there were these houses. There was a row of houses and there were three houses here and they were all really nicely taken care of, then there was a house here, and then there were some more houses over here that were well taken care of.

And that house in the middle was condemned. So the roof was rotting and they’d boarded up all the windows, and the fence was falling off and there was garbage in the yard, it was a derelict place, you know. So that’s kind of a spooky place. Well, while I was standing there this guy walked down the street, and he was very intoxicated, and he wasn’t very happy and he was sort of muttering to himself. And he passed the three houses that were in pretty good shape, and then as soon as he got in front of the house that was derelict, he just started to rant, and he was pounding up and down and muttering paranoid things, and you know, sounding really dangerous.

But he kept more or less moving forward, and then just after he got back past that borderline and back into the more or less normal neighborhood, he switched back to just mumbling quietly and kept moving forward. And you know he was just so damn intoxicated, there isn’t a possibility that he noticed what had happened, but he was being cued by the surroundings, you know, and it was a different ‘him’ when he was in unexplored territory, something that had degenerated back into chaos.

So the anger and aggression came out of him because that’s often necessary if you’re going to be where there’s chaos. You know, and chaos can burst forth, and does, all the time in people’s lives, you know. If you’re sitting around the dinner table with your family, and everything’s going pretty well but someone touches on one of those topics that you should just shut the hell up about, it can take almost no time at all before the whole thing unravels, and then God only knows where you are. And it’s not pleasant.

So instead of our belief systems protecting us from death anxiety, our hierarchical pragmatic systems for interacting with the world stop the parts of our brain that deal with the unexpected from being on. And they don’t do that because we believe, they do that because when we enact those structures, all hell doesn’t break loose. So there’s nothing illusory about it. Now, you know, you might say, well, in the final analysis, does it really protect you from chaos? And you know, that’s an okay question, but most of the time that’s irrelevant.

It isn’t always irrelevant, but most of the time it just doesn’t matter. And the other thing is that much of the time it doesn’t even matter if you believe this. By which I would mean, you have an articulated representation of it, it’s also a self-representation, and you carry that around, and maybe you have a crisis of faith and you don’t believe in that, you still act all this stuff out. And most of the time you’re still extremely well-protected by it. So it’s more robust than merely the articulated or imagined version. It’s a lot deeper than that. It’s only a tiny part of its structure.

And so, we should never really talk about ‘belief systems’ exactly, especially not if they’re shared with very many other people, because they’re not structures of belief, they’re much deeper structures than that. And the belief part is only a pale reflection of the underlying reality. Okay, so that… I presume that makes sense, and you can make sense of that in your own life. You know, there are other things that can happen too that I should mention, is lots of times people have chaos… you know, you think your body is explored territory, it’s sort of the ultimate explored territory.

But I would say, don’t get too convinced about that. That can also switch in a moment, and it happens to people all the time. So if you get a tooth pulled, it takes your tongue like three months to map the inside of your mouth again. So that’s re-familiarising your brain with the new territory, right? And that’s very, very complicated. So your body representation is extremely complicated. And it’s really easy to screw up. So if you have someone go like that [crosses forearms and hands and fingers] and then you point to one of their fingers in the middle and get them to move it (don’t touch it), they often can’t, because just that’s enough to boggle up their visual representation of their body.

And so you can play all sorts of tricks on people that way. So you know, your map of your body and your body are sort of reasonably well associated, but they can be dissociated quite rapidly, and you know that happens when, maybe you get a little hypochondriacal and start worrying about your health. Something’s bugging you and you don’t exactly know what it is. It’s like, well, all of a sudden you get alienated from your body. And that can get really serious.

And I’ve seen people after a car accident, this was the most striking of this, this client I had had her shoulder up like this [stiffens right shoulder]. And I noticed she never really looked in the direction of that arm and when she moved it she’d only move it about this far. And after seeing her for a while I thought “oh, she’s afraid of that arm”. Now it had been hurt. Well why would you get afraid of your arm? Well, it doesn’t act like it used to, so that’s annoying. And then when you move it wrong it hurts, and then you also don’t know that if you move it wrong and it hurts, whether you’re making it worse.

So then you just kind of ignore it, and then it’s sort of your arm and sort of not your arm. And I had her at one point, we just practiced just doing this [loosens shoulder]. I’d say, I’d do the action and say “can you do this?” [Raises left arm slightly]. She’d do it. And then I’d go “well can you do this?” [Raises arm slightly higher]. And she’d do it. And then I’d say “can you do this?” [Raises arm even higher]. We just kept doing this, it only took about half an hour until she was up here [arm fully raised], and she said “I haven’t put my arm up there for two years!”

And then I did the same thing with her shoulder. I said, “Can you lift your shoulder?” “No.” “Can you lift it one-sixteenth of an inch?” Well, she could do that. Well, you know, sixteen times one-sixteenth of an inch is an inch, and that’s starting to get there. And you know, she did this a bunch and then her arm went down. So she’d been holding the damn arm up for two years. Just try that. You know, I mean you do this [raises arm] for five minutes and see what happens, just hold your shoulder up there for two years and see what that does to the entire right side of your body. Like it’s really, really stressful.

And then I did something strange, then, which was a whim, but I think it was because I was embodying her because I was paying so close attention. I asked her to come lean over my desk because there was something about the way she was holding herself that was really bugging me. And so I asked her just to lean over my desk and I pounded on her back down her spinal cord and she drooped her shoulders again and then she cried for about half an hour. And again, it was because she’d got hit by a car, that’s just how she was, she just walked around like that, permanently, more or less. And we worked it out of her reasonably well.

But even your own damn body can become unexplored territory. And that’s another way of understanding that yin-yang symbol, right? You’ve got the black serpent, paisley, and it’s got a little white dot in it. Which means that sometimes when things are really broken all to hell a solution can come blasting forth and chaos turns into order. But more likely, you know, everything’s going pretty nicely and up something comes and the chaos spills into the order.

And that’s the world you live in. And that’s not a metaphor. And it’s really interesting to know that, because then the question becomes “okay, well, what do you do in order and what do you do in chaos?’ Those are useful things to know. We kind of know what to do in order because that sort of defines order. But we don’t really know what to do in chaos, you know. In fact the field of mental health is in some sense an attempt to figure that out.

But I can tell you some things to do when you’re in chaos. So let’s say you’re dealing with someone who’s very, very ill. Or maybe it’s you that’s very, very ill. And so God only knows what’s going to happen in the future. Or even next week. Well, the first thing you do is stop thinking about next week and the future. Because it’s not calculable, right? The pathways have become so multiple and so uncontrollable that if you think about them it’s just going to hurt you.

And so, you know, you can’t just not think about it, because that doesn’t work. But what you can do is narrow your timeframe of analysis. You know, so instead of worrying about the week, you think okay, well let’s make this day as good as it can be. And then if you’re really stressed, it’s like, no we’re going to really work on this hour. And so what happens is you hyper-attend to the local space-time area and that’s what you’ve got. You can work with that. And it really works. Like if you’re dealing with people who are dying, for example, that’s what you do.

You zero in to the right level of resolution, fundamentally. And you can tell when it’s the right level of resolution because you don’t feel like you don’t know what you’re doing anymore. “What am I doing here, what am I supposed to do here, what does all this mean?” You don’t feel that anymore. Because those are the wrong questions at that point in time. And you know, maybe you try to make the person comfortable, and you pay attention, so you can take the right micro-movements and the right micro-attitudes in those critical moments, and that’s what you do.

And so that’s one way of dealing with the underworld and you need to know that, because it’s going to happen. So if you’re really stressed, you think about smaller amounts of space and time. And you try to get them right, it’s still important to get it right, but the entropy is so high at that point, the landscape is so complicated, that there’s no that you can map more than a few moments at a time. But it turns out often that that’s okay. That’s good enough.

You know, obviously it’s not optimal, but one thing you can be sure of is you can take a terrible situation and you can make it a hell of a lot worse. So you know, if it’s a terrible situation and you manage it as well as it can be managed, then maybe it’s only terrible. But if you take a terrible situation and you manage it really badly, then it can be something that you never, ever recover from. So, I’m not trying to be hyper-optimistic about this, I know people go through rough times.

But there’s a difference between tragedy and hell. And tragedy is when something happens and you’re awake. And hell is when something terrible happens and you’re not awake. And that’s a place you really don’t want to go. So then the death of your father could turn into the obliteration of your entire family. Well, you know, the first is bad enough, but the second might well be unbearable.

You know, because people often fight in circumstances like that, and the family gets very, very stressed. It’s very common, for example, if a couple has a sick child or a child that dies that they get divorced. It’s not surprising, you know. It’s not like they have a psychological problem, they have a real problem. And they might be amplifying it with their psychological problems, but all problems are not psychological.

And that’s also useful to know, because if you end up somewhere that you don’t expect, you’re going to be thinking (especially if you’re conscientious): “If I wasn’t such a useless fool, I would have never ended up here”. And there’s a much more pessimistic thought than that that’s much more useful, which is: whether you were a fool or not you were going to end up somewhere like this now and then. And you might think, God, that’s a horrible thing to think, because that means that our destinies are uncontrollable, at least in part.

It’s like, yeah they are. So partly what that means is prepare yourself for that, and don’t pound yourself into the ground when you get there. Because it happens to people, and it isn’t necessarily the case that the reason it happened to you is because you’re useless. Now, that might have furthered the process and all that, but you just don’t need those thoughts at that time. All they do is undermine you.

And when you know “yeah, you know, everybody’s dog dies” (which is true), it’s like, well, it takes some of the guilt out of it, and the guilt is something that at that point you don’t really need. Okay, so, you’ve got your explored territory, and we’ve kind of walked through what that is, and then you have your unexplored territory. And then you have the things that sort of exist on the fringe.

I would say in some sense the things that exist on the fringe closer to the unknown, those are usually symbolized by the Terrible Mother. And then the order is symbolized by the Terrible Father. And then the chaos that’s beyond order… the unknown that’s beyond order and chaos, that’s the Dragon of Chaos. Now it’s a reptile, right, a reptilian carnivore. It’s a reptilian carnivore that has a variety of interesting properties.

So let me show you some of the pictures that I’ve got of the dragon of chaos. This is a good one. So that’s a figure called an ‘Ouroboros’, and you can say in some sense that that’s one of the first graphical representations of the infinite. You know, we have a symbol for infinity, right, which is another thing that’s pretty weird to symbolize, because you’re encapsulating something that can’t be encapsulated inside a capsule, right. It’s very sneaky to be able to do that.

And you actually need it to do advanced mathematics of all sorts of kinds. So it’s real, at least insofar as you can use it as a tool. So let me tell you a few things about this symbol, this representation. It’s kind of like the Judeo-Christian idea of God being the Alpha and Omega. Which is this thing that exists from the beginning of time all the way to the end of time. So it’s something that exists outside of time.

So you could think about this, at one level, as the eternal presence of The Predator. Predators come and go; The Predator never goes away. So it’s got this God-like… you could say the spirit of The Predator never disappears. And as soon as you think that way then you have some idea about what archaic people were doing when they were populating the world with spirits.

The difference between a spirit and an abstract idea is like, there’s no difference. The spirit of The Predator inhabits the jungle. It’s like, yeah, that’s for sure. And you should be very careful of disturbing such spirits when you go in there. Well so then you might ask yourself, well, what is a predator? Well, that’s a complicated thing, because we would say, because we’re scientifically-minded, that you can take predators and you can classify according to their species and their sub-species and their phyla and all that sort of thing, right.

We think about classifying them as objects, and then maybe in terms of their evolutionary origins. But that’s not very helpful. You know, if something jumps out and wants to eat you, I mean, knowing what it is might help you plot your escape but all those additional complexities, they’re just not the relevant issue at that point. The relevant issue is, how do you keep the predators away from your explored territory?

Well, now that’s a complicated question, because you might say: what do you mean by that? Do you mean right now, while you’re walking through the bush? Do you mean right now for you and your family, while all of you are walking through the bush? There’s this old joke about these two guys that go out in the forest, and one guy says to the other: “There’s grizzly bears here, so you have to be careful.” And then the other guy says, “Well, how fast can you run?” And the first guy says “Well, don’t you mean how fast does the grizzly bear run?”

And the other guy says “No that isn’t what I mean I just want to know if I can run faster than you.” [Laughter]. Right, right. So the reason I’m telling you that stupid joke is because what you want as an answer to a question depends on exactly how you put the question. And so, the answer there was “well I don’t care if the grizzly bear eats someone as long as it’s not me.” Okay, fine, so that’s one answer to the question.

But then you might think, well let’s keep the grizzly bears away from me now, my family now, my tribe now, me tomorrow, my family tomorrow, my tribe tomorrow, then across the week, then across the month, then across the years, then maybe forever. Okay so how is it that you have to act so that you keep the predators away? Well, that starts to become an extraordinarily complicated problem.

Because the simple solution might be, well when there’s a predator around, climb a tree or run into a hole, which is what lots of animals do. But it’s a pretty partial solution. They don’t get eaten that day, but what about tomorrow, when the predator’s a little hungrier. It’s kind of a bone-headed solution, all things considered. So then you might say, well, if we thought of the spirit of the predator, which is more like the fact that there is a class of predators and they’re never going to go away, then the question that we have to answer is, how do we act so that that class that’s eternal doesn’t bother us any more than necessary?

Well that’s really complicated. Really, really complicated. Because it might mean, in some sense, well, how should you act? Because conquering the problem of having your territory invaded, there’s not just reptilian and mammalian predators, right, like bird-things with teeth, there’s other people. And they’re a lot worse than anything else that’s going to come at you, so you also have that problem, how do you keep yourself away from the predatory people and the foreign tribes that are going to invade your land and take it.

So there’s no difference between that question and how do you establish the security of a nation, roughly speaking. Or maybe even how do you establish peace? You know what I mean? It’s a question that doesn’t have obvious borders. Okay, so one answer might be, stay away from the damn predators. So you build a big wall, or someone else does, and you hide inside the walls. Well, that’s not a bad solution, and of course, that’s what people started to do when they originally built cities, right?

They built these big walls, like Trump is going to build between Canada and the US, and it’ll keep the predators out. But of course, what do we know from the story of Genesis, and from the Daoist symbol? No matter how big the wall is, you can’t keep out the damn snakes. So you build a wall and all the snakes pop up inside, so it’s not a very good solution. And you know, that’s pretty obvious, right? I mean, my suspicions are that mass shooters who are native to the United States kill a lot more people in the US every week than illegal Mexican immigrants.

Well, so it’s like, what problem exactly are you solving? Okay, so the first question you have to solve when you’re… see there’s just no solution to this problem [open doors in the classroom?][Laughter]. So, why did you laugh at that, do you think? [Student: Because it opened again and it was unexpected?] Yeah, but why didn’t that terrify you? Well, you know, it’s related to the hierarchy issue, right? Because the door isn’t behaving properly.

So what’s funny about that? Well, it’s funny to watch someone’s little routine not work when the consequences are trivial. It’s like, oh well he knows how to close the door. Hahaha it’s not working. So now he’s got the problem of this door and that’s a stupid problem, so everyone can laugh about it, you know? So, little anomalies, that you can bind quickly, are common. And I think it’s an indication, to tell you the truth, I think it’s an indication of people’s transcendent ability.

Because what happens, comedians do this with you too, you know. So you’ll be sitting in the audience, and the comedian will say this thing and then this thing, and they’re connected in some way, but it’s not obvious. And then you go, click! And it’s like everybody celebrates their brilliance together, like “Oh I get it! Hahaha! Aren’t I smart?” And it transforms you from the puzzled thing into the solving thing.

And everyone really likes that. It’s like, “Yes! We solved it. We can go and combat the unknown together.” Okay, so you have this chaos thing here [points to figure]. As I said, that’s called an Ouroboros. The reason it’s got its tail in its mouth is… it’s a… the idea that that’s trying to represent is that this thing is complete unto itself. So it’s a symbol of totality. It’s everything. How? Well, you walk into the room where your interview is. You might say, what’s in there? Well a better question is, what’s not in there?

That’s a better question, because your whole damn future’s in there. And you don’t even know how much that branches. Your future’s in there. The future of your children is in there. The future of your grandchildren is in there. There’s these waves that go out from that room that in some sense, especially if you stretch them forward in time, have almost no boundary. You know, I mean, I don’t know, each of us is descended from one person. I don’t remember how many millions of years ago, but it’s not that many.

Two? Maybe it’s even earlier than that. 650,000 years? Something like that. So for all you know, one of you could be the person through whom the entire human race lived, and maybe it’s because you made the right decision in that interview. My point is that potential itself has no boundary, no obvious boundary. And you don’t know what you’re messing with when you’re messing with it. It’s very, very complicated.

So how should you do it? Well, this figure says, well you better watch out, because some of it is predatory, and it crawls along the ground, and it’s got teeth, and it’s no damn joke. And then you can think it’s sort of snake-like, because snakes sneak around through the grass. And then it’s sort of crocodile-like, because snakes don’t have teeth but crocodiles sure the hell do, and so do other predatory lizards.

And you know, as we’ve talked about before, the probability that our ancestral plains-dwelling African ancestors were regularly lunched upon by crocodiles is pretty damn high. Because how else would they get water? And you’ve got to be pretty mean before you can take on a Nile crocodile. I mean, I’m sure we did that fairly early in our evolutionary history, but before that a lot of us were snacks for lizards. Which seems… just not good, you know?

So this thing also lives in a hole, dragons usually live in holes or underground, like Harry Potter’s basilisk. And usually they’re immortal. They live in a cave, they’re immortal, right? They live forever, and you don’t want to bother them, because then they pop out of their hole, like they do in The Hobbit, and they come and burn down your village. It’s like, leave the damn dragon alone. Well, yes and no. Why not leave it alone?

Well, maybe it would be better to go get the dragon before it gets you. That’s certainly possible. And then there’s this other weird thing about dragons which is that they hoard treasure. So maybe you can go and confront the dragon and you get the treasure. And the treasure basically takes two forms. So there’s the St. George story, where the treasure is often a trapped, young female. And the other version is the dragon sits on gold.

So what’s the whole idea there? Well, maybe the best way to overcome the predator, the spirit of the predator, is to confront it. Well, that’s a hell of an idea. Then you might think, well how deep an idea is that? You confront the predator, you get the gold. Well, this is that you confront infinite possibility and you get the reward. You encounter infinite possibility properly. You derive from it the rewards that it offers.

What are the rewards that infinite possibility offers? Who knows? We have no idea. And it’s so interesting, because we live at a time in history where that’s literally true. Like I would hesitate to predict anything about fifty years from now. I quit worrying about the future about twenty years ago. Because I thought, oh, I get it. No matter what happens, the probability that it’s something I predict is zero.

So it’s like, whatever you’re worried about, well, go ahead and worry about it, but something completely different is going to happen. So it’s not really all that useful. You should just be ready for whatever comes, because here it comes. You know, like I think we’ll have fully-functional autonomous robots within three or four years. And that’s a real game-changer. And God only knows what’s going to happen after that.

Transplantable organs… those things are… you can print those on 3D printers already. Well, augmented intelligence. You all have augmented intelligence already. What good are facts? You just look them up, right? Everyone’s an infinite supply of facts.

[Student: Can you explain, in different words, why the dragon is eating its own tail?] Because it has everything it needs. That’s another way of thinking about it. So it’s self-contained. It doesn’t need anything outside of itself, and there isn’t anything outside of itself. So it doesn’t rely on anything to exist. That’s another way of thinking about it. It’s just there.

And so there’s an echo there of the idea that… of an idea of beyond time. Or I don’t know so much beyond space, but certainly beyond time. Time has no effect on it. So it’s beyond time, in that sense. Yeah? [Student: There’s another reason it has its tail in its mouth. And that’s because it represents the border between the known world, in all its goodness and badness, and the unknown world. And that border can get smaller as it eats more of its tail.] Mhm, right, right.

Okay, so, now it has wings, why does it have wings? Well, this is another horribly complicated thing. I’ll show you a diagram. This is the closest I’ve been able to get to it. I often don’t talk about this diagram, but I guess I am today. Yeah, okay, we might as well go through this completely. Okay so here’s you. So if you look right in the middle there, here I’ll make it bigger so that you can see it.

You kind of think that you’re right here. This is where your consciousness normally sits. Like, you know, are you yourself, that’s sort of your conscious body envelope and all that, or are you your family? Well you know, the border there is rather pliable. Well then, you can drill down into the cell, and this is sort of the idea of hierarchy. You know, you can look at principles, so those are your general philosophical beliefs and then your programs, and the sequence of behaviours that you instantiate that in and then your behaviours.

And then you can go below that even and you can think of yourself as… well because when you’re behaving, what’s under that? What’s the support for that? The platform for that? Well it’s your body, right? Well, what’s there? Well, once you get past the level of arm, it’s sort of like musculature. And then you might say, what’s under that, what’s next? Well you have your cellular structure, and so that’s what cellular biologists study, God that’s so complex.

And then below that you have your molecular structures, like DNA, and then underneath that there’s the atomic structure. And then underneath that there’s the sub-atomic structure, and what are you going to say about that? There isn’t even time at that level. And then you can do the same thing if you go up. It’s like, people say you shouldn’t just pay attention to your family, you’re in a cultural group, they’re important too.

And well, what about the biological group that that’s nested in, and maybe you should be paying more attention to the ecosystem rather than to yourself. And you know, you shade upward into this thing that you can’t really dissociate yourself from either. So that’s what you are, make no mistake about it. Your consciousness is such that you only are located, in some sense, at one level of observation, and God only knows why that is.

It’s almost as if being has to come to a pinpoint in order for things to exist. The way I’ve been thinking about it, in some sense, is you could take all of this structure and you know, narrow it down to a single point of a pencil that’s writing. And the writing is the transformation of potential into actuality, but in order to do that there has to be a point of contact between you and the potential, and that’s your body in part, but it’s even narrower than that.

It’s whatever occupies this tiny little laser beam of attention while you’re wandering through the world. And it’s like burning reality into being. So why that is, I mean, God, who knows? It’s beyond strange. Now, you know, one way of thinking about this whole structure is you could think about it as the psychological world, because you’re at the centre of it, or you could think about it as the spiritual world if you think about spirit as a matter of consciousness.

It’s not the material world anyways, or if it is it’s the material world insofar as it’s you as a living conscious being. So you know, we tend to separate out consciousness and matter, right? I mean, I’m conscious, that’s something weird. We don’t think this table is so we think of them as separate substances in a sense, spirit and matter. Well that’s what the dragon is: it’s half matter, that’s the thing that’s crawling around on the ground, and it’s half spirit, and that’s the wings.

And then you might say, well why the hell is the dragon half spirit and half matter? Well we’ve got the spirit part, I just showed you it. So now I’m going to show you the matter part. Okay, so we could say, well what’s that? Well it’s a chair. You think, that’s pretty straightforward. It’s actually not, and I can tell you why pretty rapidly. Why is it a chair? [Student: The legs?]

How about a beanbag? Is that a chair? That’s right because we can sit in it! And that seems to be the fundamental issue: is this a chair? Is this a chair? [Points to desk] [Student: It can be.] It can be, yeah, yeah. You’d say it’s not a canonical chair, and neither is a beanbag. Because a chair could be a beanbag or a stump. But you know, that’s sort of a canonical chair.

But part of my point is, you know, the typical answer that people will give when you ask “why is that a chair?” is that they’ll lay out the objective structure, that’s only a tiny bit of a chair. You know, if it was that high, would it be a chair? It has to have the right structure and the right function in order for it to be a chair. And so what that means is that thing which is an object is already only existing in relationship to you, in some important sense.

But I could also say well, it’s part of the classroom. What’s the classroom part of? Well it’s part of Sid Smith. This chair is part of Sid Smith. And what’s Sid Smith part of? Well it’s part of all sorts of things, but we could say it’s a piece of the city, it’s a chunk of the province, it’s a bit of the country, and then it’s nested inside a much broader civilization than that. So that’s sort of going up from the chair.

And you could say, well, that’s not really a chair, and I could say, well if that thing was floating at some point halfway between the Sun and Pluto, I don’t think considering it a chair would be reasonable. Because, well for obvious reasons. You know, you can decontextualize something so completely that it isn’t what it is anymore. It’s not that hard. You know, and you kind of do that to yourself when you say, well, who cares, why is this important?

Who’s going to know in a million years? Poof! You’re decontextualized. It’s a stupid trick, it’s like a party trick for intellects. It’s a stupid trick, you know? Because anybody can do it? And what does it mean? It means you’re looking at it from the wrong perspective, that’s what it means. So it’s not like it’s an ‘ultimate question’. You wouldn’t be able to think about it in fifteen seconds if it was an ultimate question.

But then you could do the same thing with the chair that you did that you did with yourself when you zoom in to it, right? So it’s made of parts, well obviously, and then the parts are made out of sub-parts and so forth, all the way down to the sub-atomic level. And the chair is all those things at the same time. Okay, so then you might say, well what do you encounter when you encounter the unknown? And that’s what you encounter, I think.

So let’s take a look at this. And you can think about it. It’s a weird idea. Okay, so you’ve got your little frame of reference, right? You’re going from point A to point B. And when you’re going from point A to point B something that you didn’t want to happen happens. And we already know that it can be a little thing that happens, and then you know, haha it’s funny, or it can be your whole world falls apart, and then it’s a catastrophe.

But let’s say it’s something like the interview. So I would say that’s sort of a mid-level anomaly, right? You walk in, there’s a lot in there, but you can handle it, weirdly enough. And I suppose that’s because there are other places that you can go where there are potential futures lying, so it’s not like you’re out of potential futures just because you walk through that.

So you say, well, what’s in that room is anomalous, you don’t understand it. It’s unformed matter. Now you might say, someone might say, does this interview matter to you? You think, that’s a pretty weird question, because things are made out of matter. So what do you mean when you say does this matter to you? Well, partly what it means is that before matter was our matter, it was a matter that was more complicated, linguistically speaking.

So if you go back far enough, what people meant by matter wasn’t this [raps on desk]. It was more like, I would say, it’s more like potential. Or it’s more like information. That’s another way of thinking about it. So you could certainly say that room is chock-full of information. So let’s go with the information idea, just for the sake of argument. We already talked about it as potential, let’s talk about it as information, both of those work.

You walk in there and you start interacting with people. And then you leave later and you know, you tell your partner “Well I went for this interview.” And they say “How did it go?” And you say “Well, it didn’t go very well but I learned some things.” Because you could say that, right? Well so I would say you went into that room and you extracted some spirit out of the potential. Now that’s exactly how Piaget looked at it by the way.

Well, I shouldn’t say ‘exactly’ because it’s probably not exactly the way he looked at it. But basically what Piaget proclaimed with children was that children will try out a little routine, and then something will happen that doesn’t fit in their little routine. And so they’ll investigate it using whatever tools they have at hand. Some of it’s trial and error, and some of it’s… you know, they try out other tool-like embodiments of their body that have worked in the past.

So for example, the first thing a nine-month old will do crawling around on the floor if it encounters something that’s roughly mouth-sized is put it in their mouth. Why? Well they don’t know what it is, but they kind of know how to use their mouth. So they throw it into their mouth, and then they tongue it, and they get some sense of sort of how it tastes, which is very important, and what its shape is and all that, because they’re very wired up in their mouth, and so they can investigate like mad.

And so what they encounter is a thing and then when they throw it in their mouth they practice doing something with it, you know, getting its shape, so now they know something about it. So that changes them from a spiritual perspective, a psychological perspective. Now they’re slightly different than they were, they’ve incorporated some information, and they’ve also transformed the thing into a specific thing with specific features.

And so what you might say is that out of potential spirit and matter arise. And that’s a very interesting way of looking at it. Also it fits well with the phenomenological philosophers. Because they believe that we encountered phenomena and phenomena were those things that shone forth. And so that’s like a reversion to the idea of meaning. Because you’ve got to think about it this way too… it’s like when you walk into a library, God, what’s in there? Well, it’s inexhaustible, a library.

Well, how come you just don’t get exhausted? Well, it’s because you’re not actually interacting with the whole library. You’ve got this focal point like a laser again, and you’ve made it into a focal point because you’re inside that hierarchical structure, right? So you say, well I’m in the library to get this book, I’m getting this book to read this chapter. So chapter, book, library. I’m going to university, I need to become educated and get a job so I’ll be a good citizen and a good person.

And so that’s what you’re doing in the library. You’re just doing one little fragment of that. And the more you have that whole model developed, right, all the way from good person all the way down to why you’re in the library, the more precise your aim is, the more you know what you’re doing, the less encumbered by doubt and uncertainty you are, and the higher probability you have of focusing on your task and then writing the path that you want to be into being.

And so, well, so it’s very useful to think about things this way and it’s also very interesting to note that that’s how you act. You actually act like the world is made this way. And it’s even weirder because, and this is the case I made for you when we were talking about the structure of the brain. It actually looks like this is how your brain construes the world.

Because you have systems, you’ve got a system that works when you know what you’re doing and you’ve got the other system that works when you don’t know what you’re doing. And so basically the world is divided, just like the Daoists say, into the orderly domain and the chaotic domain. And you need to know how to operate in both, and you need to balance them. And you need to transform one into the other.

And that’s basically what you’re doing when you’re interacting with reality. And you know, one of the things that I will claim, and this will become more important as the course progresses, is that when you’re doing something meaningful, you’re doing that properly. And the sense of meaning that you have, is actually an indication that your psychophysiology is manifesting that you’re in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

And it’s real. It’s not only real, it’s like it’s the most real thing. It’s where potential is transformed into reality. And it’s hard to get any more real than that. So that’s partly why I’m telling you that these things aren’t exactly metaphors, you know. They have to be represented by metaphor in some sense. But the reality that’s underlying them… it’s not just a story. Even though it is a story, it’s not just a story.

It’s a real representation of reality. So, you know, the other thing I kind of outlined here is that when you hit an anomaly… you know an anomaly is sort of the thing from which everything shines forth, when it’s still really anomalous what happens is that it manifests itself to you in sort of like a burst of contradictory meanings. And that can be paralysing. You know, you could be really, really, really excited and really, really, really nervous.

Which might happen, for example, if you were going to a job interview and you actually wanted the job. It would be even worse if you went to a job interview and like 30% of you wanted the job because that’s the 30% of you that wants to develop, and another 30% would just as soon fail so that you can crawl under your bed at home and stay there with the dust bunnies until you’re forty. And another 25% of you is resentful about the fact that you have to get a stupid job at all.

And so then you go in there and it’s really, really complicated. Because not only is all that potential there but you’re fractured and those fractures make the whole situation way more complicated and unstable than it would otherwise have to be. And that happens to people all the time. I mean, people hedge their bets in job interviews all the time. Because they think “eh, I don’t really care.”

It’s like no, you care. You just want to have a story to tell yourself if you fail. Well, and then if you have that story, well then probably you’re going to fail, because you don’t get to do that. You can’t go in there at 60% and hope to win. You have to go in there at 100%. Now that’s cool too, because what it implies is just what the clinical psychologists have been telling people for sixty years or seventy years.

You have to voluntarily face the things that you’re afraid of. Now it’s a little more complicated than that because otherwise you could just go play in traffic. So it’s not a call to stupid adventure. What it does is assume that you’ve got a direction and the direction is a valid direction. And then what happens is, as you pursue that, obstacles emerge, anomalous, threatening obstacles, and then you either confront them, or you abandon the whole project.

Well generally speaking if you chop them into little pieces then you can confront them and digest them. And then you get stronger because you’re doing all this digesting. It’s like you’re eating the monster of chaos. And that’s a classic metaphor for developing wisdom to ingest. Piaget even uses that, right? Assimilate. It’s exactly the same idea as ingesting. What you’re eating is information instead of matter.

And the information restructures you and makes you more informed. And that puts you more in formation. So you know you encounter the anomaly and it’s a burst of contradictory potential, and so that’s exactly how you respond to it. Your body’s going everywhere at once, because God only knows what’s going to happen. And then as you interact with it, it collapses. You’re collapsing it. That’s what happens when you take control of the situation.

And then you reduce it to a single path where everything is going properly. And you might say well you’re bending it to your own selfish will, but that’s not right. Because if you’re in… let’s say you’re in an interview and there’s five or six people in there, you can’t just bend the damn thing to your will, because you have to interact with those people. And so if you don’t do that with… you know, you could be a psychopath and manipulate, but that’ll only work for a short period of time, you’ll get caught, and then you’ll have to move, because that’s what psychopaths do, that’s how they keep being psychopaths.

They exhaust everyone’s trust and then they have to move. And then they go find some other people who are trustworthy because they build up trust capital with other people and then they betray them. But they have to keep moving. So it’s an unstable solution. So you go in there and you do it properly. Well what are you doing exactly? You know?

I would say that if you’re really, really nailing that interview, you’re saying, well here’s a future that we could all march together into confidently and happily. That’s what you’re saying. And I’m the person to do that. Now you might be saying that on a relatively low scale. Like, if I’m your assistant you’re never going to have to worry about me. Because I’m always going to be there.

And then maybe if you’re the CEO, you’re going to say well, you know, this is the way that all of us are going, and here’s why, and this is what it’s going to look like. And the better you are at that, the more that potential will turn into… it multiplies, that’s what happens. If you’re good at dealing with it the potential that’s accessible to you multiplies. Which is really cool. And also how you’d hope it would be.

Because you know, you’d hope that more potential would manifest itself to people who are more competent. Well, if things work well that would be good. So that’s the spirit and matter idea. And so that’s represented in that dragon. So let’s go back to it. Now, okay, so you remember this character here. So what to do about that? What to do about chaos? Well one thing you might want to start by doing is admitting that it exists.

So let’s say that you’re not a terror management advocate. Let’s say you’re an advocate of positive illusions. Does everyone know what those are? Are you still taught about those in social psychology, positive illusions? Yes? No. How many people know about them? Okay, where did you learn about them? [Student: In your class, PSY230.]

In 230? No one else has taught you about this? Anybody else learn it anywhere else? [Student: I learned it online.] You learned it online. Okay, well thank God for that. Well, what happened was, the paper where positive illusions were first touted, and that was in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it was the most cited… was it the most cited paper ever in social psychology?

It’s up there. And it’s an appalling paper! Because it basically says… it says something like this, if you scrape away all the nonsense: things are so horrible that if you just looked at them, you’ll be so depressed you’ll want to die. So you better not. You better weave around yourself an illusion that things are better than they are and that you’re more powerful and wonderful than you actually are. And if you do that, but not too much, then you’re going to be happier.

Well, you know, the errors in that are just manifold. First it’s like, well, who cares if you’re happy, what the hell does that have to do with anything? You’d be happy stepping on ants. [Laughter]. Well really! It’s like what the hell stupid idea is that? You’ve got positive emotion. Cocaine will do that. You know, bullies are pretty happy when they’re pounding out someone like Milhouse. So you know, happiness, what the hell’s that? It’s shallow. It’s a dopey idea.

And then, well, how big should these lies that you’re telling yourself be? And the answer to that is just exactly the size that will make you happy. Well that’s not helpful, because if you’re going to have a theory, let’s hear about exactly how big they should be. Well sometimes they should be this big and other times they should be this big, but there’s no real way of telling a priori.

Well so that’s not really very helpful either. And then there’s another idea underneath that that’s even worse, which is reality is so awful that you can’t look at it. Well that’s nasty man, because that means (and that’s what the positive illusion stuff meant, sort of like the terror management theorists) if you got an unvarnished look at reality, it would just destroy you. Because you’re not strong enough to look at reality in an unvarnished manner. Well, you can imagine why people would believe that.

You could think God yes, it’s pretty damn awful. But then you think, well wait a minute. Is it really the case that everyone who’s out there coping with the world is blind and deluded? Or maybe is it that the people who are not coping with the world very well are blind and deluded? I mean, ask yourself that. You’ve seen people in your life that you admire, I presume, and certainly you’ve seen people you don’t admire.

Well, so let’s take the ones you don’t admire. Well, how about blind and deluded, does that partially describe them? It would be blind, deluded, bitter, resentful, and mean. That sort of covers the territory. And then the people you admire? Well, they’re strong people, generally. They can do things that are really, ridiculously difficult, like have a baby, and raise it without destroying it. Or work in a palliative care ward or be a nurse in a cancer ward for children.

I mean, there’s a lot of awful things. I talked to this guy the other day. I just met him sort of randomly. And he had had a motorcycle accident. And it was a bad one. He rolled like 200 feet at 60 miles an hour and he broke seven ribs and you know, had a brain hemorrhage. Like it really took it out of him. He was a good athlete before that. And so it probably aged him twenty years. And he’s still recovering.

And he was telling me, he works for a power company, and so he’s climbing up these power poles, you know, because that’s part of his job. Well now he’s pretty screwed up. He’s in his mid-fifties, he’s still climbing up power poles. And he was working with a guy who had Parkinson’s disease. And so the guy with the Parkinson’s disease is at the top of the power pole and he’s doing his job. And he’s getting shaky, so they’re afraid things are going to fall, and then this guy comes up behind him to help him.

He’s only really got one arm that works. It’s like, Jesus, that’s tough. Those people are tough, man. You know, because Parkinson’s? That sucks. And well, so does having half your arm more or less destroyed by a motorcycle accident and not staying at home hiding under the bed. You know, they’re out there still making sure the lights are on. Well, that’s a pretty unvarnished confrontation with reality as far as I’m concerned.

You know, so I could say… alright, so here’s another story. So, I’ve probably told you a little bit about this before. When the behaviourists first proposed that you could use exposure to treat anxiety, the psychoanalysts were all skeptical about that, because they thought, well you’re just treating the symptom. They usually thought of a phobia as the manifestation, the visible manifestation of something that lurked more deeply underground.

And there’s real truth in that. Like, whatever a mouse is to someone that’s mouse-phobic isn’t what