Lecture: 12 Rules for Life Tour - Sydney, Australia.

[Applause] Thank you, thank you very much! It's much appreciated. Um, the last time I was surrounded like this was... I think it was at a demonstration. Anyways, it's lovely to be here, um, in this amazing building and in this amazing city and, well, also in this amazing country. We've had a wonderful time in Australia so far. This is the second time I've been here and it's gone extraordinarily well both times. I don't know why that is exactly, but something's working, and so I appreciate that very much.

It's very good of you to take the time out this afternoon and to make the trouble and to come and listen to an hour and a half of ideas. That's a strange thing for you to choose to do, but personally, I'm very happy about it. So I think we'll get right to it. I want to cover a fair bit of psychological territory today. I'm going to try to integrate four of the rules from "12 Rules for Life."

The first rule is "Stand up straight with your shoulders back," and it's a really a description of the ancient nature of hierarchies, their almost universal existence among living creatures, and the fact that you have extraordinarily ancient and profound neurological systems that really govern. They govern your psyche that process hierarchical information. It's such an important psychological fact to know. I don’t know if there's another psychological biological fact that’s more crucial than that.

It's the serotonin system that is the system that tracks hierarchical information, and it's so crucial that it actually sets up your brain in utero. So it’s the master control system of the brain. If you thought about the brain as a symphony—which is actually a pretty good way of thinking about it from a metaphorical perspective—the serotonin system would definitely be the conductor. So there's rule one.

And then there's rule seven, which is "Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient," and it's also, at least in part, a neurological chapter. Because one of the things I learned really a lot from reading Russian neuropsychology, strangely enough—the Russians had great neuropsychologists—was that the sense of meaning, the sense of engagement that characterizes life when life is progressing in the manner that you would like it to progress, is actually an instinct.

It's not a cognitive phenomenon; it's not a second-order consequence of thought. It's way deeper than that; it's an extraordinarily profound instinct. And so that's really worth thinking about, assuming you know, as you might, that we’re adapted creatures and that our instincts guide us in the world so that we can survive, and so that we can reproduce, and so that we can exist over long periods of time.

The fact that an instinct of that depth exists and that it's associated with the sense of vital engagement in being, let's say, is a good indication, as good an indication as there is, that there's something truly real about it. I would say that might even be more important than the knowledge of the role that the serotonin system plays in adjudicating hierarchical position.

Because, you know, we tend to think of meaning as something that people create as a secondary consequence through thinking or through philosophy or something like that. And when we think that, it's easy to criticize it. It's easy to become cynical about it. It's easy to lose faith in it. But when you understand that it actually is a much deeper phenomenon than that and that the cognitive elements, the philosophical elements, are sort of like... well, they're like the fronds on the top of the pond on a plant system that has unbelievably deep roots that go way down into the water.

There's something about that that's much firmer and more solid, and I think the evidence that meaning is an instinct, a deep deep instinct, is overwhelming. I don’t think that popular knowledge has caught up with that. I mean, the research is... it's not new, but it's been done, I would say, in the main, in the last 30 years or so and mostly by psychobiologists, like people who are really on the hard science end of psychology. Their work is difficult; it’s technically difficult. It involves a lot of neurobiology, neuroanatomy, psychopharmacology.

It’s hard work; it’s hard going, but it's unbelievably useful. Um, I have two books in my reading list, by the way, at jordanbpeterson.com if you're interested in this sort of thing. One is by a man named Yak Panksepp, who is an absolute genius. He died a few years ago, unfortunately. I think he deserved a Nobel prize. And you never know, maybe he'll still get one because he discovered whole circuits—mammalian circuits—that no one knew existed.

So for example, Panksepp outlined a play circuit in mammals. There's a separate biological play circuit in mammals, and like, it's a big deal to discover an entire new neurological continent, right? That's a big discovery! And that wasn't all he did; it was one of many things he did. So the book is called "Affective Neuroscience," which is a rather intimidating title: it means emotional neuroscience. And you wouldn't think you'd necessarily pick up a book on neuroscience, you know, for a light read, but it's actually a very readable book.

The people who work on emotions in neuroscience tend to be a little bit more romantic as scientists, and they're a little more interested in story and narrative; and so he tells a whole sequence of stories in "Affective Neuroscience." It's a very readable book, and it's a great book. I would, if you're interested in psychology, recommend it highly.

And then there's another book there called "The Neural Psychology of Anxiety," which is written by a man named Jeffrey Gray, and that damn thing… that's hard! That’s like a six-month slog, that book! I mean, he was an absolutely... he had an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and neurobiology and psychopharmacology, and like, I don’t know how many references are in that book—2400 something like that—and he read them! You know, he didn't just cite them! And not only did he read them, he also understood them and integrated them!

And so, it’s a tough read, but man, I tell you, there’s really something to that. So a lot of what I’m going to talk to you about tonight, although not all of it, is derived from those books. And so, I would recommend them if you'd like to go more deeply into these sorts of topics.

And so, that’s rule seven: do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Because meaning is an instinct, and meaning is the instinct that guides you in life across the totality of life. Right? What's expedient? That's what you might want to do right now, in an impulsive sense, right? Because you're driven forward by anger or anxiety or frustration or disappointment or despair—some sort of one-eyed motivational monster that's got you in its grip that really isn't considering everything at once.

Right? Like considering your life tomorrow or your life next week or your family’s life or maybe even your well-being half an hour from now. You know, because you lash out in anger. And it’s—you can, you know, people do that. It’s understandable; sometimes it’s even necessary, but it’s not wise generally.

And the instinct for meaning seems to be a consequence of the integration of all of those underlying motivations and emotions with social being and then the manifestation of something like the proper pathway forward. And you need that because you need to know how to move forward in life because you need to move forward in life; you need to act in life.

And the other thing that’s, I suppose, part and parcel of, let’s say, "12 Rules for Life" is the insistence upon action as of primary import. We're not fundamentally creatures who passively perceive the objective world. That’s not the goal of our perceptual systems; it’s not the goal of our memory. The reason that you have memories isn’t to remember the past; the reason you have memories is so that if something bad happened to you in the past, you can figure out what it was that was bad, and you can figure out why it happened, and then you can not do it again in the future.

Right? It's very practical! And it’s the same on the positive end of the spectrum. If good things happen to you in the past, then conceivably duplicating whatever you did to get those good things to happen could have them happen again in the future.

So it’s practical memory, and it’s oriented towards action. And it’s oriented towards, like, the quality of your life, not to the description of the objective world, even though that may be a useful thing to do at least under some circumstances. So that’s rule seven.

Rule eight is "Tell the truth or at least don’t lie." Originally that rule was just "Tell the truth.” But then I thought about it, which you should do if the rule is "tell the truth." And, um, I thought, “No, you better be careful about putting forward a rule like that because to tell the truth implies that you know the truth, and you don’t know the truth because you’re too ignorant to know the truth."

Like you don’t know the truth about anything fully! Right? If you push your knowledge out far enough—if I ask you why about something you’re doing enough times—it’s usually only three or four times, by the way—you’re out of answers; you don’t know.

And it’s the same generally. If I ask you how something works, like how does a helicopter work, well you know the little whirly things spin and then I don’t know, this thing like rock-like entity rises into the air; it’s like really, that’s a pretty sad explanation! And you know, that's kind of the level of detail you have about a lot of things!

So you know, you're pretty ignorant like everyone else; there's just so many—there's just too many things to know! You know? And they’re detailed and difficult. And so you get by with a pretty shallow understanding of most things. And so you can’t really tell the truth; but I think you can not lie, you know?

And that’s not even the same as not being wrong because of course you’re also going to be wrong and you have stupid theories too and they’re not even necessarily lies! A lie is when you know that what you’re saying is not true and you say it anyways. That’s a lie, and it’s a lie that you’ve decided yourself on the basis of your own knowledge; that’s a lie.

You’ve decided that; that's your own moral judgment. And so I rewrote the rule to suggest that it’s not a good idea to say things that you know not to be true. And I would say, by the way, as a practical issue, it’s also a worse idea to write things that you don’t think are true.

Because you know your mind is organized at the highest level of abstraction in language. And it’s important that your mind is organized because if you're not organized then you're disorganized, and then things don’t go well for you in the world just like they don’t go well for anything that’s disorganized.

And so you have to be very careful with what you say and what you write—writing especially because it’s like it’s focused speaking, it’s focused speech, right? It takes more intense thinking! So in some sense, writing is even deeper than speaking. But you don’t want to speak things that you believe to be untrue, and you certainly don’t want to write them because that changes you, and it changes you in the direction of the deception that you’re undertaking while you do the speaking or the writing.

And you might think, “Now I can write whatever I want, and I can just leave it be,” but that’s not true. And the reason for that, in part, is because your knowledge is shallow. And so if you take rather shallow knowledge, and then you write something detailed that’s false, you end up convincing yourself in all sorts of ways that you don’t even notice that what you wrote that was a lie was true. And then you’re stuck with that!

And it’s not stuck with it psychologically exactly, although it’s also that. It’s stuck with it neurologically because when you learn things and you make new connections, you change the structure of your brain, and then that’s that! I mean, you know, it’s plastic to some degree, but you’re messing around with your psychophysiology, and that’s a bad idea.

And you know it’s a bad idea because you kind of know, like everybody knows that if you want to get through the world, if you want to get from point A to point B, if you want to get to wherever you’re going, it’d be good to have a map. And it’d probably be good to have a map that isn’t full of holes and errors because otherwise, you’re not going to get to where you're going!

You might not even know where you are to begin with, and that seems like a bad plan if you’re going to undertake a journey. And you are going to undertake a journey because your life is a journey. So if you pathologize your speech, then you pathologize the systems that guide you.

And then that relates back to rule seven, which is, well, you have an instinct for meaning, let’s say, and it can guide you. And you need it. And then if you pathologize it by introducing material that you know to be untrue, then you distort and warp and pathologize the very structure that—the very feeling that you need to place yourself firmly in the world.

And then you can’t rely on yourself, and this is a very bad idea because you need to rely on yourself, especially in situations of crisis! You know, when you have difficult decisions to make, and it’s like, well, it’s not obvious whether I should go right or whether I should go left, right? Because there’s a lot riding on both decisions, and so you’re sweating it out—or maybe you have three or four decisions to make at the same time.

It’s like you can talk to your friends and all that, but you’re the guy in the final analysis! Man, it comes down to you! And if you can’t trust yourself because you’ve filled yourself up with nonsense, then you’ll make the wrong decision. And then hey, maybe you'll pay for it for the rest of your life, and maybe you’ll deserve to as well!

And so it’s very—You know, you hear now and then at university students say, uh, undergraduates, they say, “Well, I just write what the professor wants to hear, and then I get a good grade.”

It’s like, first of all, most professors aren’t that corrupt. There are corrupt professors, but most of them are not that corrupt. You have to be pretty damn corrupt before you go that far before a student will hand you something that’s well-crafted and well thought-through and you’ll actually punish them for it.

You've gone way off the malevolent end of the academic spectrum when you do that! Now you know, maybe you’re a bit biased and you’ll give them a B+ instead of an A, and it’s not like that’s particularly forgivable, but it’s not a catastrophe.

But so I think it’s a bit cynical on the part of the undergraduates usually. But more importantly, it’s like what are you going to do? You’re going to do your whole four-year degree, and all you’re going to do is write what you think your professors want to hear, and you think you’re going to come out educated? You think you’re going to come out the person you were when you went in?

It’s like no you're not because you’ve rewritten a different self and you've practiced deceit with regards to your highest moral faculty, right? Your capacity for articulated speech—you’ve practiced that for four years! And so then definitely when you come out you’re way worse than you were when you went in. And that’s not education; that’s the antithesis of education!

Better not to be there; better to lay bricks, right? And not—I have nothing, by the way, against bricklayers! Way to be bricklayers, as far as I’m concerned! But at least they can lay a straight brick wall and it will stand up! And there’s something honest and solid about that. Much better that than to go and produce written material that you don’t—that your soul isn’t in!

That’s what the damn education system is for, insofar as it’s not, you know, there to train you professionally. It’s to develop you psychologically and spiritually and to turn you into a citizen, you know, into a competent human being! You compromise that because of expediency, an excuse usually, it’s a very bad idea!

I would highly recommend against never doing it. And I would say the same thing at work. Whenever it’s very psychologically dangerous to say things you know not to be true. So, and in part, it is because it warps that instinct for meaning. And so you need that instinct for meaning too.

So, and we should get this real straight. Why do you need it? Well, you need it because life is really, really difficult, right? I mean people have a rough time of it. There’s plenty of suffering in life and everyone is going to encounter it!

Right? There—you don’t—you learn this as a clinical psychologist, and you know this generally. You know, unless you’re an extraordinarily fortunate person, um, you don’t have to talk to someone for very long—and really talk to them—and get beneath the surface until you find, you know, there’s a tragedy or two or three or ten lurking not very far beneath the surface.

Someone in the family is very ill, there’s a childhood history of extreme pathology, alcoholism somewhere in the family, maybe a touch of insanity, someone has cancer, you know, someone—some older relative is dying, there’s financial trouble, there’s economic trouble, there’s marital trouble. It’s like life is trouble!

And now you know it doesn’t mean it’s all trouble, but man, it’s trouble! And sometimes it’s—a lot of trouble! And sometimes it’s so much trouble that you can barely stand it! And you see that because people, you know, people get depressed and they commit suicide, and the reason they do that is because they think not being is better than being!

And that’s quite the decision, you know? So and it’s not that uncommon among people who are depressed. And so it’s a very—it’s a very important thing to consider. And it isn’t just a matter of depression and suicide; that’s bad enough!

But you know, if you’re unhappy because your suffering has pushed you past the point of your ability to cope, then there’s all sorts of other things that can happen to you that aren’t directed towards you. You can become cynical, and you can become bitter, and you can become cruel, and you can become narcissistic and deceitful and arrogant.

And it’s like everything’s for you! And then you’re out for revenge, that’s a nice one! I don’t know against who, but maybe everyone! Maybe even including you because you’re not happy about the role you've played in generating your own misery!

I mean there’s a lot of darkness underneath the suffering! And that’s—that's an ever-present existential danger for human beings, you know!? We’re aware of the future; we’re aware of our fragility; we’re aware of our mortality. It’s something that makes us truly unique, truly conscious in a way that no other creature is and capable of things that no other creature can do but also bearing an unbelievably heavy existential load.

We’re the only creatures that have to always contend with the fact that we’re finite and that everyone we know is in the same position! That, allied with the suffering. And so that’s there all the time. And, you know, even in the brightest moments in some sense, you know, in renaissance paintings, in still life, they used to put a "memento mori" often in the still life—like a skull somewhere in the corner or sometimes—in a very strange perspective so that you could only see the skull if you were standing like right beside the painting instead of dead on!

But the idea was to always remember, you know, that everything that exists is tainted or touched with the—with the taint of mortality! And you know that’s rough, but there’s some useful things in it! It keeps you awake and it keeps you focused if you’re careful!

But it also does indicate to you, if you think about it, the necessity of having a meaning in your life! Because if it’s true intrinsically that life has this unbearable element of suffering, which seems to be completely undisputable as far as I’m concerned. And it’s worse than that too because it’s not just suffering; it’s suffering contaminated with malevolence, right? It’s bad enough to have something bad happen to you, and it’s likely that that’ll happen!

But it’s even worse for you to do it to yourself and to know that you did it! That’s rough! And it’s also extraordinarily rough to be betrayed by someone else or, you know, tyrannized by your own culture! And so—and that’s—that’s not just suffering; that's like unnecessary and pointless suffering that's been directed at you by something that wants that to happen!

And so both of those are very, very powerful, let’s say archetypal forces—suffering and malevolence—and we have to deal with them at every level of reality! And you need something to push back against that! It's not optional!

If that’s the default position—and I think it’s the default position—like a meaningless life isn’t meaningless, it’s suffering and malevolence! That’s not good! And if that’s acted out, you know—that’s the other thing—if that’s acted out; and I’ve read the accounts and the actions of people who’ve taken a very vicious turn into the darkest parts of the underworld consequence of their resentment and their malevolence and then their desire to make everything in the world suffer for the outrage of its existence!

Man, I mean that’s how we turn things into hell! If you want to know why totalitarian states take the brutal twists they take and why people are motivated to do the absolutely terrible things that they do, well, that’s why! Is that the suffering and the malevolence that’s intrinsic to life overwhelms them, and they turn and they turn in a very bad direction, and then they make everything that’s already bad way worse!

And we’re very, very inventive at such things! And so that’s not good—unless that’s the path you want! That’s a bad idea! You need an alternative! And that’s meaning!

And then rule ten—well that’s "Be precise in your speech." And so I’m going to weave those together and see what we can come up with as something like a general theory of meaning. That’s really what I’ve been working on, I would say for 35 years, something like a general theory of meaning. And so, I’m going to see if I can deliver the whole damn thing in 35 minutes, which I’ve never really been able to manage, but I’ve had a lot of practice, so maybe this is the night.

So, okay, so the first thing I want to tell you about is a little bit about how you perceive things because it’s very important to know how you perceive things. And you don’t perceive very much, by the way, because, well, there’s a lot of the world—way more than you can possibly imagine—and there’s not that much of you! And so a lot of information is coming in through a very narrow channel!

And it isn’t easy, given the fact that all that information exists. It isn’t easy to figure out how to narrow that channel so that the information you get is the information that you need—information you need that also gives you a grip on the world, right? It has to be practically useful, true, and practically useful—something like that!

It’s a very, very difficult problem to solve! And a lot of it you don’t even—you don’t even really solve because you can’t! It’s too complicated! You solve it by doing what you’re doing right now, for example!

So, here you are in this unbelievably beautiful building, and I read today a little bit about it, and today it would cost about a billion dollars to build this building! And so you’re sitting here, and you’re all sitting here peacefully, and you’re all pointing in the same direction, right? And we’re all basically doing the same thing, and we’re doing it peacefully, and we can all focus on the same thing!

And we had to invest a billion dollars for that to be able to happen! And so part of you think about that is that part of the way your society solved the problem of the complexity of the world for you was by investing a billion dollars in what—15... How long did it take to construct this place? 15 years? Something like that? Maybe it was longer?

So that you could sit here in relative comfort and peace and tranquility and concentrate on something that’s very focused—maybe something of beauty, something of artistic merit, something of intellectual merit—and that the rest of the world wasn’t there so you didn’t have to worry about it.

And then—and that’s not all; it’s not just that you’re here in this building and the chairs aren’t falling apart and the floor is reliable and the electrical lights work and like all the technology is working! And there’s people beetling away in the background like mad constantly everywhere making sure that those impossible things keep happening so that you don’t have to be distracted!

But then you’re also sitting with people who are roughly like you! You know, roughly like you enough so that when they come into a venue like this, they know enough to sit down in the seats and face forward and not turn around and look at the person behind them, which would make them very nervous!

Right? Which would be an indication that that person isn’t playing the same game as everyone else! And so god only knows what they’re up to because you just wouldn’t want that!

Right? You wouldn’t want the guy in front of you turning around and just looking at you for the next 90 minutes! And, well, it’s worth thinking about why! Like: what are you thinking about? You know? You’re going to be sitting there looking like this; your eyes are going to be darting around, and maybe you’re going to be nudging someone, you know, pointing at this person because maybe they have some idea of what this person is up to because you don’t!

And the problem is if you don’t know what that person is up to, then they could be up to anything! And anything is a lot of things to be up to! And you don’t want people to be up to anything! You want them to be up to the one or two things they’re supposed to be up to while they’re with you in this narrow place that you occupy! Right?

And that’s sort of the hallmark of a civilized and socialized person! When we interact under 90% of conditions, 99% of conditions, you show me your persona; it’s just a very narrow slice of yourself, and I show you mine! At the bank, say, or, you know, at the grocery store when we pass each other casually in the street, we nod and say "hi," and you nod and say "hi," or we just walk by peacefully!

And, like, we’re seething with complexity and we don’t let any of that out! And the reason for that is we don’t want anybody else to let any of it out either, right? So we keep ourselves simplified and we build our architecture for that!

And so, you know, you come into a building like this and the building tells you what to do! The chairs are all aligned; the chairs say sit on me, right? The chairs are all facing the same way in kind of a semi-circle, and they say face the stage! And there's a stage, and so you come in here and all the perceptual problems are solved.

And so there's all this technology, and there’s all this expense, and then there’s the shared culture that enables you to know that this is something like a theatrical experience! And so what you do at a theatrical experience is come together in as a group and remain silent but attentive, participating in that manner and watch and listen to the main performance! And you all know that it's part of the shared culture!

And so that shared culture is also enabling you to perceive what you’re perceiving right now as a protective mechanism, and that’s part of a broader shared sense of civilization! And it's dependent on a shared government.

And then there's other forms of protection! You know, I mean, while we’re not—there’s the sun isn’t shining on us too brutally because we have a roof, and we’re not in danger of warfare because you have borders, and you have armed forces, and you have policemen!

And it’s like, Christ! There’s just things going on around you like mad to ensure that you can sit here so peacefully and so much as if the world isn’t a complex place for an hour and a half and do something this focused! And so that's partly how you solve the perceptual problem—you don’t see the world that much; you screen a lot of it out!

Now there’s a good indication—a good illustration of this! A psychologist named Dan Simon did this famous experiment, which he called “Gorillas in our midst,” and some of you know about it, but I'm going to go over it because it’s such a fun experiment to talk about because it’s so ridiculous and so illuminating—and because it’s so relevant to what I want to continue talking to you about!

So here’s the deal: you go into Dan Simon’s lab; he was at Harvard 20 years ago when he did this, and he was interested in this phenomena called "change blindness." You know those kids' books sometimes where there's picture one and picture two, and you're supposed to look at picture one and then look at picture two and see what’s changed? It’s actually hard! You know, you look at picture one, you say, "Well, I saw that!” And then you look at picture two, and it’s different, but you can’t see the differences!

And you have to really compare back and forth before you can check out the differences. And that’s what perception is like; you’re very blind to change way more than you think and—and way more than anybody thought before Simon did his experiments!

And so he did this crazy experiment. So here’s the setup: video camera set up in front of an elevator bank, right? And so the camera would be here; the elevator bank would be about here. So, you know, it’s pretty close-up shot. There are six people participating—three of them dressed in black, three of them dressed in white! The white team has a basketball; the black team has a basketball! They fill the whole screen!

So it’s not like they’re way over in the corner this high and you can barely see them; they fill up the whole screen! You can detect their facial figures! It’s close shot; you see their whole body—but it’s clear there’s no tricks in it! And you sit there, and you’re the experimental subject— and the psychologist or his assistant says, “Okay, here’s your task!” And you’re there to be focused on a task, apparently, because you’re in a university and you’re in a lab, and you’d expect to be focused on a task!

And so you’re already primed for that, and you’re willing to go along with it to be obedient, but to be a good sport, let’s say; that’s better than obedient! And you want to do a good job because it’s intimidating to be in the lab like that! And so you want to... you want to do a good job of whatever you’re supposed to do, unless you’re a troublemaker!

And you’re probably not because you wouldn’t go into the lab to begin with if you were a troublemaker! So Simon says, “Count the number of times, like the white team is going to throw a basketball back and forth in a variety of ways for three minutes." Just count how many times they manage it! And they're going to bounce it and throw it directly and all that!

And so the black team and the white team start to mill around in on the video, and they’re tossing the basketball back and forth! And you’re watching the basketball very intently with the central part of your vision! Now the central part of your vision is very high resolution! And you can tell this; it’s pretty easy!

I’ll show you—I don’t know, now this probably won’t work because I think the theater is too big to do it, but we could try it, I guess! So look at my finger right? But pay attention to my face! Now that’s hard because usually when you pay attention to something, you look right at it—but I don’t want you to do that! I want you to pay attention to my finger and look at my face!

And what should happen, except perhaps for those of you who are quite a distance at the back, is that you’ll notice that you actually can't see my facial features!

So, for example, if I look at even somebody in the third row—for instance, if I look directly at you, I can see your facial features fine; I can tell you have glasses. I can’t tell if you’re male or female; I can't distinguish you from the chair! And it has nothing to do with you! [Laughter] Right?

But, like, you don't have to move very far away from central vision before it becomes extremely low resolution! And so that’s how your visual system is set up: high resolution in the middle, low resolution as you move towards the periphery! Until, like, out here I actually can't tell how many—I mean, I know how many fingers I have—five if you include the thumb—but I can’t see them if I move them; I can see them better because that's one of the ways your visual system overcomes its limitations!

Is that it’s better at seeing movement than things that are stable, and that’s because, well, if you're watching something, and something suddenly moves you know, off to the right, it might be a good idea for you to shift your attention just to see what it is! And so that’s a trick your visual system uses, but mostly it's foveal vision, and it's a very, very small part of your visual field, and it's extremely heavily neurologically innervated in the visual cortex!

A lot of cells are devoted to that tiny area in the middle of your vision to make it as high resolution as possible! And it might be nice—eagles have two fovea by the way—they can see better than human beings; their eyes—bald eagles—their eyes are as big as human beings and they can see better than we can!

They're the only animals that can do that! They have two fovea! But you—you can’t have that high-resolution vision across the entire span of your eyes because then your head would have to be this big to carry that much brain around! And obviously that would be hideous and also counterproductive! So we do the best we can!

And what it means is that we’re blind to a lot of things that we don’t think we’re blind to! So, anyways, so you’re playing Dan Simon’s game, and you’re counting the number of times that the basketball is tossed back and forth between the white team! And he says “How many times?” and you say, being a good experimental participant, you say, “16!” And you're right!

And he says, “You’re right!” And you think, “Oh good! I’m smart enough to participate in a psychological experiment!” You feel good about yourself; you know, it’s a little self-respect boost, let’s say, because you passed the test!

And then Simon says, “Did you see anything out of the ordinary?” And you say, most of you—some people noticed—most of you say, “No! What do you mean?” And Simon says, “Well, the gorilla!” Did you see the gorilla? And you think, “Well, what do you mean, 'Did I see the gorilla?' There's no damn gorilla!” There’s a—I’d see a gorilla, right?

If we’re watching me on stage, and the gorilla came out here, you’d see it! Maybe, as it turns out, it might depend on what the gorilla was doing! But any—in any case, so Simon rewinds the tape as you watch it so that there’s no tricks, and he says, “Don’t count the balls this time! Just watch!”

So it’s a different command, right? So you have a different aim now; you’re pursuing a different value structure. He says, “Just watch!” And he rewinds it, and sure enough, you see the gorilla coming out backwards and being in the middle and then going off to the side! And then he replays it for you—and a minute and a half into the three-minute video, in waltzes this damn gorilla!

It’s a guy—because they didn’t have a gorilla for obvious reasons; ethics committees wouldn’t allow them to use a real gorilla—and he’s a big guy; he’s not a small chimpanzee-type ape; he’s six foot four! And he saunters out there and beats his chest like for four seconds right in the middle of the screen!

Which you might think you’d see since it’s right in the middle of the screen! And then he saunters off to the side, and you don’t see it! And the question is, well, what the hell is wrong with you? Like why don’t you see it?

And it’s worse than that; like Simon has done other funny tricks! Like imagine you went to a grocery store, and the cashier was behind the counter, right? And you're talking to the cashier, and the cashier says, “Excuse me for a minute,” and then kneels down, and then someone else stands up and keeps talking to you!

And you think, “Oh, you’re going to catch that!” And you don’t! About 50% of people miss that completely! So you can change the person completely! And the reason is, well, how much processing do you have to do to have a casual interaction with a cashier at a grocery store? And the answer is not much, right?

You don’t have to do the processing doesn’t have to be that deep, and you can kind of tell this because you can watch "The Simpsons," or you can watch "South Park," and "South Park" has like the world’s worst animation, right? I mean everything moves like this—it’s all circles and triangles—and you don’t care! It’s like five minutes into the narrative, it doesn’t matter that it’s circles and triangles having a conversation, it’s fine!

The icon will work! And that’s—that’s a good rule for perception, is you use the simplest possible perceptual scheme that you can manage to get yourself from point A to point B, right? It’s a map! You don’t see the world; you see an iconic representation of the world!

And then the question is, what makes the iconic representation sufficient? And I suppose sufficient means a couple of things, one thing it means is it means it’s tolerable, right? It doesn’t cause an excess of suffering and degeneration—it has to be functional, right?

And then maybe a more specific example of that would be, well, it has to work like a map works! A map is a low-resolution representation! But it’s a good enough map if you use the map and you start at point A, and you happen to be at Point A, which is a good beginning for a map!

And then you use the map, and you get to Point B! And you think, “Good enough map!” And that’s really—That’s us! That’s how we think! That’s how we construe the world!

Our maps are really the stories that we use in the world; they’re really the maps we use to guide us! And then they have perceptual implications! But that’s essentially what you do! So now the question is, all right, what happened in the gorilla video? Well, what happened was you’re aiming at something, right?

You’re aiming at counting the passes, and the question is, well, why were you doing that? And the answer is, well, someone told you to! Asked you to! And then you might ask, well, why did you listen to them? There are lots of other things you might have done in the lab, but that isn’t what you did! You did what you were asked to!

And we might say, well, that’s because you’re reasonably cooperative and civilized! And then we might say, we might say, well, why is that a hallmark of cooperation and civilization? And we might say, well, reciprocity, like spontaneous reciprocity between strangers who have a bit of a contractual arrangement is part of civilized behavior!

And so that’s the appropriate thing to do! And we might say, well, you wanted to do a good job in the lab because you wanted to make sure that your status wasn’t too low! You know, you could count to 16, and you can give yourself a pat on the back of the head for that!

And, you know, it’s part of being a civilized person! And so there’s a huge value structure behind that! Like you didn’t go into the lab and shoot it up! You know, you didn’t bring a hand grenade, right? And you didn’t you didn’t you didn’t sexually assault the experimenter.

There are lots of things you could have done in there, and you didn’t do those things. You just sat there and counted the balls and missed the gorilla! Okay?

So, and there’s complicated reasons for that; there are deep reasons for that! And so there are deep reasons for how you perceive things and why! And so that’s what we’re going to go into!

So the first thing we’re going to do is talk about the basics of perception! And perception is very, very tightly related to action, to movement forward, and to emotion! And those things are very important to know; they’re very tightly associated!

So for example, you live in a map, let’s say, or a story, and the story is “wherever I am isn’t as good as it could be, and so I’m going to go somewhere that’s somewhat better.” And you know that can be of different time frames! Maybe you’ve got a plan for the next minute; you know, you’re hungry, and so you want to go somewhere to eat, or maybe it could be for the next hour or the next week or the next day or the next year or whatever!

But basically, what you’re trying to do is take where you are, point A, and make it better—point B! And so you’re always somewhere that isn’t quite as good as it should be, and you’re always going somewhere that’s somewhat better, at least that’s the hope! Unless things have gone wrong, you know, and you feel, “God, it’s nothing but downhill from here on in,” and that’s not good! You don’t want that!

That’s a pathological condition! So, and it’s kind of unfortunate in some sense because it means you can’t be satisfied with what you’ve got! But how the hell can you be satisfied with what you’ve got because you’ve got problems coming your way!? You know? I mean even if everything's okay right now—which it probably isn’t—but even if it was, that doesn’t mean everything’s going to be okay tomorrow or next week or next year or five years from now!

Right? You’ve got the future to take care of, and your future self, and you’ve got your family to take care of, and maybe you’ve got your community to take care of! So you’ve got some problems! And so the way things are isn’t good enough, and so you’re going to fix them a bit!

And so then you fix them across different levels of resolution, and you do this… you know if you do this technically in this manner! So you identify where you are—one thing you might think about is if you’re mixed up. One of the problems you might have is that you don’t know where you are.

Lots of times people have to go to therapy or talk for a long time to someone to find out where they are because your experience might have scattered you everywhere, and you just—and you feel that things have—that you’ve come apart at the seams, right? The things have fallen apart around you, that you’re in chaos, that you don’t know where you are!

And so then you're in trouble because how the hell are you going to plot a course forward into the future if you don’t know where you are? And so maybe you have to bring yourself up to date! I have an exercise online, by the way, at a place called self-authoring, which is called the past authoring exercise, fittingly enough!

And what it asks you to do is to write an autobiography; it’s a guided autobiography! And it can kind of bring you up to date! And you can know if you need to be brought up to date; it’s fairly straightforward!

If you’re obsessed by memories of the past that are more than 18 months old, and most of those are negative, so anxiety provoking most often, then there’s a lot of you that’s stuck in the past! And what that means is you didn’t map the territory well enough, and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems, anxiety systems, are saying, “No, no, there’s holes in the way you’re looking at the world; there’s holes in the way that you’re looking in the world!”

And you fell in them once, and you don’t know where they are, and you don’t know how to fill them, and you don’t know how to walk around them, and so you can’t forget them! You can’t forget them! You can't forget them!

You can't forget them! So you have recurring nightmares, for example, are a good example of that sort of thing happening! But in any case, if you have memories like that, you remember them; they make you feel anxious and negative! You’re stuck back there!

Your body is still reacting as if there’s an emergency that could happen again that you haven’t fixed; it doesn’t matter if it was your fault—that’s irrelevant! Because the alarm system doesn’t care!

Like when your smoke detector goes off, it isn’t relevant whether it was your fault; the smoke detector just says, “House is on fire,” and that’s a bad thing! And your anxiety systems are like that! If they’re tagging old memories with anxiety, then you have to do something about it or you will be tortured by those memories forever!

Because that’s how the alarm system works! And so maybe you need to go back there and clean things up! You’ve got to figure out, “Okay, well, how did this happen? What sort of role did I play?” Even if it’s a minor role, that doesn’t matter!

Because the point is that you don’t want to be put in the same vulnerable position again! So anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good! You know, and often if it’s a really old memory, like maybe you were a child, it’s—you’re not a child now! So you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with a situation like that if it came up now!

And so you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you’re four! And lots of people have parts of them that are still stuck in some traumatic childhood experience! And they don’t—I had a friend like that who had a terrible childhood, and I mean really!

I’ve had clients with terrible childhoods, and his was like top of the lobster hierarchy in terms of terrible childhoods! And whenever he had a dream about it—which was very often—he was five in his dream! He’s 58! You know he’s not five!

But he hadn’t been updated! And so he was still five in his dreams! It was a complete bloody nightmare for him! Complete with physiological symptoms! Really hurting his life! He couldn’t get himself updated!

And he’s much older in his dreams now, by the way! He’s up to about 45! So that's a—way better than five, you know! Because you can’t fight back when you’re five, but you can fight back when you’re 45! Especially if you have some—some experience at your disposal!

So anyways, you need to know where you are! So let’s say where you are is, well, you’re on this stage, and you’re on this side of the stage, and you decide that you’re going to go over to that side of the stage just to show that you can!

And you’re making the decision—the same decision that you know the famous chicken who is going to cross the road! Why does the chicken cross the road? Well, if it’s a sensible chicken, it’s because it assumes that there’s something better on the other side of the road! It’s like or maybe it’s random curiosity, but then it just gets picked off by a dingo or a coyote, so that’s not so good!

The other side of the road is better, so away the chicken goes! So that’s what you’re doing; you’re going somewhere slightly better! And so that’s good, technically—it’s good! Because the way that your positive emotion systems work is they run on a neural chemical called dopamine. Which, by the way, is the neurochemical system that drugs like cocaine, and methamphetamine, and alcohol, for some people, and opiates affect dramatically, and make people feel far better than they should, which is part of their danger!

It’s a very fundamental system! The dopamine system kicks in with a kick of positive emotion if you’re going somewhere that’s worth going! And so that’s worth knowing! It’s really worth knowing!

It’s like, “Okay, you want a little bit of positivity in your life? Well, how do you get it?” Well, you’ve got to get the system! It’s almost like—it’s the left hemisphere system for most people—not that that’s particularly relevant, but it is a—it is a standalone neurochemical system!

It’s rooted very, very deeply in the brain's exploratory circuitry! So a very ancient, ancient system, and it’s happy when you have somewhere to go! That’s the first thing! And then it’s also happy when you’re going there!

And so if I’m on this side of the stage and I want to go over to that side of the stage and I see that there’s a nice clear pathway, I could just go straight down this line! Then I look at that and I’m actually a little happy!

I’m not ecstatic; I mean who the hell cares if I get to the other side of the stage, right? I mean it’s a small piece of my life, but it’s not nothing! It’s something! Okay?

And so I look at the pathway and I think, “That’s a good pathway!” And I feel a little positive! And then if I move here, and then I see that, uh, little table right in the way between me and the other side of the stage, then I feel a little negative because I don’t want an obstacle in my pathway!

And so that’s really how you’re looking at the world, by the way! You don’t see objects! It’s not the right way to think about it! We don’t see objects and then think about them and then evaluate them and then decide how to act on them—or if we do, we do it rarely and slowly and with a lot of thought!

What we see instead are pathways with tools that will move us forward or obstacles! Right? And there’s no obstacles here, and there’s a nice flat road, and so great positive emotion way!

Uh, there, this is a task I can undertake! The sailing is clear; it's a good day! And then I’m here, and it’s like, “Yeah, well, that’s a little annoying!"

Um, I get a little pang of disappointment, let’s say; anxiety—can I make it around that obstacle? I’m fairly confident I’ve done this sort of thing before, so I can take the rough route, and I can, you know, walk forward like this!

And then I can do this great trick, which is just this! And then, you know, I’ve circumvented the obstacle! Now if I didn’t know how to do the little bit of circumvention, then that would be a real problem, right?

Because I couldn’t get from point A to B! And that would screw up my plan! But I do have that particular skill set, so it’s a minor disruption to the perceptual set that I’m using to organize the world!

It’s a minor bit of chaos because that’s what happens when your perceptual set—the structure that you’re using to organize the world—the plan through which you’re viewing the complexity of the world reveals an inadequacy!

Then that destabilizes your emotions! So that’s another thing to know! One thing you need to know is you need to be going somewhere, and there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good!

The other thing to know is that if that plan is untenable or becomes destabilized, then what happens is you become flooded with negative emotion! Frustration, disappointment, anger primarily, anxiety—but all of those things, sort of intermingled!

Anger maybe, because you have to fight your way through the obstacle! Frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan! Disappointment because you put a bunch of work into the damn plan and it didn’t work out! Anxiety because now there are too many choices in front of you!

And so people don’t like to have their plans disrupted! They don’t like to have their plans disrupted! And the reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the world!

And that—that’s a good thing to know too! That’s why—you know what it is! Is you’ve decided that you’re going to go to like a Korean restaurant for dinner, and that’s fine!

And then it turns out that you can’t, and maybe you have to go to a Greek restaurant! And it’s like who cares, right? Unless you hate Greek restaurants!

Korean restaurant—that’s pretty good! Greek restaurant—that’s pretty good! You’re still going to be annoyed that your plans changed! Well, why? Because it’s annoying to have your plans changed! It disrupts the structure that you use to destabilize your perceptions of the world, and it throws you momentarily into a state of chaos!

Not much, now how much chaos? Hmm, this is interesting. We don’t know! You know, like let’s say you woke up one morning and you have an ache in your side! It’s like, well, you don’t have an ache in your side—what does it mean that you have an ache in your side? Well, you don’t know!

Like maybe it means you pulled a muscle and like who the hell cares? Maybe it means you have cancer and you’re going to be dead in six months! The whole range of possibility is there! You know?

And some people will assume one thing—it’s like that’s nothing—and some people will assume the other! And all of them will be right sometime! And so the question is, how do you calibrate something like that?

And the answer is, well, we tend to guess at it; we guess at it temperamentally! So one way we guess at it is we have our set points for negative emotion, so neuroticism traits! Some people will be a lot more nervous about a small level anomaly than others, and maybe they’ll go to the hospital first, and they won’t die!

And then— or maybe they’ll be freaking out all the time, and they’ll be a hypochondriac, right? So there’s pros and cons about being nervous like that! The other person is very emotionally stable; they don’t worry about much; they think that’s nothing. And then, you know, by the time they get to the hospital it’s too late!

Hey, that’s how the dice roll! That’s one way that you guess! It’s determined in large part genetically—not completely, but in large part! Another part is your position in the hierarchy!

You know? So the issue is how safe are you in life, and the answer is, who knows? But one of the ways you guess is, well, are you good at things? You know?

Because if you’re good at things and a problem comes up, you can probably solve it! And then you might think, “Well, how do you know if you’re good at things?” And one answer might be, “Well, other people think you’re good at things!”

Because you’re really kind of comparing yourself to other people when you’re thinking about whether or not you’re good at things! And so if it turns out that you’re in a hierarchy and you’re fairly high in the hierarchy, indicating a certain degree of competence, then your nervous system, under the control of the serotonin system, dampens down your negative emotion!

It says, “Look, you know, all things considered, you’re probably pretty safe,” and that’s nice! But it also means you don’t like having your position in the dominance hierarchy challenged at all!

Because if you get tossed down the hierarchy, let’s say you get fired—what wreaks havoc with your serotonergic function? It makes you defeated! Like the defeated lobsters that I wrote about! And then, all of a sudden, you’re way more susceptible to negative emotion!

And who wants that? And so that’s why you don’t even like to lose arguments! You know, you lose a little argument, and it’s like, “Whoop! Down the dominance hierarchy a bit, emotions are a bit destabilized!”

It’s no damn way I’m right! And why? Because I want to keep my neurochemistry in check! And no wonder! Well, the thing is, sometimes it’s better to learn than to insist on being right! Because learning works better for the future! But you get the point!

Okay! So now I’m going to go from this side of the room to the other side! And, uh, that’s my little journey! And so—but that isn’t exactly how journeys work! They’re nested!

You’ve seen bullseyes—classical arrow, you know, archery bullseyes— I think they’re red in the middle usually, right? And then there’s a variety of colored circles around them! Maybe the whole bullseye is this big and you’re supposed to hit the bullseye, but the closer you get to the center, the better!

But at least you could hit part of it—that would be good! You know? And you’re supposed to stand back and pull your arrow back and aim, and so that’s—that’s an acting out of something! It’s an acting out of the necessity of having an aim and taking your best shot, right?

That’s what makes it a sport! Now, if you think about that, most of our sports are like that! Right? Soccer’s like that! Rugby’s like that! Basketball is like that! Hockey’s like that! Almost all team sports involve some sort of projectile going to some sort of target!

And usually people organize themselves into hierarchies, too, because there are two teams, and then they compete and cooperate to get the projectile in the target! And for some reason we think that’s really cool, right?

Well, look, it’s worth thinking through deeply! It’s like you’ll spend a lot of money on that opportunity to go into—in Toronto, you can’t buy NHL tickets for the Maple Leafs—they’re unbelievably expensive, and they’ve been sold out forever, even though the damn team hasn’t won a championship since, like, 1968!

It doesn’t matter! People will spend a fortune to go sit in an arena like a long way away from the action! And there are these guys out there and they’re tough, and they’re fast, and they’re fighting with this little black frozen disc, and they’re trying to get it in a net! Well, someone is trying to stop it!

It’s completely bloody absurd! And yet people are thrilled about it! They’re thrilled! And they’ll pay for it! Right? They don’t have to be dragged; they’re kicking and screaming! Like they line up! It’s, “Oh god, a hockey game! Thank god!”

And they’ll wear the jerseys! It’s like—and then, you know, some character who’s put in his $10,000 does his beautiful move and puts in a goal in some manner that’s like technically impossible and everybody leaps to their feet, and they just have a fit of joy! And you think, “What in the world is going on with that?”

It’s like you’re happier when that happens than you were when you got married! It’s like you don’t see—well, you don’t see people doing that when they’re—and then it’s not everybody when you get married and everybody stands up and has a little—like a 10-minute fit and hugs strangers and then goes out and drinks a dozen beer and has a riot and tears down stores!

It’s like, "No, no, but a good goal? That’ll do it!" I think Guatemala and Ecuador went to war over a soccer game, literally! So, and let’s not assume we’re so stupid! You know, even though we are, let’s not assume it!

There’s something behind this! It’s like we really like to see people take careful aim and hit the target, and we really like to see them cooperate and compete in an expert manner to do that! And we really like to see them do that in a way that stretches their ability beyond what we would normally be able to see!

Right? Because it’s nice to go to a competent display of athletics! But now and then you go you see these like soccer goals on YouTube where these crazy characters, you know, they flip around in the air, and they’re like eight feet off the ground, completely backwards, and they kick the ball four feet to the side of the goalie. It’s just—it’s just impossible!

Like they’re 100 yards away, and it’s perfect! And you think, “Right on! That’s what a human being is like!” And you’re not really like that because you couldn’t do it! But you are human, and conceivably you could do something like that!

And so it’s a nice display of that potential for us to hit the damn target! Right? So then the question is, well, what’s the target? And that’s the question because that’s the same question as what’s the meaning!

And so okay, so here’s my target, let’s say! Let’s do a personal unpacking of my value system at least in part! So I’m a writer, and I’m a writer, and a researcher, and clinician, and a professor! So those things in maybe roughly in that order!

And so that’s—that’s my claim to my position in the social hierarchy! And you know, the claim is something like I’m competent at that; it’s worthwhile; therefore, I’m reasonably entitled by the rules of the game to the privileges and statuses that are associated with that position! Right?

As long as I’m competent! So there’s a match between social demand and my ability! And as long as I’m playing the game properly, then I'm safe! That’s what’s keeping my emotions regulated!

It’s not my internal regulation; it’s the fact that I can do what I say I can do! And everyone else agrees! And people value that! And that keeps me secure! That’s also why I don’t want too much social upheaval! You know, because I might end up with the same skill set in a society that doesn’t value those skills! And then, well, then what?

Then I’m done! So I want there to be an isomorphism between my internal hierarchy of perceptual value and the social structure itself! You know?

And then maybe above that playing some different games! And we need that because it’s the only way we can orient ourselves in the world! It’s the only way we can keep a match between our expectations and our skills and our desires and what’s actually expected of us in the world!

There’s nothing that’s more harmful than for you to play the game straight, right? To do what you’re supposed to do! To be a good person! And then to be punished for it instead of rewarded! Very disheartening!

You want what you think to be good and right to also be rewarded by the world in that manner! And that means the structures have to be—the social structure and the psychological structure have to match and part of the reason that we protect our cultures is so that we can protect the match between our psychological structures and our social structures and keep ourselves oriented moving forward in the world with some positive emotion and not terrified out of our skulls!

It’s crucially important! It’s why we’ll fight to protect what we’ve built! It’s the game we understand! It’s not something that can just be arbitrarily shifted or changed!

And that’s partly because the aim isn’t arbitrary! The aim isn’t arbitrary! This is the problem with the postmodernists and the moral relativists—they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about; they’re 100 years out of date; they’ve got it wrong!

Okay, so I’m typing, and when I’m typing, I’m moving my fingers, right? And that’s not thinking—that's moving my fingers! And I don’t really know how I move my fingers! But I can do it!

And I can do it on a keyboard! And so I can type letters one at a time! And so you might say, well, what are you doing if you were watching me? And I’d say, well, I’m typing letters! That’s my aim!

So I’m pretty happy when I hit an A and an A appears, and I’m not that happy when I hit an E and an E appears and I have to backspace—a little annoyance there, right?

Because I’ve shifted off the target! A little frustration! I fix it! That’s okay! Back on track! But I’m not typing letters because, like: who wants to read a bunch of letters? No one! You want to read words!

So I’m trying to organize the letters into words! So goal one is the letters! Nested inside goal two, which is the words! But you don’t want just random words; that’s not helpful! How about some phrases? That’d be good!

How about some sentences? Letters, words, phrases, sentences—now we’re starting to get into units of meaning, right? And those are directions! They’re like a map; they have a point!

Like a book has a point; like a story has a point! And the point is to outline the map properly! And they’re not just sentences—paragraphs! Right? And then paragraphs nested in a whole book!

And then not just the whole bloody book because that’s not enough; the book itself has to be nested in the shared literary experience of the audience! I have to assume if I’m writing a book that there’s a certain amount of culture that we share!

Because otherwise, I’d have to explain absolutely everything about absolutely everything, and I can’t! And so the book doesn’t work unless it’s in a culture that’s composed of maybe a thousand books, in some sense, that are widely known by all of us, even if we haven’t read them!

I can assume that the reader is a mechanism that can understand what I’ve written, and that’s part of where the meaning is too! And so that’s all nested together—all of that to make it meaningful for me to sit down in the morning and concentrate so foolishly in some sense on moving my fingers up and down on a keyboard!

Right? What’s meaningful about that? Well, nothing! Who cares if I type a letter—a single letter? Yeah, well, how about a word? How about the right word? How about the right phrase? How about the right sentence?

Well, every movement outward, more broadly, makes it more meaningful! And if that whole structure is coherent, then all of the small actions become associated with the meaning of all of the large-scale actions, right? I’m not just typing letters; I’m writing a book!

Why? Okay, then we get broader! This is still—this is the bullseye; this is the structure of the bullseye! The center might be the letter, you know? That’s one way of looking at it—that’s the highest resolution thing! I’ve got to get that exactly right!

And then it’s nested inside all of these other structures! Well, I’m an educator! Okay? So I’m hoping the book will be educational! Well, why?

Well, because maybe it would be better for people to be educated than not to be! So that they don’t have to suffer so stupidly and so they could be less malevolent; and that the world would be a less brutal place—that would be all right!

So that’s part of my goal! I’m a clinician! I want to fulfill that part of my moral obligation to justify my privileged position in the social hierarchy! Right? I’m a scientist! I want to test my hypothesis and see if they're correct so I can advance the scientific domain and push human knowledge a little bit farther out into the unknown, right?

And I’m doing that maybe because I want to be a good person, something like that! Okay? So, so now we’re a long ways out in the moral hierarchy!

And so now we might think about what does it mean to be a good person! Does that mean something? Well, you think it does! Because you know people who are good people, and you know people who aren’t good people!

And you make a qualitative distinction between them! And you know when you’re being a good person and when you’re not! And you make a qualitative distinction between that too!

So I don’t think we have to have a discussion about whether or not good and bad people exist! We might have a discussion about how you distinguish between them, but that’s a different issue!

So here’s some ideas—and this is what we’ll end off with! Um, what does a good person do? They take care of themselves! That’s a good thing! You know, you don’t want to be a burden to anyone else!

Sometimes you’re going to have to be, but most of the time maybe it’d be better if you were a net positive! You know? And rely on people when you have to!

And so that means don’t be so damn useless and constrain some of your malevolence! And that’s a good meaty bloody war to get involved in; it’s not trivial! It gives you something to do when you get up in the morning!

And then it might be the same with your social organization—your family! It’s like your family could use some work, man! Just like everybody’s family!

And you might be able to help! And the company you work for—same thing! Blind, willfully blind, stupid, corrupt! Going in the wrong direction— not entirely! You know?

I mean things work pretty well for how haphazard the world is in some sense; I’m not trying to be overly pessimistic, and I’m certainly not claiming that we live in an oppressive patriarchy! But like there’s work to do in most organizations! A little honesty and a little hard work on your part might straighten that thing just a little bit!

And god only knows what the consequences of that would be across time! And then, you know, there’s natural worries that you might want to take care of! There are diseases to conquer, and children to take care of, and there’s food to provide!

And all of the things that go along with that so that you could involve yourself in taming and regulating the natural world! That would be a good thing!

So, so there’s three sources of meaning, right? Get yourself under control, see what you can do about the tyranny of culture, and see what you can do about the civilization of nature! Right?

That’s the construction of a walled garden! That’s what paradise means—to get the balance between civilization and nature right! That’s your goal!

So people can live in there, and peace and harmony—including you—that’s a good goal! And then you think, well, that’s going out quite a ways! You know, you’re the culture hero who’s taking on your own malevolence and ignorance, the tyranny of your culture and the cruelty of nature! Great!

We need more people like you! Go for it! And then maybe we can go one stage outside of that! And this is as far as I can go with it!

So here’s how I think we are, you know? You hear scientists talk about us as deterministic creatures; we’re causal like an alarm clock! You wind the thing up, of course you don’t anymore, but you wind the thing up and it just ticks away!

And it—and one thing follows another! It’s like we’re actually not like that! You build systems of habit! So here’s an example: if I go like this, that’s a ballistic movement, and I have to plan that movement from here to here before I execute it! Because the movement is so fast that I can’t get a neural message from my hand to my brain and back to stop it once it started!

So the whole thing is deterministic! I plan it, let it go; it’s deterministic! But I know how to do this; it’s habit! I have a structure built in me that’s deterministic! And lots of things you do are like that—habit!

Anything you practice enough, it’s habits! So you're deterministic at the habit level, but you're not deterministic at the level of consciousness! Because consciousness comes into play when you’re doing something that you haven’t done before!

And now so that's interesting! Because what it means is the conscious you is dealing with the world that isn’t determined yet! And I would say it’s actually dealing with the world of possibility—the world of potential!

And it’s a world we believe in! You say to people, “You’re not living up to your potential!” And you say that to yourself, too! You know when you wake up at night and you’re guilty—“I’m not living up to my potential!”

And you don’t feel good about that! And you think, “Well, there’s potential around you that you’re not exploiting!" And you feel bad about that, too! And you should! And so it’s a good source of guilt and shame—not enough to crush you, maybe, but enough to wake you up!

And it’s certainly not something you hope for—for the people that you love! Ah, it’s okay; you’re wasting your potential! It doesn’t matter! It’s like no one says that!

And so what we’re contending with potential! And we know that because we wake up in the morning and poof! We’re awake! Like the sun has risen again, we’re awake! And we confront the world.

And what do we confront? We confront the possibilities—the potential and the horror of the day! Here are the things we could do! Here are the things that could go bad! Here’s how we could make things go better!

And you know what that is? It’s usually ah, there’s three or four things that I need to do today that I’d rather avoid, but I better do them because if I don’t do them, the world will be a worse place by six o’clock tonight!

Right? And that’s a funny thing! Because the world isn’t like that yet! It isn’t made like that yet! It won’t be made like that until you make it!

And you might think, “Well, here’s some things I could do that would be good that would actually make the world a better place by six o’clock tonight!” Take some effort, you know, and the willingness and some aim, but you could do that