Lecture: Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority

I'm really looking forward to this lecture. Not like I wasn't looking forward to the other ones, but the stories that I want to cover tonight, one of the things that just absolutely staggers me about them, especially the story of Cain and Abel (which I hope to get to), is, like, it's so short. It's unbelievable. It's like ten, eleven lines. There's nothing to it at all. And I've found that it's essentially inexhaustible in its capacity to reveal meaning, and I don't exactly know what to make of that.

I mean, I think, you know, because I said I was going to take as rational an approach to this issue as I possibly could, I think it has something to do with this intense process of condensation across very long periods of time. That's the simplest explanation. But I'll tell you, the information in there is so densely packed that it really is—it's really—it's not that easy to come up with an explanation for that. Not one that I find fully compelling.

I mean, I do think that the really old stories (and we've been covering the really archaic stories in the Bible so far) I think that one of the things that you can be virtually certain about is that everything about them that was memorable was remembered, right? And so in some sense, and this is kind of like the idea of Richard Dawkins' idea of memes, which is often why I thought that Richard Dawkins, if he was a little bit more mystically inclined, he would have become Carl Jung, because their theories are unbelievably similar. The similarity of meme and the similarity of archetypes of the collective unconscious are very, very similar ideas, except Jungian ideas—far more profound in my estimation—well, it just is he thought it through so much better.

You know, because Dawkins tended to think of memes sort of like a mind worm, you know, something that would infest a mind and maybe multiple minds. But he never really took—I don't think he really ever took the idea with the seriousness it deserved. And I did hear him actually make a joke with Sam Harris the last time they talked about the fact that there was some possibility that the production of memes, say religious memes, could alter evolutionary history, and they both avoided that topic instantly. They had a big laugh about it and decided they weren't going to go down that road, and so that wasn't fair. That was quite interesting to me, but these—the density of these stories, I do really think still is a mystery. It certainly has something to do with their impossibility to be forgotten, you know, and that's actually something that we could be tested empirically.

I don't know if anybody has ever done that because you could tell naïve people two stories, even equal length, right? One that had an archetypal theme and the other that didn't, and then wait three months and see which one's people remembered better. It'd be a relatively straightforward thing to test. I haven't tested it, but maybe I will at some point. But anyway, that's all to say that I'm very excited about this lecture because I get an opportunity to go over the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel. And I hopefully manage both of those today, and maybe we'll get to the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel as well. But I wouldn't count on it, not at the rate we've been progressing, if that's okay. That's no problem. There's no sense rushing this, alright?

So we're going to go, but before we do that, I want to finish my discussion of the idea of the psychological significance of the idea of God, and I've been thinking about this a lot more. You know, because, of course, this lecture series gives me the opportunity and the necessity to continue to think. And you know, it certainly is the case. So the hypothesis that I've been developing with the Trinitarian idea is something like that the Trinitarian idea is the earliest emergence in image of the idea that there has to be an underlying cognitive structure that gives rise to consciousness as well as consciousness itself.

So what I would suggest is that the idea of God the Father is something akin to the idea of the a priori structure that gives rise to consciousness. You know, that's an inbuilt part of us, so that's our structure. You could think about that as something that's been produced over a vast evolutionary time span, and I don't think that's completely out of keeping with the ideas that are laid forth in Genesis One, at least if you think about them from a metaphorical perspective.

And it's hard to read them literally because I don't know what—you know, there's an emphasis on day and night, but the idea of day and night as 24-hour diurnal—you know, daytime and nighttime interchanges that are based on the earthly clock seems to be a bit absurd when you first start to think about the construction of the cosmos. So it just doesn't seem to me that a literal interpretation is appropriate.

And, I mean, it's another thing that you might not know, but you know, many of the early church fathers, one of them, Origen in particular, stated very clearly—this was in 300 AD—that these ancient stories were to be taken as wise metaphors and not to be taken literally. Like, the idea that the people who established Christianity, for example, were all the sorts of people who were biblical literalists is just absolutely historically wrong. I mean, some of them were, and some of them still are—that's not the point. Many of them weren't, and it's not like people who lived 2,000 years ago were stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

And so they were perfectly capable of understanding what constituted something approximating a metaphor and also knew that fiction, in some sense considered as an abstraction, could tell you truths that nonfiction wasn't able to get at. Let's just think that fiction is only for entertainment, and I think that's a very—that's a big mistake to think that. So, alright, so here we go.

So yes, so with regards to the idea of God the Father, so the idea is that in order to make sense out of the world, you have to have an a priori cognitive structure. That was something that Immanuel Kant, as I said last time, put forward as an argument against the idea that all of the information that we acquire during our lifetime is a consequence of incoming sense data. And the reason that Kant objected to that, and he was absolutely right about this, is that you can't make sense of sense data without an a priori structure.

You can't extract from sense data the structure that enables you to make sense of sense data. It's not possible, and that's really been demonstrated, I would say, beyond the shadow of a doubt since the 1960s. The best demonstration of that was actually the initial failure of artificial intelligence because when the AI people started promising that we would have fully functional and autonomous robots and artificial intelligence back in the 1960s, what they didn't understand and what stalled them terribly until about the early 1990s was that it was almost—that the problem of perception was a much deeper problem than anybody ever recognized because like when you look at the world you just see, well, look, there's objects out there.

And by the way, you don't see objects. You see tools, just so you know, in the neurobiology. That's quite clear. You don't see objects and infer utility. You see useful things and infer objects. So it's actually the reverse of what people generally think. But the point is that regardless of whether you see objects or useful things, when you look at the world, you just see it, and you think, well, seeing is easy because there are things there, and all you have to do is, like, you know, turn your head, and they appear.

And that's just so wrong that it's almost impossible to overstate. Like, the problem of perception is staggeringly difficult, and one of the primary reasons that we still don't really have autonomous robots—so we're a lot closer to it than we were in the 1960s because it turned out that you actually have to have a body before you can see. Because the act of seeing is actually the act of mapping the patterns of the world onto the patterns of the body. It's not things that are out there; you see them, then you think about them, then you evaluate them, then you decide to act on them, and then you act.

You could call that a folk idea of psychological processing or perception; it's not—that is not how it works. Like your eyes, for example, map. One of the things they do is map right onto your spinal cord, for example. They map right onto your emotional system. So it's actually possible, for example, for people to be blind and still be able to detect facial expressions. Which is to say, you can—a person who's cortically blind (they’ve had their visual cortex destroyed, often by a stroke) they'll tell you that they can't see anything, but they can guess which hand you put up if you ask them to. And if you flash them pictures of angry or fearful faces, they show skin conductance responses to the more emotion-laden faces.

And it's because imagine that the world is made out of patterns, which it is. Then imagine that those patterns are transmitted to you electromagnetically; you have to light, and then imagine that the pattern is duplicated on the retina. And then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve, and then the pattern is distributed throughout your brain. And some of that pattern makes up what you call conscious vision, but other parts of it just activate your body.

So for example, when I look at this—when I look at this—this whatever it is, a bottle—that's words, huh? You know, when I look at it, especially with intent in mind, as soon as I look at it, the pattern of the bottle activates the gripping mechanism of my hand. And part of the action of perception, the active perception, is to adjust my bodily posture, including my hand grip, to be of the optimal size to pick that up. And it's not that I see the bottle and then think about how to move my hand; that's too slow. It's that I use my motor cortex to perceive the bottle, and that's actually somewhat independent of actually seeing the bottle as a conscious experience.

So anyways, huh, the reason that I'm telling you all of that—and there's much more about that that can be told. Rodney Brooks is someone to know about. He's a robotics engineer who worked in the 1990s, and he invented the Roomba, among many other things. So he's a real genius, smart guy. He was one of the first people to really point out that to have to be able to have a machine that perceived well enough to work in the world, you had to give it a body and that the perception would actually be built from the body up rather than from the abstract cognitive perceptions down.

And so, well, that turned out to be the case. Brooks built all sorts of weird little machines in the 1990s that didn't even really have any central brain, but they could do things like run away from light, and so they could perceive light, their perception was that act of running away from it, right? And so perception is very, very, very tightly tied to action in ways that people don't normally perceive.

Anyways, that's all to say that you cannot perceive the world without being embodied, and you know, you're embodied in a manner that's taken you roughly three and a half billion years to pull off, right? There's being a lot of death as a prerequisite to the embodied form that you take, and so it's taken all that trial and error to produce something like you that can interact with the complexity of the world well enough to last the relatively paltry 80 or so years that you can last.

And so I think about that as this may be wrong, but I think it's a useful hypothesis. I think the idea of God the Father is something like the birth of the idea that there has to be an internal structure that out of which consciousness itself arises that gives form to things. And well, if that's the case—and perhaps it's not, but if it's the case—it's certainly a reflection of the kind of factual truth that I've been describing now. And then, like I also mentioned that I see the idea of both the Holy Spirit and those also of Christ, and most specifically of Christ in the form of the Word as the active consciousness that that structure produces and uses not only to formulate the world because we formulate the world, at least the world that we experience we formulate, but also to change and modify that world.

Because there's absolutely no doubt that we do that. Partly with our bodies, which are optimally developed to do that—which is why we have hands—unlike dolphins, who have very large brains like us, but can't really change the world. We're really adapted and evolved to change the world, and our speech is really an extension of our ability to use our hands.

So the speech systems that we use are, you know, very well-developed motor skills and generally speaking, your dominant linguistic hemisphere is the same as your dominant hand. And people talk with their hands, like me, as you may have noticed, and we use sign language, and there's a tight relationship between the use of the hand and the use of language, and that's partly because language is a productive force and the hand is part of it. Part of what changes the world, and so all those things are tied together in a very complex way with this a priori structure and also with the embodied structure.

And I also think that's part of the reason why classical Christianity puts such an emphasis not only on the divinity of the Spirit but also on the divinity of the body. This is a harder thing to grapple with. You know, it's easier for people to think, if you think in religious terms at all, that you have some sort of transcendent Spirit that somehow detached from the body that might have some life after death, something like that.

But Christianity, in particular, really insists on the divinity of the body. So the idea is that there's an underlying structure; it's this quasi-patriarchal nature, partly because it's for complex reasons, but partly because it's a reflection of the social structure, as well as other things. And then that uses consciousness in the form particularly of language—but most particularly in the form of truthful language in order to produce the world in a manner that's good. And I think that's a walloping powerful, powerful idea, especially the relationship between the idea that it's truthful speech that gives rise to the good.

Because that's a really fundamental moral claim, and I think that's a tough one to beat, man, because one of the things I've really noticed is—and it isn't just me, that's for sure—is that you know there's a lot of tragedy in life; there's no doubt about that. And lots of people that I see, for example, in my clinical practice are laid low by the tragedy of life.

But I also see very, very frequently that people get tangled up in deceit, in webs of deceit that are often multiple generations long, and that just takes them out, you know? And so that deceit can produce extraordinary levels of suffering that lasts for very, very long periods of time, and that's really a clinical truism. You know, because Freud, of course, identified one of the problems that contributed to the suffering we might associate with mental illness with repression, which is kind of like a lie of omission—that's a perfectly reasonable way to think about it.

And Jung stated straight out that there was no difference between the psychotherapeutic, the curative psychotherapeutic effort, and supreme moral effort, including truth, that those were the same thing as far as he was concerned. And Carl Rogers, another great clinician who was at one point a Christian missionary before he became more strictly scientific, he believed that it was in truthful dialogue that clinical transformation took place.

And you know, and of course, one of the prerequisites for genuine transformation in the clinical setting is that the therapist tells the truth and the client tells the truth. Because otherwise, how in the world do you know what's going on? How can you solve the problem when you don't even know what the problem is? And you don't know what the problem is unless the person tells you the truth. That's something really to think about in light of your own relationships because, you know, if you don't tell the people around you the truth, then they don't know who you are.

And maybe that's a good thing, you know, because—well, seriously, people have reasons to lie, right? I mean, that aren't trivial. But it's really worth knowing that you can't even get your hands on the problem unless you formulate it truthfully. And if you can't get your hands on the problem, the probability that you're going to solve it is just so low.

And so then I've been thinking about this—and this idea has become more credible to me the longer I've developed it, the longer I've thought about it. You know, the idea that there's—oh, go Bob—it's partly the idea that, well, let me let me figure out how to start this. A property friend of mine, business partner, and a guy that I've written scientific papers with—a very smart guy—took me to task. And I think I told you this a little bit about using the term dominance hierarchy, which might be fine for like chimpanzees and for lobsters and for creatures like that, but not for chimpanzees even so much.

And he said something very interesting: he thought that the idea of dominance hierarchy was actually a projection of an early 20th-century quasi-Marxist hypothesis onto the animal kingdom that was being observed. And the notion that the hierarchical structure that you see that characterizes, say, mating hierarchies in chimps, for example, the idea that that was predicated on power was actually a projection of a kind of political ideology. And I thought that really bugged me for a long time when he said that.

Because like—I had really been used to using the term dominant hierarchy, and I thought he told me all that I thought—that's so annoying! It's so annoying because it might be right. And then it took me months to think about it. And then I was also reading Frans de Waal at the same time, and he's a primatologist, and also Jaak Panksepp because he was a brilliant, brilliant effective neuroscientist who unfortunately just died. He wrote a great book called Affect of Neuroscience, and for rats to play they have to play fair, or they won't play with each other.

And that's—that's a staggering discovery, right? Because anything that helps instantiate the emergence of ethical behavior in animals and that associates it with an evolutionary process—which is essentially what Panksepp was doing—gives credence to the notion that ethics that guide us are not mere sociological epiphenomena, constructs. They're deeply rooted, if flat.

And they're rats, for God's sake. You can't trust them? And they still play fair, you know? And de Waal noticed that the chimp troops that he studied—that it wasn't the barbary chimp that ruled with an iron fist that was the successful ruler because he kept getting torn to shreds by his compatriots that he ignored and stomped on. So he showed some weakness, they just tear him into pieces.

The chimp leaders that were stable, you know, that had a stable kingdom, let's say, were very reciprocal in terms of their interactions with their friends. And chimps have friends, and they actually last for a very long time—chimp friendships. And they were also very reciprocal in their interactions with the females and with the infants.

And I thought that's what Frans de Waal is a very smart guy. And I thought that was also foundational science because it's really something to note that the attributes that give rise to dominance in a male dominance hierarchy, let's use that word, let's call it authority, that might be better, or even shudder competence, which I think is a better way of thinking about it—is that that's not predicated purely on anything that's as simple as brute power.

And I think, too, you know, I think as well that the idea—and this is a deeply devious and dangerous political idea in my estimation—the idea that male dominance hierarchies, sorry, male hierarchies are fundamentally predicated on power in a law-abiding society, I think is—I think all you need is to think about that for like a month, say. It's not long to understand how absurd that is because most people who are in positions of authority, let's say, are just as hemmed in by ethical responsibilities or even more so than people at the other levels of the hierarchy.

And we know this even in the managerial literature because we know generally speaking that managers are more stressed by their subordinates than the subordinates are stressed by their managers. And that's not surprising—you want to be responsible for like 200 people? You really want that? That's hard work, man. And I mean, I know it's a pain to have a boss because you have to care about what the boss thinks, and maybe the person is arbitrary, in which case they're not going to be particularly successful.

But it's no joke to be responsible for 200 people, and you have to behave very carefully when you're in a position of responsibility and authority like that because you will get called out if you make mistakes constantly. So it's not like you're—it's not like because you have a position that's higher up in the hierarchy that you're less constrained by ethical necessity.

Now, if you're a psychopath, well that's a whole different story! But psychopaths have to move pretty rapidly from hierarchy to hierarchy, right? Because they get found out quite quickly, and as soon as their reputation is shattered, then they can't get away with their shenanigans anymore.

So, okay, so all of this is to say that there is something very interesting about the pattern of behavior. So imagine that sexual selection is working something like this. And we know that sexual selection is a very, very, very, very powerful biological force. Even though biologists ignored it for almost a hundred years after Charles Darwin originally wrote about it, thinking mostly about natural selection, they didn't like the idea of sexual selection because it tended to introduce the notion of mind into the process of evolution because it deals with choice, you know.

But so imagine, on the one hand, that you have a male hierarchy. We know that the men at the top of the hierarchy are much more likely to be—reprimanded the boil. It's particularly true of men. So you have twice as many female ancestors as you have male ancestors. You don't have to do the math. But I know it doesn't sound plausible, but you could look it up and figure it out.

It's a perfectly reasonable fact that actually happens to be true. So there's twice as many female ancestors because females are twice as likely, on average, to leave offspring as men. Now, what happens is any man who does reproduce tends to reproduce more than once, but a bunch of them reproduce zero. Whereas so it would be the average man who reproduces has two children, and the average man who doesn't reproduce has zero, obviously. And the average woman who reproduces has one child.

So that means that there's twice as many females in your line as there are males, so that's a big deal. And so imagine that it works something like this: so the men elect the competent men who are admired and who are—who are, I can't say dominant—who are given positions of authority and respect, let's put it that way, and it's like an election. Now, it could be an actual democratic election, but it's at least an election of consensus, or it's at least an election of, well, we're not going to kill him for now, which is also a form of election, right? It's a form of tolerance, you know.

So, and then what happens is the women for their part peel from the top of the male hierarchy. So you've got two factors that are driving human sexual selection across vast stretches of evolutionary time. One is the election of men by men to positions where they're much more likely to reproduce. And the second is the tendency of women to peel off the top of the dominant turkeys, which is extraordinarily well established cross-culturally.

Even if you flatten out the socio-economic disparity, say, between men and women like they've done in Scandinavia, you don't reduce the tendency of women to peel off the top of the male hierarchy by much. And why would you? I mean, women are smart. Why in the world wouldn't they go for—for—why wouldn't they strive to make relationships with men who are relatively successful? And why wouldn't they let the men themselves define how that constitutes success? It makes sense, like if you want to figure out who the best man is, why not let the men compete? And the man who wins, whatever the competition is, is the best man by definition? How else would you define it?

So, okay, so why am I telling you all that? Well, the reason is because it seems to me that there's this being—this complex interplay across human evolution between the election of the male dominance hierarchy and sexual success. And that's a big deal if it's true. It could be because what would happen, you see, is that as men evolved, they would evolve to be better and better at climbing up the male hierarchy because the ones who weren't good at that wouldn't reproduce. So obviously that's going to happen.

But then it wouldn't just be a hierarchy because there's a whole bunch of different hierarchies. And so then you might say, well, are there commonalities across hierarchies? Reasonable thing to propose. I mean, they're not completely opposed to one another. At least if you're more successful in one hierarchy, then you're more probable—it's more probable that you'll be successful in another.

And that's actually a really good definition of general intelligence or IQ, and that's actually one of the things that women select men for. Now men also select women for that, but the selection pressure is even higher from women to men. And general IQ is one of the things that propels you up across dominant turkeys because it's a general problem-solving mechanism. And the other thing that seems to do that to some degree is conscientiousness.

And there's also some evidence that women prefer conscientious men. And of course, why wouldn't they? Because you can trust them, and they work, and so those are both good things. So then you think, okay, so men have adapted to start to climb the male dominance hierarchy, but it's the set of all possible hierarchies that they're adapted to climb.

And so then you think there's a set of attributes that can be acted out and that can be embodied that will increase the probability that you're going to rise to the top of any given hierarchy. And then you could say, well, as you adapt to that fact, then you start to develop an understanding of what that pattern constitutes. And so that starts to become the abstract representation of something like multi-dimensional competence. And that's like the abstraction of virtue itself.

Well, and none of that has—that's none of that is arbitrary now, and that's as bloody well grounded in biology as anything could be. And I think that's a really hard argument to refute. And like one of the things I should tell you about how I think is that when I think something, I spend a long time trying to figure out if it's wrong, you know, because I like to hack at it from every possible direction to see if it's a weak idea. Because if it's a weak idea, then I'd rather just dispense with it and find something better.

And I've had a real hard time trying to figure out what's wrong with that idea; it seems to me that it's pretty damn solid. And then the idea that—you know, if you watch what people do in movies and so on and when they're reading fiction, it's obvious that they're very good at identifying both the hero and the anti-hero. We could say the anti-hero, generally speaking, the bad guy, is someone who strives for authority and position but fails, generally speaking—not always—but fails.

So he's a good bad example. A kid—you take a kid to a good guy-bad guy movie; the kid takes out pretty fast that he's not supposed to be the bad guy, and figures out very quickly to zero in on the good guy. And that means that there's an affinity between the pattern of good guy that's being played out in the fiction and the perceptual capacity of the child, you know? And one of the things I told my son when he was a kid—I used to take him to movies that were sometimes more frightening than they should have been—but one of the things I always told him was I never said, "Don't be afraid," because I think that's bad advice for kids.

What I said was, "Keep your eye on the hero." Right? Keep your eye on the hero. And again he was gripped by the movie and often quite afraid of them, you know, because movies can be very frightening. So he just like zero in on that guy and hoping—and you know what it's like in a movie: you hope that the good guy wins, generally speaking. And I mean, why do you do that? Where does that come from? You see how deeply rooted that is inside you. You'll bloody well go line up and pay to watch that happen.

It's not an easy thing to understand and it's so self-evident to people that we don't even notice that it's a tremendous mystery. And so, is it so unreasonable to think that we would have actually, over the millennia, come to some sort of collective conclusion about what the best of the best guys are—the best of the good guys are—and what the worst of the bad guys are? And to me, archetypically speaking, thinking of that as the hostile brothers. So that's Christ and Satan or Cain and Abel, for example.

Very common mythological motif—the hostile brothers. It's like those are archetypes. It's like Satan, for example, is by definition the worst that a person can be, and Christ, by definition, this is independent of anything but conceptualization, is by definition the best that a man can be. Now, as I said, speaking psychologically and conceptually, but given our capacity for imagination and our ability to engage in fiction and our love for fiction and our capacity to dramatize and our love for the stories of heroism and catastrophe and good and evil, I can't see how it could be any other way.

So, well, so that's part of the idea that's driving the notion of the evolution of the idea of God, and even more specifically, driving the evolution of the idea, at least in part, of the Trinity. So God is an abstracted ideal formulated in large part to dissociate the ideal from any particular incarnation or man or any ruler.

And there's another rule in the Biblical stories which is that when the actual ruler—I've mentioned this before—when the actual ruler becomes confused with the abstracted ideals, then the state immediately turns into a tyranny, and the whole bloody thing collapses. So the idea is so sophisticated. You know, one of the things that we figured out, and this was a hard thing to figure out, was that you had to take the abstraction and divorce it from any particular power structure and then think about it as something that existed as an abstraction, but a real thing, right?

Real. And that it governed your behavior and everyone's behavior, including the damned King. The King was responsible to the abstracted ideal man—that's an impossible—that is such an impossible ideal, you know? Why would they agreed—that 5,000 years ago? But one of the things you see continually happening in the Old Testament is that as soon as the Israelite kingdom, for example, the Israelite kings become almighty, the real God comes along and just cuts them into pieces, and then the whole bloody state falls apart for like hundreds of years.

It's like I think that's a lesson that we have not thoroughly consciously yet learned. It's still implicit in the narratives. We still haven't figured out why that's the case. Again, I think that's a real hard argument to dispense with.

So alright, so we looked at this a little bit. The Trinitarian idea is that there's a father—that's maybe the dramatic representation of the structures that underlie consciousness—the embodied structures that underlie consciousness. And then there's the son. And that—that's consciousness, but in its particular historical form—that's the thing that's so interesting about the figure of the son. And then there's consciousness as such, and that seems to be something like the indwelling spirit.

And so, I mean these psychological ideas came from somewhere, right? They have a history; they didn't just spring out of nowhere. They emerged from dreams and hypotheses and artistic visions and all of that over a long time. And maybe they get clarified into something like consciousness, but it takes a long time to get from watching, you know, from two chimpanzees watching each other to a human being saying, "Well, we all exhibit this faculty called consciousness."

I mean, that's a long journey, you know? That's a really long journey, and there's going to be plenty of stages in between. One of the things I really like about Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, was that he was so insistent that children act out and dramatize ideas before they understand them.

And Merlin Donald, who's a psychologist at Queen's University, wrote a couple of interesting books along those lines at all as well, looking at the importance of imitation for the development of higher cognition in human beings. And so the notion that we embody ideas before we abstract them out and then represent them in an articulated way, I think is an extraordinarily solid idea. And I really can't see how it could be any other way.

And if you watch children, you see that. Like, think about what a child is doing when they play house or she plays house, you know? The child acts out the father or the mother, but what's so interesting about it? To think, "Well, look, isn't that cute? She's imitating her mother." It's like, no. She's not—that's not what happens. Because when your child imitates you, it's very annoying because you move your arm and then they move their arm. You know that you moved your head, to copy you—no one likes that.

It's direct imitation. That's not what a child is doing. The child is playing. What the child is doing is watching the mother over multiple instantiations and then extracting out the spirit called mother, and that's whatever mother, like, across all those multiple manifestations, and then laying out that pattern internally and manifesting itself in an abstract world. It's so sophisticated.

It's just—I mean, that's what you're doing when you're playing house or having a tea party or taking care of a doll. It's not that you've seen your mother take care of a doll; you haven't seen that. It's that you're smart enough to pull out the abstraction and then embody it, and certainly, the child is attempting to strive towards an ideal at that point.

You know, she's not lighting her doll on fire, you know, well, with certain exceptions, but generally ones that we try to not encourage, right? So you see that capacity in the children, and it's something we also know that if children don't engage in that sort of dramatic and pretend play to a tremendous degree, they don't get properly socialized. It's really a critical element of developing self-understanding and then also developing the capability of being with others.

Because what you do when you're a child, especially around the age of four, is you jointly construct a shared fictional world. We'll play house together, let's say, and then you act out your joint roles within that shared fictional world, you know? And that's a form of very advanced cognition—very sophisticated. I see that, and Piaget did as well, and so did you, and so did Freud—these brilliant observers and also Merlin Donald, these brilliant observers of the manner in which cognition came to be. They noted very clearly that embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged.

And how could it not be? Because obviously, we were mostly bodies before we were minds, clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them, just like the chimpanzees act out the idea that you know you have to act reasonably sensibly if your head chimpanzee or you're going to get yourself ripped apart.

And you see that rules because when wolves have a dominance dispute, you know, they pump up their hair at each other to look big and they growl and bark and you know they're very menacing. And one wolf chickens out, rolls over, puts up his neck and basically what he's saying is, "Yeah, I'm pretty useless, so you could kill me if you want to." And the other wolf says, "Yeah, you know you're pretty useless, and I could tear out your throat, but tomorrow we might need to bring down a wolf, or else I'll kick you out." And it's not like they think that because they don't know.

They don't think that; they acted out as a behavioral pattern. Then if you're an anthropologist or an ethologist and you went and watched the wolves, you'd say it's as if they were acting according to the following rule. And that often confused me because I thought, "Well, the wolves act." Black wolves act out rules, and I thought, "No, no, a rule is what we construct when we articulate a behavioral pattern, right? We observe a stable behavioral pattern, and when we articulate it, we can call it a rule. But for the wolves, it's not a rule; it's just a stable behavioral pattern."

And so we acted like wolf troops or chimpanzee troops all of that when—well, I'm sure for untold, really untold tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of years before we were able to formulate that pattern of behavior at anything approximating a story or the image and even longer before we could articulate it as a set of ethical rules. And I'm dwelling on this; I know I've repeated some of this before, but it's so important because, you know, there's this tremendous push, especially from the social constructionists, to make the case that ethics is arbitrary. Ethics is—morality is relative. There's no fundamental biological grounding in relationship to human behavior, especially in the category of ethics.

And I think that that's, well first of all, it's dangerous because that means that people are anything you want to turn them into, and you bloody well better be careful of people who think that. And second, I just think that the evidence that that's wrong is so overwhelming that we should just stop thinking that way. I mean, and that's probably why I'm also attacking this from an evolutionary perspective. There are lots of converging lines of evidence that ethical standards—of at least the most crucial sort—not only evolve but also spontaneously re-emerge, for example, in the dramatic play of children. So we need to take that seriously, and so, well, that's partly what we're doing here, trying to take that seriously.

So, okay, so the idea there, at least in part, was that the Father employed the Son to generate habitable order out of chaos. I also think there might be something more approximately true about that as well, too, because one of the things we do know is something that's cool about men. Men are much more criminal than women, and that, by the way, does not look like it's socio-cultural, partly because it peaks when testosterone kicks in around 14. Like, it just spikes the hell up.

And then it really—it stays pretty high until about 27. And so standard penological theory for those of you who don't know this is that if you have a repeat offender—like a guy who just won't stop getting in trouble—you just hold him in prison till he's 28. And it isn't like you're rehabilitating him or anything; it's like by 28, he's done with his criminal career because the crime curve peaks at 15 and then falls down around 27 or so, it burns out; and that's often, by the way, that's often when men get married and settle down and stabilize.

One of the things that's—that's one of the things that's cool about that is the creativity curve for men is almost exactly the same thing. It ramps up when testosterone kicks in, and then it starts to flatten out around 27. That curves match very, very closely. So that's so that's quite cool.

It's the creativity element of it that I'm particularly interested in because the creativity is in many ways attributed to youth. And that's look, I mean, if you look at that sentence and you've stripped it of its religious context, what you would say is that, well, the older people use the younger people to generate creative ideas and renew the world. It's like, "Yeah, that's—that's what happens." And you also have no idea how many of the things that we discovered or invented as human beings were stumbled across by children and adolescents, you know, because they're, well, they're much more exploratory.

They're less constrained by their existing knowledge structures, and they're less conservative. So yeah, that seems just right to me. So—and right in an extraordinarily important way because it also means that it's like if you're an actual father, one of the things that it means is that that's part of what you should be encouraging your son to do, right? Which is—that's clearly the role, and to encourage is to say, "Well, go out there, confront the chaos of the unknown and the chaos that underlies everything, and drop it with it. You know how, because you can do it. Here, as big as the chaos itself.

And you know, do something useful as a consequence and makes your life better and make everyone else's life better." And you know, you can do it, and man, that's the right thing to tell. That's the right thing to be telling young men, you know? Talking to young women is more complicated because they have more, let's say, issues to deal with because their lives are more complicated in some ways.

But that's definitely the right thing to be to be telling your son. And one of the things that I've really noticed recently, since I've been lecturing, especially in the last seven or eight months, most of my audiences being young men, and I've talked a lot to them about both truth and responsibility. And I think that those are the two things that underlie this capacity. And there seems to me to be a tremendous hunger for that idea. It's not the same idea as right, you know, it's very different ideas. It's a counterpart to right.

And so it's, you know, life is hard. It's chaotic; it's difficult—it's really definitely a challenge. And so you can either shrink from that—and no bloody wonder because you know it's going to kill you. It's not like it's no joke, man—where you can fucking confront it and try to do something about it. Well, what's better? And then you say to the person, "Look, man, you could do it," like that's what a human being is like. And if you just stood up and got yourself together, and you find out by trying that you can in fact do that.

And I do think that that's—that's a great core religious message as far as I can tell. And I think that's deeply embedded in this sort of idea. So, alright, so this is what I've been telling you. This is something like how knowledge itself is generated. First of all, there's the unknown as—and that's really what you don't know anything about. And generally, when you encounter that, you don't encounter it with thought. You encounter it like this, right?

And that's the first representation of the absolutely unknown; it's something that is beyond your comprehension, and it's terrifying, and because it's beyond your comprehension, you cannot perceive it; you cannot understand it. But you still have to deal with it. And the way you deal with it is that you freeze—that's what the—that's what a basilisk does. Say to the kids in Harry Potter, right? They take a look at it, and they freeze. That's the snake—the terrible snake of chaos that lives underneath everything.

You see that that thing freezes you, and that's because you're a prey animal. But at the same time, it makes you curious. And so that's the first level of contact with the absolute unknown: it's the emotional combination of freezing and curiosity. And that's reflected, I think, in the dragon stories. The dragon is the terrible thing that lives underground, hoards gold or hoards virgins—very, very strange behavior for a reptile, as we pointed out before. But the idea is that it's a symbolic representation of the predatory quality of the unknown combined with the capacity of the unknown to generate nothing but novel information.

And it's very—you can see that it's very characteristic of human beings because we are prey animals, but we're also unbelievably exploratory, and we're pretty damn good predators. And we occupy this weird cognitive niche. And one of the things we've learned is that if we forth lightly confront the unknown, terrifying as it is, there's a massive prize to be gained continually. And so that seems to be true, right? It's true as anything is.

And then I would also say that that idea—and we know that one of the metaphors that underlies God's extraction of habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time is an older idea and a more archaic idea that God confronted something like the Leviathan. And that's one of the words for this serpent-like chaos creature that's often used in the Old Testament—the Leviathan—and he beat them on. Yeah, that's the other thing.

And so there's this idea that I think probably came from Mesopotamia that the God, either in the sun-like aspect or in the father-like aspect, is the thing that confronts this terrible beast that represents the chaotic unknown and cuts it into pieces and then sometimes gives the body parts to the populace in order to feed them. So you can see a hunting metaphor there as well, but it's deeper than that.

Alright, so the first thing is there's the absolute unknown, and the unknown is what you do not understand. It's what's beyond the campfire. Maybe it's what's beyond the tree. Even more anciently, an old word, when we lived in trees, it's out there. That where you don't know and what's out there—crocodiles and snakes and birds of prey and cats and all sorts of things like predatory cats, and they will eat you.

But there's utility in going out there to find out what's there. Like maybe you go and you don't kill the snake, you kill the damn nest of snakes, and that makes you pretty popular, just as you should be that accelerates your reproductive potential, let's say. And we're descended from people who did that, and so we have this notion about how the world is structured that's deeply embedded in our psyche—like really, really deeply. Way, way down—way below the surface cognition, way down in the limbic system in these ancient parts of the brain that are like 60 million years old or a hundred million years old or older than that—ancient, ancient brain structures.

And so the first thing we do is we act out our encounter with the unknown world, and we act that out in the same way—in a manner that's analogous to the manner that's presented as a description of what it is that God does at the beginning of time to extract habitable order out of chaos? I will tell you about the other part of that for now. So you act it out first. And then the second thing is you watch people who act it out, and you start to make representations of that. That's stories, right?

And maybe you admire them, and then after a long time, you collect a bunch of those stories, and then you can say what that is. You can articulate it as a pattern. And this is something Nietzsche also figured out to begin with. You know, because prior to Nietzsche, I would say he did so many things first—it was quite remarkable. You know, there was an idea that you first think and then you act. And then people like to think that of course you do it. Bloody rubbish, because you're impulsive as you can possibly imagine. You're always doing things before you think, and sometimes that's a really good idea.

So the idea that you see things and then think and then act, it's like, you really know I'm sorry—don't do that. I know one. I know—does that? And they certainly do that. Don't do that when they're emotional, you know? You act first, and one of the things that Nietzsche said very clearly was that our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And then when philosophers were putting forward those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas. They were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior. And it strikes me that that's—well, he was a genius, and that was one of his many observations of pure genius.

And so you can think about it: you can think about it like this, too. The unknown, and then you act in the face of the unknown, and then you dream about the action, and that's what you're doing in a movie theater. And then you speak about it. And, you know, of course, once you speak about it, that affects how you dream, and how you dream affects how you act. It's not like all of the causal direction is one way because it's not; these things loop. But it's still from the unknown through the body, through the imagination, into articulation. That's the primary mode of the generation of wisdom, let's say, and you can easily map that onto an evolutionary explanation.

Because the body comes first, right? And then is the imagination, which is the body in abstraction. Only then, the word. And of course, that's exactly how things did evolve because we could imagine things long before we could speak, at least that's the theory. So—and I represented that—this is an image from my book Maps of Meaning.

So the idea is that this is the fundamental representation of the unknown as such. It's half spirit because it partakes of the air, like a bird, and it's half matter because it's on the ground like a like a make. And that's what you think is there when you don't know what is there? That's how your body reacts to what's there when you don't know what is there. You know that too because if you're alone at night, you know, maybe you're a little rattled up for one reason or other—maybe you watched a horror movie—and you know there's some weird noise in the other room.

It's dark, and you could just try this once. It's like, so you're on edge. You think you want to turn the light on and go in the room and see? Don't do that; just open the door a little bit and sneak your hand in and just watch what your imagination fills that room with, right? And then you remember what it's like to be three years old in bed and afraid of the dark, right?

And I read a good book on dragons recently that had a very interesting hypothesis about them. I thought one of the things the guy did was track—I can't remember his name, unfortunately—track how common the image of the dragon was worldwide. It's unbelievably widespread; it's crazily widespread. And he thought that this was actually the category of primate predator.

And the predator was so—a predator is a weird category, right? Because like there's crocodiles in it, and there's lions, and they don't have much in common except they eat you, so it's a functional category. And so this is the image representation of the functional category of predator. His predator theory was, well, if you're a monkey, then a bird would pick you off, like an eagle, and so that's this, right?

And then if it wasn't an eagle, it was a cat, as they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And then if it wasn't a cat and you go down to the ground, a snake would get you or maybe a snake would climb up the tree, because snakes like to do that and get you. And so that's a pre-cat snake, basically: free cat, snake, bird, and that's the thing you really want to avoid. You don't want to come across one of those.

And so, and then you know the other thing it does is breathe fire, which is quite interesting, because obviously fire was both the greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity. And we've mastered fire for a long time. It might be as long as two or three million years; that's what Richard Wrangham—I think it's Wrangham—he wrote a book recently on—I think it was Wrangham who wrote a book on when human beings learned to cook that was about two million years ago.

And cooking increased the availability of calories. You know how chimpanzees are sort of shaped like a big—like they're ugly—they're shaped like a big bowling ball, you know? They're really—they look really fat, and they're short and they're wide, and that's because they have intestinal tracts that are like, you know, 300 miles long. And the reason for that is because they have to digest leaves. And so you go out in the forest and sit there and eat leaves for a whole day and see how that works out for you.

You know? Yeah, they have no calories in them! So chimps spend about—I think it's eight hours a day chewing. And it's because what they eat has no nutritional value. And then they have to have this tremendous guts in order to extract anything at all out of it. Human beings, at some point, just thought, "Oh, to hell with that! We'll cook something!" And then we traded our guts for brain, which, you know, more or less has worked and I think it's made us a lot more attractive as well.

So, okay, well, so the idea here was that—that's the basic archetype of the unknown as such. And then I like the St. George version of this; it's so cool because St. George lives in a castle, and the castle is partly falling down, and it's partly because there's a dragon that's come up—like, it's an eternal dragon; it's come back to give everyone a rough time, which always happens because there isn't—the eternal dragon is always giving our fallen-down castles a rough time, always.

And so then St. George is the hero who goes out to confront the dragon, and he frees the virgin from its grasp. And I would say that's a pretty straightforward story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown. That's just straight; that's the biological representation to me. And it's a really, really old story, right? It's the oldest written story we have, and that's basically the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Anu male-ish, which basically lays out precisely that story.

And so—and it's replayed. I mean, I bet you the moviegoers among you, especially the ones that are more attracted to the superhero, you know, they're really flashy sort of superhero type movies, you've probably seen the St. George story like 150 times in the last ten years. You never get tired of it because it's the central story of mankind. So you've got the unknown as such, and that is what you react to with your body in the existential terror and extraordinary curiosity gripping you, and then it's like the unknown, unknowns.

Who's the politician? Under Bush? Rumsfeld, yeah! I think the reason that that phrase caught on so well is because he nailed an archetype. There's unknown unknowns, and there's known unknowns, and that's the unknown unknown. And you have to be able to react to an unknown unknown because they can get you. And you can't just plead ignorance because then you're dead. That doesn't work.

Like, human beings are the sort of creature who has to know what to do when they don't know what to do. And that's very paradoxical, and what we do is we prepare to do everything. That's right. We're on guard; we prepare to do everything very, very stressful, but also very engaging and very much something that heightens consciousness.

And maybe those circuits are permanently turned on in human beings because we also know that we're going to die. No other animal knows that. And so sometimes I think that our stress circuits are just on all the time, and that's part of what accounts for our heightened consciousness. So you have your unknown unknowns and then you have your relatively—you have the unknown that you actually encounter in the world like the mystery of your romantic partner when you have a fight with them.

It's like, "Well, we're having a fight; who the hell are you?" I mean, you're not the absolute unknown because I know something about you, but you're the unknown as it's manifesting itself to me right now, right? And then there's a known that we inhabit, and then there's the knower. And the known is given symbolic representation, as far as I've been able to tell, in patriarchal form in the form of male deities, and the unknown as you encountered it is given feminine form.

So, we won't get into that too much, but if you're interested in that, you could look at my Maps of Meaning lectures or maybe take a look at the book, but I think it's a good schema for religious archetypes. I've worked on it a long time; it seems to fit the Jungian criteria quite nicely. It maps nicely onto Joseph Campbell's ideas. He got almost all his ideas from you, however. And it also makes sense from a biological and an evolutionary perspective, as far as I can tell. That’s a lot of cross-validation, at least in my estimation.

So, okay, so back to the hierarchy of dominance. Well, let's take a look at it a little bit. So I'm quite enamored of lobsters, as some of you might know, because I found out—this just blew me away when I found it out. I mean, I've done a lot of work in neurochemistry, some similar chemistry, because I used to study alcoholism and drug abuse, and alcoholism—to study alcohol, you have to know a lot about the brain because alcohol goes everywhere in the brain. It affects every neural chemical system.

And so, if you're going to study alcohol, it kind of has to study neurochemistry in general. And so I did that for quite a long time. I really got in a murky of a book called the Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray, which is an absolute work of genius, although extraordinarily—I don't know how many references that book has—it must be a thousand. And Gray actually read them and understood them, and then integrated them into this book.

And so to read it, you have to really master functional neural chemistry and animal behaviorism and motivation and emotion and neural anatomy. Like, it's a killer book, but man, it's really rich, and it's taken psychologists about 40 years to really unpack that book. But one of the things I learned about that was just exactly how much continuity there was in the neural chemistry of human beings in the neural chemistry of animals. It's absolutely staggering. It's the sort of thing that makes the fact of evolution something like self-evident.

I do think it's self-evident for other reasons that I'll tell you about later. I think evolution, or I think natural selection, random mutation and natural selection, is the only way you can solve the problem of how to deal with an environment that's complex beyond your ability to comprehend.

I think what you do is you generate endless variants because God only knows what the hell's going to happen next; they all—almost all of them die because they're failures, and a couple propagate. And you know, the environment keeps moving around like a giant snake. You never know what it's going to do next. And so the best you can do is say, well, here are thirty things that might work, and you know twenty-eight of them are going to perish.

If you're an insect, it's like the ratio is way, way higher than that. So anyways, back to the lobsters. In all of these, so these creatures engage in dominance disputes, and I think dominance is the right way to think about it because lobsters aren't very empathic, and they're not very social.

And so it really is the toughest lobster that wins. You know, and what's so cool about the lobster is that when a lobster wins, he flexes and gets bigger. So he looks bigger because he's a winner. It's like he's advertising that. And the biological—the neurochemical system that makes him flex is serotonergic.

And you think, well, who cares? What the hell does that mean? Well, I'll tell you what it means. It's the same chemical that's affected by antidepressants in human beings. And so if you're depressed, you're a defeated lobster. You're like this. I'm small; I'm not—you know, things are dangerous. I don't want to fight you.

Give someone an antidepressant and it's like up. They stretch, and then they're ready to like take on the world again. Well, if you give lobsters, who just got defeated in the fight, serotonin, then they stretch out, and they'll fight again. And that's like we separated from those creatures on the evolutionary timescale somewhere between 350 and 600 million years ago, and the damn neurochemistry is the same.

And so that's another indication of just how important hierarchies of authority are. I mean, they've been conserved since the time of lobsters, right? There weren't trees around when lobsters first manifested themselves on the planet. And so what that means is these hierarchies that I've been talking about, those things are older than trees.

And so one of the truisms for what constitutes real from a Darwinian perspective is that which has been around the longest period of time, right? Because it's had the longest period of time to exert selection pressure. Well, we know we evolved and lived in trees something on the order of 60 million years ago, but we're talking ten times as far back as that for the hierarchy. And so the idea that human beings—that the hierarchy is something that has exerted selection pressure on human beings is, I don't think that's a disputable issue. How it's done and exactly what that means we can argue about, but that sort of biological continuity is just absolutely unbelievable.

It was funny because I revealed this finding. I didn't discover this; I read about it. But I talked to my graduate students about it. I used to take them out for breakfast, you know? And they were a very contentious, snappy bunch, and they're always trying to one-up each other, and they're quite witty. And for like six months, until it got very annoying, every time one of them went up, the other one would stretch themselves out, like snap their hands. So that was very funny. It was really very funny.

So you see this in lobsters, and so that's pretty amazing. So, you know, and one of the other things that's really cool about lobsters is that let's say you've been a lobster for a long time, but you're getting kind of old and some young lobster just, you know, wails the hell out of you. And so you're all depressed, but the thing is your brain is dominant, but you don't have much of a brain because you're a lobster.

And so now, what are you going to do? Because you just lost? And the answer is, well, your brain will dissolve, and then you'll grow a subordinate brain! Yeah! So that's worth thinking about, too, right? Here are a couple of reasons. First of all, if any of you have ever been seriously defeated in life, you know what that's like. It's like it's a death, a descent, a dissolution, and if you're lucky, a regrowth.

And maybe not as the same person. That's what happens to people with post-traumatic stress disorder, right? Their brains undergo permanent neurological transformation, and they then inhabit a world that's much more dangerous than the world that they inhabited to begin with.

But we also know, too—if you have post-traumatic stress disorder or depression—that your hippocampus shrinks. Right? It dies and shrinks, and you can sometimes get it to grow back. Your hippocampus shrinks and your amygdala grows, and the amygdala increases emotional sensitivity and the hippocampus inhibits emotional sensitivity.

And so if you've been badly defeated, the hippocampus shrinks, and the amygdala grows. Now, if you recover, the hippocampus will regrow—and the antidepressants actually seem to help that—but the damn amygdala never shrinks again. And so, well, that's another lesson from the lobster.

It's quite a terrifying one, but it's one like—it's so interesting that you can relate to that, right? It's like, I get what that poor crustacean is going through, you know? So, okay, here's the rats. And this is from Jaak Panksepp's work, rat. He was the first guy who figured out that rats giggle, and you might think, "What kind of stupid thing is that to study?" It's like a $50,000 research grant for giggling rats, you know?

But he discovered the play circuitry in mammals. That's a big deal, right? It's like discovering a whole new continent. There's a play circuit in mammals; it's built right in. So it's not socially constructed. There's a biological platform for that. And so what Panksepp would do with rats—he found out that if rats are puffed away from their mother, they die. Even if you feed them, even if you keep them warm, they die.

Now you can stop it from dying by taking a pencil with an eraser on the end and massaging it, right? Because rats won't live without love. And the same thing happens to human babies. And we saw that in Romania when there was that catastrophe, Ceausescu in the orphanages, where the orphanages were full of unwanted babies because Ceausescu insisted that every Romanian woman was constantly pregnant.

So the orphanages just stacked up with unwanted babies—lots of them didn't even have names—and they were warehoused, warm, sheltered, fed, devastating. Lots of them died—most of them died before the first year—and the ones that didn't die were permanently dysfunctional. Because you have to be touched if you're a human being; it's not an option. You have to be played with; it's not an option. It's part of neural developmental necessity.

And you have to also play fair, because otherwise, you produce a very disjointed child who isn't able to engage in the niceties of social interaction, which is continual play in some sense and reciprocity. So what Panksepp did with his rats, he noticed that male rats, juveniles really liked to wrestle. And they wrestle just like human beings wrestle; they pin each other, for crying out loud.

With like that, that rat has just lost. He's down for a ten count, right? And so what you do is you take juvenile rats and you can find out that they want to play because you can attach a spring to them. And then they'll try to run, and you can measure how hard they're running by how hard they're pulling on the spring, and then you can estimate how motivated they are.

And so you can find out that a well-fed rat who doesn't have anything on his mind will still work hard to play, to enter an arena where he's been allowed to play before. He'll work for that. So then you think, "Well, the rat's motivated." So the two rats go out there and they play. And so they're playing like dogs play, and everyone knows what that looks like. If you know what—you have any sense about dogs—they kind of go like this, and kids do that.

And maybe you do that with your wife if you're going to play with her a little bit. Okay. My poor wife, man. When she was young, she had older siblings, and so she wasn't played with as much when she was little as she might have been. And I used to like—you know what? You take a pillow away, and you go like this three times, right? That means, "Look out! A pillow is coming your way!"

So I'd go, "One, two, three—wow!" But she looked—she was completely dismayed at me, like, "What do you do that for?" And I thought, "Well, I eventually taught her that rule." The other thing I used to do, you know, it said sometimes she'd come at me like this when we were playing around, and I grabbed her wrist, and I'd knock her for her hamsters heard not close together. She used to just get completely annoyed about that, and I thought—right?

That's what you do; you just open your hands. Well, she didn't know that either. So she hadn't been played with enough when she was a little rat, and so anyways, you let the little rats go out there, right? And so let's imagine one is 10% bigger than the other. And so the 10% bigger rat wins, because 10% is enough in rat way to ensure that you're going to be the pinner rather than the penny.

Okay, so that's fine. So the rat pins the big rat, pins the little rat. And now the big rat is the authority rat, and so then the next time that the rats play, the little rat has to invite the big rat to play. So the big rat is out there being cool and the little rat pops up and does the whole "Will you play with me?" thing, and the big rat will deign to play with it.

But if you pair them repeatedly unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat will not invite him to play. And Panksepp discovered that, and that just blew me away. It's like that is so amazing because you see, well first of, their—their—their—they're eager—there's an analogy to Panksepp's ideas about the emergence of morality out of play. And human beings—so that was very cool.

But the notion that that was built into rats at the level of wrestling was—and they're social—they're deeply social animals, right? They have to know how to get along with one another, and most of their authority disputes, dominance disputes, you don't want them to end in bloodshed and combat. Because you know, if your rat won and I'm rat one and we tear each other to shreds, in a dominance dispute, rat three is just going to move in.

It's really not a great strategy. And so it would be better if we could settle our differences somewhat peacefully. And so, well, so rat—anyway, Panksepp figured out that rats play—and not only did they play, they play fair, and they seemed to enjoy it. He also figured out this was really cool too—that if you give juvenile rats attention deficit disorder drugs—Ritalin suppresses play. So that's worth thinking about.

It's like, well, why do you have to give juvenile human beings amphetamines in school? Well, because they need to play! Well, you know, they don't get to play. You know, they don't get to wrestle around. I mean, that's oppression, as far as I can tell. They don't get to wrestle around; that's fine, feed them some amphetamines, man. That'll shut down the old play circuits.

Well, the other problem is Panksepp found out that if you don't let juvenile male rats play, their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly. Surprise! Surprise! You're not letting them engage! It's like, what else would you expect?

So, you know, that's something to think about really hard, I would say. So, well, so there's some wolves going at it. We're all hunting—not exactly. There's some wolves having an authority dispute, but more technically speaking, and a lot of its posturing. You know, they tend—not well socialized wolves tend not to hurt each other during authority disputes, because, well, for obvious reasons.

It's too dangerous, and so they have other ways of demonstrating who should be listened to, authorities. And there's chimps doing you have this particular house. I think if I remember correctly, I think this is right. This is a really cool picture because I think this chimp—chimps don't like snakes, by the way. So for example, if you take a chimp that's never seen a snake and you show it a snake, it is not happy. It will get the hell away from that snake.

And if you bring a chimp anesthetized into a room full of chimps, the chimps will all get away from that and then look at the body. They don't like that either. And if you bring a big snake into a chimp cage, even if the chimps have never seen it, like they'll get away from it and then stare at it.

And chimps out in the wild, if they see a big snake, they'll stand there and they have a noise that means it's like, "Holy crap, that's a big snake," you know? It actually means that technically. I'll tell you why in a minute. But they stand away from it, and they make this noise, which means, "Oh my God, look at the snake." And then they'll stand there for like 24 hours looking at the snake.

And so the snakes are really, really—they're super stimuli for chimpanzees. So that's pretty interesting. And this chimp seems to learn how to take this dead snake and go scare other chimps with it, and that was hardly how he established his authority.

And you know, and while there—there's a threat—and you, like, if I was you, and I was around that chimp, I would take that threat seriously because those things are no joke, man. And you see the same thing here with the—I don't remember what kind of monkey that is—but they're engaged in agonistic behavior.

And so, from—so, there has been, by the way, there has been recent research showing that in higher order primates that there is snake detection circuitry that's built into them, right? So it's not learned—it's not learned—deeper than that. Now, for a long time, psychologists knew for a long time that I could make you afraid in a conditioning experience experiment much faster using a snake or a picture of the snake than a gun or a picture of a gun.

So we can learn fear to snakes very rapidly—spiders as well. And so then people thought, "Well, maybe we were prepared to develop fear to snakes or spiders." That sort of thing. But the more recent research has indicated that it's more than just prepared; it’s that we have the detection circuitry built right into us. And, well, it's because, well, why wouldn't we? That's really the issue.

It's like, it's not really that much of a surprise unless you think of human beings as a blank slate. And if you think that, then I don't know—that—then you should crawl out of the 16th century, that's all I would look at, because, I mean, that's just—go on that idea. It's so wrong. So maybe you can think about this as a dominance hierarchy, but wolves look for credibility and competence as well. And chimpanzees don't like brutal tyrants.

So we'll talk about it as the hierarchy of authority. And so, well, this is kind of how it starts to develop. You see, well, these girls are negotiating the domestic environment here and how to behave properly and how to share and all that and turn and take turns. And so they're negotiating the hierarchy of authority, and if you're good at reciprocity, sometimes you're the authority, and sometimes the other person is the authority—that's fair play, right?

And so these boys are doing the same thing, and you see they're all smiling away. And so it looks like aggressive behavior, and people who are not very attentive and who are paranoid and who don't like human beings can confuse this with aggression. And they forbid it at schools, which is—you know, I know when my kids were going to school, for example, this was quite a while ago now—they were forbidden to pick up snow on the off chance they might throw a snowball.

And we know how terrible that is. So what I told my son was that he was perfectly welcome to pelt any teacher he wanted to in the back of the head with a snowball, as long as he was willing to suffer the consequences of doing it. And I don't know if he ever did, but he was certainly happy with the idea, which made me very happy about him, so yeah.

So, you know, kids need to do this; they really, really—seriously need to do this. It's what civilizes them, and that needs to happen between the ages of two and four. Because if they're not civilized by the time they're four, then you might as well just forget it. And that's a horrible statistic, but it's unbelievably well-borne out in the relevant developmental literature. Like, there's lots of aggressive two-year-olds—most of them are male—and if they stay aggressive past the age of four, they tend to be lifetime aggressive.

They make no friends. They're outcasts; they're much more likely to end up antisocial, criminal, delinquent, and in jail. And so your kids need to be socialized between the ages of two and four, and that's particularly true for the more aggressive males. And most of the aggressive two-year-olds are male, and that isn't socialization, by the way.

So there's a more—not more abstract representation of the same sort of thing, and I'm trying to make the case that the hierarchy of authority emerges out of a game-like matrix, an underlying game-like matrix. And that's one of the things that—one of the things that's so brilliant about Jean Piaget—he figured that out. It's so smart, and he was interested in the biological origin of morality, and he identified it—he traced the origin to play and the emergence of morality out of play.

And that's so smart! It's just—I just can't believe how smart