2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower

[Music] So last week I told you I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories, right? Well, more than two, but roughly speaking two—um—the creation stories because there's two of them in Genesis, and then also the story of the Buddha. And I was presenting you with a proposition, and it's a multi-layered proposition. The first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories.

The archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state where things are roughly functional; so that you might think of that as the state of things going well. And that's a state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you act them out in the world, not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself validates itself through your actions, right? Because what happens when you act something out and you get what you intend, just like when you use a map and get where you're going? Not only does that get you to where you're going, but it also validates the plan or the map. And so that's a definition of truth; that's a pragmatic definition of truth.

This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris, because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always insufficient. We never know everything about anything. And so the question then is how can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct? And the answer to that is something like, well, you lay out a plan. And you can think about it this way: this is actually an answer to the postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of the world is—well, we won't say correct because that's not exactly right, but you know the postmodernists object, say, with regards to the interpretation of a text that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted. And that's actually true.

And it's the same—it's actually a reflection of a deeper claim which they often also make, which is, well, if that's true for a text which isn't as complex as everything—although it's complex—then it's even more true for everything, which is to say the world lays itself out in a very complex manner, and you can interpret that in a very large number of ways. So who's to say which interpretation is correct? Okay, fair enough. It's a reasonable objection, and it's tied in with even a deeper problem, which is the problem of perception itself.

Because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex, then how is it that you can even perceive it? Well, that's partly the question that we're trying to answer. And the answer to that is, well, you have evolved perceptual structures, and they're actually oriented towards specific goals, and you're embodied. So your embodiment as a goal-directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception. But it's more complicated than that. So we could say, well, you come equipped—and this was Kant's objection to pure reason essentially—that the problem is the facts don't speak for themselves. There's too many facts for them to speak for themselves.

So you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework. Well, where does the interpretive framework come from? Well, the right answer to that is something like it evolves, right? It's taken three and a half billion years for your perceptual structure—your embodied perceptual structure—to evolve, and it's done that, roughly, in a trial-and-error process. I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution, but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being. So there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival and reproduction, but there's other constraints imposed too that you might regard as subsets of that.

One is that, because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape, the perceptual structures and plans that you lay out— we'll say the maps that you lay out—have to be negotiated with other people. And so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to apply. So you can think about this in a Piagetian sense—that is, if there were children in a playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play, they have to agree on a game. And the game is, of course, a perceptual structure and a goal-directed structure and a structure that delimits actions and interactions. And so they at least have to settle on a game.

And so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment to those that are deemed socially acceptable. And then you say, well, what are the further constraints? And the constraints might be, well, let's play the game and see if it's any fun. And that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually and then lay it out in the actual world and see if, when you lay it out in the world, it does what it's supposed to do. In some sense, what you're doing is testing a tool.

So the idea that the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained turns out to be incorrect. That doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained, but the technical suggestion that, well, there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations, is just not correct. It's not correct on biological evolutionary grounds, and it's also not correct on social cultural grounds, because it has to be negotiated. And then, you know, you put a further constraint on that essentially by saying, well, not only does it have to be a game and a game that attains its ends, but it has to be a game that people want to play. So it also has to satisfy some element of subjective desire as well. So that's three levels of constraint, right? It has to be a game you want to play; it has to be a game that you can play with other people; and it has to be a game that, if you play with other people, actually works in the world.

Okay, well, so much for an infinite array of options. It's a very constrained array of options now. And I think the idea that I've been proposing to you is that what evolved mythology does—these representations that we've been dealing with, these archetypal representations—is sketch out that landscape. What is the landscape of playable games? That's a good way of thinking about it. And so it sets out a landscape; it sets out a description of the landscape in which the game is going to be played as well as a description of the land of the game itself.

And so the landscape is roughly—the core archetype seems to be something like—it's something like the interplay between chaos and order. And chaos is represented by the serpentine predator because we use our predator detection circuits to conceptualize the unknown. Because what else would we do? That seems given that we're prey animals and given our evolutionary history. It's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do, because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die, or perhaps a slight variant of that is something might kill you. But whatever, those are close enough to the same thing.

So chaos is what causes your deterioration and death, and there's lots of ways to conceptualize that. But a reptilian predator—fire-breathing reptilian predator—isn't a bad way to start. And so the question is, well, what do you do in the face of that? And one answer is you build circumscribed enclosures—that's order—and then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosures. So that's partly the hero. Now the hero is also, though, that's not good enough, because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable. It can be invaded; it will inevitably be invaded either from the outside or from within, right?

And so we've been conceptualizing the predator—the malevolent predator—at multiple levels of analysis throughout our evolutionary history, say, but also in our symbolic history, trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure, right? And we can say, well, it's partly external threat; it's partly social threat. But it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure because of our, let's say, our intrinsic malevolence. And so that would be the snakes within.

And so that accounts for the analogy—the Christian analogy between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan—which is a very, very strange analogy. It's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another, especially given that when the creation story originally emerged in the form I talked to you about last week—the story of Adam and Eve—the idea that the serpent in the garden was also something that was associated with the adversary wasn't an implicit part of the story. That got laid on afterwards. It's like, well, what's the worst possible snake? Well, that's a reasonable question. And then a better question is, what do you do about the worst possible snake? And one answer is you face it.

But there's other answers too, like you make sacrifices, right? And that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos, roughly speaking. Is that you learn to conceptualize the future? You see the future as a realm of potential threat, and then you learn to give things up in the present, and somehow that satisfies the future. Now so maybe you're offering sacrifices to God. And you think, well, why does that—well, think—you got to think about that psychologically. Why does that work?

Well, you could think about the Spirit of God the Father as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group. We'll call it the patriarchy if you want—it doesn't matter. It's the thing that's common across the group as a spirit, as a psychological force across time. Why do you make sacrifices to that? That is what you do all the time. You're right now, you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the great father because your assumption is that if you do what's diligent—so you're not chasing impulse of pleasure at the moment unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like that—you’re not chasing impulse of interest; you're sacrificing your impulse of interest to satisfy the spirit of social requirement.

And so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you can make a bargain with it so that it will reward you in the future, and that reward will be part of partly the staving off of insecurity, which is no more than to say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree is because you believe that it'll aid you in finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of chaos.

So now those things were—as we've been at pains to point out—those things were articulated and represented in image and story long before they could be fully articulated. Because we're building our knowledge of ourselves and also our social structures and also the world from the bottom up, as well as from the top down. There's an interplay between the two levels of analysis, okay? And so that's partly the archetypal underpinning.

And then with regards to the stories themselves—you're in a map, so to speak. You're using a map, and with any luck, it's detailed enough so that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go. And sometimes you don't, and that means that you have to recalibrate your journey along the map, which, by the way, is exactly what GPS systems do when you go off the pathway, right? They stop—that's an anxiety response from the GPS system—they stop, they recalibrate, and they readjust the map. Now, and then if you're unfortunate—this very rarely happens anymore—you'll be on a road that isn't mapped, and then the GPS system doesn't know what to do. Well, that happens in real life too.

I mean, those are—I'm using GPS for a very specific reason. Those are intelligence systems as far as I'm concerned. Those are the closest things we've ever designed to intelligence systems because they can actually orient, right? They orient in real time, and they're unbelievably sophisticated systems, right? Because they rely on a huge satellite network and so on, and they're cybernetic systems, technically speaking. They respond very much like the way that we respond.

So anyways, you know, you're—you inhabit a map, you try to adjust the resolution of the map so that it's no more complex than it needs to be to get you from point A to point B—that's it. You want minimal resolution, because that enables efficient cognitive processing. It doesn't overload you too much. Like when I'm looking at this room, if I look, say, I want to walk down this pathway, basically what my mind does—my perceptual field—and you can detect this if I look straight ahead, I can barely see you people on the periphery. You're more like, you're kind of like blurs.

You two, I can tell that you have heads, but that's about it. When you move, I can see your hand; I can probably see your eyes, but barely. So you're all very low resolution. And even though I can't detect it at the very periphery of my vision, you guys are black and white, so my color vision disappears at the periphery even though I can't—I can't actually perceive that. So what happens is if I want to walk down here, this pathway becomes high resolution; it becomes marked with positive emotion; all of this turns into low resolution back here; it's not even represented.

And then I find out, well, am I doing this properly? And the answer is, well, I walk forward. And if I get to the goal, then I've done it properly enough. And if, you know, one of you stands up and gets in my way, then I'm going to focus on you and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly, right? I put you in the category of irrelevant entity when in fact you happen to be in the category of strange object—the thing that objects.

And so, well, so then we inhabit those structures all the time. We're in a structure like that—a perceptual structure—and if it's working, then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise, so to speak, because its axioms are correct and it's functional. And then now and then something comes along, and that's what the snake is—the eternal snake in the garden that pops up inside a structure—and it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to are the most important things rather than the least important things. And then what does that do? It blows them out into pieces.

And that can happen at different levels of severity, but at the ultimate level of severity, it's apocalyptic, right? Everything goes. And that's a traumatic intrusion. And essentially the story of the Garden of Eden is the story of a traumatic intrusion; that's exactly what it is. And so what happens is that Adam and Eve are living in unconscious bliss, roughly speaking; everything's fine. They're in their walled garden, they're in a paradisal state; they're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness, so they—they're not suffering from negative emotion.

Something pops up that radically expands their vision, and all of a sudden now they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats. So that's their own nakedness and vulnerability and temporality itself, because they become aware of the future. And bang! That state of being in that paradise is forever gone. That's the strange thing about human beings—is this is what happened to us, I think, is that our perceptions developed to such a degree that we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant. We couldn't do it.

Because we discovered, roughly speaking, once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space, we discovered that we were surrounded by infinite threat always. And maybe that's why people are so hyper awake, because threat wakes you up. Well, we're in a constant state of existential threat now. The advantage to that is that we take—we take arms up against a sea of troubles constantly. That's the advantage, right? And we build inclosures, and we take precautions for the future, and we live a very long time and we generally live quite safe lives compared to the lives we could live.

And so we've traded pain for anxiety. That's another way of thinking about it. So the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall; that's what it is. It says, look, you exist in these walled enclosures, but there's something that lurks that will always knock you off your feet. And then the question is, what is that? And the answer to that has been formulated over very long periods of time. Partly it's the probability of predation itself—that's the snake—the thing that can come in subtly and undermine you.

Okay, but then that's, what would you call it—that's expanded upward to include the abstract snake, which is that thing that can undermine your conceptual schemes, right? So you have your actual territory, and then you have your abstract territory, and in your actual territory there are actual snakes, and in your abstract territory there are abstract snakes, right? And then the worst snake of all is malevolence. And that's, I think that's technically correct, because one of the things that you view, for example, when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder is that it's almost always the case that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder—which you might think of as a real-life reincarnation of the Fall—is that people encounter something malevolent, and it breaks them.

Because it's the worst thing to understand. It's like suffering is one thing, man— that's bad enough, vulnerability and suffering—that's bad enough. But to encounter someone who wishes that upon you and will work to bring it about—that's a whole different category of horrible, especially when it also reflects something back to you about yourself. Because if someone else can do that to you and they're human, that means that you partake of the same essence. Strangely enough, that's actually the cure to some degree to post-traumatic stress disorder, is that, like, if you've been victimized, you're naïve, and you've been victimized, the way out of that is to no longer be naïve and to no longer be victimized. And that means that you see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea, for example, that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he's got a piece of them or he's been touched by it.

And the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopath so that you know one when you see one, right? But that's a voluntary thing. It's so—it's like a set of tools that you have at your disposal, which is full knowledge of evil. And that does, NCH said, if you look into an abyss for too long, you risk having the abyss gaze back into you, right? The idea is that if you look at something monstrous, you have a tendency to turn into a monster—and people are often very afraid of looking at monstrous things exactly for that reason. And then the question is, well, should you turn into a monster? And the answer to that is yes, you should, but you should do it voluntarily and not accidentally, and you should do it with the good in mind rather than falling prey to it by possession essentially because that's the alternative. And how does it possess you? That's easy. Your suffering makes you bitter; your bitterness makes you resentful; your resentfulness makes you vengeful.

And once you're on that road, you go down that a little bit farther, man, well, you end up fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school and then killing yourself, right? Because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning—being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil, and I'm exactly the person to do it. And I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth just to hammer the point home, right? And if I can garner a little posthumous fame along the way, well, that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominance hierarchy imaginings too, at least in fantasy. So, you know, it's the full package if you want to go down that route.

And of course, people don't like to think about that sort of thing and it's no bloody wonder. But without the capability for mayhem, you're a potential victim to mayhem. So you need your sword; it should be sheathed, but you need to have it. And it's very frequently the case if you treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, there's two things you have to do. You have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil, because otherwise their brain bothers them over and over and over—why were you so naïve? How did you become victimized? Why were you such a sucker? These are good questions. You don't want to have that happen to you again; you don't want to be exploited twice, okay? So your eyes have to open up.

We know the price of that from the Egyptian myth, right? You come into contact with Seth. What happens? Even if you're a god, you lose an eye. It's no joke, man. It's no joke. And then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and the revitalization of the father. That's the identification with the force that created culture, right? And then there's you, and that together, then, you can withstand malevolence. Maybe you can withstand tragedy and malevolence. And then that's the whole secret, right? Because that's what you want in life. You need to be able to withstand tragedy and you need to be able to withstand malevolence, because those are the forces that are always working against you.

And so this is associated with the Jungian idea of incorporation of the shadow, right? You have to be—we know this. God, we know how predators work with regards to children. Even if you're a pedophilic predator and you're looking at a landscape of children, the child that you're going to go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back. You pick your victim, and predatory people in general are exactly like that, man, because they're predators. They're not going to attack someone who's going to fight back. In fact, the issue is likely not to even come up. They're going to be looking for someone, one way or another, that cannot conceptualize what they are, and then perfect—it's open season, man; it’s open season.

And so if you're treating someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, first they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolence, and second they have to learn to become dangerous, because that's the only way out. What's the alternative? They get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naïveté. Because by definition, if a psychopath has exploited you, you're too naïve—it's a definitional issue. You can say, well, that's no fault of mine; how the hell could I be prepared? Fair enough, man; a perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem. Because it's an eternal problem, right? The internal problem is how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence? And you can say, well, I'm not prepared—it’s like, yeah, fair enough. Unsurprising, especially if you were overprotected as a child.

It's not a good idea to overprotect your kids because the snakes are going to come into the garden no matter what you do. And so then you—instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away, what you do is you arm your child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them. So that the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and malevolence is strength, not protection. It's a completely different idea. We also know this clinically. We know, for example, that if you treat people with exposure therapy for agoraphobia, which is roughly speaking the fear of chaos, I would say the fear of everything, you don't make them less afraid; you make them braver.

It's not the same thing, because with agoraphobia what happens to them is the fault—they never conceptualize death and suffering; they're naïve, right? It never enters the theater of their imagination. And it's because they're protected from it. But then something happens—this often happens to women in their 40s, because they're the people most likely to develop agoraphobia. Something happens—they've been protected from chaos by authority their entire life. So maybe they had an overprotective father and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend, and then they went to an overprotective husband. And maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the protection, right?

So that's the bargain—they stay weak and dependent, and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyper-protective. But the price they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent. And then something happens in their life, often in their 40s—they develop heart palpitations, maybe as a consequence of menopause. Their heart starts to beat erratically, and they think, oh no, death! It's like, well, who are you going to talk to about that, right? There's no protection from authority for that. Or maybe their friend gets divorced, or maybe their sister dies, or something like that— it brings up the specter of mortality and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality. And it brings it up in a way that authority—recourse to authority—cannot solve.

And so then they have panic attacks. What happens? They go out, they get afraid, they feel their heart beating, then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think, oh no, I'm going to die! And they think, oh no, I'm going to die, and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention. So the two big fears come up—mortality and social judgment. Then they have a panic attack. It's like fight or flight's gone out of control—very, very unpleasant. Then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack, and they end up not being able to go anywhere. So then Tiamat has come back, right? A huge monster—a little victim.

And so what do you do with them? Well, there's no saying no, there's no Tiamat that's done, right? Their naïveté is over; they've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment. They've met the terrible mother, and they've met the terrible father, and there's no going back. There's no saying, oh, the world is safe. It's not safe, not at all; it's not safe. The fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture. It's a gift, and now that's been shattered.

And so now, what do you do? Well, the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go. You're the ultimate frozen rabbit, right? And your life is hell because you can't function. The alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of—let's expose you to them, you know, carefully and programmatically—and then you'll learn that you can—you're actually tougher than you think; you never knew that. And maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because, you know, people play a role in their own demise, so to speak. When you had the opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid, you chose to withdraw because you were afraid.

So it's not only that you were overprotected. Often, it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were overprotected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity. You know, so maybe you're a kid in the playground, right? And you're having some trouble with other kids, and you know in the back of your mind, I should deal with this myself, but you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene. And you know that that's not right; you know that you're breaking the social contract, but it's easier. And so that's what you do—you run off to an authority figure and hide behind the great father, right? Roughly speaking.

Well, the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself. So then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40. So then you take people out, you say, well, what are you afraid of? Rank it from 1 to 10. So 10 is—make a list of 10 things you're afraid of. The least—the thing you're least afraid of, we'll call number 10. So we'll start with that. Okay, well, I'm afraid of elevators. Okay, well, let's look at a picture of an elevator. Let's have you imagine being in an elevator. Let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're responding to it symbolically, right?

And you're going to do that at the closest proximity you can manage. You find out you go do that; it works. You're nervous as hell, especially from an anticipatory perspective—shaking; you go out, you stop, you watch it happen, and you actually calm down. You do that 10 times and it no longer bothers you. Well, well, you've learned that you didn't die. But more importantly than that, you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death—that's what you've learned. And then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and finally, you're back in what's no longer the elevator—from a symbolic perspective—it's a tomb, right? It's a place of enclosure and isolation, and you learn, hm, turns out I can withstand that.

And then you're met much more together, much more confident. And that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that. I've seen this multiple times, is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up, they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before, because they weren't willing to undermine the protection. See, if you're protecting me, I can't bother you because I can't afford to forsake your protection. So if I'm going to play that game, I'm going to hide behind you, then I can't challenge you.

So that's no good, because that's sometimes why people—you see this with guys very frequently—they're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s. It's like, well, why? Well, because they still want to believe that there's someone out there that knows. And so they're willing to accept the subjugation, because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows, because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge, right? Because he knows. Well, what if he doesn't? What if no one knows any better than you? Well, that's a rough thing. You don't until you realize that you're not an adult, right?

That's really technically the point of realization of adulthood is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do. I mean, it's a horrible realization because what the hell do you know? It's a terrible realization, and people will often pick slavery—permanent slavery to the spirit of the great father, let's say—over that realization, and it's completely understandable. But the problem with it is that there's more to you than you think. And so if you continue to hide behind that figure, then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think—far more to you than you think.

Maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of mortality without collapsing—maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing. Who knows? It's certainly possible, and it's not an abstract question; it's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process. It's always the question that you address, and the answer is often in the affirmative because people can get unbelievably tough.

And you know that because people work in emergency wards and hospitals, right? Or they work in palliative care wards or they work as mortuary assistants. I mean, these people have bloody rough jobs, you know? Or they're on the front line of police investigation into, you know, heinous child abuse crimes. And so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis. And you know those are very stressful jobs, but people do them. And some people do them without even being damaged by them, although that's a harder thing because you can see horrible things—you know, things you'll never forget.

So I would say the story in the story of Adam and Eve is a meta story, and it's a meta story for two reasons. One is it's about how stories transform, because Adam and Eve are in this conscious paradise, and then it collapses, and that happens to every potential story, right? That's Nietzsche's realization. He said, look, imagine that you live within a belief system, and then something arises to challenge the belief system. Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens—your belief in belief systems collapses. And that's the road to nihilism.

Now, it doesn't have to because you can jump from one belief system to another, but sometimes that doesn't work. You do a meta-critique and you say, oh, I was living in this protective structure, and it turned out to be flawed. Okay, one alternative is jump to another protective structure; fine. Another alternative is protective structures themselves are not to be trusted. Bang! You're in chaos. How the hell are you going to get out of that? That's the pathway to nihilism. Well, you can work your way through that; that's difficult. Or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul-damaging move, and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re-identify with something rigid, restricted—which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to the current state of chaos.

It's like, I know that people need to identify with local groups; I understand that. But they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate God. And that's order. But that's not a good replacement for chaos; it's just another kind of catastrophe, right? Too much order, too much chaos—both catastrophes. You want to stand in the middle somehow and mediate between the two, and that's where you have your real strength because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place; because even the bloody right-wingers are after a safe place, right? They just want it to be the state. Yeah, exactly.

Well, there's no safe places, and the next issue is, do you really want a safe place? Is that what you want? You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat? What the hell kind of life is that? You're a paralyzed rabbit in a hole. That's no life for a human being. You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence because—and the reason for that too is—this is the weird paradox. This is—and I believe this is the paradox first of all that was discovered in part by Buddha, but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity—which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.

Now who the hell would ever guess that? It's completely paradoxical. It's a completely paradoxical suggestion. Is that, well, why does it work? Well, because the more you confront the two of them, the more you grow. And maybe you can grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself. And you think, well, what's the evidence for that? And that's easy; that's what people do—that is how we learn. Like, every time you expose your child to something new—a playground—what are they exposed to? Chaos and malevolence.

Now there's more to it than that obviously, because kids play and they, you know, they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that. But in the playground itself, there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully; it's right there. And you throw your kid in there and you say, adapt. And they do. Okay, so they can do it at a small scale. It's not trivial. The playground is a complicated place. The kid can adapt. Well, how much can you scale that up? Can you scale that up to—from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself? Well, that's the question. Well, I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative.

So because we don't know the full extent of a human being, and it is the problem that's worked out. So in the Buddha story, for example, what happens after—so, Buddha's world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses. It's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death. What happens to Buddha is he realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him—the walled garden—is exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story. It's fatalistically flawed; that kind of protection cannot exist. And he discovers that in pieces, right?

Which is exactly what happens to children, is that they go out, they discover a limit, they run back, and the parents can help them with the limit. They run out, they discover a limit, they run back, but at some point, they run out, they discover limits, they run back, and the parents have nothing to say to them because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit, which is like, well, what are you going to do with your life? How are you going to operate in this archetypal universe? Well, your parents can only say, well, they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures—they do that, they at least act that out for you—but at some point, it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker.

That's the thing. You know, it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy. One of the things you have to learn as a therapist is how do you not take your clients' problems home with you? It's a very common existential problem that beginning therapists face because they're afraid. It's like, well, you're dealing with people all the time who have serious problems—sometimes it's mental illness, although less frequently than you'd think, and sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe, right? Their parents have cancer or something like that, or their father has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed, or they have a drug problem, or they have a schizophrenic son. Or like, these aren't mental illness problems, right? Those are just catastrophes.

And so people are discussing those with you all the time. How do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking it home? And the answer to that is you don't steal the problem. That's the answer. It's like, you have some problems; if you come and talk to me, I'll help you figure out how to solve them. I will not tell you how to solve them; I won't steal your problems because what we're trying to do in therapy is number one, solve your problem; number two, turn you into a great solver of problems. And the second one is way more important than the first one. And so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem. That's theft.

That's the Edle situation—that's the overprotective mother. Now father can play that role too—we're talking about archetypal representations. It's like, I'll protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself. No, wrong. That's the— that's a sin. That's a good way of thinking about it. That is not what you do with people—not with your children, not with your partner, not with yourself. You don't do that. That destroys people's adaptive competence, and it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence, and that's a terrible—you're going to send someone out unarmed in a world like that? It's a terrible thing to do.

And if people aren't strong enough to manage it, then they get resentful. And then, you know, you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that, okay? So the meta story is partly you're in a map, you have a map, but it's insufficient, and things will come up to disrupt it. And sometimes the disruption is catastrophic; everything falls apart. That's what happens to the Buddha, and that's what happens to Adam and Eve. And the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together. Now that: that's been assembled, as I said, it's been assembled over centuries, right?

Okay, we've got the problem. The problem is the ever-present reality of the apocalyptic fall; that's the problem. And so you could say, well, what is that? It's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes, right? Your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world; it's a permanent problem. So what do you do? You stop relying on your conceptual schemes. That's part of the answer. You start relying on your— instead on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence. And so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity—your creative, courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown rather than some formulaic approach to the territory.

And that, and that the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt, and that provides a permanent solution to the problem. Well then you might say cynically, what's your evidence that that's a permanent solution? And the answer to that is, well, the evidence isn't all in yet. First of all, because people only live that way partially, and so we haven't put the hypothesis to the full test. And second, we don't know what our limitations are; we have no idea what our limitations are. And they're both greater and lesser than we imagined.

Because you know, you have to ask yourself, like, if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight—setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight—what would happen? And the answer to that is, well, there'd be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world. So that might not be a bad place to start, but apart from that, there's very little that we can say. Could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality? Why not? You think that's beyond our capacity? Could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist? Well, possibly, because we don't know the limitations of our capacity.

We're only running at 40%, if that, I would say. We don't make full use of all the people that are in the world. We don't have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized. We haven't set the systems up for that yet, so we waste people like mad, and then we waste ourselves like mad. And so I would say this is something also that's one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament Jews. This is, I think, one of the reasons that their book has become so central.

Because what happens in the Old Testament after the fall is that Israel produces a series of states, right? Rise of state and then a fall, and then a rise of another state, and then a fall. So it's the same thing, except it's happening at a political level. The political state rises, it gets corrupt, it falls, it rises out of the ashes again, gets corrupt, and falls. I think that happened six times in the Old Testament. And one of the things that's very interesting is the reaction of the Jews: they always say it was our fault instead of taking the Cain and Abel route.

So, and I'm going to tell you the Cain and Abel story right away. Instead of taking the Cain and route, they always say, if the state collapsed, it was because we did something wrong. That's very different than saying, you know, it's arbitrary fate; it's the nature of arbitrary fate or the structure of reality that we're doomed to collapse into chaos, and that's an indication of the corruption of being. Well, you can take that route if you want; it's the corruption of being. Well, good luck with that. So what are you going to do about that?

That's easy: start—you'll start to work for the destruction of being; that's what you will do. The alternative is to say, this terrible thing happened and somehow it's my fault. Well, at least that opens you up the pathway to doing something about it. And maybe it's actually the case. Maybe terrible things happen because you're just not who you should be. At least it's a—you know, that's true to some degree, right? You know it because things happen to you all the time and you think, well, you know, if I just would have played that game straight and if I would have put this thing in order, that wouldn't have happened; it's like, okay, fine.

What's the ultimate extent of that? Dostoevsky said at one point that every human being was not only responsible for everything that happened to him or her, but also simultaneously responsible for everything that happened to everyone else. Now, it's a very—it's, I would say, it's almost a hallucinogenic idea, right? It's a Transcendent idea, and it can go very wrong. Sometimes depressed people, for example, get hyper-responsible for what's happened, and it just crushes them. And so it's a mode of thinking that can produce its attendant pathologies, but there's something about it that's metaphysically true.

So, alright, I'm going to tell you the story of Cain and Abel now. I really like this story. It's very short—it's only about a paragraph long—which is very interesting because it's one of these examples where there's so much condensed into it that it's almost unbelievable. And there's even ambiguity condensed into it, which is very, very interesting because it actually makes the story more complex and sophisticated. So let me tell you the story now.

The first thing I want to tell you some things about the story first. So we’ve got the original paradisal state and then the collapse. And so now metaphysically speaking, we're in the collapse; we're in the post-fall condition. We're still occupying a mythological landscape, right? This isn't history as we normally understand it; it's meta-history. So when we talk about Cain and Abel, we're actually talking about the first two real human beings, because Adam and Eve A) were created by God, and B) were in paradise, and so that's not the normative condition of human beings, right? That's a special time—it's outside of normal time and space.

Cain and Abel, by contrast, they're in history, because in some sense, history actually starts a couple of times in the Old Testament. It starts with the creation of being, it starts with the formation of the garden, it starts with the fall; it starts with Cain and Abel, it starts over again with Noah, and then it starts with Abraham, which is really where what we would recognize more as conventional history begins. So there's a number of starts of history, but this is one of them. Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. Who are they? They're the adversarial brothers—hero and adversary. They're types of Christ and Satan; it's a well-known supposition. You see that hostile brother motif; well, it's an archetypal motif.

And the hostile brothers are the part of you that's striving for the light; that's one half—and the part of you that's embracing the darkness. And so that's part of you; it's part of the social structure; that's Seth and Osiris; it's part of the natural order in some sense—that's the benevolent and destructive elements of nature, right? You see that negativity running through all the archetypal representations. But Cain and Abel are the hostile brothers, and Cain is roughly that part of you that says, oh, to hell with it, and means it, right? And that means you'll work for your own pain and destruction at the same time that you're working for the pain and destruction not only of your brother but more particularly of the brother that you admire, because that's actually a lot more entertaining, right?

If you become destructive and you go destroy something bad, that hardly qualifies as destruction. What you want to do is find something great and destroy that—that's destruction, that's revenge. None of this putting punishment where it deserves to be. What you want to do, and this is partly why the story of Christ is archetypal, and an archetypal story is when you cannot push beyond what's the worst possible punishment; what's the worst possible punishment meted out for the least, the least, the most innocent person? You hit an archetypal end there. So you define the most innocent person, you can do that any way you want—define the most innocent person, define worst possible punishment, conjoin the two things, you get an archetypal story. And the reason for that is you can't push beyond it.

And so if you want to destroy something, you want to destroy an ideal, not something that's flawed. And so Cain and Abel are set up exactly that way. So I'll read you the story, and I'll interleave some interpretations along with it. So—and Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bore his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Okay, so Abel's a shepherd, and Cain is a farmer. The shepherd is an archetypal symbol because the shepherd is the leader of a flock, and the shepherd is the heroic leader of a flock. And the reason this is Middle Eastern mythology, let's say—well, if you were a shepherd, what did you do? You took your slingshot and your stick, and you defended your nice juicy, plump, delicious sheep against lions, right?

So it was no joke, man; you were a tough cookie if you were a shepherd, because, well, you were acting as the guardian of—you were acting as the guardian against predation, roughly speaking. And you weren't armed very well. I mean, well, you can just think about it for a minute. It's—to think about fighting off a lion with a slingshot or with a bow and arrow or with a spear, I mean, you have to have a lot of courage to manage that, especially successfully.

So Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground, which isn't as heroic a role. And so right off the bat, you get this dichotomy between the two roles. It's also of great interest that Cain is the older brother, and Abel is the younger brother, and you see that very frequently in mythology. Because the older brother is the one that's privileged by status, right? So he's got privilege, Cain, because he's the elder brother.

That also means that if there are possessions to be handed down the generations, the older brother gets them. Now, interestingly enough, Cain has privilege, but he's not the one that's favored by God. And I think that's absolutely brilliant that it's set up that way, because it's actually Abel who doesn't have the right that the firstborn has who actually turns into the person who's the proper manifestation of the ideal. It's because Cain has things given to him. You might think, well, that's great; he's privileged; what a wonderful thing for Cain. It's like, don't be so sure about that.

And partly because one of the things that you'll find—because many of you will be well off when you have children—is one of the problems with being reasonably wealthy when you have children is that you deprive them of privation. Because a lot of what makes people mature is necessity. And if you have—for example, if you have more money than you know what to do with, roughly speaking, it's very difficult to say no to your children when they want something, because why are you going to say no? You can just provide it. Well, what makes you think that that's what you should do? Well, you can have anything you want.

Well, what happens? You devalue what you want, and your desires continue to grow. Well, that's not very helpful. So it's not obvious at all that providing people with an excess, let's say, of privilege is something that's good for them from a psychological perspective. They need to hit the proper limitations, and if you're fortunate, it becomes very difficult to deprive your children properly. So you'll fight with that; it's a big problem, and that's what happens when you get spoiled children, roughly speaking, right? They get everything by doing nothing. Well, that's not a good lesson because that won't work in the world; it'll work very counterproductively.

And in process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord, and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and his offering, he had no respect. And Cain was very wroth (angry), and his countenance fell.

Okay, so again there's a tremendous amount packed into that. This is the first time that we see the motif of sacrifice, right? And so I mentioned to you before how these archaic people conceptualize the world, right? It's a dome with a disc of land, and underneath that, a disc of water—fresh—and underneath that, a disc of salt water—so that's the world. And then up in the heavens, that's where God is, and so God's up in the sky. And we talked about why that might be, and part of that is when you look at the night sky, you look at what transcends your current reality, and you look at what inspires awe. So there's a God exists where awe is experienced; fine, that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

When you think that what you're trying to do is formulate what constitutes the transcendent, because if you exist within a conceptual structure and you encounter that which is outside the conceptual structure, you will feel awe. That's a combination of fear, paralysis, right? And a combination of overwhelming possibility. And you can experience that, for example, if you listen to a great piece of music, what happens? The hair on the back of your neck stands up. Why? Because you're a prey animal and you just puffed up to look bigger. That's why you have that experience; it's piloerection. And it's part of awe.

So when you see a cat puff up because a big dog is in front of it, that's what the cat's feeling. It's like, oh my God, puff, right? So you—when you encounter that which transcends your limited sphere of apprehension, then you experience awe. You look at the night sky; that's what happens. Music can do that, and all sorts of things that we do can evoke that sense. And so they located the transcendent value that which inspired awe—fine, reasonable.

Now you can argue about the utility of the personification, right? Because God the Father was personified in human form, but that's a very sophisticated idea too, because as we already found in the Old Testament, there's an association between whatever God is, Yahweh or Elohim, and creating order out of chaos and something about each individual human being. And so I don't believe that the personification of God the Father in the Old Testament is archaic and primitive at all; I think it's one of the most sophisticated things that people ever developed. The idea is that the ultimate transcendent value is the capacity to generate order out of chaos using linguistic ability, let's say, and that each person has that as an essential element of their being.

It's like argue with that, see how far you get. That is one hell of a vicious conceptualization. And I would also say it's the bedrock upon which our legal system rests. So you don't move that easily; you move that, and many things fall. And there are things that you may say you don't believe, but you act them out all the time. In fact, if you didn't act them out, people would set you straight very, very rapidly, because basically what other people want from you—even though they don't conceptualize it in those terms—is that you accord them the respect due the incarnation of the logos. That's exactly what it means to interact with someone properly.

So you can say what you want about what you believe; it doesn't matter. What matters is what you act out. Alright, so now we have this conceptualization of what's transcendent that's emerged as a part—partially, perhaps—as emotional contagion. That which inspires awe is that which is transcendent, and it's associated with these underlying ideas about the creation of order out of chaos and the instantiation of that spirit in human beings. That's all lurking in the background.

And then we have this other idea, which we already talked about, which is that there's a patriarchal or paternal spirit that represents the community at large, stretched across time. You can think about that as the spirit of the ancestors. So it's the past, it's the present, but that's also projected into the future. That's the thing you bargain with for your life in the future. I'm going to sacrifice myself to get a degree. Why is that? Because the spirit of my culture will reward me in the future—that's the sacrifice.

Well, it took people a—we were chimpanzees for God's sake. It took us a long time to figure this out. Chimpanzees don't sacrifice the present for the future. You know, you've got to ask yourself, how long did it take human beings to figure out that there was a future and then what to do about it? I mean, this isn't something—we didn't go from chimpanzee to fully articulated human being in one in one step; it was created knowledge that was extraordinarily painful. What did we learn from observation? Something like storing up goods for the future helps us live.

You imagine how difficult that is? You know, imagine that you're a farmer back when—that was extraordinary. You were barely scraping out a living doing that. It was hand to mouth at best. Alright, so now it's winter and you've got your damn seeds in your cellar, right? What are you going to do? You're starving. You're going to eat them or are you going to wait and plant them again in the spring? Because that's your damn choice. And so the people who decided to eat them—well, some of the people who decided to save them died. Well, let's say more of the people who decided to eat them died. And so this sort of knowledge was gathered in unbelievable agony.

You don't get what you have—what you want, right now, for you—that's nothing because you're very much accustomed to getting what you want all the time, right now, roughly speaking, you know, compared to people who live from hand to mouth. But back when things were much rougher, the idea that you had to sacrifice something of value now to be paid off in the future—man, that was a rough thing to accept.

Okay, so what happened? So people figured this out; somehow they figured out that you could make an offering of something you valued and that might help set the world straight. How did they conceptualize that? Well, they conceptualized it ritually; they were acting it out to begin with. It's like the Piagetian idea. You know, when I look at that cup, part of the looking is this, right? It's the adjustment of my body to the shape of the cup—that's part of my understanding.

Well, P's—Piaget's—great observations is that we use our bodies to represent things long before we understand what it is that we're representing, which is to say no more than we act things out—we're dramatic creatures, right? We use drama. And the sacrificial ritual is a drama that points to a higher psychological truth, and the higher psychological truth is let go of what's in—let go of what you value now, and perhaps that will pay off manifold in the future. You're making a bargain. And then you might say, well, who are you making a bargain with? And you could say, well, nature, but that's not exactly right.

It's not exactly right, because let's say I have something of value in a social organization, and I'm going to let it go because I'm relying on a corresponding reward or a greater reward in the future. It's a contractual relationship with other people; it's not a relationship with nature. It's the—we've organized ourselves into a social structure, and we're willing to maintain the integrity of the social structure across time so that if I give up something now, I can be paid for it in the future. And the rule—the deal is that we're going to try to keep the future the same as the present so that those contracts can be met in the future; that's money. That's what money is, right?

Here's some money; you made a sacrifice. That's where you get the money. What does the money signify? It's from the community that the labor that you invested can be stored and then brought forward for your own purposes in the future. So it's actually part of the social contract. So the thing you're sacrificing to is the spirit of society that produces the social contract, and so that's conceptualized as God the Father.

Well, how else would you conceptualize it? It's the spirit of the dominance hierarchy— that's the right way to think about it. So it's what's common across all the members of the dominance hierarchy across time. Well, something you can negotiate with, true or not, what the hell do you think you're doing when you make a contract? What's the law? It's all of this. It's the manifestation of that patriarchal spirit across time and space. And what do you do? You sacrifice to it.

Well, so back 4,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, however old this story is—it's probably older than that—this is the best people could do with regards realization, and they got it quite right because they also noted that God was happier if you actually sacrificed something of value. And so there's a tremendous complexity in that idea because one of the things I could say, and this is something Jung pointed out, let's say you're miserable and unhappy, okay? Here's a cure: find what's valuable and let it go.

So we could say, well, maybe it's a relationship that you have; maybe it's a relationship with your parents, right? And the relationship is pathological, but you're locked into it. You value it—and no wonder because it's a relationship with your parents and you're suffering terribly because of it. Well, what do you do? Maybe you let it go. It's a sacrifice. And the idea is that, well, that'll clear the future for you.

Well, very frequently when people are suffering terribly—not always, because sometimes you just suffer stupidly, blindly, and without recourse; you know, you get cancer and then you die—so we have no idea how to deal with that—but sometimes the reason you're suffering is because you just won't let go of the thing that's biting you. And you think, well, I can't let go of—and I've had clients like this—I can't stop communicating with my mother, who phones me three times a day every day of my life and never says anything that isn't unbelievably critical and demeaning. I can't let that go.

It's like, well, that's not such a good idea. The funny thing too is often when people let something like that go, it goes away, sorts itself out, and then comes back. So they don't even end up losing it, but unless they're willing to let it go, to sacrifice it, they make no headway whatsoever. And so one of the rules is if people are impeding your development, you sacrifice your relationship with them, right? It's a very, very rough rule.

So in process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and his offering he had no respect.

And Cain was very wroth (angry), and his countenance fell. So again, there's a tremendous amount packed into that. This is the first time that we see the motif of sacrifice, right? So it’s exactly what I was pointing out: you have this character, Cain, who is, at least by the standards of the time, has a low quality offering. So think about that for a minute because it gets more complicated.

So, the difference between a good quality offering and a low quality offering is an important one. But then it also points to the complexity of life because, for whatever reason it is, Cain—he’s the one that ends up angry and resentful. And in some sense, there’s something deeper going on that is not stated but it’s always there. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

If Cain is being punished harshly, then the question is: why? Well, part of the established order is that, and there are many functions behind whatever it is that makes it manifest; that ambition with which God created order requires sacrifice. And just as there was symmetry upheld between the state and the offering of a low quality offering on the part of Cain, the repercussions that would follow were apparently significant.

And you think, well, that’s not fair! That doesn’t seem reasonable to me. But the truth is in the depths of that nuance lies the understanding that we can’t just extract offers and the favour they may gain, and thus we have the foundation of the underlying societal structure as it exists today. The pot of rebellion cannot go unchallenged; it has ultimately been manifested.

And I released an offering, simple as that; it’s a token by which can be provided. And the ultimate lesson resonates even in the creation narrative—offering. And the crucial point of that is not so much if the offering was a good one or a bad one; what mattered is how Cain reacted and whether he confronted, for better or for worse.

And then there’s a downhill spiral that should concern us all, because if we were to ignore that entirely, well, how do we define our love for life, for the order of chaos? It hinges largely upon our willingness to sacrifice. That’s how we define ourselves; that’s how we define our humanity.

So, I think I’m going to leave you with that thought, and I’d love to hear your reflections on how we can build an individual stand against something far greater than we think we are—but also how we must remain self-reflective on what it means to be human in this world, and this: what sacrifices will we make in order to nurture ourselves, to navigate the jungle of reality in compelling yet unyielding societal structures? Thank you.