2015 Personality Lecture 01: Introduction & Overview

So welcome to Psychology 230, Personality and its Transformations. So, I guess the first thing I'll do is offer you a bit of a description of what personality is. It's a very extensive phenomenon. Personality—your personality determines the way you perceive. So what that means, at least in part, is that your personality actually determines how you're going to extract facts from the world. You know, people think that you see the world, and then you think about it, and then maybe you react emotionally, and then you act, but that's really not accurate.

Um, it's too slow, first of all. And there are lots of times when you have to be fast. If you had to go through all that processing before you acted, you'd be dead. So, personality is deeper than what you do with facts. It's deep enough so that it determines how you bias your perceptions, so that the world appears to you in a particular manner. We don't really understand how personality does that yet.

Um, it determines your emotional response to things. People differ in their positive emotions, their baseline level of positive emotion, and their variability. And they differ in their negative emotions as well. So some people are set to be anxious, and some people are set to be fearless. The environment can move that around to some degree, but a fair bit of its, at least its origin point, seems to be pretty tightly determined by genetic factors. People differ in the degree to which they're creative; they differ in the degree to which they're orderly.

There's all sorts of different phenomena that are tightly attached to what makes you different from other people because that's another way of thinking about personality. Personality colors your actions because you act in accordance with your personality. It determines your values, and so that also determines how you act because of course you act in accordance with what you value. Because you're moving from where you are, which isn't as good as it could be, to somewhere better.

And you have to decide for yourself—or maybe that's decided for you by your temperament—just where better is. And so, it's very interesting and exciting for me to teach personality because it's the most personal of all phenomena, and its understanding is extraordinarily relevant, I think, to everyone. Understanding your personality can help you figure out who you are, for better or for worse.

Because with every set of personal personality attributes, there tend to come an associated set of vices. So for example, if you're an orderly person, which in many cases is a good thing, then you're also prone to harsh judgments. You tend to be xenophobic, and sexual behaviors that aren't strictly normative are likely to disgust you. And you might think of that as something that you conclude as a consequence of your experience, but it looks in many ways like it's determined before you act.

In some ways, personality theory can also help you understand other people. Because it's easy to think that other people are like you, and they are like you—they're like you enough so that, more or less, you can communicate with them. But they're also very different from you. And so often, when you're communicating with people, they're actually starting with a different set of a priori presumptions than you are.

And we like to think that things can be worked out as a consequence of logical negotiation, and that's true to some degree. But these a priori factors that underlie your being itself interfere with the ability to use logic because logic is usually predicated on values, and values, in turn, are predicated on your temperament. So having an appreciation for differences in personality can help you understand your own personality and maybe improve it, and also understand and give some credence to the viewpoints of other people.

One of the things we've been studying in my lab, for example, is the relationship between personality and political belief. You know, and it's been thought for a long time—it's kind of an Enlightenment idea—that you come to your political beliefs as a consequence, again, of rational deliberation. You take a look at the facts, you analyze them, and you extract out what you think are the appropriate—what is the appropriate information from that analysis.

But we've found, for example, that people who are high in creativity openness, which is the technical term really for the trait that's associated with creativity—people who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness—conscientiousness is basically industriousness. Those high in openness and low in conscientiousness tend to be liberal or left-leaning, whereas people who are more conscientious and less creative tend to be conservative. That seems to be true more or less cross-culturally, at least in those cultures where the left-right spectrum is similar in nature to the left-right spectrum in North American culture.

And we also found, although we’re still kind of wrestling with this finding, that the effects of your personality on your political preference and your voting behavior actually increase as you get older. They don't decrease. So, in some sense, the degree to which you're a biased a priori by your temperamental perspective dominates your thoughts and your behavior even more as you age. So, I don't really know what to make of that. You know, it's not the sort of thing that people normally bring into a political discussion.

But the next time that you're—most of you are probably left-wing because most of you are open and intelligent and low in conscientiousness, relatively speaking, and uh, 'cause you're likely to be lower in orderliness than the typical population given that you're interested in this course—the next time that you're having a discussion with someone who's conservative, you might give some credence to the idea that you're actually talking to someone who's quite different than you. It isn't just that they believe a bunch of stupid things that you can't, you know, understand why anyone would possibly believe. It's that the facts themselves array themselves before those people differently than they do in front of you.

And if you listen—as they should listen to you—then you know, you might learn something that you wouldn't know given your temperamental stance. So, practical matters: you need to know this URL, okay? So, you have to write it down because that's where the syllabus is, and uh, I'll post a copy of it on Blackboard as well. But for now, it's there, and the syllabus lists everything that you need to know about the course.

And I'm going to go through it today, but it tells you what the lecture topics are. Of course, the readings are posted there except for the text. There's two books for the class: there's a textbook and a book called "The Black Swan," um, and all the assignments and so forth, and their requirements are listed on the syllabus as well. So, it should serve as a place where you can get all the information you need for the course, but we'll walk through it today and I'll give you an overview of what the course is going to be like.

So, now it isn't just personality that this course is about. People tend to think of personality as something that's relatively fixed and stable, because if it was fluctuating completely all over the potential range of personality, there wouldn't be a lot of utility in discussing it. But it is stable so that you are who you are, but it's also amenable to change.

Now, it's difficult to change your personality. It's as if, in some sense, that the dice was rolled, or five sets of dice, as it turns out, were rolled at the point where you were born, and you were granted a particular kind of personality configuration on the off chance that that configuration could find its proper niche in the environment. It sort of like people have more or less settled on a five-dimensional personality model, which we'll talk about a lot in the last half of the course.

But the idea seems to be that perhaps is that the environment that you inhabit, which is largely social, right? It's not just physical; it's mostly social because you're like hyper-social primates. Some of you are probably checking your email right now. Um, it's as if there are niches within that space that may or may not predominate in the dice roles when you're conceived and you're given a set of attributes. And with any luck, you can find a niche in the broader social and physical environment where your particular set of attributes is going to be functional for you.

And so, a lot of—and this is something to think about too, we'll try to get into this in some depth in the class—a lot of what you need to do to make your life at least tolerable is to figure out what your personality attributes are and then to find a niche where they're valued. So, for example, for those of you that are creative, you probably know who you are—it's actually a rare trait, by the way.

Um, I wouldn't recommend banking or law because law and banking, just to take two examples, are very conservative enterprises. We tested the hundred most creative lawyers in Canada at one point with—they were nominated by their firms—and the most outstanding personality attribute of the hundred most creative lawyers was not openness; it wasn't creativity. It was conscientiousness, even though they were the hundred most creative lawyers.

And of course, law depends on precedent; mean how creative do you want your lawyer to be? You know, if your lawyer's creative enough, then you'll be in jail, so that's probably not, you know, it's not the greatest idea. So, it's very useful to get a handle on what your personality is because then you can take a look at the potential environments that lie in front of you and hopefully match yourself to one of them.

Now that's a tricky business, you know, because it isn't necessarily the case that the niche that you're most suitable to inhabit is one that's stable or economically viable, you know? And so for example, I think in some ways, well, it's become more difficult, for example, to monetize a variety of different creative productions. So, it's harder to monetize music, for example, because of course, it can be shared for nothing.

So, you know, it's luck of the draw to some degree. So, now the other part of the course is the transformation element. Now, you know, personality is stable, so if you test a person at one time and you test a person later, then there's high correlations between the two sets of tests. But there's also variability, and the variability is the part that contains the potential, so to speak, for transformation.

So, you're an entity with quasi-fixed attributes, but that doesn't mean that you can't transform and learn. You know, you're sort of this weird balance between stability and plasticity, which actually happen to be two meta traits of personality. And I also want to take you through the process of understanding what personality transformation is and how to conceptualize it because personality transformation comes at a cost.

And the cost seems to be, with each incremental change, there is an equal increment of instability. You know, so that's often because you learn things painfully. Right? I mean if you learn something, if it's something you expect and something you want, there's no learning there, generally speaking, because you expect it. So it means you already know about it and you want it, so it's good.

The most potent learning experiences tend to occur when something occurs within the realm of your experience that you don't expect and often that you don't want. And those are the sorts of things that destabilize your personality. Now they can also be the sort of things that eventually expand it because if you encounter something that you don't understand, that means that there's information in the event that you haven't incorporated within your own being.

And if you can do that, then, at least in principle, then your domain of competence can expand. Now, one of the things you see, the course has sort of broken up—roughly speaking, it's broken up into two sections. There are more sections, which I'll get into, but the biggest split is actually between the clinical theorists. So, those would be people who are—some of them are psychiatrists; most of them were practitioners, so their theories were derived from observations, mostly of personality pathology and transformation.

The first half of the course is really about that, and that's partly because I think the most intellectually compelling and perhaps even practically useful theories of personality have, in fact, been derived by clinical practitioners like Freud and like Jung and like Rogers, and of the various people that we're going to talk about.

And um, one of the things that's really interesting about the clinical practitioners—because they have to deal with issues of health, roughly speaking, good mental health versus poor mental health, say—is that they all, their fields of endeavor also deal with values. Because it's almost impossible to grapple with the problem of the good or well-being or mental health or psychopathology or suffering or anxiety or pain or any of those phenomena without also necessarily evaluating the domain of values.

It's like, okay, well, you're a certain way; do you want to be better? If you were better, would that mean that you were more mentally healthy? What exactly does better mean, and is it useful to use that sort of descriptive terminology when you're talking about personality? I mean, I assume that most of you want to be better people. Now, your definition of what might constitute better is going to differ, again, according to your temperament.

But generally speaking, it seems that people are—they're like copus; they're uphill climbers. You know, you don't want to go from bad to worse; you want to go from where you are to better, and that means that you have to conceptualize what constitutes better. And that makes personality theory, at least in regard to its clinical domain, a very strange hybrid of science and engineering because, you know, generally science doesn't deal with values.

But if you're dealing with human personality, it seems impossible to avoid the topic, especially if you're concerned with something like mental health. So, you know, you can assume that mental health means normal, but most of you don't assume that, right? Because, you know, if you actually—if you want your reach to exceed your grasp, a lot of you are going to be aiming for something that's better than normal or better than average, let's say. We don't consider average optimal, and that's a strange thing.

So the first half of the course that deals with the clinicians is going to take us into the realm of personality transformation and also necessarily lead us through a discussion of value because I can't see that there's any avoiding it. Also, I think it would be ridiculous to avoid it because why you should do things is—you know how you conceptualize why you should do things is an extraordinarily integral part of your personality.

I mean one of the things that we found recently—it's a variant of an exercise that I'm going to have you do in this class—um, is that if you get people to spend a couple of hours writing down their vision of the future, you know, so the question basically is, all right, so imagine yourself now. Now imagine yourself 3 to 5 years in the future. Okay? Now, and here's the rules: imagine that you're trying to take care of yourself like you would take care of someone that you cared about.

It's a strange framing, but you know, people often don't take care of themselves as well as they take care of other people. You know, they're hard on themselves and they denigrate themselves because you know you might be painfully aware of all your multiple inadequacies. And of course, inadequacies are part of the human condition. So, it's easy if you've become cognizant of your inadequacies to also denigrate the value of your being and not take care of yourself.

And that's not a good thing. I mean flawed as you are, you're probably no worse than anyone else, and if things shouldn't be good for you, then the logical conclusion is that things shouldn't be good for anyone else either. So, you know, you start with yourself and assume that you deserve at least the basic elements of the attitude that you would give to someone that you care for.

Okay, so you put yourself in that mind frame. Now you think, three to five years down the road, what do you want for friendship? What do you want for career? What do you want for family? How do you want your intimate relationships to be constituted? What are you going to do when you're not working? What sort of productive and useful activities and interesting activities are you going to engage in? If you could optimize your life three to five years down the road, what exactly would that look like?

Like, all right, so there's that question. Then we also get people to do answer the reverse question, which is, all right, now imagine that you allow your inadequacies and your pathologies, such as they are, to gain the upper hand—which I'm sure they do in your own lives on a week-to-week basis. Imagine you really let them get out of hand.

So, you know, you're drinking 26 ounces of vodka every second day in five years, or, you know, you're lying uncontrollably, or no one can stand you because you're too disagreeable and neurotic or whatever. You know, whatever your weaknesses happen to be. Maybe you procrastinate all the time and you end up unemployed. Imagine, three to five years down the road, that things turn out as badly for you as they can because you've allowed things to go from bad to worse, and conceptualize that well.

And then we have people write a plan based on the positive vision. The negative vision, I think, is really useful because if you're running towards something, it's also extremely useful, from a motivational perspective, to be running away from something at the same time. You know, then you can harness your positive emotions, which are associated with approaching a valued goal, and you can have your negative emotions, like fear, chasing you instead of standing in front of you interfering with your progress.

Anyways, when we have people do this exercise, their grade point average for example—we've done this with 3,000 people so far—grade point average goes up about 25%, dropout rate goes down about 30%. So, you know, it seems like the act of positing value—so like a valued future or a terribly, you know, negatively valued future is a prerequisite to appropriate functional being.

And so what that means in part is that human beings are value-producing creatures, and there's just no way of—it's ridiculous to avoid dealing with that in a class on personality despite the fact that it's an uneasy balance between science and engineering, so to speak. So that's the first part of the course.

Um, all right. So, let's—let's get into details here. I'm going to tell you a little bit about this picture. That's Jonah. I don't know how many of you know the story of Jonah, but the story basically goes like this. It's an Old Testament story. Um, God tells Jonah to go off and do something, and um, he doesn't want to do it.

So, because you know, at least as far as the Old Testament is concerned, God's always telling people to do horrible and miserable things that are difficult, and so avoiding it is the logical thing to do. So Jonah goes out on a boat trying to get away from this demand, and there's a huge storm, and you know, the boat is in danger of being swamped, and um, the sailors are all wondering why this storm is happening.

And Jonah finally admits that he's, you know, got this command from God and he's running away from it. So they throw him overboard, and then the sea calms. And anyways, Jonah ends up inside this whale, and then later, three days later, as it happens, it spits him up back on shore.

Now you might think, why the hell are you telling us this story? But I can give you a hint about why I'm telling you this story. Uh, remember the last time that you broke through the thin ice that you're skating on all the time? You know, everybody knows what that means, right? Is that you're cruising along in your life perfectly content, or at least reasonably content, and then something strikes you out of the blue. Maybe it's the death of someone that you love, or it's the breakup of a relationship, or something that you fail dismally at, or some manner in which you betrayed a friend, or they betrayed you, and all of a sudden, everything that you stand on disappears, and you get swallowed up.

Now it turns out that the motif of being swallowed by something that lurks underneath, like the shark in Jaws, it's a very, very old story. In fact, it's the oldest story that human beings tell. It's the same story, for example, that you see if you watch The Hobbit. How many of you have seen The Hobbit recently or the Lord of the Rings? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, in The Hobbit, the little hobbit encounters a dragon, right? And everyone seems to understand what that means, even though it's a completely absurd proposition.

And then that's allied with this sort of, this sort of pattern of story, and the idea is something like this: your current pattern of being is fragile, and the reason for that is that there's not very much of you and there's an awful lot of the world. And what that means is that at any moment, some element of the world that you have not mastered and do not understand can emerge and destroy you—potentially your psychological health, your physical health, and your dreams.

And that puts you somewhere—and the ancients believed that that put you somewhere that was akin to being devoured by a great beast. And if you're lucky, then, you know, it spits you up later. If you're unlucky, then you stay inside it. And you know, those are the sorts of people that you see in mental hospitals or wandering around on the streets, you know, hearing voices and talking to themselves. They never get out.

The standard transformative narrative is descent and ascent. You learn something by deteriorating first and then by re-ascending as you incorporate it. And I love the story because, well, first of all, to know that story, which is the fundamental story of mankind, to know that story means first of all that you understand that there's no learning without pain.

And the pain is a necessary prerequisite to transformation. Now, the pain doesn't necessarily have to be of the sort that completely destroys you, but generally a valuable lesson is one that's difficult to learn. And, but that also means something very interesting about the human psyche. Because—and this is something to really think about too, you know, because you might say, are you who you are or are you who you could be, or are you the thing that changes from who you are to what you could be? And which of those things you identify with makes a huge difference to your life.

So for example, if you are who you are, then you can't talk to someone who doesn't agree with you. You can't listen to them because they may tell you something that you don't already know, and that'll change you. And if you are who you are and that's the right way to be, then you don't want to be changed. And if you are who you're going to be in the future, then if any circumstance comes along to destabilize the environment so that that future becomes unlikely, then you're in the same boat; things are going to fall apart around you.

But if you're the thing that can change when change is necessary, well then you don't have to be who you are or who you could be; you can be the thing that changes. And then when new things come along, regardless of how they're presented to you, well then you can welcome them even though they're going to destabilize you in the hope that what comes out the other side will be an improved version of you.

One of the things that I'll talk to you about, especially in the first couple of lectures, is the notion that the idea that you should identify with the part of your psyche that can transform is actually one of the world's most fundamental religious ideas. And the reason I'm discussing religious ideas with you, in part, is—well, it's partly because when we deal with some of the more profound thinkers in the early part of the course and the part that deals with psychoanalysis, like Jung, for example—I mean, Jung's depth psychology goes down deep enough into the psyche so that the appropriate language to describe the phenomena that he is dealing with is always religious language.

Jung sort of conceptualized religious language—religious symbols—as the grammatical structure of the psyche. So that's an archetype, by the way; that's what an archetype is. An archetype is part of the structure of the psyche; it's something you can't escape from. So I could give you—I’ll give you a quick example of that. So, men are much more visually oriented towards sexual stimuli than women. It appears that way. Women seem to be more oriented towards auditory sexual stimuli.

So for example, there was a book published a little while ago called Dataclysm. It's—the first third of it's quite interesting. It's written by one of the Google analytics guys, and they—it's called—sorry, sorry, I'm wrong. It's called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. I read that. We're dealing with internet phenomena; it's called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. And the authors were analyzing pornography usage on the web.

And you know, of course, for the longest time, about 35% of web traffic was pornography, and it actually really got the web going, weirdly enough. Men—yeah, it's strange, you know—so that sexual motivation was what drove technological innovation. Um, it's interesting even now. You know, one of the things that's driving computer chip technology is the necessity for making more and more accurate CGI movies. So it's very strange, things often that motivate human progress, right?

On the one hand, it's the desire for entertainment—more realistic artificial entertainment. On the other hand, it's sex, which is exactly what Freud would presume. Anyways, men look at visual stimuli; women read pornography. So now with regards to men, there are some things you can say about what men find attractive sexually if they're heterosexual. So for example, they prefer a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.68, and that's standard across body types.

So a thin woman who has a hip/waist ratio of 0.68 is attractive, and a, you know, a mesomorphic woman of medium build with a waist-hip ratio of 0.68 is also attractive. And that's, in some sense, that's the function of an archetype. And that archetype would be the archetype of Eros or Venus or—or beauty.

And the problem with those archetypes in some sense, and this is what makes them archetypal, you can't argue yourself out of them; they're inbuilt. They're like—they're part of your operating system, to use a terrible analogy. So anyways, Jung's claim was that the archetypal images are religious, fundamentally—that they hit you with the force of religious—um, what's the word?—revelation. So, so that's all in that picture. They say, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words, and that one's worth a lot more than a thousand.

You know, you also might ask yourself, you know, why don't people do what's right? It's a good question because, hypothetically, they could. And the answer seems to be something like, well, transforming yourself into something that's continually better means continually being swallowed up by something like this, and so it's hard and frightening. So that's why people aren't enlightened.

And there's got to be some reason, given that it's hypothetically possible. You know, when you hear people like Joseph Campbell say things like, "follow your bliss," you know? And so that sounds pretty easy. You want to develop your personality, just do what you love, you know? It's a corruption of Carl Jung's thinking because Jung would say, well, follow what you're interested— it’ll take you somewhere you really don't want to go, and then maybe you learn something.

So, and that's a whole different—that's a whole different proposition. So, okay, I already asked you to write down the website, so it's easy to find; you just have to type my name into the web and my website will come up, and then you can find the course. But I would still write it down; I'll show it to you again at the end of class for those who didn't get it.

All right, so here's the basic—here's what we're going to try to do during this semester. In some sense, this is—I’ve tried to structure this class in some sense both sort of historically and developmentally. So the first thing that I want to describe to you is an elaborated version of what I just did when I was telling you about the Jonah image. I want to talk to you about an array of what you might describe as eternal images, or they're like eternal characters in a story that are archetypal.

And I want to show you how those have been represented by cultures that we would regard as, say, pre-scientific. I think that's a good way to think about them. So those are cultures that haven't precisely divided the world up into objective reality and subjective experience. And there's a—there seems to be something like a set of constant reference that human beings have used all over the world to orient themselves in their existence.

And so I want to talk to you about those because I think one of the things that does is it provides you with an underlying theory—meta-theory is a better way of thinking about it— a meta-theory into which you can plug all the particular theories that we're going to talk about. You know, because one of the strange things about personality theory is that it's not exactly integrated.

There's—and I suppose that's also partly because it's still a pre-science in some ways. So there are a variety of different theories, and all of the theories have somewhat different claims, and all of the claims seem logically coherent, appropriate, and applicable, but they don't necessarily seem mutually inclusive. So thinker A might claim one thing and thinker B another, and the two things can't logically coexist, and so that makes learning about personality theory difficult because things that aren't coherent across any distance of any length of time are difficult to remember.

So anyways, I'm going to provide you with an underlying meta-theory, and then we're going to try to plug all the different theorists into that meta-theory, and then hopefully that'll give you a nice coherent and memorable account of personality and its transformations.

So that's mythological representations. I'm going to show you how personality has been represented since history—literally since history began—because the oldest written documents that we have are about personality and its transformations. So, and interestingly enough, those documents tell a story that you're all entirely familiar with and that you've seen hundreds of times as you've grown up.

They're constantly represented in movies and in TV shows and everything that you would regard as an enthralling narrative. Because one of the things you might ask yourself is, why the hell are you interested in stories? You know, why are you interested in watching TV? Why are you interested in going to movies? You know, you'll line up and pay for them. It's very strange behavior, and you often see in movies things that are completely impossible, and yet you swallow them without a second's thought.

You know, as long as they're done in a reasonable manner that allows you, in some sense, to suspend disbelief, you get completely engaged. A lot of the early theorists, the ones that we're going to talk about, especially with regards to depth psychology, posited that the human personality was, in fact, a narrative. Or even more deeply, that human experience, which you could think of as existence itself, has a narrative structure.

Now that's a pretty broad claim, but you know, there's been some pretty—there's been some heavyweight philosophers who've wandered down that road. So, Hegel, for example, is one of them. So, and that's a very interesting thing to consider because it's certainly the case that human beings—if you talk about a human being, you tend to use something that's like a story. And when you recount your own being, you tend to use something like a story.

And that sort of begs the question, you know, does that mean in fact that your experience is either a story or something like a story? One of the things Jung said—I really like this—is you should figure out which story you're living because you're living a story, and it might be a tragedy. And so, you know, you want to find out because if it's a tragedy, you don't come to a very good end. Another thing Jung said was—this is also worth thinking about—people don't have ideas; ideas have people.

And so what Jung would say is that if you're living out a tragedy, the tragedy has you; you don't have it. And if you can figure out what the tragedy is that has you in its grip, then you have a fighting chance of escaping from it into a more pleasing plot. But it's no easy thing, you know? So if you're one of those people to whom the same terrible thing keeps happening over and over, after the third time, approximately, you might ask yourself, you know, is this the world, or is this me?

All right, so we move from mythological representations into a discussion of both heroic and shamanic initiations. And the reason we're going to talk about shamanic initiations is, first of all, they are a logical next step in moving from the fundamental mythology into depth psychology, but also because initiation processes are processes that archaic people have used to catalyze personality transformation. So for example, a typical initiation tends to be young men who are initiated more often than young women.

And the hypothesis there is that mother nature initiates young women all on her own, whereas with young men something has to be imposed from a cultural perspective in order to catalyze their transition from childhood dependency and make them independent adults. And that usually involves some relatively terrible experience that I think does two things: one is it helps the person define what actually constitutes terrible because you might ask yourself you know, how worried should you be about something?

You know, let's say you wake up in the morning and, you know, you've got, I don't know, you've got an ache in your side. It's like, okay, it wasn't there the night before, so what does that mean? Well, you pulled a muscle or you're going to die of cancer in three months. It's like you don't know. So how upset should you be? Well, the answer is you don't know. And I think one of the things that initiation processes do to people is, um, calibrate their anxiety systems.

So you know, unless you've been required at some point in your existence to face something that is truly awful without destroying you, maybe you don't know how to calibrate what you should be worried about and what you shouldn't. And it seems to be the implicit theory upon which initiation rituals are predicated. You know, and they tend to re-emerge spontaneously. You know, you see them re-emerge, for example, in situations like fraternity hazing, you know, or medical residency, for that matter.

Because if you're going to be a medical resident, you can be completely assured that you're going to be tortured to death for two years. So, and when you come out of that, you won't be the same person that you were when you went in, and it isn't necessarily the case that that will be—you know that you'll be better, but that's a different issue. So, I want to talk about the structure of shamanic and heroic initiations partly to further our understanding of personality transformation, but also partly to give you an idea of the body of the relationship between the symbolic realm and the day-to-day realm prior to the emergence of psychoanalysis.

Because when psychoanalysis emerged in the first part of the 20th century, the psychoanalysts—mostly Freud and Jung—discovered what you might regard as a symbolic realm. They associated with—within, so the symbolic realm, in terms of your experience, might be what you dream at night. You know how bizarre dreams are, you know, and there's debate about whether they're interpretable. Say some people's dreams are interpretable and some people's aren't, in my experience.

But it's a—the dream realm, for example, is very peculiar because obviously you experience it; it's quasi-coherent in that when you wake up and you remember it, you can remember it. First of all, it's not random; it's not like white noise on a blank screen, you know? It has characters— they're doing things. Um, although, there are, you know, there are dynamic jumps usually in the narrative structure that make it difficult to understand. There are chunks of it that are clearly comprehensible, you know, and that seem to have the same quality, roughly speaking, as something cinematic.

Um, things transform in peculiar ways in dreams. The normal laws of physics are often suspended in one way or another, so people frequently dream of flying, for example. Um, and most peculiarly, dreams seem to happen to you, you know? Because you say, well, I dreamed last night, but that doesn't generally mean that you know you decided which movie to play in your head, so to speak. It seems when you're dreaming that things happen to you, in your dream, that are like the things that happen to you in regular life in that they happen; you don't make them happen.

So in a dream, you're the subject of uncontrollable forces, in some sense, just as you are in waking life. It's like, okay, well, who in the world is dreaming? You know, it's not the ego, obviously, because you can't control it unless you happen to be a lucid dreamer. You know, some people can become conscious during their dreams and exercise a certain degree of control over the contents. Although it's a relatively—it's a relatively undeveloped skill; it’s not particularly rare. How many of you have had lucid dreams? Yeah, it's very much more common among women generally for reasons we don't really understand.

So, but most of the time, a dream is something in which you're embedded. It's like what's dreaming exactly? You know, Jung would say, well, the world is dreaming inside of you; it's nature dreaming inside of you; it's a natural phenomenon, and it has the same kind of meaning that any other natural phenomenon has, which is what meaning you can discover that turns out to be useful.

So there's a relationship between that internal set of processes, you know, that deeply symbolic set of processes and the kind of rituals and symbols that are used in archaic ceremonies like heroic and shamanic initiations. And so that's partly why I want to tell you about them. It also helps you understand, I think, a little more deeply the price that you have to pay in order for transformation.

Because the rule in most archaic cultures is that to transform a male adolescent into a man requires dismantling the childhood personality, often rather brutally, and replacing it with something that's new. And so, you know, you might think, well, perhaps the brutality isn't necessary, but um, it's hard to say what's necessary. You know, there's a rule in psychological therapy, and the rule is if you want to improve, you have to identify what it is that you're afraid of that's stopping you, and then you have to confront it, and you have to do that voluntarily.

It's the primary rule, you might say; it's the primary rule of psychotherapy. You're going somewhere; there are impediments. The impediments make you afraid because you're afraid; you stop progressing. So what do you have to do? You have to face the things that are stopping you voluntarily. You know, and that's part of the heroic. That's actually part of standard hero narratives, which is face the thing that you're afraid of.

That's why, for example, in The Hobbit, Frodo—Frodo, it's Frodo, isn't it? Bilbo's the second one. Yeah, Frodo has to face the dragon, and the dragon hoards gold. It's like, what the hell does a giant reptile need with gold? Well, the answer to that in part is that the giant reptile represents that which you are afraid of, and the treasure that it sits on represents what you gain if you conquer what you're afraid of.

And it's an archetypal story in some sense because you can't invent a more frightening story than that—a more frightening and richer story. There's nothing more frightening than a dragon, roughly speaking, and there's nothing more valuable than a horde of gold, and that's partly what makes the story archetypal, right? It's taking the phenomena and extending them to the point of maximum return in some sense.

So, constructivism—that's Piaget mostly. And uh, Piaget called himself a genetic epistemologist, which is hardly the same thing as a psychologist, but Piaget was actually interested in—that's something you won't hear in most classes about Piaget. When Piaget was an adolescent, he was very obsessed by the growing split between religion and science. In fact, he wrote a novel about that, and he took it upon himself—his life's goal was to reconcile the split between religion and science.

So there's something you don't know about Piaget. How many people knew that? How did you learn that? Ah, well that's—that's a good way to learn things. So how many of you knew who Piaget is? Oh, that's good. How many don’t? It's okay if you don't; you're probably engineers or some damn thing.

So yeah, anyways, Piaget became interested in how knowledge developed, and he started with the infant, and he was very interested in how the infant, who's an embodied creature, you know, who has a body—which turns out to be very important if you want to have a psyche—how the infant comes to construct his world. And I really like the Piagetian approach because it melds nicely with our discussion of both personality, the stable elements of personality, and the transformative elements of personality. So, you know, because Piaget has a stage theory of development.

And um, he doesn't concentrate a tremendous amount on the intervening period of chaos between the stages of development, but the idea is still there. So, as it is, say, in Thomas Kuhn's work on the history of science, which Piaget was aware of from. So I want to lay out the Piagetian theory because one of the things that Piaget was really good at was understanding that the psyche is not like a floating soul. And you know, people— we believe perhaps that we've dispensed with most of the religious presuppositions that interfere with our scientific clarity, which we certainly haven't.

But one idea that lurks deeply—it's very difficult to abandon for a variety of reasons—is the idea that you know, you have a consciousness that's sort of like a soul that's sort of stuck in your body. You know, and that's sort of—you might think about that as your ego, or you might think about it as the "I" that you experience when you talk about yourself. It's like a floating consciousness, you know? And that has led people like artificial intelligence researchers, for the longest time, to imagine that they could embody a mind inside complicated machines that would function perhaps in the same way that your mind functions.

And Piaget is a really good antidote to that because what Piaget points out very clearly is that you cannot have a mind like we have without having the body to begin with. And so one of the ways that you can conceptualize that, because it's very important, is that your personality is actually oriented towards action rather than perception of the objective world. It's like, what the hell do you care about the objective world? We didn't even discover it until 500 years ago. You know, in a sense, what you're concerned about is how to act in the world, and your conceptions, although you may think about them as conceptions of the objective world, that isn't what they are.

What they are instead is abstractions of how to act in the world. And Piaget explains this in a beautiful way because he starts with the infant and he talks about how the infant's body develops in sync with its psyche and how the two things are like absolutely integrally interlocked, and it's a lovely idea. And I— I think not only do I think it's right, I think that all the evidence in the last 30 years points towards it being right. You know, we haven't been able to make artificial intelligence without embodying the intelligence in something that acts.

So for example, the Google cars—they're getting pretty damn smart, but they have a body fundamentally. They're things that can act in the world, you know? And it turns out to be more difficult to walk than it does to calculate, you know, extremely complex mathematical formulas, which a computer can do in, you know, a billionth of a second, even though we haven't got computers that can walk around in the real world. That turns out to be difficult.

So, Piaget tells you how to build a psyche from the bottom up, and it's a prerequisite, I think, for accurate understanding of the sorts of things that we're going to discuss as we progress. Then we turn to the depth psychologists, and people usually start talking about depth psychology, psychoanalysis, with Freud, and then move to Jung, say, and perhaps Adler as accomplices, or no, that's not the great word—um, apprentices of Freud.

And I think that's probably because the Freudians got a hold of the—had the best biographies written first. But Jung was influenced by Freud, but he was equally influenced by Nietzsche. And in fact, Jung's primary concerns were associated with Nietzsche's primary concern, and Nietzsche's primary concern was that God had died in the late 1900s.

So Nietzsche, the philosopher, announced—that's a famous announcement: "God is dead. God is dead." Sometimes you see that written on bathroom walls: "God is dead." Nietzsche was observing was that—and this is something you all know implicitly— is that the body of knowledge that human beings had evolved over centuries that was encapsulated within religious thinking had emerged in conflict with the body of knowledge that was produced primarily in Europe over about a 400-year period, ending, say, in the beginning of the 20th century.

And the two forms of knowledge seemed incommensurate; the claims of religion and the claims of science did not seem to be mutually harmonious. And the consequence of that, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, was that the religious substructure upon which, at that point, Western civilization was built was rendered invalid. And the problem with that, from a Nietzschean perspective, was, well, there were two problems: one was, okay, then what the hell are we doing, and why?

And the second was—so that's a nihilistic problem, right? If there's no ultimate meaning, then why do anything? Which is a perfectly reasonable question. And then the second problem was, well, in the absence of comprehensive systems of meaning, if you don't want to be nihilistic, what do you do? And Nietzsche's answer was, well, you develop totalitarian systems to replace religion, which is exactly what happened in the 20th century, and that didn't seem to be a very good solution.

And we're certainly not done with that problem yet. So that's the central problem that Nietzsche posed: it was like we had these evolved systems of meaning and science undercut them—or apparently undercut them—and that left people technologically enlightened but spiritually deprived. And that state of spiritual deprivation, given that your primary orientation in the world is towards action, is equivalent to a mass mental disease, and it manifests itself in nihilism or in the penchant for adopting totalitarian belief systems.

It's a big problem; it killed millions of people in the 20th century. You know, it's not usually regarded as a form of personality pathology, but that's just because people don't think about it properly, I think. Now, Jung was very interested in that problem, and so, as a student of Nietzsche—which he was—he wrote, for example, there's a series of lectures that were published as adjuncts to Jung's collected works that I believe are 2,600 pages long, and they're written in very little type, and all they are are commentaries on the first third of a book called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is a very short book of very bizarre quasi-poetry.

And it happens to be the book in which Nietzsche had his character announce the death of God. So Jung was a real Nietzschean scholar. So what Jung was doing—see, he thought that basically that as we dean-animated the cosmos, so to speak—you know, as the projections of deities that human beings had created had been pulled in from the objective world, they didn't disappear; they weren't destroyed, as as Nietzsche might have presumed. They sort of went into hiding inside the psyche, which is where they originated from to begin with; they originated in the imagination.

Now, a standard objective scientist would say, well, if they originated in the imagination, they aren't real. Whereas Jung would say, don't kid yourself; the imagination is real. It's just a different category of real, and that you better learn how to deal with it because whether you know it or not, you are pawns of your imagination in the same way that the Greeks considered them pawns of the— themselves pawns of the Greek gods.

And so that's a hell of a thing to realize, you know? And it's one of the remarkable things about depth psychology because the depth psychologists tell you flat-out, you are a house of many spirits, and one of them is you. And if you think that you are the most powerful spirit in your house of spirits, all that means is that you're hyper-protected and deluded because you're not. There are things that are deep inside you, and you can think of them as biological systems, if you want, which also manifest themselves in psychological phenomena that have more power than you do.

It's like, try not to make a fool of yourself when you're, you know, hopelessly in love with someone you don't even know; it's like, good luck to that because you won't manage it. And that's because the instinct that grips you when you're overwhelmingly attracted to someone is more powerful than you are, and you do what it wants, even though you might want to fight back; you do what it wants. And there are reasons for that, you know? Some of them you can think of as instinctual reasons.

So if you know, if you're not overwhelmingly attracted to someone, at least throughout most of the history of mankind, the probability was pretty low that you were going to initiate any sort of sexual contact with them. So—and see, since that's necessary for the human race to propagate, it serves biological purposes to have you play the role of actor of the demands of the instinct of reproduction, which is, of course, also Freud's main claim, right?

Because Freud—whom I place after Jung—his fundamental claim was that the god that rules humanity is sexuality. You know, and I'm always—he also introduced an idea called the death instinct later, and Freud was also concerned about aggression, but you know, in some sense you could say that Freud believed that we were ruled by two gods: the god of the—goddess of sex, we'll say, and the god of war.

And you know, as far as deductive theories go, yeah, it beats most of the claims of postmodern scholars. So, all right, so that's all pretty fun, you know? Freud—Freud's really—in some sense, he's a 19th-century atheistic thinker; he's kind of like Dawkins and the other, you know, modern atheists in that way. Um, in some sense, a strict Darwinist and a biological reductionist, but Freud had some very interesting things to say, and one of them I really like.

I mean, I think Freud had it absolutely dead on here. Like, one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice, because I'm a clinical psychologist, is that I never have clients whose parents made them too independent. I always have the reverse—not that all my clients have this particular problem, but the fundamental problem is they cannot get away from their family. They've been infantilized, or more accurately, their families have conspired to have them remain in an infantilized state.

And so, what is the family? They can't get out of the world of the family, and so in some sense, that's still childhood or adolescence because they're not dealing with the, you know, the concern of the broader world. And so that's the analysis that was done by Freud most particularly in his conceptualization of the Oedipus complex.

Now Freud concretized that in a variety of ways that I don't think were particularly helpful, but he had his finger on the right button. You know, human beings are unbelievably dependent when they're born. So a mammal of our size should have a gestation period of two years. You know, if we were comparable to other mammals of approximately our size, being pregnant for two years—that does not sound like fun.

But you know, if you look at animals, say like deer or moose or animals like that, pretty much as soon as they're born, they can get up and walk. Whereas a human being, it's like 15 months, right? It's crawling around like, you know, a little—helpless little thing; can't even stand up for 15 months. Well, that's because it's born in some sense in fetal form and so that makes it incredibly dependent, in a way that no other animal is.

And then of course it takes you—well, let’s see—about 40% to 50% of people your age live in their parents' houses. You know, you're 20 or 21 or 19 or whatever you are—it's like, you know, you're still fundamentally dependent. And so it’s not that easy to break a dependence habit of 19 years. And you know, your parents may foster your independence and chase you the hell out of the house if they can and try to make you into a functional and independent adult, but maybe not too.

And it's the maybe not that's the big problem because it's actually rather frightening to develop independence, even though you get to be independent—which is supposed to be the payoff—and it's easy for that process to be interfered with. And one of the things that can really interfere with it is maternal anxiety.

Now paternal anxiety can interfere with it too, but fathers tend to be substantially less anxious than mothers. And so the classic Oedipal mother is anxious, and so every time the child tries to do something that's independent, her anxiety gets in the way: "Oh, you better be careful if you're going to do that." It's like you hear that 5,000 times, man, you're not going to be able to take a step without, you know, manifesting the anxiety that you've been taught by a powerful external force.

And that's the Oedipus complex in a nutshell, fundamentally. So that's a great thing to figure out, and we'll look—I think we're going to look at a movie called "Crumb," which was U—it's about this underground cartoonist named Crumb—and it has some very interesting things to say about the Oedipus complex, so all right.

So, humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology—they're all kind of clumped together. Brilliant theorists, I think a lot of this came out in the 1950s. You might as well—you could think about it in some sense as the precursor to positive psychology, except that positive psychology has no grounding either in psychology or philosophy, whereas existentialism has good grounding in both and it's not naive.

You know, the existentialists believed that—well, I’ll clump them together for the purpose of this brief exposition—the first thing that this group of thinkers asks you to consider—this is a hard thing to do—but if you can do it, it's really worthwhile: forget about your normal conceptions, your formal conceptions of what constitutes reality and play this game instead. It's like it's—it’s an axiom shift.

Instead of thinking that reality is the objective world and you're a like a superfluous subjective observer—a transient subjective observer—imagine that what reality is, is what you experience; that's it. So everything you experience is equally real, although there are different categories of real, right? I mean a dream is not in the same category as the chair that you're sitting on, but from the phenomenological point of view, a dream and an emotion is just as real a phenomenon as the chair is real, okay?

So that's the first axiom; it's a game. So what if we make that assumption? So you make that assumption, the next issue is what are the essential qualities of what you experience? And that can be addressed in a variety of ways. One of the most important things that the existentialists are concerned about is fundamental anxiety.

So this group of thinkers would say, well, you have—you exist within this domain of experience, and one of the phenomena that's most manifest within that domain is the feeling of anxiety or dread; that's a Kierkegaardian idea. It's that as an experience constituted like yours, which is somewhat fragile, which knows its limits, it's localized in time and space—the fundamental negative meaning, in some sense, is anxiety and dread. And then the question is, given that—that's the fundamental reality, what do you do about it?

And so the existentialist idea, in a sense, is observe your existence, find those elements of being that support you and pursue them, and that will counterbalance the primary feeling of dread and alienation and anxiety and allow you to exist in a manner that makes existence at least bearable.

So if you look at the Freudians, for example, the Freudians sort of think that if there's something wrong with you, there's a reason. So if you were just a normal person, you'd be okay, and since you're not a normal person, something went wrong. Whereas the existentialists, they take the opposite idea. They say, look, you're screwed from day one; that's just how it is because I look at you—you’re flawed, you're finite, and there's a thousand things, a million things that you don't know, and all sorts of things that are conspiring to do you in.

It's like with a problem like that, you don't need more problems to be unstable; you're just unstable to begin with. So they conceive of negative emotion related pathology as an integral part of being. And then the question is, okay, given that, what should you do about it, or even is there anything you can do about it? And that's the question that we'll try to unfold in this section of the course.

Now, the other thing that's really interesting about this group of thinkers, I think, is that especially the late ones, like, well, I include Solzhenitsyn as a personality theorist for reasons that I won't talk to you about now. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author, and he wrote a book called "The Gulag Archipelago," which was published in the 1970s, and it was one of the things that knocked over the Soviet Union because it revealed for the first time just how corrupt and murderous the Soviet system was.

Now, the thing that's interesting about Solzhenitsyn and also about Frankl—Victor Frankl, who was a psychiatrist who'd been put in the Nazi death camps—is that they were very integrally concerned with the idea of the intrinsic meaningfulness and meaninglessness of human life. One thing, so that's the personal element. But the second thing they were concerned about—and this sort of made them logical followers of Nietzsche—was what effect does your decision about the meaning of your life have on the broader social community?

So let's say that you're nihilistic or you're totalitarian, so what does that mean? Like, you're not an isolated unit; you're interacting with people all the time. You have a tremendous network of connections. You know, you can think of it this way: a thousand people—each of those thousand people knows a thousand people—that means you're one person from a million, and two from a billion.

So instead of being some little localized dot in a random array of dots—seven billion of them—you're the center of a connected network. And so if there's something that's gone astray with your psychic functioning, your psychological functioning, what exactly does that do to the broader social community? And Solzhenitsyn's idea, and Frankl's as well, it's quite straightforward: the two—the reason that societies become pathological, deeply murderously pathological, is because individuals within the society have become deeply and murderously pathological.

So instead of society—which is something that the Marxists would think, for example—you know, that you're the pawn of social forces, the existentialists would say, uh-uh, don't be so sure about that. It's the quality of the individual decisions that you make on a personal level, day to day, that spread out into the broader community and either improve it or pathologize it.

And so I'm going to have you read both Frankl and Solzhenitsyn because I think they make viciously powerful arguments that that is in fact the case. And it's actually quite a useful—it's a funny thing, because often this is sort of associated with the idea of facing dragons. Often you learn the things that are most vital to your being by considering the worst possible phenomena.

So I might say, well, just think about this. It's like the idea that Frankl and Solzhenitsyn and others, by the way, have been propagating is that whatever decisions you make that are moral on a day-to-day basis aren’t isolated to you; they spread out into the community very rapidly. And so the fate of the community is dependent, in some sense, on your personal morality. So then, well, that's a terrible thing. I mean, it's a terrible weight, but it certainly provides an answer to, well, why should I do what I do?

It's like do good things? Great, they propagate. Do bad things? Fine, they propagate too. And one of the really interesting things about the existentialists is they took a look at what happened in the 20th century with its ungodly, murderous political systems and said, all right, just exactly what responsibility does the individual bear for bringing those conditions about?

It's like it's a question well worth thinking about, and it certainly hasn't lost its relevance. In fact, I think it's well—it's as relevant as ever. So that's great. That's really an interesting thing to do. Then we move into the fields that are more strictly scientific, but a lot of what we've covered in the beginning of the class provides the platform for that.

I'm going to tell you about the structure and function of the basic biological systems that underlie your motivations and your emotions, and roughly speaking, we're going to say that a motivational system sets a goal for you. So if you're hungry, your goal is to eat, obviously. If you're thirsty, your goal is to consume some liquid. Goal-setting systems—and there's a system for each of those—we'll call them drives, even though that's—we'll call them motivational systems because they're not really drives.

Whereas emotions are things that are more likely to manifest themselves as markers for your position on the way to the goal. So for example, if you have a goal in mind and you're progressing towards it without any obstacles, you're going to feel positive emotion. And if you have a goal in mind and you're progressing towards it and you encounter obstacles, then you're going to experience negative emotions.

And what I want to do is outline what I think is the best relatively current neuroscience on the structure and function of those systems. And what we'll see is that there's a nice analog between the Piagetian story about how the psyche develops and the way the brain is organized, and there's a nice analog between the theories of psychological symbolism that were pursued by the depth psychologists and the relationship between the brain areas that subsume your sense of individuality and the underlying motivational and emotional systems that guide and drive and constrain and allow your behavior.

So that'll put some biology underneath the theorizing, and I think that's a really—that's also a very fun thing to have happen. Then after that, we're going to talk about five-factor trait theory, and the five-factor trait theory is the most modern formulation of psychometric theory. And psychometric theory is the statistical reduction of datasets that describe human personality.

It's—it's the—so if I took an infinite bank of questions that I could ask you about your personality and then I subject them to the proper kind of statistical analysis, I could group those questions into coherent groups. And what I would discover is that your personality has something resembling a five-factor structure—five dimensions. It's a lot of dimensions; the world has four dimensions, right? Your personality has five, so that's plenty complicated.

And we're going to walk through what those dimensions are, what the variability represents, how they might be related to the motivational systems and the thought patterns that we discovered earlier, and then all the practical consequences of knowing about those systems. And we actually—the model I'm going to present you with is tiered. So the top level is stability and plasticity; the next tier is the standard five-factor model: extraversion and openness—that makes up plasticity—agreeableness, conscientiousness, and what's the other one?

There. What's that one? No, no—yes, neuroticism. I'm sorry, emotional stability reversed, yeah. So, and then underneath that, each of those breaks into two, and so I want to describe to you the most current research on what each of those hierarchical tiers mean and why you want to know that. And at the same time, I'm going to have you do a personality analysis online, so what it'll do is help you identify your personality virtues using a big five model and your personality faults, also using a big five model.

So that'll give you some insight into who you are and what the hell is wrong with you, and also what's good about you at the same time that we're trying to elaborate these dimensions on a conceptual level. So, that's in a nutshell the course. I want—the readings and the order in which you have to do them are listed on the website, so I'm not going to go through them; it should be relatively self-explanatory.

I want you to read chapter 15 of "The Black Swan," and the reason I want you to read that is because it questions the validity of the standard normal distribution model that psychometrics is predicated on. And we'll talk a lot more about that later, but I think you need to know it because you're going to learn in psychology that most things are normally distributed, and all of the statistics that you'll use in psychology are predicated on the idea that the normal distribution holds, but there's lots of situations in which it doesn't hold, and they're important.

So for example, money is not normally distributed, right? 1% of the population has 50% of the money, and then if you take that 1% and you take the top 1% of that, then they have 50% of all the money that the top 1% has, and lots of phenomena are like that. Artistic productivity is like that; anything that people create productively is like that.

So, okay, exams—you can look this up on the website. Here's what you have to do. There are three exams; they're not cumulative. There’s an 11-15% essay of 750 words and the online exercise, and it's pass/fail because, you know, I don't know how I'm going to grade you for your virtues or your faults. You know, that's your problem, but you know, so all we'll do is check to see that you've actually gone through the exercise in a half-intelligible manner.

So, all right, now I want to stop with that so you can write it down if you didn't. But here’s a couple of things I want to tell you. I have some insight into my own personality. I'm very industrious, I'm not very orderly, and I'm very high in openness, and so I'm telling you that because there are some things you should consider if you want to take this course, and you should really consider them because not every course is for everyone.

Um, if you're unbelievably organized, this is not the course for you, okay? Because there's a contradiction between openness and orderliness. And the thing about orderliness is that orderliness puts everything into boxes, and the boxes are tight, and the dichotomies are black and white. And I'm not criticizing that; there is great utility in orderliness, but orderliness fights with openness, and I like to break boxes apart.

And so if you're the sort of person who is orderly, like really orderly, you'll know this—how clean is your room? Like, do you have—you alphabetized your soup cans? If you have, then this is not the course for you. To take this course, there are two things that have to characterize you. One is you have to be willing to read.

Okay, the reading load is quite—I don't think it's overwhelmingly heavy, but the material is quite difficult, and there is plenty of it. So if you—if that doesn't interest you, like, don't take the course. And the second thing is, you know, if you're the sort of person who spontaneously talks about ideas with your friends, you know, and you find conversations about things that aren't related to ideas somewhat tedious, then this is the course for you because it's—it’s really because I'm an open person.

I can't help but make my course—I can't help but create it in that image. I'm really interested in ideas. I try to tell you why it's necessary to know them because an idea isn't interesting to me unless it has utility for you. But we're going to go all over, and if you want a road that's defined and like a single track towards a goal, that isn't this road. This road is going like this, like you just heard—you just had a lecture.

So you know what they're going to be like. So you're welcome to be here; I'm thrilled to be able to teach you this material, but don't say I didn't warn you. All right, well, that's that. So we'll see you Thursday. Bye. [Applause]