2015 Maps of Meaning 06b: Mythology: Egyptian Myths / Part 2 (Jordan Peterson)

I don't know. You've probably come across this little diagram in the book, and it's quite a complicated diagram, so I'm going to just walk you through it a bit. Then I'll tell you the Egyptian story. This is a sequence of interconnected causal loops. So the question might be, well, how does morality emerge from the bottom? I would say, well, especially the morality that's associated with assuming that attention is something that's sacred, roughly speaking.

Okay, so imagine you see someone really engaged in something. You might think, oh, I'd really like to be engaged like that, which is what you would think, right? Because everyone wants that. It's like, I'd like to be engaged. Okay, so then you might think, well, this person looks like they're fully alive, something like that. They're not being obsessed by catastrophes and all that; they're into what they're doing. What's that like?

Okay, say, well, that's associated with creative exploration. And then you might say, well, why is creative exploration useful? The answer to that is because it generates adaptive behavior of all sorts. Okay, so then what? Well, then you can imitate the adaptive behavior because we can use our bodies as representational devices. So we act out the person who's interested in something. That's actually, in large part, why people like to buy art. You know, lots of people I've seen buy art. They like to buy art because they also have some contact with the artist, and they want to have some contact with the artist because it's kind of cool to have contact with an artist. It brings something into their life, and the artist is definitely someone who's outside standard hierarchies. That's sort of what defines an artist.

So then, once you imitate the adaptive behavior, then you can play around with the imitations a bit, and you can ritualize them. Then, you can dramatize them. Drama is an interesting thing once it gets formalized, you know. Because basically what you're doing — imagine little kids; they get together, they lay out some rules for pretend play, then they run a pretend play simulation. Then, I'm like little Shakespeare Jr. off to the side, and he's taken some notes. Maybe he watches six or seven different pretend play episodes, and he thinks, well, this was the most interesting part of that, and this was the most interesting part of that, and this was the most interesting part of that. I think I'll put those all together, make them coherent — we'll have a really good story.

What the story is, is an articulated representation of a dramatic representation of a set of procedures. It's two orders of abstraction, right? You know this because when you read a book, Ian, this doesn't happen to me anymore because I think I've read too many books, but I can remember when I was a kid, when I was reading a book of fiction, it was as if what was being described was playing out in my imagination as embodied figures. So, you know, sometimes you go to a movie of a book you've read, and you think, oh, that person doesn't look anything like the person in the book, you know? Because you have a representation of what the person is like.

I found, as I've got older, that — and I don't really understand this — I don't have that anymore, but I still understand the books. So I must have become so automatized that that's all gone. It's a loss, I would say. But anyway, it doesn't matter. You see that once you get the bloody drama written down, or even when you can say it — when you can tell a story — you're so close to having the pattern revealed in an articulated manner. You can't say what the pattern is, but you can describe it.

Well, once you can describe it well, you're right next to philosophy, right? As soon as we have a set of dramas that we can all agree on, especially once they get written down, then we can start thinking about the dramas. And that's when philosophy enters the stage, as far as I can tell. It's like the groundwork for philosophy is already laid by centuries and centuries of human interaction, and we keep abstracting that up to the point where we can represent it. Then, we can pull out general principles, and we discuss them and debate about them. But that’s the birth of philosophy, and all those levels interplay.

It's not just the causal direction; it isn't just from creative exploration forward. Each time you add a new level, that interacts with the previous level, right? So you can talk about how you're going to play, or you can analyze literature, you know, or you can think about what you're going to write about. Each time you add another level of the capacity for abstraction, you make the whole system much more dynamic and complex. So the causal links — that's why there's all those little arrows on the outside. All of those arrows are interacting with each other.

So, yes, yeah, too many arrows. Yeah, let me show you something here. This is quite cool. See that? Did I show you that before? Oh, this is so cool; it's mind-boggling, this thing. Okay, so the horizontal line — you see all the little squiggles that are underneath that? Okay, every one of those lines is a biblical verse, and the length of the line corresponds to how many references there are to that verse in other places in the book.

So, you look at the bloody thing, man. That thing’s hyperlinking like mad! And that's partly why the book — think about this book like a normal book. Really, what you do? No. You go see a movie, and there's a timeline — there's a beginning, and a middle, and an end — but it's illusory, right? Because the person who was writing the movie saw the whole thing at once and so could use their knowledge of the ending to fiddle around with the beginning, and they could use their knowledge of the middle to fiddle around with the end.

That doesn't happen in real life. So you can lay this out. Now, imagine you've got a story, and it's like 5,000 years old, and 150,000 people have edited it, and they all knew the end and the middle and the beginning, and they just go like this: well, this means this, and that refers to this, and that refers to this, and that refers to this, and this means that. Well, you end up with that. It's like it's infinitely dense; you can't get to the bottom of it. There's no way. And really, it's hyperlink. So you could say that in a sense, the Bible is the world's first fully hyperlink document. Weird, so yep.

Yes, and part of that's actually conscious. Like one of the things that people do when they're criticizing Christianity is say, well, if you look at the gospel stories, for example, there'll be a little story about Christ, and then there'll be this line that says, thus fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy. The biblical scholars say, look, that was put in later, and the reason it was put in later was because the hypothesis of the savior is nested in the Old Testament, and it keeps partially coming true with all these prophets.

So a prophet is like a partial savior. In the Old Testament, prophets are just popping up like mad, and usually what happens is Israel gets degenerate for one reason or another. It's because the king isn't being a good mardic, basically. And so then a prophet who's very insightful, like N or doski, pops up and says, hey, you're not paying attention to the orphans and the widows, and you better get your act together because otherwise, God's going to come along and like flood you out, or your enemies are going to stream in.

And of course, often, weirdly enough, the kings listen because they think, God, this person is either completely insane or God's talking to him because otherwise, he wouldn't be marching into the court when I could have his head cut off within a second’s orders. So often they kind of half pay attention. But what happens — and this is North Fry's interpretation, fundamentally — is that the whole Old Testament is the construction of an empire, Israel; it collapses because of its failure to follow the fundamental moral order, then it rises again, collapses, rises again, collapses. The first story like that is the flood, right? And that's a really, really old story, you know.

The Bible doesn't get quasi historic until Abraham. The story is before that. So that would be like the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Cain and Abel, no, no, that's later, Noah. And then the Abrahamic stories start, and that's more like the history of Israel, even though it's also mythologized. The first set of stories, man, those things are old; who knows how old? Really old, 50,000 years old maybe, they're old.

So anyways, what happens across time is that people have all these biblical books, and it’s like what the Mesopotamians had to do in order to organize their society. It's like, oh, we've got all these writings. They're all sacred, hypothetically. They contradict each other; they don't seem to be in any order; like, what are we going to do about that? And so then there's this collaboration of minds across centuries to think, oh well, it kind of looks like this might go there, and then this might go there, and this refers to that, and this refers to that.

And so it's trying to — it’s the collective imagination of humanity trying to make a coherent story out of experience, that's what it is. And you know, you might say, well, it's our best guess; is it true? Depends on what you mean by true, right? That's a very, very tricky question. Partly, the question it's trying to answer is how should you act? That's not a scientific story, but it's a bloody important question.

Okay, good. So Egypt. I felt like — do you know the story of, um, what was his name who discovered buoyancy? He ran through the streets, "Eureka!" Who was that, Archimedes? Okay, so Archimedes was trying to figure out how to measure the volume of something. I think he wanted to figure out how you determined whether an alloy was pure gold or not. So you'd have to get the volume of the damn thing, and then maybe you had a clump of metal that there’s no way you could measure.

Then he figured out that if you had a tub full of water and you dropped the thing in it, the amount of water that spilled over the edges would tell you exactly how big the thing was. Then you could weigh your thing, your metal, and you could tell what proportion of it was gold. And so he was so thrilled about that. Theoretically, he discovered that when he was in a bathtub. He got in, and the water spilled over. He ran naked through the streets of whatever town he was in yelling "Eureka! Eureka! I've got it!"

So that's an insight, right? So I felt like that when I read this Egyptian story, and I thought I figured it out. Because I thought, wow, that's mind-boggling. So here's the story. So, we got to show you some of these characters. Okay, so the guy in the middle, that's Osiris; he's on this pillar. So he sort of represents what pillars represent, which is what holds things up.

Okay, and then the guy on the left, that's Horus, and Horus has got the head of a falcon. Okay. And the reason for that is that falcons fly around, so they're not attached to the ground, and they can really, really, really see. Like, they're birds of prey, and they're about the only animal who can see better than us. So like raptors, birds of prey, they can see like mad. Think of an eagle; if an eagle was standing on the top of the Empire State Building, it could see a dime on the sidewalk. So it's like, go eagle!

And then the one on the right is Isis, and Isis is the queen of the underworld. Okay, and then there's one other character here. See, that's a Madonna and child, basically. That character, that's Seth, and Seth is — he's a bad guy. Now, no one knows what the hell Seth is, you know? Nobody's been able to figure out what kind of weird animal that is. So, um, who knows? But those are the four main characters.

Okay, so now you got to know how they interact here. So you got Osiris and the sto — there's variants of this story, many, but I'm telling you one sort of canonical variant. The story of Osiris and Isis and Horus, yeah, yeah. So, um, and this is the story upon which Egyptian civilization was based, although it was a very old civilization, right? It lasted for thousands of years. So Cleopatra — there's less time from Cleopatra to now than there is between Cleopatra and the pyramids.

So that kind of tells you how old Egypt was. It's like an old major civilization. It lasted a long time, had a powerful story — a powerfully organizing story, right? Way older than, like, the history of Judeo-Christian civilization, say 2,000 years older than Chinese history. It's old. China goes back a long ways, though, so you know, maybe it's not older than China, but it's something there.

Anyways, Osiris. So Osiris was the god who established Egypt. Okay, so he's like George Washington. If you had George Washington 2,000 years from now, then George Washington would be Osiris because he'd be mythologized, right? So basically, Osiris represents all the good things that the Egyptians did to establish order from chaos and set up the society. So Osiris, he's a great — he was a great hero when he was young, and he did all sorts of heroic things, and he established the state of Egypt, and he rules over it.

But he's kind of old, and he can't see as well as he used to, and he's a little on the muddle-headed side. But worse than that, so he's archaic and anachronistic. And so what that indicates is that, well, just like the Americans are experiencing with their constitution, it's like, hmm, things are a little on the old side; what should we do with it? Well, we should update it. It's like, well, we don't want to update it in a way that makes all chaos break forth. You know, so anyways, things get archaic just because they exist, right?

So, if you set up a system of rules, it's supposed to adapt to this environment, but the environment keeps wiggling around, right? So you have to chase it with the rules, and you have to update the rules as the landscape changes, and that's the biologist call that the Red Queen problem, roughly speaking, which is a reference to Alice in Wonderland. So Alice goes down the rabbit hole, and she finds the Red Queen. That's the queen of chaos, mother nature.

And one of the things she tells Alice is, "Here in my kingdom, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place." And that's the chronic human problem. It's the problem of entropy, right? Is that you build something static, but things aren't static. So even if it's a useful thing you've built, first of all, you got to maintain the hell out of it because it's just going to fall apart.

But worse than that, the environment's running away from it. And so your computers have Osiris problems all the time. It's like they're just lovely for the first three years that you own them, and then they're bricks. And it's because the underlying landscape is so dynamic that the structure loses its validity. You can almost watch it lose its validity, right, as a consequence of the exponential increase in computer intelligence.

So Osiris, great guy when he was young; a little old-fashioned. And worse, he's willfully blind now. The Egyptians insisted on that, and that's so cool. It's actually — you can be held responsible in an English common law court for willful blindness. And what willful blindness is, is the failure to realize something you could have realized.

So, for example, if you're a CEO and you have a crooked chief financial officer, and you think, maybe he's crooked, but you decide, well, I'm not going to look at the book because then I'd know, and then his malfeasance is brought to light. And you say, well, I didn't know; the prosecutor will say, yeah, but you could have, and you knew you could have, and you didn't. And so you're culpable for your own ignorance. It's like that's such a brilliant idea. The Egyptians figured this out.

Osiris is not only old and, you know, decrepit and a little on the Alzheimer side, but he won't pay attention to things. He's had it with that. He's willfully blind, and that's a problem because he has a brother who's the evil brother of the rightful king, which is a theme that you're all familiar with if you watched your Disney movies. He's like Scar in The Lion King, right? Same guy or in Aladdin; there's some bad character — I don't remember his name.

Lur! That's the guy! Yeah, yeah. So, you know, he's the evil — or Darth Vader in Star Wars. It's like he's an archetypal figure. He's the evil brother of the rightful king. Now, why does the rightful king have an evil brother? That's easy. It's because organizations tend towards decay and corruption across time. That's what they do. The Socialists are really on this with regards to corporations, right? They talk about evil corporations. It's like, and the right-wingers think, oh no, it's evil government.

So they're just projecting the archetype of the negative father onto the rest of organizations when, in fact, it's actually a characteristic of organizations. If you don't keep an eye on the damn things, they degenerate, and they become corrupt. So that's just what happens. You better stay awake to deal with that.

So anyways, Osiris has this evil brother named Seth, and Seth — the name Seth becomes Satan through the Coptic Christians much, much, much, much later. So he's like the precursor to the devil, roughly speaking. Now, Osiris thinks Seth is all right, like Scar does or like Mufasa does with Scar — underestimates his danger. Something you should never do.

And so one day, Osiris is just not paying much attention, and Seth gets a big scimitar, something like that, chops him into pieces. Then, because you can't really kill Osiris because he's a god as well as being the founder of the state and the ruler, the only thing you can do is make it difficult for him to get his act back together. So what Seth does is he takes Osiris's pieces and he scatters them all over Egypt. And the idea there is that when corruption overtakes an organization, then things fall apart.

But the things aren't actually dead. You know, it's like when a corporation falls apart, all the people in it don't die; they just fragment into maybe smaller groups. Some companies get spun off, or maybe they fragment all the way down to the individual level, but there's still potency left in it, and the structure is still there inside each of the individuals in the suborganization.

So you can get the damn thing to fall apart, but you can't get rid of it. So fine, he does that; he scatters these pieces everywhere, so it makes it hard for Osiris to recollect himself or to get his act back together. So things fall apart, and it's hard for you to get your act back together. That's the idea.

And then he rules the kingdom, which doesn't work out very well, just like Scar in The Lion King, right? Because he's an evil tyrant, and all things considered, evil tyranny doesn't work that well, even for the evil tyrant. Although you should never assume that an evil tyrant wants things to work out well, not even for him.

So anyways, fine. Osiris has a wife, Isis. Now, Isis, she's a major league player in ancient mythology. Isis is queen of the underworld, and it's a real toss-up if you look at archaic cultures whether the top god is the guy, the order guy like Osiris, or the top god is Isis, who's queen of the underworld. It's like it's 50/50 for sure.

And well, Isis represents chaos, and Osiris represents order, and they should be in balance. Like, you know, if they're in harmonious balance like Absu and Tiamat, then they produce all sorts of productive things, and if one overwhelms the other, well then, it's not so good. So they should be a harmonious couple.

Okay, but now Osiris is dead; whack! He's chopped up and spread everywhere. So up Isis comes out of the underworld. Well, that's what happened when the Americans invaded Iraq. It's like, wow, Osiris is gone. Yeah, but what about Isis? Oh, we forgot about Isis. Up she comes; chaos, it's like there it is.

So, and is it better? Not obviously. So you never want to forget about Isis. So anyway, Isis, she's not that happy that Osiris is gone because that's her husband, right? And she thinks, well, that's not so helpful. So what she does is she runs around Egypt trying to find his fellus.

And the reason for that is because it's the seminal apparatus, right? It's the seed of the new thing. So what she does is she finds his fellus, and she makes herself pregnant with it. And so, bang! She goes back down to the underworld, but now she's impregnated. And so what does that mean? It means when remarkable things fall apart into chaos, the seeds of something new are potentially planted.

Okay, so fine, she gives birth to Horus, like Arthur. He's outside his rightful kingdom, just like Simba. It's a standard routine, just like Harry Potter, right? He's outside his kingdom. And the reason for that is you're all outside your kingdom. It's like the kingdom is sort of old and archaic and doesn't quite fit the circumstances now, and it's not all that fair to you, and it's sort of arbitrary.

And so you grow up to some degree in the underworld in opposition to it, so it's just an archetypal story. So this character, she finally gives birth to this character, and that's Osiris. And Horus — he’s quite the character; that's — sorry, his name is Horus, and that's Horus there, and she's the benevolent goddess of all new things, as well as being the terrible goddess of the underworld.

And, you know, she's bringing up Horus. And Horus — where is he here? There he is. So Horus is this falcon because he can fly around and see everything, and he's also the eye of the Egyptians. And so it's like he's like Mar. He eyes; he can see.

Okay, so then Horus grows up, and he's thinking, "I've had enough underworld stuff. I'd like to have my kingdom back; my rightful kingdom." Now, he's different than Osiris, and the reason he's different is because he can see. And not only can he see, he will see. And that's a whole different thing.

So Horus is not willfully blind. And that's a drag because he can see what's happened to the kingdom, and he can see Seth, and that's not so good. It's like you're in Romeo deir's position, then, aren't you? You have to shake hands with the devil. And you know what happened to Romeo deir when that happened? It's like, poof! He's a general, right?

I hope you all know this. You know, he was there in Rwanda when everybody got massacred and the UN didn't step in properly; he had to watch all that. It was like post-traumatic stress disorder, instantly. So it's like if your eyes are open and you can see evil, it's like you better look out because if you're face to face with real malevolence, the probability that that will damage your brain is very high.

And one of the things that's very interesting, if you think about post-traumatic stress disorder, is that often in soldiers it's a consequence of something they did, not something they saw. So they'll go out in the battlefield, and they'll find out they're far more barbarous and cruel and destructive than they ever possibly imagined.

And then how are they going to fit that into like corn-fed farm boy from Iowa's scheme? You know, they can't do it. Poof! The whole structure's gone. It's very stressful to find that sort of thing out. And the people I've had in my practice who have had PTSD, it's almost always because they were subjected to some kind of malevolence.

Like it was — they came face to face with something evil. And in one case, for example, I had a client whose boyfriend was going to rape her. She was naive beyond belief. And what gave her post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't what he did because she could fight him off. She happened to be bigger than he was. It was the look of malevolence on his face when he attacked her that was enough.

And she had severe psychosomatic symptoms for four years after that. She couldn't even sleep; her whole body would vibrate. And it took a lot of untangling before we figured out that it was the look on his face. And I've seen that happen other times. It's like coming face to face with this sort of thing is no joke.

So Horus can see, but luckily he's a long way from it. Yeah, indeed! Yes, I could imagine. Yeah, that's right. That's a net. Hey, that's to put the chaos back in a net. One thing you might want to know about Hitler is that one day in World War I, he got a medal for bravery, by the way.

So Hitler was all sitting around with his buddies in a trench, and he went off to relieve himself. And when he came back, they were all dead because a shell had landed right in the middle. And so that gave him the idea that he was saved for something special. And I can tell you, if that happened to you, you would feel — because what are your options? It's a horrible, chaotic, nasty place where brutal things happen at random; that's one option.

Or you were saved because something special is waiting for you. It's like a toss-up, which of those two you're going to pick, but you're going to pick one of them. So anyways, okay, so Horus — he can see Seth; too bad for him. So he goes back to the kingdom, and he has like a vicious fight with Seth, and Seth's like, they're pretty evenly matched.

And so the idea there is that even if you're Horus, the son of order and the son of chaos, and your eyes are open, it's a pretty evil — it's a pretty even battle. So they're fighting away, and Seth gets the upper hand, and he tears out one of Horus's eyes. And then Horus, which is pretty damaging, you know, that's a drag to lose an eye.

So his vision is damaged by his encounter with evil, but Horus keeps fighting. And eventually, he prevails, and he gets the eye back, and he banishes Seth to the nether regions of the kingdom. It's like in The Lion King, where everything the light touches is the kingdom, and then there's the nether regions. That's where you send old Seth.

So you can't get rid of him; you can't kill him. He's permanent because societies will always tend towards corruption. The best you can do is get the damn guy under control for a while. Okay, so now Horus has his eye, and you think, end of story; pretty good story. You could animate that; he just slap the old eye back in his head, you know, pick up the scepter, and he'd rule happily ever after.

That isn't what happens. What happens instead is he keeps his eye, and he goes back to the underworld, and he finds Osiris's ghost down there, and it's sort of sitting there like this, you know? It's because it's all chopped up, and it's a weird combination because on one plane, it's a chopped-up body that's distributed everywhere, but down in the underworld, it's like a ghost, a spirit, but it's not very animated. It's sort of in the land of the dead, like Pinocchio's father in the whale.

So what does Horus do? Well, he gives Osiris his eye. So now blind tradition can see, and then he takes his father, Osiris, back up to the surface, sort of — now they're a unit, arm in arm, so to speak. And it's the combination of Horus and Osiris that rule Egypt, and that's what the Egyptians figured out. It's like, God, that's so smart.

It's like, well, you need the traditions of the state, right? Because you need them. They're vital; they hold back chaos. You can't just let that go because then in comes Seth, and up comes the underworld. It's like, that's not good. You need that as a — to be a part of work. But then it's old and kind of blind, and it's going to tend towards corruption and fall over of its own accord, so how do you solve that?

And the answer is you pay attention, and you provide dead tradition with living sight. And if you do that, then you get to be the ruler of the state, the rightful ruler of the state. Now, the Egyptians basically hypothesized — this took a long time — that the Pharaoh also had an immortal soul; he was the only person who did, but the immortal soul was basically the combination of Horus and Osiris. So, the Egyptians conceptualized that as something that was eternal.

So, it was the central eternal feature of sovereignty. It's so smart! And so, as long as the Pharaoh was a good Horus and Osiris at the same time, then he was the rightful sovereign, and he was reflecting something of the utmost value. It was immortal; it's so smart. So, what happened? So interestingly, they call this the democratization of Osiris.

So to begin with, in the Egyptian state, you could only use the Horus-Osiris symbolism if you were either the Pharaoh to begin with or at least a high-ranking aristocrat. But what happened as Egypt progressed, so to speak, as it developed across time, is that the right to use the symbolism that was the Horus-Osiris conjunction drifted down the dominance hierarchy.

So at some point, all the aristocrats got to use it. It never drifted down to like women or common people or slaves or anything like that. But, you know, hypothetically, the Jews came out of Egypt, and one of the things the Jews said that went beyond the Egyptians was that each person was capable — was ennobled, in some sense, by their potential relationship with the highest value, that was God.

And when the Christians showed up, that was universalized; everyone had it — even prostitutes and slaves. So it's so cool because what happens is these societies get the idea of sovereignty laid out in this phenomenal heavenly drama, and they identify that with the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy, which is what they should do.

But then what happens across time is everybody wakes up and thinks, oh, that's so interesting. It's characteristic of the Pharaoh; it's characteristic of what should be sovereign; it's characteristic of what the highest value is, but it's actually characteristic of everybody. And it's almost impossible to overstate how important that is because our whole conception of the idea of natural rights is predicated on the idea that there's something about you as an individual whose value is inviolable.

So much that it doesn't even matter what you do. So if I see you brutally murder 20 people, and there are 50 eyewitnesses, and we know for sure you did it, you still have to be treated as if your central essence is of tremendous value, and you have to be given due process. The whole law bows down before that. And so then you think, well, do people believe this, this sort of Horus-Osiris combination and its relationship to what's ultimately valuable and the fact that that's embodied in every person?

It's like they certainly act like they believe it. And if they ever encounter a violation of that in practice, especially social practice, everybody’s jumping up and down and complaining. It's like, you're trampling on my rights! What do you mean? Where'd those come from? What exactly are they, and are they real or not? And if they're not real, well then I can trample over them all I want because they're not real.

But if they — and then we can just have an argument about what human beings are like — but if they are real, and they're reflective of an underlying principle that's continually attempting to manifest itself, in a sense, from the bottom up, you better not break the rules because you're really going against the cosmic order. So, that's the Egyptian story.

It's like it's mind-boggling. It's no wonder that story had enough dynamism to propel a whole culture across several thousand years. It's like it's a staggering achievement. Yeah, so that's a really good observation. That's just one of the things that I really — that something that I figured out about all of this in the last five years. For a long time, I still haven't got this right.

It's like, okay, what is your reaction when one of those principles is violated? So this is like the terror management question, right? Well, for the terror management people, it's fear. But there's a real problem with that because conservatives tend to be less neurotic than liberals, and conservatives who have more of a propensity for right-wing authoritarianism are more likely to get upset when rules are violated.

But the rules seem to be so — I think it's more — or I thought that it was more — no, no, it's not exactly if your rules get violated; it's not exactly fear, although fear is part of it. It's the disintegration of your motivational states into general preparation for readiness. So that's more like a generalized stress response. And so everything goes on so that you're able to deal with what happens next.

It's like gunman's married couples when they're the ones that are going to get divorced, right? They're very calm on the surface, but underneath it's like the underworld — all hell is broken loose. But then there's been a twist in that because there's a bunch of data coming together from all over the world that basically goes like this: is that right-wing authoritarianism seems to be based on purity, and purity is disgust control.

And there's a deep biological root for that. Like people who are disgust sensitive and concerned with purity have better standards of hygiene, and they do tend to live longer. But they're also very much against, temperamentally against, any form of sexual contact that isn't bounded by the social contract. And they don't like foreigners, but that's all a clump. It's all the same thing.

And then we found recently — we haven't published this yet — we found recently that we know conservatives are more conscientious than liberals. And then we found that conscientiousness fragments into industriousness and orderliness, which was great because people have been wondering for five decades how you plug the proclivity for right-wing authoritarianism into the general personality structure.

And it's complicated because if you're a radical liberal, like a radical lefty — those aren't liberal, sorry, radical lefty — a communist, you can be just as authoritarian as you would be if you were a fascist. So, you know, that hasn't been quite sorted out yet, but it's the orderliness that seems to make people have this right-wing proclivity. And it does look like what they're trying to do is control disgust.

So yes, what the violation of that order — a huge chunk of it seems to be in this entirely new negative emotion system that we've only been untangling for 20 years, and it's not associated with neuroticism. Liberals are actually more neurotic than conservatives, you know? And you could say, well, that's because the conservatives are so well protected. It's like, no, no. You can't post-hoc use your theory to predict the opposite of what you would have predicted before the data comes in.

It's like, no, conservatives are — they should be more physiologically reactive, and there's some evidence that they are, but it does really seem to be disgust. And so, to jump ahead a little bit, after we'd sorted this out — now a lot of the work that was done on disgust was done by Jonathan Haidt. He's the guy that deserves the credit for the disgust/purity linkage; it's a big deal, and he was pushing the study of disgust long before people were paying any attention to it.

So good for him! When I was working on the orderliness/disgust relationship, I was also reading this book by Hitler called Hitler's Table Talk, and what it was was he would talk at his dinners, and they collected it from 1939 to 1942, and he would like just spout off on whatever it was that was on his mind. And he was a very open person, so it’s very lateral discussion.

He was very interested in art and culture, but he was very, very orderly, and he was a worshipper of willpower. And orderly people are like that, like, um, and xics are orderly too — orderly; they can't even stand their own bodies. It's disgust that their bodies elicit, and they prize the ability to control their bodies, and that's hyper orderliness.

That's, I think, why it's associated. It's generally considered an upper-middle-class disease, and I think that's because a lot of people who are at that strata are hyper conscientious, and that gets passed on to their kids. And sometimes that's just too much.

Anyways, one of the things that really struck me about Hitler's writings, and it really blew me away, I'll tell you, was that he has a metaphor. All of his thinking's metaphorical, and the metaphor is the Aryan race is a pure body, pure blood, pure, uncontaminated, and it's under assault by pathogens and parasites.

Now, as soon as you know that, bang, you've got his — you've got the underlying dynamic of his appeal to the masses, and Germans, hey, they're orderly! So, you know, one of the things people say is that what happened in Germany constituted a decline of civilization, right, back to barbarism. It's like, ah, maybe not.

Conscientiousness is associated with productivity quite highly. The correlation is about 0.4 — roughly the same as the correlation with IQ. So conscientiousness is a prerequisite for civilization. And you can think, well, why would you be disgust sensitive and orderly? And the answer might be, well, how much of your grain do you want rats and mice to eat? Because they eat lots of it, right?

And keeping the insects out of a food store, that's really, really hard. So if you're going to store things up, which is what you're going to do if you're going to be civilized, you better start to be concerned with hygiene, you know? So those things are going to go together.

Well, Hitler was hyper orderly and hyper disgust sensitive. He would wash — he bathed four times a day, and he was very, very happy about the ability to stand in the back of his car, his parade car, and keep his arm out like this for eight hours. He thought of that as the triumph of the will, you know, and the will seemed to be associated with this propensity towards orderliness.

So another thing that's really interesting, and I still don't exactly know what to make of this because it has complicated my conceptualizations, because a lot of what I'm going to show you is based on fear and horror. Horror is more like fear plus disgust. It's some — you know, the difference between The Blair Witch Project and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — they're both horror movies, but one is pure fear and the other is almost pure disgust.

So disgust seems to be a huge element of this, and it is a primary response by orderly people to the violation of moral norms. Now, here's something weird. There was a paper published in PLOS ONE about a year ago, and what these people did was they did, I think, a within- and across-country survey. And this wasn't in developed countries, so the question was how much infectious disease was there in each of these geographical locales, and the next question was how right-wing were the people who occupied those areas at the individual level.

So they weren't interested in what the government was like. And what they found was that the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and right-wing authoritarianism at the individual level was 0.6. It's like — and if you know anything about statistics, when you see 0.6, you just fall over and hyperventilate because that never happens. It's an effect size that’s bigger than 99% of the effect sizes that you'd ever encounter in the social sciences. It might be 99.9%.

That's a negative correlation: the higher the infectious disease rate, the more right-wing totalitarian the population. Why? Well, why do you think they're regulating personal contact and sexual behavior? Why? Well, think about it. You know, they're trying to minimize disease transmission vectors fundamentally. Now, they're not trying to do that; you know what I mean. It's an adaptation. Keep yourself out of contact; keep yourself isolated.

It's like a psycho-cultural adaptation, yeah, because it takes place within a generation. Well, I don't know; I don't know that, you know, because in lots of those places, there have been infectious diseases for a very long period of time.

So, but anyway, so that's all very unsettling information because it sheds a — so what it implies — and this is quite cool — it implies that the best way to control right-wing authoritarianism is to instigate effective public health policy. So if everyone has a sewer and a toilet, and there’s no infectious disease, there aren't any right-wing authoritarians anymore because they're not necessary.

Now, that might be an overstatement, but it also might not be. You know, it's definitely one of the prerequisites for the kind of stability and productivity that's characterized the West is that all of our cities have functional sewer systems, and everybody has a toilet. It's like turns out that makes a big difference, especially when you don't have one.

Also, is it fair to say that what — call disgusting conditions actually bring out totalitarian general? Well, it should; it should bring it out. And I'm a reasonably orderly person, you know. If I go into a place that's chaotic, especially if it's chaotic and filthy, I have a really, really powerful impulse to tromp around until it's fixed. You know, because it just strikes me as things are deteriorating in a bad direction around here, you know?

So, and I'm not — I wouldn't say that one of my most outstanding characteristics is orderliness, but it's up there. I'm a reasonably conscientious person. So, yeah, it's a visceral response. And the visceral response is, something needs to be done about this, you know? And you can see how that's associated with conscientiousness.

So we've been trying to figure out what makes conscientious people motivated because conscientiousness predicts life success. It's like, well, are they interested in what they're doing? No, it's dutifulness. Okay, so why is that a motivator? We're thinking that what the conscientious person wants is not to slide into the disgusting bottom of things.

So imagine the hierarchy: okay, top is pure, bottom is contaminated. Why? Well, I can tell you one reason. If you take a given geographical locale — this is even true for songbirds — and you rank order the dens of that locale by their dominance position, and then you let a pathogen in, the animals die from the bottom up.

Right? So the bottom of the dominance hierarchy is where all the pathogens hang out. And so if that's disgusting and it's morally impure, and you're bad if you're down there, which is really a conservative viewpoint in many ways, it's your fault you're there, right? And I'm not going to be there no matter what. And so I think what the conscientious person is doing is fleeing the bottom. They're not trying to get to the top, except that that's the farthest away you can get from the bottom.

And that's a purity motivation. Now, we don't know that yet because we haven't been able to figure out how to motivate industrious people in the lab. So, which is weird, right? Because conscientiousness predicts life success; you'd think that you could find a task in the lab that conscientious people would do better than non-conscientious people. We've tried dozens of things and not been able to do it.

So now we're trying to make people embarrassed and ashamed and see if we can get them to donate more to a charity if we do that, based on the idea that what's motivating the conscientious person is a flight from contamination. It could easily be. So, it's quite mind-boggling. Like it was a twist. It was a twist; I'd never forecast in my conceptualization of these things.

But the underworld, you know, is a place of chaos and fear, but the underworld — that's hell. It's full of sulfurous odors, you know? It's not only terrifying; it's also disgusting, and it's associated symbolically with disgusting elements of the body as well. So, purity, obviously; sexual purity, for example, is certainly a hygiene purity ad mixture, and it's a flight from contamination.

And no wonder, right? I mean, there are sexually transmitted diseases. It's like a major vector of disease transmission. We saw that with the AIDS outbreak, you know? Without airplanes, there wouldn't have been any AIDS outbreak. You know, jet planes plus promiscuity? It's like bang! You know, we almost generated a virus that took down the whole planet.

So it's no joke when these things escape from their little box, you know? You might say, well, why aren't people allowed to have the sexual life they want? Well, the disease — the relationship between disease transmission and promiscuity is exponential; that's why. So, you know, you might think, well, that's no reason. It's like, okay, maybe not, but I don't know how many hundreds of millions of people have died from AIDS, but it's lots.

So, you know, yep. How do you — sorting between Seth and Isis? We'll do that later. We're going to be doing a lot of distinguishing of that. In fact, that's a primary problem of men distinguishing Isis, so that's the feminine underworld from evil, right? Right, because there's a negative element to both of them.

If you haven't differentiated properly, then the woman can carry that whole load. That happened to some degree with Eve, for example, in the Genesis story. It's so interesting because if you read Genesis, we're going to talk about that later, the person who looks really bad in Genesis isn't Eve; the person who looks really bad is Adam.

You know? So Eve offers him the apple, and like a dunce, he takes it. But then God comes along afterward. He's all self-conscious now, and so is Eve. And so God comes along to have a little walk with Adam like he's used to doing, and Adam is hiding in the bushes because he's naked and he doesn't want God to see.

And so God calls him on it, says like, hey buddy, I can see through bushes; you know, come out here where I can talk to you. And Adam says, oh, I'm naked; I can't come out. And God says, how do you figure that out? And Adam, being the heroic creature that he was, said, you know that woman you made for me? It's her fault!

Like, well, who's the villain in that story? He's such a weasel that when he gets called on his disobedience, the first thing he does is blame the woman. It's like, yeah, yeah, well, that's an archetypal story, I'll tell you that. You know, so the temptations of Eve, you know? It's like the rapists who blame the attractiveness of the woman for the rape. It's like, the devil made me do it, you know?

So anyways, it's very difficult to distinguish one form of negative from another, and partly what we're going to do when we go through the symbolic differentiation process is put things in their proper place. So I would say that's this. That's the wrong direction. Sorry, I want to show you this one diagram, and then we'll stop there.

So for me, that's the map of the symbolic sphere. Okay, so what you have in the very background is the dragon of chaos. That's the absolute unknown as such. So you can think about it as the chaos from which everything else emerges. So that's the unknown unknowns.

Okay, on top of that, there's a feminine layer. That's the great mother. And the great mother has a positive aspect; she's the mother of all things, and she has a negative aspect, and she's the angry Tiamat — the force of death that pulls all biological creatures back into her grasp.

Creation and destruction. So on top of that, there's culture, and culture protects you from the great mother. Just like with Osiris, Isis stays in the underworld where she belongs. But culture has a negative element and a positive element. So it's patriarchal, represented by masculine figures; but it has an element that offers order and an element that offers tyranny.

And there's always a balance between those two. And so if you're a conservative, you think, hoay, order. And if you're a lefty, you think, oh no, tyranny. And you're both right, right? Because every organization tends towards tyranny and supports you at the same time.

So it's right on top of that — there’s the archetypal individual that's also represented in masculine form for reasons that we'll get into later, but it has a positive and a negative too. And the positive is the creative explorer moving out into the darkness with eyes open, and then there's the counterpart of that, which is the thing you shake hands with when you're Romeo deir, and you shake hands with the devil.

And that's the individual, too. And one of the things I would — you can think about this, but one of the things that I really like about this map is that I think it's the antidote for ideology. And the reason for that is that you can map ideologies onto this map, but the ideologies only give you half the story.

So like the left-wing story would be lovely, virginal Mother Nature being tyrannized by the evil corporations as civilization advances, led by the adversarial individual. But the right-wing story is the heroic individual bringing order into chaos to avoid the destructive element of the natural world. So that's like the frontier myth that settled the United States, right? Heroic pioneers moving civilization into the chaotic unknown.

You just slam those two together, and then you got the real problem, which is that nature, the unknown, is a creative source of everything, and it will pull you into pieces if it has the opportunity. And then culture — it's like you can talk, and it's warm. You better be happy with culture, but the probability that it's going to take you and crunch you and try to turn you into a cog is like, yeah, that's what it's going to do; that's what it does.

And then there's you. Well, yeah, you're a wonderful, interesting, you know, great creature, but look the hell out. So, and that's right. And I think the archetypal stories do a lovely job of continually bringing those elements together. So, well, okay, so that's good enough.