006 Maps of Meaning: 6 Submitting to Order (TVO)

We've had written history for 5000 years. People have been generally literate for less than 500 years. But we’ve had culture for 150,000 years. Identifiable culture for at least 25,000. So the vast period of our enculturation was preliterate enculturation before we could write down the rules and transmit them.

How were they transmitted? Assuming we had culture, well, there's a variety of mechanisms. We have a tendency to see elements of the world in personified form because most of the interrelationships we have with the world are actually social or interpersonal relationships. So that’s basically how our brain is structured. As we evolved, we developed the capacity to extend our cognitive ability beyond the merely social to take in the world as such, but the categories that we use to do that were still fundamentally social.

Now the reason the unknown per se is symbolized as feminine is because the critical feature of the feminine—and I don’t mean the female individual; I mean the feminine category—is its capacity to generate new forms. And the unknown is such; it is logically and appropriately symbolized by the feminine because it’s the bringer forth of all things, which is to say that the background of existence, the unknowable background of existence, is the thing that generates everything.

Paired with that, of course, according to the schema that we've been working with, is the archetype of the great father. The archetype of the great father is the archetype of tradition fundamentally. The great weight of the past because as you incorporate your past, the past of your culture through the intermediation of your parents, you learn routines and rituals for structure in the unknown. Now those routines and rituals are patterns of action that you use in the world as such.

And also complex patterns of action that you use to structure your own interpretations and your own motor output and your own conceptualizations when you're dealing with other people. So that would be the absorption, the most fundamentally, of your cultural rules. The fact of those cultural rules and their incarnation in you essentially keeps chaos at bay.

This means if two of you share the same cultural structure, assuming you're playing the same game, so to speak, that means you can each predict each other’s responses, which is very, very useful. Because that way, you can be sure that you can trust the other person. You can more or less infer their goals because, after all, their value structure’s similar to yours. And if you can infer their goals, that means you can embody their emotions.

So that’s the benevolent aspect of tradition, right—the part that protects and shelters you and structures the nature of your being in the face of existential terror and doubt, so to speak. But there's also an aspect of tradition that’s terrible, tyrannical. It’s the part that marches young men off to war, say, in defense of the structures that it’s protecting.

It’s the part that says, “When you're a teenager, wear this and not this, or you'll be the target of mockery for all your peers.” It’s the part of the structure that crushes the creative life out of you because the tyrannical aspect of social order doesn’t want your creative life; so to speak, what it wants is your obedience because your obedience is what makes the machine run smooth.

And so you're always in an ambivalent relationship with regards to security and authority. On the one hand, it provides you shelter and what you need and allows you to gain the benefits of literally thousands and thousands of years of cultural evolution. On the other hand, it’s the thing that makes you obey or face the painful consequences thereof, which can range from mere social exclusion and consequent re-exposure to the unknown to truly oppressive practices designed to make you be exactly like everyone else or else.

And so you could say, most particularly again, that that’s a standard existential problem. It’s a problem that’s faced by people in every place and in every culture, balancing the appropriate attitude towards culture. So the most fundamental representation of culture can be portrayed essentially in this manner, I think.

What you see here is the dragon of chaos, of course, lurking in the background. What that means is that all forms come from the formless and that the father itself is a primary form; a representation of God the father. And God the father, in the Christian trinity, is the representation of the positive and the security, and the tyrannical aspect of social order.

Right? God has a set of rules for you; you bloody well better listen to those rules. If you don’t, all hell’s gonna break loose, and you know that’s a pretty reasonable summary of how things work; unfortunately. So on the one hand, God offers security; on the other hand, He offers tyranny, and in total that basically represents order.

So you can see this representation is quite useful; it shows God standing over this city, which of course is a city committed to Him fundamentally, so it operates under the moral principles that He represents. Behind Him is a representation of the sun, which is partly a representation of the source of all life, partly a representation of the source of consciousness and illumination, right? Because you're conscious during the day, and partly a halo representing a sort of transcendent nature of the social order that structures existence.

So it’s a primary phenomenon, and it’s only to say that in all human experience, there's a cultural aspect and a natural aspect. And a funny thing is the cultural aspect, in some ways, is as natural as the natural aspect, right? Because we’re social beings; we can’t exist without society. Society’s structures are our very nature. And we’re beneficiaries and victims.

And so then, just as is the case with the feminine, there are two aspects that can be represented metaphorically with regards to the masculine. You can say, well, the secure aspect of social order is the wise king. You can see it written in the medieval representation of him here, sitting on his throne calmly in a relatively open posture. That means he’s ready to listen to supplicants, to people who are coming to talk to him.

He’s holding an orb with a cross on top of it, which means essentially that he’s in control of the world, and that the world is subordinated to something else that’s represented by the cross. A wise and just ruler. And then, his mirror image here is the son-devouring king, a very common mythological theme—the father who wants to destroy his son, in shades of the Oedipal conflict, of course, if you remember your Freud.

But basically what it means is this: Despite the fact that every human being is an offspring of culture by nature, every human being is also in the terrible position of facing the fact that their very individuality is likely to be crushed out of them during the socialization process. And in a sense, that’s really not avoidable. I mean, if you're subject to really tyrannical socialization, it’s obviously a much more cardinal problem, right?

But even if you're subject to socialization under normal circumstances, you are still what you are rather than the many-fold things that you could've otherwise been. And just to give you some sense of how dramatic a process this really is, one of the things you should know is that you actually die into your brain.

So one of the things you might wonder is why is it that death evolved? It doesn’t really make up much sense from a Darwinian perspective, right? Because you'd make the presupposition that if you could just stick around and father children, say, for 250 years, you'd be doing a lot better job than the poor sap who only lived to be 30. So why is it that you only live to be 70, and really your period of fertility is over, say, by the time you're 40?

Why would that be? What's the utility of death? And then you remember, well, the environment’s always changing, right? In this chaotic manner that’s represented by the great mother. Can you change with it? And in answer to that is yes, but only to a certain point. Which is why, as people age, they tend to become more and more alienated from the current culture, right?

They’ve adopted their position of being, say, which is more or less fixed by the time they're 25 or so, once their prefrontal cortex matures. And then, after that, the world gets away from them. They don’t have enough biological resources left to constantly undergo new revolutionary neurological processes. And part of the reason is this: You have more neuro connections in your brain when you're first born than you do for the rest of your life—any other time in your life.

And as you learn when you're an infant, and as you learn, say, over the first two years, what happens is that there's a plentitude of circuits and they die off, leaving only those circuits that have a function. And you think about that; it’s kind of a quasi-Darwinian process. And so what that means is that as you mature and become fixed in your form, you know, to adopt your personality, whatever it becomes, what's happening is that the excess possibility, in some sense, is being demolished by experience.

So the tyrannical aspect of enculturation is something that’s real because it makes you, in large part, what you are. And you have to understand as well that that’s necessary because it’s better to be something; in the final analysis, it’s better to be something than to be nothing.

But you know we still have residual dreams, like those expressed by Peter Pan, say, who's the boy that never wants to grow up because he doesn’t wanna attain any final and fixed form. And it’s interesting because, in one respect, as you progress through your life, you're climbing—assuming things are going well—you're climbing to ever new heights, but on the other hand, the direction that you're going in constantly narrows as you age.

So there's a real trade-off there, and I think the existential angst that’s caused as a consequence of that trade-off is often real. And I also think that adolescents and early adults feel this most intently, which is part of the reason why they tend to rebel against social structures in general, you know, whether it’s the military-industrial complex or the corporate world or globalization or what have you.

It's that you have these large structures that represent the tyrannical aspect of social being, and it’s no wonder that the fact of those structures engenders rebellion; it should. On the other hand, it’s also no wonder that structures like that exist because if they didn’t exist, then people would have no way of interrelating their social being, and we would revert back to the sort of Hobbesian state of war where everybody’s arms are around everybody else’s throat.

That doesn’t mean the payoff is always good. So... the Freudians, of course, had a real field day with this, and we’re most fundamentally concerned by it. Part of the reason that Freudian psychology has had such an immense impact on Western and world culture is because Freud came along just when classical Judeo-Christian mythological structures were on a serious decline in the West.

Freud stepped in with a secularized mythological version of reality that said, "Well, there's nature, and that’s the Id, right? That’s the wild and untamed impulses that spring up from the animal mind. And there's the ego, which is the individual, who’s in many ways a pawn of these id-like forces. And then, on top of the ego, crushing it down into the id, so to speak, is the superego; which is the internal and external embodiment of social order and morality."

So you can see the mythological substructure underlying Freud. Freud said, "Well, the ego is always being shaped by the superego and always compulsion; it’s ‘don’t, don’t.’ It’s always ‘no’; it’s like Old Testament morality and the incarnation of the Ten Commandments." Whatever you wanna do, if it feels good, the probability is high that it’s immoral from the perspective of the social world.

And you can really see this with children; you know, it’s really remarkable to watch them because my sense is—and I don’t think this is just because I'm a particularly tyrannical father—children often get in more trouble for having fun than they do for any other reason because their capacity for unbridled enjoyment is so unbridled that it actually poses a threat to orderly structure.

So you know if a child really gets in an active mood and is playing a very active game—I mean especially if they're somewhere between, say, 3 and 5—they can tear your house to shreds in no time, no time flat. And you're always bawling them out like, “No, no, no, quiet down, don’t do that.” And you know, they're smiling away, and they're happier than any adult you're ever gonna see in your entire life, and you’re doing everything you can to push them down so that they can sit quietly and read a book, or whatever it is you think they should be doing.

And that’s really nasty and horrible, but by the same token, it’s absolutely necessary because if they don’t learn to bring their impulses—even their impulses; their ludic impulses, right? Their impulses to play—under control, then nobody else can stand them. And if they don’t get access to the resources that are in the social world, man, they have one dismal life laid out in front of them.

So anyways, that’s an early description of the genesis of the conflict, say, between the ego and the superego. And I just wanted to point that out because it’s not just sex and aggression that gets regulated, right? We can understand why that might happen, but it’s also playfulness and creativity and spontaneity, and all the things that we associate with the joy of being that the terrible tyrannical social structure puts a clamp on.

So Jaak Panksepp, for example, has recently demonstrated that children—boys, because it’s usually boys who have attention deficit disorder, which is generally diagnosed in the schoolroom—do much better if they're placed on methylphenidate, which is a kind of amphetamine fundamentally. But normal kids do better on amphetamines too, by the way; they can focus better, they can focus more, and they can pay attention more.

Mostly what methylphenidate does is suppress play. So Panksepp notes that what’s happening with these ADHD kids—hyperactive kids—is they're more playful, more boisterously playful, which tends to be a masculine attribute in juvenile forms of many mammals. They're boisterously playful; give them a little methylphenidate, and that shuts down their play behavior, and they can sit down and focus.

You know, and well, you can understand how even if you might think that’s necessary—because apparently many people do—you can also still understand that by the same token, that probably represents some kind of loss because we like to see kids play, and it’s good for them besides.

So anyways, Freud says the ego pops up, it’s all thrilled to death with the world; the superego comes along and shuts it down. And that’s a fate that befalls all of us. And not only that, because Freud’s a pretty wise man, all things considered; he doesn’t say that’s all to the bad. He says that’s the price we pay for social being, and fair enough.

You see this happening in children all the time where part of what they do as they mature is adopt roles. So they’ll play being a father or being a mother, say, and what they're doing is pulling in what they see as the worldview that characterizes parenthood—embodying the father, playing out the role, and trying to organize their motivational structures within the observed framework, say, that the father provides.

That’s an introjection of social wisdom. If you can imagine that the role of father, say, has a structure—like one structure would be, well, if you’re a father and you’re around to model, then you have to be taking care of the children or at least you have to be there often enough so that you can be a target of modeling.

So you can imagine that the spirit of the father that’s modeled, at least in the optimal circumstances, is one that deals out rules and order but that also provides nurturing care and support. And that’s a kind of story we know; fathers who aren't like that. And maybe we know fathers who are too much like that, but all things considered, on average, you have a father role, and children attempt to interject that.

That’s part of the way that they learn to modulate their own motivational resources. So for example, if the child observes the father and the mother sharing, which means taking each other's motivational states into account, then they can act out the game of sharing with a doll, say, representing a child.

What they're doing is trying to imagine what it’s like inside that doll’s head, treating it like a person, by embodying the potential motivations and emotional states of that pretend object in their own body. Then by trying to organize a higher-order structure—which would be like the tea party, where tea is shared, a higher-order structure where you have a turn because you want a turn because you're thirsty like me, and then I have a turn, and we both get what we want and we can exchange information.

Well, that’s a little bit more optimistic representation of the tyranny of social order than pure compulsion, right? Because what it suggests is there's a way that you can organize the way you are genuinely and the way I am genuinely so that we both are genuine, yet we get something more than we would get if we would just fire ourselves.

And so you think that with kids, they like to play by themselves, but by the time they're about 3 and a half or 4, boy, they have a hunger for other children, and they’ll do anything in order to go out and play with other kids.

So you can say, “Well, if you take all the toys off your bed, I’ll go let you play with your friend,” and like the toys are off there in two-tenths of a second, and they're out the door because they have this primary need to go out and experiment with the social world.

In large part, that’s how they build the complex higher-order, more abstract structures that enable them to regulate their motivational states and their emotional states without just “no.” It’s a more sophisticated way of doing it, right? It’s better to play a game with someone than to engage in a battle of wills with them.

Because then there's no compulsion; there's just mutual participation. And that’s critical because one of the things that the notion of the tyranny of the social order brings up as a question is, "All right, all right, so you have to take part in society. You have to take your part in the social world, yet the social world wants its pound of flesh or its 60 pounds of flesh depending on where you live."

On the one hand, you're damned if you do, so to speak, and you're damned if you don’t. What do you do as a consequence of facing that challenge? And so you remember with the great mother, with chaos and the unknown, the way you meet the challenge is to understand that the things you don’t understand are dangerous and frightening, and that if you encounter them, they can hurt you—and that this is real.

But you don’t run away; all the same, if you're trying to get somewhere, the things you don’t understand happen. You can’t shut yourself down; you have to explore cautiously and try to gain new knowledge.

Well, how do you organize your social being? Well, let’s make the presupposition that you got half a dozen or so fundamental motivational states, right? So what they are is your subjugation to a world of a priori deities. You see in children rage, fear, hunger, anger, affiliation, love, the capacity of play—all value sets.

Which have their own goal-like behavioral patterns, their own worldview, their own way of manifesting themselves—all those are innate; they're all dependent on pre-wired neural architectural systems. They have to unfold in experience, but they're there.

Okay, and so let’s say that’s what you come into the world with. And that’s what you come into the world with. But then, the fact that you're in the world poses a more complex problem, which is, well, yeah, you’ve got one motivational state happening; you're angry. But then you’ve got another you have to worry about, which is you’d like to be affiliated with someone, like your sibling.

So you got a real conflict with your sibling. It’s like you really hate them, but you really like them too, and you want to play with them. So what do you do about that? Well, you’d say a behaviorally disregulated child who isn’t well socialized, they’re impulsive. They don’t act as if they take the future into account, so they heavy future discount their impulses.

What does that mean? If you watch a child have a temper tantrum, which around two they’re really prone to—it’s like it’s a phenomenon, it’s like a tornado on a really small scale. The child’s just flipped out. If you saw an adult do that, you’d run away screaming, right?

And they’re completely dominated by this emotional state. And my sense, watching that, has always been to try to help the kid not have that happen to them because it looks like a terrible catastrophe for their emerging ego, right? I mean they’re trying to get their world together, and something frustrates them, and (WHOOMP!) up come these amygdalic projections that govern the anger, hypothalamic, even more primitive, and just like blow them over.

Then they’re on the floor, and they're holding their breath, and they're turning blue, and they're having a fit, and then it takes them like 15 minutes to recover. So they have to take themselves into account as total, as complete beings, and that’s the emergence of a higher-order morality.

But it’s more complicated than that because not only do they have the problem of themselves, which is a bad enough problem, but then they have the problem of the other person.

So what’s the proper response of the individual, given that he or she is threatened by the natural world and the unknown on the left hand, and threatened by the social order and its tyranny on the right hand, but also dependent on the natural world and chaos for all good things and all new information, and dependent on the social order for their very mode of being, right?

Caught between four paradoxes all at the same time, how can that route be properly negotiated? Well, then you can look at hero mythology. The most common plot, and I would say in some ways the only plot—although there are variations of this that are endless, romantic variations or adventure story variations, or variations of failed heroic endeavor—still, the only plot goes something like this:

There’s a current state of being. Now that can be represented by a psychological state—your current personality. It can be represented by your family; it can be represented by your extended social group, your city, your town, your country, your ecosystem, your—your—in science fiction frequently the entire global community, right? A structure is threatened; by what? Well, you name it.

If it’s dangerous, it can threaten the structure. That can be one of various forms of barbarian, right? Any person from another culture, an alien in science fiction, a terrible monster that lives in the deep that has been dominated and oppressed before, but has come back for more, an agent of horror—that’s a common theme in modern horror movies, right?

An object that moves, the ghosts in the basement because the dead were improperly buried, etc., etc., etc. Anything uncanny, anything fear-inspiring, anything reptilian—anything that smothers or entrances or seduces, or you name it; if it’s change or some metaphoric representation of anything that can change, then it’s this: the dragon of chaos, and that’s the thing that always threatens the stable state in its multiple potential manifest forms.

And what does that mean? It means the apocalypse is always happening, right? The end of the world is always before us, which is why you see apocalyptic images, for example, throughout the New Testament. Christ says, “The world is coming to an end,” and people are waiting around for it to happen, but what they don’t precisely understand is that the world is always coming to an end—always.

And that’s because what you think now is not good enough for the next second, right? You have to change because change is coming, and what change means is you have to let go of what you know—that’s the apocalypse—and it’s always on us. The structure is threatened.

Well, what do you do about that? Well, you can run, but you can’t hide, right? That’s the theory. And the reason for that is that even if you are unwilling to face the threat that’s right in front of you, no matter where you run to, that threat’s going to be there.

And so you see in the case of an agoraphobic woman who starts to run away from the shopping mall when she has heart palpitations; then she runs away from the subway, and then she runs away from taxis, and then buses, and then other people. And then finally she’s at home, and there’s nowhere to run, but her heart’s been palpitating, and the fear of death is still on her, and there’s no place to go.

So hiding isn’t much of a help. Or you can pretend that the chaotic thing isn’t there and refuse to change, but all that does is make the threat bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So just like, simply put, well say you only have a hundred dollars in the bank, and you have a hundred and ten dollar telephone bill, and you think, well I, huh, I’d like that hundred dollars; I’m not gonna pay that telephone bill.

It’s just a little threat, right? But then you don’t pay it, and the next month it’s a hundred and twenty-five dollar telephone bill, and then they slap a fifty dollar charge on you, and then they cut off your phone. So then you don’t have a phone; then you miss a job appointment, and that’s not so good.

And then it’s two hundred and fifty dollars to pay your phone bill and another two hundred to get it hooked back up, and then your credit record goes all to hell because you haven’t paid any of that. And then you can’t buy a house when you’re 25, and you think, kind of weird, eh? A little bitty chaos turns into a great big monster, and partly that’s because everything that looks separate from everything else isn’t—it just looks that way.

And when you ignore anything, especially if it’s impeding your progress—you know it’s impeding your progress; you know you have to deal with it—you step away from it and see what its true nature really is. So you can hide, and you can not change, or you can pretend that the threat doesn’t exist; but in the final analysis, that just stores up the catastrophe for later.