2015 Maps of Meaning 09b: Mythology: The Great Father / Part 2 (Jordan Peterson)

Okay, so I'm gonna show you guys. Yeah, I can't ask her that. Assume the best, okay? I will as soon as I find out, but I suspect that things will go on as normal, so just do what we've been doing. That's the theory, yeah. I don't think she is. Well, then you're on a virtual strike. What's that?

Yes, what's that? Okay, well, of all the stupid things, I can't send her the damn essays, and we'll see what happens or in the future. Authoring stuff eventually, they're going to get graded. If they don't, I will figure out what to do about it. You're not gonna be left hanging with this course, okay? So just do the door, do the work. We'll figure out how you get your damn credit. I'm gonna do everything I can so that you're not left hanging because I don't think that's reasonable. You know the beef isn't with you guys, so don't worry about it for now. Just proceed as if everything will be worked out, okay?

Okay, okay. So I want to show you some images, and these are great. Far, they're images fundamentally, and I want you to take a look at them because they're powerful propaganda images, and we want to see what they represent. So on the right, you see Hitler there, who's taking over from Hindenburg. I believe that's right. I can't remember; he was the president before Hitler came aboard.

So you see that there's the transfer of power from the wise old man to the to the emergent hero—that's the image on the left, right? And so then on the right, well, so what do you think about that picture? What does it represent? What's going on there? What's that?

Yeah, we'll just look at just look at the image security. It's the balance between Osiris and Horus, right? It's different than that. That's close, but you know it's a call to heroism from the youth, with the father who's far-seeing and composed, serving as the protector and the model. So, yeah, no, that's your sort of ideal Aryan youth.

Yeah, and it's an interesting picture, eh? Because it's actually a picture that represents a child in a way that you very seldom see children represented. You know, because the child is very serious and determined, and you know that's not an acceptable image of a child, generally speaking, in a culture that's optimistic and naive because the kids are always like they're little innocent things that have no power. It's like that's wrong.

Yes, definitely. Oh, definitely he's a great father. He's the all-seeing great father in the background. He's like The Wizard of Oz fundamentally, you know? So yeah, yeah, so he's partly ordered, and that was a huge part of Hitler, and that's partly what was attractive because Germany was absolutely in chaos, so that made order more and more attractive, right?

So, and Hitler was a very orderly person. So, and so what does that mean? Why would that be the case? That's right, right. So that means they're above you. You're looking up at an ideal, right? And that's because they're up in the dominance hierarchy. You're kneeling; that's another way of thinking about it. Yes, yes, they're also lit from above, yes, and it's far-seeing, right? They're looking far ahead into the future. That's right, that's good.

All right, so then there's the picture on the left, so what do you think about that? Oh, well maybe I can make it a little bit bigger. What you have is Hitler on the right of the picture on the left and then a huge number of people crowded around him, and they're all smiling and joyful. And so that's a representation of Hitler as the jovial father of the race, right? And you see it said at a table, and what do people do at a table? That's right, and they share it, right?

And so that's a very familial... that's a very familial enterprise, and to share food with someone is to bring them into your house, right? And to be the distributor of food is to be the benevolent father. And then on the right, you see Hitler addressing a large political crowd. You know, he's up on a high platform with his men behind him, and then these eagles carrying the swastika sort of arrayed behind him, so he's up again.

So very good at theatrics—the Nazis were very good at using theatrics. So then you see them on the left there. What do you think about that picture? Yeah, stoic and resolute, right? Yeah, exactly.

Okay, and then you have the mental picture where the Germans are basically marching with what are really remade Roman banners. You know, and so what do you what do you what does that image show? Yes, that's exactly right; it shows uniformity and solidarity.

And the uniformity comes out because everyone's the same, right? And that makes them a powerful united force. Now you might ask yourself, well, why would people want that? And so what's the answer to that? And power, I mean, you want to be part of a powerful united force, or do you want to be like the weak member of a completely fragmented society? You know, so now you might say, well, I don't want to be too integrated, but you know, one thing I would say is don't overestimate the degree to which you don't want to be too integrated because, you know, modern people, especially in the West, they like to think of themselves as individuals.

It's like I have a hypothesis about that. I think people in the West are actually the most conforming people in the entire world, and that's why they can sort of dance around on top of that like they're free. And the reason is everyone stops at the red lights. You know, everyone obeys everything virtually. And so you can dress weirdly, and maybe you can have a bizarre opinion, and you can go off and do something that's a little out of the ordinary in some corner, but 99% of the time, you're conformist, right to the damn bone.

And that's a good thing, because if you weren't, the society wouldn't be so stable and so predictable across, you know, reasonable spans of time. So, but the idea that the West is individualistic, it's like we might represent individualism as a form of deity and aspire to it, and we might even worship it when it occurs, because we do with celebrities and so forth. But that's why it's by no means reasonable to assume that the West is primarily individualistic.

You know, I mean, I grew up in Western Canada, and in Edmonton, if there's a light that's red, like if you know you're supposed to not walk, people will stand there on the street when it's 40 below and wait until the light changes, even if they can't see a car anywhere near in any direction. Like, it was quite shocking to me when I first moved to Montreal and people were jaywalking.

You know, I thought God himself was to strike me down with lightning if I did it, you know. Now that the roads are narrow, and so that's part of it. But Montreal is definitely a lot pushier, or as pedestrians, than people in the West. And the other thing that's quite interesting about the West traffic patterns is that if you're standing on the road looking like you might want to cross, even if it's jaywalking, people will stop and let you cross.

It's quite annoying because you're just standing there; it's like, you know, five people stop, and then you have to walk across the street just to not disappoint them. So, you know, the thing about conformity is it makes for a tremendous amount of stability, and believe me, we wouldn't be promoting nonconformity if everyone was non-conforming; we'd be thinking, hey, it's time to get this whole thing conforming quite, quite tightly.

One of the things I've been thinking about Islam lately is that, you know, when you want to define a religion, we determine if it's a religion of peace or of war. And you think, well, it might depend on the level of analysis. You know, one of the things that Islam did was take a society that was very tribal and fractious and united across a large portion of territory. So, you know, what it did that by expanding its domains and incorporating other people and also going to war.

So on the fringes of the Islamic expansion, there was all sorts of bloodshed and misery, but then inside it there was this hierarchical organization of people that were basically only organized into little bitty tribal groups before that. So you might say, well, that within the expanding bubble of influence, it was peaceful, and then on the fringes, it was violent. And then you might say, well, what does that mean over the long run? Is that warlike or peaceful?

And I don't really know how to answer that question, you know, because it depends on which angle you're looking at it from. You know, we certainly know that as humanity aggregated itself into larger and larger collectives, there was a lot of conflict that had to be had in order for that to occur. But the consequence—like, you think about our lives at the moment; the probability that one of you will get killed by homicide is, you know, it's vanishingly low.

And then you might ask yourself, well, how much bloodshed and conflict did that take? You know, before everyone was hammered together so damn tightly that—well, here's another way of looking at it. Why is it possible for women to have rights in the West? And I think the answer to that is because they can go outside without being raped.

So you know, the whole culture is so damn peaceful now that a woman can present herself alone to strange men and not die as a consequence of it. It's like, okay, well, then you can start talking about rights. Before that, it's whatever you're talking about, it's not right; mostly what it is is protection. You know, you have to be protected, and there's lots of places in the world where that's still exactly the way it is.

You know, I know that even when I was traveling through Europe years ago, in the '80s, you know, I traveled with a friend of mine—a woman—and her boyfriend. And when we went through Italy, for example, she was blond; she was just harassed to death by the Italian men. I mean, not in any Norton anyway, that was brutal; I'm sure it does. I'm sure it does.

So we took her over to Greece as well, and we went to this place called Patras, and Patras had this absolutely weird celebration that was like the fourth biggest celebration in the world. I'd never even heard of it. And one of the things they do there is everybody goes on the street with these plastic bats. You know, they're really light plastic; that's the kind of kid would use, and they were like this big round. Their plastic was firm enough so that it was a bat, but soft enough so if you got whacked with it in a semi-playful way, it wasn't gonna hurt.

And then everybody also sprayed each other with silly string, which I thought was an extremely bizarre nut stuff. Wasn't that also like—there's a million people out in the street, and everybody's hitting each other with bats and spraying each other with silly string, and this poor girl, she must have been hit like ten thousand times, you know? So, and it wasn't malevolent; it was playful. You know, it had to be because if everyone's hitting everybody else with bats, it bloody well better stay playful, right?

But the pro thing is, is that she couldn't move with anywhere near the same freedom that I could move, and that's only a tiny, tiny echo of what it would have been like in many places 500 years ago or a thousand years ago. So again, you know, there's this basis of absolute conformity that's a prerequisite to freedom, especially freedom for people who are vulnerable in many ways.

So that's part of what's being celebrated in that image, and you know if people are in the state of chaos, that's one thing that really attracts them. They're attracted by order. And so, you know, you always have to give the devil his due. If you're trying to understand something like Nazism, you have to understand why it might be attractive to someone like you.

Now the question is, in part, why did it go so pathologically wrong? Well, that's part of what we're going to untangle, you know, because you might say, well, you might have benevolent motives in establishing order, but order shades into tyranny, and then your motivations for establishing tyranny might be completely self-serving and cruel. You know, there may be a process that gets you too self-serving and cruel; certainly, that is what happened with the Nazis.

The question is, was that there all along? Was it something that emerged? Was it like the snake in the garden that was gonna present itself? Well, and you have Hitler on the right there, and that's a Nazi art statue behind it, and you know, it's kind of got this quasi-Greek element, although—and Hitler was an admirer of classical statuary—but then everything's exaggerated about it.

There's this sort of hyper-masculine—well, it's like hyper-masculine eyes Greek sculpture that was part of the Nazi aesthetic. So, that one on the left says, "One folk, one country, one leader." That's what Führer means, you know? And so there you see that Hitler's head is assimilated to the idea of a country, right? So it says there's something about this country that's Hitler's head.

So, like you might think, do you ever use symbols like that? And the answer is, well, sure, every time you give someone a coin, right? So Hitler's head is like the head of the realm. And so what does that mean? In some sense, it means that the realm is an embodiment of Hitler, or it's an embodiment of the leader, and actually, a realm is the embodiment of the leader because it's a body of laws.

And so what it represents is a mode of being, and so that's what that expresses. And then you have him on the left there, and you know, you can kind of see what sort of emotions he thought were morally appropriate. And so it's almost a caricature, except there's an element of seriousness about it that stops it from being a caricature.

And so what do you have to say about that picture on the right? What does that say to you? Yeah, yeah, so those are all positive things so far, or they could be argued to be that. Do you see anything that isn't like that? There's some disdain. Yeah, that's right, who said that? Yeah, I agree, there's some disdain.

It's partly the narrowed eyebrows; it's partly the fact that his face is up a little bit, and disdain is associated with contempt and disgust. Yeah, and so I would also say there's some arrogance in that; partly it's the sideways pose, you know, because it's a real pose.

And so, well, I think one of the things that I think you can see in the picture is overcompensation. You know, because to the—you shouldn't be any more dominant than is necessary, but you really have to be well put together not to be more dominant than is necessary. And I think the dominance is a compensation, at least in part, for childhood inadequacy and weakness.

That was actually one of the central axioms of Adlerian theory, you know, that what people were doing as they progressed towards adulthood was compensating for the inferiority of their childhood. You know, and he said they'd often overcompensate. And, you know, if you watch your own behavior, you could see that happening all the time. It happens all the time; it's extraordinarily difficult not to push any harder than you have to.

And sometimes it's because you're trying to look better than you are, tougher than you are, and I think there is an element that you can see in that because it's like it's a bit too much, you know? And I would also say one of the things I've noticed about people who've really mastered something is that they can do it with a touch of humor, even if it's really serious.

You know, I had this thought when I was teaching this material probably 15 years ago. I thought there was a little voice in my head that said, well, you know, you should lighten up a bit, and I thought, what do you mean? I'm talking about genocide. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna lighten up. And then I thought—I was thinking about Jung's notion of the gesture and the Joker as a precursor to the Savior.

There's this element of subversion and humor that goes along with attempting to crack a difficult problem. And I thought about that for about five years, and I thought, no, it's right. If there isn't something that's akin to the sort of thing that a comedian does when you're talking about something, then you're doing it too seriously. It means you haven't mastered it; you can't do it with a light touch. So, and I think you can see that in him.

Well, there's one on the left there—that's Hitler for president. So what do you see in that? Yeah, what else? How—how is there an indication of clear direction? Yeah, absolutely. It's very intense perspective. So there's a force moving upward, and he's at the top of that force.

The lines go weirdly, they go to the left, which is quite interesting because generally, the way you would read a poster like that is that harsh movement to the left is regressive, right? It's backwards. But you know, you can understand why that might be, and he's clearly the thing that sits on top of the pillars. Remember I showed you a picture of Osiris? You may not remember this; that was Osiris' hand on a pillar.

It's the same idea, you know, that his body is the body of the state, and the state has this powerful movement forward. Then, this is an infamous picture—this one in the middle. So what do you think about that? Oh, yeah, he's a knight; he's a white knight, in fact. Yeah, so he's assimilated to the idea of medieval nobility, you know, and in its purest form, he's a knight of the people, you know?

And so there's a Wagnerian element to that, and he was a great admirer of Wagner, Wagnerian music, by the way. And Hitler wanted to put music halls in every classical music halls in every city in Europe. It was sort of an obsession of his. He was obsessed with Wagner and opera, and he claimed that he had quasi-religious experiences listening to it.

You know, so he's a very strange character because Hitler appeared to have been extremely high in openness, which is not something you would expect for someone who is a tyrant. You know, because conservative people are basically very low in openness and very high in orderliness, but he appeared to be someone who was very high in orderliness and very high in openness.

And I think that's one of the things that made him charismatic, you know? So there's a deeply conservative element and an element that was obsessed with will and antithetical to chaos. But he was able to bring this tremendous artistic force into his politicking, and it was captivating to people. To what was compensatory?

Yeah, well, I think that's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it, but I also think he was open by temperament. And so one of the things that happens to open people is that if they listen to music that really captures them, you know, the hair stands up on the back of their neck; the experience is sort of at hand, you know?

And I also think it's very easy for people to assume that if they're having that experience, that they're being inhabited by something that's akin to divinity, you know? And you know, you don't want to make light of that kind of experience because music is incredibly gripping. Almost everyone likes music.

You know, some people like conventional music, so, you know, they can tolerate a little bit of exposure to the divine force of music—not much; that's usually conservatives because they listen to very conventional pop music. And then there's this wide variation, but almost across, almost all people, music produces this influx of a Dionysian force, you know?

Really hyper-conservatives, so bad music and dancing, right? So because it's subversive. So, and then you have the one on the right. So tell me about that one. Absolutely, he's at the forefront of the heroic. What would you call that? It's a Roman formation. Yes, exactly.

He's at the very forefront of that. You know, and no, sir, yes, no, go ahead, go ahead, absolutely. You know, so but what's happening if you look at that image? It's like that's Christ with the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is represented by a dove, and that's often associated in Christian symbolism with the messenger of God, you know, manifesting itself.

And in some sense, one of the deeper, deepest Christian ideas is the idea that when Christ died and left, there was something left behind that was still divine that could communicate with human beings, and that was partly outside and partly inside. Now, the thing about Hitler is that's not a dove; that's an eagle, and an eagle is a carrion eater, right? It's a bird of prey.

And so, and it's a very interesting image because you know, you have to come to terms with the fact that Hitler is a master of speech, and that made him a master of logos, right? Because of that speech and communication. But the question is, you know, that seemed to be—I think it's difficult to deny that that was perverted in the favor of something else, and so the spirit that is coming out of the sun and flying behind Hitler is a devouring carrion-eating bird of prey, no?

And that's—and then you know, people think eagles, they're powerful; it is that, you know, the national bird of the United States. Benjamin Franklin recommended that it would be the turkey, and everyone laughs about that, but you know, it's worth thinking about. Absolutely, absolutely.

I mean, there's no shortage of things about eagles that inspire admiration in people, but it's not a dove. So the message—and it's black, not white, you know? So the message is quite, you know, and the flag itself, those are the three primary colors. Like if you look around cultures worldwide and you look at names for colors, every culture has a name for black, white, and red, and then after that, the colors fragment.

So that some are more frequently named than others, you know, because you can start, well yeah, like it's orange red. Well, you know, yes and no; it depends on how differentiated your language is. But black, white, and red, you know, that's fruit, day, and night. That's one way of looking at it, or it's blood, day, and night.

So, or it's rage, day, and night, or war, day, and night, and so it's a powerful symbol. It's also a sun symbol; it's a Sanskrit symbol, but it's rotating backwards instead of forwards. So you know, and the Nazis were very aware in many ways of the meanings of the images that they were using.

But I'm showing you this because I want to show you how the archetypes were captured by the propagandists or how the archetypes were actually manifesting themselves in some sense to produce the kind of powerful grip that Hitler had over his audience. And it was certainly the archetypes of order, the archetypes of heroism—all of those are being put at the service of a political ideology.

Well, they're both; it depends on the image, you know? So in some images, he's more like the father of the people; in other images, he's more like the heroic Marduk at the forefront of the march into battle with the illuminated gods behind them. So, and there's no reason for him not to take on both symbolic aspects. Like we know, for example, that as far as the Egyptians were concerned, the ideal Pharaoh was half Osiris and half Horus.

Right? So it embodied stability, and also the vision and the capacity to update that stability. So this is actually counter-propaganda, or maybe it's not. Maybe it's an attempt to represent the part of Hitler that isn't being represented by the German propaganda.

So on the left, you have—well, those are Nazi snakes; they've got swastikas all over them. And so that's an interesting image, as far as I'm concerned, because you see how logical it is to use the image of the knotted-up snakes, and there's a frog in there too, by the way. Snakes and frogs all knotted together makes a representation of the enemy—the evil enemy. Like, you get that at a glance, right? You don't need that bloody thing interpreted; it makes perfect sense, you know?

And you see the same thing, interestingly enough, I think I showed you some of them in representations of Mary when she's holding the infant out of the way of the snake or the lizard that she's stepping on. It's a very similar idea; and then you have Hitler's head there as a spreading Hydra; you know, he's sort of like a figure of death.

He's sort of like Ursula in the Little Mermaid, you know, except he's—well, it's not only a masculine image that because the spreading tentacles, that's snake-like again, and so there's an element of the Medusa there. So that's a very archaic symbol, you know? And then you have another image on the right there, which is, you know, a graphical representation of Hitler, and his head is tangled up with a snake.

So you can see the reason those images have power is because they're taking the power that's implicit in the archetype and harnessing it for a message that's intent. In a sense, actually, what propaganda is. Like, if you know the nature of the message that you're using the archetype to promote, then it's propaganda.

If you're trying to figure something else out and the symbolic representations come to mind as part of the creative process, then that's not propaganda. But then it also usually means that you end up producing a piece of art that you actually don't understand, you know? And there's still lots of Renaissance artists like that; like it contains information that we haven't even come close to processing yet, you know?

And I think most artistic representations are, you know, partly propaganda and partly art. It depends on the representation. So then on the left, you have—again, that's anti-Nazi. That's an anti-Nazi poster, and you have the idea of the dark figure lurking in the background, who's sort of everywhere, gazing at you. So that's like George Orwell's Big Brother, right?

So that's definitely harnessing the idea of the terrible aspect of the Great Father. And I really like this one on the right because that's basically—well, that's the Virgin and Child. You know, it's not precisely a Christian image; it doesn't matter because that's not precisely a Christian representation. But she's beautiful and young, and she's holding something very vulnerable in her arms.

And then you see these hands at the top—they're not Nazi, and at the bottom, they're Japanese because the symbols are on them. And so one's coming from one end, and one's coming from the other. And so what do the hands look like? Hmm, well, yeah, but why? What makes them evil?

Yeah, they have claws, so they're predatory, right? And they're wizened, so they're sort of like death, and they're black. You know, the thing is, it's so obvious, right? You know those are evil hands. The question is, why do you know that they're evil hands? You know, what is it about the image that announces itself in that way? It's also partly because of their juxtaposition with the image of purity.

So that's really the absolute corrupt Great Father reaching out for the absolute perfect feminine hero—the baby hero—and threatening that. So there's semantic, Jewish propaganda on the right there. So first of all, the Jewish guy is represented as a money changer, and he's associated with the Soviet Union because they Nazis drew a tight relationship between Jews and communism, and so that was amalgamated into the same kind of threat.

And then, and certainly, the case that Germany was threatened by communism—I mean, there's absolutely no doubt about that—but they sort of loved their enemies into one category. And so what do you think about the representation on the right? What does it say? I don't believe so. A whole—did you say? Yeah, no, I don't think so.

So his eyes are closed; that's kind of interesting. His hand is outstretched with money, and he seems to be—I would say his head is oriented towards the money. Yes, is that—is that right? So I don't know what he's leaning on exactly; I don't know what that is, but it's obviously not a flattering representation. And then you have the middle representation.

Yes, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, there is a golem element to that. Do you want to explain what that means? Yeah, it's like a zombie, right? So yes, so there's that; there's a sort of undead element to the representation, blind, focused only on money, you know? And then also aligned with this terrible destructive force of communism.

So another comment? Yes, right, right, yeah, good point, good point. Yes, so then there's the middle one. Then you see the juxtaposition of the Jewish Star of David with the Communist hammer and sickle, and you see the whole world on fire and death emerging from that, right? So there's an idea of the ultimate apocalypse behind that. There's an idea of hell behind that; there's an idea of like the living dead.

And then, you know, and this is something that's sitting on top of the worlds; it's a very satanic image. I think it says, I don't know, it's Bolshevik? Part of that is—and I don't know if there's an amalgam there or is—isthmus is a reference to Jewishness or not? I think it says Bolshevism unmasked; it's something like that. So, you know, and the idea that the Nazis were anti-communist was a very powerful idea for people.

It made the morality of the situation very murky in many ways because, for example, when the Nazis went into Russia through the Ukraine, the Ukrainians started to fight with the Nazis, like alongside of them, to get rid of the Communists because, as far as they were concerned, the Communists were worse than the Nazis. So, you know, it was a race to the bottom; that's for sure.

And then it's so interesting because you see the fire, the destructive fire in the middle, and then on the left—well, those are crematoriums, I believe. They're from Auschwitz, and those are the remnants of the destroyed bodies in the ovens. So, you know, all of that death and destruction was being projected, in some sense, all the evil was being projected onto the Communists and the Jews, and you know, that allowed the exactly the same to manifest itself in actuality in Germany.

We show—there's the laying out of the bodies on the left, and then that's Hitler closer to the end of the war, and you know, he's looking pretty haggard, and his mouth is down, and his countenance has fallen, which is a phrase that we'll encounter next week. So, you know, you see this image of Hitler on the left. He's sort of friend to children with the mother looking on happily in the back, and everybody's smiling and happy.

And then in the middle, you see someone who's been burned. One of the things that happened when the Nazis marched the Jews out of the camps when the Allies were coming is they put a bunch of people in a barn and lit it on fire, and I believe that that's an image from that. And then that's a prisoner at the bottom from one of the—who didn't die from one of the Holocaust camps.

So I would say, you know, the problem with the image on the left is that it doesn't factor in the image on the middle. And that's the thing about propaganda, you know, it's like, it's all good. It's like, yeah, no, and if it's presenting itself as all good, then you got to ask yourself, well, where's the snake? Because there's always a snake.

And I would say the more something represents itself as pure good, the bigger the snake. So, you know, Dostoyevsky knew that when he started writing anti-utopian ideas—especially notes from underground. He'd already figured out that if someone was promising you heaven, the probability that there was a hell lurking in there somewhere was, well, it was a hundred percent.

So, and part of the reason that I've been working on the ideas in this book and presenting them to people for so long is I'm trying to inoculate people against the temptations of utopian thinking and propaganda because you should always be asking yourself, where is the other half? If nature is all beautiful, well what about the destructive part? You know, and if you're offering a utopia, well, aren't you also a devil and a tyrant?

Like, what are you gonna do with that part? Yeah, what you're gonna do is you're gonna say, well I'm not the devil and the tyrant; it's those people over there. It's like, which only proves that you are, in fact, both the devil and the tyrant. But it's much easier for people to put that out somewhere else, you know, because do you really want to deal with it? You know, you said at the beginning of the class he wrote out what horrible things might happen to you if you didn't behave properly, and that's unsettling because you have to recognize in yourself the capacity to bring something like that about.

It's even worse than that because people can bring that sort of thing about and really enjoy it while it's happening, you know, in a really corrupt and destructive way. It's revenge; they're looking for revenge, and if they have to take it on themselves, that's no problem. It just makes the revenge even sweeter. So there's juxtapositions again, you know?

So I've got the crowd that's surrounding Hitler, all happy at the dinner table there on the left, and then, you know, that's cart loads of bodies that were taken away from the concentration camps when the Allies came in. So there's the tyrannical father and the positive father, you know? And that, I believe, is from Nuremberg, although I'm not absolutely certain about that.

So Nuremberg was the place where the massive Nazi spectacles were held, you know? You can see the Greek and Roman symbolism there, like the classical idea that there was a reestablishment of an enlightened classical society. Brilliant use of light against dark, which something was something that the Nazis as theits were unbelievably good at—the use of fire and light and black, white, and red contrast. Very, very powerful imagery.

I would say literature does—great literature does—because it presents people as the battleground between chaos and order and good and evil—every person. So, you know, someone might be tilted towards the good in a great piece of literature, but they're not comic-book superheroes, you know? And I mean, even the comic books—when they were DC comic books, it was pretty damn clear Superman; he was all good, the evils evil villains, they were all villainous.

When the Marvel, what would you call them, mythologists, sort of emerged in the 1960s, all the characters became more nuanced, and you know, they're more palatable to, I would say, a martyred mind. But also, of course, older people are paying attention to the comic-book characters now; they're not before they were for like ten-year-olds, you know? They liked—they couldn't handle the complexity of something that was more than one thing at the same time.

But like, if you look at great literature, the heroes are often 51% good and 49% evil, you know? And there's a battle going on inside them and outside of them—and so that makes it a lot more nuanced and complex but it's also in some ways much more frustrating to read. So yeah, so I would say the greater the literature and the more it approximates art, the more balanced the portrayal of the entire scenario.

So you have the chaos in the background; you have the positive and negative feminine in various manners; you have the tyrant and the secure father; you have the adversary in the hero. The whole picture is painted; you see the same thing, I think, in any great art. So that's what makes it great. Yes, exactly, it tilts into either oversimplification or propaganda.

So, and it's dangerous especially—especially when it harnesses the archetypal forces. So one of the things that's happened since Nietzsche announced the death of God is that political entities have appropriated the archetypes. We think, well, the gods are still in those archetypes; there's no getting rid of them. So the question is who's going to be using them and for what?

You know, because we think, well we've transcended all that. It's like, yeah, right. You know, you go see the Avengers, you know? So you haven't transcended it at all. In fact, you're more boneheaded about it than people were 200 years ago because now it's comic-book superheroes instead of transcendent deities.

I don't see that as a conceptual improvement; I see it as a regression. So, and that's a general who shot himself to death, a Nazi general, you know, when the victory of the Allies was certain. And Hitler, by that time, basically the way Hitler rationalized his defeat was the Germans let me down; Berlin should burn. And if the Russians come in and rape and pillage the people who had happens to deserve it, so that was his final judgment on the German people.

It wasn't that there was something wrong with him; it was that they just failed him, and so they weren't up to the glorious task that he had set them, and they deserved all the rack and ruin that was being visited on them. So, and when I look at that and I see what happened, Hitler shot himself in a bunker far below, but Berlin when Europe was on fire, I think, what makes you think that wasn't what he was after from the beginning?

No one thinks that. They think, oh, well, you know, he wanted to build an empire, dominate the world, and all those things. It's like, why would you think that? There's an old psychoanalytic idea: if you don't understand the motivation, look at the consequences and infer the motivation. It's an extraordinarily intelligent idea. So you can't figure out what someone's up to, okay, what happens when they do whatever they're doing?

Well, if it's utter catastrophe and pain and ruin, you might think, oh, well there was some part of him that was aiming at that. Now, you know, you have to factor out the effects of random chance, but there was nothing random about what Hitler did to Europe. Quite the contrary, you know, and you might ask yourself why did he open up a two-front war?

You know, he wasn't historically ignorant; he kind of knew by that point that attacking Russia was probably not the best thing to do if he actually wanted to win the war. Now, you know, you could say that he was arrogant and overvalued the power of the of the Nazi war machine, and was too contemptuous of the Russians, and part of him no doubt felt that way.

But by the same token, you can't suppress the suspicion that the darkest parts of him thought that's the fastest way to Iraq and ruin, and he certainly produced it. So I assume that the person is aiming for what they say they're aiming for, especially if they use means that are as undeniably evil as anything you could possibly come across.

Top left, that Stalin, and so there's an old guy kissing a statue of Stalin and a gold statue of Stalin. That's after the wall fell, you know, and Stalin was an utter monster, you know? He made Hitler into—he made Hitler up, in many ways; Hitler was compared to Stalin.

And one of the very funny things about Hitler that's extraordinarily funny in the worst possible manner is that one of the only people he ever trusted—sorry, Stalin. One of the only people that Stalin ever trusted was Hitler. So he prepared—he failed to prepare the Russian army, the Soviet Army, for a potential invasion by the Germans because Hitler said he wouldn't invade.

And so when the Germans finally showed up, they just blew the Russians back; they were completely unprepared, you know? And if the Russians couldn't have had the Germans freeze to death because of the winter, there's little doubt that the Germans would have overrun the Soviet Union. I mean, the Russians were tough, and they fought like mad, but they were completely and utterly unprepared.

So, okay, okay. So what we've been doing now—like, we're, I'm kind of working towards the idea we're moving up the food chain in some sense. So we talked about chaos, and we talked about the Great Mother, and now we've talked about the Great Father, and we're sort of tilting up towards the final level of analysis, which is the relationship between the individual and the adversary, and then the relationship between both of those and the other levels, you know?

And we touched on that a little bit today because we could see how Hitler was presented both as Great Father but also as, you know, a heroic leader into the future. You see the same thing with Stalin there, where he's shown as, you know, leader of the ship of state. And he's, as far as I'm concerned, he's nothing different than Captain Hook, who's a tyrant because he's afraid of—he's afraid of his own mortality, he's afraid of the fact that the crocodile has already got a piece of him that turns him into a tyrant.

He's terrified of chaos, terrified of the positive feminine for that matter. And there, you know what you see? Well, there's Stalin, you know, the father of all Soviet people, loving music, friend to women and children, you know? And there's a statue of Stalin that was toppled after the Berlin Wall fell, and it's covered with red paint.

Well, you can imagine what that indicates. I really like the one on the left; that's Stalin. I mean, I look at that, and I think you could hardly—if you were attempting to build a representation of the devil himself enveloped in flames, you could hardly do a better job than that picture, you know?

I mean, it's—and then on the left, on the right there, you have Lenin in the background and Stalin in the foreground on the flag. You know, so those are the two deities of the Russian state. They're what replaced God once, you know, once Nietzsche had announced God was dead.

It was like, okay, well, what's gonna come up and fill that void? It's like, oh good, it's Hitler and Lenin and Stalin; that's a real improvement. That's Mao on the left there, and you know, the estimates are that he was involved in the death of about a hundred million people.

So, which you never hear anything about! He was also a hero of the radical left in the 1960s. Anyways, we'll stop for now.