Q & A 2016 07 July: Disney Propaganda and Why Bashing Religion Doesn't Make You Smart

Hello everyone! I've got lots of questions here, and so welcome to the first live question-and-answer YouTube session that I'm hosting. So, I'm going to get right into it and answer some questions; there's lots coming up on the screen here.

Mac13571979 asks, "What does it mean 'people don't have ideas; ideas have people?' Are we okay?" Because I've got an error here, sorry about that. You're going to hear some technical talk during this because we don't exactly know what we're doing yet.

Okay, so what does it mean, "people don't have ideas; ideas have people?" I learned that mostly from Jung. In fact, I think that's virtually a direct quote from Carl Jung. One of the things I learned from Jung was that it's perfectly reasonable to think of ideas as something that's living, as something that's alive. An idea is something that's alive, and I think the reason for that is that the beings that have ideas—and so that's us, people—are alive, and we're trying to use our cognitive ability to further our living. So, we create ideas, and the purpose of those ideas is to have them acted out, because otherwise they're not of any utility.

We conjure up ideas, let's say originally, but they take on a life of their own over time, and as they take on a life of their own, their capacity to dominate someone increases to the point where the idea is arguably more powerful than the person. If you look at religious ideas, for example, maybe you could think of what happened with regards to Islam. Not you know, end up in the latter part of the first Christian millennium: a set of ideas exploded out of one source and swept through a vast population. The same thing happened with Christianity, and in fact, the same thing is happening with Christianity right now in China. Christianity is spreading faster than it did in the Roman times, and that's not something we really notice because our time frame is small compared to thousands and thousands of years.

But ideas have their own goals and their own perceptions and their own way of interacting with the world, and it's always possible for them to possess people.

Why do we feel exposed and vulnerable when we know and do what we really like?

Well, lots of times people hide behind a shell, even at the cost to them, because if the shell gets criticized, then it's not really that relevant—because it doesn't have any direct bearing on them. So, if you're not showing your true self, so to speak, to the world, and what you're showing is something essentially that's false or just constructed and that gets criticized, well, you can always comfort yourself with the idea that it's not really you that's under attack, so it doesn't wound to the same degree.

Now, I mean, that's partly why people protect themselves with falsehoods and ideologies, and it's an attempt to shield their genuine vulnerability from assault by the world. But the problem is that if you don't allow that vulnerability to manifest itself, then the probability that you're actually ever going to get what you really like, or even discover what it is, is zero. So, by protecting yourself to that degree, you end up losing—certainly losing, what it is that you're most trying to protect.

I mean, I don't want to be cavalier about this, because it's understandable that people attempt to shield their vulnerability, because the vulnerability isn't just felt; it's real. People are fragile, and you know, we're subject to the terrible forces of nature and to the terrible forces of culture, so we put all sorts of masks in front of ourselves so that our exposure is limited. People even do that to themselves to some degree. If your front is false enough, then it's also false to you. I suppose people do that to some degree to protect themselves against their own self-criticisms.

David Guida says, "How could high school teachers best promote virtue, cultivate morality, and tackle the meaning crisis in the face of an increasingly chaotic, violent, and dehumanized culture?"

Well, I would say it isn't obvious to me that the future is increasingly chaotic, violent, and dehumanized. The past was pretty rough, and now the future is definitely ill-defined. We don't know what's going to happen, and I think maybe that's more true in a general sense than it ever has been in the history of mankind, but I don't necessarily think that there are reasons to be particularly pessimistic.

However, the first part of the question I think is well worth addressing: how can high school teachers best promote virtue, cultivate morality, and tackle the meaning crisis? Well, I think the best way that people, in general, promote virtue and cultivate morality is by promoting virtue and cultivating morality within their own life. But, I think that in order to do that for yourself, and also in order to transmit that information to your students, you have to understand that morality isn't a set of injunctions of the nature of "don't ever do anything impulsive that you like," which is generally how morality is put forth.

You know, what you think about morality is something that a puritanical person might preach, and that it has to do mostly with self-control and self-restraint. I think that that's a very shallow vision of morality.

I think the way that you convince people to act morally, if that's something that you're interested in doing, is to meditate on the utility of the truth. Because I think the highest form of morality is following the truth. So, you might say, "Well, why would you bother following what's true?" The answer that I think is quite straightforward: if you follow what's false, then you're going to end up somewhere that you weren't planning to go, and the probability that that's going to be good is low.

I mean, following what's false is like attempting to use the wrong map for the territory that you occupy. If your eyes are open and you pay attention, then the probability that you'll be able to maneuver around the terrible sharp obstacles that will emerge in front of you is that much higher.

So, when you're having a serious discussion about morality with people, there are a couple of points that you make to begin with: one would be, "Do you want things to be better, or do you want things to be worse?" You might assume that people are going to automatically answer that they'd rather have things better, but that's not so self-evident because to make things better usually requires that you adopt a tremendous amount of responsibility, and that's effortful and difficult and frightening. The buck sort of stops with you, which is also part of what makes it terrifying.

But if you do want things to be better, and you have your mind straight and oriented in that direction, then the truth is your best possible guide because it'll help you get to that point. So, I think one of the things that people who talk about morality fail to understand is that it's not abstract; it's practical. Morality is precisely what's proved to be most practical over the longest possible span of time, sort of like the moral act is what's best, all things considered.

Part of the reason that it's necessary for people to follow conventional rules is because convention is part of the wisdom of mankind, and the wisdom of mankind has basically said, "No, all things considered, here's a pathway that you can follow that is going to work out in principle best for you."

You know, one of the considerations they're speaking in terms of convention is, you know, the standard path through life—say, in Western culture—has been to grow up, to form an intimate relationship of some stability, to do something productive that other people approve of and that will trade with you for, to raise children, and to establish yourself in a community.

The reason that that's conventional morality is because that's not such a bad deal compared to most of the alternatives. And if you can pull all those things off properly, then there's a reasonable chance that you'll at least have a life that isn't completely full of unbearable suffering with nothing positive in it.

But there's also the possibility that you'll have a good life, and so then you might want to try to do that correctly.

Why act morally? Why act in a virtuous manner? Because it's in your interest, and it's in everyone's interest as well. It seems like a good deal. Now, it will mean that you'll have to put off certain forms of impulsive pleasure, but the problem often with impulsive pleasure is that while you have pleasure at haste, you repent at leisure.

Part of what standard morality is trying to do is to inform you about how you might act in the present so that the present is acceptable, but so tomorrow is also good, and next week is also good, and next month is also good, and next year is also good—for you, and for your family, and for your community, for this broad swath of humanity.

Partly what you ask people, you ask high school students, is, "Well, do they want to be part of that, or do they want to do something else?" If they want to do something else, maybe they want to make things worse. Well, they should think that through, because that's just not a very good plan, you know, unless your goal is to make the world a more miserable place. And you know, often people's goals are precisely that.

Alex asks, "Beyond duress, is mindfulness really beneficial, or is it just a trend?"

Well, mostly it's a trend. The problem with mindfulness, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's a word that's like a giant box you can put anything you want in it and claim that that's not only what it is, but that's what it does. So, I would be very hesitant to make a blanket statement that suggests no one practicing mindfulness or teaching mindfulness is producing any benefit for their students, but yeah, I think mostly it's a fad.

So, how can Disney produce an archetypal masterpiece in the mid-'90s, "The Lion King," and then turn around and create propaganda in the new millennium, "Frozen?"

That's a good question, but there's an even better question that goes along with it. Not only could Disney turn around and create propaganda in the new millennium—because I do believe exactly that that's what "Frozen" is—but if I remember correctly, I think that that's the highest-grossing animated movie now that's ever been made. So, it's not only that they created propaganda; it's that people are extraordinarily hungry for it.

Why would that be? Well, one of the ideological motifs in "Frozen" is that the classic idea that the Sleeping Beauty needs a prince to awaken her is absurd and old-fashioned, and that there are alternative ways of traveling through life that don't require the subjugation that that particular story might appear to entail. I think that's really naive beyond belief.

Because a story like "Sleeping Beauty," where the feminine is waiting for the masculine to awaken, it's true—it's just as true for men as it is for women. It's not about men and women precisely; to some degree, it's more about the masculine and the feminine. The feminine part of a man, which is the part that enables him to have a relationship with a woman at all, is awoken by the archetypal masculine qualities of clarity of mind, for example, just as much as females' femininity is awoken by masculine clarity of mind.

You can read those stories in "Sleeping Beauty," and all likelihood, it's a variable story at multiple levels simultaneously. But I think that people want the propaganda because it tells them that what they already think is correct and that all the old wisdom or much of the old wisdom can just be dispensed with, and people can conduct their lives in any manner that they want. Well, that doesn't work.

Julian Tians says, "You have said that to study history is to study oneself and that one will be much more grounded and strong if they do so. Please talk more on this."

Well, you know, it's easy for people to think, let's say you're 30 years old; it's easy for you to think that you're actually 30 years old, but you're not. You're, in many ways, in at least in one level of analysis, you're three and a half billion years old, because that's approximately how long the genetic structure that has given rise to you, at least in part, has existed.

You're the consequence of this massively extensive evolutionary process extending back billions of years that's conditioned every aspect of you. So you're a very, very ancient creature from a biological perspective, and if you don't view yourself across that entire span of time, so to speak, you have the wrong idea about what it means to be a human being.

And then, on the cultural end of things, you're deeply shaped and inhibited and offered opportunity by the entire history of human cultural endeavor, which is also interactive in a causal manner with the emergence of our biology across time. If you don't understand history, then you don't understand who you are, because you're a product of history. Everything you think someone else already thought; every word that you use someone else came up with.

An naive person thinks, for example, that the thoughts that they have are their thoughts, but the probability that you're going to have a thought that's original is extraordinarily low. So, just to understand your own thought process, you need to be a deeply astute student of history.

You also understand the problems that confront you in the world. I mean, you're born into the world in a particular historical configuration; that's an archetypal truth. Your spirit is born into the world when the world is a certain specific way, and that specific way is also a consequence of vast patterns of processes that have laid themselves out on a historical timeframe.

I mean, just a simple example: a lot of the interpersonal complexities that young people face in their intimate relationships are a direct consequence of the birth control pill—absolutely being around for 50 years. So it's not deep history, but it's certainly history. If you don't understand that the birth control pill burst onto humanity like an atomic bomb, maybe like a hydrogen bomb, you don't understand what it is that's driving your own interpersonal problems.

So there's no difference between studying history and studying psychology, and there’s no difference between studying history and psychology and trying to understand who you are and what you should do. History is about you; it's not just about the world. It’s about the world and you. If you can't see the sense in it, then you're not approaching it properly or you have bad teachers, or you don't know how to read, or something like that.

Because history is unbearably interesting. I suppose that's another marker that you can use to determine whether or not your attitude towards studying history is correct: if you're not fascinated and horrified by it almost beyond belief, then you're not studying history properly.

If you were studying it properly, you'd never ask why you should study it; it would be so evident, so obvious that it was necessary.

Why do humans enjoy sad stories?

Well, I don't know if they actually enjoy them, although I think you can make a case that they do. I mean, sometimes maybe someone's watching a story that's somewhat sentimental that'll make them tear up, and you might say that that's an element of being sad, but I would say that's more an element of being compassionate and participating in a fictional way in the love and intimacy that human beings are capable of.

You can do that by proxy, and that can certainly produce sentimental emotions and nostalgic emotions, and those can be associated with tears, but you could go deeper than that and say, "Well, people will watch tragic stories." But that's not certainly the case in any Shakespearean play—virtually is tragic in many regards.

I think part of the reason that people are compelled to do that is that we're compelled to understand the tragedies of our life, and so to see that tragedy laid out on a stage, which means that it's distilled and amplified in some sense, is to simultaneously engage in the problem of wrestling with what it means to exist in a tragic world.

Any information you can get about that is going to be well worth the momentary negative emotion that you might experience while you're engaged in the play. So people like sad stories because life is often sad and we have to figure out how to deal with them, and then stories can tell you how to deal with it well and how to deal with it badly, and that can be absurdly informative.

If Christianity has much historical wisdom to offer, why is it so derided in the academy? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, I think that people generally think of Christianity as science for stupid people. It's something like that; you know, it's often reduced to its more fundamentalist manifestations. The straw man version of Christianity is fundamentalist Protestantism, of the sort that makes the case that the Bible is literally true and that the cosmos is roughly several thousand years old. Well, it's easy to make fun of that.

I'm not sure why it is, but people generally have reasons for what they believe, and sometimes it's fear and narrow-mindedness and ignorance, but sometimes what might appear to be fear, narrow-mindedness, and ignorance is actually the attempt to preserve something of extraordinary value, the value of which has not been fully articulated.

Part B: I see the salves—there's the ability for people to generate the straw man version of Christianity and then just feel intelligent by comparing their own knowledge to that. You know, that's pretty weak, I would say.

I think Marxism contributes to it a lot. I mean, I think that the universities and our intellectual life in general is still saturated with Marxist and neo-Marxist presuppositions, and I really think that's a terrible thing. I really don't think that that's any better than having our intellectual landscape populated by neo-fascist ideas.

From a historical perspective, I don't see any reason whatsoever to assume that neo-Marxist ideas are any more morally appropriate than neo-fascist ideas. I think a lot of what drives the neo-Marxist analysis of Christianity is some of its simple-mindedness.

The Marxists tend to reduce everything to power or economics, and I mean, power and economics are important, but to reduce everything to that is to reduce everything to any one thing, which is a mark of a weak mind. I mean, most problems are multivariate problems; they're not univariate problems.

I think there's a hatred for the responsibility that genuine Christianity lays upon a person, because at an archetypal level, if you just speak about this psychologically, Jung said for example, "The soul is naturally Christian." That's a hell of a thing to say, but he had his reasons for saying that. Part of what he was saying was that, or what he believed—and Aldous Huxley talked about this a bit too—is that there are elements of Christianity that have taken conceptualization as far as it can go, and that's what makes it archetypal.

So, I can give you an example of that: there's a presupposition in Christianity, speaking psychologically, that human beings make progress by making sacrifices. That's a good one. You see this acted out to begin with, to some degree, in the Old Testament, where the sacrifices that people make are genuine archaic sacrifices that they take something that they believe has value—perhaps a prized animal—and burn it and offer it to God.

The reason that it's burned, as far as I've been able to tell, is because the archaic conception of the world was that the world was a flat disc, and on top of that disc was a bowl, and the ball was the sky, roughly speaking, and then outside the ball, that's where the gods existed.

I think our archaic people believed that for the same reason that we feel when we look up in the night sky, we don't want to make the mistake that just because people didn't know some of the things we know now, that they were stupid. They looked up at the night sky or the day star, and part of the intuition that came along with that was that while they were looking at the night sky or the day star, they were looking into the infinite, and that's allowed very tightly with divinity.

So, those ideas going in the background: if you burn something and offer it up to God, the smoke rises, and God can detect the quality of your sacrifice. You might think, well, that's pretty simple-minded, but it's not; it's the dramatic representation of an unbelievably profound idea. The profound idea is that sometimes, in order to make things go properly, you have to let go of something that you deeply love or deeply want to do.

What it means to sacrifice is to let something go in the present so that the future can be better, or to let something go personally so that other people can have it better. And there's no difference between the idea of sacrifice and the discovery of the future. As soon as you discover the future, one of the things you realize is that you have to sacrifice things in the present so that the future manifests itself in a more acceptable manner.

So then you think, well that's also an amazing discovery. Here's the discovery: human beings made—if we change our behavior in the present, better things could happen in the future. No other animal really has ever discovered that.

Okay, so that's very tightly linked into the idea of sacrifice. You might say, well, you have to sacrifice something of value. And so sometimes I ask my students—many of them are children of immigrants, you know—what did your parents sacrifice so that you can go to university? Everyone understands that question. The students immediately tell me of the things that their parents have done—their parents moved from some foreign country, they spent 18 hours a day working themselves to their fingers to the bone at a laundromat or a dry cleaner so that their students could—or so that their children could have a richer and fuller life.

They're sacrificing, and the sacrifice is based on faith, and the faith in it's essentially a form of religious faith. But we don't have to get into that moment, but the fundamental driving idea is that the reality can be positively shaped by sacrifice. Well, that's amazing, right?

So then you might say, well, okay, the higher quality of the sacrifice, the more profound the positive effect on the future. That's a reasonable proposition. So then you might say, "What's the most valuable possible sacrifice?" And now sure, that is, well, obviously yourself.

So then you could say, well, that means that the ultimate moral injunction—the ultimate moral injunction is to sacrifice yourself in a manner that makes the future better. Well, that's the central idea of Christianity. The central idea, the central figure, the mythological figure at the core of Christianity is the person who voluntarily sacrifices themselves to the benevolent will of God.

Well, if you have any sense, you're terrified at that idea, especially if you're, I would say, a rationalistic intellectual or rationalizing intellectual. I mean, who the hell wants to believe that that's your moral obligation, to sacrifice yourself for the best?

Well, God, you don't know what that means. I mean, the archetypal story says it means that you end up crucified. Well, there's lots of reason to be not very happy about that idea. But then you say, well, is the fact that Christianity is derided in the academy a good thing or a bad thing?

Mostly, it's a terrible thing. You know, it's not like Christianity can't use some criticism, although I think Nietzsche in many ways took care of that for us. But mostly, I think what we're doing in the academy is running as fast as we can from the responsibility of bearing our culture and revivifying it, and we are using any number of appalling rationalizations and ideological maneuvers to try to not only make them acceptable personally, but to proselytize about it to others.

You know, the more cynical part of me sometimes thinks that the universities do students more harm than good, especially in the humanities, because they take students at a very formative period of their life, when their belief systems and their ability to identify strongly with life are already somewhat in question—because they exist in a culture that's been badly fractured.

They take those kids, and they expose them to ideas that are absolutely destructive. It's not about bashing against ideas like that; reading Nietzsche, for example, or reading Dostoevsky—I mean, that can be a very destructive act. But the purpose of Nietzsche's writing and Dostoevsky's writing is not to destroy; it's to remove d'etre so that something new can spring forth.

I just don't really see that happening in the universities. I think they're too cynical, and I think there's also a strong streak of serious anti-humanity among modern intellectuals, and that's been the case for at least a hundred years.

You hear people say, like—I think this was a statement from the Club of Rome, the people who were so concerned about a population explosion back in the mid-1960s—that the world would be better off if there were fewer people on it. Or maybe that there were no people on it. Well, man, you can't say anything that's more appalling than that. You know, if you said the planet would be better off if there were fewer black people on it, well, no one's going to put up with that. Or the planet would be better off if there were fewer European colonizers on it, well, you might be able to get away with that a little bit more, but probably not.

But as long as your sentiments extend to humanity as a whole, it's perfectly reasonable for you to say something like that. That's the most horrific thing you could possibly say. I mean, the kids who go into high schools and shoot them up call inviting kids—it's not certainly what they believe. The planet would be a lot better off if there were fewer people on it—maybe they'll take a few steps in that direction.

So, Bob Smith says, "Nice jacket." Thank you for that; I appreciate that.

All right, can you explain Nietzsche's general philosophy and some of his most famous ideas? He's really hard to comprehend.

Nietzsche's general philosophy—I probably can't do that. I've been putting together with my students here. I've been starting to plan a seminar on existentialism, and which would focus a lot on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. I think Nietzsche's so damn complicated that you can't really do that.

I don't think you can explain Nietzsche's general philosophy. First of all, he wasn't really a systematizer; he was skeptical of systematizers. It's very difficult to distill someone who's not a systematizer into a few general principles.

And the thing is, with some of the greatest thinkers, you actually have to read what they wrote. You have to read the original writings because the brilliance is encapsulated in the original writings, and they can't be condensed. So, let's see, can I do any better than that?

Can I explain Nietzsche's general philosophy? "Truth serves life." That's a good one. I guess we could unpack that a little bit. I mean, that's a good example of exactly why Nietzsche is so staggeringly brilliant. One of the things he presumes when he makes a statement like that is that a human being is in an existential situation that's characterized by the necessity of determining what he or she will actually accept as truth.

You know, you might say, well, truth is something you can prove, and that's how you know it's true. But unfortunately, it's not that simple because you have to decide what criteria you're going to accept as proof, and there's an act of faith in that. And there's an analogy—the argument seems to be lacking, and this is the famous is-ought conundrum that David Hume described.

It's okay, well, let's say that you use science to lay out a very detailed description of the nature of the objective world. Well, that still doesn't mean that you know how to act in that world, and that's a big problem. It might be a fundamental problem if the fundamental problem of people isn't what is the nature of the objective world, but how is it that you should conduct yourself while you're alive?

Well, Nietzsche believed that the fundamental question was how you should conduct yourself while you're alive—how should you act? And I would say that's the fundamental question of meaning, and science can inform you, but it can't really solve that problem for you.

And that's a problem. And then science also has this other terrible attribute, in some sense, which is that because science can't solve the problem of how you should act in the world, it empowers people towards the conclusion that there is no answer to the question, "How should you act in the world?"

And so that way, that opens up a door to nihilism, and nihilism is destructive; it does not facilitate life. In fact, it has the opposite effect; it takes the spirit out of people; it takes the motivation of people; it makes them bitter, it makes them resentful, it makes them hateful. It's not a good thing.

Also, Nietzsche is primarily concerned in some sense with action, and part of the reason that he decomposes Christianity to the degree that he does is because he believed that Christianity was a very serious attempt to answer the question, "How should you act?" And he also believed that it had become fatally flawed for a variety of reasons, at least in its typically socially instantiated forms.

So he took it upon himself to subject it to a criticism. But I've always thought of Nietzsche—it's a terrible image, but I've always thought of Nietzsche as like a maggot in a wound. So what he's doing is clearing away dead and diseased tissue so that something else can live.

It's a terrible thing to watch; it's a terrible thing to apprehend. And it's a whole—it's a terribly destructive thing to involve yourself in because Nietzsche said he philosophized with a hammer, and that's certainly true. But he was trying to clear the path for something new.

And that something new he was trying to formulate with his conception, such as like this: the Superman, the next version of human being, so to speak. He thought of them as people who would create their own values, and that would be the way forward out of the wreckage of Christianity, let's say.

I think Nietzsche was wrong about that, and I say that with all due respect, believe me, and I say it cautiously. I don't think it's an original idea of my own that Nietzsche was wrong, and I think the reason that he was wrong is because people don't create values; they discover them. Or maybe they co-create them.

But you can't create values by conjuring them out of non-existence. You could say, if you were scientifically minded, that values are in some sense arbitrary. Then if you believe that values are arbitrary, you might then believe that people could create them out of nothing.

But values aren't arbitrary, and most of the time, people discover them. And maybe they co-create them. One of the reasons that I have been so attracted to Jung's thinking is because Jung is in many ways a Nietzschean—a student of Nietzsche, also a student of Freud's, but more primarily a student of Nietzsche.

And Jung's lifelong endeavor was to understand what the way forward might be, given the situation that Nietzsche described. The situation that Nietzsche described, in some sense, was that Christianity laid so much emphasis on truth that it ended up undermining its own axiomatic presuppositions.

So you think, following Nietzsche, well okay, in principle we have to create new values. But that's partly why you got so interested in the unconscious, because one of the things he found, particularly in his analysis of the collective unconscious, was that the values that Nietzsche thought people should create were actually lying dormant in our imagination.

That's a good way of thinking about it, because that's a good way of thinking about the collective unconscious. And that the way forward in terms of the generation of new values was a return to the deepest recesses of human existence and a rediscovery of what was actually there.

I touched on that a little bit today when I was talking about the necessity for sacrifice. There's an archetypal idea that the Savior, the Messiah, is by definition the person who is willing to sacrifice him or herself for the ultimate good, whatever that happens to be.

And that's the appropriate pathway forward. Well, that's an artifact of Christianity, and I think that's almost right. I think he's correct; that's a terrible thing to say. Because Jung is such a radical thinker that it's funny because he receives subject to a lot of criticism.

I mean, I read Richard Nol's book on Nietzsche; I think it was called "The Aryan Christ." And I know, basically, who I think was a very resentful person. I think he did a hatchet job on Jung. The cover of his book made Jung look like a Nazi. I mean, how cheap a shot that is.

But you know, he accused Jung of basically fomenting a cult. And I read Nol's book, and it just made me laugh because what Jung was actually up to is so much worse, so to speak, than merely starting a cult; it's like accusing an axe murderer of annoying his pet cat. You know, the difference is that extensive—the sorts of things that Jung was actually messing around with are so complicated and terrible compared to just, you know, building a little cult that, you know, it's absolutely clear that Nol had no idea what he was talking about.

Jung, like Nietzsche, like Dostoevsky is a terrifying person, and I think part of the reason that Jung is not well regarded in the academy, and also that Christianity is subject to such continual rationalist criticism, is because people open up Jung and take one look at what he's doing and either just don't get it at all, or they get a little bit of it and it scares them so bad that they think there's no damn way I'm going there.

And because I can really understand that! I think anyone with any sense would be very, very careful about trying to figure out what Jung was talking about.

Cognitive behavior: Abir Mizo asks, "Is it a good idea to believe in something—healthy delusions like karma or life after death?"

Well, there is a whole line of social psychology that was very popular about 15 years ago. In fact, the most cited social psychological paper ever written was about the necessity of positive illusions. You know, the basic hypothesis was life was so tragic and dismal that unless you bolstered yourself against it with, you know, defensible optimism, I suppose, if you were being charitable—or just positive illusions, lies, is what I think they are—that life would actually be intolerable.

I think that's an unbelievably nihilistic and vicious philosophy. I think the fact that that was actually seriously put forward by a generation of social psychologists as a medication for the modern disease of meaning is an absolute indictment of the entire field.

No, there's nothing about illusions that are healthy. But that doesn't mean that cynicism and despair are forms of truth or that nihilism is a form of truth. There's no such thing as healthy delusions.

Now, you know, Aniwal Saka says, "Like karma?" Well, I don't know if karma is a healthy delusion, and I'm not so sure about—I mean, there's some elements of karma that I think are extremely interesting from a psychological perspective. I'm going to scrap the reincarnation element of it for obvious reasons, at least for the sake of simplicity.

But I believe in karma. I think that no one gets away with anything ever. I think every single thing you do that is immoral—because the moral thing is an attempt to work the structure of reality—everything you do that's immoral comes back to haunt you, and it generally comes back in multiplying form. Now, that doesn't mean you'll be able to draw the cause of connection, like you might have done something immoral who knows five years ago, and that produced a crack in the structure of your being.

And like it's five years later, and all sorts of things are falling into that crack, and you have no idea that that initial act was what produced this you know, cascading consequence of events. But that doesn't mean it didn't!

So, what did Camus mean by revolt in "The Myth of Sisyphus?" What are some ways to revolt without being destructive, or should one simply be a good end?

Well, that's 19km edge. Well, the first thing I should say about this is it's not so simple to be a good end. Like, I think being a good end is better than just being chaotic and useless. And so you should probably go from chaotic and useless to good, and that's a process of maturation. That's what happens when you move from being a child to an adolescent to a young adult: you adopt the strictures and responsibilities of your culture to discipline yourself.

Now, if you stop at the point where you're a good end, well then I think, you know, that's not so good. Then you're an avatar of the pathologies of your culture, as well as an avatar of the virtues of your culture. So, it's fighting against mere enculturation. That's not virtue; that's failure; that's just failure to mature.

You know, that was actually one of Nietzsche's questions of conscience. Are you leading or are you just running away? Well, the answer that almost always is you're running away. You might think you're leading, but the probability that you're leading, especially if you haven't seriously considered the possibility that you're running away, is like really—what's the point of chances?

If you really think about it, it's not that easy to lead, and it's pretty easy to run away. So, if you're not doing what other people are doing, you're probably running away. You might say, well, that's pretty rough; it's like, fair enough. You know, if you've got some absolutely unique destiny that you have to manifest, more power to you. But most of the time, what I see are people who think they have a unique destiny, and really what they're doing is wandering off the beaten path into some thorny ditch where things are not going to be good for them.

So what are some ways to revolt without being destructive? Revolt against what would be the question. I mean, Severus, you could try revolting against your lack of discipline. Like, that’s a good war. If you want a war, maybe you do.

Because people need war! You know, I think it was William James who said that people need a moral equivalent to war. I think that’s what Nietzsche was trying to discover, by the way—the moral equivalent to war, and I think he did discover it as well, and that's tied up with the idea of sacrifice.

If you want to revolt, you should revolt against your own pathology and inadequacy and uselessness and resentment and cruelty and blindness. And yeah, you could have a war against that; you could revolt against that—it'd give you something to do.

Professor Amara asks, "People are often quite smart. Why do they have this strong tendency toward atheism?"

Oh, well, you know, people who have smart get atheistic right away because, you know, it's obvious. You really believe in God? You believe in an old man in the sky? You really think the world's only 7,000 years old? It’s like, do you really believe Christ turned water into wine? You know, no one who wasn't foolish would believe that.

Well, that's the statement of someone who's I guess who's smart enough to start to notice something about what people believe. But, you know, they're ten steps along a fifty-thousand-mile journey.

And then the other thing—I already mentioned this about atheism. People like to think that the reason they're atheistic is because they're clear-headed and rational. It’s like, well, first of all, probably they're not.

Because how often do you meet someone who's clear-headed and rational? I don't. Being psychoanalytically minded, I'm always way more likely to look for the dark reason that someone is doing something rather than the light reason, you know, the reason that's moving them towards the light, because it's hard to move towards the light.

So, I would say most of the time, people are atheistic—well, it's kind of, it's fashionable in some circles, and it's a fashionable way to be able to revolt if you're rational and if you're kind of an intellectual. But also, you can just dispense with responsibility if you're atheistic, and I think that's ninety percent of the reason, especially in the modern world, that's why people are proponents of atheism.

You know, where they have some particular hatred for the church? I think Richard Dawkins has a particular hatred for the church. I would swear that something happened to him when he was a kid that wasn't good and that the church was involved because he has such an animus against the church; it possesses him.

All right, so let's see here. Can you explain why the conventional wisdom about ancient people is so swords with your ideas about each and people?

That's Harold Boone. I can explain that. People like to think they're smart, and the easiest way to think you're smart in many ways is to think that other people aren't. So we think, well, the people who came before us, all these thousands of centuries, you know, they just didn't know what we knew.

Well, their cultures didn't have the same degree of staggering technological capacity that ours did, but that didn't mean that they were stupid. I mean, throw the average person back into ancient Athens; they're not gonna last very long.

Lack of respect. You know, that is a definite hallmark of modern culture, is that you can hardly even say, well, being respectful—it sounds like you're from 1890. Be respectful! Well, if you're not, if you don't want to be nihilistic, you better be respectful, because being nihilistic and having respect for nothing are exactly the same thing.

So you can start by having some respect for your ancestors and try to figure out what the hell they were talking about. You read the Old Testament, for example, it's a very weird book. It's a very, very, very, very weird book. Lots of people wrote it; lots of people added to it. It got sequenced together and turned into this volume for reasons that we just can't understand.

It's a collective work of the human imagination, and people read it in such a simple-minded way. They read it like fundamentalists, like simple-minded fundamentalists protestants think about science. No, the fundamentalist protestants think the Bible is literally true; science is literally true; thus, the Bible is science.

Well, you know no, the people who wrote the Bible weren't scientists. That's just not how it works. But then, the modern critics of religious thinking, of traditional religious thinking, they're just—they're the same thing, except backwards. They say no, no, religion was science—it’s just bad science.

And so, you know, we don't have to pay attention to it. Well, it's not science; it's something else. It's ethics; it's morality; it's drama; it's all of that. And drama is about how to live, and religious drama is—it’s a definitional issue. There is nothing deeper than religious drama.

And the reason for that is that depth defines what's religious. And, like, I know this firsthand, partly because in my clinical practice, like I often see people who are in terrible, terrible, terrible trouble, and often that trouble is ethical.

If the trouble they're in is bad enough, there's no other language to conceptualize it in that isn't religious, because the religious language comes into its own when you're dealing with problems that normally have life and death—but literally of heaven and hell.

And, you know, modern people think, well, there's no such thing as heaven and there's no such thing as hell. It's like, okay, fine, there's no such thing as heaven. Let's accept that. But if you think there's no such thing as hell, it's like, I can't see how someone who's educated would ever dare to make that claim, like after everything that happened to us in the 20th century.

I can't see that someone could ever say that there's no such thing as hell without being terrified that a bolt of lightning would obliterate them on the spot, you know? Hell is real. And if you want to talk about—use religious language, and if you want to figure out how to get away from hell, you use religious language, and that's what religious language is for.

So, you know, that's actually understandable.

Now, I would say if you want to learn about this, you can read Nietzsche, you can read Dostoevsky, you can read Jung. It's hard. You can read Jung's student, Eric Norman. Eric Norman was a genius. Like a lot of this information is there waiting for people to begin to understand it, but it's a hard slog again.

And part of the problem is that you get to hell way before you get to heaven. You know, and one of the things Jung sometimes conceptualized as a New Age thinker, and I think that's absurd. I think it's completely absurd.

One of his fundamental propositions is that if you follow a meaningful and truthful path, that will take you to the worst place you can imagine—and then possibly having gone there, the journey uphill towards the light can begin in earnest. Well, who wants that? Well, no one, if they have any sense.

But you know, you also made another statement which really cut me to the bone when I first understood it. He said anything you don't thoroughly understand, you act out in the world as fate.

So, one of the lessons I took away from that is—you know, if you don't want hell to manifest itself in the world, then you better understand your role in producing it.

And I would say that's actually the primary religious injunction. And I would also say that that's a big part of the reason why belief systems such as Christianity—I'm talking mostly about Christianity because that's what I'm most familiar with—but also because it's definitely the foundation of Western civilization.

Actually, I'm quite a fan of Western civilization! I mean, the fundamental moral injunction is in Christianity—one of them, I mean, they're all tangled together to some degree—is like: you want to constrain hell within yourself. Well, that's no joke, man!

I mean, you know, one of the things I learned from people like Jung, for me, was that if you look at the sorts of things that happen, say in Nazi Germany, or in the Soviet Union, or in Mao's China, or that are still happening around the world where there's systematic torture and persecution of millions and billions of people—or where the entire state is devoted toward making things as bad as they can possibly be and then making them even worse after that—that people played a role in that.

And they were people just like you! And that means that people like you play a role in that. And so then the question is what's your role, and is that the game that you want to be playing? Well, that's a serious question because it is people like you who were responsible for that, which means that to the degree that you're a person and you don't want that to happen anymore, you have to sort that out within yourself.

So I can take and explain, and I think I'll close with this. Another deeply religious idea—there's another idea. This is an archetypal idea about the image of the savior, or the Messiah. The Messiah is the person who takes the sins of the world unto himself.

That's a classic archetypal idea. It's like, what does that mean? It means that you look for the motivations that drove Hitler in yourself because they are there.

And that's what it means to take the sins of the world onto yourself. It means that you have to view yourself as the perpetrator of archetypal evil. You know, one of the things you said, for example, was that if you take a small moral failing that a person manifests and you dig into that as deeply as you can, you end up in the center of hell.

Like the roots of that unethical behavior go all the way down to the archetype. And in my experience, that's being true; that's right. That's why people want to have conversations about this sort of thing.

You see it happening in intimate relationships all the time where there are things that the two people who are involved in the relationship will just not talk about it. Why? Because they don't want to go there.

And where is it that they don't want to go? They don't want to get to the bottom of things. Well, you wonder, because you know that's an archetypal idea. Hell is a pit; it's at the bottom of things. It's like, yeah, that is where it is, and you have to go there if you want to straighten things out.

It's like, who the hell wants to do that? Well, the alternative is that it plays itself out in the world, and we've seen that, and that doesn't look like a good idea to me.

So, well, I guess we should probably end there because I'm getting fuzzy-minded. That's always a good time to stop, so thank you very much for tuning in. If this seems to have been successful, kind of a slow start, as far as I'm concerned, that's kind of muddle-headed to begin with. But, you know, maybe we'll live it all out.

Anyways, I'm thinking about doing this on a regular basis, so you know let me know what you think, and we'll see how many people watch it, and we'll see what happens.

And like, thanks to all my RAs and their lots of research assistants here already helping me with this—mastering the technology and figuring out what to do with YouTube.

So, thank you very much for tuning in, and hopefully, I'll see you again. Ciao!