2017/03/11: Strengthen the Individual: A counterpoint to Post Modern Political Correctness

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I'm supposed to be nice.
My name's Tammy.
Um, Jordan and I known each other, uh, for a new 15 nearly 50 years.
Nearly 50 years.
Oh, that's better.
We come from northern Alberta.
You lived up the street for me.
I always knew he would be a fascinating person.
So in my late twenties, hey moved east.
I was in Montreal, Andi.
I thought it's probably time to marry him because if I don't marry him, I won't know what happens.
And now we're seeing what's happening.
Yeah.
I mean, he's been talking about these things.
He's been talking about what's going on in our society and how it's moving left on DDE, how things are destabilizing for last 20 years.
And so when In September, he said he came down one morning and he was quite disturbed and he said, You know, I've got a couple of e mails that I can't deal with.
I can't deal with quietly on.
I'm going to have to say something.
What do you think can I said, Well, you've been speaking to me, and my son was there, too, for for a very long time, and maybe this time for you to tell everyone what's going on on.
So he did, and we didn't know what would happen.
You know, we didn't have any idea.
He just went up and made a video.
Said what?
He's only said what he's always thought and what he sees coming down pipes and resonated with tremendous, uh, response and mostly, almost 95% or more.
Positive response.
So although it was destabilizing and family beginning No, it's it's It's a good thing we've wrecked a lot, You know, myself.
I wasn't has learned that it's him, but I sure liked a lot.
And I know you guys have to and you're gonna learn a whole bunch more today.
So welcome.
So who's your filming this?
Can I walk around?
Can you hear me without the microphone?
Good.
Then I'll be able to walk around.
So I want to tell you a story.
It's it.
It's gonna be I have a mic on here.
Yeah, so?
Okay, so I started studying.
The things that I have been talking about in well, really is long back, as I can remember, I think that's true.
I wrote an essay when I was about 13 on the on our schwitz.
It wasn't very good essay, but I was only 13.
So it's not that surprising, but and I don't know exactly why.
It was of particular concern to me.
Except that, of course, it's the sort of thing that should be of concern to everyone.
Sorry, what are you hearing?
How about if I speak a little louder?
All right, all right.
No, I'll do it.
I'll do it this way.
I think if you have any trouble at the back, let me know what I'll I'll make sure that I'm projecting.
So I said when I was about 13 I wrote an essay on in our sweats and I was trying to understand it.
I think maybe I tried to understand it in a way that was somewhat different than most people who examine historical events, because I was trying to understand how human beings could do that, knowing full well that I was one of them.
And that's the critical thing, because generally when people examined, especially something horrifying that's done by humanity, they make the assumption that it's other people doing it.
And that's a That's a big mistake, in my estimation, because if a lot of human beings have done something terrible.
You can be sure that being a human being, that you're capable of it.
And you know, one of the things that we've been asked repeatedly to do as a consequence of what happened in World War Two is to not forget it.
But it's always bean my contention that you can't remember something you don't understand, and you don't understand what happened in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Union, for that matter, until you understand that had you being there, the probability that you would have played a role and that wouldn't have been a positive one is extraordinarily high.
When people do think about themselves as actors in situations like that, they have a proclivity to cast themselves in the heroic role, assuming that had they, Bean say in Nazi Germany in the 19 thirties that they would have taken on the burden of fighting against the Nazis and defending the things that should have been defended.
But that's a very foolish presupposition, especially because it's more or less self evident from the historical perspective that that isn't what people did, and in order for us to come to terms with that, it means that we have to understand how it happened.
But more importantly, what rule?
We still play as individuals in acting in such a way that such things are not only likely, but desired.
When I was older in university, I was plagued by nightmares, mostly about They were apocalyptic nightmares, mostly about the Third World War.
And I had a very large long series of dreams about about nuclear bombs.
Remember one of them?
I was living in Edmonton at the time and on the on the south side, and I could remember watching out through my window in the dream and seeing mushroom cloud form over the main core of the city.
And then the dream shifted locals, and they're a bunch of people in the wreckage, and they started to fight, and I thought that's just exactly right.
And that was exactly what my nightmares were like is that no matter how tremendous the catastrophe, we don't seem able to derive the proper conclusions from it and start act in a way that makes such things less rather than more likely.
When I was in graduate school at McGill, which would have been after that.
I was studying political science before that.
Sorry back when I was in Edmonton, and before that I had even thought about going into into law.
But as I studied political science, I got increasingly disenchanted with the explanations that were being offered to me about motivations for human conflict, especially in the upper years of my undergraduate education that the lower years were pretty good, because mostly what I studied was political philosophy and literature, and I found that very helpful.
But in the upper years, the contention of the professors was that people primarily engaged in conflict for economic reasons.
That never struck me as a very deep, deep explanation because it didn't get up the core of the issue, which was, well, okay.
People fight about things of material value, But why did they value those things?
I mean, it's kind of self evident if you think about food and shelter and so forth.
But generally speaking, especially in the 20th century, it wasn't necessarily about the basics of food and shelter that people were engaging in conflict about.
It was it was something much more subtle than that.
Maybe it had more to do with national identity, with identity, that kind of thing.
And so there was a psychological element missing in the analysis of the human propensity for conflict that to me bloom larger and larger.
And so I decided at least in part for that reason to pursue a graduate degree in psychology and in clinical psychology.
And I went to McGill, and that's when I started to read very much more broadly, I suppose, and I spent a lot of time reading.
I read a lot of Freud in a lot of all the classic clinical psychologists who extraordinarily useful Carl Rogers and and Sigmund Freud and and Alfred Adler and a whole host of them all the classic thinkers I could get my hands on.
And also most particularly the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, most of whose major book works I read at that point, and Theodore Dostoevsky, who was writing very similar things to Nietzsche there.
In fact, Nietzsche was quite influenced by Dostoevsky, and Dostoyevsky was a like a master in the literary genre.
His five great books focused on the most difficult questions that face humanity, both socially and individually.
I found those books overwhelmingly powerful and also extraordinarily useful.
Good beyond good crime and punishment, for example, is, ah, brilliant, brilliant piece of work outlining the motivation of someone who regards himself as above all law and who decides that to not kill when necessary is an act of cowardice.
And so Dostoyevsky walks through, his rationalization sent and the murder and the aftermath of it in a way that's extraordinarily enlightening and painful.
Simultaneously and at the same time, Nietzsche and Germany was writing philosophical, tracked on exactly the same themes, their lives ran unbelievably close parallel.
In fact, when Nietzsche finally went insane, he had some illness that has been very difficult to diagnose.
He had he had seen someone beating ah horse in the street and embraced it out of compassion.
And there's a scene exactly like that in one of Dostoyevsky's stories.
So it's the parallels are really uncanny, and I also read a lot of neuroscience because I did my thesis on the biological predisposition to alcoholism and that required a lot of investigation into more hard core science investigation into the structure and function of the brain.
And I tried to weave all of that together in a book that I published in 1999.
It took me about 15 years to write.
I was writing three hours a day for every day and thinking about it all the time.
Like I was absolutely 100% obsessed by by the sorts of issues that I'm discussing with you today.
It took me deep.
I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn much of what he wrote at the same time.
And then, of course, I I studied Carl Young in great depth.
When when I finally started to crack, what he was talking about was extraordinarily difficult material.
I read Volume nine of his collected works, which is called Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
First time I read it, I didn't understand a word he was saying, and I think that's very common experience for people reading Yeung, who's certainly persona non grata in the modern e cat academy.
And I think the reason for that is that well, I think when you first encounter you, you tend to bounce off, and then the next thing that happens is you get very frightened and then you just leave it the hell alone.
And it's no wonder, as far as I'm concerned, because I don't think I've ever read anyone, including Nietzsche.
That was more terrifying than you.
Um, need Young was a student of Nietzsche.
I don't I don't mean technically speaking.
Although Nietzsche was everywhere, Nietzsche's thinking was everywhere when Juma was maturing.
People know Carl you primarily as a as a disciple, let's say of Freud, which is true in part because Freud, of course, did the initial you might call might describe it as initial excavating work, outlining the fact that there was more going on in the human psyche than met the conscious I.
And his greatest work likely was the interpretation of dreams, where he started to performing archaeology of the of the symbolic unconscious, Um, showing that much of our mental life went on in some sense underneath our conscious awareness, which is of course, regarded as a truism now by psychologists but was quite revolutionary at the time.
It wasn't Freud's.
It wasn't entirely an original idea with Freud.
Few things are entirely original ideas, but he went farther than anyone else, synthesizing it and also publicizing and promoting it and also basing a psychotherapeutic theory on it.
Pretty remarkable set of accomplishments and young was very much influenced by Freud, but also by Nietzsche, and the reason he was influenced by nature most particularly, um, was that Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God in the late 19 hundreds was very striking philosophical event, and I'll return to this.
But Nietzsche believed that because God was dead, so to speak, and the value structure upon which Western civilization was constructed had got at its foundation, that that would all crumble and that people would have to become their own day.
And he's in a sense, they would have to discover or create for nature to create their own values and before nature could outline how that might happen.
He suffered the unfortunate descent into madness and then died.
And so we left this mate major problem behind, which is if it's the case that the mediation, all foundation of Western civilization, was predicated on illusion on an illusion.
What what what would we do next?
And Nietzsche said, Well, what we will certainly do next is descend into unholy combination of nihilism and totalitarian ism because those will be the things that will beckon most clearly in the chaotic aftermath of the dissolution of the value structure upon which our society had been predicated and needs You in his book will to power profit side very directly that millions of people would die in the 20th century specifically because of communist revolutions.
And that was 40 years, roughly speaking, 30 to 40 years before the communist revolution in the Soviet Union.
So that's an act of prophetic vision that's absolutely incomprehensible to I mean in the West.
We didn't know that Soviet Union was gonna fall until the day it fell, and Nietzsche knew what was going to happen in the 20th century in like a knight in like 18 80.
It's absolutely remarkable.
You was very interested in the Nietzschean problem, more interested in it than anything else because he knew that the question of where we would derive our values from and how we would ground them in some sort of underlying solid underwrite lying reality would become was the paramount psychological question of the of the age, and he spent his entire his entire life attempting to address that.
Young's idea was that we weren't going to be able to create our own values because human beings cannot create their own values.
And you know that if if if you observe your own action, if you observe your own being, you could make resolutions.
You can try to act in a particular way may be a way that you regard is better, but you'll find out very rapidly that you can't enslave yourself and tell yourself what to do so easily, even when you're motivated to do good things.
You know when you make your New Year's resolutions and say that you're going to eat properly and go to the gym that generally lasts about a week, and so you can't boss yourself around.
As it turns out, no more than you can really boss other people around.
And it's because you do have a nature.
You have a nature, and you can't just arbitrarily mold and shape that nature because you, like other people, will rebel against your own will.
And so and so Young's contention was that we would have to go inside ourselves, that that's how he looked at it, into the symbolic background of our psychological structure and rediscover what we had lost.
And so I found that's the ancient mythological motif of voyaging to the depths and rescuing your father from the belly of the beast.
You see that idea reflected often in popular culture?
Oh, very well developed.
Example of that is in the movie Pinocchio, which I'm sure how many of you have seen that movie?
Yeah, right.
Well, that speaks for itself, right?
I mean, why why Why are you watching a puppet on animated puppet rescue his father from the belly of a whale?
It makes absolutely no sense.
But you don't care when you're watching it.
You think this is quite interesting.
And the reason it's interesting is because it speaks to you at a level that you understand, but that you do not understand how you understand.
And of course, any good work of art does exactly that to you.
It speaks to you about things that you almost no, but don't yet know, and that's what makes it profound.
And you knew that it would be necessary for modern people to journey to the chaotic depths and rescue their dead father from the underworld, which is a very interesting symbolic realization in the aftermath of Nietzsche's statement that God had died.
And so that's what you did.
That's what he spent his entire life doing, and he detailed that out in a very long series of very difficult and and very unsettling books, which people tend not to read.
And no wonder, No wonder.
And so I read everything I could get my hands on that young had published at that point, and a lot of work by various historians of religion and, like Mircea Alia, who's who's out a favor because the postmodernists don't like him.
And, uh, and I put this all together in this book that I published in 1999 called Maps of Meaning.
And it's also a very difficult book, and that was some somewhat purposeful and somewhat inevitable.
It was it was purposeful because I knew that if I was going to discuss such things, and I didn't make it ridiculously rigorous, at least to the degree that I was capable of doing that, that it would be easily dismissed.
And, um, that seems counter productive.
But but it was also because I was trying to figure out rather than trying to write a book, I was trying to figure something out, and I was doing that by writing because writing is a very good way of figuring things out, and I was trying to make it as clear as I could, but that that wasn't all that clear.
You know what?
It's about 500 pages long.
I think this book and and it's and I think I rewrote every sentence in it at least 50 times, probably too many times, because by the end it got.
I think I over edited it.
I think it was.
It's in some sense, too tight.
It's like an overworked piece of art that that might be one way of thinking about it.
But and then it's taken me decades of speaking about it, too.
Continue to what would you call it, purify and refine it so that I can discuss it without having to go through dozens of hours of explanation and to condense it down into something that's more easily comprehensible?
So that's what I'm going to try to do this afternoon.
I want to tell you why I think we're in the position that we're in, what that position is, and also potentially what can be done about it and those seams, because also, I believed and still do believe that If you actually understand the problem, you can solve it.
But you have.
That's actually an indication of your understanding, right?
If you if you if you haven't solved it, you actually don't understand it.
There's things about it that you still don't grasp.
And so when I was writing maps of meaning, I wasn't so much trying to only figure out why it was that people were capable of the terribly barbaric things that they so happily did at our sweets, but also to figure out what could be done, if anything, to stop that from happening.
Because it was also, by no means self evident that anything, in fact, could be done about it.
Because that might just be an expression of that central human nature that I was talking about earlier and be fundamentally irreparable.
There's there's been no shortage of writers who have proposed that human beings are fundamentally flawed in a way that cannot be rectified and that, you know, are are and we have a catastrophic destiny waiting for us as a consequence.
I mean, in some sense, that's built right into the fabric of Christianity itself because, of course, have these certain variants of it.
And I'm speaking about Christianity because in many ways it's at the foundation of Western society because certain elements of Christianity at least regard people as irretrievably or irreparably tainted with original sin, which emerged right at the birth of our species.
And there's something extraordinarily powerful about that idea.
Because, of course, everybody in this room knows that they're seriously flawed and also knows that they do things that make those flaws Maur rather than less likely.
And everyone has that sense about themselves unless they're narcissistic beyond belief, in which case they also suspected, but only at an unconscious level.
So you know, we do carry this sense of ourselves as deeply flawed and imperfecta and maybe fatally so, and that seems to be built right into us.
And so maybe there is no solution.
But that seemed like a dismal hypothesis to begin with, So I wanted to do it.
It wanted to investigators deeply as I possibly could, to see if I could conjure up something that vaguely Rick represented the solution for a long time.
You know, there are months when I was writing where I really felt quite mad and what one of the most intense periods of time.
Where that occurred was when I think I was kind of on the cusp of figuring out what I needed to figure out.
I'd figured out two things.
One was that I kind of understood.
Finally, white people had belief systems, and it wasn't the belief system was there because we have to deal with an infinitely complex world, and we have to simplify it down to proportions that we can manage because we don't have infinite cognitive or emotional or physiological resources.
Were very bounded creatures living in an unbounded environment.
Roughly speaking, it's too much for us.
And so we have to impose structures of simplification on the world or way.
Get so stressed we die.
That's roughly the bottom line.
For example, if you develop post traumatic stress disorder, which occurs when you encounter something in your life that you cannot compute, so to speak, your body goes into emergency preparation mode, which which makes it hyper hyper responsive to threat and ready to do anything, which is emergency preparation.
And that's so physiologically demanding that it demolishes your health.
There's no merely psychological.
It damages your brain.
I mean you just can't stay in high gear running flat out continually.
You you die.
And so people need to simplify the world.
They need to live within structures of simplification because that's how they that's how they protect themselves from the terrible onslaught of complexity.
But by the same token, we organize ourselves into these these structures of simplification.
That's what our cultures are.
We negotiate them, we inhabit them jointly.
And because of that, when we run into people who do that differently, the probability that will engage in conflict is extraordinarily high.
Because I can't give up my beliefs just because you have different beliefs.
And if we don't have the same beliefs, then we can't peacefully occupy the same territory.
So there seems to be nothing for that except conflict.
If we can't negotiate them, we have to fight.
So then I thought, Well, that's that's That's that, Then, on the one hand we can about in our belief systems because they structure are realities and protect us, but and we can't fight because now we're so technologically powerful that if we do, we're going to destroy everything.
It's like, Well, that's that there's that's option one and its opposite that completely exhausts the options.
And so that was a horrible realization.
Absolutely dreadful realization, because, you know, it's certainly possible if you think about this from a biological or an evolutionary viewpoint is that we're kind of a peculiar species in.
We've developed these terrible technologies of war, and there's absolutely no reason to assume that we won't just use them to wipe ourselves out.
And, you know, maybe 30% of us as individuals and in our own psyches would be happy about that, because life is pretty dreadful and it's full of suffering.
And there's lots of things that are harsh about existence.
And so maybe we should just let the whole thing go.
And believe me, people are plenty motivated to do that.
If you haven't observed that motivation in yourself at some point in your life, either you're not paying attention or or don't want to pay attention or something sufficiently dreadful has not yet happened to you.
But it will.
It will, you know, because everyone encounters catastrophic crises in their life and it drops the bottom out of them and makes them desperate and angry.
And that's also part of the human condition.
Luckily, after about three months of thinking about that, I had a series of dreams that helped me sort out 1/3 alternative.
And that was, of course, at least in part emerged as a consequence of all the things that I was reading.
So I want to research return to the Nietzschean conundrum.
So Nietzsche was an extraordinarily astute critic of the Judeo Christian tradition.
He wrote a book called The Anti Christ, in fact, and he also said that he philosophizes with a hammer, and what he meant by that was that he was taking the hardest heaviest object he could and smashing up everything he possibly could with as much intellectual rigor as he could manage.
And that was plenty because he was truly a genius.
But he was.
He wasn't a nihilistic person.
Quite the contrary, had a very good reputation among those who knew him, for example, is a very kind man, but he was in part looking for something that he couldn't destroy right, because that's partly how you find out what's really you hit things, so to speak.
You push against them, your Children do that to you, for example, they push against you to see where you won't yield.
And then they think authors reality there there's a wall there.
I can't go beyond that.
And that's what nature was searching for.
And he was doing it all out fundamentally.
How his contention was that what had happened in the West was that there, that the Judeo Christian tradition and even the precursors of that tradition, a point from which that tradition emerged had insisted for millennia that the pursuit of truth was the highest moral value and that one of the consequences of that was that the West developed science, which was part of that pursuit of the truth.
And then and then the tools of science once successfully grasped and universalized, where then turned against the dogmatic structure of the church when everyone woke up as scientists, so to speak and thought, Well, we're living by a set of superstitions and and they're not true, and we have to dispense with them.
And so that was Copernicus.
And that was Darwin.
And that was Freud.
That was these repeated blows that that are symbolic culture took at the hands of something that had fostered and created and Nietzsche said something as well at the same time when he remarked on this.
On this consequence, he said, One of the most terrible things about discovering that a system you believed in no longer functions there's no longer sufficient or can be undermined is that it raises the specter that all such systems have the same flaws.
You know, sometimes you can jump from atheism to Christianity and from Christianity to socialism, say, in successive leaps.
And and then you're someone who's faithless from within the perspective of a given system.
But you're faithful to the idea that there are, in fact, systems that will work.
But if your system fails enough, then you can end up in a situation where you don't even have any faith in the idea that systems as such can work.
And that makes you nihilistic.
And nature saw thatis as as as the origin of the specter of nihilism, hopelessness.
Fundamentally.
Now it's more complicated than that because there are underground reasons, so to speak, for being nihilistic, that have nothing to do with the mere collapse of irrational belief system.
I don't talk about those two, and he also talked about the This is the the the inevitable rise of totalitarian ism as a medication for the loss of all meaning.
In some sense, you might say, Well, if you're in a chaotic state because you no longer know what to believe, it's very, and someone offers you a set of certainties to guide your life.
By then, it's very attractive for you to reach out and grip onto those with all of your soul, so to speak, because that stops you from merely being adrift.
And then there's underground reasons for that, too, that I'll also return to.
So the first question is, Was it necessary for the sense of truth that Nietzsche described as developed by the Judeo Christian tradition that then manifested itself in the scientific methodology to turn against the symbolic foundation of that structure and demolish it?
Was that inevitable?
And was it correct?
And that's the first question.
And so Young's answer to that was, the conflict between science and religion is a consequence of the immature state of both of those domains of thinking.
It's not built into the structure per se.
It's just that we aren't good enough at being religious or good enough about at being scientific in order to see how they might be reconciled.
Now that's a that's a hell of a claim, and it's a frightening claim because and this speaks to some degree to the underground reasons for being nihilistic.
So the terrible thing about being nihilistic is that nothing you do has any meaning and and that's not so good, because actually, it's actually untrue, because there are forms of meaning in life that nihilism won't protect you from, or or even increase your exposure to and those air the tragic meanings of life.
I don't care how nihilistic you are, what you don't believe in.
You're going to believe in your own pain.
You're gonna believe in your own anxiety.
You're gonna believe in the fact of pain and anxiety for everyone else.
You're going to believe in tragedy.
You can't think yourself out of the catastrophe of the world by being nihilistic, So the negative meanings remain.
You can dispense with the positive meetings, which seems to be a bad bargain, but the upside of doing that is quite straightforward.
If I said to you, here's your alternatives.
Nothing.
You do matters or has any meaning alternative one.
Everything you do matters and has meaning.
Which one would you pick?
And you might think, Well, of course I would go for the second alternative because the 1st 1 is so horrifying.
But the truth of the matter is, the 2nd 1 is even more horrifying because it means that the things that you do, for better or worse, actually do matter.
And in some sense, you're responsible for them, not only for the effect that they have on you in the immediate circumstances of your life, but for the effect that they have radiating out from you the other, the other people that your network to and also as they re as they as they make waves through time.
It could be that everything you do does matter, that every choice that you make matters.
And I do believe that that's the case, that you're constantly making choices between good and evil and that that determines the destiny of being.
And it isn't obvious to me at all that that's something that you would wish upon yourself.
And so one of the advantages to be nihilistic is it enables you to be totally irresponsible, even though the price you pay for that is the sacrifice of all positive meaning.
Well, so much for the intellectual purity of nihilism, right?
And so those sorts of things have to be considered very deeply because when someone says, well, I'm hopeless, sometimes it's because they're suffering and people could suffer terribly because of that.
But sometimes it's because they don't want to be responsible for anything.
And no wonder.
Back to use point, Young started to examine religious idi ation.
I would say symbolically, but it's more complicated than that because you might think that the attempt to analyze religious thinking symbolically would reduce it to nothing but psychology.
But that isn't what happens precisely because as you reduce the religious ideas to psychology, you elevate the psyche, and so they meet in the middle, and this is something you understood very, very well.
It was for that reason that he believed that Christ was a symbol of the self, the self being, the your full totality.
That might be one way of thinking about it, everything that you could conceivably be if you were everything that you could be, and that's that potential that rests inside you.
That everyone knows about, You know, we also even speak about it because we take people to task when we say you're not living up to your potential and everyone knows what that means.
But no one knows what it means, because what the hell is that potential?
It's not something that's really by definition.
It's something that's virtual.
It's something that is yet to be and may never be.
But we still treat it as if it's real, and we also treat the entire world as if it's made out of potential.
And I believe that that is the correct way of viewing the world.
It's not the dead matter of the 18th century rationalist or empiricist.
It's the living domain of potential that that we interact with on a regular basis from which, at least to some degree, we extract our own potential.
Here's a rough outline of the story that that Yoon told that I've been working on, so I'm gonna tell it as I understand it According to the the selection of stories that were encapsulated in the biblical tradition, the world is roughly 6000 years old, and of course, at one level of analysis, that's palpably absurd, I would say, and also narrow because I think to conceptualize the world as 15 billion years old with a developmental history that extends across that massive amount of time and to note that it extends incomprehensibly vastly outward is a much more magnificent view of the cosmos than the rather constrained cosmos that we inherited from thinkers in the Middle East, say, 10,000 years ago.
But there's something about it that's true, and the truth in it seems to be its relationship to the origin of civilization, because it is the case that civilization everywhere in the world of the sort that we would regard us complex technological is about 6000 years old, and why, that is is not so self evident, although I suspect it has something to do with how long it took us to reformulate ourselves after the last ice age, which, of course, was only roughly 15,000 years ago.
It's not really that far away in time, so that's the first thing.
But the second thing is what the story, the creation stories and Genesis, for example, actually mean because they actually mean something, and what they mean is that absolutely remarkable, in my estimation.
And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that story.
Um, because it's necessary to understand what this story means to determine if what Nietzsche said about the inevitable destruction of our symbolic religious structures by science was inevitable and necessary.
And I think the answer to that is, no, we just didn't understand what the hell we were doing any more than we really understand why we put up Christmas trees at Christmas.
So we do that in part because the Christmas tree is a symbol of life, because the tree is a symbol of life because we inhabited trees for untold millions of years, and we put lights on the trees to symbolize the coming back into the darkness of midwinter of the Son and the Light.
And so we play this symbolic game that celebrates both life and the emergence of light and consciousness, and we associate that with the birth of the savior.
But we don't know that we're doing that, but we do it anyways, and we do that sort of thing all the time because we're smarter than we know.
And that has to be the case because we don't know ourselves.
We wouldn't need a psychology or sociology and anthropology or any of those things if we were transparent to ourselves.
We're machines, so to speak, that are far more intelligent and wise that the machines themselves can understand.
And we've reveal ourselves to ourselves in our action and our symbolic gestures constantly and then have to reflect on that to try to understand what it is that we're up to.
So here's the idea that lurks at the beginning of Genesis.
So there's There's three elements that are involved in the creation of habitable the creation of habitable order from chaos at the beginning of time.
One of them is whatever is represented by God, the father and one of them is whatever is represented by the chaos that exists at the same time.
And the other is whatever is represented by the idea of God's word.
That's the logos from a Christian perspective, which is a very, very strange idea.
So there's this idea that was developed over the course of thousands of years.
That redeeming savior was also the thing that God used to extract habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time.
It's a very strange idea, and two to assimilate.
An idea of that preposterousness and magnitude to mirror pre rational superstition is foolish, first of all, because we don't even understand what it means.
But it means something utterly profound, and it means something that we cannot forget.
We forget it at our peril, for the story at the beginning of Genesis means that structure that's the father.
That's the patriarchy, if you will structure extracts habitable order from chaos through speech.
That's what we do says in Genesis as well that human beings are made in the image of God.
And that's why, because we've observed these air ancient ideas, they were They were created with so much blood and effort that it's incalculable.
You cannot contemplate it.
The idea is that there's something about the human being, whatever it is that makes us conscious, that interacts with the chaotic potential that constitutes reality and extracts out from not the order within which we live and that there's something divine about that, and that's the value of the human being right.
That's the ineradicable value of a human being and the idea that each individual, even criminals, even murderers.
The worst and most reprehensible people have to be treated with the respect due a divinity, because we partake in the capacity to extract habitable order from chaos with our consciousness, with our speech and with our capacity to communicate.
And we recognize in so far as we each recognized the other as valuable.
It's predicated on that observation.
We each have something to offer each other and something vital.
And you know that if you engage in a really conversation with someone a meaningful conversation that suspends your sense of fragile mortality for a moment, you understand that in that communication between people, something of inestimable value emerges that you have to pursue and you live for that.
You live for that relationship with yourself.
You live for that.
That discovery of that relationship when you're engaged in an artistic pursuit, it's the core of meaning in life, and it's not an illusion.
In fact, it's a manifestation of the highest functions of your nervous system, because what you're nervous system does is signal to you that you're in a place and time that you cannot see when you're engaged in something meaningful.
Unit comes upon you.
And it's the cure for the catastrophes of tragic mortality, that wonderful engagement in what's meaningful, that you do you can and do experience and that you can get better at experiencing if you practice.
And that's because your nervous system, which has evolved over billions of years, has learned to tell you when you're standing on the border between chaos and order and keeping them in balance.
And that's what manifests itself is meaningful.
And that's the same phenomena that's referred to in the creation stories and Genesis.
And it's the same idea that's reflected in the strange Christian assistance that the thing that saves mankind is the same thing that draws order from chaos at the beginning of time.
It's unbelievably brilliant, and we've been trying to figure it out for who knows how long forever and have never been able to fully articulated because it's so complicated.
It's such a complicated idea, but there's nothing in the least that's illusory about it.
The habitable order that is created at the beginning of time, that's paradise right paradise.
That's a walled garden.
It's a well watered place.
That's what he did means paradise means Para Days, a walled garden, and that's where Adam and Eve were first put.
And why is that?
Well, it's because we do come in male and female form.
That's part of it.
So that's part of our eternal landscape.
That that's how you could think about it is it's the landscape that transcends all landscapes.
It's the landscape that is what all landscapes have in common.
That's what it is.
That's what makes it an archetype.
It's a walled garden.
Why?
Well, the walls, air structure and culture and the garden is nature.
And all that says is that people live in an amalgam of nature and culture.
And of course, that's precisely the case.
And that's another variant of the order chaos, juxtaposition, order being culture and chaos being nature.
So we live eternally in the balance between nature and culture, and if it's property balanced, it's is close to paradise is it can get.
But paradise is flawed.
And why is it flawed?
Because there's always something lurking in it that could turn it upside down.
And that's the snake.
And the reason it's a snake is because the circuits that we used to process the things that turn our lives upside down is the same circuit that our tree dwelling ancestors used to identify predators 60 million years ago, and so the symbolic structure has remained exactly the same.
That which lies outside what you understand is predatory and dangerous.
Well, that's why you demonize others, the four and others, because they do stand in that relationship to you and use extraordinarily deep circuitry to do that.
But human beings being slightly smarter than your average chimpanzee, also have noted that the terrible predator that lurks outside the domains of what you understand is also the thing that bears gold right.
And that's the classic dragon myth.
The hero goes out beyond the confines of order and culture into the chaotic unknown to confront the ultimate predator, who simultaneously offers the best that could be possibly gathered.
And that's what human beings are like predator animals and prey animals.
Simultaneously, we've learned to represent the unknown is that thing that threatens us hideously with a multitude of paralyzing snakes in the head of Medusa, but continually also offers us precisely what we need to continue our movement forward.
And everyone knows that, which is why we go to movies that tell us that over and over and over and over and over trying to learn what it means, and that's what it means.
And that's what it means to partake in the logos and the logos.
The reason that I made the videos that I made in September in relationship to free speech is because I know that respect for the logos and respect for free speech are the same thing, and that without that respect, our society's cannot maintain their structure, differentiate and progress.
They cannot do it.
We use our free speech, too.
Face the chaotic potential of the world and its horrors to structure it, to understand it, to communicate about it and to reach consensus.
It's the mechanism by which we adapt.
There could be no restrictions put upon that unless you want to sacrifice adaptation.
And I wouldn't recommend that things get stale, old, decayed, dead and dangerous with extraordinary rapidity.
If living people don't maintain their responsibility to update the state, and there's no difference between that and diving down into the chaotic depths and rescuing your father from the belly of the whale, it's exactly the same idea that's an ancient, ancient idea, and the reason that we haven't forgotten it was because everyone who forgot it died.
So unless that's where we want to go, we better stop forgetting about it.
Yeah, Nietzsche said that after God had died, there would be two things that would happen.
One would be the emergence of nihilism as a temptation.
We already discussed nihilism.
It's like it's a logical consequence of the collapse of value systems.
But it's also a place for the irresponsible to hide.
Fine nihilism, totalitarianism.
Well, I need you believe that once you had experienced the collapse of one value system, you were unlikely to put your faith in any value systems.
So then why totalitarian ism?
Particularly saying it's nationalistic and communitarian forms, which are the two forms that we saw act as immense devils in the 20th century, right, with nationalism being pushed most forcefully forward by the sorts of political creeds that were exemplified by the Nazis and with communitarianism being put forth by the sorts of creatures that were exemplified by the Soviet Union, both absolutely catastrophic evolutionary dead ends.
Well, nationalism is easier to understand, I think, because you need an identity and it has to be collective because human beings live collectively.
I mean, it's the fact that we share an identity, that we can all sit here in this room peacefully because the identity is partly who you think you are.
But it's also partly what you expect from the world and from others.
And because you have an identity that similar to you, you can sit together peacefully because you expect and desire something, and so do you.
And it's the same thing, and that's what it means to have a shared culture.
And so you can't.
You have to defend that culture and it has to be sufficient.
Let's say tightness or magnitude so that it makes sense for you to belong to it.
It's not so diverse and chaotic that it means nothing.
And I think that part of the reason why we're seeing a return to nationalism in places like Europe is because the European identity is so amorphous that people can't establish a relationship with it.
And that's not a good thing, because identity is actually something you have to have a relationship with.
And so you know, it's the identity, your identity, it's the identity of you within your family.
It's the identity of your family within the small community that friends and that surround you, and then the broader community of the town and the somewhat broader community of the province, in the state and so forth.
But as it expands, it gets vague and it disperses.
And at some point, the identity that's universal is so all encompassing that it means nothing at all and leaves people chaotic.
And so that's what's happening, at least in part in Europe.
It's happening to some degree in the United States as well, because we've been pushed so quickly forward into adopting a global identity that people are shaking because that's too amorphous for them.
And so we pull back and say, No, we need to be around people who we understand, which is of course, absolutely true.
Now, the downside of the nationalist endeavor is that you also need to be around people that you aren't alike and don't understand, partly because they exist, and if you don't take them into account, then you're going to have a war with them, which is a very bad idea, but also because they have something to offer and so We're trying to sort out the proper balance between differentiated identity, say, at the nation state level and the global identity that seems to be manifesting itself, partly because of our widespread electronic communication.
So okay, nationalism beckons if you're in a chaotic state.
You know, I heard the gallop people with pollsters.
At one point.
I've never seen this made public, but I remember it very well, said that, uh, that was back when Quebec was still a large proportion.
That cable court population was still agitating for separatism.
I'd always looked at that and I thought, What made perfect sense?
Because you, if Catholicism's collapses, it leaves a void.
What are you going to fill the void with?
Well, it's either nihilism, which we've already discussed, or well or what.
Well, nationalism, obviously.
And the gallop people said that if you are a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist perfect.
It's exactly what you'd expect because you have to have an identity.
So you turn from church to state.
Well, that's fine.
If you believe that the state is the ultimate identity and that's really this story that is being sold to people who are sold a nationalist story.
The state is the ultimate identity.
It's like, Well, actually, that's technically wrong.
That's why that's why it's wrong.
It's not wrong because it's ideologically wrong or or morally wrong.
Precisely, it's it's wrong because it's technically wrong, because the problem with the state is the state is what's uniform across people.
And the thing is, is that we need what's actually diverse across people in order to rejuvenate the state and to keep it awake.
And so if you reduce individuals to what's homogeneous about them across all people, you eradicate the very variability that allows people to adapt to new things.
And because we're constantly being presented with new things, we need to keep that individual variability paramount, because it's upon that variability that the very state depends.
And that's actually what the West discovered.
That's why we have always subordinated the state to the divinity of the individual, and that's expressed, has already said, in our in our in the primacy of free speech in our civilization, it's the cornerstone, the primacy of free speech, and it's because the individual has something to offer the state and so state identity is something that can only it construct chur, and it can reassure.
But it also constrains to too great a degree.
And so societies that become Onley state immediately become old and blind, malevolent and collapse.
And that's an ancient story.
The Egyptians had this figured out 3000 years ago in their fundamental mythologies.
They had a deity named Cyrus who was threatened by his evil brother set, who later became the Christian Satan.
The words air related at technologically and set was like scar in the Lion King.
He was waiting in the wings to for the old king to turn a blind eye so that he could chop him into pieces and rule in a malevolent way across the entire state.
The Egyptians had another day of the Horace who was the son of Oh Cyrus and the queen of the Underworld, Isis, who was the eye, the Egyptian I, who was the Faulcon because falcons can see and Horace was different than a Cyrus because he could see what set was up to.
He grew up outside the kingdom like King Arthur and came back and triumphant overcame set, losing an eye in the process.
He overcame his evil uncle and banished him to the corners of the world.
And then he took his eye and went into the underworld, where his father, all Cyrus, was living a the life of a dead ghost.
That's one way of thinking about it.
He gave him his eye and that revenge.
If I do Cyrus and then oh, Cyrus and Horace went back up to the surface from the chaotic underworld, and their union was the symbol of what the Pharaoh had to manifest in order to rule Egypt properly.
The Egyptians figured that out 3000 years ago in their in their great story. 00:56:38.470 --> 00:5