class that human beings world as a place of action through the lens of their

social cognitive biological sub structure and I made that argument on

the basis of the supposition that our primary environment was actually other

people and I mentioned to you I believe that those other people are arranged in

hierarchies of influence and authority or power or dominance which is often how

its construed and that the dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 300

million years old which makes it older than trees and it's

for that reason that you share the same neural biology to govern your

observations of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do which is a

remarkable fact you know it's a remarkable that the lobster uses

serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate its status position and that modifying

the serotonin function in the lobster can produce changes in its behavior can

can / help the logs to overcome defeat for example which is very much

equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take antidepressants you

know it's it's it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure

by evolution and another a good illustration of the continuity of life

on Earth it's really amazing but the other thing it is a testament to is the

ancient nature of the social structure now we tend to think of the social

structure as something other than nature right because society is I suppose

mythologically opposed it's opposed in a narrative way cultures opposed to nature

it's the town in the forest but the town has been around a long time so to speak

and the structure of the town is also part of nature in that the dominance

hierarchy is part of and because it's so ancient you have to

consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection in

the process of natural selection and so roughly seem what seems to happen is

that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies especially in complex human

communities and many of them are masculine in structure in that their

dominance are keys that primarily men compete in or that has been the

historical norm and that some men rise to the top based on whatever the

dominance hierarchy is based on and they make their preferential mates and it's a

good strategy for women to engage in because why and many sorts of female

animals do precisely this is they let the male's battle it out and then pick

from the top and or often the dominant males there's no choice on the part of

the females it's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males but

with humans it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do

at least some choosing and so we have if you think about that what that implies

is that we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies and then I would

say it's not exactly that even because there are many different dominance

hierarchies and so the skills that you might use to climb up one might not be

necessarily the same skills that you would use to climb up another and so

then I would say what we have all evolved for instead and I'm still

speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things historically speaking is the

ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies right and

that's that's a whole different idea it's like the averaged hierarchy across

vast spans of time and I think it's for that reason that we among others that we

evolve general intelligence because general intelligence is a general

problem-solving mechanism and it seems to be situation in depend

so to speak and of course there's been an arms race for the development of

intelligence between men and women because each gender has to keep up with

the other and women have their own dominance hierarchies there's certainly

no doubt about that and of course now men and women more

increasingly compete within the same hierarchies and we don't exactly know

how to sort that out yet because it's an extraordinarily new phenomena but in any

case because of the the permanence of the dominance hierarchy it has come to

be represented in fundamental narratives because human beings and this is

something that we share everywhere it's the thing the Wall Street bankers shares

with with the kalahari Kung Bushmen who are among the genetically speaking they

seem to be very close to what the original most original human beings were

like in Africa before the Diaspora about fifty thousand years ago but you know

both of those people despite their vast differences live in

communities that have a hierarchical structure that are composed of

individuals that are embedded in a natural world you know the world outside

of the dominant Sarki and so that's the standard human environment I would say

and so stories that rely on the representations of those environments

and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories and

that's why people can understand them and I would say further and this is

drawing substantially on say derivation of the work of Carl Jung because I think

he delved into this more deeply than anyone else so a lot of this stuff is

quite Union in its in its origins we the commonality between human beings so you

know you have to have commonalities in order to communicate right axiomatic

commonalities because otherwise you have to explain everything and so there's

many things that human beings don't have to explain to one another we don't have

to explain anger we do have to explain jealousy we don't have

to explain fear we don't have to explain pain we don't have to explain joy we

don't have to explain love etc those are built into us and so there are

predicates of being human and you could say that those human predicates and the

standard human environment produce standard narratives and then you could

say even further and this is more of a leap I would say is that those who act

out the role of the victor in those standard narratives are precisely the

people who attain victory in life and I would say biologically defined in that

they make more attractive partners but also I believe that there's an alignment

between human well-being which is a very weak word and participation in these

meta narratives that drive success because well do you want to be a failure

or a success well you know it's hard to be a success you have to adopt a lot of

responsibility and so you might be willing to take your chances as a

failure but I can't exactly I'm not going to make the presumption that

that's going to put you in a situation other than one where you experienced a

lot of frustration anger disappointment depression pain and anxiety at the

bottom of the heap and so generally that's not what people are aiming for

although under certain circumstances if people don't like responsibility and are

willing to take their chances they might take the irresponsibility and it's

apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through the medium and

long run anyways we stop here I suggested to you that one of the primary

narrative representations was the known or culture or order I think those or the

explored territory or the dominance arc I think those things are basically

interchangeable from from a representational perspective and you

know in the movie The Lion King that's represented by Pride Rock which is the

central place of orientation founded on Raw

which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in that's why we

make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of things rock stands for permanent

and to have rock under your feet as to be on a solid foundation and that's a

pyramid in some sense in that movie and the pyramid has topped by you know the

king and queen and they're their offspring so that's that's the divine

couple that's one way of thinking about it and Simba of course is the newborn

hero and you know you extend that even though it's lions and drawings of lions

at that and animals are acting it out it's completely irrelevant to you that

those characters happen to be animated and that what you're watching is a

fiction so and I would say to you with regards to fiction you know you might

say well is fiction true or not and the answer to that is yes and no it's not

true in that the events portrayed in fiction occurred in the world they

didn't but they're fiction is true the same way numbers are true I would say

like you know if you have one apple and one orange and one banana the common

analogy between all of those three is one and you might say well is one as

real as one fruit is the abstraction one as real as one fruit and I would say it

depends on what you mean by real but representing things mathematically and

abstractly gives you incredible power and you could make the case that the

abstraction is actually more real than the phenomena that it represents and

certainly mathematicians would make that case they would say that mathematics is

in some sense more real than the phenomenal world and you know you don't

have to believe that mostly it's a matter of choice in some sense but you

can't deny the fact that an abstraction has enough reality so that if you're

proficient in using it you can really you can change the world and in and in

insanely powerful ways you know I mean all the computational equipment you

people are using or depending on the abstractions one and zero

essentially and I mean look at what emerges from that and so I would say

with regards to fiction if you take someone like Dostoyevsky oh I think it's

a favorite of mine by the way I would highly recommend that you read all five

of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological

depth and so if you're interested in psychology Dostoyevsky's the person for

you Tolstoy is more of a sociologist but

Dostoyevsky man he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes

around transformative reading anyways Dostoyevsky's characters this character

named her skull in the Cobb is a character in crime and punishment and

Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist I would say which was a rather new type

of person back in the 1880s and he was sort of taken by the idea that God was

dead and took and convinced himself that the only reason that he that anyone

acted in a moral way in a traditional way was because of cowardice they were

unable to remove from them the restrictions of mere convention and act

in the manner of someone who rose above the norm and so he's tortured by these

ideas he's half starving he's a law student he doesn't have enough to eat he

doesn't have much money and so you know he's not thinking all that clearly

either and he's got a lot of family problems his mother's sick and she can't

spend him send a much money and his sister is planning to engage in a

marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical who he hopes

will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law

school and they write him brave letters telling him that she's very much in love

with this guy but he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that

his sister is just planning to prostitute herself in you know in an

altruistic manner he's not very happy with that and then at the same time as

all this is happening he becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he's you know

pawning his last possessions to and she's a horrible

person and not only by his estimation she pawns a lot of things for the

neighborhood and people really don't like her she's grasping and cruel and

deceitful and and resentful and like and she has this niece who's not very bright

intellectually impaired whom she basically treats as a slave and beats

all the time and so Raskolnikov you know involved in this mess and half starved

and a bit delirious and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas

decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the land

let the pawnbroker take her wealth which he all she does is keep it in a chest

free the niece so that seems like a good idea so remove one apparently horrible

and useless person from the world free his sister from the necessity of this

loveless marriage and allow him to go to law school where he can become educated

and do some good for the world you know so one of the things that's lovely about

Dostoyevsky is that he you know when sometimes when one person is arguing

against another or when they're having an argument in their head they make

their opponent into a straw man which is basically they take their opponent and

curricular their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and and

laugh about it and and then they come up with their argument and destroy this

straw man and feel that they've obtained victory but it's a very pathetic way of

thinking it's not thinking at all what thinking is is when you adopt the

opposite position from your suppositions and you make that argument as strong as

you can possibly make it and then you pit your perspective

against that that strong iron man not the straw man and you argue it out you

battle it out and that's what Dostoevsky does in his novels I mean he's the

people who stand for the antithesis of what dust is dust is he actually

believes are often the strongest smartest and sometimes most admirable

people in the book and so takes great moral courage to do that and

you know in risk Olenick oov what he wanted to do was set up a character who

had every reason to commit murder every reasonable reason philosophically

practically ethically even well so risk Olenick off goes and he kills the old

lady with an axe and it doesn't go the way he expects it will because what he

finds out is that post murder Raskolnikov and pre murder Raskolnikov

are not the same people at all they're not even close to the same people he's