Set Your House in Order

I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator. Today's episode is a 12 rules for life lecture recorded in Cambridge on November 1st, 2018. That's almost exactly a year ago. I've named it "Set Your House in Order". Obviously took that from his book, but he talks a lot about the rule "Set Your House in Order before you criticize the world in this lecture". No updates really from us yet again. Things are still improving though, so that's fantastic. Hope your Halloween was great and you didn't need very much candy. "Set Your House in Order", a Jordan B. Peterson 12 rules for life lecture. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here in this strange theater. It's quite an interesting building and in a very interesting town, I wish I had a few more days to stay here, but I have lots of exciting things planned for the next couple of days, so it should be a very interesting visit, starting with what will hopefully be a somewhat interesting talk. Since I've come to the UK and to Northern Europe, which is, I guess, about 12 days now, I've been speaking about 12 rules for life, obviously, and about my first book, "Maps of Meaning". I tend to speak about both of them together because 12 rules of life is a subset of the first book, "Maps of Meaning", and I kind of mix and match the rules and play them off against one another because each of them is a story, but they're connected to an underlying story, and so you can come at the same problem from different perspectives that way and make something new each time, and so that's kind of challenging and helpful. I use the lectures as an opportunity to think on my feet and to simultaneously and to think through complex problems that I think need to be solved. I need to solve them for me, but hopefully the solution has some general utility. And then to make the problem formulation clearer, because that's really important, that's the diagnosis, let's say, and then to make the problem solution clearer, that's useful and more concise and more poetic and more elegant. And since I've come to, on this tour, I've been working through the rules backwards. When I was in North America, I was starting with rule one. It took me a long time, I kept getting stuck on rule one because it was, that's stand-up straight with your shoulders back and that led me into a fairly lengthy discussion about the inevitability of hierarchies and the fact that the political discussion that we all engage in centers, at least in part, on the fact of hierarchies that would be, and their necessity, that would be the right-wing position, the conservative position, let's say. And the tendency for hierarchies to become corrupt and dispossessed people at the bottom, and that would be the left-wing position. And we need to continually have a discussion between those two positions because hierarchies are inevitable and necessary if you want to solve complex problems in a social environment, but they tilt towards tyranny and blindness and they do tend to dispossess people at the bottom of the hierarchy. So sometimes the hierarchy needs to be strengthened because it's decomposed and so we're not solving complex problems very effectively, and sometimes the hierarchy needs to be adjusted and loosened because it's got too tight, too hard to climb, and it isn't serving its proper purposes anymore. Okay, that's a very complicated argument, although that was a relatively straightforward summary of it. Since I've come here, I've been working through the rules backwards, and I've got to rule six, and that's the one that I'm going to discuss with you tonight. And I think it's the shortest chapter in the book, rule six, which is put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. I think it's actually set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And it's a meditation on the motivation for evil, and so you can understand why not necessarily why that would be the shortest chapter, but why it might be the most challenging because it's such a dark topic, and so I was sitting backstage juggling ideas, thinking, okay, how am I going to approach this idea of malevolence and what might be done about it most appropriately? And I will have a bunch of things together relatively quickly. I mean, there are things that I've been working on for a long time, so the weaving is quick, but the ideas behind it aren't. And I'm going to sit down in this chair, and I'm going to talk to you a bit extemporaneously, but I'm going to also rely on some notes that I made, because there's some things I want to read you that are very precisely formulated, and so, and I don't have a great memory for quotations, so that's what we're going to do. We're going to do a deep analysis of this idea that you should put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And I want to explain what that means psychologically. I'd also like to make a case that it's actually, it's, see, one of the things I've come to realize in this lecture tour with regards to rules and regulations and responsibility, let's say, which is a central theme in 12 rules that you need rules, obviously, because why else write a book called 12 rules? But people in our culture, especially over the last four, four decades, five decades, I would say, have started to view rules as nothing but limitation to their freedom, and that their untrammeled freedom is an unquestioned good, and that any limitations to that freedom are essentially have the nature of tyranny, and that's just simply not true. I mean, you do have a responsibility, and part of your responsibility is in some sense to abide by rules, but it's not only because that's a duty, and it's certainly not because it's nothing but a negative limitation on freedom. A lot of responsibility, and let's say rule following for lack of a better word, rule abiding, that's a better phrase, is actually aspirational, you know, the thing about structure, especially if it's associated with value, is that it gives you something to do. This is the problem with the idea that hierarchies are bad in essence, or that they should be deconstructed. It's like, well, a hierarchy is a hierarchy of value that posits that one thing is preferable to another, and a hierarchy is also a judgment as a consequence, right, because if there's a hierarchy of value, and one thing is better than another, then some things are worse than others, and those things that are worse are judged by those things that are better, and that dispossesses people, and might be hard on their feelings as well, you know, if you fail at something, then, well, that's painful, and one thing you can do is rectify your failure, and the other thing you can do is criticize the structure that gave rise to the idea that behavior such as yours constitutes a failure, and that's a pretty easy way out, in some sense, you also lose the perceptual structure that the hierarchy grants you, and that's a major loss, that's the loss of a value structure, it's no joke, because it leaves you with nothing, it leaves you in an enemy, and it leaves you in chaos, it leaves you without a forward direction, and the thing about life, human life, is you can't exist, I don't think you can exist, that's the right way to think about it. You can't exist without a forward direction, and so you can't sacrifice hierarchies of value for convenience, because it leaves you with nothing, and I guess that's not exactly true either, because we're never left with nothing if we're alive, you know, because life in the absence of something worth doing isn't nothing, it's just pain and anxiety, and so what it leaves you with is pain and anxiety, is the inerradicable meanings of life, confusion, and directionlessness, and that's the consequence of demolishing, casually demolishing hierarchies of value, or even questioning the idea of value, you know, one of the things Nietzsche said, when he talked about the death of God, said, "The collapse of a belief system leaves you lost," is a paraphrase, obviously, "leaves you lost because the value system gave you a direction, an orientation, and structure," and then if that collapses, the belief in God say, the collapse of Christianity, which was what Nietzsche was commenting on, then there's a nothing that replaces it, but then he went farther, he said, "It's not just that you're left with nothing, it's worse than that, because if you lose faith in one system of value, it might not only be the case that you lose faith in that system of values, but you lose faith in the idea of systems of values as such," and then that's like a meta catastrophe, because not only do you not believe anymore, and you need to believe in order to have the faith to move forward, so not only do you not believe anymore, but you don't even believe that belief is possible, and then I would say, in some sense, that's the post-modern condition, that's the skepticism of meta-narratives, which I have plenty of trouble with, well, one being, how do you distinguish between a meta-narrative and a narrative, and that's a real problem given that the structure, the very structure of your thinking is in fact narrative, and so to be skeptical about narratives is to be skeptical about thought itself, and that's the same as being skeptical about action because thought is the precursor to action, so it's a hypothesis that, well, let's say it runs into some rather thorny, practical problems, but in any case, I'm very interested in why people's belief systems collapse and certainly understand why they might, and also interested in the process by which they might be reconstructed on solid ground, because I do believe that there is solid ground on which belief systems can be constructed, and that's what I want to cover tonight, and it's difficult, so I'm going to have to do some reading and some direct thinking, and so we'll see how that goes, so, so that's the plan anyways, all right, so this is directly from 12 rules for life, from the first part of chapter six, set your house in perfect order, it's subtitled a religious problem. It does not seem reasonable to describe the young man who shot 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 as a religious person. This is equally true for the Colorado Theatre, Gunman, and the Columbine High School killers, but these murderous individuals had a problem with reality that it existed at a religious depth as one of the members of the Columbine duo wrote, "The human race isn't worth fighting for, only worth killing, give the earth back to the animals, they deserve it infinitely more than we do, nothing means anything anymore." People who think such things view being itself as inequitable and harsh to the point of corruption and human being in particular as contemptible, they appoint themselves supreme adjudicators of reality and find it wanting. For the ultimate critics, the deeply cynical writer continues, "If you recall your history, the Nazis came up with a final solution to the Jewish problem. Kill them all." Well, in case you haven't figured it out, I say, "Kill mankind, no one should survive." For such individuals, the world of experience is insufficient and evil, so to hell with everything. What is happening when someone comes to think in this manner? A great German play, Faust, a tragedy written by Johann Wolfgang von Gertha addresses that issue. The play's main character is a scholar named Heinrich Faust, who trades his immortal soul to the devil, Mephistophiles. In return, he receives whatever he desires will still alive on earth. In Gertha's play, Mephistophiles is the eternal adversary of being. You could say in some sense that he's the literary representation of the spirit that inhabited the Columbine killers. You could say the same thing about the person who shot up Sandy Hook Elementary. No, if you dwell long on terrible things, then something terrible comes to inhabit you. Human beings are capable of being possessed by ideas, and ideas can be thousands of years old. Ideas that are thousands of years old tend to have the structure of personalities. That's a good way of thinking about them. If you dwell long in terrible places, then a personality of evil that's thousands of years old can come to inhabit you. You're capable of being the dwelling place for that complex system of conceptualizations. People have been thinking about the nature of evil for a very long time, and have thought about it as something embodied, and that makes sense, of course, because it's something that's acted out, and it comes complete with a conceptual scheme. It comes complete with its own opinions, and its own emotions, and its own motivations, and its own rationales, all of that. It's best to think of that as a personality. One of the things I really like about the psychoanalysts, and this is something that I think the cognitive scientists haven't yet figured out, although the ones who work more on the level of emotion and motivation are coming close, is the psychoanalysts figured out the beginning of 20th century that ideas were alive, that they inhabited human beings like subpersonalities, and that if you were troubled in some particular way, it was as if you were possessed by some complex, and that was the psychoanalystic term, and a complex would be something like an autonomous quasi-autonomous subpersonality that would, that would, that you had granted access, you had granted that subpersonality access to yourself, or it had somehow taken you over. Now this isn't an uncommon experience, everybody knows this, it's just, we don't articulate it that well. You know perfectly well that when you're angry, you're a different person than you are when you're calm, and the more disintegrated you are as a person, psychologically, the more different you are when you're angry than when you're not angry. When you're angry, you think about being angry as you have a point, so there's a purpose to your anger, which is usually something approximating destruction or defeat, and then there's a set of emotions that go along with that, mostly rage, but, but, but, also a certain amount of pleasure, by the way, because anger is an emotion that activates both positive and negative emotion systems, which is part of what accounts for the self-righteous sense that might accompany anger. There's been good neuro-psychological studies done of emotional response during anger, but then there's also a philosophy that goes along with it, and memories that go along with it, like, if you're fighting with someone that you love, you're having a very acrimonious argument, it can easily be the case that the only thing that you can, the only memories that you can bring to mind about their behavior in the past are those memories that are precisely as irritating as whatever it is that's driving you towards the fight at the moment. And so, because the anger turns you into something that's somewhat unidimensional, only what you know that feeds that unidimensionality comes to mind, and so it's very useful to think of it as a personality. This also is very useful if you're trying to understand what archaic people meant by deities or gods, because these gods, like anger is a god, its aries or Mars, that's a good way of thinking about the god of rage, and it can possess you, and the reason that it was conceptualized as a god was because it's a transpersonal force. Like, you're not the creator of anger, and you may not be the master of anger either. It could easily be the other way around, that anger is the master of you, and then the question is, well, what is this anger that's the master of you, and it is at least in part of personality, and it's a personality that transcends you as an individual, because everyone experiences anger, even animals experience anger, and so it's something ancient and archaic, and as we come to understand anger and express it in many different ways, and watch other people become angry, and see how it's fictionalized and portrayed in art and literature, we come to have an expanded sense of what the personality of anger might constitute, and then when we become angry, then we can manifest all of those different elements of what it means to be angry. You know, they say in the United States that as the movie industry has concentrated more and more over the decades on organized criminals, mafia types, that the mafia types have come to represent movie mafia types more and more in their actual behavior, and that's a good example of precisely that, art feeding life and life feeding art, and anger is one personality that's transpersonal, and love is another that's transpersonal in jealousy, but the figure of evil itself is one of the ultimate transpersonal entities, and so that's partly what we're going to talk about tonight. Now, that was Gert's idea in Faust when he was trying to understand the nature of evil, and he embodied it as a personality, the adversary of being, and the question is, what would be the fundamental motivation of the great adversary of being, and this is a psychological question and a personal question as well as a literary and theological question, because there will be times in your life where you're opposed to the idea of existence itself, and I think this is common experience for everyone when people despair, and that despair turns into resentment and bitterness, you question the very utility of not only your life, and then of course that leads into something approximating suicidal ideation, but that can also drive homicidal tendencies or even genocidal tendencies, and there's something underneath that too, which is deeper than mere suicide or mere homicide or mere genocide, which is the hatred for the idea of existence itself, especially limited suffering existence, and that's what Gert was attempting to express. And so his words for Mephistopheles, the great adversary of being were this, "I am the spirit who negates and rightly so, for all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly, it were better nothing would begin." He has years later Gert the Second Part of Faust, and he had Mephistopheles repeat that credo in different words, but with exactly the same thesis and the thesis is a very straightforward thesis. It's a very powerful thesis, and it's definitely one that each of us contends with. Perhaps existence is structured such that the suffering that it entails makes the whole game suspect, and that it would in fact be better if nothing existed in preference to something. And if you become desperate enough in your life, and there will be times when that's a high probability, then some variant of that idea will enter your thinking. And that's certainly the case in the situation of the people who I just described that did the particularly terrible things that they did. You can't understand the motivation of someone like the Columbine high school shooters without understanding the level at which they were seeking revenge. It wasn't personal, it wasn't social, it wasn't a matter of being bullied at school, it had gone way beyond that, absolutely way beyond that, to elevate themselves to the position of the judge of all being, and to make the determination that it would be better if everything could be punished for the crime of its existence. And you might not think that high school students could be sophisticated enough to come up with such conceptualizations, but you're perfectly welcome to go online and read the writings of the killers themselves, and you'll find some things there that will make the hair stand on the back of your neck, if you understand what's being written, that's for sure. Now in Dostoevsky's book, the brother's Kramazov, there's a character, Ivan, who's the older brother of the main character, the main character, is a monastic novitiate, and he's a good person. He's kind of a simple person, which is often the case in Dostoevsky's stories, like the idiot, and the main character in the idiot is a Christ-like figure, but by no means an intellectual giant, his virtue is in his action, in the simplicity and straight forwardness and honesty of his action, whereas Ivan Kramazov is definitely a figure of towering intellect and charisma and worldliness, and so he's the dominant character in some sense, and one of the things that's so remarkable about Dostoevsky's book, especially the brother's Kramazov, is that Ivan wins all the arguments, but loses the war, and the reason that he loses the war is because he wins all the arguments, but his brother, Aliyosha, has a better life, like a more moral life, and despite the fact that he can't articulate the rationale for the morality of his life. And so it gives Dostoevsky an advantage in some sense over Nietzsche, because Dostoevsky could dramatize what virtue looked like in the face of overwhelming intellectual criticism, and have the virtue win, despite the fact that at the intellectual level, the criticism wins. So Ivan is always criticizing Aliyosha for his simplicity and his belief in God, and Aliyosha isn't really up to the task of defending himself, and no wonder, because it's indefensible in some sense. I mean, it's become indefensible in the modern world to what, make a rational case for God. It's a good luck with that. It's very, very difficult, especially in the face of the scientific revolution, but far more than that in the face of kind of an over-weaning cynicism about the structure of reality, and also about, in the face of tremendous confusion about what it might even mean for there to be something divine. So anyways, Ivan is after Aliyosha one day, and about his belief in God, and he lays out these stories that Dostoevsky took from actual newspapers of the time, and they were stories of suffering, essentially. And Ivan picked a particular form of suffering, which is, I suppose, particularly unbearable for anybody who has any sense of compassion and fair play. And he talked about a girl, a young girl, who, as I said, this is a real story, who had been, she was four years old, I believe, and her parents were very cruel, and apparently weren't very positively predisposed to her, to say the least. And they locked her in the outhouse overnight for some infraction, and she beat on the walls, and was screaming about, and crying about being out there in the cold. And the neighbors heard, but no one did anything about it, and she was praying to Jesus to save her. And it froze to death, and Kremlin, Ivan, faces Aliyosha with his story and says, do you think that the entire structure of being is worth having one little girl like that tortured to death in that manner? He said, would you do that? And of course, Aliyosha has no answer to that, and Ivan's response is, well, it's not even so much that being is therefore unjustified, it's more than that, because Ivan isn't atheist in the standard sense, he's sort of meta-atheist, he doesn't, it isn't that he, it isn't that he has no belief in God, it's that he doesn't approve of God, and that's a different thing. And he uses the stories, which are very powerful stories, the stories of the unjust suffering of children to indicate that if there is a God, then he's certainly a morally reprehensible creature and Aliyosha is basically what driven to silence in the face of that, and unsurprisingly, because it's not so easy to formulate something coherent that justifies the suffering of innocent children, right? It's a permanent existential problem. How is it that the world could be constituted in that manner? So that's something, and I would say that Memphis-Dothley's credo is best justified by precisely that set of observations, and now the danger, of course, is that if you draw the conclusion that being as such is something so corrupt that it deserves to be eradicated, then you may come to act in that manner, which is, of course, what people like the columnine killers did, you know, on a much larger scale, people like, let's say Hitler and Stalin, who were motivated, I believe, at the deepest level by the same--by possession, by exactly the same credo, you certainly see that with Stalin, with his immense contempt for people, and also with Hitler, especially as World War II advanced, and the Germans started to lose the war, because by the end, he believed that the German nation itself deserved nothing but to perish, which, as I presume, was his hope from the beginning, because we don't have to take him at his word, and he was very attracted to fire and destruction, and the idea of purification through death, and so it's certainly possible that it was possession of that type that drove both Hitler and Stalin to do what they did, their large-scale revenge on God for the crime of existence. And so a question emerges out of that, which is whether or not evil is to be attributed to God, and I think this is a question--you see, I don't think--I don't think that you need to be--I don't think that you need to believe in God in order to be troubled by this question, because it doesn't really matter at this level of analysis whether you believe in God, because you will find that there will be times in your life where you act as if God exists, whether or not you believe in Him, and that's often the case, I would say, most commonly the case, when you're absolutely desperate, and maybe when that desperation has boiled over, spilled over into resentment and hatred, because you will find yourself acting out the great drama of doubt about the creator's goodness, something like that, even if you wouldn't articulate it in that manner, you'll play out the drama, and so you still have to ask--you still have to answer the question. And my conclusion after thinking about this for many years is that tragedy can be attributed to God but not evil, and so now I'm going to talk about why I think that's the case. So the first thing is, I'm going to talk a little bit about the story of Adam and Eve, and so--and what I think it means psychologically. It's a very interesting story, which is why we haven't forgotten it for many thousands of years, right, because it's sort of the definition of interesting that you don't forget it. And so you might think about a story like that as a maximally interesting story. You might even think about that's--you might even think that that's why it came to be, because it's a maximally interesting story. It's so interesting we can't forget it. Now why that is, that's a whole different question, and I'm not going to go into that tonight, although I think there are answers to it, but we'll proceed on the assumption that it's interesting enough to be--not to be forgotten, and for almost everyone to know it. And we'll use that as evidence that it's not forgettable. And so it's memorable, and that there's a reason for that. I think it's memorable because it describes something that we cannot describe any better, that needs to be described. So what happens in the story of Adam and Eve? There's many things, but we'll concentrate only on the rise--on the part of the story that I believe indicates is indicative of the rise to self-consciousness. Now what happens is that Adam and Eve are naked in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden is the human environment. It's the ultimate balanced combination of culture and nature. That's the walled garden, right? The walls and the garden. Culture, the walls and nature, the garden. And that's the human environment because we don't just live in nature, obviously, because we just die in nature. And we can't just live in culture because we need nature, and so we have to balance the two, and a great metaphor for the balance between nature and culture as a garden. And so that's a perfectly reasonable representation of the dwelling place of human beings. And initially we dwelled in that garden in unconsciousness, or at least in unself-consciousness. Now the dividing line between those two things is not so easy to draw. But it's certainly the case partly because human beings are clearly conscious. And animals appear to be conscious as well. Although perhaps that consciousness is on some sort of gradation from lower to higher, it's hard to tell because animals can do some very intelligent things. It doesn't seem like there is any evidence that's credible. But then animals are really self-conscious. Get trivial evidence like the fact that if you put lipstick on a chimpanzee and you show it a mirror, then it sometimes can notice that it has lipstick and that's sort of self-consciousness. But it's really reflexive self-consciousness whereas the self-consciousness that human beings possess is a much richer and detailed kind because not only can you recognize yourself as an individual entity, separate from other individual entities, but you have a theory about your own being, a very thoroughly developed, fantastical, imagistic theory of your own being that's laid out, say in dreams, and then an articulated theory of your own being. And then also on top of that, knowledge of your borders and your boundaries, which is the critical aspect, not so much whether you can recognize yourself in a mirror, but the fact that you know that you're finite in time and space, which is the critical element of self-consciousness because it defines your limits as a being, right? You once weren't and then were and at some point won't be. And it's the consciousness of that boundary that surrounds you that's like the boundary of your body except the temporal extension of that that really makes you self-conscious. And so Adam and Eve are clearly not that to begin with and the serpent tempts Eve into eating this apple, this fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is a very strange tree and a very strange fruit and a very strange tempter to say the least. And one of the great mysteries is why the fruit is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it's not obvious how the ingestion of this particular delicacy, let's say, results is associated with knowledge of good and evil. And so this is something that I did write about in 12 rules for life that took me decades to figure out. And it's it's it was a discovery that I would say shook me to the core because I think it's so crucial. And I think it's actually quite it's quite easy to understand. You already know it, but you don't know you know it. And so when you hear it, then you know that you know it and that's even worse than merely knowing it. So Adam and Eve, Eve takes the fruit and eats it and the scales fall from her eyes and then of course she shares it with her husband who who is who is equally enticed, let's say, to devour it. And the scales fall from their eyes and their eyes open, which implies that their eyes were closed to begin with. And that's the unconsciousness that I was discussing. And the first thing that happens or one of the first things that happens is that they both realize they're naked. And that's often given as sexual connotation. And there's utility in that, but that's not the fundamental issue as far as I'm concerned. Like, you know, if you have a nightmare that you're naked on stage, which is a fairly common nightmare, then that's not sexual. I mean, there might be a sexual element in it. Maybe you're afraid that people will make fun of your endowment. Let's say that. You know, but but it's deeper than that. That's that to be naked on stage is to have your limited self subject to unmediated evaluation by the group. And so that's rather terrifying. It's partly why people don't like public speaking as well, especially if they're actually saying what they mean, because then they have who they are laid bare for the evaluation of the group. And that's that's that's knowledge of that's nakedness. That's knowledge of nakedness. And the nakedness is, well, the nakedness is the vulnerability to know that you're naked is to know that you're vulnerable is to understand your is to understand your limitations. And with human beings, I think part of the reason for that and maybe part of the reason that that actually developed is because of our stance, you know, like most animals are, of course, on four legs. And they're the most vulnerable parts of them are actually armored in the mammalian community. Anyways, they're armored because they have their back covering the vulnerable front parts of them, right? But human beings we stand upright. And one of the consequences of that is that everything about us, so to speak, and certainly the most centrally vulnerable parts of us, physiologically speaking, even metaphysically speaking, for that matter, are subject to public evaluation. And not only public evaluation, but to harm because you can certainly be with open like this. I mean, we're not rhinoceroses, you know? We're not armored. We're very vulnerable creatures. And when you become self-conscious, then you become aware of that vulnerability. And then that's like a meta-vulnerability. Not only are you vulnerable, but you know it. And so not only can you then experience pain, but you can experience anxiety and not just anxiety in the trivial sense, but anxiety in the long term permanent sense, knowing that no matter how comfortable you are right now and how well constituted your life is at the moment, that all of that can break apart at any moment and leave you with nothing and leave you dead. And everything around you can disappear. And that's all a consequence of the knowledge of your limitation. And that's in some sense why death enters the world. And the consequence of that is that Adam and Eve clothed themselves, right? They put an intervening structure between them and the terrible world, both social and natural. And it's only clothing in the, it's only a leaf in the, in the story, but it's symbolic of the, well, you're all clothed. It's symbolic of that. There's a reason for that. I mean, it's warm in here. You don't have to be clothed, but you certainly are. And you have been for a very long time. It's tens of thousands of years that people have worn clothes to protect themselves against the elements for sure, but also to protect themselves against their own harsh self-judgment and the judgment of others. And that's partly the intermediation of culture against nature. And it's symbolic of that as well as because once you understand that you're vulnerable in some permanent sense across time, then you're liable to work. And of course, that's the next thing that happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that God finds out what happens. One of the next things that happens, God finds out that Adam and Eve are now self-conscious. And he says, "Now you're in trouble. You're going to have to work." As a, "Why do you have to work if you're self-conscious?" And the answer is, "Well, you might have everything you need now, but that doesn't mean you're going to have it in the future." And so there's no escape from that. You have to work. You have to sacrifice the present for the future because now you're aware of the future. And the definition of work, in some sense, is the sacrifice of the present for the future to forego gratification. If it's merely spontaneous pleasure, we don't define it as work. Work is when you're doing something for later that you'd rather not do now. And why would you do that? Well, it's because you know that you extend across time. And even if it's not you, maybe it's your family that extends across time. You're vulnerable on all fronts. And so you're going to work. And that's that. And so, well, and then, of course, the other thing that happens is that people become aware of the difference between good and evil. And that's attributed. There's a God-like element that's attributed to that. What God actually says after Adam and Eve eat the fruit and become aware of good and evil, he says, "Well, we have to remove them from paradise unless else they eat the fruit from the tree of life and live forever and be like God, God's themselves." They're halfway there with their knowledge of good and evil. Say, "Well, what's going on? How is it that the ingestion of whatever this was?" I mean, and food is often a metaphor for knowledge. It's to ingest or to dis. And you might have received a bit of indigestible news. That's a good way of thinking about it. The idea of incorporation of food and the idea of incorporation of knowledge are very tightly linked. And the reason for that, at least in part, at the metaphorical level, is part of the reason that you want to incorporate knowledge is so that you can incorporate food, right? This knowledge is actually. This knowledge is actually the abstract representation of the food that will. that will sustain you across very large periods of time. I mean, it's more than that, but it's certainly that. So there's a very tight relationship between us foraging for knowledge, which we do, and something very specific about human beings that we forge for knowledge, and that foraging for knowledge is partly what enables us to maintain ourselves biologically across long spans of time. It's like squirrels forge for nuts, and then they have to remember where the nuts are, and then the remembrance of where the nuts are is equivalent to the food, and the knowledge and the food are the same thing. And so. And then there's the food that you can eat today, and then there's the food that will sustain you for the rest of your life, and the knowledge is the food that sustains you for the rest of your life, and that's why man does not live by bread alone. That's why that works out. So Adam and Eve realized that they're vulnerable, and they realized that their. And that death enters the world at that point, the knowledge of death, so the vulnerability is final in some sense. It's cataclysmic. It destroys the structure of reality. That's what that story means, and there's something about that, you know, because we're very complex creatures as human beings. There's nothing more complex anywhere than what's inside your skull. The brain is immensely, immeasurably the most complicated thing that there is, and at some point it gathered the power to reflect upon itself. And the story in Genesis is partly predicated on the idea that that put a cataclysmic rift in the structure of reality. Now it depends on how you define reality, but the most complex thing that exists might have something crucial to do with the structure of reality, at least you can make that case, and whether it does or not, in some objective sense, whatever that might mean, it certainly does as far as you're concerned, and so that's of sufficient importance. And so what happens when you realize that you're vulnerable? Well something very interesting, and this is where the idea of good and evil enters the world, because, you know, maybe you're hungry, and maybe you're hungry like a lion, and when you're hungry like a lion, you rouse yourself out of your torpor, because most of the time lions just sleep, except when they're hungry, and then when they get hungry they organize themselves, and they go hunt, and they take down a zebra, and then they eat the zebra, and that's the end of that, and it's a little hard on the zebra, but there's no malevolence in it, you know, there's no casual slaughter, they're certainly not dragging out the torment of the zebra, you know, they're just eating, and so it's tragic certainly for the zebra, but it's not malevolent, an animal that does something carnivorous, does it by necessity, but humans can do something carnivorous out of far more than necessity, and the reason that they can do that is because they actually understand their own vulnerability, and the flip side of that is that as soon as I understand my own vulnerability, I have some sense of how I can be hurt, and what makes me terrified and anxious. As soon as I know that for me, I also know it for you, and as soon as I know it for you, then I can use it, and that's how the knowledge of good and evil enters the world with the revelation of vulnerability, and because now you have within you the power to take that knowledge of the misery of the world, and to utilize it in any way that you see fit, and so that's why human beings are capable of malevolence because they can take that which they hate, which is something far darker than mere predatory behavior, and subject to endless creative torment, and that might be something that you apply to yourself, and it might be something that you apply to your family, and it might be something that you apply to your community, and now and then it might be something that you directly apply, that you're directly engaged in precisely that malevolence, which is the exploitation of vulnerability, and if it's truly malevolent, it's exploitation of vulnerability merely for the aesthetic joy of doing so, and you see this dark humor, the satirical humor that goes along with great acts of malevolence, like this gate sign over the Auschwitz concentration camp, work will set you free, some great cosmic joke that could have only been written by the spirit of evil itself to demarcate a place where if there was work, all it was done was to parody work for the purpose of the violence and destruction that it could produce prior to death, and so that's the depths of malevolence, and there's no doubt that exists, that's for sure, and so, and so then the question I suppose is, well people became self-conscious and they became capable of malevolence, and is that something that you can lay at the feet of God, and so that's something that Milton was very interested in, in Paradise Lost, is great poem, and so, and it's a poem that's very much worth reading if you understand what it's about, and it's about free will, and it's about evil, and it's about, it's about this great narrative that we're embedded in that we don't understand, that's part and parcel of the biblical corpus, let's say, but it's also part and parcel of all the great plays and dramas, and literary productions, and musical productions, and cathedral-like architecture, and the dream, all of that artistic endeavor that's part of the dream in which our articulated cognitive structures are embedded, and that's what Milton is trying to understand, it's the structure of that underlying dream, because you're embedded in a dream, you have to dream every night, or you can't maintain your sanity, your articulated cognition has to dissolve into the dream that surrounds you in order to maintain its sanity, and the underlying metaphysics of our culture expressed at least in part in stories like the biblical corpus, constitute the dream upon which our sanity depends, even though we don't know that, and you see people like Milton who are great poets, who are geniuses of the imagination, who are playing in the realm of dreams, trying to sort things out at level that's far below articulated cognition, to wrestle with questions that are so deep that they trouble all of us, but that none of us are intelligent enough to articulate our way through, and that's why you study literature and poetry, if you have any sense, because it pushes you down into that dream where you can straighten out the metaphysics upon which you're more formal theories of being indefinitely rely, something has to buffer us, something has to serve as a buffer between our limited knowledge and the unknown itself, and it's the dream that surrounds us that constitutes that buffer, and it has to be maintained in order, and that's what poets and artists, and philosophers, if they're deep, and sometimes psychologists, that's what they do, and I'm thinking about people like Jung and Freud when I'm thinking about that. So this is God's discussion of the emergence of evil in the world, and his attempt to reconcile his attempt to justify, I would say, in some sense, the structure of being even given that malevolence made its emergence on the stage, and he's talking about the relationship between Adam and Eve, but mankind in general, and the spirit of evil as such, which might be that proclivity to seek revenge on existence for the tragedy of being, for man will harken to his glowsing lies, and easily transgress the soul command, soul pledge of obedience, so will fall. He and his faithless progeny, whose fault, whose but his own, in great. He had of me all he could have, I made him just and right, sufficient to have stood though free to fall, such I created all the ethereal powers and spirits, both them who stood and them who fell, freely they stood, who stood and fell, who fell. So that's a fairly straightforward hypothesis that evil backends, but that people have within them what would be necessary if they drew upon it to resist it. And the existence of evil, the manifestation of evil in the world can never for not be laid at the feet of God. Now, perhaps it's an argument that you don't buy, but it's an argument and it's a strong one. And then there's another justification, you know, Milton wrote Paradise Lost. He said, he wrote Milton's Paradise Lost to justify the ways of God to man. That's quite an ambition. It's a hell of a thing for someone to say, especially given that he meant it. And so here's another section from book two. Why would you allow people the choice to indulge in evil? Why, why grant the power of free will? Because perhaps that's free will is the power to choose between good and evil. It seems to be the most fundamental definition of free will. I also must change their nature. And revoke the high decree, unchangeable, eternal which ordained their freedom. They themselves ordained their fall, self-tempted, self-depraved. And one more, and perhaps this is more relevant to freedom to choose the good rather than evil. What pleasure I, from such obedience, paid when will and reason reason also is choice, useless and vain of freedom both dispoiled, made passive both, had served necessity, not me. They therefore as to right, belonged. So were created. Nor can justly accuse their maker or their making, or their fate as if predestination overruled. So the next story in Genesis is the story of Cain and Abel. And it's a very interesting story. It's a very short story. It's only a few lines long. I don't, I've never encountered a story that has that much depth packed into that tiny amount of space. It's absolutely unfathomable, in some sense. And so I'll go over the story briefly. The first thing is, is that, well, Adam and Eve are the mother and father of us all, and so you could say, well, if you were thinking about it symbolically, maybe from the Jungian perspective that Eve is the personification of nature itself, and Adam is the personification of culture itself, and each of us is the child of nature and culture. And then the question is, well, what is the fundamental nature of the child of nature and culture? And the answer is Cain and Abel, the hostile brothers, the first two real human beings, because they're born in this standard manner, they're not made by God, they're real. And it's a terrible story because it's a story of murder and worse. And so that's the first story of mankind. And this is the story. So there's Cain and there's Abel, and Cain is the first born, and Abel is the second born, and there's a reason for that, but we won't go into that. And they're both working in the world, they have to work, because work has entered the world, and Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a shepherd. And then shepherd is no trivial thing. It's not a little boat peep, you know, a few thousand years ago, if you were guarding sheep, there were wolves and lions, and you had very rudimentary weapons. And so if you're going to defend your sheep against lions, then you were the sort of person who could defend sheep against lions, and that's no joke. And so, and that's useful to know. In any case, Cain and Abel makes sacrifices to God. It's kind of a mystery. It's a mystery for modern people because we don't know what this means to build an altar, and to burn something, and to offer the burnt remnants to God. It's to offer something to God. It's the acting out of an idea, right? And it's a deep idea. It's the idea of work itself, because work itself is sacrifice, or it's a deeper idea than that. The idea is that in order to get something that you need and want in the future, you have to let go of something you value in the present. And that's the discovery of the future. So this idea of sacrifice that's put forth, and so early, and this document is, it's a representation of what might be the second most fundamental discovery that human beings ever made, is that we can alter our behavior in the present so that the future would change. That's a hell of a thing to discover. It is literally the discovery of possibility itself. And the thing about it is it's actually true, or at least we all act as if it's true. You do give things up in the present so that the future can be better. You do actually act out the idea that reality is structured such that if you bargain with it properly, you will avoid punishment and receive and receive what's good. It's a negotiation, and it's an act of trade. And the strange thing is that it actually works. Now, part of the reason that it works is because you're actually negotiating with future people and your future self. And so there is a personified element to reality in that manner, but it's deeper than that, but we can leave it at that. And so people had to act this out before they could understand it. We can hardly understand it. Now, you know, I ask my students, well, did your parents make sacrifices so that you could go to university? They're often children of first generation immigrants, and they can just reel off the sacrifices. Everyone knows what this means, but when we see it transposed, you know, several thousand years into the past, and we see it manifested itself in its more archaic form, like the pretend plane that children engage in, in some sense, there's a disjunction, and we don't understand, but the idea is fairly straightforward. Well, there's some ultimate structure of reality. Where might you encounter that? Well, how about the sky? Well, why would you think that? Well, go out and look at the sky at night and see how you feel, and see that that produces a sense of awe at the realization of infinity itself. And believer and non-believer, that emotion is there. And so why not put the divine in the unknown like that? It's perfectly reasonable. And then, so God inhabits the celestial spheres. Fine, how do you communicate? Well, smoke rises. Well, so you burn something, and it offers up the essence to whatever resides up there. It's a little bit on the concretized side, but it's not so bad for a first-pass approximation, a first-pass abstraction of the idea of sacrifice itself as a fundamental moral necessity. We had to discover that somehow, and so Cain makes his sacrifices, and Abel makes his sacrifices, and Abel is very careful in his sacrifices, and he takes the best of what he has, and he sacrifices that. And what it means, he puts his best foot forward. That's what it means. Whereas Cain, well, we're never too sure, and the story is a bit ambivalent, and it should be because, you know, it might be that because there's some something about life that's somewhat arbitrary, and it isn't obvious always that those who put their best foot forward are justly rewarded, and those who fail to do so are justly punished, right? There's an arbitrary element, and so there's some ambivalence about Cain, but you get the sense from the story that he isn't putting his best foot forward, far from it. And what happens, well, what happens to Abel is everything good happens to him, and every time something good happens, then something even more good happens, because what do they say? From those who have nothing, everything will be taken, and to those who have everything more will be given, and that's already played out in the story of Abel, you do things right, and then things start to happen in a good way, and then that starts to multiply, and up you go, and then, but if you take the other pathway, let's say, and you don't make the proper sacrifices, and you hold back what's best, because you think you can get away with it, or because you don't think it's necessary, because you're not willing to make the effort, or whatever it might be, then it goes from bad to worse very, very rapidly. That's exactly what happens to Cain, and he's not very happy about it, and so he decides to have it out with God, and it's no bloody wonder. And so he confronts God, and he says something like this. What's up with this universe that you created? I'm breaking myself in half down here, trying to struggle forward against the impossible odds that you've laden me with, and nothing's going well for me, and then there's Abel, you're darling, and everything works out for him, everyone likes him, everything he touches works out. It's like, what the hell's going on here? And God says to him something that took me a long time to understand, I had to look at a lot of different translations, and think this through for a long time to understand what it meant. God says something like, sin personified. Sin, that means to miss the target, by the way. Sin crouches at your door like an amorous and aroused predatory animal, and you've chosen to invite it in so that it can have its way with you in the creative sense that that amorous arousal would indicate metaphorically, that you've invited something in that you can join with creatively and produce something as a consequence, and what you've produced is not a good thing, and that's why things aren't going well for you. And that's the end of the discussion. And it says in the story that Cain's countenance fell, it's like, yes, well, you can imagine that it might, because of all the things that you don't want to find out when you put a complaint like that forward to God, is that it's your doing, or you're not doing, that's bringing it about. And so what's Cain's reaction? Well, it should be, what should it be? It should be to shut himself up in a cave for a month and think very carefully about everything that he's done in his entire life that's wrong and put it right. But that isn't what happens. What happens is he finds Abel and he kills him. And why does he do that? Well, every ideal is a judge. How about that? Abel is actually what Cain would like to be. And worse, knows that he could be if he had chosen to be. And the pain of that is so great, let's say, the pain of that gap between the ideal and the reality is so great that Cain chooses instead to destroy his own ideal out of spite against God for the conditions of existence. And that's the story of human malevolence. Well, Cain calls God the pain of what he's done is too great for him to bear. It's not clear exactly what that means, but perhaps it does mean that he realizes that he's destroyed his own ideal and therefore has nothing left. And God marks him and tells people to leave him be. And I think the reason for that, at least in part, is it's an indication of the lack of utility for a cycle of revenge. But it doesn't matter because then Cain has offspring. And if you bother, if you disturb, if you transgress against one of Cain's sons, then seven of you die. And if you transgress against one of Cain's grandsons, then 49 of you die. And then his descendant, approximately next in line, is tubal Cain. And he's the first person who makes weapons of war. And so there's that idea there lurking in that story that not only is there this Cain-enabled drama that exists, that's a fundamental part of human nature. That's the hostile brothers. That's the two forms of reaction to self-consciousness itself. But that the Cain-like response multiplies and is fundamentally responsible for the catastrophes of war. And that seems to me to be precisely accurate. Also, then the question is, well, is there something that can be done about it? Maybe I'll go one more place before I do that. I recently wrote the forward to the abridged version of Solshen-Hitzen's Gulaig Archipelago. That was just published today, conveniently enough. And I was thinking about why the Russian Revolution went so terribly when it was predicated, at least in principle, on compassion for the dispossessed. It's not so easy to have compassion for the dispossessed. It's easy to claim compassion for the dispossessed. But to segregate that from hatred for the successful, let's say, or maybe more to segregate that from hatred for the good and justly rewarded is no straightforward thing. So I'm going to read you something from the forward. The Russian Revolution became bloody very rapidly. It wasn't that there was a pristine period where the poor were treated properly. And then over time, the structure of the revolution became corrupt. It was exceedingly murderous right from the beginning, which lightly due to conclude that it was exceedingly murderous motivations that dominated right from the beginning, despite the claim. Solshen-Hitzen cites, for example, one Martin Latsis writing for the newspaper, Red Terror, November 1, 1918. We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education, and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of Red Terror. It is necessary to think when you read such a thing to meditate long and hard on the message. It is necessary to recognize, for example, that the writer believed that it would be better to execute 10,000 potentially innocent individuals than to allow one poisonous member of the oppressor class to remain free. It is equally necessary to pose the question, who precisely belonged to that hypothetical entity, and the bourgeoisie. It is not as if the boundaries of such a category are self-evident there for the mere perceiving. They must be drawn, but where exactly more importantly by whom or by what? If it is hate inscribing the lines instead of love, they will inevitably be drawn so that lowest, meanest, most cruel, and useless of the conceptual geographers will be justified in manifesting the greatest possible evil and producing the greatest possible misery. Members of the bourgeoisie, beyond all redemption, they had to go as a matter of course. What are their wives? Children, even their grandchildren, off with their heads too, all were incorrigibly corrupted by their class identity and their destruction therefore ethically necessitated. How convenient that the darkest and direst of all possible motivations could be granted the highest of moral standings. That was a true marriage of hell and of heaven. What values, what philosophical presumptions truly dominated under such circumstances? Was it the desire for brotherhood, dignity, and freedom from want? Not in the least given the outcome. It was instead and obviously the murderous rage of hundreds of thousands of biblical canes each looking to torture, destroy, and sacrifice their own private ables. There's simply no other manner of accounting for the corpses. And it is exactly the necessity for interminable sacrifice that constitutes the terrible counterpart of the utopian vision. Heaven is worth any price, but who pays? Christianity solved that problem by insisting on the sacrifice of the self. Insisting that the suffering and malevolence of the world is the responsibility of each individual. Insisting that each of us sacrifice what is unworthy and unnecessary and resentful and deadly in our own characters, despite the pain of such sacrifice, so that we could stumble properly uphill under our respective and voluntarily-shouldered existential burdens? Solzhenetsson said, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, and mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such pondering over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners. I remember myself in my captains, shoulder boards, and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say, 'So were we any better?' But it was, and is the opinion of the materialist utopians that someone else be sacrificed, so that heaven itself might be attained. Some perpetrator or victimizer or oppressor, or member of a privileged group – a cynic might be forgiven in consequence for asking. Is it the city of God that is, in fact, the aim? Or is the true aim the desire to make a burning sacrificial pyre of everyone and everything? And the hypothesis of the coming brotherhood of man merely the cover story, the camouflage, perhaps it is precisely the horror that is the point and not the utopia. It is far from obvious in such situations just what is horse and what is cart. It is precisely in the aftermath of the death of a hundred million people or more that such dark questions must be asked. And we should also note that the utopian vision, dressed as it is inevitably in compassion, is a temptation particularly difficult to resist and may therefore offer a particularly subtle and insidious justification for mayhem. There's this story in the cocktail party by T.S. Eliot, this woman who's not having a good time of it talks to a psychiatrist and it's just out of party and she says to him, seeking free medical advice, "My life is not going well. I'm suffering and it's too much to bear." But I'm really hoping that it's my fault and he's surprised and he asks, "Why would you hope that? Why would you hope that it was your fault?" And she says, "Well, there's only two options as far as I can tell. Either I'm suffering as a consequence, unbearably, as a consequence of the structure of existence itself, in which case I'm lost, there's nothing I can possibly do, or there's something that I'm doing wrong that I could rectify to improve the situation." That's the issue. That's the rule. Put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. What's the idea? Well, if things are not going sufficiently well for you and if that's leading you to dark places which it will, then the proper response, and that would be the response that wouldn't make everything worse, is to ask yourself, is what you say true? Is what you do true? Are you aiming upward? Are you making all the sacrifices that are necessary? Have you taken advantage of all the opportunities that are laid out in front of you? Have you done everything you possibly can to put your house in order? Or instead, are you going to do what Cain does and dare to challenge God? The consequence of the former, at least in principle, is the destruction of that part of you that's unworthy and the possibility of rebirth and redemption. And the consequence of the second is your descent and the descent of everyone that you have contact with into something as closely resembling hell as you can manage. Thank you very much. So I want to do one thing before I dive into the audience questions. I think when I tell the audience that you change it up every night, I think people will think I'm being sarcastic or hyperbolic, but I'm not, but I thought tonight this may have been the most intense talk you've given the entire time. How do you feel right now? How do you feel after you do that? Give everything that you have for a good hour and a half. Well, that's a rough lecture, that one. Yeah, I mean, that's the darkest rule in the book by a large margin. And you know, I was surprised when I went because I read it, I reread it before coming out here tonight. And I thought that I was surprised how short it was, and I knew that there was a lot underneath it. And you know, I was quite nervous backstage, partly too, because most of the time I don't use notes. I mean, now and then I'll read the lecture when it's something really new. And I'm not familiar with it. But I most never use notes. And so, also using notes is not common. And so I was nervous about that. And I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to weave all those elements together. Because I wrote out what I talked about tonight, I guess in the half an hour before the show. So that's also, it was a tight day, right? Because we flew in from Amsterdam. It was in Amsterdam for the last three days. It was really, really busy in Amsterdam. And so when we came here and went to our hotel, I just slept for about four hours. And then there wasn't much time, you know, and so I prepared backstage. And I usually just sit and think about what I'm going to say. And I can get that ordered, but to have written that out. And then not to know if it was going to cohere. And whether or not I was going to get to the end and all of that. And then the seriousness of it, it's a terrible, terrible topic. It's the worst of all possible topics, which is why I saved it for you people at Cambridge. By the way, I figured I figured this was a good place. I mean, it makes sense to do that at a place like this. You know, it's sort of the center of the intellectual universe. I mean, I'm sure the Oxford people wouldn't be very happy to hear that. But I let them off light in comparison. That's for sure. But it's rough, man. It's rough that lecture. So I'm glad it's over mostly. I'm sure you all are as well. Not to eat yet. All right, let's dive into some of these. Given your popularity, is it possible that people develop an ideology loyal to your stances? How would you suggest people continue to develop their own views? Well, that is what I suggest. So it's a weird thing. You know, I don't know. Is the ideology of developing your own views and ideology? I mean, what about a cult of individuality? How about that? Is that a possibility? I mean, I don't, I mean, there's this funny line. And you remember the life of Brian, and Brian is up on the second floor of his house with his mother, I think, and that crowd is outside. Some of them have shoes and some of them have gourds, which is really ridiculously comical. And he, he, he's really not happy that all these people have gathered. He says, you shouldn't be following me around. You're all individuals, and they all chant. We are all individuals. It's like, it's so funny. It's so ridiculously comical. But I mean, I'm hoping that, I'm hoping that what I'm providing is actually an encouragement to the development of genuine individuality outside of the persona shell, the non-playable character shell, right, as the new meme has it. You know, and I don't think that the idea that the individual is the sovereign element is a cult. It's not a cult idea. It's maybe the, it's, maybe it's, it's maybe the non-cult idea. I believe that. Now, you know, my students have told me for years, some of them, I lay out in maps of meaning what I regard as a comprehensive representation of narrative structure. It's balanced. There's positive elements and negative elements in balance, and make the case that what an ideology does is only represent some of the characters. So, for example, the idea that the West is a patriarchal tyranny. It's like, that's an ideology. Why? Well, because the West is partly a patriarchal tyranny, right? And there's a big difference between stating that something is only one thing and that it's partly one thing. That's the difference between, well, it's the difference between delusion and reality. In my, my world, it's the difference between sophisticated nuance, thought, and, and a one-size-fits-all cure for every problem in the absence of the necessity of thinking. You know, the tyrannical patriarchy is the evil king. Well, there's always an evil king. Everyone knows that, but there's a wise king too, you know, and you have to, you have to have some gratitude for the wise king at the same time that you have some apprehension about the evil king and some proclivity to criticize him. And so, when you just see one, you know, especially when that's allied by the idea, well, what's the antidote to the evil king? Well, the wise queen. It's like, well, fair enough, but what about the evil queen? Well, there's no evil queen. There's no evil queen. There's just the evil patriarchy. It's like, you know, what happens in Sleeping Beauty? You know, the Disney movie? What happens if you don't invite the evil queen to your daughter's christening party? She grows up unconscious and falls asleep at puberty, right? Never to awake. That's what happens, because she's too painfully naive. So, I don't forget to invite the evil queen to your damn party. And so, you know, what you're providing with a balanced narrative, and this is what a profound religious system actually does, like a truly poetic system. It provides all the characters, and then an ideology is a parasite on that. It pulls the mode of force from that underlying dream-like structure, and it manipulates it and uses it, but it's, well, so what I'm hoping, and who knows, is that the narrative that I've laid out that's implicit in 12 rules, and more explicit in my book, maps of meaning, actually lays things out in a balanced manner. And so, it's good to know the whole story. It's good to know that there's a benevolent element to culture, and a malevolent element, and that there's a benevolent element to nature, and a malevolent element, and that there's a heroic element to the individual, and an adversarial element, and that all of those things have to be part of your conceptualization of reality. I mean, they are in some sense, because when you go and watch a movie, or you read a novel, any of this, those characters are always there. It wouldn't be a story without those characters. They're always there, and you need all of them, and then you have to figure out how to put them in balance. And so, so I'm hoping that's not an ideology. I'm hoping that it's something much more fundamental than an ideology, just like I believe that the idea that the individual is sovereign, and that each sovereign individual is a center of creation. I don't believe that that's an arbitrary ideological idea. I think it's the truth. It's the grounding truth. It's certainly the grounding truth of our culture. And your culture, this great culture that you people have managed to build over centuries that's been, in my estimation, a fundamental light in the darkness of the world. It's predicated on the idea of the sovereignty and value of the individual. That's not just an idea, man. That's the idea. And so, well, so I don't think that if you're an acolyte of that idea, and you understand it, that it's something, there's something cult-like about it. It's like, there's no following in that. There's only you, man. It's on you, straighten yourself out. And I don't see that that's a cult. It's like, it doesn't have any of the elements of a cult. There isn't anything required of you except to do what you can do and to do everything you can to do what you can do. And that's not how cults operate. So, I think it's rubbish. So. So, what you're saying is it's a cult. Actually, the second most uploaded question here was, "Do you and Kathy Newman stay in touch?" Only in brief Twitter wars. So, which are probably not very productive, but well, that's life. I have asked her if she'd like to have another discussion. At one point, she did get back and touch with me through an intermediary. This was after the first interview, and she said that she would wait until the scandal died down. I guess it hasn't died down yet. What's the best piece of advice that someone has given you? I would say it's something approximating, avoid arrogance if possible. That was probably one of my father's fundamental pieces of advice to not brag when I was a kid. I mean, I don't know if I had a particular propensity for that. I mean, I was a smart kid, and I had a reputation for that in the little town that I was in for a variety of reasons. So, which wasn't necessarily a stellar route to popularity, although I'm not complaining about that. It had its advantages, and I wasn't a non-popular kid. That was just the thing that if I was bothered about, most people have something they're bothered about, and you could have a lot worse things to be bothered about than that, but to stay. I hate the word humble because I don't really. You can't claim to be humble and be humble, right? You know what I mean? That doesn't work. So, it's hard to describe it, but I am partly as a consequence of that, I think. I think that was embedded very deeply in me because my father was very adamant about that. I think I am very reflective about what I might do to improve, and I try to concentrate on that, and that's good advice. It's very good advice to the degree that advice can be good. That's kind of what tonight's lecture was about, that what you should do is concentrate on how you could improve. You know, you don't have any right to become cynical and better unless you've stopped making mistakes. You know, you might say, "Well, you'll never stop making mistakes." It's like, "Well, the biggest mistake is not to recognize and rectify your mistakes." I think that's the sin against the Holy Ghost, you know, that's unforgivable. So, that would be a piece of stellar advice. We talked a little bit about this during the break here. Do you sense things are going to get much worse before they get better? I think that's up to us, man, to decide. I don't think they have to get worse. I mean, there's lots of reasons, there's lots of evidence that in many ways things are getting better, depends on your level of analysis, at a rate that's almost beyond comprehension. I mean, we're lifting people out of poverty worldwide at an absolutely, at a rate that's absolutely unparalleled in the entire history of the world, right? We have the number of people in absolute poverty between the year 2000 and the year 2012. The most optimistic UN projection goal was 15 years, we did it in 12. It's mind-boggling. And even the UN projects now that by the year 2030, there won't be anyone in the world that lives under their current level of abject poverty, it's $1.90 a day. And you think, "Well, that's pretty damn low." It's like, "Yeah, that's for sure." And so you could say, "Well, that's sort of an arbitrary line." And it is, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. The point is is that people have superseded that. And it's also salutary to understand that in 1895, which isn't that long ago, the average person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day. So, you know, by historical standards, $1.90 a day, well, it's not luxury. Let's put it that way, but it's well above the historical norm. And so, and that's not the only good news. There's lots of good news. Child mortality rates in Africa are now what they are. We're in Europe in 1952. That's really good news. Looks like our population will probably peak out at 9 billion, which we can, that's tight. It'll be a bit of a bottleneck, you know? But it looks like we can probably feed all those people, and it'll decline precipitously after that. There's more forest in the northern hemisphere than there was 100 years ago, and more forest in China than there was 30 years ago. And it looks like if you can get people's GDP up to about $5,000 a year, they start taking care of the environment. And there's no wars in the Western hemisphere for the first time in, well, for the first time, that's a big deal. You know, well, that's a big deal. No wars. And rates of violence all over the world are plummeting and rates of death and warfare have declined precipitously over the entire course of the, well, ever since the end of World War II. And, you know, everybody and their dog has more technological power in their hand by a huge margin than sent the astronauts to the moon in 1969. And it costs absolutely nothing and draws no power. That's certainly moving the economies of Africa forward. And the sub-Saharan countries in Africa have the fastest growing economies in the world. So it looks like the economic miracle that took hold in China and Southeast Asia. And India has finally spread into Africa. And that's starting to produce real improvement. And so that's a lot of good things, man. And maybe that could accelerate. But, you know, we're also becoming more and more technologically powerful. And I think we're politically polarized in the west in a manner that's perhaps not dangerous, but it intimates the possibility of danger. And that would be a catastrophe. And so what I'm hoping is that people will be sensible and careful and live decent respectable, responsible lives. And that if enough people do that, then that'll stabilize things. And we won't have to do something catastrophically stupid. But we'll see. Like, I think it could go either way. That's how it feels to me. And I don't know. I mean, I don't know. It's very difficult to predict the future. But I think it feels like that to a lot of people. So we're in a choice point. Like, we were in 1984. You know, it seemed to me that in 1984, the whole world decided that, well, let's step away from the nuclear brink. You know, because it really got intense in 1984. '62 was another one. But I think the Cuban Missile Crisis was '62. 1984, things really peaked again. And I think we made a collective decision. It's like, no, let's not put everything to the torch. You know, and maybe we can make another decision now. Let's not destroy what we've labored to produce just as it's bearing fruit everywhere. Because I believe that it is. So we've got things to do. We've got good things to do. We could we could eliminate the five most common diseases in the world in the next 20 years. There are people working diligently to do that. It's within our grasp. We could certainly eradicate hunger. We've more or less done that already. You know, we could really get things in order if we chose that. But we have to get rid of the bitterness and the resentment. And we have to aim at that. And we'll see. It's a terrible thing to give up bitterness and resentment, you know. It's satisfying. What is it psychologically about humans that causes us to focus on all of the negative things where you could do it easily a lecture an hour and a half on all the positive things that you just mentioned. But we don't focus on them or you could tweet them all out every day. And it wouldn't do half as well as talking about all the terrible things out there. Well, we're we're tilted so that a loss of a given magnitude has more psychological impact than a gain of the same magnitude. And the reason. So if you lose five dollars, you're more annoyed at yourself than if you find that you are happy if you find five dollars on the street. And like the ratio of response to gain and response to loss differs from person to person. If you're very extroverted, you experience gain more positively. And if you're very high in trait neuroticism, which is the negative emotion dimension, then you feel lost more profoundly. But on average, people are tilted more towards the pain of loss. The reason for that is that, well, you know, so what you're happy, fine, what if you're dead? Right? So like pain and anxiety are signals that you ignore at your mortal peril. Whereas things that signify positive outcomes are generally only only signify, you know, temporary and incremental improvements. So it makes sense that we're lost a verse, right? Because we can be hurt so badly. But it does make it much more difficult for us to to properly wait positive news. You know, so you know, and there were also wired to be looking for threat. Like you don't have to look around for things that are okay. You know, you don't even see things. That's another problem with our perception in some sense. Everything that's okay is invisible, right? Because well, why wouldn't it be? You don't have to do anything about it. You're not paying attention to the floor. And that's because it's not going to fall out from underneath you. You know, so, and you're so blind in that way, it's just absolutely unbelievable. You can't believe how much you don't pay attention to. But you pay attention to things that might go wrong. Well, that makes sense because those are the things you should think about. But it does tilt us towards apocalyptic thinking. You know, that's why the apocalypse is always nigh. There's always something that could go wrong enough to blow everything into bits. So it's something that we have to struggle carefully to regulate because it can be exploited. And I think it's being exploited by the mainstream media as it dives into its death spiral. You know, and well, I'm really serious about that in a technical sense because like we had a means of communicating globally that was more or less quasi-stable for a few decades. You know, it was centralized, narrowcast, television, radio, not accessible to everyone at least in terms of production. So there was sort of a consensus that emerged as a consequence of that. And everybody focused on it. So there were lots of dollars flowing into it to sustain it. Well, now that's falling apart because everybody is now a news producer. And the consequence of that is that mainstream media is falling apart because it lacks viewership and money and budgets and fact checking and highly paid journalists and all of that. And so increasingly in order to retain a shrinking audience, they tilt towards covering the extremes. You know, like there's good estimate published a week or two ago in the Atlantic monthly that it depends on how you define these things, of course, but the extreme political views on the left and the right only characterize about 8% of people on the left in the US and a slightly smaller fraction if I remember correctly, but approximately the same on the radical right. But if you are engaged with the news, you'd think that that was everyone. And it's not. It's hardly anyone. And then the question is, well, why is all the focus on those people and the answer is, well, they say provocative things that attract attention and what the news media is driven to do in the short term now because their medium to long term survival is in doubt is to maximize short term return. And you do that with sensationalism. And you see an analog of that, this is a very bad thing. I don't, you probably don't know this, but the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by 50 percent in the last 30 years, 50 percent. You know, they're shutting jails down in New York City because they just don't have enough people to put in them. And so it's a real catastrophe. You know, it's got to get that criminal population motivated, but at the same time, so now in the United States, well, first of all, New York City is one of the safest major metropolitan areas in the United States. But at the same time, and it's safer in the US on the street than it has been since the early 60s, and that's safer than it ever was in the entire course of human history. So it's like, that's as good as it gets. But what's happened is that the reporting of violent crime has gone way up over the same period of time. So if you ask people, are the streets more dangerous than they once were, everyone says, oh my god, yes, it's way more, it's like, no, it's not, it's way safer, way safer. But that's, but the, but the messaging is not an unbiased sample of the reality. And so, well, we don't know what to do about that because we don't know what to do about this technological revolution, you know, that's, that's, that's democratized news production. And one is destroying these old enterprises. In the UK, it was reported two months ago or so, more people now get their video online than on TV. That flipped about two months ago. And like, I had this experience a while ago, I was on a major TV show in the United States. And it was about a product that I have, an online product that's a, it's a personality scale called understand myself. And I had my whole team prepared, we thought, man, we better get our servers in order because we're going to talk about this personality test. And the, the demand for it's going to spike and hopefully it won't crash our system. So, we stress tested them for like two months. It was like, so then the day came and this story was released, an audience hypothetically in the millions and tens of millions around the world had zero effect on sales. Zero. It just shocked me. I thought, oh, I see, people aren't watching TV. They just have it on. And so people over 55, it's like, they're not watching it. They're just lo and some. It's like, well, I need some noise, click, you know, and then they go, you know, people like that, you know, they have their TV on all the time. But people on YouTube, they're watching it. It's different. And so I think the, I think the mainstream TV stations, when I walked now into a TV station, like a mainstream TV station, it feels like I'm in 1975. It's like, what's this? This is like, it's like back to the future, you know? So, I think that's just dead. And podcasts are really hard on radio. And so it's desperation that's driving attention to the polarizing figures. And that makes it, you know, and another thing that's happened in the US, like surveys have been conducted over the last two years. You ask someone, well, how's your life? How's thing going for you and your family? Oh, better than they have been for a long time. Well, how do you think everyone else is doing? Oh, they're doing terribly. And, and, you know, that's also not good because actually people aren't doing terribly. We've been in, how many cities have we been in the US in the last, like 40, in the last three months? Oh, that's just on the second half. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. How are the cities looking? Pretty good. Pretty good. Hey, downtown lots of activity. Some of them are rough, Philly, Philadelphia is kind of rough, but it's been rough for a long time. But man, most of the cities, it's like they're rebuilding their downtown cores. There's construction everywhere. It's like, it's, there's, there, it's not Venezuela. I can tell you that. Although San Francisco does have the poop app where, well, they tell you where humans poop, and there's an app for that. Well, stupidity and economic failure, not the same thing. So, yeah. All right, we only have time for one more. I think I thought this would be sort of a fitting end or a funny one to end on here in Cambridge. Any news about your online university? Is it going to offer a recognized degree? No, I won't offer a recognized degree because that would cost like $20 million and take 30 years and then I'd be dead and broke. And that I'm not interested in either of those outcomes. And I'm certainly not interested in their intersection. No, what our hope is that we'll, we'll provide a, what we're trying to design is something like a portal. Imagine that it was sort of like a companion. That might be a way of thinking about it, thinking reasonably far into the future, that tracked the way that you use YouTube and the internet so that you could get credit for what you learned and that you could set, it could help you set up learning objectives and it could assess your knowledge and teach you to read and teach you to write and teach you to think and that that would be personalized to you and that that would accompany your use of online technology. And then that your progress could be tracked and that would constitute the accreditation. And then imagine that that accreditation was of sufficient validity so that it actually measured your skills accurately so that it would become valedic accreditation by its quality. That's what we're aiming at. And so it's impossible. It probably won't work. Something like that's going to be built eventually because like the way that we interact online is, you know, maybe your portal is Google search or Reddit or whatever or the YouTube. It's like the user interface for interfacing with the content is it's not there. It doesn't make any sense. It's like there should be something more programmatic about it. It's something less random. So, so why not, why not allow people to assess themselves with regards to what knowledge they've accrued and to have a continual record of that across time. And so, so that's the vision at the moment. And, you know, perhaps this is thinking a long ways down the road maybe 10 years, you know, perhaps that could be something allied with a particularly insightful form of artificial intelligence that was personalized to you that would know what you knew. And then, so imagine this, imagine that you knew, you know, 20 percent about some topic. And that the system could figure out how how that knowledge compared to a bunch of people, a very large group of people who knew 25 percent about the topic and that the system knew the pathway from 20 percent to 25 percent so that it could tell you, look, here's where you are in your knowledge about X topic. Here's two things you could watch. A couple of questions you could answer. Man, you'd be up to 22 percent and so forth. And I can't see any reason why that's, that's what Raymond at. We've developed a prototype already for that. And I just can't see any reason why that would, I think people would find that attractive and imagine as well that, you know, maybe you developed a certain amount of knowledge about a political issue or a historical issue and I could say, well, here's a hundred people who have about the same knowledge that you do. You could all enter into a little contest. It's like which of you can maximize your knowledge fastest in the next month, then you could track that. You'd have a peer group, you know, that you could compete with because that sort of competition is kind of entertaining and so we'd like to introduce a competitive element into it. And we're starting to figure out how to teach people to write online. So one of our ideas is imagine that to take a bunch of paragraphs that were written by people who can write, you know, and you wouldn't have to judge that accurately because what we do is just assume that high quality books were written by people who could write and high quality books are ones that are cited a lot, let's say we take paragraphs from those books and then scramble the sentences, so the scramble the sentences into phrases and scramble the paragraphs into scrambled paragraphs and then have you set them right. It's like, well, here's a scrambled sentence, drag and drop the phrases, see if you can match the original. You know, that's a good way of scaffolding writing and we don't know how to teach people to write on a mass scale. It's really expensive because usually you write something and then someone has to grade it and that's just unbelievably time-consuming and painful and unbelievably expensive. So it can't scale, but we've got about 10 ideas about how we might be able to teach people to write more effectively and that should help them think more effectively. And I've got a good little team, a small team working on this and we're not over-capitalized, I'm funding this mostly as a consequence of Patreon donations, so I put a chunk of the Patreon donations aside for this. We are not raising money because one of the things I've learned when you develop a new project is that if you raise too much money, then what you have is the problem of what to do with all that money, which is not the same problem as whatever the problem is that you're trying to work on and so we just want to work on the problem and we'll scale incrementally if necessary, but but that's the plan and we've made arrangements with a couple of consortia of private schools in the United States who are willing to allow us to test the software on students as we develop it. So another thing if you're developing a product, it's a really useful thing to know. You don't build the whole product and then launch it into the marketplace because like what the hell do you know? Even if it's a good product, that doesn't mean people will buy it. What you do is develop a little bit and then survey a bunch of people and carefully and see if they would actually buy it. Like they might say they like it, they might think that it's cool, they might think it's a good idea, all that's completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that they would actually purchase it and so you develop, you test, you develop, you test, you develop, you test and so we've got a huge range of people who are willing to test and so we're hoping that we can produce a universal online education system that will cover the knowledge domains as such. We've already mapped them out from Wikipedia. My smart kids, the guys that are working on this, one of the problems we're trying to solve is well, how do you conceptualize knowledge domains? What are the knowledge domains? It's like well the universities have disciplines. Well, are those the right boundaries? Are those the right categories? I mean, who knows? They're just kind of arbitrary. Well, one of them found a site that mapped knowledge structure of Wikipedia. So that was one week's work. He's very smart this kid. Well, here's the knowledge structure of Wikipedia. That's good. It's like English common law because Wikipedia emerged organically. It evolved and so if you track the structure of Wikipedia, you might think, well, that's pretty good snapshot of human knowledge and so now we've got the basic structure of knowledge laid out and we can map the interrelationships and we've got people who are working on it that are pretty good at statistics and measurement and so we hope instead of offering university degrees, we're going to try to offer a valid form of accreditation instead. So that's the plan. It'll probably fail but it's, well, it's so ridiculously difficult and unlikely that the probability that it will succeed is very low but it's a worthwhile, it's a very challenging thing to do and so that's something, you know, and the people that I'm training will learn a tremendous amount doing it and so even if it fails, they'll go do something else that's successful and it's a very interesting problem to try to solve. So, well, so that's what we're doing with the online education system. So. Well, on that note, he clearly has a lot of work to do so I, I'm going to get out of the way, make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peters and everybody. Thank you guys very much. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or as newer bestseller, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Petersen podcast. See JordanB Petersen.com for audio, ebook, and text links or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B Petersen. On Twitter, @JordanB Petersen. On Facebook, @Dr.JordanB Petersen, and at Instagram @Jordan.B. Petersen. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanB Petersen.com. My online writing programs designed to help people straighten out their paths, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com from the Westwood One podcast network.