This podcast is brought to you and made possible by generous financial aid from Peter kanzler K. Ay n z l-- e-- r-- you can buy his Amazon books at your favorite Amazon Branch, for example, the original texts of lock Hobbs and the US Constitution of Pennsylvania put together into one book for only $15. Thanks for listening. Thanks. I've been thinking about here recently and I don't know why I hadn't really realized this before but you realize things in stages is that I think that this model this hierarchy is actually a model of the unconscious. So when people talk about the unconscious, I think this is what it is because there's the procedural unconscious. That's at the lowest level right? Because that's movement. So that would be procedural memory. And then the the hierarchy is above that or representational most of them or or their what area called kinetic Melodies which would be Habitual patterns of behavior that you've mastered strung together in a novel way but then above that that starts to become representational. And so I think for example when you're digging to the bottom of things when you're having a conversation and the unconscious opens up in the conversation, which almost always happens if you're having a dispute with someone right you say what do you really mean? Then they have to decompose what they're saying into its subsidiary elements and sometimes that's a search but sometimes it's actually Adaptation where did that idea come from? What is the underlying structure? So, okay. So keep that in mind and then We were talking about play last time and we talked about the fact that even animals have rules for play. And that that's the evidence that's evidence that there are modes of interaction between animals in the social environment that are acceptable to both animals such that they will voluntarily continue and and such that they aren't so so and you know, it's appears Eddie and observation that that constitutes one of the basis of moral behavior. And that seems to me to be a very very powerful. Because it takes it takes the idea that there's something arbitrary about morality. It takes that out of the picture says well, it's malleable but it's not arbitrary, you know, it can't just be anything so that still leaves you with the problem of how large the boundaries are and that's a tough one because obviously you all know that there are many ways to play that all function as acceptable play. Although one of the rules would be everybody who's playing the game actually. Really has to agree to play it, you know and that seems to me to be something like an absolute rule regarding social conventions. So so again, it's a process rule rather than a Content rule to some degree, but that's okay. That's still important. All right. So now I believe we talked a little bit about friends to walls work with with chimps. Right? And I mentioned that what Duvall has found out is that it isn't just the you know, the caveman chimp with the biggest Club. Who's the top chimp the top Chimp in a hierarchy that remains relatively stable and who doesn't get torn to shreds by his subordinates can't be an absolute Tyrant. There are social conventions that he has to follow and those seem to involve the ability to form. Coalitions with other males. So there's a Cooperative element and then also attention to the females and infants that are in the chimp troop as well. And in some sense what it seems to indicate. Is that the more Sophisticated the top guy because in chimps, it's usually a guy I think it's always a guy and chimps. The more sophisticated. He is in his social maneuvering the more stable the resultant hierarchy and so what that implies as we've discussed is that there are differences that are qualitative between hierarchies and that's again that's a moral hierarchy some function better than others some you have to Define better, but I think it's reasonable to Define better again from a modified kuhnian or Piaget in perspective. You say better a better system is one that does all the functions of the previous system plus more or that it's more stable or something like that. You can Define better so now this particular Pictorial representation, I'm trying to transmute this into into another dimension of representation. So you've got here you've got your hi doorman and primate and so he he represents something if he's dominant what he represents his dominance and we're associating dominance to some degree with competence and the competence is social competence. And so you can think that there's a pattern that constitutes acceptable dominance. I think you could think about that as Authority, you know, I mean people especially rather simple minded social critics like to think that dominance hierarchies are only based on power, right but That's except in the most brutal of societies. That's just not the case because there's power but there's also competence and lots of hierarchies in a functional Society are predicated on competence. And so what's at the top isn't dominance precisely its authority and authority is a better way of thinking about it. So then the question might be well, how is our Authority represented and then also what is it and so imagine that for up chimp or maybe four now we'll go with chimp because we don't know how long ago it was in history when people started to abstract out these things, you know, if you think of a word like chief As soon as there's a word like that. Chief isn't or tribal leader or whatever the term might be the fact that that term exists indicates that there's a category for Authority. Right? And what that means is that soon as you have the category for Authority you can detach the idea of authority from The Authority holder and you can start to think about Authority itself right in a troop like in a chimp troop. There's no Authority independent of the thing. That's at the top. It's completely Even though you might be able to say if you were an anthropological Observer you might be able to say well there's some common here's a chimp troop here and there's a chimp troop here. And another one here. You can say well there's some commonality in Behavior across all of the chimps that are at the top but the chimps don't know that it's just a natural fact that that point But as soon as you can make the category or that category leader or something like that then what you're starting to do is to conceptualize the principles that make authority authority. So and that's because we can abstract and because we can represent we've been doing that for a very long period of time, you know, we do that as modern people all the time. There's there's a huge body of studies studies in management science about what makes a leader now, it turns out that it's very very difficult to go into that literature and extract out anything of any generality, you know, I mean my sense my sense was in reviewing that literature that one of the You can say about a leader. Is that a leader knows where he's going? But once you go past that. Then that what constitutes leadership in complex human organizations is hard to articulate but it's also rather situation dependent, you know, when I would also say there's different ways of being a leader that are dependent on temperament that maybe all be functional. So trying to categorize that as quite difficult, but people still have been trying to do that for a very long time and they've got they've gone a very long way. So here's a way here's a symbolic transmutation in some sense. So Left top left there. You've got people playing football. And then in the middle there, you've got an abstract representation of a game. So computer games are quite interesting because they've taken the whole abstraction process one step further write their representations of representations of representations and you can play with them and their simulations. So then the ones on the on the on the far-right The Border one, you see there's a guy standing down there and he's gazing up at God in heaven with this cross, right? And to me that's essentially a dominance relationship is that think about it anyway, so so first of all, you're looking up to see the source of authority. So there's the idea that Authority is above you somehow I would say that that representation is an attempt to capture in image what Authority constitutes now when people were capturing this in image like they are in that particular drawing it isn't that they were trying to put into images something they understood it in articulating. Way, it's exactly the opposite is that the phenomena itself of authority as a concept emerged on the basis of the processes. We've been describing which means it emerged from the bottom up as as increasingly complex social animals organize themselves into increasingly complex and large social hierarchies. There's an emergence and emergence of morality as a consequence of that organization, and then there was an observation of it you might think well, What form would that observation take and it's a union hypothesis and I think it's a very good one that part of what the artistic Endeavor does is transmute. What's not understood yet into image into image and drama and that's the source of its further articulation up into stable rules. So for so, so first of all the bottom picture there indicates that a human being can be struck by the concept of authority per se You know, so you might think well what's even more of an authority than an authority and the answer to that is it's whatever makes authorities authorities across a large class of authorities and the you might say well what is that and the answer to that is well, we're still figuring that out because it's so damn complicated. It's unbelievably complicated now, I can tell you some things about that image. I can tell you some things that it represents. What it means is that first of all, it means that Authority has this trans no process that seat transpersonal existence. That's Eternal. So and why is that? Well, it's because what makes authority authority is stable across hierarchies, the hierarchies can come and go but the concept itself has an eternal element to it because it remains constant across Transformations and I think that's represented in the symbolic Realm by the idea of God in heaven. It's something like that now I got to tell you too. I'm not trying to reduce these religious explanations. Concepts that I'm describing because I don't think that what I'm telling you is a complete representation of what happens. So there's a Transcendence the element to religious thinking that you can't Explained Away by by reducing it to its constituent elements but having said that we're just going to put that aside we're going to try to make it as concrete as possible. Now in this representation, the idea basically is that Authority has something to do with the father, right? It has something to do with eternality and Transcendence and it also has something to do with the cross. It's Christian representation. So that's fine. It's that's a hypothesis. That is what that is. Now. It's a weird hypothesis, right if you look at that. Chur, and and you start thinking about it from an anthropological perspective instead of a personal perspective. You might think well what the hell are these creatures up to when they're making representation like that? It's what are they trying to express, you know, and the classical view would be well, this is a belief and the belief is being imposed on the viewers. It's like well, let's let's not assume that let's let's try something different. Let's assume that it's an explanation that people have been trying to work out that nobody really understands and I think that that's a much better way of looking at it because otherwise you're stuck with some bloody conspiracy theory of history or something like that, you know, and I think one of the advantages we have in the 21st century is because our culture now is composed of such an intermingling of cultures it enables people. Let's say for the sake of argument in the dominant culture to step outside of their own presuppositions and start to view themselves as anthropologists. Okay, so you think well, what are people up to? Well first of all that Bigger sorry, it's not bigger, but I'll show you a bigger one later is being held up in heaven by By Angels. So it's like there's an idea that it's there's some Divine entities out of which a top Divine entity emerges and there's a that's a father figure in that representation its associated with light and it has this cross and the cross is a very very old symbol and so and in Christianity, obviously the Cross isn't Negative of the father it's representative of the Sun. And so that's interesting because what that means is this representation says that whatever Authority is has something of the father and something of the sun and the reason I'm telling you that is because it's going to become very relevant. When I tell you the Egyptian that one of the fundamental variants of the central Egyptian religious story a little bit later in class, so it's not just the father there's something else and one of the mysteries about Christianity for example, and this is one of the things the rationale Always take Christianity to task for is the idea that God is a you know is a three-part Unity. It's what's very bizarre idea, you know, and obviously it's not an empirical idea. It's like it's some bizarre fantasy and I think that it's expressed quite well in that drawing at least part of it, which is well. Yeah, it's a Unity because there's something similar about the father and the son and there's something that that they both need from each other and it's a dynamic interplay, but it also has to be something that's Differentiated there's utility and differentiating the concept. So, okay. So keep that in mind now the top one there on the right. That's Moses and I'll tell you the story of exodus in detail later in the class. But one of the things I want to to introduce you to is this possibility. So what happens in Exodus basically is it's a it's a tyranny descent into chaos rise story, right? So it's like a in some sense the This story is a microcosm of the entire Christian Bible. So that's kind of interesting. It's it's a story about transformation nested inside a broader story about transformation. The transformation is everyone's in a tyranny and they're being exploited and they need to escape. Okay, so you should be able to relate to that because everybody is in a tyranny and they're trying to escape now the degree to which the Tara T is tyrannical varies a lot between societies, but the classic out A lesson to experience and you see this in Coming of Age novel has all the time is the young person Against The Establishment something like that. Right? And that's the I would say that's an existential. That's an existential Condition. It's always the young person against against the establishment. Now the establishment is also helping the young person. So it's not the only story but it's an archetypal component of the story. So you have to escape from the tyranny of the group. And what happens when you escaped from that is your cast into chaos, even if it's a tyrannical group because even a tyrannical group provides you with a hierarchy and an identity and maybe it's a pathological hierarchy in a pathological identity, but you could still make the case that it's better than no identity at all. And I think you play that situation by situation. I mean remember what happens to the Israelites, right? They leave Egypt, they're all slaves there and they end up in a desert and they're wondering Out in the desert for 40 years and a lot of them are thinking hey, that's not so obvious that this chaotic existence out here in the desert is better than you know, what where I know my three meals a day are coming from and you know, you don't want to think about that is merely something that's an abstraction. It's like there's plenty of people in Russia who longed for the Soviet Union, right? Because there were there was a stability that was associated with it. Now we would say and I think the Russians themselves said that was a pathological Bility, but whether it was worse than the consequent chaos is well. It's to be it's to be seen we don't know at the moment for some societies like Poland. It's like Poland seems to have pulled out of it quite nicely but there are other countries that haven't so the chaos and and I think this is also the conundrum it's very much think we're thinking about this because you might think what stops people from progressing in terms of the Quality of their personality structure and the answer to that is well every time you want to move forward you have to let something go and there's a disintegration associated with that. And so that's somewhat terrifying. It's like maybe you find well the case of the abused spouse is a good one. Why go back to someone who abuses you and people usually do and well and that's partly because you know couples abused each other all the time. So it's a matter of degree. But you know, if you if you go out on the Spectrum to the point where it's pretty damn obvious that the abuse is Criminal let's say because that sort of the bordering line people will still return. Well why Really hard question why sometimes it's because the abuser conspires to make sure that the abused person is in a position of such weakness that they actually can't believe they have no money. They have no resources and they're terrified. So, you know, that's that aside. Well, what do you give up when you leave? Well, you give up everything you give up your past, you know because you have to think geez that was a mistake and that's going to require a lot of thinking through to figure out why you made that particular mistake and how Ought to make it again because you probably will because whatever got you into that situation to begin with is undoubtedly still there unless you fixed it and then of course your future shot, right and so is your present self image and that's a chaotic collapse, you know, it might mean that you have to move cities God only knows you have to change jobs. You have to change where you live. You have change all your friends. It's like is that better? Well, not obviously and so people won't take the leap off the burning. You know the burning grasslands on the cliff into the water below and it's not surprising because who knows how many sharks are down there and that it's really useful to understand it that way I think because it tells you why people won't transcend themselves constantly. It's like, well you have to make a sacrifice. And you know, it's not always obvious that the soccer that the gain you will make from the sacrifice is worth the costs of the sacrifice and that's even in extreme conditions. And that's partly why Exodus is such an archetypal story. It's like it's not obvious at all to the Israelites when they're out in the desert wandering about half starving that it's only faith that keeps them going faith that there might be something better at the other end. It's like well, so what happens is that they get pretty damn crabby at Moses for lead them out there, you know, and Start to worship all sorts of alternative Gods, which is exactly what you do when you're in chaos, by the way, because when you're in chaos, you're looking for new moral principles to orient Yourself by you know, and those are new hierarchies of value and to think about those as alternative structures of you know of dominant structures of value that could be represented by a given daddy. That's perfectly reasonable thing to do especially in the absence of articulated knowledge of what a moral structure is. It's a Perfectly reasonable way to represent it. So that happened. So the Israelites are trying to orient themselves on this trip. They don't know what the hell you're doing and then another thing happens. That's quite interesting is that well, they're all squabbling among each other now, I want to tell you a story about that. So among the Bushman the Kalahari Bushmen, who by the way look to be the most genetically similar of all human beings to what our earliest relatives would have been who moved out of Africa that something like that. So that's kind of interesting the Kalahari Bushmen are very egalitarian society and people like to think that egalitarian societies because they were egalitarian are peaceful, but that's not true at all. They're not peaceful at all. And neither is the Bushmen society and the problem with the Bushmen Society. Is that lets say I don't know, you know, you steal my wife. Okay. Well, there's no hierarchy. So what am I going to do about that? There's no authority to appeal to so I'm stuck with it. So what am I going to do? Well often I'm just going to wait around until I get my chance and then I'm going to take out my little bow and arrow with my my poison arrow and I'm going to nail you with it because what else is there? There's no Authority. Now, this is what the Bushman do very interesting is that there's another tribe located. And near them and I think it's the band to but I'm not absolutely certain but I think it's the band to and they have a hierarchical structure. So there is an authority and so now the Bushmen will go to the band to have their disputes mediated so they don't just have to shoot each other when they have an argument. So it's quite interesting. It's worth thinking about because in a flat egalitarian society. Nobody has the final word and when everyone's getting along that's that's perfectly fine. But as soon as two people aren't getting along it's like Who do we turn to to mediate this? Okay. So the Israelites had that problem in the archetypal story. And so what happens in relationship to Moses is that every time to Israelites have some squawk about who's chicken is whose they have to come to Moses and they pour out their tale of Woe and he has to sit there and listen to it and then he has to decide. Who's right now you so he's serving as a judge. Now. You got to think what are you doing when you're judging which is a word. That's all you know, people say well don't judge me. It's like really it's like that's the same as not thinking you know judging is actually an extraordinarily useful ability because it helps you separate out what isn't good for anything from what's valuable. It's like it isn't absence of judgment. You want its its judicial judgment right principal judgment and then you might say well, what is that? That's a good question. You could say well it's all arbitrary. Anyways, well, then you've just got chaos. So that's not much of a solution. Okay. So the Israelites are coming to Moses like no one stopped bitching about these little trivial things that are aggravating them to death and he's sitting there like four years literally for years listening to them like 14 hours a day and finally he does this so long that I think it's his father-in-law who tells him he has to stop and distribute the responsibility because he's just going to get exhausted, but you could imagine What happens to you? If you sit there and judge and judge and judge and judge and judge and judge and judge is that you're building up a very articulated and differentiated representation of the moral structure that actually constitutes your Society because imagine if you're a good judge here's what has to happen. You two are at each other's throats like in a really homicidal way. So things have gone too far. And so then I have to listen to you both and I I have to decide what you're going to do, but I have to do something even more spectacular than that. I have to decide it in a way that you both feel is more acceptable than killing each other and that means you have to feel that not only is it is it reasonable and just it also has to absolve you of your responsibility to seek revenge because that that's one of the functions of law that people never think about. It's like if someone you may not remember this because you're all young. But when Michael Dukakis I'm hoping was running for president. Somebody asked him what he would do. They were having a Republicans. He was a Democrat. He had he had let some character out of jail and he went and killed someone and so the Republicans made a big deal out of that during the presidential convention and maybe there was a rape involved. It's possible. He was asked on TV what he would do if his own wife was raped, you know, which is good question and Dukakis blue the answer because he went he kind of wishy-washy did way, you know, so the right answer is With every fiber of my being I'd like to chop them into bits but as a civilized person I'm willing to defer that to the judicial system because they'll take appropriate and measured steps and then my proclivity won't generate itself through the community because the danger is if I take vicious Revenge that that'll start a cycle of Revenge and then the whole thing falls apart and so it's the Judicial Systems responsibility. To take that moral burden off my shoulders because you know, what's the right response when someone you love is terribly hurt. Well, it's not well, I'll just forget about that and go home. It's like that's what you do if your contemptibly week fundamentally. So the judicial system has to stand in for you. So anyways, the point is if you make a judgment the Judgment won't hold unless it suits the people who are being judged and it's not going to suit them unless it matches the implicitly Oral presuppositions that they're already bringing to the dispute. Now you see this in kids, you know, the kids will be arguing over a toy and then they'll come to the mother or the father and they'll say rap and then the mother will say well you do this and you do this and if the kids don't like that, they'll go well that's not fair and kids like they're really they're really obsessed with Fair. They want exactly fair in an understandable way. So the parent not only has to adjudicate the Cute but the parent has to adjudicate the dispute in a manner that the children will accept or they'll just go back into the other room and have the fight all over again, right or they'll poke each other. You know, they'll be they'll be Tit for Tat Revenge going on Non-Stop. So what that means is that the articulated representation of the solution has to match the embodied expectation of the population. So there's already a morality that's governing their interactions. They just don't know what it is. If there wasn't they wouldn't even know when They had been wronged right because you can't figure out when you're wrong unless you know when you're not wrong, so to say well I've been wronged means to say well, I don't know what's going on here, but it doesn't seem fair. And so then poor old Moses has to look at that and he has to think about it. You just think well, why is this fair and why is it unfair and who was right here? And then what's the solution and the story represents him as doing that for the 10,000 hours. It would take someone to become an absolute expert at doing it. Well, then the story what the story is essentially relates is the revelation of a moral code. And that's the Ten Commandments right think. Well, they say the 10 commandments came from God. Well, that's fine. We kind of have an idea about God that's already stemming from the bottom picture. So it's the abstract representation of what constitutes the source of authority across time. That's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it and Moses. He has this bright Revelation, which is like a moment of insight. Now what happens in Psychotherapy when you have a moment Moment of insight is that you figure out what you've all read that you figure out what you're already doing. That's what happens because you come to the therapist and you say look I had this relationship and this is how it went. Now this relationship. It went the same way and this relationship. It went the same way what's going on? And so then you talk about it you talk about it and talk about it until all of a sudden bang. You think ah, here's the explanation that maps onto the behavior and it feels like a fit right and that's the Moment. It's like I got it and it's interesting because if you you know, I do dream interpretations fairly regularly, and you know, you think well that's kind of like the straw ology and you know, it's that's a perfectly reasonable objection except that it's more like literary interpretation. And you think well, how do you know when you've got it, right and the answer is well, it's an Insight like you talked about it and all of a sudden it's sort of crystallizes the person goes. Oh, yeah that fits I've got it how you figure that out. I don't really understand. I think I don't get it. Exactly. I think it's something like when you get when you get the map, right what happens is that there's an understanding of how that generalizes across situations and so partly that simplifies the problem. You know, you say well, here's the rule instead of having to act it out on stage. And I think the reason that that would come with a with a burst of insight is because Simpler and more efficient and so your body recognizes right recognizes it as a optimal solution and I think it also opens up new possibilities for the future and I think that gives you a dopamine kick and so that's why it's that's why the moment of insight is associated with this really potent. Effective marker and that's a revelation. When you have a moment of insight. It's a revelation these people even say that now we might not think anymore that it's divine revelation, but I'll tell you if you had a revelation of sufficient magnitude. So maybe it was one way up in your abstraction hierarchy. If you had a revelation at that level, you described it as a religious experience people do all the time that's happens to alcoholics all the time when their recovery, you know, they have a flash of insight. And that's when a new personality gets catalyzed and if that happens to them, sometimes they can stop drinking. It's the best now. Maybe this is outdated because I knew the literature 25 years ago, but I doubt it because we haven't made really any progress in treating alcoholics. Revelatory personality transformation cures alcoholism. Now, we don't know necessarily know how to bring it about but the you know, the 12-step programs try to bring it about so okay so you can think about all that. There's a there's a bigger representation of the picture. So that's Authority. What is it thority well, there's a now I'm hoping it's been a while since I looked at these pictures. I'm hoping that picture that I think that picture is of door a I think it's good stuff, too. A and I think that's Moses receiving the tablets from God, but I might be wrong, but I think that's what it is. And there's light associate. Yep. They just didn't know that they knew it. Or even necessarily why they'd been wronged. They just have a sense that this wasn't right. And that's it. I think the best way to think about that is to think about five year olds. They know when somebody breaks a rule, but they don't know what to do about it it bug really bugs them. That's a PhD and observation to you're not playing by the rules. That's enough to make many young kids cry right and when they're crying you think what happens when you're crying. Well, it's a distress call that it's a it's a request for the intervention of That's what crying is. So the kid knows something's going wrong his pattern detection system. Is that sophisticated but his capacity to represent that an articulated well from appears yeti in perspective. That doesn't come until multiple stages of development later like the highest level of development and lots of people according to Piaget don't even get there. Right and that would be the ability to to play games with the rules of games. And so you do that when you were having a Discussion for example, or maybe when you're talking with your friends on the playing field about what the rules are going to be for a pickup football game. So you're so you can conceptualize yourself at that point as not only a thing that is good because that thing can follow rules which is an earlier stage of development, but that as a thing that's good because not only can It follow rules. It can abstract the represent the rules it can engage in a discussion about the rules and it can update them and I would say That's part of what's being represented by this picture on the left. So the father is the thing that's the rules and the sun in this representation is the thing that can update the rules now, it has to die and come back in order to update the rules. And so that's partly why the father in that figure is holding a cross because the cross is a symbol of death and reconstruction. That's the price you pay for reformatting the rules because you have to do that to yourself, too. So, yeah. Well, it's exactly the advantage of abstract representation. You can start to manipulate the representations before you manipulate the thing so that means you can start to think about morality now. Is that a good thing? Well, I think it was Alfred North Whitehead. I hate taping these because all these errors that I'm making In My Memory going to be preserved. But anyways, I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said something like the reason to think the reason that thought is valuable be is because we can let our thoughts die instead of ourselves, right? And so then you think well once you can lay out the rules, okay. The kids are playing a game one kid cheats or or another kids suspect. The first kid is cheated and there's there's no adults around. So what what's the outcome? Well one outcome is The Game Stops. That's a high probability outcome or the game continues but no one's having any fun or one kid gets resentful and solemn than the other kid just oppose imposes his will or they fight. That's it. Those are the options now when they can abstractly represent the rules. First of all, they can agree on them before they play the game and kids do that automatically. So if for example if you watch kids play pretend games what they do first, you can probably all remember this from when you were little kids if you're you're playing some pretend game in a blanket fort or something. Maybe you get together with all the other kids and you think okay. Well, this is your role in this is your role and that's your role and you know, and here's what we're going to do. Here's going to be the little drama will lay out. So kids are very good at that. Once you can get the rules abstracted. You can talk about the damn things instead of having to kill each other and you can also update them in principle. Run simulations of what would happen with the update which is basically what an argument is or a debate and then you can Implement them. And so hopefully you can get rid of the stupid updates before you actually Implement them and die because you implemented them and so the other advantage to abstraction either in drama or in articulation is that you can transfer the rules more more more efficiently so you can get the kid to act out the rule but you can also say here's the rule and you should fall. In multiple situations and then they don't have to learn purely through imitation to embody that rule across all possible situations. So whatever advantages abstraction has the pulling out of the moral rule system from the underlying Behavior has those advantages and disadvantages the other disadvantages while you can come up with a perfectly good reason why you shouldn't keep doing what your forefathers have done for 20 centuries, you know, because it doesn't make any sense. Well it does you You just don't know why and you know, you can easily it's like the Mesopotamians last week. We were talking about remember. The noisy God's killed absolute. They didn't know what the hell he was good for. It's like, you know, he's their Shield against chaos. He's their tradition. It's like well, we'll just kill him and see what happens. It's like you better be careful because lurking behind your tradition is chaos and you know, you might be the master of chaos, but you're probably not so look out now we got some clue from the Mesopotamians what the master of chaos was like the master of chaos was a new kind of God who had eyes all the way. This head who could speak magic words. So there's a there's an attention verbalization communication element to that and the Mesopotamians figured out that thing should be at the top now. That's it's staggering insight to think that because it also might be right. It's like, okay, what should you follow? Well, the first answer is follow the damn rules why well, because that's what people expect and you won't get into too much trouble if you do that, but then you might say well Well, sometimes the rules are wrong or sometimes they don't apply. Okay, that's definitely true. Then what well that's a whole different issue. Well in the Mesopotamians would say that's a really good time to pay attention and to confront the chaos voluntarily and to communicate about what you're doing and to reformat the world restructure the world as a consequence of your confrontation with this chaos, and that's that's a higher density and I think it's the god of attention fundamentally its Thing like that, but it's more its attention plus articulation plus communication and that would be the highest. So the Mesopotamians would say that's the highest God. It's a hypothesis. So to the degree now, I wanted to tell you the rest of the Mesopotamian story so cool. So you remember that market goes off and Congress time at puts it in the net cuts her to Pieces makes the world. Okay, and then out of time at has organized this Army to go against Marduk and his and his and his and his army. And what time at does when she goes out to have a war is she's at the Forefront know she's sort of behind the scenes maneuvering and manipulating everything and she puts she creates this like all sorts of Monsters the worst monster. She can think of and then of all those monsters she picked the worst possible monster and she puts him at the head of the Phalanx that goes into battle and his name is King who So mardik defeats him to it. So he's like a he's bit of a precursor of Satan. He's like he's at he's the agent of chaos, but he's more embodied, you know, anyways martic makes human beings out of the blood of Kings who which is also extraordinarily interesting idea because it's very much like the idea in Genesis that was picked up particularly by the Catholics that human beings are characterized by original sin right were made out of the blood of the worst monster and I took me a long A long time to think that through I thought what the hell what what? Why would they think that and I think the reason is that because human beings are the only things on the planet that can deceive you write like everything else is either the way it is or you just don't understand it. It's not like the garbage can isn't trying to deceive you there's things about it. You don't understand like it's subatomic structure, but it's not actively fighting against your comprehension. Whereas human beings they're Lee different creatures and it's definitely the case that along with our capacity for abstraction and self-consciousness. We immediately evolve the constructability for high-level Intrigue and deception even see that in kids the smarter the kid the earlier they learn to lie and you can see that's that's you can't separate that from the capacity to spin off alternative simulated worlds because that's what a lie is accept. If you're doing it in an online manner, you're trying to spin off a world that actually represents the real world better instead of trying to spin off a simulation that get allows you to avoid responsibility for something. So I think that's so it's interesting that you know, the Mesopotamians also were very cognizant of the fact that there was something in human beings which is fundamentally the capacity for deceitful and evil action. That was also something that really had to be contended with but they also assume that Marduk was the That so that's pretty cool. It's very implicit in the story. So what happens so the emperor so the emperor lived in a walled City because cities were walled at that time. And the reason for that was if they weren't walled then The marauding Barbarians would come in and kill all the men and take all the women and burn the place to the ground and steal everything. So, you know people weren't all that happy when that happened. So they built Big walls to make sure that that was difficult. So that was order inside the walls and Chaos outside. Side and Chaos was out where the barbarians are which is still what we think but what would happen to the emperor at the New Year's ceremony was that they would take them outside the city walls. So they take the emperor who's like king of order they take them outside into chaos to remind him that even the emperor could is is surrounded by chaos. So then they'd strip them of all the clothing and symbols that made him emperor. And they'd make a meal and then the priests would make him recount for the last year all the things he did that made him not a good martic. So he was supposed to embody martic. That was what made him the emperor to the degree that he can embody the attentive and communicative force that could keep chaos at Bay. He deserved to be Emperor. So that was that's idea of sovereignty right of lawful sovereignty. It's a brilliant. It's brilliant. They take them now the Miss is the Emperor might forget that he's supposed to be Marduk and he might just be you know guy with the biggest hair out who's stealing everything he possibly can which is really not what he's supposed to be doing. So they take him outside at the New Year's Festival when the world was going to be renewed which we still do right because it's out with the old Year in with the new that's when you make your resolutions to be a better person, right? So this is an ancient ceremony. Okay out you take the emperor strip him of his Emperor close. So now he's just, you know, some dude you have him kneeling there and then you'll walk them with a glove to just remind him that he's not boss of everything and then you get them to recount all his sins basically but the sins were okay in the last year. How did you fail in your task as a representative of Marduk on Earth? And so then the Hypothetically would tell you know, everybody why he was allowed and useless and six different ways and promise to be better. And then the Mesopotamians would take statues out of the city that represented the gods that we've talked about and they would reenact the Battle of Marduk against chaos, they'd act that out. And then at the end the emperor would sleep with a ritual prostitute like so she'd be like a temple virgin representing the benevolent element of femininity and then Then they go back in and have their year start now. It's very much like Saint George and the Dragon you think about it, right? You know the st. George and the Dragon Story say George Goes dragon has captured a virgin and st. George is out there. He's going to slay the dragon and free the Virgin and that works at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously one level is the guy who's best at keeping chaos at Bay is going to be the guy who's most attractive to women because women are smart. So that's first that's like the archetypal level. Or that's the story. That's the biological level. The archetypal level is even more abstract. It's that the the dragon time at is a representation of chaos itself and chaos is something that's deeply informative. So the dragon has gold or it has a virgin depends on how the story works out when you encounter that you free something of value and that's something that you can you can incorporate you can have that's more like the treasure variant of the story. It's also Good, if you kind of spread it around a little bit so because otherwise, it's an incomplete story. Okay. So what's happening? What's happening? In Mesopotamia at that time is many many tribes are being brought together. They've all got their own mythology and everyone's trying to figure out. Okay, how do we benefit from the fact that we're all going to live together without having to kill each other which is the standard human problem, right? Because it's good to cooperate but you don't want the foreigners upsetting your your your horse cart and and you don't want the whole thing collapsing into chaos. So how do you balance that? So what you could imagine Ellie addict called this the War of the Gods in heaven, which is a very common mythological Motif so you can imagine if you will All these tribes have their own culture and their own representation of that culture often in mythological stories. They're brought together. Where does the War take place? Well, if it doesn't take place between the people which is what will happen. If they can't cooperate it's going to take place between the representations. So what's happening is you know culture has got a story and culture bees got a story and the story is kind of are the same and they're kind of not the same and so you think well then everybody Smile, you've got your garden. I've got mine. It's like, who are we going to pay any attention to here? And what answer is well just kill you that'll be the end of the problem my God winds or another issue would be well, we'll just let everything drop into chaos, which in some sense I think is what happened to Rome. It just ate so many gods that could no longer survive or we're going to figure out how to get along together. Well, that means your story and my story have to be brought together. So their commensurate now one of Of the things that's quite interesting is that you can actually see this happening in the oldest books in the Bible. So the Bible is a collection of books, right? And there's a lot of books that were sort of Bible like that didn't get into the final version. The people are arguing about which should be in and in what order so the books were written and there's huge arguments about what should be included and what shouldn't and what sequence they should be included in and these arguments went For thousands of years that major league arguments, but if you go into the into Genesis, for example, and you look at the story of Adam and Eve what you find is it's not one story. It's at least two and maybe three and that's been identified through cycle linguistic analysis and also through anthropological investigation. And so there's version 1 and there's version 2 and then the guy they called the redactor who's a hypothetical character or denies these stories cut them apart and sequence them try to keep both in some order that made sense. And so what he was basically doing was taking two Traditions whose stories had some archetypal similarity, but whose whose details differed and he's trying to make them logically coherent so they can fit together and you think well, why is he doing that? Well, the answer is we either get our stories together or you're a slave and I'm a tyrant or the reverse or we kill each other. Those are the options. Well apart from Pierre disappeared. Into the chaos, which is, you know not going to do either of us any good either that's kind of a nihilism. It's a real threat to human societies. So that's pretty cool. So the war between the Gods in the heavens is something like this. It's like the top left-hand representation is too simple. We know that because when you're doing something it isn't when that you're going from point A to point B, and you act that out because sometimes you're working at a much more abstract level. You might say well I'm trying to do well. at University Well, how do you move your body to accomplish that well answer is that's the wrong level of resolution to answer that question. You'd go try to do well in University. Okay. How do you subdivide that I take five classes? Okay for right now, you got it subdivided down to five classes. I do the readings in each class. So that's getting closer to behavior. Right? How do you do the readings? Well, I open the book and I move my eyes right? So then you get then you're down to a Low resolution level of representation. But so when you look at the thing on the top left, it's really more like the thing in the middle. It's nested. It's nested value orientations that ground out in action and how those are going to be nested. Exactly. That's either War discussion that determines that war thought or discussion. That's it. That's what you've got. And if you can't do it with the first two thought And discussion the only recourse you have is war or the degeneration into chaos, which will produce War anyways, so and then there's a further transformation is which is well if I could do any of these three things to further my move forward. which takes priority now, you're solving that problem all the time or you can't act and sometimes you'll actually see this in yourself, you know sometimes If you're driving somewhere, you're not sure whether you're going to go straight or go left. You kind of go you flip between them, you know and confusion. Well, you're not going to go anywhere. If you're doing that. You have to make one more important the other than before you can act. And so whenever you're undertaking any action what you've done is organize the whole hierarchy of values so that there's no contradictions at the level you're operating or your Frozen. And so you're making value judgments all the time. And you know, this is like should you go to the library or should you read your book at home? You know, or maybe Should you be studying for that course or this course, you know or when you're really feeling desperate should you be in that discipline or should you be in University or should you be alive? Right that's when you should visit very seldomly, you know, you want the local problem to to to dominate that that's well if things have got very disorganized you're going to go all the way to the top. You know, what's very very hard on people to do that. So societies have to get their priorities straight which Is there value hierarchies and an individual's due to and then if you're looking at how that happens over the historical time span you're going to think it's the Battle of Gods of the Gods in heaven. That's the higher and that is what happens. It's the right way of thinking about it. If if if there is a transpersonal space, that's the imagination in which these Long-term discussions in battles take place you have to represent that somehow so you would think about that at least in part is the collective unconscious. And the collective unconscious is here's one way of thinking about it. The collective unconscious is all those behavioral patterns and presuppositions that we share. What are those? Well, we don't know we write we don't have a full account of that. We're trying to figure it out. So, okay. So these are different representations of this so they want on the left at the top. There's another representation of what constitutes Authority there's the there's God Father you see he's kind of got a little pyramid hat on which I think is quite cool. And it also I think helps explain why the damn Egyptians were so obsessed with pyramids, you know, it's a it's a it's a hierarchical structure up here at MIT and they thought about that as something sacred and there is something sacred about hierarchical structure. The question is what's the structure and how should it be structured? So there's god with his little pyramid hat and then in front of them, he's got a cross and I think that's in an orb that represents the world and then in front of that. is a dove and the dove is the third part of the Christian Trinity and the dove represents the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit hypothetically is You might think about it as the action of conscience. It's something like that. It's the manifestation of tradition and the capacity to update tradition in you. So there's a personal element of to it. So that's why the dove is a thing that communicates between the Heavenly realm and the Earthly realm fundamentally something like that. Now you see that on the American dollar bill, that's pretty cool because what they've done there. Same kind of idea except the top of the pyramid is detached from the bottom, which I really love because what it's making this claim that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid isn't part of the pyramid and that's a bloody brilliant. And I think that that's an observation Egyptians first got right and we're going to tell that story here in a minute. It's that Think about it this way. We'll go back to the game idea your kids playing hockey and you say Be a good sport now, then the question would be if the pyramid at that point is the hockey game. If he's a good sport, does that mean he's going to win the hockey game and answer that is no, it doesn't mean that what it means is that he's going to win the game that goes across multiple sets of games across very large spans of time. And so it's not really part of any hierarchy. It's something that's above them all and that's the best game to play so At least that's the theory and you know, even in that representation, there's an eye. It's like pay attention pay attention, you know, the Washington Monument at the top of it has a pyramid, you know, and there's a cap on that pyramid in the cap is made out of aluminum and you might think well, why would it be made out of aluminum and the answer was when that Monument was made aluminum was the most precious metal on the planet because people had just figured out how to make it. So they made this nice cap that rep was even more precious than gold. So what this what the symbol is that The thing that's out the top of the pyramid that isn't quite connected to it is more precious than gold and that's an alchemical idea to and it's right. It's right. It's not a metaphor or it is but it's a lot of things we think are metaphors aren't there just descriptions of things that are Level. We don't understand. Yep. Because it keeps Chaos and Order properly balanced everywhere and and I all we'll get into that more deeply as we get into these stories. It's a very good question, you know dancer that you sort of have to answer. Well what constitutes sacred and and what I would say is the more unshakable a truth the more sacred it is now you might say well how do you know if one truth is more unshakable than another? The answer is what you got to figure that out. And so what I'm presenting as far as I can tell is how people have figured that out over God only knows what's what span of time. Like it's a hundreds. It's a hundred and fifty thousand years for sure of actually trying to figure it out and then the dominance hierarchies themselves man. Those things are we know they're 400 million years old. So we've been working at this for a very long period of time so and I would say well one of the things that sacred roughly speaking is how you keep that thing intact and transforming because if it's intact and static it just falls apart. Because their environment around it changes, right? So what the hell good is that you can't play the same game forever, but you have to play a game. So how do you do that? Well, that's the question. That's why I'm going to tell you the Egyptian story. So what time is it? This is a good time for break and then I'll come you come back and I'll tell you this Egyptian story, and it's a great story. This podcast is brought to you and made possible by generous financial aid from Peter kanzler k --a n z l-- e-- r-- you can buy his Amazon books at your favorite Amazon Branch, for example, the original texts of lock Hobbs and the US Constitution of Pennsylvania put together into one book for only $15. Thanks for listening.
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