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. I don't know how many of you got my email this morning, but this is the last class and so I sent in my email a link to the other lecture That was supposed to happen. But I have to go to a conference on Thursday and Friday and so I'm going to do the last lecture today and you can watch the second last lecture from last year which will cover the territory hopefully sufficiently well. So I usually use the last lecture to sort of sum up where we've been and also to talk to people about. Let me open it up here first. How about my more specific thoughts on personality? So I think that's probably what I'll do today. I'll start with with what we've where we Bean. so I started talking to you about mythological representations of personality. And I wanted to do that for a variety of reasons, but the most important was to place. The rest of the course in a deep history context essentially because personality is the consequence of very many things. And many of them are grounded in our biology and therefore grounded in evolution. And I generally think that in some ways the social sciences don't take Evolution seriously enough. No, they don't they don't take the fact that we're three and a half billion years old seriously enough. It's a serious thing and some of that is evident. In a relatively straightforward way conceptually in that we share so much of our biological platform with other creatures, you know, there was a recent genomic analysis. I think of gorillas and I don't remember what percentage of our DNA we share with gorillas, but it's like 99.2% or something like that which you know is quite shocking Until you realize that we share about 70% of our genetic makeup with yeast. So, you know, yeah, obviously we're a lot closer to gorillas then to yeast but we're still pretty damn close to yeast and it also indicates not necessarily how just how similar we are to gorillas. But how minor modifications in the genome can also make substantial differences because like as we are to gorillas were a lot different from them, too. so so there's the biological aspect which is really important. But then there's what you might describe as a quasi biological element, which seems to be operating in the space between biology as evolutionarily determined and culture. Those things are often, you know, we have an archetypal tendency. To consider culture as something in opposition to Nature. And there's utility in that from a heuristic point of view. You can do a lot with that division from a conceptual perspective, but in lots of ways, it's misleading because some of the primordial elements of culture are biological and I think the most striking example of that fundamentally is there's two striking examples one is the existence of structures of power or structures of Authority or structures of influence hierarchies, which are incredibly old at least 400 million years old. And which have in consequence being around for so long that you also have to think about them as part of the environment part of nature. We don't because we tend to think of the hierarchical structure as cultural and also as easily alterable in some sense, but there's no reason to think that given that it's been around as I pointed out one lecture longer than trees. You know, it's a very very permanent element of the environment that human beings find themselves in so much so that you know, you can think of a dominance hierarchy as the Prototype prototype of culture, but because it's been a constant environmental feature for so long our nervous systems are built for operation within a hierarchy and they're really built that way. It's not a trivial matter because you know the serotonin systems. That regulate our emotions because the serotonin system does that fundamentally? It's also the system that sets up your brain during fetal development. The serotonin system is above all perhaps concerned with calibrating your nervous system in accordance with your position in a hierarchy and its basic rule is the higher in the hierarchy. You are the less negative emotion. You have to feel and the lower in a hierarchy you are. And the more tenuous your actual life because there's a direct connection between the tenuousness of your life and your position in the dominance hierarchy the more negative emotion, you're going to feel and then not house drastic consequences. And those are best exemplified in longevity. So there was a famous study called the Whitehall study, which was done in Britain. And basically what they were looking at the researchers were looking at was Health including mortality of English civil servants in the first study was done 50 years before the second study think the second study was done in the 80s. Anyways in the first study. You have a power hierarchy and all with the top civil servants at the top obviously in the bottom civil servants out the bottom and you know, you might ask yourself what constitutes top and And some of it might be regarded as autonomy over choices and then that so that would be part of it. You can make choices. So you have a bit more control over what's going to happen to you but also the probability that you have a stable and productive place is higher the higher you go and lower the lower you go and the consequence of that all things considered is that the civil servants out the bottom of the dominance hierarchy died younger and more. Currently than those at the top. Now, you could attribute that to Poverty relevant to Poverty. Right? Because the people at the bottom especially say in the 1930s were materially deprived in comparison to the people at the top. Although they certainly weren't materially deprived in comparison say to UK citizens a hundred years before or to most people in the world at that time. So a poverty argument is hard to make although a relative poverty argument is is easier to make but then years later Britain was a lord Richard and so the absolute level of wealth of the entire hierarchy moved up substantially so that the people at the bottom were richer than the people at the middle in the previous study, but the pattern of overall overall mortality remained quite similar and you know, the importance of studies like that as well as studies that indicate the consequence of income inequality on on Behavior are so important that they should be put front and center and university curricula mean one of the things that really bothers me about the humanities education in particular, although some of the Social Science Education to for modern University students is there are some things we know that you're never taught and it's really appalling be especially the relative poverty issue because most of the phenomena that People tend to attribute to Poverty has nothing to do with poverty. It's relative poverty. And that is absolutely not the same thing because the first one is a material deprivation hypothesis, but if you think about it, there's almost no one in North America whose material lead deprived now, you know, you could become Mitten and I'm not saying there's no one I'm saying, there's almost no one and you know, it also depends on your definition of material deprivation, but Most people the vast majority of people have too much to eat and a place to live and you know, once you have Plumbing and Heating and food and access to information, you've pretty much got everything that wealth can give you that isn't relative right the privation part of it is gone, but relative poverty relative positions, unbelievably powerful determinant of almost everything that you could imagine. So Lon Every is one Health is another and those are a lot of those are stress-related. It's a lot more stressful at the bottom that it is at the top. I'll tell you something interesting. We found out about conservatism and this is when I wrote I wrote a book called maps of meaning a long while back and I realized that I was trying to account for why people are prone to identify so strongly with their belief systems, you know, and part of it in some sense was a control over negative. Native outcomes hypothesis. So partly if you have an idiot logical Theory, it's a set of tools that you can use quite with quite a bit of proficiency to operate in the world, right simplification strategy enables you to control uncertainty. It also enables you to communicate with people but even more importantly to the degree that we share a cultural system we can predict each other and that's not psychological. It's you act out the game and I act out the game and so I don't have to really know much about you and I don't have to assume that you're a barrel of snakes. I can assume that you're more or less like me. And so if we interact I don't have to be on constant alert. And so that's not a psychological function of a belief system. That's a direct real-world function. And if you know, if you listen to people like the terror management theorists, they're always telling you how belief systems protect people against psychological uncertainty or maybe the fear of death. They never tell you that The shared belief systems actually prevent you from death, which is even more important than protecting you from the fear of death. So there is the stabilization of society aspect that that's a motivator for maintaining a set of shared beliefs because it kind of makes this identical which you might say is bad on the side of individuality. It's like yeah. Yeah. Yeah individuality. It's really good on the side of not having to assume that the next person is going to kill you and that's way more. Important and individuality, you know, the other thing I would like to make a case for briefly is that you know in the west people think Western people are individualistic. That's the stupidest Theory ever. I think except for maybe the theory that poverty is at the root of all these social problems that we see Western people are hardly individual at all. All you have to do is go out and look at traffic patterns to figure that out. You know, everybody stops at a red light everybody crosses when the walk signal turns virtually everybody. Buddy waits in line when there's you know a lineup for some restricted access event. We all dress the same way men and women alike, you know, we follow the rules like math like crazy and then on top of that there's a bit of fluff, you know, which is the things we could do if we're free which we could talk about and dream about but which hardly anybody does and that's what looks like individuality so you get that freedom, but the cost of it is incredible obedience and but you know the fact of the obedience That while you could sit here for example, and look at this. It's all safe and everything and you can come here with all these other weird primates and you don't know a damn thing about them and you know, they come from all sorts of different places, but there's a shared social structure and everybody participates in the game and then all of a sudden, you know, it's basically safe fine. That's one reason for conservatism, you know in for identification with the belief system. It's like stabilize the damn game so you can predict the other primates and a lot of people who talk about conservatism as a political belief make the assumption that that control element is the fundamental motivator for for for right-wing political belief, but weirdly enough the other thing that happens when you stabilize a game, let's say which would be a shared belief is that you provided goal because a value system shared value system is always oriented towards a goal. Otherwise, it's not a value system. It's not a belief system. And the thing is as soon as in this is a PS Yeti and point as soon as you organize something around a goal. You give the people the opportunity to do two things one three things cooperate with in the rural framework compete within the rule framework. So that brings in the possibility of Victory and loss and also, To experience some positive emotion because like if if we haven't unified or gain which is basically the job of a bloody three-year-old if we haven't unified or game and so we reach playing our own games. There's no way that we can collectively aim at something and there's no way that you can progress, you know, and so one of the things that when you're taught about the oppressive structure say of the patriarchal system, one of the things that's never noted is that because that's a hierarchical system. It's also a precondition for any kind of Victory and that would even be victory over yourself if you want to be better tomorrow than you are today. Basically what you're doing is aiming at a point that's defined by the System so that's aiming up and trying to move yourself towards it you get rid of that shared value system. There's no structure for positive emotion anymore. So part of the reason people want to stabilize their belief systems is so that the environment mostly other people but also the environment remains under control and thank God for that because otherwise, it's just outright bloody chaos. but the other reason is No Game No winners nothing to do. You know what that's I think why there's an orthogonal relationship between agreeableness and conscientiousness, you know conscientiousness seems to do something like stabilized rule structures across long periods of time. So kind of defines the game explicitly and that lays out the possibility of a hierarchy and the value system and then agreeableness says, hey don't get too carried away with that. You know, you don't want to make the game so damn tight that the losers Stack up at 0 and Dy so, you know, it's egalitarianism versus Justice or something like that. I mean that's not exactly it but it's something like that, you know, everybody should go to university fine egalitarian presupposition the people who work hard and study should do better. Well, that's a presupposition of justice. And those aren't the same thing. Right? Actually, they work somewhat in opposition to one another so you could say Let everyone in you into University and fail half of them in the The first year and that's kind of what they do in places like Holland, you know where we have fairly structured admission criteria, but you know, you can see the tension there because if you let everybody into University, then the really smart people are being dragged far. They're being put into a position where they're able to advance much more slowly than they would otherwise. So that's a real price to pay at the top of the Distribution on the other hand. You're opening up opportunities for people who for one reason or another might Not done well in high school or previously but could actually thriving University. But you see that those things, you know, there's two values structures. They are it's not easy to optimize them and that's exactly why I think we have those two parallel personality dimensions and it's real hell when one of them gets the upper hand, you know part of it is balanced inclusion and hierarchy you need to have those things operating at the same time. So, So back to the mythological representations mean partly what you see in mythological representations of reality. And we have to talk about reality a bit too is the presence of something that represents the hierarchy I would say. You know in Fairytales that's often the king wise king or otherwise and then in religious mythology. It's usually something that represents the king or the father and I think that's because the primary social hierarchies among human beings are masculine in nature. And I think that's probably because While men are more like pack animals and why aren't women. Well, I think the reason for that is that the things that men did historically had a communal element like a goal-directed communal element that wasn't as prevalent in female dominance hierarchies, if something like that. So there's a representation of the of the hierarchy but then there's a counter representation which is the representation of the individual and that's another really tight balance that societies have to manage. I don't want you to be too different because if you're too different. I can't predict you and you may actually be a threat to the Integrity of this Society because you might come up with something so wild and so unconstrained that it just blows the entire game into pieces on the other hand. To the degree that I'm a rigid hierarchy I'm going to fall behind as the environment transforms and the environment the natural environment. Let's say or the environment outside of the dominants arc is also something that's stably represented mythology. So one of the things you see happening is there's a hierarchy and the other thing is there's a force outside the hierarchy and it's often represented by an eye. So you see this in a variety of ancient myths and that represents the capacity of the individual to pay attention and to maintain An update the hierarchy so you have this dance between the individual and the hierarchy the hierarchy structures the individual and disciplines them and produces a cultured being but then hopefully the culture being kind of pops up above the hierarchy and then can start, you know altering it hopefully relatively minimally where it where it's necessary. It's very much akin to Piaget's idea that Once children hit higher levels of moral development. First of all, they play alone. Then they can play with others then they know the rules and then morality is following the rules. And now after that and not every child gets to this point at least according to Piaget the child starts to regard him or herself as something that can make the rules right so you could think about that as the Piaget did as the Pinnacle of ethical development and Whether or not that's the Pinnacle is debatable because I think um, so young extended that idea. Although people never think about this is a variation on Piaget alien Theory. So for Piaget, once you hit individual status it sort of you pop out of the group and then you hit individual status. It's not like you're a rule breaker because you can follow the rules and usually do but you can observe them and modify them when necessary. It's almost exactly what your consciousness. To your own internal neural structure. So for example, imagine you're playing a piano, you know, and you've automatized most of it. So you built little machines in the back of your head to take care of the of the trills. Let's say in the arpeggios and you make a mistake. Well your Consciousness picks up the mistake and then you slow down what you're doing and observe yourself for the motor errors, and then you correct them, which is difficult and then you practice and practice and practice and practice and practice and you automate the new routine and then you go on and so what Consciousness is doing is watching output and when there's a mismatch between what you're aiming at and what happens you stop that's basically anxiety you make your error correction that fixes the hierarchy and then you go on well, that's really the relationship of the individual to society as well. Now you push that idea a fair bit further and I might as well tell you about this. We never discussed this in our section on you and but it's pretty interesting. See if I can get this right? Okay, so young basically preserve presume that as you were socialized you develop that Persona and the Persona was you insofar as your socialized now, you can see persona persona. I when you listen to someone who's very very concerned with their appearance and whose whose speech is somewhat false as a consequence, you know, so they don't seem genuine. They seem to polish. Let's say or something like that, you know, there's not a lot of Ocean for example in their speech their very self-contained and concerned with their public appearance, which is seems also to be a very unfair desirable consequence of spending too much time in social media because it's all Persona development. It's not it's not necessarily a good thing. It does seem to be associated with higher rates of depression anyways. Your your persona is you as socialized being and then so we young would say, yeah, obviously you can be socialized and what that means is some of you is invited out to play and to develop but a lot of you is left undifferentiated or even forbidden. So for example, This happens with agreeable people agreeable people think aggression is wrong. Well, that's not very useful because first of all it's not wrong and second of all because they have the capacity for aggression. And so if that isn't brought out to play it sits at home and it's closet and gets all warped and bent and only comes out, you know at night to cause trouble and so one of the things young would say as well. This is part of the exploration of the Shadow is there's going to be you as Persona and then there's this mishmash of undeveloped and resentful potential roughly speaking and your job is to transmute your moral system and integrate all that stuff that was rejected into your personality and that's often involves a descent into the underworld that a rebirth and that's another mythological motif. So his idea was it? You can think about it this way. So Piaget said at the utmost step of moral development you view yourself as someone who can alter the rules and you'll would say wait a minute. There's another point in that not only do you alter the rules you alter them so that you can include things that were denied or forbidden by the previous system of rules. And so it's a more inclusive game and part of what it includes is those parts of you that you'd cast off because they were socially inappropriate so, Often you Freud's comment about that sort of thing was that was often sexuality and aggression partly because those are kind of individual in nature and they're kind of harder to integrate into a social group and people will take offense to them. I mean, look what's happening on college campuses universities are spending more time worrying about sexual assault. Then they are worrying about education. And the reason for that is it's the reason we're just describing is that sexuality and aggression are very hard to integrate. So they remain on the outside now, you might say suppress it for Christ's sake, you know, get your sexuality under control and eradicate your aggression. That's a stupid idea because we know what happens when you do that, you know, you'd earn into a little milk soppy sort of creature with a tremendous amount of resentment and then you sporadically explode that hardly plus you're denying yourself immense depth in your personality, you know, like a person who has repressed their aggression their sexuality Generally is just dull as you can possibly imagine. You don't even want to talk to them. Whereas someone who has that integrated. There are far more interesting, you know, because there's a provocative element and a teasing element and a dangerous element and and a colorful element and all those things that make, you know, social interactions much more interesting. It's it's you know, you're playing with fire. At that point in your personality development, but human beings are born to play with fire. So you don't want to deny yourself that so anyways, so Young's idea of continued moral development was you know Hall the oppressed self out of captivity. So to speak notice what you're doing, you know partly to refuse to take responsibility, but also partly just to tame yourself so that you're at least not annoying and get that other stuff up into the game so he would think of that at least in As the union of the let's say the union of the articulated self with the unarticulated self a lot of which would be grounded in emotion and motivation. So, okay, so that's he thought of that as a conjunction that's conjunction number one. So that's the bringing together of spirit and and soul or or articulated self it in articulate itself something like that. So now you're an organized from the perspective of your Psyche but then there's another step and so now think of that as an organized thing. The next step is to integrate that with your body and that basically means not only to have that integrated state of being as a as a as a belief system and and system of representation at perception but also to act it out in the world because it's one thing to know something it's another thing to do it. But if you really know it, there's no difference between knowing it and doing it. Okay, so then your body and your your mind and Body are unified. And then there's a third step after that which is really quite complex. And this is where you starts to shade into a phenomenological perspective. So, you know when we were talking about phenomenology, one of the things I pointed out was that the phenomenologist are there playing a you could say they're playing a complex philosophical game and the game is what if and the what if is okay forget about the idea of subjective and objective just forget about it for a moment. Okay. We'll Start with a new set of presuppositions the presuppositions are that everything you experience is real and everything you experience is you so you say reality is experience, but there's an implication to that in the implication is that insofar as your part of my experience the separation between us is illusory. And so the next stage that Jung proposed was that the integrated self The distinction between self and other so that would be that would be recognition. For example, and you everyone already knows this that is pretty hard for me to be stable and happy if I see you miserable and suffering but why is that? Well, it's because insofar as I encountered you at least your misery and suffering is my misery and suffering, you know, unless I'm Psychopathic to the nth degree and so the idea that and that has to be taken care of Well, you certainly see this in the realm of the family, you know, if you're in a family and one of your family members is, you know not doing well in a manner they can't help or not doing well in a manner they can help the probability that that's going to have a direct bearing on your quality of being is 100% In fact, it might be the prime determinant. And so then you can seriously ask yourself. What makes you think you're separate? And you know what phenomenologist should say? Well, that's your assumption that the subject-object Divide is absolute. That's what makes you think your separate and so the final step its kind of akin to a Dostoyevsky idea Dostoyevsky posited in one of his weird sort of transcendent moments that everything that happened to you was not only your fault but everything that happened to everyone was your fault and he didn't mean it precisely like that. He meant it more like everything that happens to you is your responsibility and everything that happens to everyone else is also your responsibility, you know, and that's a well, it's an insane claim to some degree because it broadens the realm of your responsibility out to unlimited reach but but life is an insane thing. And so there's no reason to assume that just because of that, you know seems exaggerated to the point of your rationality that it's wrong. There's lots of things about life that are exaggerated to the point of irrationality like the fundamental structure of life is irrelevant irrational you you're boring arbitrarily there. You are in your particular time and place. You live in accordance with your talents and limitations and then at the end of that there's no you anymore. It's like good luck make a not rational it like it's intrinsically irrational. You know in one of the things that really Advanced theories of human development positive is that to answer an irrational question, you need an irrational answer and I think that's exactly right. You know if life is an impossible burden, which is clearly the case. Then you need an impossible goal to set against it to justify it and part of that might be well, you know get your act together improve the quality of being around you but then that starts to you know stretch its tentacles out to include more and more people and so, you know, one of the things I've thought about for a long time is there's this proclivity of people to flee into let's say nihilism for every good reason under the books or ideological possession. And the alternative to those two things you might think of as chaos. So nihilism is sort of a form of chaos. Anyways, it's not surprising that people become nihilistic plus it's easy and it's not surprising that they become ideologically possess plus it's easy. The question is is there any reasonable alternative to that? You know, what if you read people like Ernest Becker who wrote a book called the denial of death, he was a hyper Freudian really his whole hypothesis like the terror management theorists who derive their ideas from Better by the way, is that everything people do is illusory? You know, no matter what it is. It's an illusion. And so the fundamental underlying reality of human life is that it's hopeless. Well God, you know, that's a hell of a conclusion to draw and I think it's I think it's clearly the wrong conclusion because it leads to it leads to places you just do not want to go and for me that's enough evidence that there's something wrong with it. You know, like if you're following a path and it leads to Josh wits I would say hey, there's something wrong with that path. And you might say well the whole paths are equally absurd it's like yeah, okay, but some of them really hurt and you know, maybe we could do without those and I think it's a very difficult very difficult to dispute that as far as you know mean you can but what you have to say then is all the pain and suffering in the world doesn't matter, you know along with all the good stuff. You can make that irrelevant right away just by doubt, but you really going to take Next step and say, you know, all that human-induced unnecessary pain and suffering is actually meaningless and irrelevant. It's like I think yeah put that person in jail. Now, you know before they do something really dangerous. Well, I don't really mean that but you get you get the point is that you draw a conclusion like that, which is a logical conclusion of nihilism you draw a conclusion like that. It's like all all bets are off for you. So there's something that just seems To be wrong. It just seems wrong that conclusion. And so then one of the things you might ask though, it's okay. That doesn't seem very good. What's the opposite of that? So one of the things that I've really been trying to figure out is what is the opposite of the path that leads to our Schwartz, you know, once we can agree that that's a bad path. Okay fine. We've got a bad identify that implies the reverse a good path. It doesn't Define it though, right? It just implies it. So the implication would be whatever is Likely to lead you there is defective good or at least you could you basically identified the territory and it seems to me that the opposite of not caring about anyone and wishing perhaps for their painful destruction is something like caring for everyone and wishing for their Universal betterment something like that. And that seems to me to be associated with the idea of improving being itself and that means yours and you know your families and your communities and far out as you can reach probably starting with the local, you know till you get yourself all practiced and so that seems to me to be an impossible aim in some sense and that's actually a good thing because the the psychological consequences of pursuing an impossibly good goal are that everything you do starts to become meaningful because it's related intelligibly to that goal and you have a structure within which you can grapple with uncertainty, you know, because if someone says well even you says well, why do you bother with that? You can say well because of this and this and this and this and this and this and then it leads down to our sweats and so we're not going there. and that's why I'm doing this and that's a that's a hell of a tough argument to argue yourself out of and you know, one of the things you really need in life is an argument for life that you cannot dispute. You know because otherwise you're playing like the existentialists would say with this constant recurrence of existential doubt and that paralyzes and cripples you and it makes you weak and so and worse, you know, it's worse you can end up with so much self-contempt just because of who you are as a creature that you're unconsciously wishing for, you know, absolute annihilation. I see this in many many places, but one of the things I've seen it most frequently probably in the last 30 years is the insistence on the part of certain. Certain parties who are at least in principle concerned with environmental issues that the planet would be better off with no people on it. It's like I think well, the first thing I think is well, let's start with you. But the next thing I think is really that's really what you thinking. It's like, you know, if you all you don't have to go very far down from a psychoanalytic perspective into the dream underlying a statement like that before you see that it is a sort of dream that you do not want to have anything at all to do with because there's an actively Jenna Seidel component to it and it's based in loathing of humanity self-loathing, but also loathing of Entire species. It's like Better beware of that sort of thinking which is not to say that, you know, we don't have some things that we could clean up, you know, but you know little Sympathy For Humanity wouldn't be a bad thing. We do have a relatively hard time of it after all which is also something the existentialist, you know, they're nice corrective to Freud because Freud says, hey, you're probably healthy unless something terrible has happened to you, you know, and the existentialist call arm come along and say yeah, but something terrible happens to everyone so, you know existence itself is sufficient. Cause for human insanity and you know, I'd basically by that I think everyone has an impossible existential and moral burden. It's a condition of life. And so so when you see a creature like that you think yeah, well it's no wonder you're a bit cracked and you know, maybe somewhat dangerous but it's like man, you've got the motivation for it. So, you know little understanding might be in order. You know when I see people who are Agra phobic hey come and say to me. Well, I've become afraid of everything I think. That's easy to understand. I just can't figure out how the hell it was ever any different than that. How did you ever manage to not be afraid of everything? Because that's the question, you know, and that's the fundamental existential question to when you're surrounded by infinite vulnerability. How the hell can you stay calm? Well, you know part there's a bunch of answers that we've explored. Some of them partly is will you organize yourself with everybody else so that the chaos is at least held at Bay, you know, you know what confronted every single second with the possibility of insanity or disease or death. You could put some distance between you and And that's not an illusion. It's like You know, you don't want to spend the night in a hospital room where an epidemic of Ebola is Raging and that's not a psychological problem. That's just you just don't want to be there and intelligibly so so even putting any distance between you and that outcome isn't the losery but then then you know, there's the other things that we do to which are which is try to find meaningful things within the confines of our own lives and the destructive and nihilistic philosophy is basically always claim that that's delusional and I don't believe that I think that's wrong and I think it's dangerous and I think it's almost everything that students are known taught in universities and so over the last 10 years it seemed to me to be and maybe this is an overstatement but the university education in the humanities and often in the social sciences causes more harm than it does good, you know because this is basically what it teaches students how to Point in their life where instead of confronting the radical uncertainty underneath everything is that you know, you should be invited into life helped find a niche that's fulfilling from a human perspective master that and then you know, maybe start thinking about extending yourself a little bit beyond that into the unknown but to take people who hardly know what the hell they're doing to begin with and then expose them to you know, postmodernist. irrational Fundamental critique of everything like what do you expect is going to happen when people have that experience plus I think it's I think it's wrong. That's the worst of it. I don't think it's factually true. I don't think it's philosophically true and I think it's dangerous. That's a bad combination and you know part of the reason I think that people do this and are such admirers of postmodern nihilism is that it abdicates the necessity of responsibility, you know, because people say well I'm just Thinking it through it's like you're never just thinking something through the probability that motivation has nothing to do with that is it's zero because we already know just from the things we covered in this class that motivation frames your perceptions, you know, you can't even see the damn. Gorilla When you're counting the basketballs and so, you know, if you're formulating a rationalistic critique of everything and then you say oh, well, I'm not motivated. It's like, well you're motivated when you count the basketballs and so The probability that you're motivated when you're doing something far more extensive and and difficult than that is a hundred percent. young would say you know, this is when we get back to the mythological underpinnings of things as well, you know in the in the in the Egyptian myth of creation and reality Osiris is the figure of tradition. So he sort of represents the dominance hierarchy roughly speaking in all of its manifestations and he has an evil brother named Seth Seth is a typical figure in fairy tales, you know in The Lion King you see scarves exactly the same figure and the scar sort of Seth figure stands for the proclivity of bureaucracies to degenerate into look malevolent. totalitarian states which is always a problem, right because they rigidify and then oppress that's the price you pay for existing within a hierarchy and then they rigidify no, press sometimes because that's just what happens as the age and sometimes because there's a voice recommending that as a mode of being it's okay. If you do this, it's okay. If you break this rule, you know, what the hell difference does it make anyways, you see some of that being played out right now with the revelation of all those Panama papers, right? So which is a huge revelation of corruption at hardly surprising, you know at high levels of power all around the world now you see the You know at the bottom of everything, so this is the archetypal depths. I see this battle in the human soul. Basically between an attitude that says despite its limitations life is valuable and worth preserving and improving that's proposition. One. Another proposition is the suffering that life involves renders it ethically untenable and physiologically and psychologically. Unbearable and as a consequence of that it should just be eradicated. And so it's a binary choice is some sense. Yes to being or no and you know, you can you can conjure up powerful arguments on both sides of that but to some degree your whole being is an argument between those two questions. You know and one of the things that young said which I think is extremely worthwhile is that you should figure out what archetypal forces are in charge of your of your being because they're there whether you know it or not now, you know, we've walked through that to some detail. You can look at it in a sense from a biological perspective. it's more mechanistic, you know, you're a tool of hunger and anger and fear and Love and You Know lost and all those primordial forces that that Make up your field of experience. That's a purely biological way of thinking about it or archetypal way of thinking about it is that those things are actually characters or personalities and there are organized into hierarchies that are also characters and personalities, you know, an anger and fear and resentment and hatred and current, you know, that they're carnivorous soul of human beings and all of those things aggregated into one form of meta personality and Things that you might think about as existing in opposition to that aggregated to another and then the topmost struggle for integration is the struggle between those two things. That's a very common mythological theme, you know, that's basically the battle between good and evil in heaven. And that's an unbelievably old it says old and ID as human beings have no the Battle of the Gods for dominance in heaven, even if it's not strictly between good and evil, you know, even if it hasn't been developed to the point of that ultimate opposition, it's still a battle at some level between Titanic forces for Domination. Well, that's partly a description of your own psyche and partly a description of the organization or lack thereof of he's across time and well, it seems to me that that one of the things you own was insistent upon because he was trying to and many of the thinkers that we've covered in this in this series. You know they were they were trying to answer the question. This was especially true for the clinicians of how it is that an individual should conduct themselves so that their motive being is optimized you can say well that's mental health, but that's it. It's it's a radically insufficient way of describing that because Well, it's not merely the absence of pathology. It's something much more complex that something active and it's not even individual its individual and social you know, because you're not going to be mentally healthy unless your integrated into a functioning social Community. You just can't do it because other people are part of what keeps you sane, you know, because they're always whacking you when you get out of line a little bit. They just tap you with sarcasm or raised eyebrows or frowns or Smiles or they're constantly tapping you into being a proper person whatever the hell that is, you know, but they're telling you all the time what it is, so You know, so Nietzsche's idea was that. The modern world had landed itself in hot water because its own proclivity for searching out. The truth had undermined its Faith In traditional axioms of morality fair enough that seems Boatwright, you know, and his cure for that was that people became he called it over men often translated as Superman which were people who created their own values, you know to fill the void left by the absence of Additional values but there's a bunch of problems with that idea one is individuals probably can't do it because they don't live long enough and second. It's really hard. I mean just from the perspective of what are you going to be the best philosopher who ever lived because that's really what it requires and then the third problem is what makes you think you create values like it isn't phenomenologically obvious that you do. It's more like you experience them. And sometimes you don't even know where they cut came come from you get Angry, you know why maybe you'll have to think about it for like three days. So in what way you created that is, well, it's not self-evident and Young's idea was well. The forces that we had regarded as traditional sources of values were actually spontaneous constructions of the human psyche. They weren't arbitrary systems of rules. They were way deeper than that and I think if you have an ounce of biologists in you you immediately read that and think well, yeah, obviously right obviously, you know, even the social rules that govern a dominance hierarchy like they're instilled in you you know them. Right in your body. And so there's a biological basis for your understanding of culture right at that level that's damn near spinal like it's old so you and secondary proposition was and this is quite an interesting one. Is that by attending to your fantasies in your dreams and your Daydreams for that matter? You can come into contact with some of the primordial psychic forces that originally produced religious revelation. And so that you can find what's lost by looking within you know, and that's basically the entire point of Union Psychotherapy part of the reason I'm concentrating on young is because guys like Rogers You know and a phenomenologist there are they're moving down the same trail of thought but they didn't get as far as young as far as I could tell like they never took it to its ultimate conclusion, you know, like Maslow for example talk about a hierarchy of needs and the self-actualized person was someone who had accomplished all those basic needs and popped out at the top. It's like kind of true but sort of primitive, you know, because it is by no means obvious that you have to take care of all your basic material needs before you could act morally it's a foolish idea that it assumes that people are going to get like they're going to become more moral as they get richer now, like I'm not saying they become less moral because I don't believe that but I don't see that. There's any positive Association. It's just you can use it you can use your wealth well or you can use it. To be just like you can use your poverty well or use it badly. So so Maslow, it's like yeah, there's a hierarchy. Yes something emerges at the top. No, it's not a consequence of the Fulfillment of needs. It's way too materialistic. It's basically like a utopian select a utopian socialist idea, right? If you've seen people enough cake all of a sudden everyone will get along. So like people aren't like that at all. So you took this idea of personal development as far as I can tell to its ultimate extreme to its logical. People conclusion and that's where he ran into the archetypes because what archetypes are in some sense is the ultimate instantiation of an idea. You can't go beyond it. That's why it's an archetype, you know, so there's an archetype of death. Well why well because he can't go past that like words fail when you're confronted by that and there's an archetype of love and you know, there's an archetype of evil and all of those things are there Beyond articulation. And in their archetypal form and they there's a place where you're articulated thought ceases to be relevant. So for you, you know the self-development. Route was the confrontation of those things that you had abandoned Within. Now I've been thinking about young for a very long time and I think that one of the things that struck me about the psychoanalyst is that they're much too concerned about the idea that if you're probably properly organized as a human being that organization is intrapsychic like it's in you somehow and which is a you know for young that hero's journey was a journey into the unconscious an individual journey into the unconscious. Now he started to see flaws in that idea as he moved forward with his thinking but one of the flaws in that idea is that you're not only individual not at all like and if you're if you're situated properly will say in being your familial relationships are healthy as well as the proper balance being struck inside you between the competing sub personalities that make you up and those things are actually not different. You know what? I mean? You can't have one without the other. So to think about them even as separate spheres is improper in a sense because you're limited in your well-being by the well-being of those people who are you know in concentric circles around you and no matter how well organized you are internally. It's insufficient, you know, you see that reflected in stories like the story of the Buddha because at one point the Buddha after being walloped by knowledge of old age and sickness and death because that's really what does it mean he attains Enlightenment under a tree for a variety of reasons. We won't go into you know, so he's attained a perfect state of primarily subjective being and that sort of like it's a temptation to there's a temptation to remain there but he shuts that down and then goes back into the world and teach his people because his realization is nirvana attained individually is not true Nirvana. You can't be Not suffering in a sea of suffering, you know, all that means is that you've got a particular kind of blind Iran. And so, you know, he goes back so to speak and then suffers, you know, mythologically speaking suffers a normal human death and then some sense that's portrayed as voluntary. So Sometimes I show people Pinocchio in this class. I think we did a little bit of that. Did we do a little bit of that? Well, you know in Pinocchio Pinocchio's trying to become a real person and he has to a variety of very strange things to manage that one of which is to go down into the depths of the ocean and confront the most frightening thing roughly speaking and simultaneously rescue his father and which is a very very strange set of ideas. You know, it's definitely a descent into the underworld there's elements of Jonah and the whale in there which is very very old story, but there's an idea that's that's very much associated. It with Union thinking too and that is that in the in the background chaos of your mind. There are depths and in those depths are what the Forgotten or non articulate structures of your culture, but more than that the Forgotten or non articulate parts of your psyche that would make it a cultural culture creating entity and that that has to be discovered in order for you to be to have the courage to be an individual And there's nothing delusional about that, you know, because the idea there as opposed to say the typical nihilistic or Terror management theories is that if you got your act together, the fear of death would no longer be the thing that fundamentally rules you like that that's actually possible. So there's a weird idea there the idea is not that fear of vulnerability and death is irrelevant or not. Not even that it's not Central but that people are so goddamn tough that it's possible that they can face that directly and say that's not going to be what rules my life and I believe people can do that. I've seen people do that certainly in their careers, you know, even if they can't articulate that philosophy you put them in a situation where they're doing nothing but dealing with death and and destruction and you know, they can do it. Just mind-boggling and a great thing to be able to see and it's you know, you search in vain throughout the annals of psychology for optimistic ideas. And I think that's particularly true with regards to like the more experimental brands of psychology that are associated with being like social psychology personality will leave out of this for the time being because it's become more statistical, you know. But the idea that there's enough in you so that if you don't Flinch from life, you can become strong enough to master it. That's an amazing idea. It's the only optimistic idea I've ever seen that's profound that I actually believe because most of the profound ideas that are easy to believe are terrible ideas, you know, they have to do with the inevitability of malevolence and death and insanity and suffering and all of that, you know, those things kind of blow through your persona, but trying to find Something optimistic to counterbalance that that's tough. But you know the other thing we know about people now that we didn't know a few years ago. is that If you put yourself a new environments, you actually change yourself genetically. You know, so if I take you out of your safe environment and start to expose you say to situations that you fear you could say that one of the reasons that you transform is because you observe yourself mastering those situations, you know, so you get bigger. So to speak in the Situation's get smaller lovely you can you can you can account for that by learning. But there's an additional Dimension that might be related to The Learning which is that if you put yourself in the new situation then different proteins start to be encoded in your brain and you know in the rest of your nervous system, so you actually transmute literally speaking and the total range of human transmutation is unexplored. So there's this idea. Let me show you this is a cool thing to know about. Okay, so that's a picture of a labyrinth at in the shark feed rural now a cathedral is shaped like a cross. And then the focal point of the cathedral's right at the middle of the Cross and the cross is an X. So to speak in the center of the x is where you are and the reason it's across as between the because of the center of that X is suffering. And so the central aspect of consciousness of being is integrity associated with suffering betrayal all of those things. That's the nature of the center of the world. And so then the question might be well, how do you cope with that? Well, the typical religious idea is that you identify with a hero figure of some sort and although that's often warped and morphed into the idea that you believe in them. That's not what it's not the right idea. The right idea is that you identify with so I can give you an example from that in the Christian Mass ceremony, which is actually a cannibalistic ritual and it's a very very old idea and the idea is that you become what you Just right and so it's the mass ceremony which is in principle. The eating of the Flesh of a God is not a ritual to instantiate articulated belief. It's a ritual to instantiate embodied transformation. You're supposed to become what that represents question is what the hell does it represent what we know some of that it represents for example the ability to pay attention. That's one thing that for sure it represents because you know Christ is an ugh of Horace a very tight analog of porous as a matter of fact, so but what else does it represent? Oh, I can give you some other suggestions. One of the things that is often required of the believer in a traditional religion is a pilgrimage right now that was quite common in Christianity in the Middle Ages. That's kind of disappeared. You see bits and pieces of it and Judaism with the idea of modern Judaism in particular with the idea that you know every North American For example should go to Israel at least once and then of course it's a massively featured element of tradition traditional Islam. So you think well, what does a pilgrimage do to someone well partly it's a journey to the holy city, whatever that means the holy city is a symbolic representation of an ideal mode of being so you're you're making a symbolic journey to an ideal mode of being. Okay. Well, let's say you're some like ratty villager from somewhere and you've never been more than a mile away from your from. Um your village and your functionally illiterate, you don't know anything about the world and one day you decide to, you know, take a 1500 or 3000 mile pilgrimage the probability that you're going to be the same person when you come back as you were when you left is zero. And the reason for that is well, a lot of things are going to happen to you along the way God only knows it's going to be a big adventure and you might say well what's the utility in that and utility is that you know with each stressful situation you encounter and Aster your Your Capacity grows and so maybe you'll encounter 500 of those on your pilgrimage maybe you don't even you know, maybe it's dangerous enough so there's a reasonable probability that you won't even come back alive, but if you do come back you're not naive you've seen the world you're going to be someone who's much more difficult to contend with you know, when you're going to be a bit of a foreigner to the people in your village price you pay for that remember in The Hobbit when Bilbo goes out to confront the dragon. Then he comes back. No one really likes them anymore. Like they respect them, but they think well, you know, here's this weird guy that transformed himself into like a thief and you know, then when confronted a dragon he went way the hell away from his home. So he sort of contaminated by The Foreigner and he made it back. You don't want to mess with him, but he's not the same thing that he was when he was there. You know and that's all to the good. I mean what happens in the next series of books makes it quite evident that if Bill Bole hadn't undergone his Adventure then the battle between good and evil would have gone to the evil side. Right? That's the entire plot of The Lord of the Rings. It's this massive fantasy of good versus evil. Just like Harry Potter those things like those ideas and never go away. You see that with the Avengers 2, you know in that in the in the one of the scenes There is extremely interesting, you know, so there's this scene. This is where the what are they called those foreign alien things Qatari or something like that, you know the big monsters that come through the portal and then invade New York and is don't remember what they're called, but there's a very interesting scene in there where the Armed Forces send a hydrogen bonding to take New York out because of the scent of these terrible aliens, right and Iron Man. Who's this? Weird Android like thing. So he's a human being that's transforming himself into something. That's more than a human being one of the things that happens with iron man is his suit gets increasingly gold as the series continues. There's a real reason for that. He makes a personal sacrifice to avert the hydrogen bomb, right and then it blows up all the bad guys and he falls to Earth just like Icarus. That's pretty cool. And then what's really interesting is that when he falls to Earth and he's dead. It's the Hulk who wakes him up. And the reason for that is that like the Hulk represents masculine energy. That's completely Unbound, you know, and then Tony Stark is this sort of tightly constrained intellect character whose half machine he's not Enough Savage that's one way of looking at it. And so what he's lying there half dead. He's missing something and so the whole comes along and like yells them into being again. He's already made a relationship with the Hulk right and these things are genuine myths because they're co-created with their audience. You know, all of these stories has a backstory and if you're a comic book writer and you deviate improperly from the back story, then you're going to get like 10,000 letters from fans say well, what about issue a hundred and eighteen on page 13 You know, that's part of the necessary pla well. All right. You keep Tony Stark in mind for a minute. Now. You see this Labyrinth here. So I'll tell you what, you do in the chartres cathedral. So you've got this cross and then this thing is at the point of it. Now. If you go on a pilgrimage you go out there and expand your personality by visiting the north part of the world in the west part of the world of the East part of the world in the South part of the world you go everywhere. You're a Wanderer that's gone everywhere. Okay, but maybe you can't go to the damn pilgrimage for what reason or another so you do a symbolic pilgrimage you go to the casino. Beedrill you go to the point of suffering so to speak and then you enter this Maze and to get to the middle of the maze which is very much like the Buddha the flower of the that the Buddhist it's in because it's a flower to get to the middle. You can't just walk straight to the middle. You have to wander the entire Maze and cover every square foot of it and only once you've done that so that's a symbolic journey to north east west and south only after you've done that do you get to the middle? And the middle signifies the point where the suffering that's represented by the entire structure of that building can be withstood. And you know, you got to understand this idea is so you think about what those damn Europeans were doing when they were building those Cathedrals, you know, some of those things took 500 years to build you can't even imagine a modern society building something that would take 500 years to build. You know, it's it's unimaginable to us. So and these Cathedrals were so expensive. They were like the moon the trip to the moon in the 1960s, you know, the whole damn culture was devoted to producing these fantastic structures of stone and light that had this particular message embodied in it. It's like, why were they doing that? Well, you know, you can get cynical about it. Although I think that'd be a little premature but this is part of the answer. It's like the culture was trying to figure something out and We're trying to figure out is where you should be and how you should get there and and and to point out as well how massive the consequences were of failure versus success is failure that leads to hell and success that leads to heaven and you know, you can think about that as something projected into the into the future life which needs to call the biggest are Christianity ever made, but if you dispense with that at least provisionally, you know, the reality of that becomes clear right away. Way what happens if you don't take the voyage while you become corrupt as your week it's as simple as that and as soon as you and you have every reason to become corrupt, like you can say the conditions of existence are such that if you cannot tolerate them, you will become corrupt. and I just I just can't see in any way how that's not self-evident lie true. And so if you don't take the voyage, well what happens is everything tilts towards hell around you, but you have a lot more influence than you think so you don't know exactly what waves of causality are emanating from your decisions. You have no idea, you know, and then if you do just start to go everywhere and to pick up your responsibility then what Out from you, you know, maybe in receding waves is the idea that it's possible to live life properly and to make things better. And that's an idea like I think that idea is more powerful than death. and it would be really good if that was the case, you know, they existential element comes in and I guess this is also the element of faith is the only way you're going to ever figure that out as if you try it because no one else can demonstrate, you know, the truth or falsity of those two branching Pathways accept you because you have to test it in the conditions of your own life, you know, and at some point by the time you hit about 30, nobody can tell you what to do and you think well hooray it's like Let's go a little easy on the celebrating. You know, it's quite a relief when you have a problem. You can go to someone and they say well here's what you can do about it. But by the time you're fully adult your damn life is so individualized that you know, you can use moral guidelines and you should for sure but you're basically stuck with the choices. all these old ideas, they suggest that if your choice is to voluntarily confront and to improve and to repair that not only do you repair the things around you they don't have to be within you they can be anywhere around you and you continually heal the structure of being well, that'd be a good thing to try. You know, it's a big deal. It'll keep you busy. In order to provide your suffering with some meaning that's a big deal and the alternative looks Dreadful. Well, you know, I walked you through all these various theories some of them about. Behavior and some of them about personality and some of them are both philosophy and some of them about Clinical Psychology. You know what it's an attempt to to allow you to take multiple snapshots of what a what a human being is and you know, how we might manifest our self for me knowing all those things has been ridiculously useful ridiculously useful far more practical than anything else I ever learned. You know, when one of the advantages to knowing about personality is that you know, instead of reducing the individual to some set of measurable phenomena, which I'm all for by the way. It also expands your conception of what the individual can be to an almost unlimited degree. you know, so instead of something like instead of a human being some being something that has to waver and be crushed under the weight of its own being, you know, a human being could easily be something that could stand up and say yeah well I can handle that and I think people can do that. People are so damn tough. It's unbelievable. You know, I've seen people go through things that are just grinding terrible and not only come out the other side, but actually put themselves together enough to clearly be a force that rescues the culture and tries to improve the structure of being and so like gray for us if we could do that that more than justifies, whatever. You know Horrors might be late at our Collective at our Collective feet. So I would say don't underestimate yourself. You know and you guys all have a lot going for you, you know, you're smart. You're young you're reasonably conscientious a number of you are creative. You have access tremendous access to technological power. You know, so God only knows what you met might manage to hammer yourself into over the next 30 years or so, but the more people that try to make things better consciously rather than worse. The better off everything is going to be and that would be a hell of a fine thing to aim for so that's mostly what I've learned from studying personality. So thank you very much for attending the course and good luck with the client. 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 twisted. 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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