Transcription
I'm told that my overanalyzing is a double-edged sword, but I'm suffering from being this way. Yeah, well, you're probably, you know, high in openness, and maybe you're very verbally intelligent, so you're pretty much stuck with that. Maybe you've got a bit of mania to you, too. And I don't mean that in a negative sense.
I find relief when I drink alcohol, smoke, or take certain drugs because it slows down my thought process. How can I use my overanalysis to my advantage? Well, I would say find yourself a difficult cognitive problem to solve. You know, pick a challenge. Pick a challenge. But you know, you also might consider you might consider talking to someone.
You find relief when you drink alcohol. That might be that might be an indication that some of what you're overanalyzing isn't so much a consequence of excess cognitive power, but an excess of of high negative emotion. And so that would be illustrated in say, high trait neuroticism. We're going to release the Big Five Aspect Scale here later this month, and you'll be able to take that, and it'll give you a pretty good, detailed description of your personality. And there's two dimensions of neuroticism: withdrawal and volatility. And you know, if you're overanalyzing because you're you're um, what do you call that? Ruminating. That can be a consequence of high levels of anxiety. And the reason I'm suggesting that is because you said you find relief when you drink alcohol. And alcohol is a very powerful anxolytic agent, anti-anxiety agent. And so lots of people who have high levels of anxiety do ruminate and so overanalyze, let's say, and they find relief when they drink because alcohol is a primary anxilytic, like Valium, like benzodiazepines and barbiturates. So the fact that alcohol gives you relief probably indicates that some of what's driving your overanalysis is anxiety. And then you could, um, exercise can really help with that.
I would also recommend this is something really to think about. I don't know what your eating habits are like or your sleeping habits. But if you are an anxious person and that's manifesting itself in say, neurotic overanalysis, there's two things you can do very rapidly. Three things, really, that will help quell that. Um, well, four things, even. Number one, get up at the same time every day. And I would recommend in the morning because that's when people generally get up, and it's good to do what everyone else does unless you have a good reason not to. Number two, eat a large breakfast, right? Keep it carbohydrate light, you know. Don't don't eat two toast and like, and Froot Loops. That's not going to do the trick. Make it fat and protein heavy, and eat more than you want. You might say, "I'm not hungry in the morning." It's like, this has nothing to do with what you want or what your appetite is. It's like, you need to eat in the morning. If you're an anxious person and you don't eat in the morning, and then you stress yourself out, your body hyperproduces insulin. It takes all the blood sugar out of your blood, and that disregulates your metabolism for the entire day. You can't reset it till you go to sleep at night. And I've had lots of anxious clients who would say, fall into the overanalytic category, who were like virtually cured by eating a large breakfast every morning. I would highly recommend that you could try some physical exercise. Weightlifting is really good for curing anxiety. And the other thing you could do, as I alluded to earlier today, is to make a schedule and start attending to your daily micro-routines.
So, you know, you got to figure out what your overanalysis is. It might be cognitive, like maybe you have a very active mind. You know, you're fast verbally. Are you fast verbally? One way you can find that out is to do something like write down as many letters, words as you can that begin with the letter S, for example, in in three minutes. Do that with a bunch of your friends. And if you're someone who writes down way more words than anyone else, then you're verbally fluent, and that might be driving some of your overanalysis. But my guess is that you're suffering from some rumination that's related to anxiety. And so I told told you what I think the simplest ways are to rectify that.
People like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, they assume that the natural person is the civilized creature that you see before you in a discussion like this. But I don't believe that. I think that people are far crazier and far more destructive and and far greater as well than the typical rationalist approach. Rationality is a surface facade. That's all. And the idea that people will eventually be rational, it's much more likely that they will be irrational than rational. You could say, for example, that Catholicism, let's say, for all its irrationality, was as rational as people can get. If you remove that level of irrationality, that's structural, say, then everything falls apart, and people get so irrational, you can't believe it. Not more rational, you know, because they like Harris and his crowd think that we were superstitious for thousands of years, kind of savage and and and and superstitious, and then all of a sudden the Enlightenment came along and the scientific revolution, and poof, we got rational, and since then things have been good. And that's not how it looks to me at all. I don't I don't buy that.
Um, I think that our rationality, as I said already, our our rationality, even our science is nested inside this larger metaphysical structure. This is also something that Carl Jung would be an advocate of. That there's an irrational, pragmatic, I would say, evolutionarily determined ethic underneath this rationality. And when it goes, then all that rationality goes too. So, yes, you can be a non-believer. But the funny thing about that is too, you can't be a non-believer in your action. You see, because Harris's metaphysics is fundamentally Christian. So he acts out a Christian metaphysics, but he says, well, I don't believe it. It's like, well, yeah, you do because you're acting it out. You just say you don't believe it, but you believe.
What do you mean? What do you mean he's acting it out? Like what, for example? Well, he doesn't rob banks, doesn't kill people, doesn't rape, doesn't murder, you know. Well, there's a good case to be made for atheism. I mean, let's let's make no no bones about it. Um, I actually think it's an easier case to make than the alternative. Um, because you could say in some sense, there's been 300, 400 years of brilliant scientists who've been doing nothing but laying the foundation for an objective empirical atheism. So, it's an unbelievably powerful argument, but it's not going to lead to the to the rule of rationality.
See, I don't believe that. I don't believe that because Do you think anything could get you there? Do Do you think somebody could lay out a case that could eventually turn you on this the same way you would want someone like Sam to come around to what you're saying? Do you think that that that's even in the realm of? I can't see how because it's it's not like I haven't thought these things through. I mean, I am a scientist, you know, I understand the scientific worldview. In fact, everything that I am saying and thinking about religion is nested inside an evolutionary viewpoint, an evolutionarily an evolutionary biology viewpoint and an evolutionary psychology viewpoint. So I do believe there's a fundamental contrast between a Darwinian worldview and a Newtonian worldview, which is the worldview that I think Sam Harris and his crowd basically have. He didn't agree with that. But and it's complicated. Yeah.
But but um, see, I guess in some sense, I'm more romantic in temperament than Sam. And I think than his followers too. And because of that, I can see the irrational and malevolent side of human beings. I believe much more clearly than they can. And I also think I have far more experience with that sort of thing. Science and the scientific worldview, in some sense, has won, you know, and and because it's so self-evident, let's say, because of what it can produce, that people just will accept it and move forward with it. But I'm not sure about that either. I mean, I think there's a strong anti-science movement afloat now. I don't think there's any reason to assume that a scientific attitude of that sort would be stable. Um, I mean, it it's only 300 years old, 400. I mean, people don't like it when I say that because, okay, fine, you can chase it back to some degree to the ancient Greeks, you know, barely, but really it was Newton and Bacon and and Deart, and and that's not very long ago, and we take it for granted, but there's anti-science movements popping up. Well, look, the whole debate over biology, to some degree, is is profoundly an anti-science movement, and and not unconsciously so, consciously so, right? Very conscious, very consciously so. Yeah.
So I I don't think that there's any reason to assume something like that would be stable. There's no evidence that it's stable, let's say. Whereas there is evidence for the stability of cultures that were non-scientific for thousands of years, millions of years, for that matter, at least hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah. Well, you know, the other thing that often happens with with Dawkins and Harrison and and their crew is that they attribute war and conflict to religious motivations, you know, and I find that quite interesting because, first of all, chimpanzees go to war. So, you know, we could just lay that right on the table and say, well, so much for the religious theory. They're territorial. We're territorial. You could consider religious sentiment as an aspect of territoriality, but the fundamental motivation for the battle is territorial, and and that's grounded in, like, you can see that in animals always.
That was only discovered, you know, the chimps went to war in about the mid-70s, and and and Goodall suppressed it for quite a while because she thought maybe she had warped the chimpanzees by by provisioning them, and so that they were manifesting abnormal behavior. But they were studied for quite a while, and they do do raiding, and they'll wipe out another colony, no problem, and brutally. They seem to have absolutely no inhibitions on their aggression whatsoever. They'll tear them into pieces, and chimpanzees are about six times as strong as an adult male. They're super strong. And so when they let loose, they're vicious with no control. And so unless you're willing to attribute religious sentiment to the chimpanzees, which I think you could to some degree, by the way, how can we make that jump for a chimpanzee?
Well, because the precursors to religious belief are in place. So, for example, animals organize themselves into a hierarchy. You could call it a dominance hierarchy, but it's it's not exactly the right way to conceptualize it because dominance sounds like power, right? And and that's sort of the social justice warrior, postmodernist claim that all hierarchies are based on power. But Frans de Waal, who's a a Dutch anthropologist who studied chimps for a long time, has noted that the brutal chimp dictatorship tends to be unstable and end in a very violent, mean manner. Well, so if you're a brutal chimp leader and you're always tormenting everyone, and you don't do any reciprocal grooming, and you don't have any friends, then one day two chimps who are nicely bonded together, three-quarters your size, wait and ambush you and tear you into pieces.
And so one of the things de Waal has noted is that the the stable chimpanzee troops tend to have a leader that's quite pro-social. Lot of friends, a lot of social bonds, a lot of mutual grooming. And so you could see even there, imagine that, imagine that there are sets of hierarchies among chimpanzees, and there's different principles of leadership at the top. Then you could imagine a competition across time. Which principle of leadership is going to produce the most stable and functional chimpanzee hierarchy? Well, that is exactly what does happen. And so there's there's some shape that the top of the hierarchy starts to take. And you could think about that as the beginnings of an ideal.
It's even more complicated than that because let's say you get a stable hierarchy set up, and then this is what happens in human beings. It doesn't happen in chimps, or it does, but only to a limited degree. You get a stable hierarchy set up, and then there's some pattern of behavior that emerges that's that reliably moves men to the top of that. Okay? They leave more offspring. So what happens is that the male dominance hierarchy, the male hierarchy, forget about dominance. The male hierarchy becomes a selection mechanism. It promotes men to the upper ranks, and then the women peel off the top because we know that human females do that. Chimpanzee females don't. They're promiscuous maters. The dominant males are more likely to mate with the females, but that's because they chase the subordinates away. It's not because the females are choosy.
So the reason I'm telling you this, it's it's really important because imagine that there's a reliable pattern of behavior that will move you up a male hierarchy across time. Well, what that means is that men over time have become biologically adapted to that pattern. The hierarchy is there. It's stable. It exists across millions of years. And so it acts as a selection mechanism by promoting men. And so the men who have the genes that are most likely to get them promoted put those genes forward. And so we get more like the group ideal as we progress through time, both biologically and culturally. And then we also start to articulate that group ideal. And that's partly what a religion does when it when it's coming up with the idea of an ideal.
There's a there's a distinction made between countries that rule by the ruler, who's God, and countries that are ruled by God, who's not the ruler. Okay? So, strip it for a minute of its religious language. And imagine this instead. Imagine that what we consider God is the abstraction of the ideal by which people have to orient themselves to produce a functional society. It's an abstraction, right? So it's just sort of the the basic underlying truth of how we are able to function as a group of people. Properly. And you can't identify it with any one person because when you identify it with a person, then the system gets corrupted because the person gets inflated. Let's say.
This would be like the pharaoh, basically. Yes. Exactly like precisely like that. That that's exactly that that's the canonical story in the Old Testament. Yeah. Is the pharaoh is the earthly ruler who demands everything that you should provide to God. What's God? Well, we'll we'll can speak about it from an evolutionary psychology perspective. God is the idea of the abstract ideal, and you separate it out from from the actual ruler. Just like in in in our society, the idea of sovereignty is abstracted from the president, right? The president comes and goes. The sovereignty of the president remains. The sovereignty of the president is a very abstract idea because it's disembodied, right? It's disembodied.
Now, how we were chimps, for God's sake. How long do you think it took us to figure out how to disembody the idea of sovereignty from the individual? Man, it was like, well, it was it was maybe up until maybe it took us till 150,000 years ago to start to start formulating that, you know, in in some articulated way, in some abstract way. I think we could recognize it before then. And the way you recognize it is through admiration, right? If you meet someone that you admire, there's someone you want to imitate. And what it is, imagine this pattern that will move you up the hierarchy, and then you see people who manifest different elements of it, and you see someone who manifests an element that you don't have, and something in you responds to that with with admiration. It's unconscious, right? Cuz it pulls you towards them. It's not voluntary.
I want to do a video directed towards young women because I'd like to tell them what lies they're being taught and are going to be taught. And there's a couple of lies. And the first is the first lie is you're going to have a career. Okay? No. A tiny fraction of people have careers, maybe 2%. Okay. Most people have jobs. Yeah. And the definition of a job is an activity that you get paid for because you wouldn't do it voluntarily. Okay? So, first of all, you're not going to have a career. You're going to have a job. Second, most jobs aren't very desirable. They're not very meaningful. They're not the center place for your life. And even if you have a career, like um, for example, if you go into law, you're going to find that it's very, very demanding, and very, very difficult, and very, very stressful, and very, very competitive, and you're not going to find the fulfillment of your of your desire, for example, for intimate, close interpersonal relationships in a competitive domain like law. It's just not going to happen. And if you go and be a doctor, then you're going to be looking at 60-hour weeks. And I and so careers are careers are exceptionally demanding. You're never done. You're always working. And jobs are are people pay you to do jobs because the jobs are difficult and unpleasant and require responsibility and and difficult decisions. Okay. So that's the first lie. The second lie is that career or job is actually the fundamental purpose of life. And that's not true. The the most important thing in life is your family, your relationship, and your children. And you might not know that when you're 19 because what the hell do you know when you're 19? You don't know anything. Seven years ago, you were 12. You don't know anything.
Yeah. And what you don't understand is that by the time you're 40, if you don't have a family and children, you are one lost soul. Because as you get older, you know, and I mean, I've had a very good career and it's still going just great guns, and I don't expect it to end, you know, unless someone gets particularly irritated with me for another 15 or 20 years. But I can tell you that despite all that, despite the fact that I'm absolutely fascinated by my job and and my my career and and I and I'm in a very fortunate position because it's an extraordinarily interesting job. Ever since I had kids, they were the most important thing in my life. And as I get older, that just becomes more and more and more clear. And so, Western people, Carl Jung commented about this at one point. He thought that because the the fundamental archetypal hero of Western culture was Christ, and Christ died when he was in his early 30s, that we really didn't have a good model for the latter half of life. It's a very interesting kind of idea, but um, I I can I can say with with virtual certainty that if you're not orient if you're not situated with a family in the latter half of your life, especially if you also don't have a partner, you're one lonesome, isolated, miserable creature.
I imagine the rates for people like that are quite high, aren't they? Well, and and increasingly we're going to have a society where there's a tremendous number of isolated old women who have no one. Now, that's partly because men die young, too, compared to women, you know. But um, you know, you were talking about this famous feminist who didn't have children. It's like not having children. And you'll wake up when you're 35, if you're not careful, if you're female, and you'll think, uh-oh, I don't have any time left to have kids. And that is not fun. That is not a good realization. And then maybe you'll be on the assisted reproduction carousel for the next 10 years. And believe me, that's that's like having a near-fatal disease. That is not entertaining.
Life, in some ways, isn't that complicated. There are there are fundamental, like people think, well, what should I do with my life? Okay. Well, the first answer to that is do what other people have always done, unless you're certain that you're exceptional in some manner. And and even if you are, you're probably only exceptional in one direction, not in all. So what do you do? Well, you get as educated as you can so that you can make yourself useful. So that you have a skill or multiple skills that other people will pay you validly for. And not only be because of that, but because you need to contribute to your own maintenance and to the and to the uh, health and survival of the broader community. Okay? So you have to do that. Get your act together. Get yourself a trade or or get educated. Then you need a job. Then you need an intimate partner. Then you need a family. It's like, and if you miss any of those, then you're in trouble.
Now, you might not think so because you might be cynical about it, or or prematurely cynical, which is so many young women. You ask them at 19, well, do you want to have children? They think, well, I don't think so. It's like, you don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah. And why people have decided that you should be some sort of authority about it is is nothing but an index of how pathological our culture has become. You don't know anything. You're a child. You haven't read anything. You haven't accomplished anything. Your parents have taken care of you up to this point. And you you can pronounce on something as profound as how society should be constructed. It's absurd. And it's dangerous for the for the women because they don't understand where they're headed. And other women lie to them. They don't sit the 19-year-olds down and say, "Look, you know, like you should pursue a career. You're smart. You've got something to offer. Um, and and society needs your intelligence, but you better look the hell out because women have complicated lives, and they also have to have a family, and you're going to struggle like mad to figure out how to to balance those two things. And nobody's going to help you."
The thing about movies, for example, is that movies, there's only really two types of movie. There's a there's romance and adventure. And romance is a young person's game, you know. I mean, you can you can get a movie now and then that's about two old codgers falling in love, and that can be cute and it can be touching, and movies like that actually are made quite frequently, but fundamentally romance is is a young person's game. And the reason for that is obviously it's the precursor to having children.
Mhm. Now, that's the other thing that that seems to be missing from the conversation so often on the left. It's like the purpose of romance isn't lifetime happiness. That's first of all, that's insane because you're just not going to find a person that's going to make you happy. That isn't what the person is for to begin with. But second, the purpose of romance is to is set up the precondition for for having children and and doing it properly. And so and and and and that's another reason why it's associated with youth. And if our our culture is so self-centered that we actually believe that the purpose of romantic relationships is to make the two people who are in the relationship fulfilled and happy, that's completely crazy. No one in their right mind ever thinks that.
I mean the reason that you have a relationship with someone over the long term, it's complicated, but part of it is in sickness and in health, you know. Part of it is that life is punctuated by tragic circumstances of of monstrous magnitude, and you're just more robust and resilient if there are two of you manning the oars rather than one.
Mhm. So so that's a huge part of it. And of course, because our culture is also so youth-obsessed, we never think about the last half of our life. A huge part of the utility in having a partner is companionship, but and also the maintenance of sanity. I mean, you need someone around so that every time you manifest one of your uncontrollable weaknesses, they slap you on the side of the head and tell you to behave. And you you you do that for each other in a in a relationship that that where where communication is actually where communication actually occurs. And because of that, the two of you are much less likely to walk into a pit, and you stabilize your your household so that you can produce children that won't drive you crazy, that won't drive other people crazy, and that have a half-decent chance of growing up to to have fulfilling lives. And we're so immature in our response to to intimate relationships that it's just it's just a never-ending cause of absolute amazement. For me, it's like we're we're stuck we're stuck in the daydream of a naive 13-year-old girl.