Transcription
I had lots of clients and students who were chaotic in their orientation to life. They didn't know what to do, and they didn't know what to do about not knowing what to do. It's like, "I don't know what to do with my life, and I don't know what to do about my ignorance." My reaction to that, in some sense, wasn't exactly the reaction of a typical clinician because typical clinicians are liberal Protestant in their fundamental orientation. They tend to think of psychological development as something like self-actualization, right? It's really a self-development process. But that wasn't my observation, partly influenced by the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. I had a more communitarian view of human development than that. My observation was that most people find the cardinal meanings in their life not as a consequence of the development of their self, whatever that is, but in relation to other people and in the adoption of responsibility.
You know, you're told to be responsible, and it's a finger-wagging thing again. If you were a good person, you'd be responsible; you'd do your duty. But no one ever says, "Well, because that's where you find the abiding meaning in your life," and you need that meaning to sustain you through suffering. That's definitely the case. I was very ill for a number of years, and a lot of what got me through that wasn't my own special nature, let's say, but the support of my family, the support of my friends, and the support of the broader community. It made a huge difference, not only psychologically because I knew people were supporting me but also practically. You build yourself a community; you sacrifice yourself in the service of other people, not so much because you should, although you should, but because that is where meaning is to be found. You need a deep meaning to sustain you through tragedy.
That's the arc, and you find that deep meaning. There's a notion that it's better to give than to receive. It sounds like a Hallmark greeting card in some sense, and people are cynical about that too. You say that because you should be good and think that, but if you watch yourself, you'll see that it's true. One of the things that's been a really pronounced element in my life is that people thank me from time to time for things that I've done or said, and there isn't a better experience than that. You know that you've put something out that's actually a manifestation of what you truly believe, and the consequence of that is part of the redemptive process for someone else. There is nothing better than that—zero. In fact, I don't think there's anything that's even in the same conceptual universe of that in terms of its intrinsically rewarding properties.
There's nothing better than to have people, perhaps particularly people you've never met, tell you that what you have been doing has had a salutary effect on their lives. That's a hell of a fine thing to aim for, and why not aim for it? You know, because you could do it. I wouldn't even say necessarily that you put other people first because I think that's a mistake, but I do think it's the case that you treat other people in the manner that you would wish to be treated if you were treating yourself properly. That's also a sophisticated thing, right? To learn to treat yourself properly doesn't mean you get to fulfill every momentary whim. That's what you do when you're two. Two-year-olds can't live without their parents. You have to be wise enough to govern your current behavior in light of the future, and that's really what it means to be an adult. It's what it means to forestall gratification and to attain the responsibility of an adult.
The reason that you should do that, because you should, is because it's actually better in all ways. It's a panacea for suffering to adopt that responsibility. So I would tell my clients and students as well, "Let's just take a look at where other people find meaning, and we'll see how your life matches with that. Do you have an intimate relationship? Yes or no?" The right answer is yes. Now, maybe not for you, and maybe you don't right now, and maybe you have your reasons not to because you're a singular person in that regard, but probably not, because that's like a third of life. If you don't have that, that might be one of the reasons you're not doing so well, and the fact that you don't have it might be an indication that you're not oriented in the proper direction.
Oh, I can give you an example of that. I had many people question me when I was just on tour. This is a question that came up quite rapidly often in the Q&A sessions: "How do I find the right person when I'm dating? How do I find the person who's right for me when I'm dating?" I got that question like three times in a row, and I thought, because I always think this, "What about that question? What's wrong with that question?" Something's wrong with that question. How about, "How do I conduct myself so that I am the best possible partner?" Now that's a whole different conceptual universe, and virtually no one asked that question.
I would say, "Well, if you want an answer to the first question, which is how do I find the person who's right for me, you actually start by asking the second question, which is what can I bring to the table for someone else?" If you're really good at bringing something to the table for someone else, hey man, people might be lining up to be your partner. If they're not, then you might think, "Well, maybe I'm just not bringing the right thing to the table," and that's worth thinking about, especially if you're desperate, you're lost, and you're alone. It's like, "Hmm, maybe I got this wrong."
I usually sort of top that with the suggestion that even if you did find the person who was perfect for you, and they're that perfect, what makes you think they wouldn't take one look at you and run screaming away? They likely would if they were that perfect because, you know, really, are you that much of a catch? If you think you are, you know, that might be part of the problem. So, look, that's one right intimate relationship. I would say to you at the crossroads, develop a vision for your relationship. You know, there's a gospel saying which is, of course, impossible to comprehend or believe: "Knock, and the door will open; ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find." People think, "Well, no way, the world's not constituted like that."
It goes back to the idea of aim. If you don't aim at it, you're not going to hit it. It might also go back to a question about what you mean by "ask" and what you mean by "want," because it isn't just some casual request. You know, you're praying to God, "I wish I could find my wallet," or something like that, as if he's the casual granter of magical wishes, like a fairy with a magic wand. It's not that asking means something like this: "I am willing to give up everything that I'm doing wrong so that I can put things right if I could know what right was." You're on your knees when you say that, man, and maybe if you're on your knees, you get the answer.
So that's worth thinking about. If you knocked and you wanted to walk through, and you asked and you wanted to learn, and you sought because you wanted to find, maybe you would receive and be answered and find, but not without aim. I might say, "Well, look, if you could have the relationship you wanted, you get to have the relationship you want and need, but you have to know what it is." Then you need a vision of that. It's like, "I need to find the person right for me." It's like, "What do you mean by that?" No, how about, "How are you going to treat your partner when they come home from work?" How about something that concrete? Or, "How would you like to be treated when you come home from work?" Or, "What sort of partner do you want in relation to their attitude towards children?" You have to make it real.
You know, it's the story of your own life, which, by the way, it is. Then maybe you find it because at least once you've developed the vision, if it manifests itself, you'll recognize it. That's something. Why don't you set your family right? No, you need siblings. Maybe you don't have them. Set your relationship with your parents right. Fix your relationship with your father, with your mother, with your siblings. The same thing. What sort of relationship do you want to have with your children? You know, if you could have what you wanted. I had a very good relationship with my children. My daughter, as I said, was very ill, so that made things complicated, but I had a great relationship and still do with my son. It's one of the lights of my life, and we concentrated on making that relationship pristine, you know, both of us and my wife as well.
So you imagine, "Well, I want my son to love me. I want my son to respect me," and vice versa. "I want a child who can make mature decisions. I want someone I can rely on. I want someone who other people gravitate towards." You can have what you want if you're willing to make the proper sacrifices. That's a good thing. Could you set your family straight? Well, you need a job or a career. So what can you offer, and what can you bring to the world in that regard? Then I would say, "Well, if you're thinking about career success in this Tower of Babel manner, then that's a temptation." But you might think, "Well, how much good could I do if I had the opportunity in the shortest possible period of time if I went all in?"
Then there's a name, man. There's a name. Then you might think, "Well, what would that look like? If I was a light to my community, if I was a light to the people I work with, who would I be if I was like that?" Then you can conceptualize that, and you can see when you deviate from it. Why couldn't you correct for the deviations and move towards that? Then you might say, "Well, are you going to make productive use of your time outside of work? Productive and generous use of your time? Productive, generous, and meaningful use of your time?" How about that?
You're going to control your susceptibility to temptation, regulate your alcohol and drug use, because alcoholism takes out lots of people. Regulate your sexual temptation. Can you control yourself? For some reason, that's worth controlling yourself for, you know, because there's something to being strategic. There's at least the momentary pleasure; it's not nothing. You're not going to sacrifice that if you have any sense unless you sacrifice it to something clearly better.
Here's some items so you guys can do a quick Big Five on yourselves, and I'll tell you the upside and downside of it. So if you're orderly, you follow a schedule. How many of you follow a schedule? Okay. And how many of you don't? Okay. So one thing I would recommend is that you do, and I'll tell you why. Intelligence is a very good predictor of academic performance, and there's not a lot you can do about your intelligence. I mean, you can squander it, but it's very difficult to improve it. Conscientiousness, well, it's a trait too, so it's hard to work on, but we know that conscientious people get better grades, and it's reliable, and it's a powerful effect.
If your time use is organized, then the probability that you're going to be successful is very high. So one of the things you might think about is to make friends with a calendar, like Google Calendar or something like that. I can tell you some tricks about that because really, it is important. I'm not kidding around about this. If you're low in conscientiousness, it's really going to trip you up as you walk through life. There are not very many advantages to it that I've been able to see. I'm not assuming that just because you don't follow the schedule, you're low in conscientiousness, but it is one of the items that mark it.
The only advantage I've seen so far to being unconscientious is that if you become unemployed, it doesn't bother you as much. I mean, that actually turns out to matter in some situations. If a big company has to shed 50% of its employees, it's the conscientious people who are going to suffer themselves to death for it. The unconscientious people, they're not going to care anyways because they weren't working anyways, so it doesn't matter if they have a job or not.
Here's one way of thinking about making use of a schedule. Often, people are afraid of schedules because they think of them as a trap. You know, you make a schedule, and it's like this little prison that you have to live inside. All you're doing in your schedule is putting down things you have to do or should do, and there's not a lot of fun in that. Not only is it a trap or a prison, but it's kind of an unpleasant one.
A way to work with the schedule in a much more sophisticated way is to think, "Well, I'm going to plan the next week," say, because you plan it day by day, but we'll take the week as the unit level of analysis. Think, "Well, I'd like to plan a week. I'd like to have..." Then your schedule all of a sudden becomes a tool for increasing the quality of your life, and that's a whole different issue. You might think, "What's the emotion that you suffer?" Assuming you suffer one of these emotions, if you have an essay that's due and you're not doing it, would you regard that as a pleasant emotion or an unpleasant emotion?
Okay, so you think you can characterize the unpleasantness. What kind of emotion is it? It's guilt. Okay, anything else? Frustration? Frustration, yeah. So you're sort of frustrated with yourself. Yeah, you need a slap, right? You think, "I need a slap." So, okay, so guilt, anything else? Anxiety? Restlessness? So that's kind of an agitation, yeah. It's because your body knows you should be doing something, but you're not pointing it in the right direction. So it's shame. Is that reasonable?
The reason I was asking you about that is because most of the negative emotions are associated with neuroticism, but some of them seem to be associated with conscientiousness. The conscientious negative emotions seem to be guilt and shame fundamentally. Recent research, and really recent—I only got this paper like a week ago, I think it's about four months old—seemed to indicate that conscientious people feel less guilt, but they're more guilt-prone. If they don't do something that makes them guilty, but they organize their time so they are doing the things they're supposed to do, then they don't feel guilty.
So anyways, back to the schedule. You think about your week, and you think about your day, and you think, "How would you improve the quality of a given day or a given week?" One of the ways of improving it is to not put yourself into the situation where there are things hanging over your head that you have to feel guilty and ashamed about, because that's a very unpleasant way of being. If you have an essay that's due in a week and you're procrastinating, then the fact that you have to do that essay can ruin the whole week. Even when you're doing something that's positive, hypothetically, it's kind of that horrible kind of positive that you experience when you know that you should be doing something else.
That's when you end up watching YouTube videos about dancing cats or something like that. It's at best a guilty pleasure; it's not a pleasure at all. You think, "What the hell am I doing watching videos of dancing cats?" But then you're procrastinating, and that's a low-quality, very low-quality existence. If you use your schedule, you can think, "Okay, well, here's some time that I'm going to do this work." You can also sort of ask yourself about that when you're designing your schedule because you don't want to design a schedule like you're Adolf Hitler telling yourself what to do. You're not going to comply with it.
What you have to do if you're going to design a schedule is ask yourself, "All right, I'm going to set aside some time to study over the next week or to do this essay or whatever it is. How much time would I actually spend studying? An hour or two a day might be a worthwhile thing to schedule in." I would say don't schedule in more than that to begin with because then you'll fail, and then you'll stop using the schedule. The other thing you want to do is schedule in things that you want to do. Then you want to look at the day or the week and think, "Hey, that's a week I'd like to have. If I had a week like that, it would be good. I'd be caught up."
So all that negative emotion doesn't have to accrue, and I want to have done a bunch of things that I'm interested in doing. At the end of the week, I'd be in better shape than I was at the beginning. If you treat a schedule like that, so that what you're using it for is to design the days and weeks that you want to have instead of using it as this little jail that you have to put yourself in that you're not going to do anyways, then you can learn to use them. That's one thing you can do to make yourself more industrious, more conscientious: follow a schedule.
I've told people to learn to use a schedule, and people often hate schedules because they act as their own tyrants. They say, "Well, you have to do this unpleasant thing, and then here's another unpleasant thing you have to do, and then you have to do this unpleasant thing." You do that for about three days, and you think, "Hell with this, I'm not doing that." You know, and you fall off the wagon. That isn't what you're supposed to do with a schedule. You're supposed to use it to design the days that you would like to have if you were taking care of yourself.
So some of that is, you know, you wake up in the morning and think, "Here's five things I have to do that if I don't do, my life will be worse." It's like paying bills, for example, or taking out the garbage. You have to do those because otherwise, things degenerate. So you've got to put some of those in the schedule because otherwise, tomorrow is worse than today, and that's a bad trajectory. But you also want to build in things. You know, you've got to act in some sense like you're dealing with a relatively recalcitrant nine-year-old. It's like, "So, well, here's some things you have to do, but here's some things that if you do, you could reward yourself with."
If you get the balance there between obligation and reward right, then you'll find that you're motivated to do the things, and that's what you want to do. You want to do that so it's sustainable across days and weeks and months. You've got to treat yourself like a good boss would treat a valued employee and not like a tyrant would treat a slave because the slave will rebel. People say, "Well, I don't follow through on my plans." It's like, "Well, A, they're probably not very well formulated, and maybe you're doing them because of an external moral obligation or something. They're really your plans, right?"
B, you're acting like a tyrant and a slave, and that's a bad relationship to have with yourself. Treat other people as you would like to be treated. It works both ways. You also treat yourself like you treat other people properly, so that's a necessary thing, and often people don't do that. But the scheduling is really important.
Now, this young man told me that his life lacked purpose, direction, and meaning and that he was nihilistic until he started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," which is a book I actually like quite a bit. I've read it three times at different decades of my life. One of the things that's very interesting about that book is that it's an examination of the idea of quality, of the idea that there are qualitative distinctions between things and that we have an instinct to make qualitative distinctions.
A qualitative distinction is simply, "This is better than that," which is a judgment. Now, what Ratzinger is hypothesizing is that the person enough—you know how the modern idea is you're supposed to accept yourself? I think that's an insane idea, by the way. Really, I think I can't think of a more nihilistic idea than that. You're already okay? It's like, "No, you're not." The reason you're not is because you could be way more than you are. So what do you want to be? You want to be okay as you are, or do you want to strive towards what's better?
This young man, this Australian, said that the reason "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" had such an impact on him was because he wasn't happy with his current mode of being. He didn't consider the manner in which he conducted himself sufficient, and the fact that the author of "Zen" laid out the notion that you could make qualitative distinctions and that there really was a difference between good things and bad things, or great things and evil things, gives you direction. It gives you the possibility of moving upward.
Ratzinger is pointing out, at least to some degree, that human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward. They need to conceptualize something like the highest good and then strive for that. The thing is that there isn't any difference between conceptualizing the good and being judged because if you're going to conceptualize the good and move towards it, what you have to do is separate from yourself all those things that aren't good and leave them behind. That's why the Redeemer and the judge are the same thing.
One of the things that's really appalling, I think, about our modern world is that we're rejecting the notion of qualitative distinctions. You say, "Well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying that one thing is better than another." It's like, "Okay, fair enough. It's not fun to be cast off with the damned, that's for sure." But if people are, in fact, insufficient in their present condition, which seems to be the case—try finding someone who isn't—then if you deny the possibility of qualitative distinction because you want to promote a radical egalitarianism, then you remove the possibility of redemption because there's no movement towards the good.
It seems to me that it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for—well, it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for the equal because for us to be equal would mean, as far as I can tell, that we would all be equally unredeemed and miserable. What we mean by soul is something like animating spirit. You might say, "Well, what's a spirit?" Well, that's actually rather easy to answer.
When a child of four is playing house, let's say, when a child of four is playing house, she acts out the role of the mother. But acting out, that's a strange thing, right? Because she doesn't literally duplicate in her actions or her perceptions in the game what she observed her mother literally doing. For example, she didn't go into her mother's bedroom when her mother awoke and watched her turn her head in a particular way to awaken and count the number of blinks so that she could mimic that in her play. You know, you think that's absurd, but it's not absurd if it's just mimicry. It's not; it's unbelievably sophisticated.
What the girl does is she watches her mother manifest maternal behavior across a vast array of instances, and she integrates that with the image of the mother she's received from all the books she's been read and all the little movies she's watched, the Disney movies and so forth. She abstracts out the animating principle of the maternal and then embodies that in play, usually with a little boy. That's practice for what's going to come later. It's unbelievably sophisticated, and she's embodying a spirit. The spirit there is the abstraction of the central animating principle from multiple embodiments of its manifestation.
If you think children can't do that, well, then you don't know anything about children because they do that all the time in their pretend play, which is a necessary precursor to healthy psychological development. Part of what we refer to as the soul is the presence of that spirit, or maybe even the capacity of embodying such spirits. It's very difficult to know how deep that goes. I had a vision at one point of all the men in my life who've been particularly influential in a benevolent way. You know, and you think, well, just the mere notion of the idea that there could be a benevolent way that would unite the acts of benevolence across a series of men—that's all comprehensible to you.
You take that as a matter of course when you say that there are such things as good men, and you can identify them, right? There's something stable about whatever is good across multiple manifestations of incarnation, let's say. I saw that transform into the father person of the Trinity as the embodiment of that benevolent spirit. Now, I don't have any idea what that means metaphysically because who does? But that spirit manifesting itself within is certainly part of what we refer to when we talk about the soul, and you can see that shine through people. I mean, it's part of what gives someone charisma. It's part of what elicits the instinct to imitate in you.
You see that even in simple things when you see a remarkable athlete do something incredibly athletic, to put the soccer ball, the football ball, through the net to score the goal, and everybody leaps to their feet in celebration of that. Well, that's a celebration of the divine capacity to hit the target dead on, and it grips you at such a low level way down inside your soul that you're compelled to your feet to cheer, and you don't even know what you're doing, but you enjoy it, that's for sure. That enjoyment is also a sign of the depth and utility of that response.
You see this in all the things that people do that are, you know, so-called popular entertainment. It's unbelievably sophisticated. The soul is participating in that to the fullest extent. You know, you can say, "Well, there's no use for the religious. There's no necessary use for the religious terminology." It's like, "Well, until you come up with a better word, there's plenty of use for it because it's a very complex and deep phenomenon." To just cast it into the realm of superstition in some casual manner is just not helpful. Not in any possible way. It's not helpful scientifically; it's not helpful ethically; it's not helpful existentially.
Try treating someone for a while as if they don't have a soul. Just really, I mean, treat them like a deterministic machine if that's your belief. Really act it out. You'll be like the most hated person in town in about 15 minutes. What do you make of practical evidence like that? I mean, you interact with people as if they're free souls capable of choosing between good and evil. That's what you do all the time. Maybe you can addle yourself out of that by some ridiculous rationalist ideology, but that just means you're kind of a gabbling fool, and it's just going to make you trip over things you don't even notice in all of your social interactions.
I don't care how you think philosophically or ideologically; you bloody well know that what I just said is true. That's true even when you're interacting with an infant or a small child. It's true when you're dealing with someone who's elderly and virtually incapacitated in every way. You still see that divine spark, for lack of a better term. We do lack a better term, by the way. You see that everywhere if your eyes are open and if you're willing to see it. To the degree that you're responsive to that, then your actions are guided by love, and your words are guided by truth.
I started doing what I'm doing back in, say, probably 1985 because I realized that one of the pathways to totalitarian catastrophe was deceit at the individual level. This is something that Solzhenitsyn made very much of, Orwell as well, Huxley as well. These great thinkers concluded in the aftermath of these totalitarian catastrophes that there was an integral link between pathology at the individual level, which was fundamentally the willingness to use deceit in an instrumental manner—"I'll lie to you to get what I want"—and authoritarian catastrophe, and that it was a direct causal link.
Actually, by that argument, I think that's literally true. Partly what I'm doing, I hope, is helping people walk through thinking about why telling the truth is a good idea—not only for them, not as a top-down shaky finger moral injunction, "Don't lie; you shouldn't lie," but in a detailed manner to explain the relationship between the instrumental use of deceit and the collapse of civilizations. That connection is way closer than people think. One person has influence over a thousand people for sure in their lifetime, and sometimes a lot more than that.
The next rung out from that is a million, and the next rung out from that is a billion. You're always at the center of a concentric circle that, two rungs out, contains a billion people. Well, it turns out that what you do matters. Basically, what I'm doing, as I hope, is touring and talking to people face to face in these lectures, for example, and making the case that it's a terrifying case. Everyone says, "Well, we want meaning in our life." It's, "Do you now? Do you now?"
Because you might ask yourself, "What's the more threatening possibility? That nothing you do matters, which means you can pretty much do whatever you want?" That's the upside of that nihilistic claim—no responsibility, right? Why not pursue narrow-focused hedonism since nothing matters anyways? So that's the shadow of nihilism. Or everything you do matters, and it's a lot more terrifying to contemplate that you will be held accountable for everything you do. I believe that firmly, partly as a consequence of my clinical experience. I never saw any one of my clinical clients ever get away with anything, even once.
You think, "Well, people get away with things all the time." It's like, "No, they don't." They might gain a narrow advantage in one dimension in the short term, but you know, let's say that you use deceit in your business practices. First of all, that doesn't work very well because people will figure you out. As a long-term strategy, it's terrible. It just doesn't work. No one is going to play with you if you're a cheat.
But let's say that someone asked me the other day, "Well, what about these dictators that ruled their whole life, and they were at the top of the hierarchy, let's say, and they had all the power?" Stalin's a perfectly good example. It's like, "Didn't he win?" Well, everyone Stalin ever talked to lied to him because they were absolutely bloody terrified of him. His country was a nightmare. It was a hell, or as close as we've been able to produce with the possible exception of the Nazis and the Maoists. But it was up there in terms of hell. Did he rule? Yes, but he ruled hell.
If you think that's a victory, well, go ahead and try it and see how much of a victory it is. Milton's Satan said, "I'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven." It's like, "Fair enough. Go ahead. Use deceit. Use instrumentality. Rule in hell. You'll be the ruler. See how much good it does you. See where that takes you." It takes you somewhere terrible. Despite my love for the psychoanalysts, very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work.
You can parameterize that. It's like, "What do you need? How about some friends that feel kind of like that? How about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future? That'd be good. How about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere so at least you've got some possibility of rising, some possibility of stabilizing yourself? And a schedule and a routine because no one can live without a routine." You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine.
You need to pick a time to get up, whatever time you want, but pick one and stick to it because otherwise, you disregard your circadian rhythms, and they regulate your mood. Eat something in the morning. I've had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders. I had one client who was literally starving—a very smart girl. There was very little that she liked. She kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day. She came to me and said, "I have no energy. I come home; all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over. Is that weird?"
I thought, "Well, it depends on how hard you work. It's a little weird, but whatever. It's familiar. You're looking for comfort." So I did an analysis of her diet. It's like, "Three-quarters of a cup of rice? It's like you're starving. Eat something. You'll feel better." So she modified her diet, and all her anxiety went away, and she had some energy. It's like, "Yeah, you got to eat."
So a schedule—that's a good thing, man. Your brain will thank you for it. It will stabilize your nervous system with a bit of a plan. That's a good thing. You need a career. You need something productive to do with your time. You need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol, most particularly alcohol, because that does in a lot of people. You need a family, like the family you have, your parents and all that. It'd be nice if you all got along. You could work on that. That's a good thing to work on.
Then, you know, you probably need children at some point, and that's life. That's what life is. If you're missing, you know, you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions. It's not mandatory, but I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them—there's no way you're going to be psychologically thriving. That's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological. Human beings have a nature. There are things we need, and if we have them, well, that's good. If we don't have them, well, then we feel the lack.
Behaviorists, behavioral psychologists, concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing. You know, it's practical. It's like strategizing. Make a career plan. Figure out how to negotiate because that's bloody important. Figure out how to say what you need. Figure out how to tell the truth to people. Figure out how to listen to your partner in particular because if you listen to them, they will actually tell you what they want, and sometimes you can give it to them, and maybe they'll return the favor.
If you practice that for like 15 years, well, then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want. Well, hooray! That would be good. Then there's two of you under most circumstances, and it's better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly. The negotiation is where the wisdom arises, and it's part of the transformation, the psychological transformation, that's attendant on an intimate relationship.
One of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship, for the first time in my life, really, I believe this to be the case: conservatives really have something to sell to young people. They can sell the meaning of responsibility because young people are bereft of meaning, and most people find meaning in responsibility. When the right talks about responsibility, they kind of do it in that finger-wagging way that makes conservatives unpopular among young people. "You should be responsible." It's like, "Yeah, you should. Why?"
Well, because your life is chaotic and meaningless, and you're stuck in this juvenile surreality, and it's really painful for you. You're anxious and aimless and goalless, and then you look at people who have a life because maybe you could have a life, and you think, "Well, what does that life consist of?" It's like, "Well, you have a committed intimate relationship. There's one. You have friends that you're honest with and playful with, so you have a group of friends. You have a job or a career. You learn how to use your life, your time outside of work, in a productive, engaging way. You regulate your susceptibility to the multitude of hedonistic temptations that are in front of you. You pay some attention to your mental and physical health. You make some goals for the future that are concrete."
Well, there are seven things you can do. They're all responsible things. Why? Because then your life will have some meaning. Now, you might say, "Well, what's the ultimate meaning?" It's like, "Get those things straight first. They're not nothing." Maybe you won't be so damn miserable and bitter and resentful and angry and aimless and anxious and frustrated and disappointed and ashamed if you had five of those seven things going well.
This is so useful, man. If you get good at doing this, your life will get so much better you can't believe it. Watch the people around you, and whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on a regular basis, tell them exactly what they did in detail. Be positive about it, obviously, and just indicate that you notice. I saw this when I was grading student essays, you know, and so I taught this seminar for a long time. I was trying to teach kids how to write. They were in their fourth year of university in the honors psych program. You'd think they'd bloody well already know how to write, but they didn't.
I'd have them write a four-page essay on a given topic, and then they had to rewrite that to a six-page essay, and then they had to rewrite that to an eight-page essay. The first essay I graded was only 5% of their grade, and I told them, "I'm going to cut you into ribbons, but it doesn't matter because it's 5% of your grade." They could tolerate that, and generally, by the third essay, they had written the best thing they'd ever written in their life, and they learned so fast it was unbelievable.
But one of the things I noticed was that they did a little testing with the first essay they handed in. It was just like God, formulaic, boring. They weren't in it at all. There was nothing of the person in there. There was no thought. There was just the kind of psycho-babble that they'd learned, especially if they were in faculties of education. It was dry and dull, and everything about it was wrong. Those are hard to grade, right? What's wrong with my essay? The words aren't right. The phrases, they're not so good. They're not organized well into sentences. The sentences aren't sequenced well in the paragraphs. The paragraphs don't make a coherent argument, and the entire thing is empty. But other than that, no problem.
It was often easier just to rewrite those essays than to grade them. In any case, though, one of the things I did learn was that even in an essay like that, there is usually like one sentence or two sentences buried on like page three that was an actual thought and reasonably clearly stated and somewhat gripping. It was like the person popped out from all the background rubbish and said, "What about this?" If you saw that and checked it and said, "Hey, you hit the mark right there," the next essay would be like two-thirds that, and that was really fun to see.
Maybe by the third essay, maybe it was all like that, and then they were really thrilled. It's like, "Wow, I wrote this!" The culmination, well, it was a fourth-year seminar, was the culmination of their career as a psychology undergraduate, so that was great fun. But you can do that in your own household. If the envious part of you isn't jealous of the revelation of the goodness of the person, here's the opposite tack if you want to do this.
Imagine that you're a man who's managed to attract a mate who believes he's punched above his weight. This woman is more attractive, let's say, more vivacious, more desirable than he deserves. That's going to grate on his soul a fair bit, right? Partly because her shining casts a dim light on his lack of utility, let's say. You can imagine someone like that being prone to jealousy for obvious reasons.
The best tack to manage in a situation like that, if you're that man, is to wait until your wife dresses herself up in a particularly attractive manner and then either fail to notice by occupying yourself with something trivial while she's attempting to gain your attention or by criticizing her directly for what she's just managed to do. If you do that 50 times, let's say, you can be sure that she'll never reveal her attractiveness to anyone else for the rest of her life, including you, and you'll get exactly what you deserved.
So that's the opposite of watching people carefully. Now, I learned this in part from Skinner, B.F. Skinner, the famous animal behaviorist, because he used all sorts of reinforcement contingencies to shape animal behavior. Skinner was unbelievably good at this. He trained pigeons in World War II to guide missiles by pecking at photographs so they could map the photographs onto the missile trajectory, viewing the territory underneath and peck accurately enough to guide the missile to its destination. That was discontinued as the technology for guided missiles developed, but Skinner could do that.
We think pigeons, well, they're not that bright. They're smarter than you think, pigeons. That's why they can live in cities. That's not easy for a bird to pull off. You know, it's not their natural habitat. In any case, Skinner would use punishment, technically speaking, which is the application of a certain amount of pain or threat, which is the use of anxiety. But what he believed was most effective was reward, but it required a tremendous amount of attention.
For example, if Skinner was trying to train a rat to climb up a little ladder and then across the ladder and then maybe do a pirouette and come down, which he could do with no problem, he'd wait. He'd just watch the rat, and then when it got close to the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet. Now, his rats were starved, by the way, down to three-quarters of their normal body weight, so they were pretty eager to work for food. It's not something you necessarily saw in the methodology section of the papers, but that's not a critique of Skinner. It's just an indication of how simplification takes place in laboratory experiments.
In any case, he'd wait for the rat to get near the ladder and give it a food pellet. Soon, the rat would be hanging around the ladder quite a lot. Then, now and then, just more or less randomly, the rat would put a paw up on the ladder's food pellet. If he did that continually through observation, he could get the rat to do pretty much anything that you could imagine a rat could do and then maybe some things you couldn't imagine.
This isn't a manipulative technique, by the way, although it can be used that way. It's not effective unless you do it with a certain degree of wisdom. You want to think, "What do you want in your house? How about peace, tranquility, happiness, and humor?" Something like that. It's not a bad first-pass approximation. You've got to get that in your head. It's like, "Do you want that, or do you want the delights of endless martyrdom?" Because you have to make a choice.
You might think, "I wouldn't pick martyrdom." It's like, "Really? Really, you wouldn't?" You'd pick peace and happiness and humor, and so everywhere you go, that's all you're ever surrounded with. It's highly improbable, so don't be so sure you're aiming up. But if you can orient yourself in that direction, and then carefully, and knowing full well what the hellish alternative is—because you need to know that—then you can watch and see, "Well, when is this manifesting itself in the people around me?"
Then you can tell them in detail, "I noticed, son, I noticed today we were having a discussion at dinner, and you made a spectacularly witty remark right at the right time. It was provocative but not annoying, so good work." The kid thinks, "Oh my God, he noticed!" Then he's like twice as funny the next day, and maybe not in some unbearable manner. That really works. It really works.
But like I said, you have to quell the envy that would otherwise beset you, and you have to want to aim up. You have to not be jealous of the other person's goodness, and you have to be extremely attentive. But man, as a transformation technique, even in extraordinarily difficult relationships—which goes back to your point—there isn't anything I know of that's more effective.
If you want people to appreciate having you around, learning how to listen—that is a skill that is absolutely unbeatable. This technique of summarizing to their satisfaction works like a charm. You might be a little awkward when you first try it, and it might feel a little manipulative because you're not that good at it. But if you get expert at it, you can have the greatest conversations with everyone you know.
I had people in my clinical practice who were extraordinarily impaired intellectually and suffering from all sorts of assorted pathologies in addition to that. If I was listening to them properly, they were as fascinating as anybody I had on the, say, more able and competent end of the spectrum. You learn so much because there is nothing that people won't tell you if you listen. It is absolutely amazing what people will tell you, and so quickly they'll reveal things they didn't even know about themselves. They need to know those things. Often, they've been hidden for years. It's so rewarding.
This use of attentive reward—it's fun in a game-like sense once you learn to play it because you're watching. You think, "I'll just wait. This person's going to do something good sooner or later." It's like, "Pat! Good, good work!" People are so thrilled that that little manifestation of goodness in their heart managed to sneak out past their cynicism and boredom was recognized. They're so... what is it? It restores their faith in what's good inside them. It really does. It's unbelievably powerful.
That can work if you're embroiled in a difficult relationship, you know, and you can't escape easily, or maybe you can't escape on moral grounds. That listening helps a lot. You might have to listen a lot, but that use of judicious reward, man, that's a powerful technique.
What's my advice to young men seeking a woman for marriage and family? Well, okay, fine. That's the same question. That's pretty straightforward, man. I mean, you can't eliminate the necessity of being attracted to one another. That's important, and that's mysterious.
For example, here's a funny thing. One of the things we know that attracts people to one another is bilateral symmetry. If you take men and you rank them by the symmetry of their faces, and then you give the asymmetrical men clean t-shirts to wear for a day and the symmetrical men clean t-shirts to wear for a day, and then you give the t-shirts to women and have them rate the odor, the women rate the odor of the symmetrical men as more attractive than the odor of the asymmetrical men.
There are other factors that determine sexual attractiveness that are based on biological factors that are so deeply embedded in terms of smell, for example. Women also tend to not be sexually attracted to the scent of men who have, if I remember correctly, RH factors that would make for potential trouble in childbirth. Often, the reason that the women give for not preferring the scent of those men is that they smell too much like their brother, something like that.
There are weird, mysterious things that determine whether or not people are sexually and physically attracted to each other, and I think it's very important that that's part of a marital relationship. The next most important thing is trust, man. There's no marriage that's successful without trust. You guys, you've got to tell each other the truth.
One of the reasons that Jung believed that marriage as a bond was necessary—it's really wise. It's like, you know, telling the truth to someone is no simple thing because there's a bunch of things about all of us that are terrible and weak and reprehensible and shameful and all of those things. They kind of have to be brought out into the open and dealt with. You're not going to tell the truth about yourself to someone who can run away screaming when you reveal who you are.
The marriage bond is something like, "Okay, here's the deal. I'm going to handcuff myself to you, and you're going to handcuff yourself to me, and then we're going to tell each other the truth, and neither of us is going to get to run away." Once we know the truth, then we're either going to live together in mutual torment, or we're going to try to deal with that truth and straighten ourselves out jointly. That's going to make us more powerful and more resilient and deeper and wiser as we progress together through life.
I think that's absolutely brilliant because if you leave a back door open, man, you're going to use it, that's for sure. The oath is there, and this was Jung's commentary on the spiritualization of the human pair born by Christian marriage, for example, which emphasized the subordination of both members of the marital union to a higher order personality that was embodied in the figure of the logos.
The idea is that in Christian marriage, for example, the man isn't the boss, and the woman isn't the boss. The boss is the mutual personality composed by the seeking of truth in both of them, and that's conceptualized as their joint subjugation to the logos. That is absolutely dead on, man. It's like the ruler of your marital life should be your vow to tell each other the truth.
In hard times during your life, when you've done something stupid and idiotic that might take you down, and you don't have anybody that you can turn to, you know, if you have a partner that you can trust, you can go say, "Hey, you know, I made a big financial mistake, man, and it's really torturing me, and I feel like a complete idiot, and it's really dangerous." The person there is going to help you figure out what to do about it, and they're going to know that when they make a stupid mistake—and they're bloody well going to—they can come and talk to you, and you guys are going to work your way through it.
That's a big deal. There are a couple of things our culture gets really wrong, and one is it devalues marriage. That's really a very bad idea because marriage is like a third of your life, and maybe more. Kids are a third of your life, and your life outside of marriage and kids is a third of your life, you know, approximately speaking. To miss any of that is a massive, massive mistake.
Now, having said that, I will also say that for some people, missing one or more of those is necessary because they have a reason. Maybe they're brilliantly creative artists, and they need to devote themselves entirely to their career, or they're outstanding in some way, and they can justify the sacrifice of one part of that triad of being to another part. But generally speaking, it's a very dangerous thing, and it shouldn't be done.
Also, kids get an absolutely terrible rap because kids are delightful if they're well-behaved. One of the chapters in my new book is called "Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them," and you can do that, especially if you discuss it thoroughly with your spouse, the person that's helping you discipline the kids. Children are the best company because they're really enthusiastic about everything. They love doing new things. They really love you, so they're happy that you're around.
All you have to do is make sure they're not too hot and they're not too cold, and they've had something to eat, and they're not too tired. You don't expect them to stay engaged in something for longer than they can manage because we used to take our kids, when they were little, out to restaurants, for example, and they could sit there no problem, behave really nicely when they were two and three. But they couldn't do it for more than about 45 minutes. You can't push your luck.
I also noticed with little kids that they got antsy and unreasonable about five to ten minutes before the adults did too. It's just that the adults were too stupid to notice. The kids would notice right away. So back to marriage: well, you look for someone that you're attracted to, that you love, and then you look for someone that you can bloody well trust. Then you tell them the truth, and that way maybe you can get through life, and you can have someone to weave the rope of your being with, and together to make your joint rope stronger.
You can have some continuity in your narrative, and you can have children, and then you can have grandchildren. You can have a life, man, and you're so fortunate if you can manage that. So, okay, there's that one.
So what's my advice to young men seeking a woman for marriage and family? Yeah, well, and also, you know, marry someone you think would be a good mother and that has enough sense, generally speaking, to know that she wants children. Now, some women don't want children, and fair enough, and some women perhaps shouldn't have children. That's also possible. But the general rule of thumb is, especially once a woman is in her mid-20s, if she doesn't know that she wants children or won't admit it unless she has a viciously important reason, then she's not oriented properly psychologically.
She doesn't know what's important in life. Now, that might also be the case with you, and it probably is, but as a rule of thumb, that's a really good one. The root to optimal quality of life and productivity has been laid out by other people. We kind of know what the parameters are. You need to do something that other people find useful, and you have to regard it as useful as well, or at least you have to be entertaining.
There has to be something about you of value to other people that you have to pursue with a fair bit of diligence. You have to play a productive social role. You probably need friends. You probably need an intimate relationship, and if it could be a medium to long-term intimate relationship, perhaps all the better. That's what most societies hold up as ideal. You could assume, "Well, there's probably a reason for that."
I think one of the reasons is that your life gets badly fragmented otherwise. It's because every time you have a long-term relationship and it fragments, it's like your identity is blown into pieces. You get fragmented across time. It's not good. It breaks you into pieces, and you don't necessarily recover that well. It makes everything much more impermanent and unreliable, all of those things.
It introduces a tremendous amount of uncertainty into your life, and it also means that you don't have anyone around that you can really trust, and that's bad. If you have someone around you can really trust, then you have two brains instead of one. You probably need two brains to manage your way through life. It's pretty complicated.