Transcription
Now, here's something interesting. You can think about this for a minute. I went and saw an autistic woman speak at one point. Her name was Temple Grandon. She's really worth looking up. Temple Grandon is a very interesting person. She's very seriously autistic when she was a child, but her mother and her worked her out of it so that she could be she's very functional. She works as a professor. I don't remember where. It's in the Midwest somewhere.
Now, she's famous not only be for being a highly functional autistic person who talks a fair bit about what it's like to be autistic, but also for designing slaughter houses across the United States. And the reason she can do that, as far as she's concerned, is because she thinks she thinks like an animal thinks. And so she doesn't and and she's identified maybe at least part of what the core problem is with autism.
So she the talk I heard her at was in Arizona and and it was a it was a really uh an entrancing talk. She showed some showed some really interesting pictures of animals. So what she's done is she's redesigned slaughter houses so that when the animals enter the slaughterhouse they go in a like a spiral basically they can't see what's around the corner and the walls are high so they're not distracted by anything outside.
So, one of the things she showed, for example, was a [snorts] bunch of cows going through a standard uh sequence of of gates essentially, and off to the side there was a windmill spinning, and the co cows would stop because the windmill, they didn't understand what the windmill was, and they'd stop. Or showed other pictures where cows were going down a pathway, too, and there was a coke can sitting in the middle of the pathway, and the cows would all stop because they didn't know what to do with it. Or she had another picture of cows out in the middle of the field all surrounding a briefcase and they were all looking at the briefcase and the cows didn't like anything that shouldn't be there and had a hard time mapping it.
Now she said here here's a little exercise she did. She said, "Think of a church." Okay, so maybe you think you imagine a child's drawing of a church. It's like your standard house like a pentag pentagon, right? Which is basically how children draw the front of a house with a steeple on top and maybe a cross on top of it or something like that which actually isn't a church. It's an icon of a church. And you think about how children draw houses too. Pentagon, rectangle, what is it? Trapezoid chimney almost always with smoke, which is quite interesting. It's I don't know where kids get that exactly, but they almost always draw a chimney with smoke even though chimneys with smoke aren't that common anymore. But anyways, you know, you you can see what a child's picture of a house looks like in your imagination. One of the things that you might want to think about is that is not a picture of a house at all, right? It's an iconic representation that's kind of like a heroglyph because no house looks like that. And then you think about how a child will draw a person. Circle stick stick. And you show it to someone, they go, "That's a person." It's like, really? It looks nothing like a person, right? It. I mean, you you immediately recognize it as a person, but it looks nothing like a person.
Well, what Grandon said was that when she thinks of a church, she has to think of a church she's seen. She can't take the set of all churches and abstract out an iconic representation and use that to represent the set of all churches. She has she gets fixated on a specific exemplar. And she thinks that one of the problems with autistic people and they have a very difficult time uh developing language by the way is that they can't abstract out a generalized representation across a set of entities. They can't abstract and then they and well and of course if you can't abstract then it's also very difficult to manipulate the abstractions. And you see very strange behavior with autistic children for example. So they don't like people and that's because people don't stay in their perceptual boxes. Like a human being is a very difficult thing to perceive because we're always shifting around and moving and doing different things. Like we don't stay in our categorical box. So autistic people have real trouble with other people. But they also have trouble. So for example, if your autistic child gets accustomed to your kitchen, let's say, and you move a chair, then then especially if they're severely autistic, they'll have an absolute fit about it because you think kitchen with chair moved. They think completely different place because they can't abstract the the the constancies across the different situations and represent them abstractly.
So I I made this little diagram I made this little diagram here to to kind of give you a sense of what you might be doing when you're abstracting perceptually. And so you could say think about something that's that complicated. It's sort of my model of how complex the world is. But the world is a lot more complex than that. But the world is made out of everything is made out of littleer things and those littleer things are made out of littleer things and so forth. And those things are nested inside bigger things and so forth. And where you perceive on that level of of abstraction is somewhat arbitrary. It has to be bounded by your by your goals. That's the other thing is that your perceptual structures are determined by the goals that you have at hand. I mean, some of that's that's not completely true because your perceptual systems also have limitations, right? There's things you can't see or hear even if you need to. So, there are limitations built in. But within that set of limitations, you're still trying to tune your perceptions to your motivated goals. And that's also very useful to think about when you're trying to understand artificial intelligence because for human beings without goals there's no perception because there's no filtering mechanism that you can use to determine the level of resolution at which you perceive anyway.
So there's the there's a thing made of smaller things which are made out of smaller things and it's so it's kind of my iconic representation of the complexity of the world and then you could think well what is this? How can you see this object? And I think if you just look at it, you can detect it's like a Necker cube. You know those cubes that that are line drawings that you can see the front of and then it'll flip to the back. Have you seen those? So this is kind of Necker cube like or at least it is for me in that when I look at it my perceptions play around with it. Sometimes I focus on the kind of cross-like shape in the middle and sometimes I can see these other lines and then sometimes I'll focus on that square and sometimes I can see the little dots there or maybe one dot and my perceptions are going like this trying to fit a pattern to it and I you can kind of detect that when you're watching it and so I would say well you have the options of perceiving this in its full complexity or you can simplify it essentially. There's lots of ways you can simplify it, but some of them are laid out there. So you take the comp complex thing, you make a low-resolution representation of it. So that's its rough that's the rough area that all those dots occupy. That's the rough area broken down to its four most fundamental quadrants. That might be how you would look at it. If if this was a map of an orchard and you were trying to walk from south to north, that would be a useful representation. This combines this and this. That's the [clears throat] h that's the highest level of resolution that you can perceive this object at. That's lower resolution than the object itself.
So the first issue is how should you look at things? Well, that's a problem that intelligence has to solve. So that's one of the problems that intelligence goes after. And then I think what happens is we have the thing in itself and then we simplify it with a perception and and that's like an iconic representation. And then we we nail the iconic representation with a word. And that's how we compress the world's complexity into something that we can manage. We take the complex thing, make it into an icon and represent the icon with a word. And then when I throw you the word, so to speak, you decompose it into the icon and then decompose it even further into the thing. If you can't, if you know the icon and you know the thing, and so then we can use shorthand, right? Because you have representational structures and so do I. And I'm just tossing you markers about your representational structures and you can unfold them. That's what you do when you're reading a novel because the novel comes alive in your imagination in your own idiosyncratic way. And it wouldn't if you didn't understand the references of the novel, right? The the novelist has to assume that your basic perceptual structures and your intuitions and your instincts are basically the same as his or hers because otherwise they have to assume that because otherwise they would be lost in an infinite regressive explanation. So and it's problematic often for example if you start reading Victorian novels you may find that it takes a while to get into them because the presuppositions the expectations are slightly different and so is the language. You have to update the representations.
But anyway, so that's roughly as far as I'm concerned, that's roughly a representation of what intelligence is doing in the world. It's or a big part of it. It's how in the world do you look at things so that you can use them for the purposes that you need to use them for. And then the next problem that intelligence has to solve which is related is once you've got the perceptual landscape sorted out, how do you abstractly represent the action patterns that you're going to implement in the world? So it's how do you perceive where you are now? How do you perceive where you're going? And how do you construct up and then implement strategies that enable you to move from where you are to where you're going? So, it's a continual process of mapping and movement. And so, it's it's it's navigation. That's what we're doing in the world all the time is navigating through it because we're mobile creatures. We're navigating through it attempting to make the world manifest itself in accordance with our wishes. And that's the fundamental problem that intelligence has to solve. And animals have their perceptions to rely on, but we have our perceptions and our ability to abstract from those perceptions multiple times and then to abstract finally into into language. So we live in a very abstracted world and it also means that we can learn a lesson in one place and generalize it across many other places which is also something that animals have a hard time doing because they they don't know how to do that perceptual initial perceptual generalization.
What were you like when I was 25? H well I was obsessed um 25 so that would have been '87. I'd been in graduate school for two years. Well, you know, um, when I was 25 or so, I probably weighed about 138 pounds. I smoked like a pack of cigarettes a day. I drank tremendous amount of alcohol. I was from northern Alberta, this rough little town up in northern Alberta called Fairview. And, you know, there were long winters there and my friends were heavy drinkers and most of them dropped out of school by the time they were 15 or 16, went off to work on the oil rigs. And, you know, it was a rough town and we drank a lot. I started when I was 14 and you know um and so I was I had a lot of bad habits let's say and uh things that were and I wasn't in great shape physically and I was also still intellectually obsessed by as I am now and uh so that would have been that would have been an '85 but when I but I decided around then about '85 '84 something like that maybe a little earlier that I was really going to try to get my act together and so I started doing that. I you know I first of all I I quit smoking though that took a long time because I eventually had to quit drinking too in order to quit smoking. And I started working out and playing sports which I'd never done. I was a small kid. I'd been skipped a grade and I was a small small for my age. So sports were never especially team sports were never really a domain of expertise for me. Um although I skied and went trapping with my dad went you know crosscountry skiing and camping and all that. So, but uh when I went to graduate school, I started swimming. The first the first uh physical exercise routine I did, I enrolled in a swim exercise course, I think it was called, it was me and this like really overweight kid. And like these 60-year-old women and men, they could out exercise me like mad. It was really embarrassing. Me and the the overweight kid, you know, we'd be just panting ourselves 3/4 to death at the end of the bloody workout. And these 60-year-old women who weren't in great shape were like, you know, chatting away uh as if nothing was going on at all in the pool. So, that was quite embarrassing. And as was going to the weight room, you [snorts] know, because when I started, I could barely bench bench press 75 lbs. And people used to keep coming over and helping me, which was the last thing I bloody well wanted, but certainly needed. And I got to the point where I could bench press 225 lbs. I think that was the best I did. And I gained about 30 lbs of muscle in a year and a half. So, that was good thing. So like I was kind of a wild man and you know I'm a little bit manic in my in my uh temperament and so you know I was I was kind of going every direction at the same time. So, [snorts] and uh you know, I don't regret that. I had a fine time when I was a kid and but uh I needed really to get disciplined and I had to do it because I was working on these hard problems that you know that I've been discussing with all of you and I've been working on them really you know obsessively since I was probably about 18 maybe even earlier than that and got to the point around 25 when I was in graduate school trying to get my PhDs doing all my research like I published 15 papers by the time I graduated with my PhD which was by I think by a fairly large measure the most papers that any undergraduate student at that time had ever published at McGill. I think that's right. Might have been twice as many or maybe twice as many maybe even three times as many. And at the same time I wrote Maps of Meaning which was a terrible terrible terribly difficult thing to do because I was writing about 3 hours a day doing that. I couldn't do all that and continue with my misbehavior, you know, my sort of my what what would you say? My my hedonistic my hedonistic my massive hedonistic consumption of alcohol and all of that. I just couldn't keep it up and also work seriously on the issues that were at hand. So, you know, I had to stop that's a sacrifice. I had to stop messing about and straighten myself out. And I I got married. Well, my the woman who's my wife, Tammy, who who I've known since she was 8 years old, she lived across the street from me in this little town called Fairview. And I was in love with her like the first time I saw her, which is quite the bloody thing. So, that's worked out pretty well for me. But, she came to live with me about the same time. And, you know, we decided jointly to get our act together. And we swore that we tell each other the truth, which I think she's actually done better than me. Like I don't think I don't think she's lied to me ever in our entire marriage, which is unbelievable, you know, and it's been so useful because I can really tell her things and we can really talk. So I tell you, if you want to have a good relationship, man, you embedded in the truth because if you don't embed it in the truth, you don't have a relationship. It's it's just lies. It's it's a tissue of lies and it will it will dissolve in the chaos as soon as a crisis comes along. So the truth is a terrible thing, but not not compared to falsehood.
So, well, what's the role of a mother if she's awake? I had a client come see me a while back, not very long ago, woman in about who's about 30 and trying to make decisions about her life and she was pretty career oriented and so I asked her about although maybe having a bit of trouble with her career. I I've seen this many many times. So, this is an amalgam. This is a story that's an amalgam. And I talked to her about the other elements of her life. It's like, well, you know, there's only five things you do in life. So, you've got your career down. You know, what do you do outside of your career that's meaningful and engaging? How are things going with your family? It could be your family of origin, your siblings, whatever. Do you have an intimate relationship? And like what's your plan for your own family? And apart from those five things, there's sort of something like get some exercise now and then, don't eat too badly, and try to stay away from the drugs. You know, that that that kind of and the crime that kind of lays out life. And if you miss any of those five things or if you do any of those other things wrong, then you're in trouble. And you can get away with missing a couple of them, but not all of them, you know. And she said something along the lines of, "Well, I'm not sure I should bring a child into this world." And I thought, "Oh, God Christ, you got to come up with something better than that. Such a bloody cliche." Which is what I told her. I said, 'You know, you must have thought that up when you were 16. It's like, really? That's your You can't do any better. This was a very, very smart woman. It's like, really? You know, you can't do any better than that. It's like, yes, obviously this is a veil of tears and, you know, a well of suffering and all of that. You know, if you ask 30 people who are wondering about having children why they're wondering, 20 of them will say that. And so that that tells you how original it is. It's not original at all. It's not a thought. It's like this little it's like a it's like a it's a meme. It's something that lives in your mind. It's not a thought. And it's certainly not something It's certainly not something that you should just take at face value and then say, "Oh, well, I'm not having a family then." It's like, no, no, you kind of look at that and you criticize it a little bit. It's like, well, the pop the It's the other one. That's the other one that's very common. There's too many people on the planet already. It's like I really don't like that statement. It's like just who are you going to ask to leave? Just how are you going to get them to leave? You know, it's a serious question. And who says there's too many people? What the hell's wrong with people anyways? Well, we're running around ruining the planet. Yeah. It's like I think it was the Club of Rome who who prophesied by the way that there would be so many people on the planet by the year 2000 that there would be widespread starvation and they were completely and utterly wrong about that. And I think it was the Club of Rome who either compared us to a virus or a cancer on the face of the planet. It's like oh really that's what you think about people e aren't you something? Isn't that something to think about human beings? Viruses and cancer. What do you do with viruses and cancer? Invite them in and make them at home. It's like, no, you try to eradicate them. You got to bloody well watch your metaphors, folks, cuz it isn't clear that you come up with them or that they run you. So, you better watch them. [applause]
So, anyways, Mary, you know, and Mary's the great mother, right? That she's the mother. That's what Mary is. Whether she existed or not is not the point. She exists at least as a hyper reality. She exists as the mother. What's the sacrifice of the mother? Well, that's easy. If you're a mother and you if you're a mother who's worth her salt, you offer your son to be destroyed by the world. That's what you do. I mean, that's what's going to happen, right? He's going to be born. He's going to suffer. He's going to have his trouble in life. He's going to have his illnesses. He's going to face his failures and catastrophes. And he's going to die. That's what's going to happen. And if you're awake, you know that. And then you say, "Well, perhaps he will live in a way that will justify that." And then you try to have that happen. And that's what makes you worthy of a statue like that, but still the sacrifice of the mother. Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? Well, every woman asks herself that question. Some say no, and they have the reasons. Mary answers yes voluntarily. Mary is the archetype of the woman who answers yes to life voluntarily. That's what that image means. And not because she's blind. She knows what's going to happen. And so she's the archetypal representation of the woman who says yes to life knowing full well what what life is. Not naive, not someone who got pregnant in the backseat of a 1957 Chevy, you know, in one in a one night of of of half drunk idiocy. Not that, but consciously consciously knowing what's to come and then also allows it to happen because that's another thing that's a testament to the courage of mothers. And my mother was good at this. My mother's a very agreeable person. Too agreeable for her own good. But that's what happens if you're agreeable because you're too agreeable for your own good. That's the definition of agreeable. And so she is a nice person and still is luckily she's still alive and we've had a very good relationship and I have always been able to make her laugh which is which is a good thing and but she was tough cookie that woman you know if if uh I remember once she came across I was out playing in this baseball diamond little diamond in empty lot really in this little town I grew up in and I was about 10 and she walked by. I was there with a bunch of my friends and I was about to have a fist fight with this little tough kid that I hung around with and u there were half girls on the team and the fist fight had some relationship to status maneuvering you know in relationship to that. Anyways, we were going to have a fight and my mom walked by. She took a look and I could see from her demeanor that she knew exactly what was about to happen and she looked for a second and then she walked by and I thought, "Whoa, good work, Mom. No kidding." It's like last bloody thing I needed at that moment was for her to come charging up and say, "You boys aren't planning to have a fight, are you?" It's like, "Well, yeah, Mom. We were actually planning to have a fight. And now that you came and intervened, I actually lost before the godamn thing even started. [applause] So, two thumbs up for mom. She was also the person that said cuz I had some trouble with my dad when I was a, you know, adolescent. He had some trouble with me. So, you know, it was 50/50. That's for now. Probably 70/30 with me on the 70 end of the being the trouble. And anyways, I left home when I was about 17. And uh she said something really interesting when I left home. She said, "If it was too good at home, you'd never leave." I thought, "Hey, mom, that's pretty good. You know, for for an agreeable person, you've got a real spine, man." So that was pretty good. So, so you know mother that says this the mother is the person who also says get out there take your godamn lumps because you're tough enough so that you can handle it. She doesn't say you just stay down there in your bedroom brooding away because the world is unfair and treating you badly and your suffering is too much. She says, "Yeah, there's a lot of suffering out there, but you're a hell of a lot tougher than you think you are."
So, in turn, Mary's son, Christ, offers himself to God so completely that his faith and trust in the world is not broken by betrayal, torture, or death. That's the model for the honorable man. So, you know, you have an interesting dynamic there. You have the woman who's willing to make the sacrifice lays the groundwork for the son who is willing to make the sacrifice. That works out pretty nicely and it's a good thing to know. In Christ's case, however, as he sacrifices himself, God, his father, is simultaneously sacrificing his son. Right? That's one of the oddities of the trinitarian model is that God sacrifices himself to himself. Same thing happens in Norse mythology, right? Um, is it Norse? It's Zeus. Germanic mythology. Zeus sacrifices himself to himself. He actually hangs on a tree. He's actually wounded in his side. It's very interesting parallel. But I think part of the idea is, well, the human the human race is trying to work out, well, what's the ultimate sacrifice? It's something like that. The ultimate sacrifice of value. Well, the the the the passion story and I told you I was foreshadowing. I'm bringing into consideration things we won't talk about for a long time and maybe not at all in this lecture series. I don't know because I don't know how far I'll get is that well there's a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the mother and there's a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the son and there's a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the father all at the same time. And then that makes the supreme sacrifice possible. And hypothetically, that's the one that renews. That's the sacrifice that renews and redeems. It's a hell of an idea, man. And the thing about it is that I don't know if it's true, but I know that it's opposite is false. And generally, the opposite of something that's false is true. It's its opposite is false is because if the mother doesn't make the sacrifice then you get the horrible edible situation or something like that in the household which is just its own absolute catastrophic hell. And if you want a really good insight into that I would say watch the documentary Crumb C R U M B a man that's been rated by some critics as the best documentary ever made. And it is some piece of work man. It is the only thing I've ever seen that actually lays out the edible catastrophe in its full nightmare you know. [snorts] So you could you could look at that. So if the maternal sacrifice isn't there, then that doesn't work. If the paternal sacrifice isn't there, you know, if you if the father isn't willing to put his son out into the world, let's say to be broken and betrayed and all of those things, then that's a non-starter because the kid doesn't grow up. And then if the son isn't willing to do that, well then who the hell is going to shoulder the responsibility? So if those three things don't happen, then it's cataclysmic, it's chaotic, it's hell. If they do happen, is it the opposite of that? Well, you could say, well, maybe it depends on the degree to which they happen. And and it's a continuum. How thoroughly can they happen? Well, we don't know, you know, because you might say, how good a job do you do of encouraging your children to live in truth, let's say? Well, that's part of the answer to this question. And the answer likely is, well, not. You don't do as good a job of it as you could. So it works out quite well, but you don't know how well it could work if you did it really well or spectacularly well or ultimately well or something like that. You don't know. And you know, people have an intimation of this because one of the things that's really cool about having a young baby, this is something you don't know till you have a there's two things you don't know. There's a lot more than two. There's three things you don't know until you have a baby. The one is that you didn't grow up yet because you actually don't grow up until someone else is more important than you. You can't. So, people think they grow up if they don't have children, but they don't. They just think they do. Now, there are some people who make sacrifices of other sorts, but this is a whole different ball of wax as far as I'm concerned. It's not a very elegant metaphor, but >> [snorts] >> um you learn that it's kind of relief not to be the center of attention. That's cool. That you can sit back because of course your child in your family and in society is immediately the center of attention and so unless you're narcissistic then you allow that to happen and then you learn all sorts of really good things about other people because other people really like babies. It's so cool. I lived in Montreal when we had our first child and I lived in a pretty rough neighborhood by Montreal standards, right? It's like you know Montreal is such a great city like Toronto. It's like even the rough neighborhoods are they're more like charming with a little, you know, dark underbelly, something like that. But there were some rough characters in our neighborhood. It was pretty poor. And we'd we'd uh push her around in her stroller and these like grizzled, wrecked old guys would come by and they'd look at her and they'd just light up and they'd come over and like smile at her and you know, you just saw their the the positive element of their humanity just well forth. You have there has to be something seriously wrong with you if you don't respond that way to a baby, you know? I mean, that's that's not good. That's not good. But it was so cool to see these people. You'd kind of give them generally you'd sort of walk four feet around them on the street, you know, and yet they were all of a sudden all that the layers that were on them would just fall off and they'd be so And the babies are sort of like public property, weirdly enough, too. Sort of like pregnant women, you know, because people often treat pregnant women sort of like their public property, too. I mean, in a positive way. Oh, wow. Look, you're gonna have a baby. Hey, and then, you know, they they do all sorts of cute things.
So, so if you take children and you group them together in age age uh in groups defined by age. So let's say you have 32-year-olds, 33-year-olds, 34-year-olds all the way up to 18. And then you watch them interact and you code their behavior for kicking, biting, fighting, and property theft. Then what you'll find is that the two-year-olds are by far the most aggressive of the lot. So that's pretty interesting, you know, because you think, well, children are naturally peaceful, and if they're aggressive, it's because they learn it. It's like, no, that's true for a small minority of children, but there's a substantial number of children who are aggressive at two by nature. Most of them are male. Now, that doesn't mean most children are like that, because they're not. Even if you look at two-year-olds who are the most aggressive human beings, most two-year-olds aren't aggressive, but some of them are and most of those are male. Okay? So then let's say you identify this cohort of aggressive 2-year-olds and you track them across time. Track them for the next 2 to four years or or the next track them until they're four years old. What you find is the vast majority of the hyperaggressive male 2-year-olds get socialized perfectly well. So by the time they're four, they're temperamentally probably still more aggressive, but they've become civilized little monsters so other people can tolerate them. And that means that they've had parents or peers or educational experiences that enable them to learn how to interact productively with other kids and to bring their aggressive nature under control. Some of that seems to be mediated by the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play. And that's one of the things that we know that that helps socialize rats, for example. It's vital to them. But it also seems to really be good for socializing young kids and rough and tumble play which is something that adult males particularly like to do with young kids by the way not not before 9 months cuz they're just too little but once they become ambulatory and you know kind of puppy like so that they're a little bit more robust then you can play a lot with them and you can play with them right at the edge of danger too which kids absolutely they absolutely go nuts for that. They love that. So when when I had little kids, I made this kind of wrestling ring out of these two couches that we had that would hook together and I'd bring them on there and, you know, toss them up in the air and catch them, you know, 8 10 ft. No, no, no. A foot in the air and catch them and they'd go like this and then, you know, I'd catch them and they'd laugh and I'd throw them up and they're all freaked out and then they'd laugh and, you know, so they're learning trust with that in an embodied way. And they're also learning, and this is from stretching them out and wrestling them and twisting them around and letting them pull on your hair and hit you and all of those things. They learn deep in their bones exactly what can hurt them and what doesn't. And you want to kind of push them to the edge, you know, so that they can tell the difference between what hurts and what's still within the realm of the game. And you do the same thing when they're wrestling with you, so they learn not to, you know, awkwardly stick their thumb in your eye or or or do things that are actually painful, like grab your lip and pull it. you know, it's like no, no, you you let go of my lip, you know, and so that seems to help regulate the aggressive impulses and and help the church child find a more appropriate embodiment. You could think that what you're doing in some sense when you're rough and tumble playing with kids is teaching them how to dance because that is what you're doing. You know, you're making them comfortable in their bodies in all of its extension and building in that kind of body fluency that you see in people who are well situated inside themselves. And so that's something to really think about, you know, and it's a it's appalling. We know that the ability to engage in rough and tumble play among rats inhibits aggression, impulsive aggressive aggression among rats. We also know that if you deprive rats of the ability to of the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play, they they show prefrontal cortical developmental deficits and manifest behaviors that are akin to attention deficit disorder, which you can then treat with Ritalin. And so one of the things that's happening with boys, because they're way more dosed with attention deficit disorder medication than girls, is that their natural proclivity to engage in robust and troublesome active play isn't appropriate for a school environment where you're just supposed to sit down and shut up. And so the kids get hyperactive. And instead of letting them out to run around until they fall over half exhausted, which is exactly what you should do, you know, you medicate them so that their exploratory systems, which are um the activity of which is facilitated by the by the dopaminergic agonist, that's the ADHD medication, suppresses the play function. It's absolutely appalling. There's no excuse for it, you know, but it it's a good it's a good indictment of the education system because why in the world would you take six-year-old kids and get them to sit without moving for 5 hours? Unless you want them to grow up fat and stupid, why in the world would you train them to do that? Well, it's easier. That's one thing, you know, and and when they're sitting there, there's nothing disruptive about the rough and tumble play. And that can be quite, you know, play can be quite disruptive. So anyways, most of these kids are reasonably well socialized by the time they're the age of four using one mechanism or another. They learn how to regulate their aggression and they learn how to engage in fictional play structures with other kids. They learn how to cooperate and compete. And the advantage to having a well socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way. So if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized, that person can be quite quite the creature, you know, because they're very they're very forward moving in their nature and very difficult to stop. But if you don't get them successfully domesticated, tamed, roughly speaking, by the time they're four, their peers reject them. And that's a big problem because your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four, right? You got to you want to burn that into your brain because people don't know that. That's your job. And here's here's why. You think it's it's easy if you think about it carefully. So you imagine you've got a you've got a three-year-old child. So sort of halfway through that initial period of socialization and you take that child out in public. Okay. What do you want for the child? Who cares about you? What do you want from the ch for the child? You want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her and so the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly. And if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining them or you don't know how to do that properly, then what they're going to do is they're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children and false smiles from other parents and adults. And that's so then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying. And that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the well-being of your child. If your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior, like don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much and pay attention and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary. Then and you know and share and play properly. Then when they meet other kids, the the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them and that's going to go well. And then they're going to go off and socialize each other for the rest of their lives because that's what happens is that from four years old onwards, the primary socialization with children takes place among other children. And so if the kids don't get in on that early, they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind. And you can imagine how terrible that is because a four-year-old will not play with another four-year-old who's two. But a 5-year-old certainly will not play with a 5-year-old who's two, right? Because the gap is just starting to get unbelievably large. And so the kids start out behind and then the peers leave them behind and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life. Well, those are the ones that grow up to be long-term antisocial, right? They're already aggressive. It doesn't dip down.
Now, what happens to normal boys, roughly speaking, imagine the aggressive two-year-old types. They get socialized, so their level of aggression goes down, and then they hit puberty, and testosterone kicks in, and bang, levels of aggression go back up. And so, that's why males are criminals between the ages roughly of 16 and about 25. So, and it matches the creativity curve, by the way. It's so cool. If you look at the spike of creativity among men, 16 to 25, then it starts to go down. Criminality matches that absolutely perfectly. So that's quite cool. So and part of so the testosterone levels raise raise raise the average level of aggression among men. It's more dominance than aggression actually. And testosterone is by no means all bad. And then it starts to decrease at about age 25 or 26, which is usually when men stop staying up late at night, stop drinking as much, develop a full-time career, and take on the burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family. And so well, so that's that's the development of of of what I what I would call predatory aggression because I also think that the the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression versus maternal sympathy, it's something like that. So if you look at other if you look at other mammals that are that are predators because we're predators as well as prey animals. If you look at other animals like bears, the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants. In fact, the female bears will keep the male the hell away because he's likely to kill the infants and maybe even to eat them. So, there's no maternality at all in solitary male mammalian predators. Now, it depends on how social they are, but roughly speaking, that's the situation. Whereas with human beings, males are quite maternal. So but anyways I think the I think the the the extreme of agreeableness on the low end so disagreeableness is predation and the extreme on the upper end is maternal caring and so and those two things compete right obviously it's very difficult to be both of those at the same time and so men of course in the wild so to speak are very very few women hunt in modern societies or in or in archaic societies and you can also understand why that is because hunting actually requires hurting something, killing it, and it's it's usually something that's not very impressed about being hurt or killed, and that will emit a lot of distress while it's happening. And so for anybody who's compassionate, who's got compassion as, you know, one of the fundamental elements of their temperament, that's something they're just not going to be able to tolerate at all. So there's t, you know, in the evolutionary landscape, because that's really what we're talking about, there's tension behind the development of different modes of being in the world. And it if you're good at one thing, that sometimes means that you can't be good at the other thing at the same time.