Jordan Peterson: "Act as if Everything Always Works Out for You"

You take the core metaphysical presupposition out from underneath Western civilization or any civilization for that matter, and the whole thing loosens, shakens shakes and crumbles. Well, for Nietzsche the metaphysical presupposition was God. Well, and then the question of course: well, what even does that mean? And it on one hand it means, I suppose, adherence to a dogmatic set of beliefs, but then you might ask yourself, well, is there something else that it means? It means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value. It means at least that. So, you know, Nietzsche announced the death of God, and so one of the consequences of that – Dostoevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas, and in Crime and Punishment in particular, which is a book like it's a necessary book. That's the thing: there's a number of books that were written in the last 120 years that you really have to read, and Crime and Punishment is one of them, and I think The Gulag Archipelago is another, and probably Beyond Good and Evil is another. But, you know, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were writing in parallel. It's remarkable how much their their lives intertwined, and Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than than is generally known. There's been some recent scholarship indicating that, but in Dostoevsky's book Crime and Punishment he has a his main character Raskolnikov decides that he's going to commit a murder, and he has very good justification for the murder, and Dostoevsky is very good at this. He he puts his characters into very, very difficult moral situations and gives them full justification for pursuing the the uh pursuing the pathway that they're pursuing. And so, Raskolnikov: he's broke and starving. He wants to go to law school. His sister's about to prostitute herself, roughly speaking, by marrying a guy that that hates her, that she hates, and that and he has contempt for her, at least acts in that manner. He's trying to rescue his mother, as well, who's also in dire financial straits. He He He goes to a pawnbroker to pawn his meager possessions so that he can continue to scrape by. And she has this niece, I believe it's her niece that's not very bright, who she basically treats as an as a slave and is horrible to. And And so, the char- the the the pawnbroker has this money. Raskolnikov is in dire need. He thinks, "Look, I'll just kill her, because why the hell not? I'll take her money. She's not doing any good with it, anyways. I'll free her niece, who's just lurking as a slave. She's got all these other people tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes. All that'll happen is the world will be a better place. And the only thing that's holding me back is conventional moral cowardice." And you know, Dostoevsky has his character in Crime and Punishment go through days, hours, hours and days and weeks of intense imagination about this, rationalization about this, trying to justify himself, placing a outside placing himself outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act, and telling himself with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding him back is an an arbitrary sense of indoctrinated morality. And so, Dostoevsky explores that. He does commit the murder, and then, of course, all hell breaks loose, because things don't necessarily turn out the way that you want. He gets away with it, however. Well, he gets away with it technically, because no one knows he did it. But he doesn't get away with it in relationship to his own conscience. And so, that the rest of the book explores that.

Well, Dostoevsky, I believe it was in Crime and Punishment, although he makes the same point in many of his books. He makes a very fundamental point, and this is the kind of point that that I think that people who haven't investigated these matters down this particularly particular literary and philosophical pathway never grapple with. Dostoyevsky said straightforwardly, "If there's no God." So, if there's no higher value, let's say, if there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want. And that's the question that he's investigating. And you see, this is why I have such frustration, say, with people like Sam Harris, the sort of radical atheists, because they seem to think that once human beings abandon their their grounding in the transcendent, that the the plausible way forward is with a kind of purest rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value. It's like, I just don't understand that. They They believe that that's the rational pathway? What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you, whenever I want it, at every possible second? Why is that irrational? And how possibly is that more irrational than us cooperating so we can both have a good time of it? I don't understand that. I mean, it's as if the the psychopathic tendency is irrational. There's nothing irrational about it. It's pure naked self-interest. How is that irrational? I don't understand that. Where Where's the pathway from rationality to to an egalitarian virtue? Why the hell not every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost? It's a perfectly coherent philosophy. And it's actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it. So, I don't See, to me, I think that that the universe that people like Dawkins and Harris inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted. The ethic that emerges out of that as if it's just a given, a rational given. And this of course precisely do not Nietzsche's observation as well as Dostoevsky's. That's Nietzsche's observation. You don't get it. The ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its of its of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history, much of which was expressed in mythological formulation. You wipe that out. You don't get to keep all the presuppositions and just assume that they're rationally axiomatic. They're the rational To make a rational argument, you have to start with an initial proposition. Well, the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality. Now, you could say that's a transcendent morality instantiated in the figure of God. That's fine. You could even call that a personification of the morality. If you if you want to If you If you don't want to move into a metaphysical space. I'm not arguing for the existence of God. I'm arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God. And that you can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact midair without any foundational support. Now, you don't have to buy that, but if you're interested in the idea, then you can read Nietzsche because that's what he was trying to sort out. And it wasn't only Nietzsche who came to that conclusion. There was many people have come to that conclusion, but I think the two who've outlined it most spectacularly were Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. And Nietzsche is an unbelievably um influential philosopher. You know, I don't think there was anyone that was more influential during the entire course of the 20th century excepting a very, very tiny handful of other people, excepting the scientists. We won't bother with their with their discussion. You could put Marx in that category. You could put Freud in that category partly. But after that, the list starts to get a lot thinner, you know? So, maybe there's 10 people up in that level. And Dostoevsky, of course, I think I mean, if if he ever if anybody ever prepares a list of the top 10 greatest literary figures in the world, he would be in the top 10 list, you know? I think he's perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare in my estimation. So, these aren't trivial people we're talking about. And they weren't dealing with trivial issues.

Well, so then the question might be, what's at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value? And I want to wanted to approach that staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible, because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective, and that's a big problem. And so, people will say, well, why come up with a hypothesis of God, for example? God could be anything. There's a satire, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, right? Is a classic satirical representation of a deity that the atheist types use to buttress their arguments. And fair enough, you know, as a satirical idea, it's pretty damn funny. But there's things about this that aren't the least bit amusing. And the thing that's not amusing is, well, what, if anything, is our culture predicated on? Okay, so what happened? Well, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky put this forth this set of propositions. And out of Dostoevsky's line of thinking, to some degree, grew Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn documented the absolute horrors of equity-predicated Soviet society, you know? And we don't teach we don't learn about that, right? This I don't understand. Is that what happened in the 20th century on the radical left end of the spectrum is not well documented. Students don't learn about it. Why the hell is that? We learn about World War II. We learn about what happened in the Holocaust, and fair enough, we absolutely should. But nobody knows. It's a mystery to everyone when when I talk about what happened in the Soviet Union, and that's absolutely appalling. And that's to say nothing about what happened in China, which was equally horrible. The system didn't work. It was predicated on the wrong values. Unless you think that that sort of thing means worked. You know, cuz you you have to define that as well. But it collapsed under its own weight after it killed tens of millions of people. That doesn't really And still, it's not like Russia has recovered. It doesn't seem to me like that's a very good definition of worked. Now, whatever we're doing in the West seems to work for all of its flaws. And the question is, are we just deceiving ourselves? Is it just arbitrary power politics and opinion? Or is there something at the bottom of it? So, when Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, he believed that the Russians would have to return to Orthodox Christianity to find their pathway forward. And that's of course has made him into a reactionary in the eyes of many of his critics. But that is perhaps what is happening in Russia, although it's very difficult to tell because Putin also seems to be using his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian Church as as a means to consolidate power. So, the situation in Russia is unclear, but a religious revival, if that's happening in Russia, and perhaps it isn't, but if if it is happening, is something that unfolds over decades and even centuries. So, it's not an easy thing to evaluate when it first starts to happen.

You live in a in a map, let's say, or a story. And the story is, um, wherever I am isn't as good as it could be, and so I'm going to go somewhere that's somewhat better. And you know, that can be of different time frames. Maybe you've got a plan for the next minute. You know, you're hungry, and so you want to go somewhere to or maybe it could be for the next hour or the next week or the next day or the next year or whatever, but basically what you're trying to do is take where you are, point A, and make it better, point B. And so you're always somewhere that isn't quite as good as it should be, and you're always going somewhere that's somewhat better. At least that's the hope. Unless things have gone wrong, you know, and you feel, "God, it's nothing but downhill from here on in." And that's not good. You don't want that. That's a that's a pathological condition. So, and it's kind of unfortunate in some sense because it means you can't be satisfied with what you've got. But how the hell can you be satisfied WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT? Because you've got problems coming your way. You know, I mean, even if everything's okay right now, which it probably isn't, but even if it was, that doesn't mean everything's going to be okay tomorrow or next week or next year or 5 years from now, right? You've got the future to take care of and your future self and you've got your family to take care of and maybe you've got your community to take care of. So, you've got some problems. And so, the way things are isn't good enough. And so, you're going to fix them a bit. And so, then you fix them across different levels of resolution. And you do this in a you do this technically in this manner. So, you you identify where you are. One one thing you might think about is if you're mixed up, one of the problems you might have is that you don't know where you are. Lots of times people have to go to therapy or or talk for a long time to someone to find out where they are because your experience might have scattered you everywhere and you just and you feel that things have that you've come apart at the seams, right? That things have fallen apart around you, that you're in chaos. You don't know where you are. And and and so, then you're in trouble because how the hell are you going to plot a course forward into the future if you don't know where you are. And so, maybe you have to bring yourself up to date.

Um I have an exercise online, by the way, at a place called Self-Authoring, which is called the Past Authoring Exercise, um fittingly enough. And what it asks you to do is to write an autobiography. It's a guided autobiography. And it can kind of bring you up to date. And you can know if you need to be brought up to date. It's fairly straightforward. If you're obsessed by memories of the past more than 18 months old, and most of those are negative, so anxiety-provoking most often, then there's a lot of you that's stuck in the past. And what that means is you didn't map the territory well enough, and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems, anxiety systems are saying, "No, no, there's holes in the way you're looking at the world. There's holes in the way that you're looking in the world." And you fell in them once, and you don't know where they are, and you don't know how to fill them, and you don't know how to walk around them. And so, you can't forget them. You can't forget them. You can't forget them. You can't forget them. So, you have recurring nightmares, for example, are good example of that sort of thing happening. But, in in any case, if you have memories like that, you look you remember them, they make you feel anxious and negative, you're stuck back there. Your body is still reacting as if there's an emergency that could happen again that you haven't fixed. It doesn't matter if it was your fault. That's irrelevant, cuz the alarm system doesn't care. Like, when your smoke detector goes off, it isn't relevant whether it was your fault. The smoke detector just says, "House is on fire." And that's a bad thing. And your anxiety systems are like that. If if they're tagging old memories with anxiety, then you have to do something about it, or you will be tortured by those memories forever. Cuz that's how the alarm system works. And so, maybe you need to go back there and clean things up. You got to figure out, "Okay, well, how did this happen? What sort of role did I play? Even if it's a minor role, that doesn't matter, cuz the point is is that you don't want to be put in the same vulnerable position again. So, anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good. You know, and often if it's a really old memory, like maybe you were a child, IT'S YOU'RE NOT A CHILD NOW. SO, you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with a situation like that if it came up now. And so, you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you're four. And lots of people have parts of them that are still stuck in some traumatic childhood experience. And and they don't I I had a friend like that who had terrible childhood. And and I mean really I've had clients with terrible childhoods and his was like top of the top of the lobster hierarchy in terms of terrible childhoods. And >> [snorts] >> whenever he had a dream about it, which was very often, he was five in his dream. He's 58. You know, he's not five, but hadn't been updated. So, he was still five in his dreams. It was a complete bloody nightmares for him, complete with physiological all sorts of terrible physiological symptoms, really hurting his life. He couldn't get himself updated. And he's he's much older in his dreams now, by the way. He's up to about 45. So, that's a which is way better than five, you know, cuz you can't fight back when you're five, but you can fight back when you're 45, especially if you have some you know, some some experience at your disposal. So, anyways, you need to know where you are.

So, let's say where you are is well, you're on this stage and you're on this side of the stage and you decide that you're going to go over to that side of the stage um just to show that you can um and you're you're making the decision the same decision that you know, the famous chicken who is going to cross the road. Why does the chicken cross the road? Well, if it's a sensible chicken, it's because it assumes that there's something better on the other side of the road. It's like or maybe it's random curiosity, but then it just gets picked off by a dingo or a coyote. So, that's not so good. The other side of the road is better. So, away the chicken goes. So, that's what you're doing. You're going slum somewhere slightly better. And so, that's good. Technically, it's good. Because the way that your positive emotion systems work, they run on a neurochemical called dopamine, which by the way is the neurochemical system that drugs like cocaine and meth- methamphetamine and the alcohol for some people and opiates affect dramatically and make people feel far better than they should, which is part of their danger. Um it's a very fundamental system. The dopamine system kicks in with a kick of positive emotion if you're going somewhere that's worth going. And so that's worth knowing. It's really worth knowing. It's like, okay, you want a little bit of positivity in your life. Well, how do you get it? Well, you got to get the system. It's almost the like it's the left hemisphere system for for most people. Not that that's particularly relevant, but it's a it it it is a standalone neurochemical system. It's rooted very, very deeply in the brain's exploratory circuitry. So, very ancient, ancient system. And uh it's happy when you have somewhere to go. That's the first thing. And then it's also happy when you're going there. And so, if I'm on this side of the stage and I want to go over to that side of the stage and I see that there's a nice clear pathway, I could just go straight down this line, then I look at that and I'm actually a little happy. I mean I'm in I'm not I'm not ecstatic. I mean, who the hell cares if I get to the other side of the stage, right? I mean, it's it's a small piece of my life, but it's not nothing. It's something. Okay, and so I look at the pathway and I think that's a good pathway and I feel a little positive. And then if I move here and then I see that uh little table right in the way between me and and the other side of the stage, then I'm I feel a little negative because I don't want an obstacle in my pathway. And so that's really how you're looking at the world, by the way. You don't see objects. It's not the right way to think about it. We don't see objects and then think about them and then evaluate them and then decide how to act on them. Or if we do, we do it rarely and slowly and with a lot of thought. What we see instead are pathways with tools that will move us forward or obstacles. Right? And there's no obstacles here and there's a nice flat road and so great. Positive emotion. There this is a task I can undertake. The sailing is clear. It's a good day. And then I'm here and it's like, "Yeah, well, that's a little annoying. Um, I I get a little pang of disappointment, let's say, anxiety. Can I make it around that obstacle? I'm fairly confident. I've done this sort of thing before, so I can take the rough route and I can, you know, walk forward like this and then I can do this great trick, which is just this and then, you know, I've circumvented the obstacle. Now, if I didn't know how to do the little bit of circumvention, then that would be a real problem, right? Cuz I couldn't get from point A to B and that would screw up my plan. But I do have that particular skill set, so it's a minor disruption to the perceptual set that I'm using to organize the world. It's a minor bit of chaos cuz that's what happens when your perceptual set, the structure that you're using to organize the world, the plan through which you're viewing the complexity of the world reveals an inadequacy, then that destabilizes your emotions. So that's another thing to note. One thing you need to know is you need to be going somewhere and there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good. The other thing to know is that if that plan is untenable or becomes destabilized, then what happens is you become flooded with negative emotion. Frustration, disappointment, anger, primarily anxiety, but all of those things sort of intermingled. Anger maybe because you have to fight your way through the obstacle. Frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan. Disappointment because you put a bunch of work into the damn plan and it didn't work out. Anxiety because now there's too many choices in front of you. And so, people don't like to have their plans disrupted. They don't like to have their plans disrupted. And the reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the world.

There's this new There's this post-modern idea about literature and about the world for that matter that if you take a complex piece of literature like like a Shakespeare play, there's no end to the number of interpretations that you can make of it. You know, you can interpret each word, you can interpret each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph, you can interpret the entire play. The way you interpret it depends on how many other books you've read, depends on your orientation in the world. It it it depends on a very very large number of things, how cultured you are or how how much culture you lack, all of those things. It opens up a huge a huge vista for potential interpretation. And so, the post-modernists sort of stubbed their toe on that and thought, "Well, if there's this vast number of interpretations of any particular literary work, how can you be sure that any interpretation is more valid than any other interpretation?" And if you can't be sure, then how do you even know those are great works? How do you know they can't Maybe they're just works that the people in power have used to facilitate their continual accession of power, which is really a post-modern idea, a very very cynical one, but it has its point. But the thing is it's grounded in something real, right? It's like, "Yes, you can interpret things forever." I want to show you something here, just briefly. We'll go back to it later. Look at this. This is the cool one of the coolest things I've ever seen. So, at the bottom here, every single one of those lines is a biblical verse. Okay? Now, the length of the line is proportionate to how many times that verse is referred to in some way by some other verse. So, you say, "Well, this is the first hyperlinked book." Right? I'm I'm dead serious about that. It like you can't click and get the hyperlinks, obviously, but it's a thoroughly hyperlinked book, and it's because Well, the people who worked on these stories that are hypothetically at the end, right, which is The end can't affect the beginning. That's That's the rule of time, right? What happens now can't affect what happened to you 10 years ago, even though it actually can, but whatever. Well, you reinterpret things, right, and then they're not the same, but but whatever, we won't get into that. But technically speaking, the present cannot affect the past, but if you're we're looking at a piece of literature, that's not right, because when you write the end, you know what it was at the beginning, and when you write the beginning or edit it, you know what's at the end. And so, you can weave the whole thing together. And there's 65,000 cross-references, and that's what this map shows. And so, that's a great visual representation of the book. And then you can see, "Well, why is it deep? Why is the book deep?" Well, just imagine how many pathways you could take through that. Right? I mean, you just journey through You just journey through that forever. You'd never ever get to the end of it. There's permutations and combinations, and every phrase is dependent on every other phrase, and every verse is dependent on every other Not entirely, but 65,000 is not a bad start. And so, Okay, well, so So, that that's another issue in some sense that seems to make the postmodernist critique even more correct. How in the world are you going to extract out a canonical interpretation of something like that? It's like it's not possible. But here's the issue, as far as I can tell. The interpret So, when the postmodernists extended that critique to the world, they said, "Look, well, a text is complicated enough. You can't extract out a canonical interpretation. What about the world? The world's way more complicated than a text, and so there's an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world. And so, how do we know that any one way is better than any other way?" And that's a good question. Now, the post-modern answer was we can't. And that's not a good answer because you drown in chaos under those circumstances, right? You can't make sense of anything. And that's not good because it's not neutral to not make sense of things. It's very anxiety-provoking. It's very depressing because if things are so chaotic that you can't get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency preparation mode, and your heart rate goes up, and your immune system stops working, and like you burn yourself out. You age rapidly because you're surrounded by nothing you can control. It's varying. That's an existential crisis, right? It's anxiety-provoking and depressing. Very hard on people. And even more than that, it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim, and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim. It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy, as you all know if you've ever attained anything, because as soon as you attain it, then the whole little game ends. Then you have to come up with another game, right? So, it's it's Sisyphus. And that that's okay, but but it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you because it collapses the game. That's what happens when you graduate from university. It's like you're king of the mountain for one day, then you're like serf at at at at Starbucks for the next 5 years, you know? So, yeah. So, what happens is that that human beings are weird creatures because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment. And what that means is you have to have an aim, and that means you have to have an interpretation, and it also means that the nobler the aim, that's one way of thinking about it, the better your life. And that's a really interesting thing to know, because you know, you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person and you shouldn't lie, for example, and you might think, well, why the hell should I act like a good person and why not lie? I mean, even a three-year-old can ask that question because smart smart kids learn to lie earlier, by the way, and they they think, well, why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short-term needs? I mean, that's a great question. Why not do that? Why act morally? If you can get away with something and it it brings you closer to something you want, well, why not do it? These are good questions. It's not self-evident. Well, it seems to me tied in with what I just mentioned. It's like you destabilize yourself and things become chaotic. That's not good. And if you don't have a noble aim, then you have nothing but but shallow, trivial pleasures, and they don't sustain you. And that's not good because because life is so difficult, so much is so much suffering, it's so complex, it ends, and everyone dies, and it's painful. It's like without a noble aim, how can you withstand any of that? You can't. You become desperate, and once you become desperate, things go things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate. And so there's the idea of the noble aim. And it's it's not something it's it's something that's necessary. It's the bread that people cannot live without, right? That's not physical bread. It's the noble aim. And what is that? Well, it was encapsulated in part in the story of Marduk. That's that's it's to pay attention. It's to speak properly. It's to confront chaos. It's to make a better world. It's something like that. And that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without, you know, cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched position on on planet.

So, now there's a The literary issue is that So, look, you take a text, you can interpret it a variety of ways, but that's not right. This is where the postmodernists went wrong because what you're looking for in a text and in the world, for that matter, is is sufficient order and direction. So, then we have to think, well, what does sufficient order and direction means? Well, you don't want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable, right? That just seems self-evident. Pain argues for itself. I think of pain as the fundamental reality because no one disputes it, right? I mean, even if you say that you don't believe in pain, it doesn't help when you're in pain. You still believe in it, right? It's It's It's You can't pry it up with logic and rationality. It just stands forth as as what the fundament of existence, and that's actually quite useful to know. Say, well, you don't want any more of that than is absolutely necessary. And I think that's self-evident. And then you say, "Wait a minute, it's more complicated than that." You don't want any more of that that's necessary today, but also not tomorrow and not next week and not next month and not next year. So, however you act now, better not compromise how you're going to be in a year because that would just be counterproductive. That's part of the problem with short-term pleasures, right? It's like act in haste, repent at leisure. Everyone knows exactly what that means. So, you have to act in a way that works now and tomorrow and next week and next month and so forth. And so, you have to take your future self into account, and human beings can do that. And taking your future self into account isn't much different than taking other people into account, right? Cuz I remember there's this Simpson episode and uh Homer downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. And he says, um someone Marge says, "You know, you shouldn't really do that," and Homer says, that's a problem for future Homer. I I'm sure glad I'm not that guy. That's so ridiculously comical, you know? But But Okay, but you see, we have to grapple with that. And so, the you that's out there in the future is sort of like another person. And so, figuring out how to conduct yourself properly in relationship to your future self isn't much different than figuring out how to conduct yourself in relationship to other people. But then we could expand the constraints. Not only does the interpretation that you extract have to protect you from suffering and give you an aim, but it has to do it in a way that's iterable, so it works across time, and then it has to work in the presence of other people, so that you can cooperate with them and compete with them in a way that doesn't make you suffer more. And people are They're They're not that tolerant. You know, I mean, they have choices. They don't have to hang around with you. They can hang around with any one of these other primates. And so, if you don't act properly, at least within certain boundaries, it's like you're just cast aside. And so, people are broadcasting information at you all the time about how you need to interpret the world so they can tolerate being around you. And you need that because socially isolated, you're insane, and then you're dead. No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time. We can't maintain our own sanity without continual feedback from other people cuz it's too damn complicated. So, you're constrained by your own existence, and then you're constrained by the existence of other people. And then you're also constrained by the world, you know? If I read Hamlet, and what I extract out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge, it's like it's it it puts my interpretation to an end rather rather quickly. It doesn't seem to be optimally functional, let's say. And so, an interpretation has is constrained by the reality of the world. It's constrained by the reality of other people, and it's constrained by your reality across time. And there's only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space. And so, that's part of the reason that the post-modernists are wrong. It's also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who've been trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body. It It turns out that you just can't make something intelligent in some sense without it being embodied. And it's partly for the reasons that I just described is you need constraints on the system before you need constraints on the system so that the system doesn't drown in an infinite sea of interpretation. It's something like that. So, that's the literary end of it looking at it.

Now, in the Potter situation, which is related to this image, the one that's up here, the idea is that everything that's stable rests on something that's unstable and dangerous, and that's underneath in the Potter series. And then, the other thing that happens continually in the series, but particularly in the second episode, particularly in the second episode, is that Potter has to go down beneath things to encounter something that's terrifying and deadly, that's that's actually preying on his friends and on the community. So, it's It's very much like, for example, the Hobbit having to go off and and and steal treasure from from Smaug, I think the dragon's name is. And except that in the in the Potter sequence, the dragon, which is the basilisk, their their equivalent, it's the same thing as this, um in the in the Hobbit, the dragon hoards gold, whereas in the Potter representation, what does the basilisk guard? What's it What has it captured? It's the little red-headed girl. >> Ginny. >> Right, Ginny. Ginny. Right. And that's a very That's a very old story. Now, now, Potter's kind in love with her, right? Now, I mean it's it's they're young and sort of platonic, but you know, you can see the relationship sort of burgeoning. Now, he has to confront this thing that's terrifying that exists underneath everything in order to free this virginal figure from the clutches of something terrible and reptilian. Now, it's a very, very interesting story that. And what it means a whole variety of things. And what it means to some degree is that uh a male human being can't really become mature until he confronts the terrible things that lie underneath the civilized veneer of society. That's one thing it means. Uh another thing it means is that it's the capacity it's the capacity of the male in that situation to do that that makes him attractive enough to wake up the females that he might be associated with. So, that's like a Sleeping Beauty motif. Um it has evolutionary echoes because much of what we've battled with for the last 60 million years, say, because I think you can trace the development of our cognitive structures quite straightforwardly back 60 million years, there's been an endless battle between human beings and predators, and many of those predators were reptilian. And so, you know, we're the result of a very, very long battle between mammals and reptiles. And in our case, particularly, it appears that part of the reason we evolved our tool using capacity and our great capacity for vision was because our ancestors were continually preyed upon by predatory snakes when they lived in trees. And that's a long time ago. And so, these these symbolic representations are unbelievably archaic. And they're kind of as archaic as the underlying biological systems in your brain that that provide you with motivation and emotion. And those are extremely old. You share those with Well, you share those with any animal that you have any hope whatsoever of understanding at all. And that even means lizards. You know, my daughter had these lizards that were called I can't remember, unfortunately. They're a desert kind of lizard and they make a good initial pet, but they're they're very funny little creatures cuz they they, you know, they're very lizard-like, being that they're lizards and they have points all over them. >> [laughter] >> And uh if you put them in water, they puff themselves up, which is quite fun, and then they zoom around in the water. But more importantly, they like to stack on top of each other. They're very very social and they're friendly, which is not exactly something that you'd expect from a lizard. But But my my point is that even something that's as distant as that from you in the evolutionary hierarchy shares enough commonality of biological structure with you so that you can understand a fair bit of its motivation. So, for example, it's pretty easy to tell when when one of those lizards, even though they're basically friendly, gets angry cuz it'll puff up and hiss and you know right away. You don't have to have a discussion with the rest of your family to figure out that that's an angry lizard, right? It says to you it maps onto your body immediately. And you know, the same thing applies to snakes. It even applies to insects. And lots of insects have developed the kind of warning behavior that will immediately signal to you that you're about to be bitten or or it's usually bitten with insects. So, so this is all to say that there are levels of understanding that are underneath, say, your your your normative mundane day-to-day comprehension that informed everything that you do with deep levels of meaning, and a lot of the activities that you pursue that you might regard as entertaining actually draw on those representations, and you find them entertaining because they're actually deeply meaningful.

Now, the idea that a man can be swallowed or a human being, cuz there are myths like myth of Persephone where the protagonist is clearly female, where they they they there's an underground journey and then a re-emergence. And and that's the journey to the underworld. That's the journey that Harry Potter undertakes continually, by the way, throughout the Potter series. Um the underworld taking different forms um as the as the series progress. Um Now, that's also with death and rebirth idea. And and that's that's a very old and profound idea. It's actually one of the most profound ideas that human beings have. And it's the idea that um you will spend time in your life underground. Now, you might think, "What does that mean?" Well, it means what the Potter movie, the second Potter movie, was trying to represent, which is that there will be times in your life where you are faced with things that will terrify you into paralysis. And that will take you underneath your normal set of assumptions because when your normal set of assumptions are functioning, you don't end up facing something that's terrifying enough to to freeze you. When your normal set of assumptions are working, the world stays happily predictable around you. And most of the time that's where you are, and that's the normal world. But that's blown apart whenever something that you're attempting to do fails in a in a dramatic or less dramatic way. The more dramatic the way, the deeper you go into the underworld. And the underworld is in some sense the substructures of your presuppositions. Now, you you know this already because I don't suppose there's a single person in here who hasn't spent some time in the underworld, so to speak, because this is what happens when something terrible happens to you, unpredictable and terrible. And you know, there's sort of classic categories of events that send you to the underworld, you know, the death of someone you love, a serious illness of some sort, either for you or for someone you love, um the death of a dream of some sort, you know, so you've got some goal that you think is really important, and all all sudden you find out for one reason or another that there's just no way you're going to be able to pursue it. Um betrayal, that's a really good one. People that's a really rough one and that'll send you for that'll throw you for a loop for sure. So, they're all they're all elements of the part of the world that you can't control that in some sense always remains beyond your control that has in some sense a predatory relationship to you because it can devour you at least metaphysically. And when that happens, you go somewhere and the place that you go is very dangerous. It's underneath everything and maybe you come back out and if you come back out, what that means is that you've reconstructed your erroneous presupposition so that you can function once again in the world. And but maybe you don't. Maybe you don't. So, people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, they go into the underworld and they just stay there. And you know, when if you're if you're chronically depressed or if you can't get over your grief or if you're in a state of continual anxiety and upset or if you're nihilistic for that matter, you exist essentially in an underworld domain because you can't [snorts] master the perceptual apparatus, the culturally informed perceptual apparatus that would help you um orient yourself in the world so that the things that you want to have happen and that you need to have happen actually happen. So, that's what that picture means.

It also means at least in principle that, you know, people have the capacity to die and be reborn at different levels of analysis. So, you know, there are minor disappointments that you encounter when you have to drop some presupposition that you have and let it die and then put a new one in its place and that's painful, but it's nowhere near as painful as holding on to the things when they don't work because then you just end up wandering around in sort of a cluttered collection of dead presuppositions and, you know, nothing that you ever want will happen under that circumstance because you're you're you're armed with tools that don't fit the world and, you know, when you try to apply them the world won't do what you want it to do and then that's endlessly anxiety provoking and frustrating. So, part of pain is is part of the price that you pay in some ways for being updatable. You know, because the world transforms around you and as a consequence you have to be able to transform with it. Otherwise, it runs ahead of you and you get left behind and you know, that happens to people to some degree anyways as they age. That's actually one of the evolutionary explanations for why people die. Cuz it's a mystery, right? There there are elements of you that are immortal. You know, the the cells that that that that give give rise to you are immortal. They're you know, the DNA that produced you is at least three and a half billion years old. It might be older than that. So, structures can maintain themselves over unbelievably vast expanses of time. So, it's not self-evident why human beings have to die, but we do and we die at about after you're done being a grandparent, this is kind of when you're when you're done. And the the hypothesis is is that at that point in some sense, it's too costly to keep you updated and you have to be replaced by a younger version, which would of course be your grandchildren or whatever. You know, you've sort of exhausted your plasticity and flexibility. And uh then it's cheaper just to replace you than to update you. So,