Transcription
Young people always have a reason to be upset and cynical about the current state of affairs, and and it's that way forever and and so it's useful, I think, to consider such considerations or such conceptualizations as the of the as the patriarchy in that light. Because it's an archetypal truth that the social structure is corrupt and incomplete, and and what that means is that it's something that you have to contend with every moment in some sense of your life, life. It's a it's a permanent fact of existence, and to be upset that the structures, the social structures or even the biological structures within which we live are incomplete and imperfect is to and to take that personally, that that's the worst part of it, to take that personally is a misreading of the existential condition of humankind.
Because it's always the case that what you have been given and and what you live in is degenerate and corrupt and in need of repair. And it's easier just to accept that, because there's also a positive element. And the positive element is, well, you you've been granted something rather than nothing, and maybe you haven't been granted pure hell. Because especially in a culture like ours where many things actually function quite well, so there's room for gratitude there. Even if it's a broken machine, it's it's not one that's completely devastated, and it's not absolutely hellbent at every second on your misery and destruction. And it easily could be, because many societies are like that, and so the fact that we happen to live in one that isn't corrupt beyond imagining is something to be eternally grateful for.
Well, so we live inside a damaged structure, and we also bear responsibility for that damage because we don't do everything we can to constantly repair it. And you might say, well, that's actually one of the fundamental, you know, people say, well, what's the meaning of life, they what they really mean is what's the positive meaning of life, because as we've already discussed, the negative meanings of life are more or less self-evident. Well, the positive meaning of life is to be found in noting the state of lack of repair of the of the walled city that you inhabit and then sallying forth to do something about that, to repair the breaches and to fix up the walls and to make the structure that you inhabit as secure and as productive as it possibly can be. And there's no shortage of opportunities to do that. You can do that in your own mind, you can do that in your own room, you can do that in your own household, in your local community, you and maybe if you get good at doing it at all those levels, then you can start to look beyond that.
And so there's challenges, that's the thing that's kind of interesting about this insufficient structure, is that it has a set of challenges built into it because of its insufficiency and perhaps even because of its corrupt nature that calls forth the potential response from you of heroic adventure. And the heroic adventure is to man the barricades and repair the city, and you can always do that. It doesn't matter what's what your personal circumstances are, there's always something that isn't right near you, isn't correct, isn't laid out properly that you could just fix if you wanted to.
And one of the things that we're going to talk about tonight is the idea that if you adopt the attitude, an attitude that's like that, that the role that you should play is to make things better wherever you are, however you can, that what would actually happen would be that things would get better wherever you are in all sorts of ways. And that we've really, as a species you might say, or maybe even as singular individuals, we've we've explored that rarely. It isn't something that's put forth as a proposition that often, and it's quite surprising to me. And you know, I had an interesting experience the other day, I went to The Keg. I go there because I have food allergies and they're very careful with people who have food allergies, and the waiter took me to the table and he said that he had been watching my lectures, and that's a very common experience, um, and he was happy about that, and he said that he'd had two promotions at The Keg in the last four months because he'd been watching my lectures. And like, I really found that an affecting experience because you know, you might say, well, he's working as a waiter at the Keg, and there's nothing particularly heroic about that, and and I disagree with that actually, because I don't care where you're located, you can do a hell of a job, and I mean that literally, at whatever job you have, you can you can take whatever job you have and you can make it a real nice little piece of absolute misery or you can do you can act like a civilized human being and notice that no matter where you are there's a there's a richness and a complexity that's completely inexhaustible right at hand, and then you can take that seriously and you can say, well, I happen to be a waiter at The Keg, and perhaps that's not what I expected, and he's a young guy, and perhaps that isn't where I want to end up, but it's not nothing, it's a rich environment, and I can make it a lot better if I want to. I can get along properly with my co-workers and not gossip behind their back, and I can treat my customers properly, and if an opportunity comes my way, I can take it and I can see what happens.
And so he said that's what he started doing, and that things were working out much better for him, he was in a much better job than he was three months ago, and three months that's nothing, right? I mean, that's a nice trajectory, it's an uphill trajectory, and that's what you want really, an uphill trajectory is actually even better than being somewhere good, as far as I'm concerned. Because one of the things that really makes your life meaningful is the clear realization that you're headed somewhere better than you are now, and then it's even better if you also understand that there's a direct causal relationship between the things that you're doing and the steepness of that incline. And so I get a lot of letters from people like that, and they're most most frequently young men, although not always, and they say, well, you know, I've been listening to these lectures and I decided that I'm going to try to take responsibility for my life, and so I'm I've started to stop doing all the stupid things that I know that that are stupid that I know I shouldn't be doing, and I've started doing some of the things that aren't stupid that I know I should be doing, which seems pretty obvious really if you think about it, but obvious though it may be that isn't necessarily what people do. And then they write and say, you can't believe what difference that makes, and they're thrilled about it, and so I'm thrilled about it when I get letters like that because I I really don't experience anything as better than a letter like that or a message like that because it's so good to see things that aren't so good replaced by something better.
And I really do think it's an open question, I truly believe it's an open question, to what degree we could make things better if that's what we actually aimed at doing. You know, in some of the stories that we've we've covered already, the story of Cain and Abel in particular is really an analysis of that problem, which is so remarkable, it it occurs so so early in this document, it's such a a such a foundational story, and it basically says, well, there's two modes of being in the world, right? There's one where you adopt the responsibility for living properly, for being properly, and you make the sacrifices necessary for doing that, and then everything will flourish properly, and the other one is a pathway of resentment and bitterness and rejection and murder and genocide, and that just seems exactly right to me. And so if the positive path beckons, if you can actually see what it is, if you can if you can lower yourself enough to see what it is, Jung, Carl Jung said once that modern people didn't see God because they didn't look low enough, it's a phrase I really really like, because people denigrate the opportunities that are right in front of them, and and there's no reason to do that because what's right in front of you is the Majesty of being, that's what's right in front of you, it's inexhaustibly complex and full of potential, and there's no reason to assume that wherever you happen to be isn't as good a starting place as anywhere else.
Now, you know, I know some people have terrible terrible lives, they're in situations that are absolutely unbearable, and but I also do know that even situations like that can be made a hell of a lot worse by the bad by by by the worst kind of attitude, that's for sure. So so anyway, so that's where you are, you're in a damaged structure, you're a damaged structure, you're in a damaged structure, but you know, at least it's got some walls, you know, you're not being fed to the lions on a regular basis, so that's a good thing, and you can you can emerge forward, you know, heroically, magically to confront the chaos that constantly threatens the structure within which you live, and you can freeze something as a consequence of that, you can learn something, you can strengthen yourself. That's the other thing, because the way what you're actually made of in in many ways, that what informs you, what you're made of is what you encounter when you voluntarily encounter the unknown, and so the more you voluntarily encounter the unknown, the more you get made of, and the more you get made of, the more there is to you, and then the more you're good at encountering the unknown and restructuring order and and calling forth proper order out of the potential of being. And God, you got to think, why wouldn't you do that since you can do that, and it's an endless mystery.
I think part of it is that people, well, it's it's also encapsulated to some degree in the story of Adam and Eve, because what happens to Adam is when he becomes self-conscious, right, he he becomes ashamed of his of himself and regards himself as a lowly sort of creature, and there's endless reasons why people would do that, because of course we're rife with imperfection, and so he hides from God. And I think that's actually the answer to the conundrum, which is that people don't aspire to the highest good because they're deeply ashamed of of themselves and their weaknesses and their insufficiencies, and and so it's it's that's not the only reason, I mean, there's there's the desire to avoid responsibility, and there's all the negative motivations as well, like resentment and and and hatred and and the desire to make things worse. I I don't want to you know, give us give us too much of a break, but but it's something like that. But it's okay to to not be in a very good place if what you're trying to do with that not very good place is make it better.
And one of the things I really have learned as a clinical psychologist is that you just cannot believe how powerful incremental progress is. You can you can do the calculations, like it's like compound interest, you know, if you make your life a tenth of a percent better a week, man, in two or three years you're you're in such a better place than you were that it isn't even like the same domain. And if you keep that up for 10 years or 20 years, you know, especially if you're young and you start early, you start to straighten yourself out and and fix the things that you can fix, you can transform your lives in ways that are completely unimaginable. And God only knows what the upper limit of that is in terms of human possibility, because we are amazing creatures, you know, when we really get our act together and stop running at 10% of our capacity. You know, so so so that's what you do, you've got you know, the fact that things aren't exactly the way they should be at least gives you something to do, you know, and that's that's and and and maybe something great to do, because there's no shortage of suffering and trouble that besets the world that you could conceivably ameliorate in some way. And the util and meaning, the utility of that and the intrinsic meaning of that is self-evident.
So it also makes me curious about nihilism, for example, and despair, because I mean, I understand those emotions, I understand them deeply, and and the intellectual mindset that goes along with it, but they just seem beside the point to me in some sense because there are so many things that need doing that all you really have to do is open your eyes and look at them and then decide that you're actually going to do something about them. And you might think, well, what's with within my scope of of of influence is so trivial that it's not worth doing, it's like it won't stay trivial for long if you do it not at all. And I don't think it's trivial to begin with, I don't think that any I really don't believe that anything done right is trivial, and my experience in my life has been that anything I actually did paid off, it didn't didn't pay off necessarily in the way that I expected it to pay off, that's a whole different story, but if it was genuine commitment to do something, even if it went sideways and the outcome was really something other than what I expected, the net consequence over time was nothing but good. So every new frontier that can be conquered is an advance forward, and there's no shortage of frontier because we're surrounded by the unknown, we're surrounded by our our own ignorance, and we can continually move into that domain, into the domain of chaos, or we can restructure pathological order, and that's that's the secret to proper being. And so then you encounter chaos that way, you know, and then you can regard yourself as the sort of entity that despite its insufficiency has the capability to conquer chaos, despite the danger of that, that's the other thing, because the fact that you're fragile is actually a precondition for your heroism, because if you weren't fragile then there'd be nothing heroic about doing something difficult, right? Because if you couldn't be hurt or damaged or defeated or or end up in failure, then where's the where's the moral courage in the endeavor? It has to be that the fragility is built into the courage, and so it's not a it's not a reason not to engage in it at all, in in fact quite the contrary, and so.