Self-awareness is the essential foundation for personal growth, requiring individuals to understand their emotions, personality traits, and shadow aspects through honest self-observation and confronting difficult truths. This process involves recognizing one's limitations, embracing incremental improvement, and taking responsibility for one's life by crafting a compelling vision that justifies facing life's challenges. True self-mastery comes from integrating all aspects of oneself, including both strengths and weaknesses, into a coherent identity that enables meaningful engagement with the world.
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Discover Who You Really Are | Jordan Peterson
Added:Are you depressed or do you just have a horrible life? [music] And those are not the same question because if you're depressed, you have a life that in principle should work but isn't. And so you come and say, "Look, I've got a lot of things going for me. You know, I I've got a good job.
I've got a good family. My wife loves me, but man, I'm miserable all the time." It's like, okay, well, let's delve into that a bit more deeply. But that kind of sounds like depression. But then you might come and say, "Well, I'm miserable. I'm suffering. I don't even want to be alive." And and then I might ask, "Well, do you have an intimate partner?" Well, no, not really. And and and I have had a history of catastrophic relationships. Do you have any friends?
Well, you know, I I have this one person I phone like once every month or so. And but other than that, no, I don't really see anyone. Well, do you have any close family? No, my family's pretty fractured. I don't get along with my mom and dad. I don't see my sisters or my siblings much. It's like, well, how about a job or or how about a career or failing that a job? It's like, well, I've always kind of been undermployed and I just lost my job and you know, I'm [music] I'm that's not going very well and and so on. You can walk through someone's life and you can find out if if if what if what if what if they're reasonably embedded in a hierarchy of social institutions?
And if the answer is no, no intimate partner, no family, no children, no friends, no job, no career, no educational pathway, no engagement in civic responsibility, let's say, no church attendance, no spiritual life, no routine. It's like, well, you're not depressed. You just have a horrible life multi-dimensionally. Like, it's no wonder you're depressed. There's nothing in your life that is working. But it's interesting because that's not exactly a diagnosis at the level of the individual. It's a diagnosis in relationship to the relationship between the individual and this structure of containing social institutions. If you don't have an intimate partner and you don't have a family and you don't have any friends and you don't have a career or a job or any civic involvement or any involvement let's say uh with religious institutions and you don't have any creative striving.
All you've got left is pain and so that's what you have. And so, so here's a different way of thinking about sanity.
Sanity isn't being well constituted as an atomized individual.
Sanity is what makes itself manifest if you're properly situated in a hierarchy of social order. To be well constituted, you have to be a harmonious player in a multi-dimensional symphony in some real sense of social interaction. It's very hard to stay on the straight and narrow without a partner who doesn't share your blind spots correcting you constantly. [music] You know, now that's annoying. There's a tussling about it, right? There's a there's there's a fractious and adversarial element to that because if you're married, you don't see eye to eye. And thank God for that because sometimes in your foolish insistence on being right, you're wrong. And wrong in a way that'll take you out. And so, you better have a partner who doesn't think the same way you do. And fortunately, if you have a partner, you have a partner who doesn't think the same way you do. And so if you can get the dialogue flowing then that's a that's a mutually corrective mechanism. And so then you might say well the truthful dialogue between partners in a marriage is actually it's the process by which sanity itself is generated. And I mean technically it's like you're too complex to regulate yourself. Period. And so you need other people to help you do that. So if you have a wife or a husband, someone who knows you and is there for the long run, they can help you can help each other find the meaningful path and stay on it.
And you can't do that alone. And probably just having a partner isn't enough. You you you need kids likely to keep you sane or to drive you crazy depending on the nature of your children, let's say. You need family.
You need your parents. You need your siblings. You need you need another community around you that's not merely your wife because you're so crazy that it takes a village to keep you saved.
And so and then surrounding that more intimate web of kinship, you need friends. And friends keep keep you saying well how well you have to act in a manner that wants that makes them want to be around you to have friends and that means that to maintain your friendships you have to be ser than you really are right you have to be they have to be able to enjoy their time with you if you practice this forthright and voluntary exposure to that which terrifies and dismays you, it transforms you. And we really know this as psychologists. We we even know there's more and more evidence suggesting for example that if you imagine you adopt this attitude of voluntary confrontation that changes you psychophysiologically. So you the the all of much of the biochemistry of motivation and [music] emotion is transformed when you take a stressor which could be oppressive and paralyze you and cause you to withdraw and you reverse that and you decide to advance.
It's like a different spirit inhabits you and and I mean this physiologically.
There's a whole different pattern of being that makes itself manifest in you neurologically and psychophysiologically and pharmacologically. So you take it on as a challenge, right? And that transforms you at a cellular level too because one of the things we've discovered in recent years is that if you do something new and complex, then that turns on new that parts of your DNA that haven't produced proteins before will start producing new proteins and reconstruct you from the cellular level up. So, it's a deep transformation and we we have no idea how deep. And and you could ask yourself if you did if you didn't withdraw in fear from anything that that from everything that life threw at you, who could you become? And I would say that's the central religious question [music] in some real deep sense. You know, are more things thrown at us than we can manage? Well, that's a tricky question because pretty dreadful things are thrown our way. And you might say, well, that's just presents an insupable barrier to progress. That's not very helpful cuz you're alive. Here you are. You got these problems to contend with. And if it's an impossible task, then how could you be anything but hopeless and desperate? But then you think, well, wait a second.
How would things transform if I took this on as a voluntary adventure, you know, regardless of its scope? And the scope would include unjust suffering, death, and hell. And and that's a that's not just some religious or metaphysical vision. It's like, no, no, you're actually going to have to contend with that in your life in whatever way those things make themselves manifest to you personally.
You're that's coming, man. And so maybe you better get prepared. And then the question might be, well, what would happen if you got prepared? And the answer might be, you'd be prepared.
And I think the religious enterprise in its deepest sense is that process of preparation. And you know, you might want to even push that a bit farther.
You might say, "Well, not only do you want to get prepared for what's coming your way, but you want to be so prepared that when it comes your way that it doesn't make you bitter and resentful and and tempted by the desire to walk the path that would make all of that even worse." And so you might say, well, if you could really face up to what you need to face up to, not only could you turn yourself into some that could bear the catastrophe of life and exposure to hell, but maybe you could turn yourself into someone who would still do good even while facing those things.
That's a pretty noble goal.
If you gave a thousand people a list of adjectives to describe themselves with and one of the adjectives was happy and another of the adjectives was social, you'd find that those who rated themselves high on happy would also rate themselves high on social and those who rated themselves low on happy would also rate themselves low on social. And by looking at those patterns of covariation, you can determine what the essential dimensions are of human personality. One of the dimensions is roughly happiness. That's extraversion. Another dimension is neuroticism. It's a negative emotion dimension. So, if you ask someone if they're anxious and they score high, say, on a scale of 1 to 7, they're also likely to score high on another item that says that they're sad. And it turns out that negative emotions clump together. And so that people who experience more of one negative emotion have a propensity to experience more of all of them. There's another dimension called agreeableness.
And agreeable people are self-sacrificing, compassionate, and polite. If you're dealing with an agreeable person, they don't like conflict. They care for other people. Um, if you're dealing with an agreeable person, they're likely to put your concerns ahead of theirs. They're non-competitive and cooperative. Uh it's a dimension where women are women score more highly than men on agreeableness across cultures including those cultures where the largest steps have been taken towards producing an egalitarian social circumstance like Scandinavia. Actually the gender differences in personality there are larger than they are anywhere else. Um another trait is conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is an excellent trait if you want to do well in in school and in work, especially if you're a manager and administrator.
I can't say we understand a lot about conscientiousness, although it it reliably emerges from factor analytic studies of adjective groups across different countries. Conscientious people are diligent, industrious, and orderly. Their orderliness tilts them towards political conservatism, by the way, because it turns out that your inbuilt temperament, your inbuilt personality, which constitutes a set of filters through which you view the world, also alters the manner in which you process information and influences the way that you vote. And so you might say, and I I do believe that this is true, our we've been doing a lot of research on this as of late, the more accurate a measure you take of someone's political beliefs, the more you find that personality is what's predicting them. And I I think that's a reasonable thing to think about because, you know, you have to you have to figure out ways of simplifying the world, right? Because you just can't do everything. And so people are specialized. They have specialized niches that they occupy. You could think about them as social niches. A niche is a place where your particular skills would serve to maintain you. And so if you're extroverted, you're going to look for a social niche because you like to be around people.
And if you're introverted, you're going to spend much more time on your own. And so if you're an introverted person, for example, you're going to want a job where you're not selling and where you're not surrounded by groups of people who are making social demands on you all the time because it'll wear you out. Whereas if you're extroverted, that's just exactly what you want. And so the extrovert sees the world as a place of social opportunity. And the introvert sees the world as a place to retreat from and spend time alone. And it turns out that both of those modes of being are valid. The issue, at least to some degree, is whether or not you're fortunate enough to match your temperament with the demands of the environment. And I suppose also whether you're fortunate enough fortunate enough so that you're born in an era where there actually is a niche for your particular temperament because it isn't necessarily the case that that will be the case. You imagine that all of these temperamental dimensions vary because of evolutionary pressure, right? So there's a distribution of extraversion, a normal distribution. Most people are somewhere in the middle and then as you go out towards the extremes, there are fewer and fewer people. And what that means is that on average across large spans of time, there have been environments that match every single position on that distribution with mo most of the environments matching the center because otherwise we wouldn't have evolved that way. And so sometimes being really extroverted is going to work well for you in a minority of environments, a minority of niches and sometimes it's just going to be a catastrophe. I suspect, for example, that if you live in a tyrannical society where any sign of of of of personally oriented activity is likely to get you in trouble, that being extroverted and low in neuroticism wouldn't be a very good idea because you're going to be mouthy and happy and saying a lot of things, unable to keep your thoughts to yourself, and you're going to be relatively fearless. Now I don't know that for sure because we've haven't done the studies that precisely match temperamental proclivity to environmental demand but you get what I mean. So conscientious people anyways conscientious people are industrious and orderly we know a little bit about orderliness. It seems to be associated strangely enough with disgust sensitivity which I suppose isn't that s surprising. You know, if you take an orderly person and you put them in a messy kitchen, they respond with disgust and want nothing more than to straighten it all out and organize it and clean it.
And there's tremendous variability in order. Um, and as I said, orderliness predicts political conservatism. It's not the only thing, but it's certainly one of the things. Um the correlation between conscientiousness and and grades is about 04. It's about 16% of the variance. It's it's the second best predictor of university grades after intelligence. And we'll talk about intelligence during this course, too.
Intelligence is actually a relatively straightforward concept. I don't think I'll get into it today, but conscientious people, their industriousness and their orderliness makes them schedule their time. So they make efficient use of their time. They use schedules and that sort of thing. We haven't been able to figure out anything about the underlying biology or psychology of industriousness. We've we've tried really dozens and dozens of tests attempting to find a laboratory measure on which industrious people do better and we failed completely. And there's no animal models of industriousness either. And so I would say it's a great mystery that remains at the heart of trait psychology. Um, and maybe it's a human specific category, you know, I mean, you can think of sled dogs maybe of being industrious and maybe and maybe sheep dogs and animals that work like that, but of course they've been trained by human beings.
So, but it isn't obvious that animals are industrious the same way we are. I mean, industriousness involves sacrificing the present for the future, something like that. and you it seems like you have to be able to conceptualize time in order to sacrifice the present for the future. One of the things that I would recommend that you do as students um in this course and and maybe in every course speaking of industriousness is come up with a plan of attack for the course and use a scheduleuler. You know, if you treat your university career like a full-time job, you're much more likely to succeed. And if you keep up on the readings and you keep up on the on the essays and all of that, then you're much like less likely as well to fall into despair when you get too far behind using a Google calendar or something like that to organize a schedule for the entire semester at the beginning of the semester can be invaluable especially if you're not very industriousness very industrious because it can keep you on track. And one of the things we know about industrious people is that they are very good at using schedules and at planning the use of their time. And so I would like to say that you should all be smarter, but I don't know how you could be smarter. We don't know anything about how to improve intelligence. And I suppose we don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either. But I can tell you that people who are industrious come up with a strategy for solving the problem that's ahead of them and then they do whatever they can to stick to the strategy. And so, for example, if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of hours, three hours, and you filled in a Google calendar, whatever you happen to use with a a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and all of that, and when you're going to sit down and study, then you won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right before, you know, an important exam.
It's also a very ineffective way of studying by the way. I mean, first of all, people who cram for 10 hours say they're studying for 10 hours, but they rarely are because, well, I can't study for 10 hours. I don't have the power of concentration that would enable me to do that for that prolonged period of time. I can manage about 3 hours of intense intellectual activity before I'm pretty done. And it's also the case that if you study and then sleep and then study and then sleep and then study and then sleep, you space it out, then you're much more likely to remember. It's also much more likely that you you're much more likely to remember if you try to recall the material. And so highlighting in that sort of thing isn't very useful. But reading, closing the book, summarizing what you've read without opening the damn book, that's useful. And the reason for that is that you're practicing remembering. And that's what you have to practice. If you're practicing memorization, you have to practice remembering. You don't just go over the thing o over and over. That'll help you with recognition memory, but some, but it won't help you with recall memory.
Anyways, the last trait is openness.
Openness is a creativity trait. It's also associated with intelligence in that intelligent people, and I'm speaking technically of IQ tend to be higher in tend to be more creative, which is hardly surprising.
Creative people are more likely to be liberal politically, by the way. Um, they like novelty. They like aesthetics.
They like fiction. They like movies.
They like art. They like poetry. There's something about them that grants them an aesthetic sensitivity.
And and that's a that's an inbuilt trait. And um it's not the case, by the way, that everyone's creative. In fact, far from it. uh we've used the creative achievement questionnaire to to measure people's creativity. I'll talk to you about that later in the class. And the creative achievement questionnaire takes 13 dimensions of creativity. So, you know, writing, dancing, acting, scientific investigation, entrepreneurial activity, architectural activity, uh cooking, um there's a there's a handful of others, singing, etc. you know, the sorts of things that you would assume that people could be creative about. And then it asks people to rate themselves on a scale from 1 to 10 on their level of achievement with regards to all those creative domains with zero being I have no training or proficiency in this area. And 70% of people score zero across the entire creative achievement questionnaire. A tiny proportion of people are outliers way out their creative in many dimensions simultaneously. exceptionally creative. It turns out, as you'll find out, that that pattern, which is called a Pareto distribution, where most people stack up at zero and a few people are way out on the creative end, characterizes all sorts of distributions, like the distribution of money, for example, which is why 1% of the people have the overwhelming majority of the money. It's a different 1% across time. It like it churns. And you're much more likely to be in the 1% if you're older, logically enough, because one of the things you do as you age is you trade youth for money if you're fortunate. I don't think the trade is really worth it, but that's the best you've got. So anyways, those particular traits, you can think of those as ways that you simplify the world, right? There's lots of different places that you can act in the world, and there's lots of different ways you can look at it and survive. That's why you can be a plumber and a lawyer and an engineer and th those all work, right?
Even though they're very different modes of being and you can have different personalities and survive as long as you're capable of finding the place where your particular filters and behavioral proclivities match the demand of the environment. And a huge part I would say of successful adaptation is precisely that.
The Greeks had the maxim know thyself.
How do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly potential? Well, one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't you know you can learn to kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. You have to adopt a position is a position of radical humility. I would say humility in two senses. So one sense would be the humility of recognizing your ignorance. So you have to understand that you don't know who you are. That's not easy to understand because you think you know. But then you know you remember you can't control yourself very well. You're not very disciplined. You're full of flaws. Maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think. But it's hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are.
Now there's an upside to that too which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be. And so the discovery of that, you know, is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are. Then I would say, well, then you watch yourself. You watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. You watch what you say and you listen. You think, well, what sort of person would say that? And how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner? Is that making me feel stronger or weaker? Is it is it is it filling me with shame? Is it helping my confidence? Um, am I laying out a lie? Am I deceiving myself and other people? Am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse and it comes across as nothing but self-centered narcissism? Um, what are my dark fantasies? What are my aggressive fantasies? Um, what is it that I'm willing to do? What am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it?
What do I procrastinate about and why?
What am I unwilling to do? What do I think is good? What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing? And what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement?
Those are all incredibly complicated questions and you don't know the answers to them. So, that's that's a start. And then in terms of potential, well, you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself [music] because then you discover your potential for mayhem. There's some real utility in that. It's actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that a realization like [music] that can in fact produce is the ambition to incorporate that dangerousness into a higher order personality. And that can make you implacable.
That can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no. You know, that can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict. And so that's unbelievably useful. And so that's one of the potentials that you might discover.
The other thing you do to discover your potential is to well, you challenge yourself. You know, it's like rule four in my book 12 rules for life is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. And that's kind of a good way to start this.
It's like, well, take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve, that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve, you know, and set yourself a little goal, you know, maybe you're not studying at all at your university or maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there, you know, and you haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month and you know that you should be and your boss bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that. [music] Think I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month. I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper. How about tomorrow I just like put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I I glance through it for 15 seconds. See if I can do that. It's like, well, you set yourself a goal of improvement. You know, it's a humble goal because Really, are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to a stack of paper? You know, it could easily be. You've been avoiding it. You're obviously afraid of it. And so, the situation could be that dismal and dire. And you might think, well, geez, it's no bomb to my ego. It's no, it's not fostering the strength of my ego to recognize in myself someone who could only withstand 15 seconds of exposure to that thing I'm afraid of. And so that's a form of humility, too. It's like there's things you could do to improve.
And you know what they are and there's small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction. And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps? You know, are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them? An answer to that is yeah, you are. And that's the lot of I don't know if it's the lot of everyone.
Most people have things they avoid, you know, and they're afraid of. So, I would say to some degree it's the lot of everyone. People vary in the degree to which they've conquered that. You do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined but most of the time they've got disciplined in exactly this manner. It's through slow incremental improvement and then you challenge yourself. It's like, well, could I do this that would be better?
Then you find out and then you think, well, is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do that would be better? And and you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out generally you get better at it and you can take on larger and larger challenges. You know, you take responsibility for yourself. That's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back. It's like take on the world, man. But only in the only at the level that you can manage.
You know, when you're ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature, it's where everyone starts.
You don't want to bite off more than you can chew, but it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with with part of reality.
You know, some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at victory to put yourself together. The first steps towards that is to allow yourself to be a fool.
Right? It's because you don't know what you're doing. You have to admit that and there's going to be a loss of ego or destruction of ego, arrogant ego that necessarily accompanies that. But you need the loss of that arrogant ego because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward.
You know, it's part of the adversarial process, mythologically speaking, that stops moral progress. You're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're like so that you could change properly. You don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself. It's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive, although very fragile self-image. You know, in the absence of genuine effort, it's not to be recommended.
You know yourself by watching and paying attention. It's watching like you're a snake.
A snake watches like coldbloodedly with no emotional reaction just to see what's there. Doesn't allow symbolically speaking doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed. [music] So you watch yourself like that as if you don't know who you are.
Well, that's the beginning. And then you challenge yourself.
continually to see how far past yesterday you can push today and tomorrow and to continually experiment with expanding the domains not only of your competence but of your ability to increase that competence and the upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it. The more that's guided by the highest of all possible visions, right? the alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good.
And the more it's accompanied by truth in speech and action, the more you will develop your potential. And you also, I suppose, have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure because it's a hell of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility.
It takes a person out of the ordinary.
It takes them out of themselves.
And there's an alienation and an isolation that goes along with that and a great sorrow. All of that together, but there's deep meaning to be had in it. And it's and there isn't anything better that you can do. So that's the answer to that question.
So I was talking to a client the other day. It was so interesting. This person said something. He had been talking to his mother and he he just made a casual comment. He said he was talking to his mother who was in a state of grief for for good reasons that [music] were independent of of this particular person who said um and I hate her and I I thought oh that's interesting like where did that come from? [music] And so I made a comment on that. That's a Freudian slip, right? Because there was the conversation was flowing and then this little emotion tagged utterance came forward. And whenever an emotion tagged utterance of that sort comes forward, you know, it's associated with a whole rat's nest of underlying pain and anxiety and and and [music] what would you call it? Disappointment and frustration that hasn't been properly rectified. So, it's like a marker. [music] And yeah, you know this when you're talking to people, they say something and you think, "Oh, you know, like too much information." That's one way of thinking about it's like just what are you up to? And and then if you have any sense, you just forget that that even happened. And you continue.
But [music] that's that's like the snout of a dragon peeking out from a cave. And you might say, "Well, it's just a snout, man." But it's not because dragon snouts tend to be attached to the whole damn dragon. And so this is also something to know about relationships because when you're in a relationship with someone, they'll do that now and then. they'll, you know, utter something and you think, "Haha, it's like there's a bump in the road." Well, we're going to look underneath that at our apparel. But if you do go down there and you look at it, then then the whole thing comes you can start to disentangle the the web of of of memories and and experiences that are all tangled together as a consequence of their emotional identity. Because I could say, well, everything that makes you anxious or everything that makes you upset is the same as every other thing that's ever made you upset. And so, and then there's an even different subset of set of that, which is all those things that have made you upset that you've never dealt with. They're all laying down there at the bottom of your nasty little soul waiting to pop themselves up in some in some random utterance, right?
And so then you go in there at your peril because if you're the person who pokes around in that, then you're going to get blasted with all of that stuff.
It's going to come out like almost uncontrollably. Then [music] then you can sort it out. And so what you find is if you ask a person a question like that and then you let them free associate, which is just talk about it, they'll they'll do a wandering around like that maze that I told you about, they'll do a wandering around of that entire territory. [music] And sometimes just having them wander around in it can help them straighten it out. But you might find out that [music] something happened to them 15 years ago that left them with a terrible sense of guilt or dismay or frustration. And then when when they interact with their parent in a certain way, the parent knows exactly how to tap that and then that all comes up and that's [music] what produces that that little utterance. And so that's the material of the world manifesting itself. That's what matters manifesting [music] itself. And it almost always manifests itself as an object, something that objects. We're having a conversation. It's going quite well. No problem. There's a bump in it. There's an emotional disjunct right now. We're no longer in the same place at the same time. we're no longer playing the same game. So then I might say, okay, well, let's open that up and see what's behind it. Well, the question is, what's behind the game you're playing? And the answer to that is all the world that you're ignoring always. So when so when imagine that, think about it this way.
You're trying to do well in a class and you get a bad grade. Okay? So you're in this little frame. You want to get a good grade. That isn't happening. He got a bad grade. Okay. What is it that's manifesting itself as the bad grade?
Well, you could say, well, it's a C minus on a piece of paper. It's like, well, that's, you know, really, no. That that's the objective manifestation.
[music] You got a piece of paper with a C minus. The value free proposition is that you've been delivered a piece of paper with a curve on it and a little, you know, negative sign. Well, you think, well, that's what that is. Well, you know, it's it's as dopey as thinking, well, here you got your failing grade. You go into the lab and you like weigh it on a scale, then you burn it and see what it was made of.
It's like, well, why did I get so upset about that? It's just paper. It's like, no, that's not just paper. [music] It's an entity that exists in a web of connections. The fact that it's signified by paper is almost completely irrelevant. What is it? The answer is you don't know. And that's why when you pick it up, you're get this paralyzed sinking feeling because your lyic system is a lot smarter than your perceptual systems. And your perceptual system say, "Well, that's a piece of paper." And your lyic system says, "Nah, [music] for sure dragon."
Right. Right. And so then you're sweating and then maybe you put it away and and you go play video games because you know, better the hypothetical dragon than the real dragon. And so instead, you pull out the piece of paper maybe and you think, "Okay, why did I get this C minus?" Well, that's a hell of a question, isn't it? It's like, maybe you're stupid. Well, that could be or at least stupid compared to who you think you are. Like, that's that's the real horror that's lurking there, right? It's like, oh, I thought I was kind of smart.
That's a that's a proposition of the highest order. I thought I was kind of smart. It's like, yeah, well, what about this C minus? It's like, well, that goddamn professor, right? That's the first thing. [snorts] It's it's I've been attacked by a predator. That's the first response, right? So, it's it's a nonsensical message. It's just delivered by someone evil and predatory. Well, that's, you know, possible, but I wouldn't go there. I wouldn't go there first necessarily. So, but then, well, then say you don't go there. Okay. Well, so what is this exactly?
Do you not know what you thought you knew? Are you not who you think you are?
Do you not work hard enough? Are your values not organized properly? Do you misuse your time? Are you in the wrong field? Have is the way you're construing your life completely inappropriate? Are you acting out what your parents wanted you to do and you're pissed off about it? So, you're only running at 40% despite them, despite the fact that they're paying $25,000 a year for your education because that's a fun game.
Yeah, I'll go do what you want me to do, but I'll fail and but not completely because then that would wouldn't cost you very much. I'll just fail a little bit so that you have to spend all that money forcing me to do what I don't want to do, but you'll never get to escape from it. And then every time we interact, I'll stab you in various ways that you don't quite understand just to show you how irritated I am that I happen to be acting out the destiny that you've put forward for me. So maybe that's part of the dragon, right? And then that pulls in the whole parent thing. And you know, it's these are bottomless pits. Often when you when you're in the world and something objects to you, something that matters objects to you, then in the entire unrealized world is in that thing that objects. It's all tangled up inside it.
That's why it's the great dragon of chaos. It's everything that's outside of your conceptual structure. And what is that? It's everything that lurks outside of your of your walled city. And it's manifested itself like the snake in the garden. And the easiest thing to do is say, "I'm not having anything to do with that." But the problem with that is, well, you get your C minus and you don't do anything about it. Maybe you're a little bitter and more resentful and your study habits get a little worse. So the next time you get like a D+ and then you collect a bunch of Fs and then you stop going to school and then you stop showering, right? Then you end up jumping off the bridge. And so that's a that's that's how the dragon eats you when you don't pay attention to it. And so it's no bloody wonder that people avoid, you know, it's really no wonder that they avoid because error messages contain within them the implicit world.
Now the upside of that is well they contain within them the implicit world and the world isn't all negative and so maybe you get your C minus and that's actually the best gift you ever got cuz somebody finally took you and went whack, you know, clue in. And so you take that apart and you think, oh, I don't know how to write. I don't know how to think. I've never read anything in my life. My study habits are abysmal.
You know, like maybe I'm working at 2% efficiency, which which is probably I would suspect that, you know, some of you aren't doing that, but I bet you that [music] I bet there's 30 30 to 50% of the people in the room are working at 2% efficiency. It's like you got to that's so to find that out is so optimistic. I mean, if you're barely hanging in there, but you're only working at 2%, you might imagine what you could have as a life if you're working at like 50%.
So, so that the C minus can be the best gift you ever had. And that's the gold that the dragon hoards, right? That's exactly what that means to determine when you were being inauthentic or non-ongruent. And I've thought about this for a long time and tried to sort it out in a practical manner. And what I've concluded is this.
You can try this for a couple of weeks.
It's it's an extremely interesting exercise. So, you sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and what you say. So you got to assume. You start by assuming that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you. And of course that's just the case because a lot of what you think in fact most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people.
They're things you've read or things people have told you. You know that's a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating. But it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you. Okay. So you detach yourself from that. You're no longer your thoughts or or the things that you say or maybe you're no longer all of them. And now what what you're going to try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you and maybe so you can not utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they're not representative of yourself as an integrated being. They don't take everything into account what I learned to do I think was to stop saying things that made me weak. I mean, I'm still trying to do that because I'm always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either making me align or making me come apart.
I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them, let's say, then they come out of the depths inside of you because we don't know where thoughts come from.
We don't know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge. We don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being. We don't understand any of that.
We don't even conceptualize that. But I believe that you can feel that.
I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak. And what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying. I would say 95% of it. It's a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that, you know, and you might think, well, do you really want all of that to burn off? It's like, well, there's nothing left but a little husk, 5% of you. It's like, well, if that 5% is solid, then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen.
The issue is there are times in your life where you know that the thing that you're saying is not true, it's a deception, it's a lie of some sort, and you're using it to manipulate yourself or another person or the world. And you're also possessed, fully possessed of the idea that you can get away with it.
Where are you once you destroy your own ideal? What's left for you? There's nowhere to go. There's no up. And when there's no up, there's a lot of down.
If you destroy your own ideal, which you do with jealousy and resentment and and the desire to pull down people who you would like to be, let's say, then you end up in a situation that's indistinguishable from hell.
Your moral degeneration contributes in no small way to the degeneration of the entire cosmos.
Stop cheating at whatever game it is that you've chosen to play. That's a good start and that'll straighten out your life.
just exactly what are your motives? If you're not doing something important with your life, maybe you're prone to cause trouble just because you don't have anything better to do because at least it's trouble is more interesting than boring. And so if you're not doing something, if you're not pushing yourself to the limits of your capacity, then you have plenty of leftover willpower, energy, and resources to devote to causing interesting trouble.
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, the what's within my scope 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 it 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 own ignorance. And that's the secret to proper being.
If you're interested in life, if you're interested in proper being and you're disincined to produce any more suffering than necessary, then you want to know how to conduct yourself when the catastrophe comes so that you have a reasonable possibility of of moving through it.
If you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize, your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else. Well, how are you going to find out if that's true?
Well, it's a Kirkagardian leap of faith.
There's no way you're going to find out whether or not that's true unless you do it. So, no one no one can tell you either. You have to be allin in this game. There is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it.
There's no better pathway to self-realization and the enobblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it.
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 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."
So you're [music] at a particular stage right now and that stage would involve a particular world view and the behaviors that go along with that. So the perceptions and behaviors, but it's not enough because you [music] haven't mastered the whole world and you're making mistakes all the time. And then there's other neurological mechanisms [music] that so maybe that's a more left hemisphere phenomena, the instantiation of that identity. Then there's right hemisphere mechanisms that are tracking your errors and sort of and keeping track of them. And the errors are an indication that your theory is incomplete. So it accu the errors accumulate and the information around the errors accumulate and another identity starts to become formulated and [music] it it solves all the problems your previous identity did but also some additional ones. When you have an aha moment like that, it's [music] the manifestation of that next identity that's that's making itself known. It's, you know, because it's being built from the bottom up. It isn't [music] explicit yet. Then you'll encounter an explicit statement. You you you mentioned a couple there and they map on to that and that's the aha. It's like, oh yes.
[music] Oh yes. That's what ties together these things that I've been wrestling with in the back of my mind.
If you're thinking about your past, what it means is you haven't analyzed [music] the causal change. Because you might say, well, why do you remember your past? Well, you might say, well, it's in order to have an objective, you know, record of the past. It's like, it has nothing to do with that. There's only one reason you remember the past, and that's to be prepared for the future.
That's why you remember the past. And so, what you're supposed to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom.
And wisdom is the ability to avoid stumbling blindly into ditches. Here's a time in my past. I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch and terrible things happened to me.
You need to take that apart. You need to figure out how was it that events conspired with your participation voluntarily or involuntarily so that that terrible consequence emerged. You need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation. And as soon as you do that, your brain will leave it alone. It won't obsess you about it anymore because the anxiety producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where there are obstacles in your environment.
Don't go there. There's fire.
Maybe you could master the fire, right?
Then you're a wielder of fire. You're not just a victim. And lots of situations are dangerous or not dangerous depending on your level of mastery, right? Life is like that. And so a negative emotion that's associated with a memory is is something that's crying out for mastery.
And writing can really help with that.
You're reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically.
[music] Imagine emotion. Memories can be stored at different levels of your brain. Some from sort of primordial reptilian image laden areas that are very emotional up to finely articulated plans for your future life. Well, you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and [music] transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future. And that frees you of your past. You shouldn't be thinking about your past. I mean, maybe if you're 80 and you know you're going over a well spent life, that's a whole different thing. But if you're 30, 35, or 20 and most of the time you're thinking about your past.
It's like it's like your soul is trapped back there. You need to free it through investigation. And the metaphysical language is appropriate because that is in a sense what you're doing. You're trapped in the past. It's like you got to break free of that so you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future.
idea in Yungian psychology called the circumambulation. And Jung had this idea that you had a potential future self which would be in potential everything that you could be. and that it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things.
And the things that you're interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development. Now, it sounds like a metaphysical idea or a or a mystical idea even, but but it's not. It's it's not. It's a really profoundly biological idea. The idea is something like, well, you're set up so that you're automatically interested in those things that would fully expand you as a well- adapted creature. Well, like there's nothing radical about that idea. How what else could possibly be the case unless there's something fundamentally flawed about you? That is what the the situation would be. It's kind of interesting to think about how that would be manifest moment to moment. But the idea is something like, well, your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of development. Well, that better be the case. Okay, so that's fine. And so there's some utility in pursuing those things that you're interested in. That's the call to adventure, let's say. So, and the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places. Now, the problem with the call to adventure is like, what the hell do you know? You might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent. And often it's the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves and grip their interests, say they do it very badly and shoddily. And so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new. That's why the fool is the precursor to the savior from the from the symbolic perspectives because you have to be a fool before you can be a master. And if you're not willing to be a fool, then you can't be a master. So So you're going to it's it's an error [clears throat] errorridden process. And that's also laid out in the Old Testament stories because the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks them out of their father's house when they're like 84 is that they they run into all sorts of trouble and some of it's social and some of it's natural and some of it's a consequence of their own moral inadequacy. So they're fools and but but the thing that's so interesting is that despite the fact that they're fools, they're still supposed to go on the adventure and that they're capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward on the adventure so that they straighten themselves out across time. And so it's something like this, this circumambulation that Jung talked about was this continual, we'll return to this, this continual circling in some sense of who you could be. You might notice for example that there are themes in your life. You know when you go back across your experiences you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself and there might be variation on it like a musical theme but it's it's like you're you're circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time.
So imagine that something glimmers before you. It's an an interest that's dawning and you decide well first of all you're paralyzed. You think, well, how do I know if I should pursue that? It's probably a stupid idea. And the proper response to that is, you're right. It probably is a stupid idea because almost all ideas are stupid. And so the the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you're going to get it right the first time is zero. It's just not going to happen. And so then you might think, well, maybe I'll just wait around until I get the right idea.
And which people do, right? So they're like 40year-old 13 year olds, which is not a good idea. And so they wait around until it's waiting for good until they finally got it right. But the problem is you're too stupid to know when you've got it right. So waiting around isn't going to help because even if it the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form, the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero. You might even think it's the worst possible idea that you've ever heard of anywhere.
highly likely highly likely so so you have there's niche niche called that a will will to stupidity which I really liked so because he thought of stupidity as being you know it's it's you have to take it into account fundamentally and work with it and so and so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny and you can assume that you're going to do it badly and that's really useful because you don't have to beat yourself up it's easy to do it badly.
But the thing is, it's way better to do it badly than not to do it at all.
If you're going to be a fighter, you have to want to win and you have to want to hurt people. I mean, not for the sake of hurting them. That's what makes you different than an evil person, but you have to have that capacity. You have to develop that. And, you know, that's the step on the way to enlightenment, weirdly enough, because that isn't what people think. People have been fed this diet of pablum rights and impulsive freedom for so long. There's [music] just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story. There are no rights technically [music] speaking without responsibilities. And all we've had for 60 years is a dialogue about rights. Well, that leaves a hole on the other side of the story. [music] And it's a whole that that's in people's hearts essentially because responsibility, well perhaps that's not more important than rights. [music] Like I said, they're they're part and parcel of the same formula. But it's in responsibility that most [music] people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It's not in happiness.
It's not an impulsive pleasure. Those things blow away at the first ill wind.
[music] but to adopt the responsibility for your own well-being and to try to put your family together and to try to serve your community and to try to seek for eternal [music] truths and to live them. That's the sort of thing that can ground you in in your life enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life. And when you tell people that, especially when you include yourself in the audience, let's say, [music] and you're not finger waving from above, then everyone knows that it's true. There's been this attempt to identify [music] masculine competence and and power, let's say, but mostly competence with tyranny. And that's very very hard on on young men. It's also hard on young women for that matter. But it's very helpful for people to hear that they should make themselves competent and dangerous and take their proper place in the world because it's the alternative to being weak. And weak is not good. The people who shoot up the high schools, they're weak. They're weak. And life is a very difficult process and you're not prepared for it unless unless you have the capacity to be dangerous. [music] That doesn't mean that you should be cruel. It doesn't mean any of that.
There's a statement in the New Testament, the meek shall inherit the earth. But the meek isn't well translated. It [music] means something more like those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheath will inherit the world. That's a way better way of [music] thinking about it.
You have to be powerful and formidable and then peaceful in that order, right?
And that's not the same as being naive and weak and harmless, which is what young men are being encouraged to be.
[music] It's like that's a very bad idea. It's a very bad idea because naive, weak, and harmless means that you can't withstand the tragedies of life.
You can't bear any responsibility.
[music] You'll end up bitter. And when you get bitter, then you get dangerous.
You don't treat adult men as if they're infants.
So that's an interesting thing. Well, so let's say you go over your past with a fine tooth comb and you decide you're going to take responsibility for everything that you did that was wrong and everything that you failed to do that you could have done that was right.
It's like does that change the world?
It's like depends on how thoroughly you do it. You might say it changes the world like nothing else possibly can.
And I think that that's actually right.
You have to allow yourself a certain latitude for error. And that's a useful thing to know too. One of the things I tell people when they're trying to develop a vision for their life or an implemental plan is um make a bad plan.
Like make the best one you can, but don't get obsessive about it. It's like make a plan, implement it. You'll figure out when you implement it why it's stupid. Exactly. And then you can fix it a little bit.
>> What would you estimate are the boundaries between self-care and and selfishness?
Well, that's a good follow-up question for what we've been just discussing.
Well, the first thing we have to sort out there is, well, what what do you mean by self? And people make memes about me because I'm always asking for word definitions, but and and it annoys people because they think, well, it's just, you know what that means? is like, "Is God real?" "What do you mean by real?" "Well, you can't ask that." It's like, "Well, then you can't ask your question either.
What do you mean real?"
"Oh, well, everyone understands that."
It's like, "Really? We do, do we? We we we understand what's real. We've got that nailed down. What you're really asking is something like here's what I am insisting that you regard as real, which is usually something like an objective materialism.
Does God fit into that category? It's like, well, that's a completely different question than the one you asked. No, perhaps is the answer to that question. But you didn't formulate the question reasonably because when you formulate a question like is God real?
God's a mystery in that question and so is real and you don't get you don't get away with the axiomatic presupposition that you've got real nailed down and all we have to do now is mop up God. It's not it's not reasonable. It's not it's not acceptable in the least. It's just a trick and it's not a very sophisticated trick. And so in this situation, selfishness versus self-care. Well, I think really the issue there is the definition of self. So whatever the self is is very complicated because it's really what you are at your core. That's the question. That's unbelievably complicated. It's like what the hell do you know about who you are at your core? I mean, human beings are we have no idea what we are in in the final analysis. And so Carl Jung wrote books on the on the self. He believed Christ was a symbol of the self. It's a very complicated idea uh and takes a lot of unpacking.
You could think about the self as what it is that has demands right now.
And when people attempt to define themselves subjectively, which has become something to be insisted upon in our current culture, they usually mean something like the ultimate self is the whim that possesses me now.
And that's a dubious proposition.
What the whim that possesses you now is more accurately conceptualized as a fragmentaryary self. You know, if you have a 2-year-old and the 2-year-old wants something and has a little tantrum in the grocery store because of it, the impulsive demand that possesses that child in that context is a fragmentaryary part of the child, but it in no means is reflective of the totality of that person. Then you might ask yourself, well, what's the totality?
And well, as I said, that's a very complicated problem. But the totality of a person is certainly their iterations across time. It's at least that, right?
Because there's a past you and there's a present you and there's a future you.
And whatever you is in the final analysis is the aggregation of all of that across time. And maybe the aggregation of all of your manifestations in every social context as well. And then I could say, well, if you're taking care of yourself wisely, then you're taking all of that into account simultaneously.
And then if that's selfishness, then that could be viewed as a positive good.
But if you're subordinating that greater totality to the impulses of a momentary whim, which you've defined as the self, then that's a very bad idea. All that's going to do is cause trouble and make you unpopular.
And so I don't believe there's any difference between service to the highest self and service to other people. I think those are the same thing. And we can think about that technically too. So there's a lot of other people and there's only one of you. And you're going to interact with people in a multitude of ways across your life. You could imagine this is that if you play fair in every interaction or if everyone you interact with walks away from your interactions having gained, then everyone is going to line up to to play with you.
And so, how is that going to be anything but good for you? How how could anything possibly be better than that? because you're outnumbered very badly. And so if all the people around you are inclined because of the way you've conducted yourself to facilitate your progress forward, why wouldn't that be the best thing for you that could possibly occur? And one of the things I've suggested to my audiences and and people seem to resonate with this quite deeply is imagine yourself ill and bereft of capacity suffering. You think well what might sustain you during such a time it this is the question that's posed in a marriage for example for better or for worse let's say and one answer is the fruits of the sacrifices that you offered in relationship to other people previously and so what does that mean well if you had been responsible and caring mature and self-sacrificing in the proper manner and I don't mean martyrdom like like a nihilistic martyrdom or resent martyrdom, then you've stored up, to put it sort of coldly, social capital, and then people will be pleased to return the favor in times of desperation.
And and that way, if that was the case for all of us all of the time, then we'd be in a mutually sustaining web of interactions. And that's not exactly organizing your psyche, right, so that you can sail through suffering. It's more external. It's that you're storing up your sanity in the reciprocal goodwill that you've built up with other people. And to do that optimally, you do that in a spirit of something like playful love if you do it optimally. And of course, that's going to redound to your great benefit. But but even better than that, it's going to redown to your great benefit in a way that's also simultaneously mutually beneficial to as many others as you're skillful enough to manage.
It's this developmental psychologist named Jean Pia.
PJ is a very interesting u thinker and uh he was motivated by his his life's goal was to reconcile science and religion and uh modern analysts of PJ generally regard him as a developmental psychologist but he described himself as a genetic epistemologist and by genetic he meant one who analyzes the genesis of things or their beginning. And by epistemologist, he meant someone who analyzes structures of knowledge. And so what PG was trying to do was to understand how our structures of knowledge developed across time. He thought if you wanted to pursue philosophy and even more deeply let's say theology then it would make sense to look at how knowledge structures develop from childhood forward because they're simpler in childhood and you might be able to understand them better than having to dive right into adult cognition and uh he got a long ways on his enterprise uh I think farther than people realize he's very sophisticated thinker and he had this theory of equilibration which is a lovely theory.
So an equilibrated system will maintain itself without outside compulsion.
And you might think, well, that's what you want in a political system, right?
Because you want to live in a state that you want to live in. And you you all in fact live in a state. I don't mean California. I mean the United States and California less so lately, by the way.
you you want to live in a state where you don't have to be compelled. You you want to be part of an organization that you've bought into voluntarily.
And it's it's so interesting because that's actually one of the criteria by which you could judge the the value of a state.
Does the state have to impose its dictates by force or does the state offer you a vision that you voluntarily accept and and celebrate? And I would say your country has been very very good at that. I mean the American dream is not a dream that merely possesses Americans. It's a dream that in some sense has been offered to the whole world. And I would say you might ask well what's the evidence for that? And I would say, how about the fact that people want to move here? That that constitutes the evidence. And even though this country is far from perfect, that's not exactly the issue. The issue is, is it less imperfect than the other offerings? And the answer to that is, well, do people want to move here? And if the answer to that is yes, then that's the evidence. And clearly they want to move here. And there are reasons for that. And so and the reason for that in some sense is because you're playing an equilibrated game. It's a game that will sustain itself without compulsion.
And that's actually the definition of a game. So for Pia, a game was a a game was a microcosm of the promised land. That's a good way of thinking about it if you want to think about it theologically. So a game is a is a an arrangement a vision shared by two or more players voluntarily. And so when two children decide to play a game together, maybe they decide to play house, the one child who's offering the game might say, "Do you want to play house?" And the other child, say it's a boy and a girl, say, "Yeah, I'd like to play house with you."
And so then no force is required because both are voluntary participants. And then the children develop a shared vision which is the confines of the game to play house. Then they run the simulation.
And if they run the simulation properly, then they both find it engaging.
And the engagement is a marker for the quality of the game. And the game expands their capacity to perceive and act with skill in relationship to an important life goal, right? Establishing a permanent relationship because that's what you're practicing when you're playing house. And if that's done optimally, then it's it doesn't require compulsion. And if the two children are very good at doing that together, then they want to repeat it and continue to develop their skill. And that's what a friendship is. And that's not based on power, right? That's not based on a power relationship. That's so cool to know that because you know the cynics say, "Well, it's all about power." And they usually say that because they want it to be all about power. But really, and but that isn't the basis for stable human relations. Stable human relations are based on the construction of equilibrated states. And if your marriage is equilibrated, you both want to be in it. Now, I mean, there'll be times when you don't and you know, you need to abide by the fact that you've accepted some constraints so that well, you're not equilibrated. You're not getting along. You don't just leave, right? You still fight it through and try to reestablish an equilibrated state. But the idea of equilibrated state is extraordinarily interesting. And it's it's a vision of paradise. And the proper vision of paradise is something like eternal play.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And play is a better basis for the establishment of social relations than power by any measure by any multitude of measures. And so properly selfish is an equilibrated state across multiple instantiations of games across a very long period of time in very many social contexts. And so if you're serving that, that's enlightened selfishness, you could say. But it's identical with treating other people in the best possible manner. It's the same thing.
And we know that, you know, we have an ethos. Our culture is predicated on an ethos which is treat your neighbor as as you would like to be treated yourself or maybe more love thy neighbor as as thyself.
And that means to act towards your neighbor as if he or she is capable of producing a sequence of Jacob's ladder like goals across time and that you're of the same nature and that will increase the probability that that direction will be the one that makes itself manifest. And that's that's definitely the case. I mean, I had people in my clinical practice who had become embittered and resentful. They're often naive people. And people generally start out naive who'd been betrayed, you know, and they they regarded their loss of naivity as an increment in wisdom.
And and you see this with cynical people, right? And they think, well, I was naive and I got burned and that's not going to happen again. And it's like fair enough, that actually is an increment in wisdom, but you're in the desert at that point, right? I mean, the naivity wasn't a virtue and the collapse is a catastrophe, but the place you end up with is not positive. But you're not going to say, "Well, I'm not going to drop my cynicism and go back to being naive." Because that would actually be a a reversal of of of the acquisition of knowledge. Plus, you know what they say, once burned, twice shy.
So then well what's the alternative to the cynicism that's induced by malevolence? And the answer to that is something like it's something like courageous trust.
So imagine that you want to bring the best out of people even now though now you know that there's plenty of the worst there too.
And the answer is well how do you the question is how do you do that? And the answer doesn't seem to be by facing everyone with a pervading spirit of distrust and bitterness. That just doesn't seem to work. And you might think, well, that's justified because I've been burned multiple times. Why wouldn't I do that? And the answer has to be something like because you have the courage not to. Right? If you're not going to fall back into a foolish naivity and not allow yourself to be twisted into nihilism by bitterness, then your option is something like, "Well, I know perfectly well that you're full of snakes, but I'm going to extend my hand anyway." based on the faith that if you have the courage to do that, that the being that you will call out of the other person is thereby rendered most likely to be of the upward stumbling type.
And I think that's I think that's the case.
You know, you see people who are very sophisticated in their perceptions and social ability and they can interact even with people who are quite corrupt and still increase the probability quite dramatically that the interaction will be positive. And so and that's part of that impulse towards the development of an equilibrated state.
And so to reach out your hand like that to your fallen brother, let's say, without being naive, that's part and parcel of acting out that highest order conception of the self. That's the logos. That's that's how that works. So So that's an answer to that question.
Is there a purpose to our life? And well, that's a hard question. And then if there is a purpose, well, how is it expressed? And then if there is a purpose and our lives are truncated as they are by death, then how can that purpose have significance? And those are hard questions. But Socrates experience seemed to be that he had lived enough in his life so that when push came to shove, which it certainly did, he was able to gracefully let it go. And that's and you know he attested to that with his death and and and that's fairly convincing. You know I mean [laughter] that's a fairly convincing argument and it's one that I find well it's hard to tell if I find it exactly credible but I I don't find it incredible. I mean, I certainly have noticed that as I've got older and I've done things various I've I've what would you say accomplished isn't exactly the right word. I've participated in many things that I'm pleased to have participated in them, but wouldn't necessarily go back and participate in them again. It's sort of as if when you do something and you finish it, it's as if it's done. you don't have to do it again. And maybe it's possible, who knows, that if you finish your life, whatever that might mean, if you exhaust your life, then then that's enough life, you know, that that you've had enough.
And I mean, that doesn't mean that I try not to keep myself healthy and that I want to die tomorrow. It doesn't mean any of that. I'm trying to stick around as long as I can, but but but there's still that that that curiosity about the relationship between life and mortality and and the possibility that a life well-lived exhausts itself in some fundamental sense so that you can be satisfied, let's say, with with what you with what you were. There is some psychological evidence that bears on this. If you ask people what they regret um especially as they get older, what they generally report is things not done. So they don't regret so much mistakes they've made, although of course people obviously regret mistakes they've made as well. So they don't exactly regret sins of commission, right? Errors that they've actively made. they they miss they they they they they torment themselves for opportunities that had presented themselves that they did not let's say exploit or engage in and I think that's worth thinking about too because one thing that I have become convinced about with regards to human consciousness um which I think is equivalent to the spark of divinity in some sense that our fundamental stories insist has been placed within us is that human consciousness is that faculty that confronts potential itself. I think there's good neurological evidence for this by the way for those of you who are scientifically minded because uh we build circuits within us for habitual action that we've practiced many times that seem to run in a very deterministic fashion. And we are strange combination of deterministic and non-deterministic as far as I can tell. But what our consciousness seems to be for is to encounter those things that we have not yet encountered. And those things that we have not yet encountered seem to me to be those things that have not yet been brought into being. And so you could say that what our consciousness is for is for the encounter with potential.
you know that our consciousness is for the it's not for the past. It's not even for the present. It's to transform the future into the present. And and really that that's what our consciousness does.
When you wake up in the morning, you have a new day ahead of you. And the day could take you in very many directions and and the weeks and the years, all of that can take you in very many directions. And you have some apprehension about what those directions might be. you have some apprehension about what role your choices might make in transforming that potential into one form of actuality or another. I mean, you certainly know that there are dreadful mistakes that you might be very tempted to make that would produce all manner of hell around you and still be tempted to do it. It seems like it's sitting there right in front of you as a possibility. You also know that, you know, you could haul yourself up out of bed and attend to your duties and do the sorts of things that you're supposed to and set a few things right that day and that week and that likely things would at least not be worse and they would probably be better. And I I believe that I do believe that I don't understand how this can be the case. I don't understand how it is that conscious consciousness can function in that way because I think to understand that we would have to understand what it means for the future to be only potential rather than actuality. And who the hell understands that? I mean, no one. And then we'd have to understand how it is that our conscious choices and our conscious ethical choices transform that potentiality into actuality into reality into the present and the past. And we certainly well we certainly act as if we believe that that's what we do. We upgrade ourselves. For example, when we do a bad job of it, we're upset with our children and those we love if we don't believe that they're living up to their potential. We're guilty and ashamed when we make choices that we feel are inappropriate. We understand to some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something to do with the ethics of our choice. And again, I would say that's a very deep idea. I think it's a I think it's I think it's the most true idea I know. It's very emphasized that idea emphasized in ancient religious stories such as those that are outlined in Genesis or in Genesis with its strange insistence that you know God is that which brings order out of chaos formless potential generates the world out of formless potential and that we're somehow made in that image which which seems to me to be the case and that the proper way by the way to go about Acting in that image is to act in relationship to the potential that confronts you with truth and with courage with careful articulation.
That's the logos. And that if you do that then what you bring forth is is good.
And it's also very much worth thinking about with regards to setting up your life in general. It's like if you concentrate solely on your career, you can get a long way in your career. And I would say that that's a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do. That that's all they do. They work like 70, 80 hours a week.
They go flat out on their career.
They're staking everything on the small probability of exceptional status in a narrow domain. But it's it's hard on them. They don't have a life. It's very difficult for them to have a family.
They don't know how to take any leisure activity. Like they get very one-dimensional. Now, it may be that that unid-dimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at one thing, right? Because if you're going to be something like a genius level mathematician and you want to do that for or a scientist, say, it's like you're in your lab, you're in your lab all the time, you're working 70 hours a week or 80 hours a week, you're smart, you're dedicated, you're unidimensional, and that's how you get to beat all the other people who are doing that. It's the only way. But the problem is you don't get a life. Now, if you love being a scientist and you have that kind of focus of mind, well, first of all, you're a rare person. And second, you're going to pay for it. But fine, more power to you. But but it's a it's a risky business to do that. You sacrifice a lot for it, you know. And I would say most often if you're speaking about having a healthy life, that isn't what you do. you spread yourself out more.
So, you know, you have a family, you have some things that you do outside of work that are meaningful to you and useful, you you have a network of friends. Um, well, that that those three things alone are four things alone are plenty to keep you well oriented. And then if one of those things collapses, you know, everything doesn't go. Now the the price you pay for that is the more you strive to optimize that balance, the less likely you are to be fantastically successful at any single one of them.
But you might have a very, you know, if you consider your life as a whole, that might be a winning strategy. One of the things Carl Jung said, I really liked this. He thought that men went after perfection and w women went after wholeness. So they're different they're different value they're they're different there's something different at the top of the value hierarchy. So perfection would be stake it all on one thing and and look for radical success.
Not all not that all men do that because they don't but we're talking about extremes at least with regards to the men that do that. The wholeness idea is more like well I want I want it's like I want one thing in my life to be 150%.
or I want five things in my life to be 80%.
Well, there there's a lot more richness in a life where you have five things operating at 80%, but you're not operating in any of at any of them at 150%. So, and I really believe this because I've watched men and women go through their careers now for a long period of time. And one of the things that there's lots of things that produce this, but one of the things that I've noticed is that mostly women in their 30s bare bail out of uni-dimensional careers. They won't do them. They won't they won't put in the 80 hours a week that they would have to put in in order to dominate that particular area. And it isn't the reason that they won't do it is because they decide it's not worth it. And no wonder because why would that be worth it? You have to ask yourself that. It's like, well, you want to be an outstanding scientist.
It's like, okay, really, really, that's what you want because that means that's what you do because you're competing with other people. You know, they're smart, they're hardworking, and if you want to be at the top, you have to be smarter and work harder than any of them. And working hard means working long hours. I mean, it also means working diligently, but in in the final analysis, it's all also an additive issue. If I'm smart and hardworking and I can crank out for 70 hours a week and you do it for 30, it's like in two years I'm so far ahead of you, you will never ever catch up. So anyways, and I think partly maybe part of the reason too that women are oriented that way more than men. I think there's two reasons is one is socioeconomic status does not make women more attractive on the mating market, but it does make men more attractive.
And the second is women's time frame is compressed, right? Because guys can always say, "Well, I'll have kids later." and they can say that till they're like 80. Whereas women, it's like, "No way, man. You got to get it.
You got to get it together by the time you're, let's say, 40." But really, probably by 35, but definitely by 40, because otherwise it ain't happening.
And that's bloody dreadful. Like the most unhappy people you ever see, no.
[laughter] No. One of the common routes to extreme unhappiness is to want children and not have them. I wouldn't recommend that. You know, you see couples who were in their 30s. One couple in three over the age of 30 has fertility problems. That's defined as inability to conceive after one year of trying. One in three. It's worth thinking about because people are very, very unhappy if they want to have kids and then they can't. Man, you're in the medical mill for 10 years if that's if that's what happens to you.
Faith is a presupposition for living in the truth. And then you might ask yourself another question, which is, well, why bother living in the truth?
Well, one answer would be so that reality doesn't rise up and smite you repeatedly, which it will if you're deceptive.
So, that's one answer. But here's another answer. And this is a better answer.
People ask themselves all the time, what's the purpose of life? And there's a variety of answers to that. There's no purpose. We're just atoms on a dust moat at the edge of a rather reprehensible corner of the cosmos. And we exist for a moment and we're out and that's that.
Or or we're so lost in a plethora of subordinate meanings that were confused and aimless.
or we want to be hedonistically happy.
And I would say that's really the offer that's on the table in our culture most of the time. It's like, well, I just want to be happy. And people will say that to you.
It's a slogan. It's the most common slogan of our time, I would say. And it's such a preposterous slogan. It's like, what do you mean just?
You just want to be happy. That's all.
That's all you want. that absolute impossibility. You want bliss unending no matter what you do. And that's that's all you want. That's it's it's not exactly a small ask, let's say, because it's the same thing as asking to dwell permanently in paradise. It's something like that. So, it's not that likely.
And then it is also isn't true. That isn't what you want.
If you do careful analysis of what people mean when they say they just want to be happy, what they mean is they don't want to suffer stupidly. They're much more concerned, we're much more concerned with not experiencing an excess of negative emotion than we are with experiencing a surfight of positive pleasure. So first of all, we don't mean we just want to be happy. We mean please don't make us too miserable.
And and fair enough, that's reasonable.
But then even on the happiness front, even on the absence of misery front, that's not true. One of the things Dossi pointed out in Notes from Underground, which is so bloody brilliant, he was criticizing the idea of materialist utopia. He said something like, "Well, imagine we made our materialist utopian dreams come true and everybody had enough to eat all the cakes they wanted and enough to drink and nothing to do," he said, but busy themselves with the continuation of the species.
And we were so pleased that we emitted nothing but bubbles of bliss. He said, "Human beings were so damn ungrateful that the first thing we do is take a stick and smash up all that comfortable prosperity just so that something unexpected and provocative could happen." And that's very smart. You know, that's that's hearkening in some sense back to the story of the Garden of Eden and the proclivity of human beings to eat the forbidden fruit. It's like it isn't obvious at all that we want happiness.
It isn't even obvious that we want absence of misery. What's really obvious is that we want an adventure, right? We want an adventure that's so compelling that it makes the misery of life not justifiable, but but worthwhile.
You want to look back on your life, you know, [applause] you want to look back on your life and and you know this to be true.
You you want to be able to say to yourself, even considering a month or a week or a series of days, you want to be able to say, "That was really difficult, but you know what? It was worth it."
And I think that's what you want from your life. It's something like, you know what, that was difficult, but it was worth it. And that meant that the adventure was so great that it justified the difficulties. And so then the question is, and here's the question, where do you find the great adventure of your life? Well, how about in truth?
Well, why? Because you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth.
It's a mystery.
It's going to lay itself out for you.
And and and so that's an adventure because you don't you literally do not know what's going to happen. You have to let go of knowing what's going to happen. And so then you have that adventure. And then what what else what what is also the case is that it's you that's having the adventure, right? Because if if what you're doing is living in truth, that's your that's you.
That truth is you. And so that means that whatever happens when you tell the truth is your adventure.
And and then you think, well, I'm using deception. It's like, well, maybe you are, but maybe deception is using you.
And then maybe it's the spirit of deception that's having the adventure of your life. And then you might ask yourself, well, why are you so miserable and unhappy? And the answer would be, well, the spirit of deception is having the adventure of your life. You're not even there. Because if you're not living in truth, you're not there. Obviously, what's there is the spirit of deception.
And you might think that's your deception. But I would be very careful about thinking that because there has been there have been centuries of meditation on the nature of the spirit of deception. And the answer isn't that the spirit of deception is you. The answer is that the spirit of deception is something that possesses you and convinces it convinces you that it's you.
And that's not something you want to fall into the clutches of.
So, [applause] [cheering] so now you have Tell me the question again.
>> I'm certain you answered it.
This was about teenagers.
>> Oh, yes. Yes. Well, back to the teenagers.
Do you not want to go to college or are you just lying about being lazy?
So that's a question and we can ask ourselves that question. And as I said on the teenage front, craft a vision, you know, craft a compelling vision. That's really what we are as human beings is we're we're visionaries. That's how we confront the horizon of the future. We meet the horizon of the future by crafting a compelling vision. And your vision might not involve a college education, but it should be a vision that makes you think, if I could make that come true, it would justify the trouble that it would take to manage it. And I think that's the right attitude to take towards your life. And you know, we're all going to have our crosses to bear in the most fundamental manner. We all have to deal with the catastrophe of mortality. And I think we all have to deal with the reality of hell. And you can think about that religiously or not. You political hell will do for hell as far as I'm concerned. Uh we certainly saw no shortage of evidence for that in the 20th century. And we all have to contend with that, right? The reality of mortality and the reality of hell. And then we all have to contend with the fact that we have to we have to develop a vision for our life that is so compelling that it justifies those bitter realities.
And that's really the nature of the religious enterprise. And that's something you can embark on and should embark on young. If you're trying to figure out who you are, it's figure out who you need to be in order to justify the catastrophe of your life. And then you think, well, that was difficult, man. That's for sure. But it was worth it.
So, [applause] thank you very much.
[applause] It was very good of all you to come tonight.
Appreciate your time and attention.
Thank you, Tim.
>> You're welcome. [applause] >> Yeah.
>> Lovely to be here.
>> Thanks so much.
>> Thank you.
[applause] [applause] Thank you all.
[cheering] Yeah. Good night. [applause] They use power to exploit those who are weak. That explains all economic relationships. You can apply the same lens to history. History is nothing but the power struggle between different claims to power. That is absolutely what people are being taught in our institutes of higher education. And there's it's unlikely that there's a doctrine that's more corrosive in relationship to the actual spirit upon which your country and the free West in general was founded.
Those are antithetical stories. Well, what's the what's the alternative story?
Well, let's let's lay some out. Here's another story.
Do what you want will be the totality of the law. That's a somewhat mangled quotation from Aleister Crowley, who was a Satanist in the late part of the 1800s.
He was uh he was like a disciple of the marquee assad. He was one of these people who believed as you can believe rationally that why the hell shouldn't I do just exactly what I want whenever I want to whoever I want regardless of well let's say the cost to them. What's the rational argument against that?
What if I have power and I won't get caught? For example, if I just get away with what my the untraled expression of my most primordial desires. Why not let that be the story?
One whim after another. That's the hedonistic story. It's it's a cacophony that story. Because as you know from your own experience, if you give yourself over to your immediate wants, you're just one appetite after another, right? There's no real coherence there.
You're basically you basically have the same psychological status as a very badly behaved two-year-old.
Well, two two-year-olds are like that.
They don't have a integrated their self, their fundamental pattern of being and personality isn't integrated yet. And so they're more or less at the mercy of their whims. And a hedenist, a hedenist is a worshipper of his own whims, right? And he's a pagan in that sense because it's just one damn desire after another. And he might say to himself, well, those are my desires.
He might identify with those desires.
And that's really what would you say the cardinal form of identification in the modern world. I identify with my what my wants are, particularly sexual wants.
that constitutes my identity and anyone who gets in the way can go directly to hell. And that's a very pathological mode of being and there's a variety of reasons for it, not least that it's exactly reflective of the same kind of immaturity that makes 2-year-olds entirely self-centered and driven by instinct. Now, you might say, well, what's wrong with that? You know, and two-year-olds have their delightful element. You know, they're very enthusiastic. They're very spontaneous.
They're kind of alive in a fiery way, but they're completely incapable of taking care of themselves, right? And this isn't this isn't a hypothesis. You don't see roving bands of thriving two-year-olds running through the forest organizing themselves. Well, why not? Well, it's because that shortterm selfcentered, whimdominated possession doesn't allow you to exist in the world. You have to mature. And of course, that's what you're trying to do with your kids as a parent is you're trying to shepherd them through the process of maturation. Well, why? Well, so that how about so they have some friends? Cuz if it's all about them, well, then they don't have any friends. And that goes for all of you, too. If it's all about you, good luck with your marriage. If it's all about you, you don't have friends. You might have, if you're a bully in particular, you might have, you know, toadies and and thugs who benefit from your use of power, but you don't have friends. If you exploit your customers as a business person repeatedly to redown to your own immediate advantage, you're not going to have customers for very long.
Your reputation is going to precede you.
You're not going to do well in the world. So what do you do instead?
Power is a bad story. It's a corrupt way of looking at the world. It leads to violence.
It's generally manifested in service to a narrow kind of hedenism because why have power unless it's to get exactly what the hell the worst of you wants from moment to moment. If you're not under the sway of some self-centered and relatively malevolent whim, you don't need to use power on other people because you could just ask them to go along for the for the journey. And maybe they would. That's what you do when you play instead of when you use force.
That's what you do when you invite instead of using force. That's what you do when you establish a vision that other people share instead of being a tyrant.
Well, that's what you do if you're mature. That's even what two-year-olds understand by the time they're three when they start engaging in pretend play with with a wouldbe friend. Who's a friend to a 2-year-old? Well, the first thing or three-year-old, cuz three-year-olds start to become social.
Well, the first thing you want to do if you're a three-year-old is play a game with someone. That's not the same as having your own game, right? If you play a game with someone else, there are some intrinsic rules. Well, what are the rules? Well, how about they get a turn, right? and maybe a generous turn, right?
Because if you're going to have a friend and you want the friend to like you, which is kind of like the definition of a friend and someone who likes you would like to see you again. And that continuity of the desire to see you again and to play together. That's the definition of friendship. It's a sequence of games played with the same person. The game has to be voluntary. It has to be invitational. It has to be reciprocal.
Right? And so what you're trying to do with your 2-year-old is you're getting them to sacrifice the immediate gratification of their instincts to reciprocity.
Right now, you do you do something that's a bit more sophisticated than that, too. Because the other thing you do with children and yourself and with people you love, if you're the least bit sensible, is you let them know that they shouldn't conduct themselves in a manner in the immediate present that compromises their future. Right? That's what you mean when you tell your child, "Don't do stupid things." Well, what's a stupid thing? Generally speaking, something interesting and entertaining in the moment that you pay for, right?
And that's the same as an impulsive bad habit in adulthood. It's like the definition of a bad habit. A bad habit is something that works now and not so good tomorrow or next week or next month or next year or 5 years from now or 10 years from now. That implies as well that just as the child establishes a relationship of reciprocity with the friend by starting to understand the future they establish a reciprocal relationship with their future self and that's the same thing. So what maturation is we all know this maturation is the ability let's say to share and to forego gratification to delay gratification. What does it mean to delay gratification? It means you don't get what the hell you want right now all the time. You have to conduct yourself in a manner that assures communal stability, let's say, and reciprocity. And in the enjoyable sense, you want to be surrounded by friends and compatriots and people who move you forward and people who wish you well because that's going to be a lot better for you than the alternative. And you want to do that in a manner that assures the future. The whole cortical higher cortical apparati that human beings are blessed and cursed with is there to integrate the possessive possessing spirits that might otherwise be impulsive and fractionating. integrate them into a personality that can act reciprocally in relationship to others and guide itself as a consequence of apprehension of the future. It's a definition of maturity. Now, you kind of know this because as your children mature, as you've matured, the amount of time you can consider expands, right?
For the 13-year-old, for a fouryear-old, sitting down to take piano lessons, half an hour is an eternity, right? For a 13-year-old, six months into the future is forever.
By the time you're 50, a year is like a week, right? Well, and and there's a loss in that to some degree, but there's a huge gain because as you develop, your capacity to apprehend the consequences of your actions across broader spans of time is much improved. And that reflects cortical maturation. And the same thing happens with regards to your ability to manage yourself socially.
What does it mean to manage yourself socially? Well, it means as I said that it's not all about you. Your aim can't be the immediate gratification of the whims that possess you. If you're married, if you're married, if you have a wife or husband, is your wife or husband, how do they stand in relationship to their importance in relationship to you?
Well, we could just think about it in a sort of clear-headed manner. Let's say you have a scrap with your wife. You have a fight with your wife, a disagreement, and you win. You win.
She's wrong.
She's punished for it in whatever way you can manage. What's the problem with that? You're right. She's wrong. Well, let's say you do that 50 times.
Well, now you're living with someone who's you always defeat.
And so now you're living with someone who's defeated. And what's the problem with that? Well, they're around, right? And so maybe that's the problem with attaining a manipulated victory over your marital partner. Fine if it's a one-off, but you know they're there when you wake up in the morning and so is the consequence of your what?
Self-centered power-based maneuvering, right? And maybe you're a victorious tyrant and she's a defeated slave. Well, that's not much of a victory there, buddy, right? And I and the same applies to any reciprocal social relationship.
You know, if you have any sense, if you think it through, you want to build up the people that are around you. Well, why? Well, because they're around you.
And so if you were a generous if you made generous offerings to the social world and you improved the nexus of relationships that you were involved in, why wouldn't that be good for you? Now you might think, well, there's only so much to go around and if everyone else wins, I lose. But that's another story and it's the story of power and it's a very bad story and it's not true because the truth of the matter is is that there's more than enough for everyone to do and your victory doesn't have to ever come at the cost of someone else's defeat. I shouldn't say ever. I mean there are times when you know people are headtohead and the game that's being played isn't fair and it's your victory or your defeat. that those are very pathological and unnecessary circumstances and it would be better to do everything you can to ever avoid being in a situation like that.
Situations like that arise when your relationships have deteriorated radically.
She goes to where the most genuine evil is made manifest. Once inside, she made a deadly poisonous apple. Well, why an apple? Well, an apple is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, right? The apple is the thing that you incorporate that changes you. The apple is information. The apple is education. The apple is ideology. The apple is an idea rather than an artifact, right? That's what it's a that's what it's symbolic of. That's what it represents. And so the first kinds of poison or death that the pathological evil queen attempts to administer to Snow White are pretty straightforward and basic, right?
They're appeals to her own vanity in the form of pathization of her attractiveness. But this is a deeper form of poison, right? It it's a poison that strikes right to the soul.
Remember, it's the consuming of the apple that is the original sin that knocks Adam and Eve out of paradise. The poisoned apple is what is it? It's pathological knowledge, right? I think it's exactly the same as the symbolic representation of the kind of evil doctrine that young women are fed by jealous, miserable, single, bitter, envious, resentful old women to knock them out of the mating game. Partly to reduce competition and partly just out of selfdestructive spite.
A deadly poisonous apple. On the outside it looked beautiful with red cheeks, right? Red cheeks. So the apple is red cheeks. It's emblematic of health itself, of flourishing health, right? If you wanted to be a healthy young woman, this is obviously the apple that you would eat. And that's exactly what young women are taught in today's universities, right? To pursue that path of career that now has left the prioritization of self-interest. It's not precisely career. The prioritization of narrow self-interest that compromises their youth and leaves 50% of women in the West childless at the age of 30 with the probability that 90% of them will regret that as the years pass by.
Apple beautiful with red cheeks. Anyone who saw it would be enticed to take a bite. Well, so this is propaganda in its most attractive form. It's like, well, if this is what you were offered, of course you'd take it. It sounds like you could have it all. Young women, you can have it all. Yeah. Well, the question is, who's offering that particular apple? And what exactly is their motivation? We're just looking out for our younger sisters. It's like, yeah, maybe you're looking out for them, and maybe you're a manifestation of the evil queen whose fundamental motivation is to devour their liver and lungs. Yeah. Well, thereafter, she disguised herself as a peasant woman, a lowly woman, not a hottie beauty, went to the dwarf's cottage, and knocked on the door. Little Snow White looked and said, "I'm not allowed to have anyone inside. The seven dwarfs have strictly forbidden me. Well, if you don't want to let me in, I can't force you, answered the delightful peasant woman. Right.
Emblematic of the oppressed working class. I'll surely get rid of my apples in time. I have something that everyone wants, obviously. But let me give you one to test another manifestation of her evil making itself camouflaged in the guise of care and compassion. No, said little Snow White. I'm not allowed to take anything. The divorce won't let me.
Yeah, well, you see, that's the sensible manifestation of the ordinary, productive, patriarchal impulse inside her, protecting herself from the depradations of predatory, competitive females.
You're probably afraid. Yeah, said the old woman. Look, I'll cut the apple in two. You eat the beautiful red half.
However, the apple had been made with such cunning that only the red part was poisoned. When little Snow White saw the peasant woman eating her half, and when her desire to taste the apple grew stronger, she finally let the peasant woman give her the other half through the window. As soon as she took a bite of the apple, she fell to the ground and was dead. The queen rejoiced, went home, and asked the mirror, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is the fairest of them all?" And the mere answered, "You, my queen, are now the fairest of all." So the evil queen produced the pathological fruit of knowledge that dooms Snow White to death, administering it under the guise of compassion and caring in the form of a fruit so attractive that anyone with eyes would be tempted to take it.
brutal.
Now I can rest in peace, she said once again. I'm the most beautiful in the land and Snow White will remain dead this time. So couldn't kill her with the bodies or the corset. Couldn't kill her with the poisonous comb, but could certainly kill her with the consumption of the fatal apple.
When the dwarfs came home from the mines that evening, they found little Snow White lying on the ground, and she was dead. They unlaced her and tried to find something poisonous in her hair, but nothing helped. They couldn't revive her. Okay, so what does that mean?
The core element of the evil queen is so unbelievably pathological, so destructive that ordinary, conscientious, diligent, protective masculinity is revealed as insufficient to redress the poison. Right? So that's why the queen the the prince has to come along. Right? It's only the higher order form of masculinity that's associated with true nobility and true courage that has the archetypal force, you might say, to provide true protection from the depradations of the evil queen.
Well, Snow White is the help meat of the dwarves, right? But there's no individualized relationship there. She hasn't moved beyond cooperation with the social patriarchy as such to the establishment of a personalized relationship with an individual and identifiable man. Right? So, she's still in the land of generic masculinity, and that's a hell of a lot better than the land of pathological evil queen destructive femininity. But it's not a relationship that's of sufficient depth and intensity to provide protection against the most fatal of feminine poisons.
They couldn't revive her, so they laid her on a beer and all seven of them sat down beside it and wept for three whole days. Then they intended to bury her, but she still looked more alive than dead. and she still had such pretty red cheeks. So instead, they made a glass coffin and placed her inside so that she could easily be seen.
So they're worshiping her in a sense even in her poisoned and near dead state. They still value her, right? So what does that mean?
It means that the ordinary men apprehending an attractive young woman who has been poisoned by the teachings of the evil queen still hope in their soul for the revivification of her spirit but are unable to match the machinations of the evil queen themselves. Right. So they stand back and observe and that's all they can do.
They wrote her name on the coffin in gold letters showing how much they value her and added the family name. One of the dwarfs remained at home every day to keep watch over her. So Snow White lay in the coffin for a long long time.
Right? So now she's that's failure to launch. Now she's in a state of suspended animation because of her poison knowledge. Because of her receipt of the poisoned apple, she is mimicking life but is unconscious and unable to fully participate.
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