So, I want to take another look at this figure
to begin with.
Now, one of the reasons that I began to think
about these sorts of things is because I wanted
to understand what it might mean to have a
set of, let’s say a set of values and beliefs
(because those two things go together), that
would…
I guess part of the question was, is it possible
to develop of system of beliefs that’s outside
of the realm of ideology?
You know, because one thing you might claim
is that it’s all ideology.
Any belief system is ideological.
And if you develop a belief system that criticises
other belief systems it just means that you’ve
developed a new ideological stance.
And there’s some… that’s a good argument,
you know.
I can think of a number of ways that it’s
true.
One of the things Nietzsche said in the late
1800s was that if you inhabited a belief system,
even a religious system, and you lost faith
in it, not only did you lose faith in that
system, but you also potentially lost faith
in systems themselves.
And so, it was a meta-collapse, in a sense.
Not only did you lose your belief, but you
lost your belief in beliefs.
So you think of the set of all possible beliefs
and then abandoning any hope of relying on
those as valid sources of information.
You know, so that’s one perspective and
it’s a powerful one, and Nietzsche believed
that that was a certain pathway to nihilism,
essentially, or perhaps to a reactionary totalitarianism,
but it boils down to the same thing.
I’ve been reading this book recently, the
title of which I can’t remember, unfortunately.
But I’ll tell it to you after class.
It’s a critique of certain lines of left-wing
ideological thinking, including the existential
thought of people like Jean-Paul Sartre, and
Foucault.
And one of the most trenchant critiques of
Sartre, because he believes that you have
an absolute freedom, that you’re destined
for freedom, that you’re doomed to it, in
some sense.
And that part of your existential journey
is to establish an authenticity that’s correct
for you.
But he doesn’t, he isn’t able really to
give any description of what that should be
grounded in.
And the critic concludes that all Sartre can
do is stand outside of any potential belief
system and criticise it.
And that that’s… there’s nothing in
it for anyone as a consequence of that.
It’s only destructive.
Now, it’s important to remember, with regards
to Sartre, that he viewed other people, to
some degree, like the common man, the bourgeoisie,
we might say, as the embodiment of non-freedom,
of inauthenticity, and also as a barrier to
genuine authenticity.
So he wasn’t willing to give any credence
to the utility of normality.
But I also think he wasn’t able to tolerate
the consequences of his own thought, because
he was an avid supporter of the communist
party, far after anyone with any reasonable
moral sense would have stopped doing that.
So Sartre didn’t really denounce the communists
until the end of the… beginning of the 70s,
roughly speaking.
He was never a card-carrying communist, but
he was very left-leaning.
And you know by the 1970s, by the late 60s,
by the early 70s, a lot of the evidence about
what was going on in Soviet Russia had been
in for 30 years.
So there was really no excuse for not facing
up to that, and trying to understand what
it meant.
And you know, it would be bad enough if it
was just the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t.
The same sort of thing happened wherever those
utopian presuppositions were put into place.
And I suppose many of you don’t know this,
but Pol Pot, who was the Cambodian dictator,
was educated at the Sorbonne, and he wrote
his thesis (I think it was his PhD thesis,
although it might have been his Master’s
thesis) on the Marxist doctrine that urban
people were parasites on rural people.
So you know, there’s a theory that says
that the general value is generated purely
by labour, and much of that is rural labour,
and the cities siphon off the excess productive
power and are able to parasitize the countryside
as a consequence of that.
Which is a, you know, tremendously non-productive
theory.
But Pol Pot put it in practice, and so when
he went back to Cambodia he chased everybody
out of the cities and killed about six million
people.
So, you know, you can read about that if you
want.
It’s a pretty appalling section of 20th
century history.
Especially when it was the case that he was
educated in the West and had these presuppositions
drummed into him.
Well then there’s Foucault.
Foucault, who I have no respect for, by the
way…
I’ve read a fair bit of Foucault, and I
think everything he says is obvious.
So for example, he criticises the idea of
mental illness as a social construct.
It’s like, well yeah, obviously.
I mean, it’s not like psychiatrists and
psychologists and mental health professionals,
who are relatively well-informed, haven’t
known about that since… for the last 60
years.
I mean, it might be a revelation to people
who don’t notice that psychiatry, for example,
is something like a compromise between the
patient biology and the social world.
You know, I mean, psychiatric ailments often
have a biological tilt, but the way they manifest
themselves in society is clearly conditioned
in very intense ways by the particular conditions
obtaining at the point that the person who
has that biological predisposition exists,
even when it’s not pathological, can be
tilted one way or another by cultural norms.
And then of course, when you’re dealing
with issues like insurance payment, and treatment,
and hospitalisation, obviously you’re pulling
in all sorts of systems that are by no means
purely scientific.
But I don’t find it a particularly useful
critique.
It’s obvious, as far as I’m concerned.
And, the other thing that Foucault did.
I mean, I think this is the typical, especially
the French intellectuals’, typical sleight
of hand once Marxism became… you know, once
you were no longer able to call yourself a
committed Marxist, because committed Marxism
had led to unbelievable brutality, you know,
on a scale that had never been experienced
in the entire history of the planet, at least
in terms of its reach and duration.
You didn’t get to call yourself a committed
Marxist anymore, unless there were people
(and you still see them) saying “well that
wasn’t real Marxism), which I think is a
cop-out of staggering proportions.
It usually means “well if I was the person
running the country that wouldn’t have happened”.
That’s the logic behind it… “they didn’t
put the principles into practice properly”.
It’s like yeah well lots of people put the
damn principles into practice and the same
thing happened everywhere.
So at some point you have to kind of wonder
if there’s something wrong with the principles.
Anyways, what Foucault did was take the Marxist
presupposition that everything could be boiled
down to economics and economic power and translate
it into the idea that everything just translated
into power, you know.
And that the reason that we have institiutions
is to include and to exclude and that the
institutions always run for the benefit of
those at the top.
It’s like well yeah, that’s a little bit
true, but it’s… a scientist would look
at that and say well probably… you know,
power dynamics in a functioning economic and
political system maybe account for 10% of
the variance, something like that, maybe 15%.
It’s like, say you want to go to an Ivy
League school.
Well if you’re parents went to the school
you’re more likely to get in, but you’re
not that much more likely to get in and you
still have to be… you know roughly speaking
what happens is if you have a pretty decent
high school GPA and you do very well on the
SATs, and you have some other talents of some
sort, because that’s also necessary, then
they might pick you over someone else who’s
roughly equally qualified if you have a familial
history attendance at the school.
So obviously you get an advantage, but it’s
not the kind of advantage that accounts for
the entirety of how the system is structured.
It’s an advantage.
Well, you can say that’s not fair.
It’s like, yeah okay, fair enough.
Most systems are certainly not 100% either
fair or just, definitely not.
But, you know, instead of comparing them to
utopia you might compare them to another system,
which is the only reasonable way to do it.
It’s like, everything looks terrible when
you compare it to the best thing you can possibly
imagine.
But the best thing you can possibly imagine
is an empty fiction, because it’s so devoid
of detailed content that you can’t use it
as a guide to reality.
Now, I mean, the idea that things could be
better has its roots in, in some sense, a
broad-scale utopian project, and I believe
things could be better.
But that doesn’t mean that when you’re
doing an analysis of a complex system you
get to compare it to an ideological utopia
and then describe all the reasons that it’s
bad.
It’s not appropriate to do that.
It’s too simplistic, you’re not going
to do anything to actually address the problems
that the system has if you take that approach.
And then, of course, pure utopian thinking
is extraordinarily dangerous.
Because if you think that you’re way of
molding society into some ultimate state of
perfection is headed towards some ultimate
state of perfection, then you can justify
absolutely anything you do right now, on the
basis of the fact that things are going to
improve so radically in the future.
And that means any of your behaviours are
excused.
The end is worth it.
Well, if someone says that, you have to kind
of wonder what they’re actually planning
to do.
Okay, so, well what’s the issue?
The issue is that it’s… so the same critic,
with regards to Foucault, said that well it’s
basically the same thing, that Foucault criticised
a variety of profound institutions.
Sexual institutions say, like marriage, and
then institutions of power, like prisons,
and institutions of mental health, like the
whole institutional framework.
He criticised them on the basis of power and
exclusion.
And you could do that and there’s some truth
in it.
But you know Foucault also made the presupposition,
and the problem with that presupposition,
that everything is about something else, is
that it’s almost impossible to see how it
can’t be applied to Foucault himself.
So you’d have to ask, if you were a student
of Foucault, what power aims drove his attempt
to analyse everything in terms of power?
And I actually think with Foucault it’s
pretty obvious.
But it’s a game that never goes anywhere.
Okay, so I thought about that a lot, it’s
like, is there any system that you can develop
that doesn’t have the negative consequences
of systems in general?
And then if that is possible, how and why
might it be possible?
And this is partly why I’m talking to you
about this particular diagram again.
I think the reason, now I don’t know this,
and you guys can think it through yourself.
I mean, lots of people have talked to me about
the content of this course and you know, they’ve
said that it’s been very helpful for them
when it comes to interpreting certain elements
of their life.
But some people have said well it’s just
another system.
And I don’t believe that.
I think it’s a meta-system.
And I don’t think the rules that apply to
systems also apply to meta-systems.
But you know, that could just be me.
So you’re going to have to decide that for
yourself.
But I think the reason that I can make that
claim, and that it’s a valid claim is because
first of all, I don’t believe that it’s
an intellectual system.
I don’t think it’s an attempt to reduce
a complex set of phenomena to something that
is… dispenses with important elements of
their existence.
So for example, let me give you an example
of how that sort of thing happens.
If you’re looking at the world through a
biased lens, what it means is that you take
non-random samples of the environmental data.
So I can give you a quick example of something
I saw that I thought was very particular in
that regard.
I don’t think I’ve used this example before,
but about ten years ago or thereabouts Naomi
Klein made this documentary about this factory
down in South America.
I believe it was in Argentina.
And this was just after all the foreign capital
fled out of Argentina and the economy collapsed
completely, which is something that happens
to Argentina fairly regularly, by the way.
And she went down there to this factory where
there were working men and they had been building
heavy machinery.
And the working men had decided that they
were going to… the factory had been padlocked
and they had been locked out because things
had come to a halt.
And they had decided that they were going
to take a chainsaw to the factory gate and
go in there and start making heavy machinery
again.
And you know, it was a very cool documentary
as far as I was concerned.
She went down there and she interviewed all
these working guys and they talked about how
their lives had been brought to a halt by
the factory closure.
And obviously it sucked that they were sitting
around doing nothing and not being paid for
doing anything when they could’ve been inside
the factory building heavy machinery, which
is what they wanted to do.
So she went down there and laid out their
story and it was very sympathetic to the workers
and good, you know, fair enough, good.
But then she went and interviewed the guy
who owned the factory and she didn’t ask
him any real questions.
What she did instead was caricaturize him,
even a priori, you know, as sort of a fascist
capitalist, sort of like the millionaire in
Monopoly, and never tried to get beneath the
superficial a priori categorisation to find
out what he actually thought.
And I was just waiting, I thought, well this
is cool, what the hell does the factory owner
have to say?
It’s like, where did his money go, why does
he think he has a right to the factory, like
what are his conditions of ownership?
Did he earn the money?
Did he inherit it?
It’s like, what does he think about the
fact that Argentina’s economy has collapsed?
How does he feel about the fact that all these
workers are out of work?
What does he think about the fact that they
opened up the factory again?
Like, there’s a lot of interesting things
to ask this guy.
None of it, none of it happened.
And so, to me what happened was that she was
someone with neglect.
You know, she was looking at the world but
she could only see half of everything.
And the half she saw was probably perfectly
justifiable, had its proper domain of application,
but the half she missed, well, what about
that part of the story?
You’re going to reduce that to cliché and
stereotype and expand up the rest of the story?
Well, the only reason you’d do that is if
you didn’t want to find out what the hell
was going on.
If all you wanted to do was gather evidence
that would support your initial theory.
Now, I know perfectly well that there’s
plenty of situations where workers, the conditions
of workers are absolutely abysmal.
I mean, one of the books I’ve read that
I think a remarkable documentation of that
is a book by George Orwell called ‘Road
to Wigan Pier’, which is a study of the
conditions that coal miners lived in in the
1930s in Britain.
And you know, it’s bloody dismal.
And the idea that they were exploited, well,
that’s a tougher one, because the Industrial
Revolution was very, very hard on people,
and it was really, really hard on some people.
You know, particularly on some people.
Whether that was because of exploitation or
because of the existence of absolute poverty
is not all that obvious.
And you know… so it’s a complicated issue.
Now there’s lots of times when workers were
clearly exploited, but I think there are times
as well when they weren’t.
Anyways, it’s a great book, and he does
a lovely job of laying out a rationale for
why the workers should be treated far better
than they were treated, and you know, so fine,
good, wonderful.
There’s something to be said.
But the thing is when you want to say something,
you want to take an unbiased sample if you
can, and so this is why I like this particular
mode of conceptualisation, and I think it’s…
the reason I think it’s not an intellectual
construction is because I think it emerges
naturally out of the structure of mythology
and narrative, and you can think this through
yourself, but as far I’ve been able to tell,
narratives present themselves in terms of
archetypal characters.
And the thing about a comprehensive narrative
is it can’t leave out an archetypal character,
or it fails.
Now I can give you an example of this.
So how many of you have seen Disney’s ‘Sleeping
Beauty’?
Okay, so many of you have.
How many haven’t?
Okay, so there’s a few that haven’t.
Well the Disney movies, you know they’re
kind of standard childhood fare.
You know, in Sleeping Beauty, what happens
is the King and Queen give birth to a princess
after trying for a substantial amount of time.
And she arrives healthy and beautiful, and
then they have a christening day and they
invite everybody to it.
But they don’t invite Maleficent, who’s
a dark witch, roughly speaking.
You know, she’s Queen of the Underworld,
for lack of a better word.
She’s the negative element of femininity.
And they don’t invite her to the party.
And so she shows up anyways, and says that
because they didn’t invite her, their daughter’s
going to die when she hits sixteen, which
is roughly the age of let’s say sexual maturation
for a story of that sort.
Now there’s another little positive magic
female in the story, who mitigates that death
sentence to protracted sleep.
Well the idea behind it, it’s a very, very
interesting story, it’s an Oedipal story
in a sense, because what it says is that if
you’re parents protect you too much from
the dark side of life when you’re young,
what will happen when you start on the road
to maturity is you’ll be so naïve and so
fragile that you’ll want to be unconscious
instead of paying attention.
And that you’re going to have to be rescued
from that state by something.
And it could be a prince, which is how the
story lays itself out, or it also could be
the symbolically masculine and exploratory
element of your own psyche.
And the story’s ambivalent about whether
it’s an external event or an internal event,
it doesn’t really matter.
The things end up being the same.
And so that’s actually what happens in this
Sleeping Beauty story.
You know, at the end, a prince, who’s also
enslaved by this terrible negative feminine
force, manages to escape, and Maleficent turns
into a dragon and then he has to fight her,
and then he goes and rescues the princess.
And she wakes up and the kingdoms rejuvenate
and everybody’s happy.
It’s a classic, classic story.
And it’s not… it’s funny because the
Disney movie Frozen was put forward as a,
in some sense as a feminist alternative to
the classic fairy tales, but first of all
you can’t do that, you can’t just generate
up a fairy tale.
You know, there’s recent evidence that some
of these fairy tales, the ones that the Grimm
brothers and Hans Christian Andersen collected,
are up to ten thousand years old.
You can’t just come up with a counter-fairy
tale.
That’s just not how it works.
And the way that a fairy tale is structured,
it has nothing to do with the necessity for
anyone to rely on anyone else for anything.
It’s a complex portrayal of the dynamic
relationship between archetypal characters,
and you know, it’s one form of the story.
There’s lots of different forms of the story.
But what I like about Sleeping Beauty for
example, and this is what’s nice about the
real fairy tales, is that along with the positive
there’s negative, and it’s real negative.
Like real fairy tales are terrifying.
I don’t… who is it?
Is it in Sleeping Beauty?
Or Snow White?
I don’t remember.
In one of the famous Grimm fairy tales, one
of the evil sisters ends up dancing in red
hot shoes till she dies.
You know, it’s… they’re very, very violent
and unsettling.
And it’s because they have the quality of
genuine folk tales.
But the reason for that is because they’re
dealing with real things.
Like the Hansel and Gretel’s story is a
good example of that, right?
Kids are abandoned out in the woods.
They find something that’s too good to be
true.
Inside this thing that’s too good to be
true is something that wants to fatten them
up and devour them.
It’s a rough story.
But what it’s doing… the stories have
evolved to represent the fundamental dynamic
elements of existence, if you conceptualise
existence in terms of character.
And the thing is you have to conceptualise
existence in terms of character if you’re
a person, because what you do in existence
is act out your character.
So your character is an element of existence.
Now, you might say well that doesn’t mean
that society has a character.
But actually, it does mean that.
Because partly what happens… like if you’re
socialised, say, into a culture.
The culture exists in the same relationship
to you, roughly speaking, as another person
does.
So for example, if you put money in the bank,
which is in principle a representation of
your labour, what you’re doing is entering
into a contract with the broader social world,
which is one of promise, essentially, where
the future society promises to return your
value at a future date.
So it’s a contractual relationship.
And the reason that God the Father is a very
common representation is because treating
the ‘they’, in Heidegerrian terms, the
others, in Heideggerian terms, as if they’re
an embodied entity, actually works.
So it’s because it is an emergent property
of all of the personalities that make it up.
And so you’re interacting with that emergent
personality all the time.
You could even say for example, that that’s
the Freudian Id.
It’s the thing that… the representation
of that inside you is what makes you feel
guilty when you transgress against certain
moral rules.
And you might say, along with the radical
existentialists, that that’s just arbitrary
and that you can create your own values, but
it’s not just arbitrary.
Because it’s dependent on the consent of
others, as well as on some internal harmony
or disharmony.
It’s not arbitrary.
And you can’t just set that up by yourself.
So these things are realities and they’re
deep realities.
Now, this particular portrayal indicates a
kind of balance.
So the fundamental ground of reality is neither
positive nor negative, it’s the ground out
of which everything positive or negative emerges.
So you might think of the fundamental ground
of reality as that which exists prior to your
encounter with it.
And we have no idea what that is.
Now you can think about it as… people tend
to think about what things are made of in
atomic terms but it’s not a particularly
comprehensive way of thinking about it.
Because what exists beyond the realm of your
comprehension is the patterned relationship
between everything and everything.
And you can’t reduce it to any simple level
of analysis because you miss all sorts of
elements of it that are extraordinarily important
if you do that.
So you can’t do that, that’s not what
experience is made out of, or what the grounded
experience is made out of.
And so it’s neutral in some sense.
Because it exists beyond your encounter with
it.
It’s the unknown as such.
And the reason that that’s often represented
in the form of a predatory lizard that has
something to offer is precisely because of
that.
The absolute unknown has the capacity to tear
you into pieces and burn you up, but it also
has the possibility of rewarding you with
everything you could possibly be rewarded
with.
So it’s this strange juxtaposition of potential.
I like to think about it as potential, you
know, because people can get a grip on what
potential means.
There’s potential everywhere, whatever that
is.
You have potential, your parents tell you
that all the time.
What is that?
Well, it’s the unrealised stuff of your
being.
Now it’s a very strange concept, potential,
because you can’t characterise it any way
that you would characterise something that’s
real.
Because it’s not real, it’s potential.
But you act like it’s real.
You know, you’ll feel guilty that you’re
not living up to your potential, you’re
not manifesting your potential.
You want people to interact with you so that
they allow you to demonstrate your potential.
You act as if it’s a reality continually.
You think as if it’s a reality continually.
You ask if your relationship has potential,
you know.
But it’s a very, very strange substance,
whatever this potential is.
It’s unrealised possibility, essentially,
but you regard it as something that’s fluid
and something that can develop in all sorts
of different directions, and something whose
development you can shape.
Because otherwise why would you feel guilty,
you know?
It’s like, if you’re doing the wrong thing,
you’re realising some potential in the wrong
way, and then you feel bad about that.
It’s like, well, there’s some sense of
intrinsic morality operating at the bottom
of that.
We’ve talked a lot about that.
Some of that’s built in biologically, some
of it is structured culturally, some of it
is a consequence of you trying to organise
your… this plethora of semi-beings that
you are into some integrated manner.
Like it’s a very, very complicated thing.
It’s not just arbitrary.
Okay so that’s the very background, the
dragon of chaos, positive and negative.
And it’s the thing out of which everything
springs.
If you look at the Scandinavian world tree,
for example, or world trees in general, you
very frequently have a representation of a
serpent that’s associated with them.
The reason that the… that potential is serpentine
is extraordinarily complicated, but I think
it’s partly because, say snakes shed their
own skin, so they can be reborn, so they’re
a symbol of transformation.
And then they’re sneaky and subtle and so
they appear in places that you wouldn’t
necessarily expect them to, and then they’re
a terrible, terrible threat.
In overcoming that threat, you also develop.
So not only are they a threat, but they’re
the kind of threat that makes you become strong
when you face it.
And that’s partly why the snake is such
an ambivalent figure in most mythology.
Okay, so that’s complicated, but we’ll
return to that later.
And then out of that, you might say, emerges
the unknown as you encounter it.
So there’s potential itself, and then the
first layer of potential are the things that
you encounter that you don’t understand.
So I can give you an example of that.
So let’s say you’re a three-year-old,
or a two-year-old, that’s better, and you’re
in the kitchen and a mouse runs across the
room.
And so you track it because your eyes pick
up the movement, and you track the thing.
And then it’s an unexpected occurrence,
so you don’t know what it signifies, right.
So that’s the emergence of something tangibly
unknown into your conceptual space.
Now it’s not like you lack any knowledge
of it.
You can tell what its size is, and you can
get some estimation of its speed.
And I think what you have to do when you think
about whether or not something is unknown
is you have to think about it in relationship
to that hierarchy of perception that I keep
throwing at you.
You know, if something emerges… if you encounter
an entity and you can map it at every single
level of your value hierarchy, then it’s
known.
You know how to interact with it at a micro-level,
and you know what its implications are for
every other level of your conceptual being.
You know what its implications are for the
future.
Like you know exactly how to deal with that
thing, it’s mapped at every single level.
There’s other things that are only mapped
at one level and not at others.
So maybe the mouse, we’ll say, for the child
who’s never seen a mouse, it’s like…
it shares some commonalities with objects
that the child is familiar with.
But there’s sufficient novelty so that it’s
also contaminated with the unknown, and that
makes the child, basically, semi-startled
and alert.
Now the child will immediately refer to an
adult, and it’s a technical term, actually,
they’ll look at the adult’s face because
the adult broadcasts the motivational affective
significance of that event.
And so the child looks, references, and then
reads off the face (and of course the speech
and the bodily actions) exactly what that
thing signifies.
And then if the person that they’re looking
at jumps up on the table and screams, then
that’s one sense of meaning, which is ‘God,
this thing is magical, it’s only this big
and look at what effect it has on, you know,
my aunt (for the sake of argument), who’s
you know, a pretty competent creature as far
as I can tell, being two years old’.
And then if she just dismisses it, you know,
her actions are going to determine the meaning
of that phenomenon.
So that’s how the transformation of the
semi-known thing into the more-known thing
occurs.
It occurs almost always in a social context.
You can explore things by yourself, but you
rarely actually do that by yourself.
It’s almost always you plugged into a social
apparatus, you know.
So you might be doing the specific investigating,
but the social apparatus is around you so
that you can confer with it, and it also shapes
the way that you’re going to interact with
that specific thing.
Okay, so the unknown, that’s generally…
the unknown that you encounter, that’s generally
characterised using feminine symbolism.
And I think the reason for that, there’s
a bunch of reasons, and we talked about many
of them.
One reason is because females do the sexual
selection in human beings, and so they act
as the face of nature.
Another reason is that you can think of new
possibility always emerging out of the non-cultural
background, in some sense.
So for example, let’s say that we send an
expedition to Mars, and we’re gathering
new information as a consequence.
The reason we’re gathering new information
is because we’ve gone out past the domain
of our knowledge, in a sense, and we’re
interacting with something new.
And in that interaction, new information is
generated.
Now you can say that it’s partly the act
of the perceiver that’s generating the new
information, and you can say that it’s partly
the act of the culture.
Because we sent robots to Mars, let’s say,
which is very, very difficult.
So the culture goes there but the individuals
are observing, so the individuals are buttressed
by the culture.
But they’re generating information because
they’re somewhere truly new.
And so the information… the unknown is a
constant source of new information.
So it’s a place that gives birth to new
information.
And so that’s another part of the reason
that it seems to be symbolised in feminine
form.
You know, I’m just taking this, in some
sense, as an empirical fact.
I’ve looked at… it looks like that’s
how these stories work.
And so I’ve been trying to puzzle out why
exactly that would be the case.
I also think it’s the case that we tend
to look at the world from a social cognitive
perspective.
We filter it through a social, cognitive,
biological apparatus.
And so we’re very likely to see things in
character form, and characters have sexes,
and so that’s going to happen.
And then which, the attributes of femininity
or the attributes of masculinity, that get
used as symbolic reference in some sense,
there’s an arbitrariness involved.
So for example, for the Egyptians… you know,
usually have a sky god, but they had a sky
goddess.
Now, she usually represents the night sky,
which is not exactly the same thing as the
day sky, but you have to... it’s so tricky
because you have to look at the relationships
between the characters in order to decide
what all of them mean, and that shifts a little
bit from story to story.
So this is a, what would you say, it’s an
approximation of the underlying structure,
but there’s a fair bit of variation in it,
just like there’s variance in stories.
Well the feminine element has a destructive
element and a creative aspect.
And you can see that people characterise their
environments in that way.
So for example, you can map on environmental
beliefs onto this structure.
You can say that the environmentalist portrays
nature as positive, portrays culture as negative,
and portrays the individual as negative.
And the basic story is rampaging individual
as member of rapacious culture invading the
pristine landscape of beautiful Mother Nature.
Now the thing about that story is it’s true.
The problem with that story is that it’s
half true.
So for example, one thing that’s interesting
to conceptualise is that that’s exactly
the opposite of the frontier myth.
Now the frontier myth was a story that was
used extensively in Europe to drive immigration
into the United States.
And it was used to some degree in Canada too.
And so the story was the exact opposite.
It’s the hero, so that would be the immigrant
pioneer, bringing the benefits of order to
a savage wilderness.
Well that’s also true, but it’s so interesting
that both of those things can be true, and
they’re completely different from one another.
There’s no commonality at all between those
two stories, except for the way that they
use the characters.
There’s a feminine character, a masculine
character (that represents culture), and then
there’s another character that represents
the individual.
And you could even see that, if you think
about it historically, the US was founded
in some sense on the frontier myth, and that
was to one side.
And so by the time the 1960s came along, the
early 1960s, it shifted to its opposite.
And you need that, because systems have to
oscillate to some degree to remain stable
across time.
They can’t just be fixed in place.
So they’re going to play back and forth
through the archetypes in an attempt to keep
them balanced because that’s what you’re
trying to do, you’re trying to keep them
balanced.
And so, you have the destructive and creative
element of Mother Nature.
You see that all the time in movies where
the thing that the hero is striving against
is the negative element of the unknown.
How many of you have seen the movie ‘Alien’?
Okay so that’s a pretty graphic representation
of, well those aliens were more reptilian
in form, so they’re almost like… they’re
more at the dragon of chaos level of civilisation,
but they’re a terrible external force that’s
threatening human culture and the individual.
It’s exactly the opposite story that’s
played out in… what was the movie with all
the blue creatures?
Avatar, right.
Avatar is exactly the opposite of that, where
you know, the unknown nature is just nothing
but sweetness and bliss.
And the culture is portrayed as spear-headed
by greedy and rapacious individuals who are
basically manifestations of the military industrial
complex.
The funny thing is that those both made good
stories.
And that’s because… well, it’s because
they have enough archetypal truth so that
there’s many situations that they’re relevant
to.
You know, sometimes Mother Nature is your
best friend, and sometimes it’s your worst
enemy.
And so you could go down to the jungles of
Peru, and you could talk to the people who
live there, and you could find out what they
know about medicinal plants in the jungle,
and you could bring home things to cure disease.
Or you could just go down there and get lost
in the jungle and then you’re dead.
You know in some sense it’s the same jungle.
And whether it’s positive or negative depends
on what stance you take towards it and how
you behave.
And so the other thing that’s really interesting
about mythology, and this is the lovely element
of mythology, is that part of what it does
is tell you how to take this incredibly complex
landscape that’s positive and negative at
the same time, at every level of analysis,
and how to navigate through it so that the
proper balance is maintained as far as the
entire system is concerned.
So the culture has an orderly element, and
that’s what protects us here, and it has
a tyrannical element, and that’s what makes
you treated like numbers at the University
of Toronto.
You know, you get both of those at exactly
the same time.
And then the archetypal individual has the
same fundamental nature.
Hero or villain.
And you know those have archetypal roots,
because the ultimate hero is the ultimate,
perfect person.
And the ultimate villain is Satan himself,
in whatever form he happens to take.
It doesn’t take much knowledge of the structure
before you can see it manifested all over,
especially in movies that are particularly
popular, because they almost always have a
central archetypal theme.
The Marvel superhero movies are a really good
example of that.
And if it’s complex literature, the archetypes
are mixed to some degree.
So you have a hero who’s not only a hero,
you have a hero who has all sorts of flaws.
And he’s in a culture, or she’s in a culture,
that has positive elements and negative elements
and they’re in a broader landscape that’s
characterised by exactly the same thing.
So it’s nuanced.
And the more sophisticated you get, the more
you can tolerate that kind of nuance.
And I think that’s also one of the things…
that’s partly why literature is such a good
antidote to ideology.
Because the more sophisticated the literature
becomes, the more complex, and fragmented
in some sense, or differentiated, the more
differentiated the archetypal landscape becomes.
So when someone tells you a story, whatever
the story happens to be, one of the things
you can do when you know the substructures,
is you can say ‘okay yeah, but where are
the missing pieces?
Where are they going?’
Because if they’re not included then they’re
generally projected onto something.
Because they’re there, you can’t get away
from them, they’re there.
How does the person account for them?
Alright, so now I want to tell you another
story.
So we talked about the Mesopotamian creation
myth last week, and now I want to tell you
about the Egyptian myth of sovereignty.
And so, the first thing I should do is say
that all of the stories that I’m talking
to you about have all sorts of variance.
And so, the Egyptian story that I’m going
to describe lasted for thousands and thousands
of years, and so it isn’t like there was
only one variation of it, there’s all sorts
of variations of it, and I’m only going
to tell you one of them.
And that’s a limitation, but that’s just
how it is for the time being.
So I’m not saying that this is the only
version of this story.
But it’s a version, and it’s the one I’m
most familiar with, and so I can talk about
it, hopefully with some utility.
And it’s a great story.
When I finally figured out what it meant…
it’s so cool, with some of these stories
if you crack them, and you’re able to see
what they mean, they’re absolutely overwhelming.
They’re so bloody brilliant, it’s no wonder
that people regard them as revelatory, you
know, of divine origin, because they have
such power that it’s almost impossible to
imagine how that could’ve got there.
Now, I provide you with the Darwinian explanation
of how that got there, right, because the
stories are representations of social contracts
and behavioural tendencies that have evolved
over thousands and thousands of years.
Because of that, the representation, the story’s
going to have way more information in it than
a typical story might.
But I still can understand how these things
burst upon people with the force of revelation.
One of the things that’s quite interesting
too, if you look at cultures historically,
is that you usually find that the revelation
of the story… it’s like the energy source
on which the culture feeds.
So the story comes first, it has this tremendous
dynamic energy.
The culture basically uses that energy to
propel itself through time, you know, to give
itself conviction and force.
And then at some point the story exhausts
itself, and that would be equivalent, in some
sense, I suppose, to Nietzsche’s announcement
of the death of God.
And this has happened many times.
Alright, so there’s four main characters
in the Egyptian story.
There’s Osiris, Isis, Set, and Horus.
Now, Osiris, we’ll start with Osiris, but
you could start with any of the characters,
because one of the things that’s quite interesting
about mythology is that the myths don’t
make any distinction between the causal priority
of these characters.
Any of them can be regarded as fundamental.
So the hero is the person who separates the
world parents for example, and brings being
into existence.
But you can also say well it’s Tiamat, which
is more how the Mesopotamian creation myth
is tilted, or you can say you can’t make
sense out of anything unless you have a cultural
lens through which you’re looking.
Like there has to be some pre-existent structure
before information can be generated in any
manner.
So you’re always stuck with this problem,
that in order for something to exist you need
a substrate, you need an interpretive substructure,
and you need an interpreter.
And you can’t say that one of those thing
precedes the other.
They all have to be there at the same time.
You could say from a Darwinian perspective,
they all emerged and complexified in unison
as time progressed.
It doesn’t explain how the origin originated,
however.
Okay, so you’ve got Osiris.
Now Osiris is the founder of the Egyptian
state.
And so, you know, before people wrote things
down, you have to kind of try to understand
how it was that they remembered things.
Their memory was more like an amalgam, or
a gist.
So we already know that if you tell the story
of your actions yesterday that it doesn’t
take you 16 hours to tell the story.
Hopefully it takes you like five minutes.
And why that is is not obvious, but part of
the reason is, for whatever underlying reasons,
you know what parts of the story are relevant
to other people, and what parts aren’t.
So basically what you’re going to do is
try not to tell them things they already know.
Because that would just be pointless.
And in order to do that you more or less have
to know what they know and what they don’t
know.
And you have to more or less stay on the edge
of that.
But you can do that.
Well, I might ask you, well what did you do
over the last three months, or I could say
what have you done for the last couple of
years?
And in each case you’re going to collapse
that into some representation.
Now imagine that the problem you’re trying
to solve is ‘what did your culture try to
do for the last five thousand years?’
Well imagine that there are… the culture
in part is being continually informed by the
individuals that compose it.
And there’re going to be different individuals
of different stature who discover things of
different importance.
And we often know some people like that.
We know of Thomas Edison, for example, and
we can name actual people.
But that’s in part because we write things
down and have records of them.
You can imagine though that you’re trying
to represent your history in a way that you
can remember.
You’re going to tell stories about people
who have done interesting things, because
that’s what you even when you tell a story
about yourself.
So imagine you tell one story about someone
who did something interesting and then you
tell another story about someone else who
did something interesting, and so forth.
And that’s continually going on, let’s
say, in a tribal or archaic culture.
So then what you get is a set of stories about
people doing interesting things.
Well, it’s easy for that to shift into the
ancestors doing interesting things.
And then it’s easy for that to shift into
the ancestor doing wonderful things.
And that’s basically what happens, is that
you get the emergence of the culture story,
which is something like a small set of cultural
heroes who have done all the things that are
worth doing.
And what you’re doing is imitating them.
And you know, this is… you know, your empirical
memory of events only lasts about a hundred
years.
Because there isn’t anyone old enough to
remember anything past that.
And so what has to happen is that everything
that happened before that has to be collapsed
into some form that’s memorable, so that
it can be brought forward and taught, and
that’s the function of these stories.
These stories actually… it’s almost as
if the story has abandoned everything that
hasn’t stuck in people’s memories.
And so all that’s left is the most significant…
is the most significance.
Because otherwise why would people bother
with it?
They wouldn’t tell the story, they wouldn’t
be gripped by it.
Okay, so Osiris, he’s one of these figures.
You could think… if you allowed people to
tell stories of George Washington, say, and
Abe Lincoln, and all the semi-mythologised
founders of the United States, if you allowed
people, in the absence of textbooks and writing,
to tell stories about those men for the next
thousand years, maybe what you’d get out
of that is an origin story of the mythic founder
of the state.
And that seems to be what’s happened in
the Egyptian case with Osiris.
Now he’s a god, but he’s got human characteristics.
And so he’s also granted the status of something
that’s eternal.
Okay now, here’s the story of Osiris, roughly
speaking.
He’s kind of old now, and he’s a little
bit blind, but he’s blind in a specific
way.
And the way that he’s specifically blind
is that he’s wilfully blind.
Now if you’re wilfully blind about… the
Egyptians say this straightforwardly, and
I’ll tell you why they believe this.
If you’re wilfully blind there’s things
that you could know that you take pains not
to know.
And wilful blindness, under English common
law, can be grounds for criminal conviction.
So for example, if you run a company and you
think that your treasurer is cooking the books
but it’s working to your favour, and you
decide ‘well, I just won’t look’, and
then later it comes out, you could say ‘well
I didn’t know’, and the people who are
prosecuting would say ‘yeah but you could
have known and you took a conscious choice
not to know, so you’re culpable.’
And I think that’s actually the best model
of Freudian repression, in a sense.
It isn’t exactly repression, it is failure
to make the effort to know something that
you could know.
Now, sometimes you…
look, sometimes something terrible happens
to you and you just can’t understand it.
But sometimes something terrible is happening
and you refuse to think about it.
And because you refuse to think about it you
really don’t know what it is.
And you might say, ‘well I can’t be culpable
then because I don’t know what it is’,
but you could have known, so you’re culpable.
So it’s voluntary ignorance.
And that’s the problem with Osiris.
He was a great guy when he was young, he was
a hero.
He founded the Egyptian state.
But you know he’s not everything he could
be anymore.
He’s gotten anachronistic and outdated and
wilfully blind, which is even worse.
Now there’s an idea here.
It’s such a bloody brilliant idea, it’s
mindboggling.
So Osiris is the state manifested in personified
form, and that’s reasonable, because the
state is like a person.
The person of the state is manifested in the
body of laws, and you guys all imitate that
body of laws, and that’s what basically
makes you citizens of the state.
So that’s what makes you citizens of the
state.
You can all get along because all of you are
imitating the same thing, and what you’re
imitating is the central body of custom and
law that makes up the state.
And that’s why you can predict each other.
So that makes you a good citizen.
Now the problem with being a good citizen
is that sometimes if you’re a good citizen
you’re a bad person.
That’s a big problem.
So for example, the better you were at being
a Nazi, in all likelihood, the worse a person
you were.
And so that’s a very useful observation,
because one of the things it shows is that
even though it’s necessary for you to imitate
the central personality of the state, sometimes
the central personality of the state can be
pathological.
And the Egyptians, who had established quite
a lengthy state (as opposed, say, to the Mesopotamians…
the Egyptians had been existing in a complex
state apparatus for a very long period of
time), they started to encounter problems
that were intrinsic to the state.
Now you remember, in the Mesopotamian creation
myth, the primary danger was Tiamat.
You know, you make a lot of racket, you kill
Apsu, that’s order, Tiamat comes flooding
back and takes you out.
Well you can imagine that that would be the
primary story of people in a civilisation
that was somewhat fragile.
They’re a hell of a lot more worried about
being invaded by the next, you know, round
of barbarians, or having their crops fail,
or being flooded out or something like that,
than they are concerned about whether or not
the whole state apparatus has become corrupt
and is going to collapse.
Now they’re partly concerned about that,
because remember Marduk, the emperor, is supposed
to be being a good Marduk and keeping an eye
on everything.
But the myth, the mythic structure only talks
about Apsu a tiny little bit, it basically
says ‘don’t kill Tiamat’s consort or
you’ll make her angry’.
The Egyptians take that a lot farther.
They look at Osiris and they say ‘well he
was… there was something really good about
him.
Without him we wouldn’t even have our state,
so we bloody well better be happy about that,
because the state is better than no state’.
You know, you could say pathological order
is better than absolute chaos.
Now you can have an argument about that but…
whatever, it’s, you know, it depends on
how pathological the order, obviously.
But it isn’t that untrammeled chaos is a
good solution.
I think that you can, and I’m only using
this as an example… you know, the Americans,
and us as well, went into Iraq to take out
a person who was clearly a dictator.
And who had… who was a pretty bad guy and
who had really bad sons.
And his heroes were people like Stalin and
Hitler.
Well, they took him out.
Well then what?
Well, then all hell broke loose.
You know, because the theory was, you take
out the bad guy at the top and all the good
guys at the bottom get together and instantly
they have a good government.
It’s like, that isn’t what happened at
all, what happened was the whole state degenerated
into chaos.
And partly out of that chaos came ISIS, and
it’s not self-evident that ISIS is preferable
to Hussein.
At least Hussein educated all the women, and
he was relatively secular, all things considered.
So I’m not making a case for Hussein, my
point is that, you know, you have to be careful
when you disrupt order, even when it’s pathological,
because God only knows what’s going to spring
forth.
And that doesn’t mean that you should never
try to overcome pathological order, but it
does mean that you should be very, very careful
when you do so.
You know, you have to do a micro-analysis
in some sense to make sure that you know what
the hell you’re doing.
Alright so anyways, Osiris, he’s a good
guy man, he established the state, he was
a great guy, he was a hero, he, you know,
made order out of chaos, and that’s where
you live, so great.
But he’s a little old, a little out of date,
and he’s wilfully blind, and that’s so
smart because I think what the Egyptians did
is encapsulate in narrative form the primary
danger of all human institutions.
There’s two of them.
And Eliade talks about this a lot with regards
to flood mythology.
So here’s an example.
There are flood myths all over the world,
and there may have even been a flood, there’s
pretty good archeological evidence for that,
that there was a great flood about 13,000
years ago, when a bunch of comets hit the
Earth and melted the North American ice shield,
but we won’t get into that.
But it doesn’t really matter, because the
mythological sub-structure of the story still
has the same meaning regardless of its historical
reality.
So in the Biblical story of the flood, basically
what happens is that humanity is created,
then they degenerate rapidly.
And they get so degenerate, which is sort
of like the elder Gods getting out of hand
in the Mesopotamian story, that God thinks,
‘oh to hell with all of you, you’re a
big mistake, I’m just going to wipe you
out’.
But he finds one good guy, that’s Noah,
and out of Noah, who’s like another Adam,
in some sense, the world of human beings is
regenerated.
But the idea is that corrupt people get washed
away.
And Eliade talks about the flood myth all
over the world, Mircea Eliade, and he says
that generally speaking there’s two reasons
why the deities flood the planet.
And one is the system is old and out-dated,
and the second is that people are corrupt.
And then if you get the two things working
together, you get a system that’s out of
date that becomes pathological faster because
people are corrupt.
And so I think that you can use the flood
in New Orleans as a good example of that.
Because on the one hand you can say, well
it was a hurricane.
So that’s a natural disaster.
But on the other hand you could say, well
people knew the damn dykes were too weak,
and they didn’t do anything about it, you
know, they were only built for a hundred year
storm.
And Louisiana is corrupt beyond belief, I
mean, for a democratic state, it’s not corrupt
compared to most states, but it’s really
corrupt compared to most democratic states,
and if you dump money into Louisiana it just
goes into people’s pockets anyways and the
infrastructure doesn’t get fixed up.
So then you might ask yourself, well was the
flood a consequence of a natural disaster,
or the blindness of the culture?
Well, you can never tell which of those are
true.
If you freeze to death in the winter is it
because it’s cold or because you’re stupid?
You know, there’s no difference between
those two things.
So if you get wiped out, it’s because nature
comes after you and because your culture isn’t
sufficient to protect.
And so you can’t separate those two things.
Okay, so… now the other case that the Egyptians
are making, and this is quite cool, is that
if you take a system that’s doing just fine,
and you just leave it alone long enough, it
becomes dysfunctional.
And there is a bunch of reasons for that.
I mean, you know, you can imagine that you
take your laptop, and it’s in perfect working
order, and you put it in the closet for twenty
years, and you take it out, what do you have?
Well, it’ll still turn on.
Do you have a laptop?
Well no, by then it won’t even work, it
won’t be able to communicate with the internet,
there won’t be any peripherals that could
plug into it, the software would be so outdated
that you wouldn’t even know how to use it.
Like it’s a brick, basically.
And so the point is that, and you can really
see this with electronic equipment, a perfectly
functional thing, maintained in stasis, of
its own accord becomes dysfunctional.
And so what that means is that you have to
run around like a mad hyena just keeping your
things working.
Now of course you know that, because how much
time do you spend in a month updating your
electronics?
You know, it’s just a treadmill of updates.
I think part of the reason they haven’t
contributed to overall productivity is because
people take all the time they used to waste
typing things out on paper trying to keep
their efficient electronics actually working.
And you know, learning all the things you
have to learn and re-learning them.
There’s this scene in Alice in Wonderland.
So Alice is in the Underworld, right?
And she meets the Red Queen down there.
So that’s Mother Nature.
And she’s always running around going ‘off
with their heads!
Off with their heads!’ in an arbitrary way,
which is of course what the Red Queen does.
And at one point she tells Alice, which is
such a… it’s such a remarkably deep line,
she says to Alice ‘in my Kingdom you have
to run as fast as you can just to stay in
the same place.’
And that’s exactly right.
So you can think, the environment that you’re
trying to adapt to is a dynamic concatenation
of patterns and it’s transforming across
time.
Not completely unpredictably, but certainly
not predictably.
And so that means if you build a structure
that’s adapted to it, that structure has
to change and flow in keeping with the change
and flow of the underlying environment or
it gets outdated.
You know, it gets obsolescent.
And so all you have to do is sit there and
do nothing and you become obsolescent.
And so that’s the problem with Osiris being
old.
He was a good guy when he was young, but he’s
old now, and the old solutions don’t solve
the new problems.
And you could call that an Egyptian existential
statement.
All of you have a culture.
It’s old.
It doesn’t apply.
Or it doesn’t apply well.
And so what are you going to do with it?
Are you going to throw the whole thing out?
Well we know what happens, the Mesopotamians
already told us what happens if you do that.
It’s like, Tiamat comes flooding back and
all hell breaks loose, so you can’t throw
everything away, but it doesn’t work very
well, so it’s up to you to figure out how
to fix it.
Okay so… but now Osiris has got another
problem.
So you might say… well let’s say you’ve
got an old computer (this, by the way [points
to computer], in case you haven’t noticed,
is a very old computer), and if you keep tapping
on it, and upgrading it a little bit, you
could keep it more or less up-to-date.
At some point you’re going to throw the
whole damn thing away.
But you could do incremental changes to it
on a continual basis, and the thing will more
or less stay functional.
You could think about those incremental changes
as partial revolutions, right?
Remember that hierarchy.
Now and then you have to change the operating
system.
That sucks, because that means everything
operating underneath virtually has to change.
But more often you’re doing a tweak here
and a tweak there, at lower, more specific
levels, and if you tweak enough then the probability
that the whole thing is going to collapse
and you’ll have to do a clean install is
quite low.
Well the same thing applies to the state,
logically enough.
This is the state.
If you think that your laptop isn’t the
state then you’re not thinking about your
laptop properly.
It’s the state.
And it’s going to be more and more the state
as we progress over the next twenty years.
So you know that if you’re aware and you
keep the updates up and you stay awake that
you can keep the thing functioning.
At some point it’s going to get anachronistic,
it’s better to just replace it, which is
also by the way what’s going to happen to
all of you, right?
And it’s a decision that evolution, in some
sense, and biology has made, that at some
point trying to keep you updated is so bloody
complicated that you might as well get rid
of the whole thing and let something new occur,
and I’m really dead serious about this,
because death evolved.
You know, you have elements in you that are
three and a half billion years old.
Not everything dies.
And some creatures are functionally immortal.
But not us.
And the reason is, well at some point we’re
too old to be updated, and so that’s the
end of that.
Seems to happen about over a hundred year
period.
Anyways, now imagine you just ignore your
computer completely.
You don’t update the thing at all.
Well, it’s going to get anachronistic of
its own accord, but if you refuse to engage
in those operations that would keep it updated,
it’s going to get anachronistic a lot faster.
And that’s what happens to Osiris, they
say the same thing.
It’s like, he’s old, and that’s part
of the problem, he’s past his prime.
But the worst part of the problem is that
he’s wilfully blind.
He won’t take action even though he knows
it’s necessary.
And so he gets out of date and pathological
faster than necessary.
Now when you hear in the flood stories that
God is angry about the sins of men, and that’s
why He washes everything away, it’s the
same idea.
Now the word ‘sin’ comes from the Greek
word hamartia, and hamartia is an archery
term.
And to sin means not to hit the centre of
the target.
And so basically the idea in the flood stories
is that if enough people aren’t aiming at
the target, or hitting the centre, then things
are going to get so corrupt and unstable that
everything is going to get washed away.
And that’s right, it’s exactly, perfectly
accurate.
Which is very, very cool.
It’s remarkable that that’s the case.
Okay, so now Osiris (because this is a myth)
has an evil brother.
Now that’s a pretty common occurrence.
If you look at The Lion King (which is very
much the Egyptian creation myth, by the way),
the Lion King… what’s the old guy’s
name?
The old lion.
Mufasa.
He has a brother, right?
What’s his brother?
Scar!
And what’s the problem with Scar?
He’s scarred.
Right, so you know, he says he’s from the
bottom of the gene pool.
And you know, he’s been in second place
all his life, and he’s very, very intelligent.
He worships his own intelligence.
He regards himself as a higher form of intellect,
which is a very common characteristic of evil
brother is mythology, and there’s a reason
for that.
And he’s scarred because life has scarred
him.
And he’s bitter and resentful and he wants
to bring down the order and he wants to kill
the son of the king.
I mean, he’s a bad guy.
Now the problem is that Mufasa underestimates
him, and that’s exactly what happens to
Osiris.
So Osiris has this brother, Set, or Seth.
And I’ve a sneaking suspicion that our word
‘set’, for setting Sun is from that word,
although I don’t know that for sure.
But sounds are generally… sounds in language
remain stable across a very long period of
time, and set was definitely, from the Egyptian
perspective, the enemy of the Sun.
You know, that’s part of the Egyptian cosmology.
And the Sun is associated with illumination
and brightness and daytime consciousness and
clear apprehension and vision, and all those
things.
And of course night is opposed to that, unconsciousness
and blindness and danger, and all of those
things.
So anyways, Set, he’s pretending to be Osiris’s
loving brother, but he’s not.
He’s plotting to overthrow him first chance
he gets.
And so he’s just sitting in the background,
feeding him bad advice, waiting for him to
get weak enough so that he can strike.
Now the name Set is taken by the Egyptian
Coptics and turned into Satan.
So Set is the precursor of the Christian Satan.
So the reason I’m telling you that is so
that you can see how these ideas, these archetypal
ideas of corruption and evil are extraordinarily
ancient, and they’re part of the process
whereby people are trying to figure out what
the right way is to act and what the wrong
way is to act, and what the right way is to
set up institutions and what the wrong way
is to set up institutions.
So it’s a very, very long process.
And it’s not something that someone just
sat around and thought up.
It’s way, way deeper than that.
So anyways, Osiris is being, you know, getting
weaker and being blind, and one day Set thinks
‘alright, time for action’, so he takes
his brother and he chops him up into little
pieces.
Now, Osiris is a god, so you’re not going
to kill him, but you can make it very difficult
for him to get his act together.
So basically what happens is Osiris falls
apart.
Now think about that.
You fall apart.
People say that.
The relationship fell apart.
I fell apart.
Things fall apart.
What does that mean?
Well it means that a thing is usually a complex
unity of multiple sub-entities, and sometimes
what holds them together, the superordinate
structure, collapses, and all that’s left
are the things.
Because you know, when you fall apart, you
don’t completely fall apart.
You know, you’re still alive.
What’s happened is that the unity of your
psychological structure has been fragmented.
And that’s a trip to the underworld, man.
So you’re going to be unhappy.
I broke up with my partner and then I fell
apart.
Well everyone knows what that means.
Okay, so that’s what happens to Osiris.
Things fall apart.
So then Set, being a sneaky sort of character,
takes all of Osiris’s pieces and he puts
them all over Egypt.
He hides them here and there so that Osiris
is going to have a hell of a time recollecting
himself and getting his act together and coming
back.
And so, things fall apart.
Now the same thing happens in The Lion King,
obviously, because Scar kills Mufasa.
So fine, then Set rules.
That’s not a good day for the Egyptians.
Remember what happens in The Lion King when
Scar rules?
The environment becomes completely devastated
because they overhunt, right?
So you get total environmental devastation.
It’s all black and burnt.
And, you know, nothing is functioning properly.
And remember after Simba comes back to set
things right it starts to rain and everything
comes back to life.
Well it’s another indication of the idea
that you really can’t separate the environment
from the culture, you know, they’re in a
dynamic system of interaction.
Anyways, Osiris, things have fallen apart.
Well Osiris has a wife, he has to, he’s
King of Order.
Well, we’re missing someone, we’re missing
the Queen of Chaos, we’re missing the Queen
of the Underworld.
That’s Isis.
Now Isis was a long-lasting goddess.
There’s been goddess religions forever.
There’s an idea among misinformed feminist
anthropologists that the original religious
structures were feminine, earth-goddess type
religions, and then they were replaced by
patriarchal religions.
And there’s no historical evidence for that.
And the best work I know on that is actually
through the Jungians…
Jung and Eric Neumann.
Because what they figured out… they’re
kind of on the same track, thinking about
the same idea, that there seems to be a shift
between matriarchal values to patriarchal
values, and that that was a historical shift.
But what they actually found out instead was
that’s a shift in mythological idea.
It’s not a historical reality.
And it’s useful as a mythological idea but
you shouldn’t project it backwards onto
time and make it a historical reality.
Anyways, Isis, she’s been Queen of the Underworld
forever.
Now of course, when order collapses, chaos
reappears, and that’s what happens.
Isis pops up out of the Underworld and her
husband’s missing and she’s not very happy
about that.
So she wanders all over Egypt looking for
his phallus.
And so… now that’s an interesting idea,
because it touches on the biology of innovation,
in some sense.
So you’ve heard of the notion of a seminal
idea.
Well, that’s a mythologically informed metaphor.
And so the idea is that, in biological reproduction,
semen falls on fertile ground, and out of
that something emerges.
Well, there’s a tight analogue between that
and what happens in the Egyptian myth with
regards to sexuality.
Now, Jung and Freud had a big argument about
this, eh, because Freud thought that you could
reduce everything to sexuality.
And Jung said no no, what you don’t understand
is that sexuality itself is often used as
a symbol for something even more profound.
And they didn’t agree on that, and that’s
part of why they went their separate ways.
Freud was very much unwilling to believe that
religion could be anything other than a set
of defensive and repressive beliefs and practices
designed to protect you from death anxiety.
That was basically his hypothesis.
And it’s wrong.
I mean, there is that element, of course,
because you can use dogma to protect yourself
against all sorts of things.
But you can’t reduce a whole damn thing
to that.
You have got to watch people of any type,
that are intellectuals, who will tell you
that everything can be reduced to one cause.
You know, it’s like a misplaced monotheism.
Lots of people do that.
For Marx it’s economics or class warfare,
for Freud it’s sexuality (although he also
considers aggression), for Foucault it’s
power.
You know, it’s like no, it’s not that
simple.
You can make a good story out of those motivations,
because they’re powerful motivations, and
they do affect everything, but that doesn’t
mean they cause everything uni-dimensionally.
Okay, so anyways, Isis pops up, Queen of the
Underworld, Set takes control, chaos emerges
from the Underworld, Isis wanders around,
she finds Osiris’s phallus, and she makes
herself pregnant.
Well, so what does that mean?
Well, it means a lot of things.
One thing it means is that if a great system
falls apart, the parts still have life.
And, you know, you could think about that.
People often talk about the stability (to
the degree that it’s stable)… part of
the stability of capitalism is its creative
destruction.
Capitalism allows great enterprises to collapse
and disperse.
But they don’t break down into sub-atomic
particles, right?
They collapse but the pieces they collapse
into still have life, some of them more than
others.
And then if something collapses, sometimes
part of the thing that collapsed has enough
life to build something new out of the pieces.
That’s the same thing that happens to you
when you undergo a radical, revolutionary
transformation in your character.
You might even feel like you’re dying.
And in some sense the organising principles
by which you lived are dying.
That’s what’s taking you out.
And it’s painful.
Those things are alive.
It’s no trivial matter to be taken apart.
But you know, you hope that you get taken
apart, you can find some new information down
there in the chaos, and that’s your union
with Isis, roughly speaking.
And out of that union of information from
the chaos and the parts of you that are left,
you could come springing back.
And everyone hopes that, and often it’s
the case.
You know, one of the lessons you can derive
from Egyptian mythology is bloody well stay
awake.
And make the little corrections when you need
to.
Don’t be wilfully blind, because if you’re
wilfully blind you’re going to store up
chaos, because you’re not keeping it at
bay.
And then one day when you’re weak it’s
just going to take you out.
And that happens.
That happens to people all the time.
They let things around them degenerate back
into chaos.
And then one day they’re weak, and something
else comes along to hit them, and they’re
done.
They can’t get up.
It’s too heavy and too hard a hit.
And so then they’re down in the Underworld
and they stay there.
The general rule is if you’re going to go
to the Underworld, it’s better to go on
purpose and for short voyages.
And that’s the idea behind voluntary exposure,
right?
Find out what you don’t want to look at.
It’s easy enough to do that, because you’re
going to see yourself avoiding it.
Then figure out how you can approach it and
order some of it, in as big chunks as you
can manage.
And you can do that all the time.
Stay awake.
Because then you keep your infrastructure
properly maintained, and the probability that
you will tolerate a powerful blow is much,
much higher.
It’s not certain.
That’s the other thing about myths.
They tell you the best way to negotiate through
life, but they never tell you that that will
work.
They just tell you that that’s your best
bet.
And so yeah, maybe that’s enough.
It might be enough.
Okay, anyways, so Isis finds Osiris’s phallus,
and gets pregnant.
And then back to the Underworld she goes.
And she goes through her pregnancy and she
gives birth to Horus.
Now that’s a pretty common story, right?
That’s the long lost rightful king.
You know, in King Arthur, for example, Arthur
has to be taken away from the castle to be
raised, basically in isolation.
It’s a very, very common story.
And the reason… the same thing happens Harry
Potter, right?
Harry Potter is stuck with these Dursleys
and they just… they’re like every resentful
child’s image of their parents.
Maybe it’s more like every resentful 13-year-old’s
image of their parents.
And you know, the truth of the matter is that
you are kind of stuck off in the normative
wastelands of your culture.
You have your specific parents, they’re
not archetypal representatives of reality,
they’re your parents.
They’re nature and culture, but in finite
and flawed human form.
And what that means in part is you are raised
outside the domain of your culture.
It’s old, it isn’t working very well,
and it’s not transmitted very well to you.
So you grow up outside of it, you’re alienated
from it.
That’s that existential alienation, but
people have always felt alienated from their
damn culture, because it’s old, and it’s
sort of blind.
And there you are young and dynamic and full
of life and all it’s telling you is you
can do this and you can’t do that.
And then you know, lying to you about some
things, and doing a pretty nasty job of others.
So you’re outside it, you’re alienated
from it.
And that’s what happens to Horus.
He’s outside, in the Underworld.
That’s where he gets born.
And so that’s worth thinking about too.
Anyways, he grows up.
Now Horus is an interesting sort of character.
So you’ve all seen the image of the Egyptian
eye, right?
Everyone knows that image.
Even now, which is pretty cool.
So it’s got an eyebrow and it’s got an
eye in the middle and then it’s got the
iris, and usually the pupil is so big that
it covers the whole iris.
And there’s a variety of reasons for that,
but one of the reasons is that it symbolises
interest and attention.
So when you’re interested in something,
your pupil grows.
And so Horus’s pupil is really big, and
he’s checking things out like mad.
So Horus is the eye, and he’s also a falcon.
And you might say, well why is he a falcon?
And the answer to that is falcons are birds
of prey, and they can really see.
So that’s another amplification of the idea
of the eye.
Now falcons fly up above everything, even
above the pyramids.
And they can see wherever they want to see,
and so Horus is the thing that flies up above
the structures of mankind, in some sense,
and can see them panoramically.
So he’s not encapsulated in any particular
pyramid, he’s the thing that’s above all
pyramids and looking and providing you with
an overview.
And I think the best way to conceptualise
Horus in modern terms is attention.
That’s not thought, that’s a whole different
thing.
Like attention is what thought… attention
is the precursor to thought, in some sense.
Attention is where you meet meaning, and that’s
another way of thinking about it.
Attention is actually where you take undifferentiated
chaos and start to turn it into order.
And you think about… how much do you like
being paid attention to?
People love that.
Children, you don’t pay attention to them,
they become pathological.
You don’t pay attention to your partner,
your relationship dissolves.
No one pays attention to you, you crawl off
in a corner and die.
Advertisers pay for your attention.
Like attention, that’s a currency, man,
that’s value.
And you like to be paid attention to when
you do good things, and maybe you’ll even
do terrible things so that someone pays attention
to you.
Attention’s a big deal.
We don’t understand it very well.
But anyways, the Egyptians conceptualised
it as a god.
And that’s smart, that’s a very smart
idea.
Anyways, Horus grows up in the Underworld,
and then when he gets kind of big and ready
to contend with the world, he thinks I’m
going to take the damn state back from my
evil uncle.
Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
You’re supposed to grow up, pay attention,
get yourself the hell out of the Underworld,
and then take your state back from your evil
uncle.
Okay, so what happens?
So Horus, he gets himself all prepared.
And he’s son of Order and Chaos, man, he’s
no second-rate character.
You remember… how many of you have seen
The Avengers movies?
Okay.
Okay so I think it’s Samuel Jackson, right?
Samuel Jackson is often in the background,
and if I remember correctly he’s kind of
like the mediator between these shadowy figures
that sort of exist as…
I don’t know, they all look like middle-aged
white men and they’re sort of like a power
group and they communicate on screen, I don’t
know exactly who they are.
But Jackson plays an intermediary.
But he is lacking an eye.
And part of the reason, you infer, that Jackson
is lacking an eye is because he’s had a
pretty long history of being involved in catastrophe.
And you know, one consequence of that is that
he’s become damaged.
Well, the same thing happens to Horus.
So Horus goes back and he says to Set, I see
you for who you are.
I know what you’re up to.
You’re working for destruction.
You want to take the state apart.
There’s nothing positive about what you’re
doing.
You facilitate deception.
So I’m taking the state back.
So they have a big fight.
And during the fight, Set tears out one of
Horus’s eyes.
Now that’s worth thinking about too, because
what it means (and this is exactly right)…
you know, one of the things Jung said about
encountering malevolence.
It’s like, let’s say that you wanted to
understand what the Nazis did.
And so you started to take it apart.
And at each little bit of exploration you
take it apart a little bit more deeply, and
then a little bit more deeply, and then a
little bit more deeply.
You want to get to the bottom of it.
Well you might ask yourself, well what’s
at the bottom of terrible things?
Well the answer to that… an answer to that…
is the archetype of evil.
And if you are to the degree that you encounter
that, even if you’re capable of god-like
attention, which is the case with Horus, the
probability is that that will be so devastating
that it will destroy half your consciousness.
That’s what happens to Horus.
And so that’s another thing I really like
about the myths, man.
They don’t mess around.
You’re supposed to come out of the Underworld,
you’re supposed to see what the hell’s
going on, you’re supposed to go back and
take the state away from its archaic institutions
and wilful blindness.
But if you really contend with that, you better
look out, because you’re contending with
something that you can barely master.
Anyways, Horus beats Set, despite the fact
that he has his eye torn out.
And so then he tell Set to go outside the
boundaries of the Kingdom and to never come
back.
Well, why doesn’t he kill him?
Well he can’t, he’s a god.
You can’t get rid of Set.
Set is the deity of the decomposition of states.
That’s not going away.
The best you can do is hold it at bay for
periods of time.
And you have to be awake and aware of its
constant presence.
Anyways, he chases Set away but he gets his
eye back.
And so he reclaims his consciousness from
malevolence, essentially.
And then you might think, okay, well what
should he do?
He should slap that eye back in his head,
and he’s defeated evil, so now he should
be king.
And that would be a good ending to the story,
but that isn’t what the Egyptians do, and
this is where they really get brilliant, in
my estimation.
So Horus takes his eye, and he goes back to
the Underworld.
So he does this voluntarily.
He goes back to the Underworld.
And he goes back to where Osiris is existing,
because it’s sort of the land of the dead.
And so Osiris has this weird existence.
He’s scattered all over Egypt, but his essence,
I suppose, his spirit, is down there in the
Underworld, which is… it’s not exactly
hell.
Hell is a suburb of the Underworld.
Like it’s the worst neighbourhood of the
Underworld, that’s a good way of thinking
about it.
You guys go to the Underworld fairly often.
You may take a rare side-trip to hell, and
you probably regret it.
And we can talk about that means, because
it actually has a very specific meaning.
Anyways, Osiris isn’t in hell, he’s just
in the Underworld.
So he’s sitting there sort of, you know,
inactive.
And in rough shape.
So Horus goes down to the Underworld, and
he finds Osiris, and he gives him an eye!
And so then Osiris can see again.
Remember, he couldn’t see, he was wilfully
blind, right?
And so that’s partly what led to his demise.
Horus give him this eye that’s been hard
fought.
It’s the eye with which he encountered evil.
He gives Osiris that eye, perks him right
up.
And so then Horus and Osiris go back to the
surface world, and they unite to form the
ruler of Egypt.
And so the idea is that the proper ruler is
obviously the thing that can pay attention
and conquer the pathology of the state and
wilful blindness, but it’s more that.
It’s the thing that does that and then rejuvenates
the state.
And you know, one of the things, I think this
is quite interesting… so the hippie culture
in the 1960s was a revolutionary culture,
and you can make a case that during the 60s,
and the latter part of the 50s, young people’s
attention was very much focused on certain
pathological elements of the state.
You know, the Civil Rights Movement seemed
to be a real thing, there was a movement towards
emancipation of women, there were lots of
things that I think you can look at from a
distance and say, you know, good work.
But then there was the other element of it,
which was, well, you know, down with the state
and don’t trust anyone over 30.
Well, that’s kind of stupid, because first
of all it’s not that long till you’re
30 and then what do you do?
And second, well no, you can’t throw the
damn baby out with the bathwater.
I mean first of all, you’re probably doing
that because you don’t want to grow up,
ever.
You’re just Peter Pan.
And second, it’s like, you can’t leave
Osiris languishing in the Underworld.
You have to give him vision and bring him
back up to the surface.
Because I don’t care how attentive you are,
if you’re also not wise you’re not going
to be good for anything.
And the wisdom is partly the integration of
the best your culture has to offer you into
your character, so that you can be an avatar
of culture, an attentive avatar of culture.
And then you’re a well-balanced soul.
Well, so the Egyptians figured all this out.
And then it’s even cooler than that, because
they used this idea of the union of Horus
and Osiris as their conceptual representation
of what gave the Pharaoh sovereignty.
Because again, like the Mesopotamians, they
were trying to figure out, well what should
rule?
What should be above all?
And the Mesopotamians figured, well it’s
something like Marduk, he’s got lots of
eyes, he can talk, he’s brave, he’ll conquer
the unknown.
As a consequence, he makes a pretty good top
god.
And the Egyptians added a level of sophistication
to that, because Horus is not only the thing
that will go into the Underworld, he goes
into the Underworld and he rescues things
of tremendous value and then unites with them,
so that not only can he see, but he’s wise.
And so then that’s what the Pharaoh is supposed
to be.
And the Egyptians basically characterised
that union as something akin to the immortal
soul.
Now, Eliade tracks this development, he called
it the ‘democratisation of Osiris’.
So first of all, basically only the Pharaoh
was allowed to be the Horus-Osiris union in
some sense.
And so in a way he was God on Earth, you know,
which is a conception of course that has lasted
into cultures for a very, very long period
of time.
And the Japanese still thought that way about
their emperor until the end of World War II.
Many of them still think that way.
So he was the embodiment of divine sovereignty.
It was in the leader only.
But as the Egyptian state developed, the idea
that that soul was an attribute started to
descend down the power hierarchy.
So after a while the aristocracy started to
use it.
And then, and this is a radical oversimplification,
but it’ll do for the purposes of this discussion,
you know by the time the Jews came along,
and they came out of Egypt (mythologically
speaking), the idea that there could be a
union or a relationship between something
that was divine and something that was individual
was distributed a long ways down the power
hierarchy.
And then by the time the Greeks showed up,
well in some sense it was all males, at least
all males who were part of the polity.
And when the Christians emerged, it was everyone.
Prostitutes, tax collectors, thieves, murderers,
everyone.
And so the idea of sovereignty started to
become, you know first of all it was a mythological
attribute, it was identified with the ruler,
but then it became a psychological attribute
that was distributed across the entire population.
It’s brilliant.
It’s brilliant!
And as far as I can tell, those conceptualisations
formed the sub-structure of our belief that
each person is divinely valuable, in their
own right.
That they have inalienable rights, even if
you’re a murderer, right, the state is very
restricted in what it can do to you.
Even if you committed a terrible crime, even
if you admit to it, the state is still very
restricted in what it’s allowed to do to
you.
Because there’s an idea that there’s something
about you that has the quality of transcendent
value.
That’s exactly it.
And well, we know some of the attributes.
One of them is you can see and pay attention
and another is that you can speak and communicate.
You know, the other is that you can become
wise, that you can approach things that frighten
you with courage, and generate new information
as a consequence.
Like there’s lots of things about you that
the relationship between Chaos and Order actually
literally depend upon.
And so the state has come to respect the individual
partly because the individual is, by necessity,
the thing that rejuvenates the state.
And so there’s this dynamic relationship
between the two.
The state structures you, but it’s old and
it’s blind, and there’s lots of things
it can’t see, and it’s partly corrupt.
Okay, but it’s hell of a lot better than
nothing, generally speaking, and so then you’re
like the forerunner of the state, and you
can pay attention.
Maybe you can see where things aren’t working
exactly right, where they’re not working
properly, and fix them.
And so then the state maintains its protective
structure across time and you exist in a dialectical
relationship with it.
You know, you see by the time the Christian
hero mythology emerges, Christ is more the
reconstructor of the state than he is the
thing that encounters chaos, right?
Because a huge chunk of the Christian story
is about the antagonism between him and his
culture and the Roman culture as well.
So the whole existential drama actually shifts
from hero as buttressing against nature, which
of course would have been the case earlier,
to hero as thing that decomposes and reconstructs
culture in a radical way.
So you know, Moses does the same thing, and
Moses is a master of water, he’s a transformative
agent, so it’s an indication of exactly
the same sort of idea.
That’s a good time for a break.
