the problem with political narratives in my estimation is that they can rapidly transform themselves into ideologies and ideologies are dangerous for a variety of reasons but the primary reason for their danger I think this is a hypothesis is because of their one-sided nature what happens is that they capitalize parasitize I think is even a better way of thinking about it a profound underlying narrative but they don't tell the entire story and so then if you're looking for orientation in the world because you're fragmented and chaotic and somebody provides you with a partial story that's going
to serve an integrating function and it's very one of the things you see in Psychotherapy is that if you're chaotic and confused and you go see a therapist who has a particular kind of practice Freudian behavioral cognitive rogerian whatever there's a high probability that undergoing that course of therapy is going to be good for you and that you might even come to view your life in in the uh in the terms of that therapeutic practice you might say well you why is that therapeutic practice right for you maybe it could have been rogerian instead of
Freudian say and the answer to that is yeah well it probably could be could have been because roughly speaking any coherent ordering principle is better than none and so that's also a good way to think about human development from a intellectual perspective is that partly what has to be provided to individuals as they mature into an adult is some kind of ordering structure and this is one of the facts that people who criticize the dogmatic element of religious belief don't really understand they don't understand that you can't you have to provide people with a determinate
structure of some of some type even if it's constricting and restricting and crushing for that matter you have to pass through a disciplinary structure before and even in principle you could be free before you're disciplined you're not free you're just chaotic and so you have to practice some set of routines and rituals now you could say well they don't necessarily have to be religious and they could be secular you could become a lawyer you could become a plumber you could become a carpenter and I would say yes that's far better than not becoming anything but
the problem with an identity that isn't rooted into the archetypes is it leaves you incomplete because the archetypal rooting of the identity is what helps you grapple with the fundamental existential problems of life and whether you're a carpenter or a plumber or lawyer they're still gonna your soul is still going to hunger for some deeper form of identity and you're not going to get that without being without having your practical identity encapsulated in something that's that's greater from a philosophical perspective and perhaps even deeper than philosophy which I think the archetypal stories are they're the
they're the structure within which philosophy itself is embedded and outside of that is a behavioral structure we've talked about how those evolve you know there's there's a behavioral evolution of something approximating a consensual morality and then stories about that consensual morality emerge and then inside that the the structures of philosophy nest and all of those things have to be addressed by your identity to some degree or you're weak that's the problem you're beset by doubts you'll be set by anxiety you're easy to stop and you don't have much motivation and none of that's good it's
not good at all because life presents you with enough real obstacles in the for in the face of genuine suffering so that unless you're strongly ground and have a real reason for moving forward you're going to get stopped and as soon as you're stopped you are one miserable thing because it's it's almost like the definition of human misery is to be paralyzed by anxiety and emotional pain and also have no motive Force forward it's a terrible State and so you don't want to be in that state and you have to have an identity that's powerful
enough and deeply rooted enough so the most profound doubts that might emerge about your life are met by something of equivalent Force okay so we're going to review the symbolic domain and briefly and then I'm going to show you a bunch of different examples of how it plays itself out partly archetypally and symbolically but also partly politically because I want to show you how both of those things how those things parallel one another and partly what I'm hoping is that understanding the full domain of archetypal symbolic representation will also inoculate you against ideological possession because
you'll know when you're told a half-sided one-sided ideological story you'll know that there's something missing in the story there's there's there's pieces that aren't being told or there's part of the story that isn't being revealed so if it's a story about how tyrannical modern culture is and how oppressive you think well yes obviously but what about the beneficial aspect of it and how is that being represented and dealt with and and so and it's the same story about the negative element of the human being which you hear stories like that all the time because I
think perhaps more intensely since the 1960s but but but because I wasn't around before then I don't know what it was like previous to that there is this idea that people hold and that's promoted that there's something fundamentally you know cancerous about human beings the it was the club of Rome I think when they pronounced that everyone on the planet was going to die of starvation by the year 2000 that human beings were no better than a cancer on the planet it's like well yeah you know there's lots of things about us that could be
improved but when you when you portray the human only as negative the question should arise it's like fair enough but what about the positive part why aren't you telling that story and it doesn't take you you know all you have to do is be sick once and go to a hospital where you get competent care to understand that you know and you can get incompetent care too but sometimes you get really competent care you think yes it's really good that there are some people out there who have their act together and are trying to put
things together you know when you can't forget that in your story and you don't want to forget that in your story about yourself either so so what is the fundamental landscape well the basic idea is that it's it's it's predicated you can look at it multiple different ways it's predicated on the contrast between explored and unexplored territory or the contrast between the interpretive structure that philosophers like Kant talked about and the real world manifestation that underlies under whose existence underlies the validity of empirical thinking right there's you and your structure you interpret the world but
there's also the world informing you and so that's the explored territory versus unexplored territory something like that or its order versus chaos or it's or it's another variant of that would be it's the hero going out into the unknown to count to encounter the dragon of chaos and to gather the information that that's out there in the unknown and and I tried to make the case to you because I'm often accused most recently on Sam Harris's podcast of making up post Hawk stories you know you have a set of stories you can interpret them any
way you want of course that is a danger because you bring an interpretive structure to bear on every set of facts how do I know that this isn't just an arbitrary post-hoc analysis and my answer to that it's a technical answer is it manifests itself at multiple layers of analysis simultaneously and the probability that it's merely an imposition of an a priori interpretive structure is decreased by the number of different levels of manifestation that you can detect the phenomena it's it's an it's it's axiomatic that's why you have five senses that's why because they each
report a different level that's why in science use multiple methods to detect the same thing so one of the things I tried to point out is that you can map this archetypal structure onto brain structure quite nicely even onto hemispheric structure and the function of the subcortical systems but even more particularly you can map it onto the function of specific neuropsychological systems within the within the within the biological neurology we do have an interpretive structure right that's your map so to speak of of expectation and desire in the world that's your model there's a brain
area roughly the hippocampus although this is an oversimplification IT Compares that with incoming sense data which is also a model but we won't get into that for the sake of argument so that's explored territory unexplored territory and the thing in the center doing the comparison that's the knower and so so it strikes me as a highly unlikely although you're welcome to criticize a way that you'll see that kind of stacking of evidence across multiple domains of inquiry without there actually being a pattern there so it's not merely post-hoc analysis and even the people who derive
these patterns like Jung to begin with let's say looked cross-culturally at least to say well here's here's a manifestation of a pattern and here's a separate culture and you can see the same pattern so there's some attempt there to be methodologically rigorous he did the same thing with people's fantasies and dreams and then again by mapping those onto people's behavior in therapy also had them test out the ideas in the world so these aren't as trivial methodologically as people make them out to be and especially that's the case when you can put a biological underpinning
underneath them so the proposition is explored territory unexplored territory and the Explorer roughly speaking and then a differentiation of those two things into positive and negative why because everything complex has a positive and negative element and so explored explored territory can become stultifying and crushing that's tyranny but it's also provides the structure that informs and protects you and unexplored territory well that that can kill you obviously but it's also the place that you need to go when you're static and dead and you need new water and you need new life and you need new information
so it's a constant movement out into the unknown and back and out into the unknown and back and that's what human beings are like right we're information foragers and then the individual is both positive and negative and you know that okay because you know yourself and you know other people and you know yourself you can be there's parts of you there that are good classically speaking or good even by your own definition and other parts that really could use to say the minimum a tremendous amount of work and you also know that about other people
and if you get truly unlucky with yourself or other people it won't merely be that you're not trying hard enough you'll encounter something in you or someone who's absolutely malevolent and bent on destruction and that's also not a hypothesis you know the the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder reveals quite quite clearly that people typically develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they encounter some form of malevolence and if it's ever happened to you you know that it's no joke it's not some figment of your imagination quite the contrary so and then that entire world that's sort of
the world that can be comprehended is nested inside a broader symbolic Network and that seems to be the symbolic Network that's made up of the Dragon of chaos which is something like our representation of the set of unknown the set of all currently unknowable things it's a very strange category right it's like the category of zero or the category of infinity and the reason that we formulated that category is because we don't only want to know how to solve a problem just like we don't only want to know how to win a game we want
to know how to win the set of all possible games and we want to solve the set of all possible problems and so what the human beings have been trying to do for the last forever is trying to figure out how to solve the problem of the set of all problems and we actually have some ideas one is play to win the metagame and not the game that's one solution another solution is go out into the unknown voluntarily and gather the information that lies there because that continually updates you
