okay so this this without form and void is this chaotic and it said it's hard thing to it's a hard thing to get a grip on you know what exactly this means but I can give you it another kind of example of how you would experience the formless chaos of potential in your own lives and and even how the order that you currently inhabit can dissolve into that and you know in Dante's Inferno when he outlined the levels of Hell so Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constituted evil really in this
representation so it's a work of psychology and he was thinking well there there are various ways to behave reprehensibly but there's a hierarchy of reprehensible behavior and there's something absolutely the worst at the bottom and and and Dante believe that it was betrayal and and I think that's right because you know one of the things that enables long-term cooperation peaceful cooperation between people is trust and I would also say that Trust is the fundamental natural resource there's been some very good books written on the economic utility of trust for example and societies where the default
economic presupposition between trading partners is trust tend to be rich even if they don't have any natural resources and you can see that for example with what happened with eBay which I think was a kind of miracle because what should have happened with eBay was that you sent me junk and I sent you a check that bounced right and that was the end of eBay but right right exactly but that isn't what happened like the default the default transaction on eBay was so honest that the brokers you could hire brokers to begin with I can't
remember what they were called exactly but you could pay someone a fee so that they would guarantee the transaction so you know you wouldn't send me junk and I'd actually send you a payment and we'd pay 10% for someone to guarantee that the default trade was so honest that those things vanished right away and so that meant that all this frozen capital roughly speaking which were all the junk that people had lying around that someone else might want instantly became money and the only reason that worked was because people trusted one another and so Trust
is an unbelievably powerful economic force may be the most powerful economic force anyways if you have a relationship with someone it's predicated on trust and part of the reason for that is that Trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming and what I mean by that is that if I trust you then I don't have to take into account how complicated you are because you're horribly complicated you know I think chimpanzee full of snakes that's what a human being is and and as long as you'll do what you say
you'll do then I can take you at your word and your word simplifies you and you can take me at my word and my word simplifies you and then we can act like we understand each other even though we don't but then if that trust is betrayed then all the snakes come forth very very rapidly and so all of you I suspect of being betrayed one way or another and so what happens if you're in a relationship with someone and you trust them then you make certain assumptions about the past and you make certain assumptions
about the present and you make certain assumptions about the future and everything's stable and so you're standing on solid ground and and the chaos it's like you're standing on thin ice the chaos is hidden the shark beneath the waves isn't there you're safe you're in the lifeboat but then if the person betrays you like if you're in an intimate relationship and the person has an affair and you find out about it then then you think one moment or one place right you're we're we're everything is secure because you've predicated your perception of the world on
the axiom of trust and the next second really the next second you're in a completely different place and not only is that place different right now the place you were years ago is different and the place you're going to be in the future years hence is different and so all of that certainty that strange certainty that you inhabit can collapse into incredible complexity and you say well if someone betrays you you think well okay who were you because you weren't who I thought you were and I thought I knew you but I didn't know you
at all and I never knew you and so all the things we did together those weren't the things that I thought were happening something else was happening and you're you or someone else and that means I'm someone else because I thought I knew what was going on and clearly I don't some sort of blind sucker or or the victim of a psychopath or someone who's so naive that they can barely live and I don't understand anything about human beings and they don't understand anything about myself and I have no idea where I am now I
thought it was at home but I'm not I'm in a house and it's full of strangers and I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow or next week or next year it's like all of that certainty that habitable certainty collapses right back into the potential from which it emerged and that's a terrifying thing that's a journey to the underworld from a mythological perspective and that is really something worth knowing because you know journeys to the underworld are extraordinarily common in mythological stories and you know like The Hobbit going out to find the Smaug the
dragon and and get the gold is a journey into the underworld and journeys to the underworld happen all the time and modern people don't understand what the word underworld is except that we've all been there and we go there all the time and we go there every time the solidity and stability of the world that we've erected at least partly through our speech is shattered because well some sort of snake appears that's another way of thinking about it and it's a really good way of thinking about it because you know no matter how carefully you
construct a little habitable area that's around you there's always something you didn't take into account and there's always something that can pop up its head and do you in and make you aware of your mortality and age you for that matter or even kill you and that's the permanent that's the permanent situation of life which is part of the reason why I think the story of Adam and Eve for example is archetypal it's because we do inhabit walled gardens right because a walled garden is half structure Society and half nature that's what a walled garden
is and walled garden is a place of paradise and warmth and and and and and and love and and and sustenance but it's also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it and I think part of the reason that that story exists at the beginning of this collection of books is because it explains the eternal situation of human beings we're always in that situation we're a walled garden or we bloody well hope we are but there's always a snake and then it's even worse because if there is
a snake we're exactly the sort of creatures who are going to do nothing but go and interact with that state the second that we can manage it you know it's it's definitely the case that if you want a human being to muck around with something the best thing to do is to tell them not ever to do it have anything to do with it which is of course something you know if you have teenagers
