right yeah well it's a really good question so the question is nietzsche said god is dead and he believed that things would fall apart as a consequence of that and i'm claiming for example that people have an implicit religious structure and they act it out okay so there's actually a lot of things happened as a consequence of the fact that that's a reasonable issue a good question so one of the things you might think about is that so nietzsche's claim and dostoevsky's claim were quite straightforward they said that once you took the foundation out of
something it would fall it might take a long time to fall especially if it's a big thing so you know you could make the claim for example that the soviet union basically fell in like 1970 but it took 19 years to topple over because it's a big thing right it just doesn't crumble all at once and so nietzsche and dostoevsky's claim would be once you hack out the basic assumptions and question them then it's only a matter of time until the entire structure decays and you could think that perhaps you know if you have a
habit and then you become conscious of the habit and you practice a new habit then you can have a new habit and so what that means is that you can use your conscious mind to restructure your implicit beliefs it's hard or you can use your conscious mind to destroy your belief in the value of those implicit actions and demolish them across time okay so that could happen and i think to some degree that has happened it's certainly happened enough so that people are very confused about what they believe or even about what belief means because
there's a contradiction between what people think and there's a and how they act so okay that's one tangent so to speak jung actually took that question very seriously in some sense because nietzsche here's the flaw in nietzsche's argument i think it's like i hesitate to ever say that because like i said he was a staggering genius so but nietzsche believed his proposition was that once the religious edifice fell that people would have to create their own values so he believed that the over man the superman so to speak would be a new type of human
being like an existential type of human being who would be able to accept the fact that there was no ultimate meaning but create their own values okay but the weird thing about that is you don't actually seem to create values that's what that's where nietzsche is flawed i think that's where he implicitly accepted the presuppositions of the rationalists because if there's no real source of value then it stands to reason that you create values but you don't not easily like you know think about your own life you know so let's say you make a new
year's resolution you say well i'm gonna study like three hours a day it's like you're trying to create your own value structure right but then you find out it's a lot harder than you think because you don't listen to yourself it's like you wander off and you know play video games or watch something on youtube you know and and you know why are you doing that well it's because you're led by values you don't create them now maybe there's a co-creation you know because it's not like you can't change yourself at all but we should
be very careful before we jump to the conclusion that values are or even can be something that people actually create now the phenomenologists like heidegger and jung as well would say no no let's let's just not get too hasty about making the presupposition that we can or should create our own values now one reason you might be hesitant to do that is that hitler created his value so to speak and so did the soviet communists and the north koreans you know they're trying to impose a rationalist value structure on a society and the consequences of
that have been you know people debate about how many people died in the soviet union as a consequence of internal repression and as the marxist revisionists rally back to their original beliefs the estimate keeps going down but you know it was tens of millions of people so and in china who knows it was maybe it was a hundred million people it was a lot of people and then of course there's the nazis you know so the the the act of in attempting to rationally construct a value system and then impose it that doesn't seem to
work out very well so you know on a sociological level we seem to have evidence that that's dangerous and then on a personal level it's like yeah you're so sure you create your values i would say to a large degree you discover them and so you know here here's here's an experiment you can try one i told you last week i think to try to watch yourself speak for i think you should do it for the rest of your life you know because words are very very very powerful and they lead you places so you
should be careful how you use them but like here's another really interesting experiment is watch what you're interested in try don't try to control it so much just see where it is because like in the phenomenologist certainly made much of this it's like for them like for heidegger value was something that manifested itself in the world and attracted your attention you know it wasn't something you precisely created now i believe you have a hand in creating it we'll talk more about that later because you're not you're not a deterministic entity precisely so it's like you
can participate in the construction of a value system but you know you have to take your biological nature into mind and you have to take your cultural nature into mind and you have to take other people into mind and so you know you have you can vary the game but i don't think you can really change the rules that's a reasonable way of thinking about it now what jung did in many ways was he said well maybe we have to go back down into the deep symbolic substrata of the human psyche to find the origin
place of the ideas that we used to hold as religious it was a hypothesis in some sense and so there the psychoanalytic hypothesis is something like it's the it's the psychic substrata the pre-linguistic psychic substrata that is the source of ritual symbol and religious ideas and so that you can go back to the source in a sense to revitalize those ideas and that strikes me as a wiser approach than the rational approach which says you can just create your values it's like we tried that it didn't work it really didn't work it was murderous so
and then the the alternative the no value proposition is well then you're going to be nihilistic and that's not i think nihilism is a form of mental illness it's a sociological it it's caused by sociological conditions but fundamentally it's a mental illness
