A MarketPlace of Ideas

Piaget was very interested in how you produce structures that enable you to regulate yourself because you're like a kind of a colony of strange sub animals that have to figure out how to get along so that you can sort of be one thing you kind of learn that I would say between the ages of 2 & 4 as you're being socialized you know how erratic two-year-olds are I mean they're a blast and it's part because they're erratic it's like they're unbelievably happy and then they're unbelievably hungry and then they're really hot and then they're really upset and crying you know and then they're really scared it's like and all of that's just untrammeled and so it's really fun to be around them especially when they're happy because they're so happy that it's just you know you don't ever get to be that happy and so it's nice to be around a two-year-old because you can kind of feel that again you know and a lot of what they're one of the horrible things about being a parent is that you spend a tremendous amount of your time making your child less happy and the reason for that is that positive emotion is very impulsive you know and you know because everybody says well you should be happy it's like well no when you're happy you're actually quite stupid and so because happiness makes you impulsive happiness makes happiness says hey things are really good right now get what you can while the getting's good and so as a like if you're hyper optimistic manic will say it's like every stock investment looks like a really good stock investment it's like you won't spend all your money because look if there's those wonderful things everywhere and you could do such great things with them and then you know you spend all your money and then you crash and you think oh god my life's over you know because I just I just spent all my money on all this useless stuff but and it's all under the grip of impulsive positive emotion you know and so when when you're telling your kids to be quiet and settle down it isn't because they're making a lot of noise being in pain it's because they're running around like wild baboons having a blast and disrupting things like mad you know and somehow you got kids you got to settle down you know like quit having so much fun and it's it's kind of awful it's that you do that but but you do that's because the emotions and the motivations have to be brought into like a relationship with one another within the person so that you know one thing I remember with my son who is quite he's quite disagreeable by temperament which is actually a good thing as far as I'm concerned although it brings its own challenges and so with my daughter when she was misbehaving she was pretty agreeable and you know if she was misbehaving I could basically just look at her and then she'd quit you know but my son was like that was just nothing you're looking at me it's like no that's just not gonna go anywhere then and so then I'd like tell him to stop and that really wasn't having much of an effect either he just sort of made me laugh or run away or whatever I mean he was a tough little rat and you know what I would do with him is he would be doing something and I'd interfere and he'd get upset and you know angry and so then I'd get him to sit on the steps and I had told him this is when he was about to I said look you're gonna sit on the steps that's timeout you're going to sit on the steps until you've got control of yourself and you can come back and be and play the family game again I basically said be a civilized human being and then you're welcome again and so he'd sit on the steps it was so interesting to watch because he was just enraged he'd sit there like have you ever seen a two-year-old have a temper tantrum it's really quite the bloody phenomena if you ever saw an adult do that you'd like you'd call 911 eleven eleven adults do that you know because people say with borderline personality disorder will have temper tantrums and it's like man you want to be about thirty feet away from that person that's for sure it's really but in kids it's like well first of all they're only this long so how much trouble can they really cause but it's like you know they're just completely gone they're like on the floor their face is red they're just furious like way more furious than you ever get if you're even vaguely socialized they're just outraged and they're kicking and hitting the ground and like it's like a little epileptic fit of anger you know they're completely controlled by their rage and we took care of one kid for a while who he was out actually a pushover that kid you get him to behave by you know kind of shaking your finger at him but his mother thought he was really tough because he had her he had her figured out and one of the things he would do is have a temperature temper tantrum and during the temper tantrum he would hold his bloody breath until he turned blue it's like try that like you know well that's your homework go home and go home and have a temper tantrum and while you're doing it hold your breath until you actually turn blue it's like you won't be able to do it you don't have the willpower of a two-year-old that's for sure that little varmint man he just have a fit then he'd hold his breath and then he turned blue it was like wow that's that's amazing and we would just like let him do it mm-hmm you know he'd turned blue and everybody would be gone and he'd come out of it you know and it didn't work so he just quit doing it I think he did it like twice and he figured out oh well that's a lot of work for a very little outcome and you know it's not like two-year-olds are stupid they're they're not stupid they're probably smarter than you but they're not civilized by any stretch of the imagination and so anyways back to my son I put him on the steps and he'd be like oh just like enraged and and trying to get himself together you know and I wait up you got a strict rule which was as soon as you're done you're welcome again so it's completely under your control you you get yourself calm down you come and talk to me again if you're calm enough so I like you then you're welcome back in the family no grudges nothing and so it's harder than you think like people think they like their kids it's like don't be thinking that they're hard to like their little monsters and they're very very pushy and provocative and so lots of parents do not like their children and they do terrible things to them their whole life so it's no joke and it's very common and you know that was Freud's observation fundamental observation that a lot of psychopathology is rooted in the family and you can be sure of that you know when when you hear about some mother who's done something terrible to her child which happens reasonably frequently you know perfectly well but she has a very terrible capacity to discipline the child's just provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and it just happens to be a day where her new boyfriend left and she's quite / and she got fired and it's like that's the wrong day to provoke her and then she does something that is not good and you read about it and you think well how could that happen how could anyone do that well that's how they do it and so and kids are very provocative just like little chimps chimps will the adolescents will like throw little pebbles and sticks out the sleeping larger males and bug them and that teasing which it is that teasing turns into full-fledged dominance challenge behavior once the adolescent males get big enough to do it and so when you're being provoked by a child which they provoked you all the time they're trying to figure out well just where are you exactly what happens if I do this what happens if I do this you know and how else are they going to figure it out anyways he'd sit on the steps and just it's just enraged and trying to control himself and I'd watch that and then you know I come back after about two minutes or whatever and he'd still be ER I'd say well are you know have you got yourself under control are you ready to get off the steps go no not yet and then you know he'd get himself under control and then he'd come back and you know he'd be contrite and then I would like him right away you know you got to watch that you know because you don't like being dominated by a two-year-old no one does and so if the child hasn't mastered himself and started to act in accordance with the prevailing social norms you won't like them while you think oh yeah I will because you know I'm a good person like no you won't and no you're not a good person so don't be thinking about that at all it's just not true so when he was contrite then he'd come and then you know we just go on like nothing had happened because that's what you want to do right as soon as you get compliance especially if the compliance is in the best interest of the child you want to reward it instantly right that's the right thing to do because so then and and you could just see him gaining control over himself and so really what was happening is his in his mind in his brain will say there was a war between the psyche the ego that was starting to become integrated you know and starting to become a continued was person an identity and it's fragile in two-year-olds and it can be disrupted all the time and it is that's why they're so hyper emotional it's fragile that little Eagle and it doesn't have a lot of power and so what you want to do is reward it when it wins you know it's when it when he gets control over the underlying motivations you want to say hey good work man good work kid you did it you know you got yourself under control way to be and the kids really happy about that because it's actually not that much fun to have a temper tantrum it's exhausting you know it takes you over

The next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness so the question is well what can you do about your industriousness and the answer to that is well that's kind of rough too because there's a strong genetic component but you can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness and I think the best micro habits this is partly to do with these future authoring program processes I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis I would say and so the questions are something like well alright you're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in in the Big Five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high in neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we asked people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career well how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to order down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to be and that associates the so the goal once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro process has become rewarding in proportion in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want to you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and now there would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the sub components of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's bad that's a bad deal for you so so once you but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at that and then use everything you learn as a means of building that person that you want to be and and I really mean want to be I don't mean should be even those things those things are going to overlap and it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so I started saying well you're going to try to make yourself more industrious okay number one specify your damn goals because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to happen and often people won't specify their goals too because they don't like to specify conditions for failure so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you don't know when you fail and people might say well I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful so I'll keep myself blind about when I fail that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just won't know it until you failed so badly that you're done and that can easily happen by the time you're 40 so so I would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness right you could have known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if I could have this life it looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved in all of that obviously the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort okay so then what do you do well then then you turn down to the micro routine it's like okay well this is what I'm aiming for how does that instantiate itself day to day week to week month to month and that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful Google Calendar it's like make a damn schedule and stick to it okay so what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong is well I don't like to follow a schedule looks like well what kind of schedule are you setting up I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you know and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay I've got tomorrow if I was going to set it up so the best possible day I could have practically speaking what would it look like well then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's going to go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were that then at the beginning of the day right that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it's like sorry that's just not a good strategy it's a bad strategy so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can you can ask yourself okay well I've got these responsibilities I have to schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just like you'd ago she ate with someone who is working for you it's like okay you got to work tomorrow okay so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay well what are you going to do for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes I don't know whatever turns your crank man but you know you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care for that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's how you make the schedule it's like and then you look today and you think well if I had that day that'd be good great you know I knew you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward and so so that's one way that you can work on your conscientious a plan of life you'd like to have and and you do that partly by referring to social norms that's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work you know for you you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyways you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but but you know my point is is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and that's and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much so you know they're always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating and it's like god it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time and you know what that's like because you probably waste like six hours a day and I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back right your time is probably worth 50 bucks an hour something like that I mean you're not getting paid that now but you're young and so this is investment time and what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future so so let's say it's 50 bucks an hour which is perfectly reasonable so if you weigh six hours a day and you are then you're wasting about 2,000 USD a week or about 100,000 USD a year so like go ahead but that's what it's costing you every hour and you need to know what your damn time is worth so let's say it's not 50 bucks it's 30 whatever maybe it's a hundred it's somewhere in that range one of the things you should be asking yourself is when you spend an hour was that well what have I paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour and if the answer is no it's like well maybe you should do something else with your time and it depends on whether or not you think that your time is worth while but the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn't worthwhile what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility let's bliss what you do is you suffer existentially and so that seems like a stupid solution

 If you're hungry it's not a deterministic Drive it's a subpersonality that has a goal and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal it has a bunch of perceptions that that suit that goal and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal and so to think about it as a personality is a much it's a much more intelligent way to look at it one other thing about Skinner's rats you know Skinner could get rats to do almost everything and he would reward them with food and so he had a simple rat model but his rats were starved down to 75 percent of their normal body weight so not only were they not social gregarious rats like rats or because they were isolated they're genetically altered from wild rats but they also weren't as complex as a real rat because they were starving and so but you know what starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat and a rat is a pretty good model of a person but are a lot of our models of simple behavioral learning were based on starving isolated rats so anyways how to think about motivation well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation doesn't set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I'm going to use that schema even though it's not exactly right so you say well motivation determines where you're going to aim so if you're hungry you're going to aim at something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration disappointment grief those would if you had a response that's serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know so you walk downstairs and I don't know the contracting company said a wrecking ball through your kitchen it's like that's going to be disappointing you're not going to keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up it instead and you know one of the things we're going to try to sort out is how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious you know and you can you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so we don't know how people solve that problem it's a really complicated one so anyways we're going to work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference so it's not a goal it's not a drive and it's not a collection of behaviors it's a little personality and the personality has a viewpoint it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions it has action tendencies all of that you can see this in addiction most particularly so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because when they're they built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves or a big one might maybe it's 90 percent of the personality and one of that one of the things that component consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people and so the addiction has a personality you know and so when the person is off ma-maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more good it's more short-term powerful that I would say than an alcohol addiction they'll say anything and then the the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we're going to say motivations one way of thinking about if they set goals but it's not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation and so we're going to think about that framework of interpretation and and emotions emerge inside of that so that's it so the world is framed motivation set goals you could say the world has to be framed so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and inactions track progress so positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don't expect you stop that's anxiety it's like oh we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do so we should stop because we don't know where we are what we're doing stop frozen and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions forward stop reverse that's your emotions within that motivated frame so and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know motions are like they're they're offshoots of action tendencies that's that's the right way to think about it because action is everything fundamentally so what are some basic motivations most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way that tells you just how important a control system it is the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it's action is necessary right you don't want to go into a biker bar because you might pop find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don't want that you don't want the panic you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight you don't want any of that you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic so you just don't go there and then a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong so okay so basic motivations hunger thirst pain pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus that's a different circuit anger slash aggression thermal regulation panic and escape affiliation and care sexual desire exploration play and you can kind of break those in you can kind of break those into the classic Darwinian categories too and say well there's a set of motivations that go along with self maintenance Godby your survival ingested and defensive see I've sort of coded them there so the self maintenance there's an ejective set of basic motivations that go with self maintenance you say that's hunger thirst there's a set of defensive motivations paying anger thermoregulation patek and escape and then there's there's motivations that are associated with reproduction affiliation care and sexual desire and then I put exploration in place sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally

first of all you need to know them for your own life because you ought to know that there are differences intelligence it's really important if you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job you're going to have one bloody miserable time and you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position and as you climb hierarchies of competence the demand on fluid intelligence increases and so unless you want to fail you don't put yourself in over your head well what's over your head well that's a tricky thing to figure out I mean you have to figure that out with intelligence you have to figure it out with conscientiousness you have to figure it out with creativity you have to figure out with stress tolerance with agreeable Ness because you want to go into a cooperative environment and not a competitive one if you're agreeable and with neuroticism you what probably want to keep the stress level of your job relatively low because those are all places that you can break down and most people have at least one significant weakness in their intelligence personality makeup and you've got to be careful not to place yourself in a position where that's going to be a fatal flaw but what you really want to do as far as I can tell if you want to maximize your chances for both success and let's say well-being is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile that's perfect then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be just you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room it's a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room right you should look at a place where if you're right at the top it's you've mastered it it's time to go somewhere where you're a little lower so that you've got something to climb up for so and I can if you're not hyper conscientious for example you're probably not going to want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at because you're just not wired up that way you'd rather have some leisure and like more power to you if that's how you're wired up there's nothing wrong with having some leisure but if you're someone who can't stand sitting around doing nothing ever then maybe you can go into a job that's going to require you to work 75 hours a week and almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance hierarchies require very high intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness as well generally speaking as pretty I'm high levels of stress tolerance you know because that can knock yo – because there's going to be sharp fluctuations in your career generally speaking at the higher levels of a structure and you have to make very complicated decisions often with very short time horizons so you have to decide if that's what you want so okay so how smart do you have to be to be different things in life well if you were have an IQ of a 116 to 130 which is 85th percentile above so it's one person in eighth up to one person in 130 I believe is 85 90 95 is it 95 I think it's 95 one person aide to one person in twenty then you can be a attorney a research analyst and editor dad vert izing manager a chemist and engineer and executive manager etc that's that's the now that's not the high end for IQ by the way you know that it can go up well it can go up indefinitely although there's fewer and fewer people as it goes up so if you want to be the best at what you're doing Bar None then having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in a hundred thousand and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably stressed tolerant and also somewhat conscientious so you know people when you think well why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in part is because they get there first right I mean everything is a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed that's not all of it is so if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly the faster people are going to get there first so IQ of 115 110 to 115 so that's 85th to 73rd 85th percentile copywriter accountant manager sales manager sales analyst general manager person purchasing agent registered nurse Sales Account Executive if you look at universities the smartest people are there above this who are the smartest people at university what do you think mathematicians physicists and mathematicians right right I could tell you who's on the other end but I won't hahaha yeah I'd like to though anyway anyways okay going down the now 103 to 108 is slightly above average right 60th to 70th percentile store manager bookkeeper credit clerk lab test your general sales telephone sales accounting clerk computer operator customer service rep technician clerk typist so you see at this level people are people have some technical skill and some ability to deal with complex things okay that's dead average 100 is average dispatcher in a general office police patrol officer receptionist cashier general clerical inside sales clerk meter reader printer teller data entry electrical helper 95 to 98 machinist food to partner manager Quality Control checkers security guard unskilled labor maintenance arc welder die setter mechanic good-good IQ range for relatively qualified trades people 87 to 93 messenger factory production worker assembler food service worker nurse's aide wear host Minh custodian janitor material handler Packer now what you seeing what you're starting to see is that as you move down the hierarchy the jobs get simpler they're more likely to be assigned by other people or their repetitive because what IQ predicts to some degree is how rapidly you can learn something but once you've learned it it doesn't predict how necessarily how well you do at it and so the more repetitive jobs ten people with lower IQs are more suited to more repetitive jobs under 87 is there something well no right that's a big problem and it's something our society has not addressed at all jobs for people with IQs of less than 85 are very very rare so what the hell are those suppose people supposed to do it's like 1 it's 15% of the population what are they supposed to do well we better figure it out because one of the things that's happening too is that as the of the high IQ tech geeks get a hold of the world the demand for cognitive power is increasing not decreasing right you want to be a teller well you know those checkout machines they're not so simple you want to work at McDonald's you think that's a simple job you don't see robots working at McDonald's and the reason for that is that what McDonald's workers do is too complex for for robots to do so well so this is a discussion that no one wants to have but that's okay it's still a problem and it has to be dealt with so the US government I think I told you this at one point already it's illegal to induct anyone into the US Army if they have an IQ of less than 83 right it's about 10% of the population because the US Army and they be doing IQ testing since IQ testing began because they want everybody they can possibly get into the army because in peacetime they use it as a way of moving people up the socio-economic ladder and in wartime well obviously you need as many soldiers as you can get your hands on and so you're not going to be any pickier then you have to be so when the US Army says it's illegal to induct anybody into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83 then you know that they've done it for absolute necessity right and when people have made a finding that contradicts what they want to hear and they're doing it out of absolute necessity you can be reasonably true that it's one of those facts that just won't bloody well go away and so you might think well if there's nothing for someone with an IQ of less than 83 to do in the army what makes you think that there's something that they can do in the general population and then the issue is you know because the Conservatives will say well they should just work harder it's like sorry that ain't going to fly and the Liberals will say well there's no difference between people anyhow and you can just train people to do everything and that's wrong so they're both wrong and they're seriously wrong and the fact that neither side of the political perspective will take a good cold hard look at this problem means that we're going to increasingly have a structural problem in our societies because we're complexify 'never ething so rapidly that you can't find employment unless increasingly unless you're intelligent you guys are really going to face this you know lawyers are disappearing like mad and the reason for that is you can look it up online increasingly you can do things yourself if you're smart and so like the working-class people have been wiped out pretty nicely over the last 30 years by by automation and various other things it's the low end of the white collar class that's coming up next so I'm not saying that lower lawyers are in the low end but low end lawyers are in the low end of the white color class so there's still going to be plenty of positions for people who are creative and fast on their feet and super smart in fact those people are going to have all the money that's already happening to a great degree

So then I learned about Piaget and Piaget had some very interesting ideas and I think I've told you already what Piaget was up to he wasn't a developmental psychologist he didn't even regard himself as a psychologist he wanted to reconcile science and religion that's what he was doing through his entire bloody life because it would drove him crazy when he was in adolescent and he didn't think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together so he's working on the same problem and so one of the things that Piaget who was very prone to observation he was an ethologist of human beings that's a good way of thinking about an ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions and he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children it was so smart this so smart that idea that you know when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal so in play that a morality emerges out of that and that that morality and I've mentioned this before there's a morality in Game one there's a morality in game two there's a morality in Game three what's common across all those morality is a meta morality and so the meta morality emerges from the particular morality z– that are embedded in particular cooperative situations we could say cooperative and competitive situations you can expand that out today you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy right every social animal and even many animals who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy the dominance hierarchy has a structure we couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy dominance hierarchy a b c d e thousands of them across thousands of years you extract out from all of them what's central to all of them that's the pyramid of value what's the what's the question do you need answered about the pyramid of value what's at the top does that's the ideal that's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden buddha in the in Lotus it's the same thing it's the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough and that has to do it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and there or transcendence of suffering it's something like that these are not arbitrary ideas they're deeply that's my case anyways they're deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture there there is deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology and we already know the answer to that the dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years it's a long time you don't get to just brush that off and say well morality some sort of second-order cognitive problem it's like no it's not I can't I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system you have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status and it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions so if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy barely clinging on to the world everything overwhelms you and that's because you're damn near dead and so everything should overwhelm you you've got no extra resources any more threat you're sunk so you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well the grabbing is good and if you're near the top in the dominant hierarchy and your counter tells you that then your serotonin levels go up you're less sensitive to negative emotion you're less impulsive you live longer like everything works in your favor your immune system functions better and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long-term future and you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time and so then the question is is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies well that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want but I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever I mean we certainly have even for sexual selection we impose criteria they're not ramp random and arbitrary so okay so back to young so what was young trying to do well he was trying to see see young believe that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods that they went inside that's a good way of thinking well think think about it this way you know mmm the archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky what the sky well it's the constellations it's the domain of the gods well why well because the gods are what RB are out there beyond your understanding well that's what you see when you look up at the sky so you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination so the gods are the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world it's like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown it's exactly what it is that's exactly how how else could it be right you're projecting your fantasy onto what you don't understand that's how you start to cope with what you don't understand you populate the unknown with deities where did they come from they came from your imagination well what happens when you take them out of the world do they disappear no they just go back into your imagination so that's where young dug down to find them that's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the-from or rescuing your father from the belly of the whale it's the same idea is that the corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination so where do you go if you need to revivify them you go into your imagination and that's exactly what Jung did and that means this is no secret if you read Jung he tells you that's what he did he tells you that's why he did it it's not an interpretation on my part so then then the question is what's down there is it just mass and catastrophe or is there something in it that's patterned while Jung's proposition was that you read it you rediscover the great archetypes that guide human being by investigating the structure of your imagination when he thought about the imagination in some sense at least in part as a manifestation of your of your biology well yes what else would it be you know and I told you that story about my nephew I believe right about him running around as a knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the Dragons it's like well where did that come from well partly it came from his culture right because it he was a knight and and so obviously that's a cultural construct but the thing is is that his imagination is it's this structure that's looking for things to fill itself with just like your predisposition to language you have a predisposition to language what is that we don't know what does it do it looks for things in the world to fill itself with right and if you're if you first of all when you start to learn how to speak you babble every phoneme did you know that there's there's larders if I was learning to speak an Asian language there would be phonemes I couldn't pronounce and vice-versa an infant all of them they babble all the phonemes and then as they start to learn the language they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language so a baby babbles all laying all possible languages that's a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability so that's a manner that you can see there so you could say well you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes it's built into your biology and then as your enculturated in your own culture the set of archetypes that manifest its benefits themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use so my my nephew's running around like a knight well you know if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon he would be running around with a bow and you know a poisoned arrow and a bow it's the same thing it's the same idea it's just trapped out in different cultural dress and he his little imagination was trying to solve the problem how do you deal with the unknown well what's the unknown it's these little devils that keep biting jumping up on you and biting you and they come out without end so just killing them it's like cutting the head off the Hydra right seven more grow well what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems that are come going to come after you and that's everyone's question that's the ultimate question of nihilism right why bother solving a problem if all that's going to happen is that twenty more problems are going to come your way why not just give up and die well right it's a good question it's that it's a good question right is this suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end that's another fundamental question of existence and people who've become truly malevolent answer that question in the affirmative they say it's too much we should destroy it now I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons but you have to understand and appreciate the logic it's not irrational that's the other thing it's not irrational to work for the destruction of being it's not irrational in fact it might be the most rational thing you could come up with depends on your initial initial set of presuppositions so you down into the belly of the beast so to speak to to to to to see what lurks in the imagination he sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas well what are our typical ideas there there are patterns of it you could think about them as representations of patterns of adaptive behavior and so then you might ask well where did they come from well that's part of what I've been trying to to to teach you about they evolved as far as I can tell right they evolved collectively is that our society and this is the dominance hierarchy idea doormen desire key set themselves up as a matter of course they're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory well ok human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware thinking what the hell are we up to what the hell are we up to what's and there's a question that lurks in there what constitutes acceptable power what constitutes acceptable sovereignty who should lead who should rule what should be at the top well we talked about that the Mesopotamians figured that out speech and vision that's Marduk speech vision and the willingness to come front the terrible unknown that's what should rule well what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea how could it be any other way well that's what human beings are like and I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamians story and understand the reference which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion Marduk has eyes all the way around his head he speaks magic words he goes off to fight time at the dragon of chaos well what's that that's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown well is any of that is it is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective we're prey animals were predators we'd be threatened by reptiles forever why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forests or the water as a representative of the unknown why wouldn't we harness that circuitry we already have it at hand and even more to the point how could we do anything else it's it makes perfect sense well so then what you might say well what would you want to be king you could say king of the world or king of your own soul what do you want to subordinate yourself to how about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people there's no nobler vision than that and I don't see that it's merely arbitrary and so and it's not merely arbitrary – because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt you will be successful it will actually aid you practically you'll rise up above men you'll be selected by women you'll be admirable you'll be valued and and you know that because if you look at the people that you admire in value again unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions and you can ask yourself to when you're torturing yourself with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it what is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to you have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you're not matching it what's the ideal well you don't know right it's it's kind of incoherent and and poorly articulated but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and and make itself known to you it's really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated you