A MarketPlace of Ideas

Dostoevsky Dostoyevsky was a big influence on Nietzsche and it's very interesting to read them in parallel because Nietzsche Dostoyevsky is of course a dramatist and Nietzsche is a philosopher and it's almost as if Dostoyevsky wrote the drama and Nietzsche provided the philosophical commentary they're very very powerful to read together this is from notes from underground it's a very short book about this character who is a bureaucrat nasty sort of bureaucrat he knows he's a nasty sort of bureaucrat all he does he spends his whole life trying to make life more miserable for people because he's so resentful and and crushed and weak and so he just did nothing but abused his bureaucratic position and used his trivial bit of power to lord it over people he gets a little bit of an inheritance and and quits and this is his confession notes from underground he's the underground man it's a brilliant book it's viciously funny and it's so psychologically alive if you're if you're interested in psychology it's a spectacular book and it's only about a hundred pages long anyways he's arrogant and nihilistic and resentful and what he does is he tries to justify his life to himself and does a very poor job of it even though he's trying to be honest there's a lot of honesty in it at one point he meets a woman who's been forced out onto the streets because there weren't very many options for women in the Victorian period who who had fallen a follow of economic necessity and he basically ineffective false messiah nism offers to save her which he can't because he's completely useless he can't save himself even but he offers to save her and she more or less accepts and then when she shows up having sacrificed a tremendous amount to do so he basically tells her that he was toying with her and joking and and and makes her situation far worse than it was to begin with it's a brilliant book because you see he repents and he says what he's like he's this horrible person he knows that we can resentful and then he confesses and then he says well now I've confessed I'm a better person then he tries to do something good but he hasn't changed a bloody bit not a bit the confession was just to make himself feel better and so he offers to help someone and pulls them right into the right under the where they drown it's an amazing book and this is from notes from underground in short one may say anything about the history of the world anything that might enter the most disordered imagination the only thing one can say is that it's rational the very word sticks in one's throat this is a good example of the existential criticism of the idea of rationality Dostoevsky says well lots of things operate according to rational principles but let's think about history for a minute especially from from the perspective of a thinking and feeling bit being history is a is a slaughterhouse it's a catastrophe and how would you ever consider that something rational Dostoyevsky's point his rationality fails in its analysis of something as complex and terrible as history the only thing one can say is that it's rational the very word sticks in one's throat in short one may sorry and indeed this is the odd thing that is continually happening there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible so to be to be so to speak a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world and yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves playing some queer trick often a most unseemly one now I ask you what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities this is a criticism of utopianism that's what he's trying to do right because the utopian ideas were starting to emerge in Russia at about this point in the 1880s the idea that you could reorganize society so that material privation would disappear and that as a consequence the the paradise would be ushered in all Dostoyevsky was no fool he knew perfectly well a that that was never going to happen but even more importantly that if you gave people exactly what they wanted even what they needed there's no reason whatsoever to presume that would make them any more sane than than they already are now and then he takes that further because he says well you can give people cake and and material goods until they are satiated and they'll still be ungrateful and insane and you might think well that's pessimistic but then he says well wait a minute what makes you think that that insanity isn't exactly what's valuable about people what makes you think you would ever want to take that away and that's the case that he makes shower upon him every earthly blessing drown him in a sea of happiness so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species and even then out of sheer ingratitude man would play you some nasty trick he would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish the most unethical absurdity simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his faithful fantastic element it is just his fantastic dreams his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain simply in order to prove to himself as though that were so necessary that man are still man and not the keys of a piano which the laws of nature threatened to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar and that is not all if even if man really were nothing but a piano key even if this was proved to him by natural science and mathematics even then he would not become reasonable but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude simply to gain his point and if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos will contrive suffering of all sorts just to gain his point he will launch a curse upon the world and as as man is the only animal that can cursed it's his privilege the primary distinction between him and other animals may be various curse alone he will attain his object that is to convince himself that he's a man and not a piano key and if you say that all of this 2 can be calculated tabulated chaos and darkness and curses so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all and reason would reassert itself then man would purposely go bad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point I believe in it I answer for it for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he's a man and not a piano key it might be at the cost of his skin it might be by cannibalism and this being so can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off and the desire still depends on something we don't know you will scream at me that is if you condescend to do so that no one is touching my free will that all they're concerned with is that my will should of itself of its own free will coincide with my own normal interests with the laws of nature and rithmetic good heavens gentlemen what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic when it will all be a matter of twice two makes four twice two makes four without my will as if free will meant that it's brilliant I think it's one of the most remarkable criticisms of utopianism I've ever read it's like and it's sold it's so intelligent it's like what makes you think that if you had everything you asked for that that would satisfy you what what if being dissatisfied is part of what satisfies you what if the fact that you have to have limits and need them and that there's an element of insanity in the world and that there's an element of insecurity and vulnerability what if that's what you need what if it's what you want it's what what if that's what gives your life meaning going to be like a lion after he's eaten a zebra and do nothing but sleep it hardly constitutes the appropriate human paradise what makes people think that merely providing economic security would be sufficient who wants that it's what you it's what you offer a cow in its pen so that it remains calm and fat it's not something for human beings and that's Nietzsche's fundamental point and he formulated that what forty years before the damn Soviet Revolution when that sort of utopianism was put into practice without absolutely catus traffic consequences

I was to a certain extent and this would vary from individual to individual.  The most detested weapon on earth far more silly than the hydrogen bomb.   Real early up I began to see radiation,  nuclear radiation as an effective means of waging ground warfare in a relatively moral way because the neutron bomb is the most discriminative weapon ever devised there's a very sharp cutoff between the radius out to which the enemy will be killed and where the friendly troops are positioned.  If you're like roughly a thousand yards away you within a matter of minutes are going to be rendered totally incapacitated and physiologically you will be one of the most miserable creatures imaginable You will be vomiting your guts out your head will be bursting and within a matter of less is considerably less than an hour you'll be dead. So I don't claim any god-given uniqueness as being the only one on earth that really understands what this business is all about.  I don't.  I never have and I never will.  It's not about logic and it's not about rationality.  And I'll add one it's not even about sanity.

The idea of cultural appropriation is absolute nonsense so that's that there's no there's no difference between cultural appropriation and learning from one another they're the same thing now that doesn't mean I can't that doesn't mean that there's no theft between people there is you know and it doesn't mean that just because you encounter someone else's ideas you have an immediate right to those ideas as if they were your own but the idea that manifesting in your own behavior some element of another culture the idea that that's somehow immoral is insane it's actually one of the bases of peace you know one of the things that the various groups of human beings that exist have to offer each other is the tremendous value of their culture you know it's been really interesting to me for example to watch the responsive of all of everyone but for this argument to you for young Caucasian males to hip-hop you know there's an aggressiveness about hip-hop that's really attractive to young Caucasian males and there's something absurd about about that the spectacle of the young Caucasian males taking on the persona of inner-city black gang members you know it's but but I'm sympathetic to it because there's an aggressiveness to that to that art form that's a necessary corrective to the insistence that the highest moral virtue for a modern man is harmlessness which is absurd women don't even like harmless men they hate them they like that claw them apart know what women want are dangerous men who are civilized and they want to help civilize them that's Beauty and the Beast so you know I'll tell you a funny story and only engineers could have come up with this because they're the only ones that have the unparalleled blindness to social convention that would allow them to discover it so the Google engineers I like engineers by the way because they're very straightforward the Google engineers wrote a book a while back called a billion Rick and thoughts which is a study of internet searches billions of them literally and they were looking a lot of pornography use and well there's lots of known about male pornography use partly and it's easy to understand I mean males are you know pretty visually oriented and what attracts them to pornography is fairly straightforward um you can tell that if you look at graffiti in a men's washroom you know it's like two circles in a triangle and the men are absolutely transfixed by it so for women the story is more complex they use pornography too but it tends to be literary because women tend to like words more than they like visual stimuli and so the Google guys tried to track down the archetypal structure of they didn't use those words of female pornographer use and so some of you know how many of you know what a Harlequin romance is okay good so those are our two Dipple stories so I've got a Taming of the wild man essentially by the by the desirable and virginal woman and do you think women don't want that then you better bloody well come up with an explanation for Fifty Shades of Grey right which is the most the most rapid selling novel in human history and emerged at exactly the same time that all of this noise about the lack the absence of gender roles is being produced you know on Moss it's like perfect female fantasy it's exactly architect Lee correct it's Beauty and the Beast so what the yoga guys showed was the structure of beauty of the beast although they didn't use that as a reference that the female pornographic fantasy was wild guy you know somewhat careless about the wants and desires of others attractive to everyone therefore high-status tamed by the magic of a single woman and brought into a relationship with her okay so but here's the comical part this just made me laugh man it was like what were the five categories of most desirable male entity used most broadly and female pornography oh it's so embarrassing women you have to cover your head will I say that the vampire werewolf billionaire surgeon and pirate Oh

The psychology of human misjudgment by charlie munger investor lawyer and business partner of warren buffett [Music] well I am very interested in the subject of human is judgments I don't have too much interest in teaching up people how to get rich and I wasn't because I bear the competition I saw this pattern irrationality which was so extreme and I had no theory or anything to deal with it I just started to create my own system of psychology partly by casual reading but largely from personal experience and I used that pattern they helped me get through life I'd like to share that with you standard causes of human misjudgment first simple psychological denial this first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super athlete super student son and flew off a carrier in the North Atlantic and never came back and his mother who had was a very same woman just never believed it he was dead simple psychological denial the reality is too too painful to bear so you just started until it's bearable we all do that to some extent and it's a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems agency costs here my early experience was a doctor who thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil and that you really loved your patients you couldn't get that organ out rapidly enough he sent bushel baskets full of normal gall bladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln Nebraska human nature causes this terrible abuse so you're getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias you can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor I got used to do when I was a rifle shooter just adjust for 70 miles an hour wind you can learn the basic elements of your advisors trade you don't have to learn very much by the way because you learn just a little and you could make him explain why he's right by us from consistency and commitment tendency and this is a superpower in error causing psychological damage the human mind is a lot like the human egg and human egg as a shutoff device women sperm gets in it shuts down so the next one can't get in the human mind has a big tendencies of the same sort and here again it doesn't just catch ordinary mortals it catches the deans of physics according to Max Planck the really innovative important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard instead a new guard came along with less brain blocked by its previous conclusions and at max Planck's crowd have this commitment tendency to in spite of disconfirming evidence you've been imagine with the crowd that you and I are part of games like and of course if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion you're pounding it in to your own head many of these students that are screaming at us if they aren't convincing us but performing metal chains for themselves because what they're shouting out there pounding in by us from Pavlovian association misconstruing pass correlation is a reliable basis for decision-making I never took a course in psychology or economics either for that matter and but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology you know so the dogs salivated when the bell rang so what the Pavlovian association is an enormous ly powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us I'd say three-quarters of advertising works on pure Pavlov take coca-cola company they want to be associated with every wonderful image correct and the Olympics wonderful music you name it then want to be associated with presidents funerals when a gatina coca-cola ad associated with bad psychologically rooted dependencies all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level which makes them very insidious talking about economics you've got two products now you think under the laws of economics that a product a costs X plus something if product equals X minus something it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something that's not so in many cases when you raise the price of the alternative product it will get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitors product if you're old a blob and his dog bias from reciprocation tendency including the tendency of one in a role to act as other persons expect it is so easy to be a patsy the compliance practitioners of this life sealed any demonstrated this by running around a campus and he asked people to take delinquents to the zoo one in six actually agreed to do it and after he'd accumulated the statistical output he went around on the sand campus and he asked other people would you do two afternoons a week and there he got 100% of the people to say no but after he'd made the first request he backed off alone he said well would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon he raised the compliance rate to a half got three times the success by just going through the little Astro a lot and back off now the human mind on the subconscious level can be manipulated that way and you don't know it I always use the Frazier like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest over influenced by social proof that is the conclusions of others particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress and here one of the cases the psychologists use is getting Genovese eager Olli people 50 60 70 of them just sort of patented nothing wealthy was fully murdered one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything and so there's automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing that's only part of Big Shot businessman get into these waves of social breeds do you remember some years ago when an auto company bought a fertilizer company and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought fertilizer company and there was no more damn reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies but they didn't know exactly what to do and if Exxon was doing it it was good enough for mobile or vice versa and of course it was a total disaster what I always call man with a hammer semper – the man with a hammer every problem can still look pretty much like a nail by us from contrast cause distortions of sensation perception and cognition here the great experiment that sealed any does in his class he take three buckets of water one's hot ones cold and ones room-temperature he has the diligence stickers left hand in the hot water his right hand in the cold water and he has them removed the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket and of course both hands in the same bucket of water one team's hot the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over influence by contrast it has no absolute scale maybe you have a magician remove your watch without your noticing it I certainly have it's the same thing taking advantage of compressed cognition mimics sensation and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch removing magician sealed any sites the case of the real estate broker you got the rule that some transferred into your town and the first thing you do is you take the robot the two of them awful overpriced houses you've ever seen and then you take the room to some moderately overpriced house and then you stick them and you think you're immune from these things and you laugh and I want to tell you you aren't my favorite analogy I have this friend I like W bridge with he said Charlie he says if you throw a frog in hot water the front will jump out so then you put the frog in room-temperature water and just slowly heat the water up the Frog will die there I don't know whether that's true about a frog but it sure does help true about many of the businessmen I know by us from over influenced by Authority well here the Milgram experiment had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what bad every reason to expect was heavy torture by electric shock and perfectly innocent fellow says he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded in a few other things Milgram it's been widely interpreted as mere obedience but the truth of the matter is the experimenter who got the students to give her the heavy shocks and Milgram he explained why was a false explanation we need this deliver scientific truth and so on that greatly changed the behavior of the people and you'll like this one you get a pilot the copilot the pilot is the authority figure they don't do this in airplanes but they've done it in simulators they have a pilot to do something where the copilot but know the plane was going to crash but the pilots doing a pilot is the authority bigger twenty five percent of the time the blendra bias from deprival super reaction syndrome caused by present or threatened scarcity removals something almost possessed but never possessed here I took the Munger dog lovely harmless dog one way the only way to get that dog to bite you was to try and take something out of the small factor was already learned and the human version of that dog is there in all of us people are really crazy about minor decrements down if you act on only you get into reciprocation tendons because you don't do a percentage of affection you reciprocate and also the extreme business is here was no coke now coca-cola has the most valuable trade mark in the world focused on he's a brilliant engineers lawyers psychologists advertising executives and so forth and they spent better part of a hundred years getting people to believe that trademark have all these intangible values to and people associated with a flavor and so they're going to tell people not that it was improved because you can't improve a flavor and flavor as a matter of taste you man blew through what detergent or something but telling you're going to make a major change in flavor so they got the huge deprival super super reaction syndrome Pepsi was within week of coming out with old coke in a Pepsi bottle which would have been the biggest Fiasco in modern times by us from envy jealousy well envy jealousy made what two of the ten commandments here again you go through the psychology the survey courses go to the index and the jealousy thousand-page book it's ranked there's some blind spots and I get Enya I've read once a half a dozen times it's not greed that drives the world that Envy by us from chemical dependency well we don't have to talk about that we've all seems so much of it but it's interesting how it always causes moral breakdown if there's any need and always involves massive denial by osram if gambling compulsion for instance a lottery give a lottery where you get your number by lot and then somebody draws a number by lot and gets lousy play we get a lottery where you will get to pick their number get big play the minute they picked it themselves it gets an extra validity after all they thought it and they acted on and look at what's happening to our country every Indian Reservation every River town and and look at the people who are ruined but then you take slot machines you get bar bar lemon it happens again and again again you get all these near misses well that's deprival super reactions under and boy to the people who create the machines understand human psychology by us from liking distortion including the tendency to especially like oneself one's own kind and one's own idea structures and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone like disliking Distortion reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone dislike hugely powerful tendencies man with a hammer syndrome revisited he believes his own idea structures will cure cancer and he believes that the demons that he's the guarding against are the biggest demons and the most important ones and in fact they may be very small demons converting the demons that you face other normal limitations of sensation memory cognition and knowledge smelling content of that stress induced mental changes here my favorite example is is the great Pablo from the Eloise dogs and cages which had all been conditioned into change behaviors great Leningrad flood came and went right up and the dogs in a cage and the dog was had as much stress as an imaginary dog ever having and the water was hidden time to save some of the dogs and Pavlov noted that they had a total reversal of their conditions personality being the great scientist he was he spent the rest of his life getting nervous Green Township dogs the thought system indicated by this list of psychological tendencies was great value not widely recognized and employed what should the educational system knew about it I am NOT going to answer that one now I like leaving google mystery [Music] you

And so in 2008 when the politician said too big to fail they got something truly backwards as far as I can tell and that was it was a reverse the statement was reversed it should have been so big it had to fail and that's what I think the story of the Tower of Babel is about it's it's a warning against the expansion of the system until it encompasses everything it's a warning against totalitarian presumption so what happens for example when people set out to build the Tower of Babel as they want to build a structure that reaches to heaven right so the idea is that it can it can it can replace it can replace the role of God it's something like that it can erase the distinction between earth and heaven and so there's a utopian kind of vision there as well as we can build a structure that's so large and encompassing that that that it can replace heaven itself not too interesting the fact that that doesn't work and that God objects to it is also extraordinarily interesting and it's an indication to me of the unbelievable profundity of these stories it's like I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century but of course didn't was that there's something extraordinary dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions at something Dostoyevsky wrote about by the way in his great book notes from underground because dossiers kids figured out by the early 1900's that there was something very very pathological about a utopian vision of perfection that it was profoundly anti-human and and notes in notes from underground he demolishes the notion of utopia one of the things he says that I loved it's so brilliant so imagine that you brought the socialist utopia into being and Dostoyevsky says and that human beings had nothing to do except eat drink and busy themselves with the continuation of the species he said that the first thing that would happen under circumstances like that would be that human beings would go mad and break the system smash it just so that something unexpected and crazy could happen because human beings don't want youto be in comfort and certainty they want adventure and chaos and uncertainty and so that the very notion of a utopia was anti human because we're not built for static utopia were built for a dynamic situation where there's demands placed on us and where there's the optimal amount of uncertainty well we know what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of the widespread promulgation of utopian schemes and what happened was a ham on a scale that had never been matched in the entire history of humanity and that's really saying something because there was plenty of mayhem before the 20th century I guess there wasn't as much industrial clout behind it and so so early you see so early in the biblical narrative you have a warning against hubris and and some indication that properly functioning systems have an appropriate scale I read an article in The Economist magazine this week about the rise of nationalist movements all over the world as a counterbalance to globalization maybe its most marketed with the European Economic Community and The Economist writers were curious about why that counter movement has been developing but it seems to me that it's also a Tower of Babel phenomena is that maybe this is most evident in the European Economic Community to bring all of that multiplicity under the what would you call it under the umbrella of a single unity is to simultaneously erect a system where the top is so far from the bottom that the bottom has no connection to the top you know your your your social systems have to be large enough so they protect you but small enough so that you have a place in them and it seems to me perhaps that's what's happened in in places like the EEC is that the distance between the typical citizen and the bureaucracy that runs the entire structure has got so great that it's an element of destabilization in and of itself and so people revert back to say nationalistic identities because it's something that they can relate to it there's a there's a history there and a shared identity a genuine identity an identity of language and tradition it's not an artificial imposition from the top an artificial abstract imposition in in the Egyptian creation myth the version I'm from the most familiar with in the previous creation that's an older one the immense of Damian creation myth mostly what you see menacing Humanity is tile Matt she's the dragon of chaos and so that's nature it's really it's really mother nature red in tooth and claw but by the time the Egyptians come along it isn't only nature that threatens humanity it's the social structure itself and so the Egyptians had two deities that represented the social structure and one was Osiris who was like the spirit of the Father he was a great hero who established Egypt but became old and and willfully blind and and and and senile and he had an evil brother named Seth and Seth was always conspiring to overthrow him and because Osiris ignored him long enough Seth did overthrown chopped him into pieces and distributed all around the kingdom and his son Horus had to come back and fight Cyrus his son Horus had to come back and defeat Seth to take the kingdom back now how that story ends but the Egyptians seem to have realized maybe because they had become bureaucratized to quite a substantial degree that it wasn't only nature that threatened humankind it was also the proclivity of human organizations to become too large too unwieldy too deceitful and to willfully blind and therefore liable to collapse and again I see echoes of that in this story of the Tower of Babel so it's a calling for a kind of humility of social engineering one of the other things I've learned as a social scientist and I've been warned about this by I would say great social scientists that you want to be very careful about doing large-scale experimentation with large-scale systems because the probability that if you implement a scheme in a large-scale social system that that scheme will have the result you intended is negligible what will happen will be something that you don't intend and even worse something that works at counter purposes to your original intent and so and that makes sense because if you have a very very complex system and you perturb it the probability that you can predict the consequence of the perturbation is extraordinary low obviously if the system works though you think you understand it because it works and so you think it's simpler than it actually is and so then you think that your model of it is correct and then you think that your manipulation of the model which produces the outcome you model will be the outcome that's actually produced in the world that doesn't work at all I thought about that an awful lot thinking about how to remediate social systems because obviously they need careful attention and adjustment and it struck me that the proper strategy for implementing social change is to stay within your domain of confidence and that requires humility which is a virtue that is never promoted in modern culture I would say it's it's a virtue that you can hardly even talk about but humility means you're probably not as smart as you think you are and you should be careful and so then the question might be well okay you should be careful but perhaps you still want to do good you want to make some positive changes how can you be careful and do good and then I would say well you try not to step outside of the boundaries of your competence and you start small and you start with things that you actually could adjust that you actually do understand that you actually could fix I mentioned you at one point that one of the things Carl Jung said was that modern men don't see God because they don't look low enough it's a very interesting phrase and one of the things that I've been promoting I suppose online is the idea that you should restrict your attempts to fix things to what's at hand so there's probably things about you that you could fix right things that you know that aren't right not anyone else's opinion your own opinion that aren't right you can fix them maybe there's some things that you could adjust in your family that gets hard you have to have your act together a lot before you can start to adjust your family because things can kick back on you really hard and you think well it's hard to put yourself together it's really hard to put your family together why the hell do you think you can put the world together right because obviously the world is more complicated than you and your family and so if you if you're stymied in your attempts even to set your own house in order which of course you are then you would think that what that would do would be to make you very very leery about announcing your broad-scale plans for social revolution well it's a peculiar thing because that isn't how it works because people are much more likely to announce their plans for broad scale social revolution than they are to try to set themselves straight or to set their family straight and I think the reason for that is that as soon as they try to set themselves straight or their families the system Italy kicks back at them right instantly whereas if they announced their plans for large-scale social revolution the lag between the announcement and the kickback is so long that they don't recognize that there's any error there and so you know you can get away with being wrong if if nothing falls on you for a while and so and it's also an incitement to hubris because you can now see your your plans for large-scale social revolution and stand back and you don't get hit by lightning and you think well I might be right even though you're not you're seriously not right I might be right and then you think well how wonderful is that especially if you could do it without any real effort and I really do think fundamentally I believe that that's where the universities teach students now that's what they teach them to do I really believe that and I think it's absolutely appalling

You know not everybody is equipped to or interested in engaging in high-level discussion of abstract and creative ideas you know you hear this idea that everyone's creative that's a lie it's as straightforward as that drew creativity is very very rare and so and if you happen to be a creative person or if you happen to be someone who's profoundly interested in ideas you are in a pronounced minority just as you are if you happen to be extremely extroverted or extremely agreeable or extremely conscientious these are minority issues and what you do is you find like-minded people who are capable of engaging that we know a heavy weight weight heavy weight weight lifters compete with heavy weight weight lifters for a reason and everyone thinks that's fine the same thing applies to intellectual and creative endeavors so what you do is you try to find a community where that's that's the nature of the community and you likely have to find a relationship like that as well you know so I don't think so I think what contributes to the siloing is the arrogance that goes along with it because if you're you can be interested in ideas and you can be creative well that's the arrogance of the intellect right that's the thing the Catholic Church had warned about for centuries is the arrogance of the intellect so because if you're if you're wise as well as smart and there is no relationship between being smart and being wise they are not the same thing there's no quick pathway from smart to wise and many of the people who I've known who were very wise were when some of them were intellectually impaired and were skill wise you know so it's the arrogance that brings up the block and I see this for example happening in the United States in particular because the last time I went down there for example I was I had friends down there and and some of those friends are very very smart people and some of them were talking about the Trump voters and they were talking about the Trump voters with contempt and I thought you better watch that because that's 50% of the damn population and it might be convenient to think that they're stupid and beneath you but it's not conducive to a civil state and there's no evidence that it's true because there isn't a straight line between Intel and wise and so I think that if your if your character is developed and you're intelligent you can have your siloed creative community but you develop enough wisdom so that you can see all the things that people can do that are of high ethical utility that are outside the intellectual domain you know and I think that's why in the New Testament I think that's why Christ is a carpenter right because well first of all carpenter is one of those jobs that when you're dishonest it manifests itself immediately because what you build falls down and so if you're an honest carpenter you build a good house so that there's a nice metaphor there but it's also it's also a warning in some sense against the the equation of intellectual brilliance with moral superiority and so if the intellects would drop their moral superiority and fat chance there is of that then that divide between the working class say and the elite would would resolve and there's every reason to have respect for decent working class people I mean it's on their labor as the left-wingers at least hypothetically agree that the entire edifice of the culture is is resting so you can have your cake and eat it too but you have to not assume that your niche makes you superior and it's very difficult for smart people especially smart there's a scene in Nietzsche's it seems thus spake Zarathustra we're 0th Easter the Prophet comes down from the mountain and he comes into a public square and there's this crowd around this little midget who's only about this high who has a gigantic ear and everyone is marveling at him well that's what the modern intellect is like it's a midget with a giant full mouth generally not an ear and the the being is underdeveloped but the intellect is hyper activated and and it makes the person extraordinarily unbalanced and as part of cuz they they can't compete outside the intellectual realm and that makes them very bitter because they tend to think I'm so smart everything should just come to me it's like sorry that's not how the world works and and it also that that and that that that attitude is immediately evident to people that they're talking to when they talk in the manner that they talk if they are arrogant intellectuals of that sort you see that and the Simpsons did a good job of that with Comic Book Guy right I mean he was completely useless in every possible dimension with an IQ of about 160 and it's very annoying to people who have an IQ of 160 that they can also be completely useless but it happens a lot so yeah [Applause]

The worst snake of all is malevolence and that's I think that's technically correct because one of the things that you view for example when you're looking at post-traumatic stress disorder is that it's almost always the case that someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which you might think of as a real real-life reincarnation of the fall is that people encounter something malevolent and it breaks them because it's the worst thing to understand it's like suffering is one thing man that's that's bad now vulnerability and suffering that's bad enough but to encounter someone who wishes that upon you and will work to bring it about that's a whole different category of horrible especially what it also reflects something back to you about yourself because if someone else can do that to you and they're human that means that you partake of the same essence strangely enough that's actually the cure to some degree to post-traumatic stress disorder is it like if you've been victimized you're naive and you've been victimized the way out of that is to no longer be naive and to no longer be victimized and that means that you you see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea for example that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he's got a piece of a right he's being touched by it and the way that you the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopath so that you know one when you see one right and then but that's a voluntary thing it's it's so it's like a it's like a a set of tools that you have at your disposal which is full knowledge of evil and that does Nietzsche said if you look into an abyss for too long you risk having the abyss gaze back into you right the idea is that if you look at something monstrous you have a tendency to turn into a monster and people are often very afraid of looking at monstrous things exactly for that reason and then the question is well should you turn into a monster and the answer to that is yes you should but you should do it voluntarily and not accidentally and you should do it with the good in mind rather than falling prey to it by possession essentially because that's the alternative how does it possess you that's easy you're suffering makes you better you're better this makes you resentful you resent means meat makes you vengeful and once you're on that road you go down that a little bit farther man well you end up it fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school and then killing yourself right because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil and I'm exactly the person to do it and I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth just to hammer the point home right and if I can garner a little post post posthumous fame along the way well that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominance hierarchy imaginings too at least in fantasy so you know it's the full package if you want to go down that route and of course people don't like to think about that sort of thing and it's no bloody wonder but without the capability for mayhem Europe you're you're you're a potential victim to may have so you need your sword it should be sheath but you need to have it and it's very frequently the case if you treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder there's two things you have to do you have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil because otherwise their brain bothers them over and over and over what why were you so dealing with naive how did you become victimized why were you such a sucker these are good questions you don't want to have that happen to you again you don't want to be exploited twice okay so your eyes have to open up we know the price of that from the Egyptian myth right you come into contact with Seth what happens even if you're a god you lose an eye it's no joke man it's no joke and then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and with the revitalization of the Father that's the identification with the force that created culture right and that then there's you and that together then you can withstand malevolence maybe you can withstand tragedy and malevolence and then that's the whole secret right because that's what you want in life you need to be able to withstand tragedy and you need to be able to withstand malevolence because those are the forces they're always working against you and so it's just this is associated with the Union idea of incorporation of the shadow right you have to be we know this God we know how predators work with regards to children even if you're a pedophilic predator and you're looking at a landscape of children the child that you're going to go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back you pick your victim and predatory people in general are exactly like that man they're because they're predators they're not going to attack someone who's who's going to fight back in fact the issue is likely not to even come up they're going to be looking for someone one way or another that cannot conceptualize what they are and then perfect it's it's open season and it's open season and so if you're treating someone with post-traumatic stress disorder first they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolence and second they have to learn to become dangerous because that's the only way out what's the alternative to get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naivety because by definition if someone psychopathic has exploited you you're too naive it's a definitional issue you can say well that's no fault of mine how the hell could I be prepared fair not man a perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem because it's an it's an eternal problem

One of the things you'll see if you're interested in this sort of thing if you ever go read the writings of the Columbine killers that the teens they're very interesting they're very much worth reading especially I think it's Dylan Klebold who was the more literate of the two but he tells you exactly where he went after brooding and brooding and brooding on his his isolation and segregation from mankind so he's out there beyond he's out there in a chaotic domain and because he's tortured by that his thoughts take an unbelievably dark turn like it's unimaginably dark if you're interested in that sort of thing you could read that there's another book you could read called panzram PA and Zed ra em and it's a fascinating book it's about this guy who I think he raped 1200 men so that sort of tells you what sort of guy he was extraordinarily physically powerful and brutal and malevolent and he was kind of a juvenile delinquent type and they put him in a reform school and he was not well treated in that reform school it's sort of like the worst of the Canadian residential schools and when he came out he was not a happy boy and so he spent the rest of his life trying to be as destructive as he could possibly imagine and purely consciously with malevolent intent and then and and believe me he was pretty destructive he kept track of the dollar value of all the buildings he burned down he tried to start a war between Britain and the United States like he was all out for all-out mayhem his dying words they're gonna hang him he told the guy who was gonna hang him he said hurry up you who's your bastard I could kill 12 men in the time it takes you to hang me and that's exactly the sort of person he was and he made friends with this physician in the in the prison who he thought was like the first person who ever did something nice for him gave him a dollar for cigarettes if I remember correctly and the physician encouraged him to write his autobiography and so he did and it's it's available and so if you want a view because you know you you always think of people you think well people have good intentions you know that you especially think that if you're naive and agreeable so all of you who are sitting there out there thinking people have good intentions you're probably high in agreeableness but that's not always the case people can have very dark motivations that are fully conscious and very well elaborated and panzram was know he was smart and his book is very well written and he tells you exactly why he thought the way he thought and so it's a good glimpse of exactly this sort of thing where you can get to if you want to by brooding on your specific misfortune you know in his his basic credo was that human beings were so reprehensible that they should just be eliminated and believe me that's what he was trying to do and these people who do terrible things like the Columbine shooters that's exactly what four block of a better word they're possessed by its sheer malevolence and the Columbine kids had a much more spectacular catastrophe planned than the one that actually occurred and they knew it was going to be a full-blown media circus and lots of these people who engage in those sorts of mass murders they know about the other mass murderers and they're engaged in a competition and the competition is who can do the most brutal thing the fastest something like that so you can't just be thinking about people who've you know who have good intentions but have somehow gone wrong if you ever meet someone who isn't like that and you think that you're just a tree with ripe fruit to be plucked