Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I'm McKayla Peterson. This is Episode 37 of Season three titled Existentialism Nicha, Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard. In this lecture, Eleventh in the twenty seventeen series, Dad discusses the giants of existentialism, a philosophically grounded psychological position, positing one that psychopathology or mental illness distress is built into being itself. That would come from somebody in my family and to that the adoption of responsibility through action is the appropriate response.

I shouldn't make bad jokes on this, but I do happy early. Merry Christmas, everyone. A couple of updates if you'd like to check out the self authoring program dad has, you can use code MP for 15 percent off that. That's great for New Year's resolutions, too. And his Understand Myself dotcom personality test is also 15 percent off right now with code MPLX. The second update, if you have purchased or preordered his book Beyond Order, you can go to his website, Jordan v.

Peterson dot com. And there's a printable PDF to put under the tree because the book isn't shipping out until March. This episode is brought to you by thinker. I actually used thinker recently to read a book, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss in preparation for the podcast Dad and I did with him. That'll be out in a couple of weeks. Thinker Doug summarizes key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite sized form.

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So we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time and about Carl Rogers, and I mentioned that. The phenomenologists were interested in experience in some sense as the ultimate reality, and that's it's a very complicated concept to to grasp. The existentialists. Also adopted that viewpoint, they were concerned with the quality of subjective experience, not that they were ignoring the reality of subjective experience, but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience. And they're also more focused on action than on on statement or belief, because here's something to think about.

You can think about this for a very long time. If you're trying to understand what someone believes, even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world. Should you pay attention to how they act or what they say? And that's a profound question even from a from a neurological perspective or a neuropsychological perspective, because the memory system that you use to represent what you say that you believe is not the same memory system that you use to embody your your knowledge about action.

So it's akin, I would say, to the distinction between telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike. Those are not the same things. The descriptions don't even really lay very well on top of one another because you don't actually know how you ride a bike. You just know how to do it. It's built into your physiology, right? It's a skill. And that's called procedural memory. And procedural memory is the same kind of memory that basically structures your perceptions.

Not it's not that you can't orient your perceptions consciously because you can, but once you've oriented them consciously, say, toward some goal, it's automatic procedures that take over because you really don't know how it is that you organize your senses so that you can pay attention. You just know how to do it. Now, the existentialists believe that. Actions spoke louder than words, and that if you were interested in belief and even if you were interested in analyzing believe, that it was better for you to look at how someone acted than what they said.

Now, one of the things that you might think with regards to Roger's. Is that his psychotherapeutic practice would be predicated on the idea that you should bring how you act into alignment with what you say you believe, so that there's no discontinuity in your between your body. That's one way of thinking about it and your mind and so that there are fewer paradoxes in your. In the way that you manifest yourself in the world. So the concentration on action is one of the fundamental characteristics of existentialism.

Another one is. The insistence upon trouble and suffering as an intrinsic element of human experience, so you could say we could concentrate on subjective experience, what's your life like to you? How do you experience it? And we could say, well, built into that is trouble, built into that is chaos, built into that is anxiety, and pain, and disease, and that you can fall prey to those things without there being something wrong with you. Now, you know, if you pin down a psychoanalyst like Jung or Freud, they would, of course, admit that human misery is endemic to human experience.

But Freud in particular tend to look tended to look for adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure in childhood and pathological childhood experience. And he at least implicitly claimed that if you hadn't experienced childhood trauma and you had developed properly, that what would happen is that you would end up healthy, roughly speaking, certainly mentally sound. But the existentialists don't really buy that perspective right from the beginning. They they basically make a different claim, which is that life is so full of intrinsic misery, let's say.

But suffering is a better way of thinking about it, suffering that that manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic vulnerability, that psychopathology is built into the human experience. There's no real way of avoiding it, or at least. There's no reason to look for extra causes that might be a better way of thinking about it and. You'd be surprised how often that sort of observation is useful for for clinical clients, for example, because one of the things that's quite characteristic about people, especially if they're introverted and they don't have very many friends, they don't have people to talk to if they're suffering, maybe they're depressed or anxious or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder.

One of the things they always presume that is that the fact that they're suffering in that manner means that there's something, not only something wrong with them, but something uniquely wrong with them so that it's their fault and no one else is like them. And one of the things you do as a diagnostician, you know, you'll hear a lot of rattling about how labeling is bad for people and. Certainly mislabeling is bad for people and even an accurate label can be a box that you can't get out of, but it's very, very frequently the case that if you diagnose someone, it's a relief to them, like you can't believe because they come in to see you knowing that something isn't going properly.

But they think, well, they're the only person facing it. And that means they're idiosyncratically strange in some incomprehensible way that no one else could possibly understand. And there's no way they could ever get better. And one of the things you do is point out to them is like depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation. Right. There's plenty of reason. I don't remember who said it. Everyone has sufficient justification for suicide. I think that was the claim.

Well, but the point is, is that if you look through the experiences of the typical person, unless they're very, very fortunate and they won't be that way forever, that's certainly the case that they can point to traumatic experiences in their life, death and loss and illness and and humiliation and all those sorts of things that are sufficient to account for existence in a state of quasi permanent negative emotion. Now, often, if you see, as I said, if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature, they assume that everyone else is the smiling face that you see on Facebook.

And so that that alienates them from other people and themselves. Even more than that, then that certainly far more than necessary. And part of the psycho education that goes along with therapy is merely educating people to understand that a fair bit of misery is the norm and that there's plenty of genuine reason for it. And so the existentialists basically start from that stance.

It's like a fall of man stance in some sense, you know, because deeply rooted in in in in the Western tradition, roughly speaking, is the idea that people are divorced from some early paradisal state and that it was the emergence of something like self-consciousness that produced that demolition of humanity and left us in a damaged state. And I mean, people think they don't believe that, but they believe it all the time.

And it's frequently how people experience themselves, you know, as if there's something wrong that needs to be rectified and it seems unique in some sense to human beings, it doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way, but people definitely think that way. And so all the existentialist basically take that as a given.

And then they they offer another question, which is, well, given that that's your lot and that there's ample reason for misery, how is it that you should conduct yourself? Because merely, say, giving in to that misery or multiplying, it doesn't seem to be it doesn't seem to do anything but multiply it. It doesn't seem to do anything but increase it knows that it's bad to begin with, you might say, well, increasing it is definitely going to be increasing.

It is something that you have to regard as worse. So how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery? OK, so how do they how do they present that to begin with? Well, this is from Pascal, and this is an existential statement that describes the position of the individual in the universe, you might say, or or you could say that it explains the deep, deep characteristic of individual experience or existence, hence existentialism. "When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I feel, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me.

I am afraid and wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there's no reason why I should be here, rather than there, or now, rather than then. " And so that's an element of existential thinking that is shared with the phenomenologists called Thrownness. And that's a term that Heidegger. Originated, if I remember correctly, and what it means is it's an analysis of a certain characteristic of human experience, which is that, well, there was an immense span of time in which you could have been born, but you weren't born then.

You were born 20 years ago. And there was an immense span of time in the future that you could have been born and you weren't born then either. You were born when you were born and you're who you are and you have exactly the characteristics that you have. And there's something tremendously arbitrary about that. It's as if you were thrown into experience and that's what Thrownness means. It means that you were randomly placed in a place in time. And there's something fundamentally irrational about that, meaning that there's no real way of understanding it.

It's something you have to deal with. And you might say, well, why was I born poor or why was I born? Less attractive than I might be, or why was I born less intelligent than I might be, or maybe why I was born, why was I born to these terrible parents at this particular horrible moment in time? And in some sense, there's no answer to questions like that. It's just how it is. And you have to deal with it.

So the question is for the existentialists, how do you deal with that? This is Walter Kauffman, if I may, rarely has the existential question been put more simply or beautifully in this passage, we see first the profound realization of the contingency of human life with which the existentialists call thrown us. Second, we see Pascall flinch, facing unflinchingly, unflinchingly the question of being there or more accurately, being where.

Third, we see the realization that you cannot take refuge in some superficial explanation of time and space, which Pascal scientists that he was could well know. And lastly, the deep shaking anxiety arising from this stark awareness of existence in such a universe. There's a fairly well-developed line of social psychological theorizing known as terror management theory, and that the basic premise of terror management theory is that. Human beings have belief systems. And what the belief systems do is serve to protect them against death anxiety and that now I have that that's derived from the work of Ernest Becker, by the way, who wrote a great book called The Denial of Death.

And his theories in the denial of death have been put to the test by the terror management theorists with, I would say, some success.

But I think the theory is flawed because. I don't believe that. Becker phrased the issue properly. I think it's deeper than a fear of death, and that's what the existentialists are attempting to do to.

To communicate, it's more like it's more like terror and it's more like terror of isolated being. You know, it's not only that you're that you're mortal, you know, that you have a border. A temporal border, you're born and you die, but also that during that time, you're vulnerable to all sorts of things and all sorts of contingencies, one of which, of course, is death. But it's by no means the only one that is horrifying.

I think you can certainly make a case like the existentialists do that the mere fact that you're you're limited in the face of infinite complexity is also a primary existential problem.

It's a problem that human beings have been dealing with ever since they started to understand. They started to make sense of concepts that were beyond their immediate experience. Millions of years ago or tens of millions of years ago when our ancestors lived in trees. You could be sure that they were frightened of what surrounded them. They were frightened of when they were little, they were frightened of birds that might pick them out of a tree.

They were afraid of cats that might climb a tree and eat them. They were afraid of snakes that would come slithering along and bite them and. They were they existed in a space that was safe, surrounded by a space that wasn't safe, that was full of predatory. A predatory entity's. And those were primarily birds of prey and and cats and and snakes or other reptiles. And then what seemed to have happened as we evolved was that the way we construed the world, you can think of the world as a safe place surrounded by the possibility of predation.

But you can also think of the world as the known, surrounded by the unknown. It's the same idea except put up one level of abstraction and the unknown has the same relationship to us in some sense that the territory of predators has relationship to us. And we use the same circuitry to represent the absolute unknown that we used so many millions of years ago to represent predators. Now it's more complicated for human beings because first of all, we're not just prey animals, we're also predators.

And so we're not only targets, but we're the thing that makes other thing targets. And we're also something that isn't only shaking in the face of the unknown because of its predatory element, maybe like a rabbit, but something that can explore the unknown and garner something of value as a consequence. And so we have this very paradoxical wiring. You might say the unknown is partly terror, and that's the pretty potent element of the unknown. So negative emotion for human beings is more powerful than positive.

Emotion is sort of dose for dose. And that's I think that's because you can be completely and utterly dead, but you can only be so much happier. And so it makes much more sense to be tilted to some degree towards sensitivity to negative emotion than it does to be tilted towards sensitivity for positive emotion. But it's also another one of those things that makes life rather intrinsically difficult because negative emotions are commonplace and they're powerful and they need to be because otherwise you'd wander stupidly into something that would kill you.

And it's better to be anxious than to be in pain or dead, even though it's not so good to be anxious. So for the existentialist that the the fundamental, the fundamental. Quality of human existence is limitation in the face of incomprehensible complexity. And all of the things that stem from that. Existentialism is not a comprehensive philosophy or a way of life, but an endeavor to grasp reality, existentialism is immersed in and arises directly out of man's anxiety, estrangement and conflicts.

This was written 60 years ago and it was written so it was it was aimed at Western audiences at that point. If you go back 100 years, you could make the case or or or perhaps a little longer than that.

You could make the case that the parts of the world that weren't Western were still reasonably well ensconced in traditional belief systems. And so those traditional belief systems provided an overarching canopy of meaning. That's one way of thinking about it. That was designed exactly to you could say rationalize or you could say cope with or deal with, depending on your perspective, that existential anxiety it gave, it gave significance to everything. It gave meaning to everything. That was a religious systems, let's say.

But they came crashing down in the West. In the late eighteen hundreds and then increasingly everywhere else in the world, so the point at which we are now in time. It isn't reasonable to only consider this a pathology of the Western individual. It might even be. The prime conflict that exists in the world right now between comprehensive and traditional religious systems and a modern viewpoint that has this existential angst built into it as part of it, as part of its nature, maybe it's the price you pay for increased technological mastery and awareness, but it's a big price to pay.

And the existentialists were concerned about that because they also believed that although the scientific method had given us immense technological power, the worldview that came along with it, which you could say in some sense is incidental to the method, but it doesn't matter.

The world view that came along with it was sufficiently powerful and objective and reductive to blow gaping holes in the meaning systems that protected us from our existential anxiety and to open us up to the possibility No one of nihilism, which is really belief in nothing. And we'll talk about that more as we progress or a proclivity towards rational totalitarianism, which would be, you might say, the the extreme reaction to the threat of nihilism and the abandonment of classic belief systems.

I I think you still see that playing out everywhere.

You certainly see it playing out in the universities right now because there's huge ideological conflicts in the substructure of of Western intellectual thinking. And people are and this is very hard on young people.

They're caught in part B B between an emergent nihilism that seems to be implicit in a materialist world view and the temptation of radical ideologies. And neither of those options, I would say, is tenable. I mean, the nihilistic option leaves you with nothing, and that's not good. And that's an existential realisation in some sense, too, because if your life is fundamentally problematic without you being pathological, just as the essence of your life, then you need something to defend your to defend against that you can't just have nothing, because all it does is leave you with the suffering that's implicit in your experience.

And then to swing to a totalitarianism totalitarian system means that you don't even exist to. Once you've done that, everything you say can be predicted. You're just the puppet of a of a rational scheme that has an explanation for everything. But that's really good for nothing except destruction, because it's too vague and and abstracted to be used to actually solve any concrete problems.

So this is this is the situation of modern people as far as the existentialists were concerned and the people that I'm talking to you about specifically, I'm going to talk to you about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. And I picked those people who aren't psychologists except in the broader sense, because I don't think there is anybody who there were and are existential psychotherapists. But I don't think that any of them do as good a job of explaining the problem as those people do.

So you might as well get right. You might as well get the information right from the source. Like psychoanalysis, existentialism seeks to utilize these very conflicts as avenues to the more profound self understanding of man. Well, so what does that mean? Well, it means, at least in part, that the theorists that we're going to talk about had an idea that was akin to the psychoanalytic idea of facing what you're afraid of. And that's a key concept in psychotherapy.

There's there's not that many key concepts in psychotherapy. One might be that you enter into an honest relationship with your client, that the second is that. Exposure to the things that you don't want to be exposed to is curative, if it's voluntary, that's a big deal and it has to be voluntary. It can't be involuntary because that'll just make it worse, because you might ask, well, you know, if a kid has a fear of rats or mice, they got that fear because often they were exposed to rats or mice and then you use exposure to rats and mice to cure them.

Well, that makes the precipitation of the illness the cure, which makes no sense. Well, what's the distinction? Well, it's it's one thing to have something pop up at you when you're not expecting it. That puts you in a state of of apprehension and preparation for action in the state of even a state of terror, a state of reflex of shock and then perhaps terror and maybe something you don't recover from that's completely different than facing something voluntarily.

The psychophysiology isn't even the same. So if you're faced with a stressor of a certain magnitude and it's involuntary, your body produces a lot of the stress hormone cortisol. And in large doses, cortisol is toxic, especially if it's produced over long periods of time. But if you face it voluntarily, then that doesn't happen. You use a completely different set of circuits to do something voluntarily, and it's the utilization of the voluntary circuits that indicates your mastery over the thing that you're afraid of and that mastery over the thing that you're afraid of and can't cope with that actually constitutes your adaptive personality.

And so part of what the existentialists were suggesting is that precisely. And you see this you see this in Freud with his insistence that you go into your messy past and and dig up the corpses in the skeletons and sort them out. And Jung's insistence that what you want is most is to be found where you least want to look. And Roger's insistence that people communicate honestly about difficult things, it's all predicated on the same idea in some sense that voluntary exposure is one of the prime things that cures people.

And one of the things that you should think about. You think, well, is that a valid claim? Well, you have the psychophysiological evidence, but it's also the case that that is how people learned. Right? If you're a child and you're learning to master the world, you actually exist in a state of existential anxiety unless you're near someone that will take care of you. So, for example, if you take the typical child and you go to a mall, say a three year old, and then you.

They have the three year old stand and you leave, it isn't going to be very long till you're far enough away so that most of most children in that situation will immediately start to cry. They'll get worried and they'll start to cry and then they'll break down because. Well, because that's the existential anxiety. Like you think, well, a normal child is calm. It's like wrong. A normal child close to someone who will take care of them is calm.

But that is by no means the same thing. It's not even close to the same thing. And so you get backwards in your psychological thinking if you don't notice that, because you think, well, the normal human being is calm and well put together, it's like no wrong. The normal human being in a place of safety is calm and well put together. But why you would ever think that a normal place is a place of safety? You know, assuming that that's the standard or the norm, there's absolutely no reason for that.

You see this with rats to because the behaviorists, for example, made the presumption that you had to teach rats to be afraid. But let me tell you how that actually worked. It's really interesting. And it shows you how carefully you have to analyze, say, psychological experiments to understand what's going on. So let's say you take a lab rat like let's say it's a lab rat that like a rat that Skinner used. B.F. Skinner, who is the most famous of the behaviors, and he could get rats to do anything.

He taught pigeons to play ping pong. He taught pigeons to guide guided missiles by photographs. And he did that with behavioral training. They were never used for guided missiles because they got the electronics working before the program was set into operation. But he could get them to peck at photos to guide something that was flying accurately. And he did that with behavioral training. So Skinner, I mean, he he was no joke. He he really knew how to train animals.

And it's very useful material to know. We'll talk about it to some degree if you want to train children, for example, or pet. So because the learning mechanisms are very similar, which is why, of course, we can get along with pets. Right. We understand them like we understand children, roughly speaking.

So anyways, so let's say you've got your rat and he's sitting there and he's pretty calm and he's in his cage. And so he's already a weird rat because he's been genetically altered. He's not a wild Norway rat. So he's a little tamer than a normal rat. Maybe he's a little more fearful, although perhaps not. And he's also a solitary rat in his cage. And there's no such thing as a solitary rat.

It's like a solitary zebra or a solitary carp or not carp, cod, cod existed huge schools. There's no such thing as cod, which is why they will never come back, as far as I can tell, because once you wipe out the school, it's like you wipe out a beehive and you're going to have six bees. What the hell are you going to do with six bees? What are they going to do? They don't exist on their own.

And and herd animals are like that, too, and Cod'd like that. So they organize their mating behavior in their huge schools. So without the schools, what the hell is the cod going to do? Nothing. And that is what they're doing. But anyways, back to the back to the rat. So you've got this rat.

He's in a cage, he's alone and he's hungry because one of the things that Skinner did was starve his rats down to seventy five percent of their normal bodyweight so that they would respond a lot more to food. So so that's the model. And that you got to keep in mind the nature of the model, because the model is like the way, the model is constituted is equivalent to your implicit assumptions about your experiment. And people don't take that into consideration.

OK, so the rats come. So then what you do is you take the rat out of his cage and you put him in the testing chamber. And so maybe what you're going to do is you're going to set the rat up so that a light goes on and then he gets a little electric shock. OK, but and that you're going to teach him to be afraid of the light. So after you pair the light with the shock six or seven times when the light comes on, the rats are going to freeze.

So and he freezes because he's using predator avoidance strategy basically to deal with the threat. But but and so you think, well, calm rat learns to be afraid. But no, because when you put the rat in the cage, the new cage, what does it do? It doesn't just, you know, find the sofa and have a nap. It's terrified when you put it in the new situation. That's the normal rat. It's the one that's like this.

It doesn't move because if it moved, maybe a predator would pick it out like a cat because cats can see lateral movement. That's why they have slit eyes, by the way, so they can detect lateral movement. And you know that because you play with your cat like this, it'll chase your hand. But if you do this, it won't. It is because it doesn't chase things that do. This doesn't chase kangaroos. You know, it chases things that move like this.

So it has eyes for that anyways. The rats frozen and then it starts to sniff because a rat is all smell. Most animals, most the brains of most animals are organized around smell. Human beings are very weird because our brains are organized around vision. But that's just not the case for most know dogs. They're the weirdest things because they can they can smell like way better than you. They can detect odors way better than you. Probably most of you smell better than a dog, but they can detect odors better than you.

But everything seems to smell good to a dog, which is the strangest damn thing. You know, with a nose like that, you'd think they'd never even want to go outside.

But anyways. Oh, now I probably lost my place. All right, dogs smell. Where were we going with that rat? Yes. And what's that? Frozen?

Yes. OK, so the rat. That's the one. That's the one. So the rat is in its cage and it's frozen so that nothing can see it and eat it. And so it starts to sniff because it uses smell to see what's going on.

And so if you take rats that have never been exposed to a cat and you like blow cat odor over them, they do not like that at all. They do not like cat odor. So it's built right into it's an archetype. The predator cat is an archetype for the rat and it doesn't need any any training to respond to it. And it's probably also the case with human beings and things like snakes and and looming objects. We've got some archetypal predators as well.

But all right. So the rat sniffs and then if nothing happens, it thinks, OK. A rat can sniff here without dying, and so then it starts to relax a little bit and maybe it starts to move around a bit and it takes a sniffing rat that's moving a little bit, can live here without dying, and then nothing else happens. And so it relaxes a bit more. And then it starts to sniff its way around and they'll sniff all around the cage and check out all the corners and make sure that there isn't anything there that can eat it, because that rat actually cares about that.

And then when it's completely explored the cage and decided that it's safe, then it turns into a normal calm rat. But that's post exploration. So you have to say, well, a rat that has thoroughly explored its territory is a calm rat. That's a whole different way of looking about fear. Then you turn the light on and Shock it and the rat thinks, wrong. It's not safe here. And that light indicates so indicates that it's not safe.

So basically what you've done is remind the rat that life is dangerous. You have not taught it fear. It's not the same thing. The rat knows everything about fear.

It learned that it was safe and it was wrong.

And that's a really a really important thing to understand also about what you're like, because, you know, like anxiety that needs no explanation, depression that needs no explanation. What needs explanation is how the hell do you ever feel secure and together ever? Because that's the mystery and partly the way you do that is by never going anywhere where you're upset. You stay in your territory and so like this is your territory and everyone knows how to act here, right?

So you look around it and everyone's sitting and doing exactly the same thing. So you can ignore them. You can pretend that they're not dangerous. And most of the time that will be correct and some of the time it won't be. And so you maintain your emotional stability by staying where you belong. And that's quite different than the psychoanalytic view, psychoanalytic view. You know, that you're you're calm and well put together if your psyche is properly organized.

It's like this is partly why I introduced you guys to Piaget because adds this other element, you know, he says something like, yeah, well, your psyche has to be organized properly. So you have to turn you have to have turned everything that is a constituent element of you into a functional being. But that being has to be integrated in a functional game like landscape, made of other people who are doing the same thing.

And then it's the concordance between your structure and that landscape that makes you emotionally regulated. That's a way different theory. It's a much more sophisticated theory. So you could say in some sense the psychoanalysts had it half right. You know, and also you can be individually pathological in a way that doesn't let you fit into society. But you have to understand the concordance between the social organization and the individual organization to get the to get the picture right.

Well, so what are the existentialists say? Well, it's something like in the depths of your existential terror, the wisdom to cope with that terror will be found. So that's the fundamental idea. And then there's a there's a a more profound idea in that which I would also say is implicit in in psychotherapy, the more behavioral the psychotherapy, the more implicit it is. But the idea is that.

Despite the fact that you are mismatched, that you're outmatched by, let's call it existential complexity, there's something in you that's far more complex than you know. And if you challenge it, it will respond by growing and developing, and that will not protect you against the existential anxiety. It's not like a shield or a guard that you're that you're hiding behind. It's not a defense. What happens instead is that you actually learn how to deal with it, you know, so you think about it this way.

One of the things that human beings are archetypal related to is fire, and of course, fire is something to be afraid of because it will burn you and it will burn everything down. But by the same token, when we mastered fire, which may have been two million years ago, something like that, because it looks like it was about then that we learned how to cook, which made a big difference. So you know how chimps I haven't told you the chimp story.

I don't think, you know, chimps are sort of shaped like this. They've got this huge barrel shaped body. Well, they spend like 12 hours a day chewing leaves. And why is that? Because you go out in the forest and eat leaves and see how much you have to chew so you don't starve to death. It's like leaves aren't edible. They hardly have any nourishment at all. And so if you're a chimp, all you do is sit around and chew leaves and then you need to have an intestinal tract that could wrap two or three times around this room so that you can digest the damn things.

Right. So that's chimp life. While human beings, we decided to trade intestine length for brain. And the way we did that was by learning how to cook and we mastered fire. And so you might say, well, is fire dangerous? And the answer to that is, well, it depends on how you react to it. It's exactly that, right? You say, well, fire is intrinsically dangerous. It's like no fire is multivalent.

It has all sorts of possibilities and some of them are extraordinarily destructive. But if you match your behavior properly to the phenomena, then you can master something like fire. Well, so the idea is that there's a potential inside you. Whatever inside means, there's a potential that's part of you, some of its genetic potential. And we know that because if we move you into a new environment, new genes will turn on inside of you and manufacture new parts of you.

So if you stress yourself optimally, if you push yourself out into the world, you can incorporate information from that journey, the exploration. That's Piagetian idea, right? You you go out, you learn something new and you adjust your behavior to it and you adjust your concepts to it and then you can master it. But what I didn't realize was that it also transforms your biological structure at a microscopic level merely as a consequence of being put in the new situation.

So the idea is that there's more to you than you know. And the way you call it out is by challenging yourself voluntarily in as many directions as you can manage. And that's a real thing. It isn't the construction of defences. It's not something artificial like defence against death anxiety. It's actually how you learn to cope in the world. And the existentialists, I would say, despite their exceptional pessimism, we're in some sense unbelievably optimistic because what they would say it's the opposite of a straw man argument.

They would say, well, how how weak are human beings ultimately weak? We're up against an opponent, so to speak, a social opponents say, which would be the crushing weight of society and a natural opponent. That is nature which overwhelms you. We're up against the ultimate opponent. But and so in that sense, we're extraordinarily weak. But it turns out that if we face that opponent or that series of opponents, then all sorts of possibilities manifest themselves inside of us.

And it isn't clear what the upper limits are to that.

So it's so interesting that it's a good example of how if you face what you're afraid of, you can find what you need. You say, well, the existentialists make the strongest case possible for the vulnerability of human beings. And out of that, the extract out the strongest case possible, why human beings are strong and powerful. It's very interesting paradox. And again, I would say that that's central to psychotherapy. One of the things you one of the things that's been learned about agoraphobics, for example.

Agoraphobics, they're usually women, they're usually in their 40s, they've usually been dependent, often someone close to them divorced or died or they're having heart palpitations or something like that, sometimes as a consequence of menopause. And they've they've accustom themselves to seeking authority when challenged. But the problem with having heart palpitations is it's like who's going to help you with that? Well, maybe you go to the emergency room and that is what agoraphobics do. Most agoraphobics have been to the emergency room like a dozen times because they have heart palpitations and then they feel them.

Then they get afraid and panic. Then their heart rate goes way up and then they think, oh, my God, I'm going to die. And, well, I do it well. I die. I'm going to make an absolute fool of myself and everyone's going to laugh at me. So that's social rejection and biological mortality, staring them right in the face. Well, so then you take an agoraphobic and you find out her background, because, as I said, it's usually women and then you start to expose that person to the things that she's afraid of.

Elevators, maybe subways, taxis. Actually, I agoraphobics, really. What happens is they're not really so much afraid of of places or things. What they're afraid of is being trapped in a place or a situation where they can't get away. And then if they had a heart attack, they wouldn't be able to get to an emergency ward. So that's really at the basis of the fear. And so and the emergency ward thing only helps to a limited degree, because if you're having a heart attack and it's a really good one, you're dead.

And so so that's a place where recourse to authority is only going to take you so far. Right. So it's a it's a it's not a good solution to the problem. Well, so what do you do? Well, you expose the person maybe to an elevator and, you know, maybe the elevator is there and you tell them, well, can you get on an elevator?

And they say, no. So, well, can you look at an elevator? Well, I don't think so. Well, how about some pictures of an elevator? So you show them some pictures of an elevator on Google and maybe one with closed doors and one with open doors. And you have them look at the damn thing because they won't want to look.

They'll want to look away. But you can't look away. You have to investigate it. And then what your brain learns is that you're afraid of that thing, but you can scan it with your eyes and nothing happens. It's like the rat in the in the cage sniffing and realizing, well, he can sniff it and he doesn't die. It's like you can look at the picture of an elevator and you don't die while you do that until you're bored.

And that's when you've learned that you can look at that elevator without dying. It's built right into you. Well, then maybe I can take you out and we'll look at a real elevator. And so I say, well, let's walk. It's close to that elevators you could manage. I want you right on the edge between order and chaos. Let's say I want you to find that edge. Can you can you stand here? Yes. How about here?

Yes. How about that's good enough. OK, you're standing here. Order, chaos. That's where you're at. So what happens? You stand there and you notice you don't die and you do that long enough. So you're bored with it. And then you think, well, can you step three feet closer? Yes, you can. Well, and maybe after three weeks you say, well, we're by the door. So here's the deal.

I'm going to open that door and I'm going to hold it open and I'm not going to play a trick on you. And so what you're going to do is just poke your head in and take a look around. And so imagine doing that. OK, so you imagine OK, now actually do it then.

I know I don't let go of the door. That's what evil psychotherapists do anyways. Then you get the person inside and what you see is they're looking at their shoes, they're in there but they're not really in there. You say no, no, no. You got to look, you look in the corners, you've got to look at the numbers. You've got to see that you're in this thing that you're afraid of. And so you have them look around and look around and look around.

They're like the rat coming, relaxing and starting to move. And you say, well, that's good enough. You can get out of the elevator slowly. Don't don't rush out. Just go out calmly. Good enough, go home, sleep for a week and then come back and we'll do it again.

And then if you do that for depends on how fast the person is capable of of advancing. But you can move people through phobias pretty fast if they trust you and they have to trust you and you have to be careful. You say you say to them, look, we will stop doing this whenever you want, as soon as you say so. So this is this is completely up to you. I'm not pushing you. I've got no demands on you.

You want to be able to go outside again. We're going to walk through that. But you're not performing for me. This isn't a test. This isn't a contest. It's none of that. And when you're done, we're done. And, you know, you can also help help people, like, step through that. So I was treating someone who had a needle phobia recently, and this person really felt trapped by authority figures that were medical and this person had their reasons for it.

And so the first thing I did because we were working with this needle was say, you're going to practice getting the hell out of here. So I'll come at you, I'll come at you with this needle, you know, I don't have a needle, but we'll pretend I do, OK, so I'm going to move it towards you and you're going to tell me to stop and you're going to leave the room because you want to see that you can, you know, in the personal think, well, I know I can.

It's like, no, you don't know. You don't know. And so we're going to practice it just like a kid pretending. And so I move forward with the the nonexistent needle and they say, stop, and I stop and they say, I'm leaving. And they leave and they come back and they're smiling because they didn't know they could do that, you know, and part of them is still thinking, well, I'm a four year old kid and there's no way I can get out of here.

No one's going to listen to me. It's built right into them. That's like Freudian regression or fixation at an earlier developmental stage.

And if you watch that, if you watch for that and people sometimes you can see how old they are. You know, if you if you tap into something that they were afraid of, very young, their whole facial expression will turn into that person, their body language and everything. It's very interesting. You have to watch very carefully to see it, but you can definitely see it. So, OK, so with the agoraphobic, you think, well, you treat the agoraphobic, you know, and then she can go take taxis and she can go on the subway and then she goes and has a big fight with her husband because she should have had one 20 years ago.

But she was dependent and authorities seeking. So she never would risk it because if she upset the relationship with authority, then it would expose her to the world. And so she was always in a subordinate and inferior position and a bit of a slave. And one of the things that often happens when you treat someone with agoraphobia is they get a lot more assertive and you think, well. One of the things the psychoanalysts objected to when the behaviourist started to use exposure therapy as a treatment was the idea that there would be substitution because the psychoanalysts would say, you're not really afraid of an elevator.

So if I just treat your elevator fear because that's really not what you're afraid of, the fear is just going to pop up somewhere else. That would be symbolic substitution, but that isn't what happened. What happened was, is that if they learn to get on the elevator, they're much more likely to take a taxi. You think, well, why is that? It's because they weren't learning. The things were less frightening.

That was the original idea. The original idea was counter conditioning, that basically the person had been conditioned to be afraid of whatever it was. And then what you did was you put them in. An encounter with that and you let them breathe and relax and then the relaxation they learned would counteract the panic and that's why exposure therapy worked. But it turned out you didn't need to do any of that, wasn't counter conditioning at all. And so then you think, well, it's fear reduction or habituation.

That was the next theory. Habituation is just take a snail. He comes out of his shell, you poke them, he goes into a shell and he comes out again, poke. So you tease a snail if you if you you know, if you ever need to know that. So he comes out, you tap him and you do that 10 or 15 times, the snail gets bored and you tap him. He just sits there. Now, he doesn't get bored because snails are probably always, always bored.

But what's happened is that you've in some sense, you've exhausted the nervous system representation. That's one way of thinking about it. Or you can think about it as a very simple form of learning. That's habituation. It's learned you learn to ignore. And the idea then for a while was that you were teaching people to habituate to these things they were afraid of. But that also turned out not to be true. What you're actually doing is teaching the person to be brave.

And that generalizes so what happens is they think they're all pathetic and and fear ridden and and tiny and vulnerable and useless and and so they're acting like that. And then you say, well, look, this is a horrible thing you've got here. Why don't we see if you can manage it? And so they go through it and think, wow, I could do that, ha, I'm not as useless as I thought. And then maybe they try twenty things like that and they think, wow, I'm a lot tougher than I knew I was.

Maybe they stand up a little bit straighter because they're a little more dormant in their serotonin system, start to work again and then they're ready to take on the world more. And so maybe that's why they go home and have a fight with their stupid husband. And that doesn't necessarily make him very happy either. And that would be an example of psychotherapeutic resistance from a family member. Do you really want your person to be better? Right.

If they're a little more assertive and a little less fearful, you might not be able to tyrannize over them so easily. And so it's not necessarily the case at all that you would be happy about that. So you got to watch that sort of thing, too. And maybe the person wouldn't even be that happy about it because they're getting all sorts of secondary benefits from being, you know, neurotic and martyred because that's a vicious weapon to be weak and useless.

If you can wield that as a weapon, it's extraordinarily effective. So you got to watch for that sort of thing to be working against your psychotherapeutic games as well. Like psychoanalysis, existentialism seeks to utilize these very conflicts as avenues to the more profound self understanding of man, in many ways, existentialism is existentialism is the unique and specific portrayal of the psychological predicament of contemporary Man. OK, so that relates back to the idea that.

Modern people have been stripped of their archaic belief systems that are exposed more. Completely to. To the possibility of a meaningless and painful existence with no superordinate meaning. Existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets, the three writers who appear invariably on every list of existentialists, Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre, are not in agreement on essentials. Such alleged precursors as Pascal and Kierkegaard differed from all three men by being dedicated Christians. And Pascal was a Catholic of sorts while Kierkegaard was a Protestant Protestant.

If is often done, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky are included in the fold, then we must make room for an impassioned anti Christian nature and an even more fanatical Greek Orthodox Russian imperialist. That's a little hard on Dostoyevsky, I would say. But by the time we consider adding real Kafka, Ortega and Camu, it becomes plain that one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism. Well, so that's another element of existentialism. The local of action is in the individual.

And the idea is that, well, you're you're fated in some sense to suffer and to be vulnerable as an individual. And so the right unit of analysis for people is as individuals. And again, I would say that's a primary tenet of psychotherapy. There are family psychotherapy, schools, for example, but individual psychotherapy is predicated on the idea that the individual is the right level of analysis, the correct level of analysis.

Intense, intense, committed. I can give you an interesting example of this, one of the things that you guys are going to do is the you're going to do the personality analysis, which is part of this self-authoring suite that my colleagues and I have of have developed.

If you take maps of meaning, you would also do the future authoring exercise. And we've done that for people, mostly university students, mostly in Europe. So I want to tell you an interesting story, and this has been replicated a couple of times. So in the business school at at the Rotterdam School of Management, we've tested and we put about 4000 students through this future authoring program that helps you make a plan for three to five years into the future, a plan and a counterplan.

The plan is what you want to have happen, and the counterplan is what you really do not want to have happen. And then you make a plan to avoid the latter and to move towards the former.

And we compared their performance three years students performance to the performance of students three years before that. So it wasn't a perfect design, although we also did a controlled study that that had the same results. So when when we started before we started having people do this plan, here was the ranking of performance. So we looked at ethnicity, ethnicity and gender. So the top performing people were Dutch national women and they were a minority among the business students and probably a fairly selected minority.

So maybe that's what accounted for their higher performance. Although women tend to be outperforming men in academic institutions pretty much all the way from elementary school through university now, which is an absolute catastrophe. But we will talk about that now. So and then the next highest performing group were Dutch nationals and then the next highest performing group were non Western ethnic minority women. And the lowest performing group were West, non western west, non Western ethnic minority men. And there were quite a few people in all those categories.

So it wasn't just even a couple of dozen, it was a couple of hundred solid study. And within two years after doing the future authoring program, the non Western ethnic minority men were outperforming the Dutch women. Their their academic performance went up 70 percent and their dropout rate plummeted.

And it really looks good for decreasing dropout rate. And the reason I'm telling you about that is because people make the automatic assumption that ethnic disparities in ethnic performance are necessarily a consequence of sociological inequality, let's say, or sociological or or political or economic disparity. Let's say this was a pure psychological intervention. It wiped out the difference completely. And the Dutch women had actually improved slightly over that two year period as a consequence of doing the program as well. So the man not only caught up to the women the way they were performing, but the way they were performing even better in the in the aftermath of having a plan.

So our original theory, we've replicated that a couple of places. It works better for men. Now, that's partly because women are already doing well. But we have a hypothesis that men are ordinary enough so that unless they have their own plan, they just won't perform. I think it's associated with disagreeableness now. We don't know that for sure because we haven't been able to disentangle that. But it's been a very striking finding. So anyway, so you can say, well, what's the right level of analysis when you're trying to to improve human adaptation to terrible word.

But but. But. But it'll do for now because I can't think of another one, so. The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs, whatever, and especially of systems and a market dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy, a superficial academic and remote from life, that's the heart of existentialism.

And I think that if you're a good psychotherapist, you take an existential approach to your clients. And that's why listening is so important as well, because it's really useful to have a body of theories about what might be up with a person and how you might approach the problem and to have a whole array of psychotherapeutic tools.

So those would be the theories that we've been discussing, opens up your your it makes you more skilled. It gives you more more to offer. But you've got to be careful not to hammer the person into one of those schools. Now, sometimes that's useful because if someone comes to you and they're just chaotic, they've got no structure at all. If you approach them as if their problems were Freudian, at least it's systematic and they can come out with a systematic understanding of their problem.

And it might match to some degree, like, you know, if you're having all sorts of anxiety and depression problems, we could probably look into your family history and identify reasons why that might be at least partly the case. And so that's at least a reasonable maybe there's multiple reasons, but at least nailing one of them would be useful, more useful than nailing none of them. So but what's better is to treat the person as someone you don't know.

You have no idea what's up with this person, but you have a bunch of potential tools to use and then you talk to them and you treat them as if they're unique.

And you figure out what is up with them specifically and they tell you what's up with them, you know, they've got all sorts of cockeyed theories about who they are and what they're doing. And it's scattered and paradoxical and it doesn't make much sense. And and it's like a bad undergraduate essay, roughly speaking. It's full well, really, it's full of internal contradictions and it's incoherent. But if you listen long enough that stops being the case. The person starts to pull themselves together with their representation and they start to act that out properly.

And that's great. So that's that's that's. You could consider that applied existentialism. Now. The other thing, the existentialists are kind of romantic, I would say, but the romantics are thinkers who who deny the overarching supremacy of rationality and the intellect. They would say that to think about life as a problem that is to be solved rationally is insufficient because you're not a rational being or you're only partly a rational being. You're also an emotional being and you're a motivated being and you're an embodied being.

And that's a lot different than being purely rational. And I would say there's actually not even a debate about that anymore because it's pretty damn clear that rationality cannot really operate unless it's embodied. So it has a it has a set of operations that it can undertake, that it's motivated so that there's certain things it's doing and other things that it are that it isn't, that it's emotional because emotions are low resolution, quick solutions to problems that can't be computed.

So, for example, we get in an argument and we just can't go anywhere. And at some point you say, well, to hell with you, I'm going home. You're angry, right? Do you win? Well, no, but you don't have to have the stupid argument anymore. So the anger is actually it's a way of popping you out of a rational framework that there's no escaping from. You just say, well, this is stupid and you leave.

It's like there's nothing rational about that except that you don't want to stand there and argue till you starve to death. So certainly you need the emotions to give you guides in situations that you can't really compute your way through. So and only inside of that does rationality operate with all of those underlying predicates. And the rationality has to be informed by the body and by the motivations and by the emotions for a t even operate. So the existentialists are correct about that to to deny rationality as the fundamental principle of orientation.

That doesn't mean that irrationality is the right approach. It means that rationality has to be augmented by other elements of being, elements of subjective being. And that's akin to the psychoanalytic viewpoint, too, that you have to integrate your drives and emotions, especially anger and sexuality, into your personality. And also akin to the idea that there's some personalities, the reflexes and so forth have to be, you know, gender have to be organized into a playable game so that everything is working in harmony.

So it's a similar idea. Now, the existentialists regard the division between object and subject as part of what specifically torturing people who are outside of, say, traditional systems of belief. Because and this is a tricky one, you know, the scientist might claim that while the world is material in matter is essentially essentially dead and without spirit or or or psyche. But and it's easy as a consequence of adopting that viewpoint, to think the same thing about you, that you're ultimately a short lived material entity and a meaningless material world.

But the weird thing about that, and this is worth thinking about is that if you're a scientist.

You throw away the subjective as soon as you start operating the science, because the idea is, well, you'll watch something according to a procedure and you'll watch it and you'll watch it and you'll watch it. And we're only going to allow what all of you experience the same way to be real.

Well, you throw out the subjective right at the beginning and then so you can't say, well, there's no subject left in what results. It's the reason there's nothing left in what results is because you threw it out to begin with. Now, the question is, what should you do with it when the existentialists say, well, you're alive, you can't just dispense with it? The fact that you're alive is the critical issue. And so you can use science as a tool which is proper.

But if you use it as a way of describing being, well, then you fall into this subject object dichotomy. And underneath that is nihilism or the proclivity for totalitarianism. So they don't like that idea. They don't like the idea of compartmentalization for people either, but we won't go into that to any great degree. OK, now I'm going to read you some things from some of the people that I described, and we'll take them apart a little bit.

Things I've been collecting for a long period of time, so. This is Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, and I called them Prophets of the Dawning Age, Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and writer, was really the first person who wrote about phenomena like anxiety, dread, and more particularly so he was the first person to sort of conceptualize it as a as even as something akin to a scientific phenomena, something that had existed.

And he wrote very much about that.

Nature, of course, was the great prophet of the death of God and and a prognosticator of what the psychological consequences of the demise of this classic. Meaning structure that was unbelievably ancient, what the collapse of that actually meant to me. You can think about Christianity and then maybe you could think about the Judaism that it was embedded in as it even an older system, but that Judaism emerged out of the Middle East, partly out of Egypt, which was it enmeshed and even an older belief system.

And that was enmeshed in something absolutely prehistoric. That and so it was a continuum in some sense of adaptive structures that that reigned supreme essentially right until while right until the scientific revolution. And so we're outside of that now. We're in a different paradigm and there are consequences to that. And that was the sort of thing that Nietzsche was concentrating on. And he actually, in some ways made it worse because nature was an incredible critique of Christianity. I mean, he wrote a book called The Antichrist, and all he did in that book brilliantly was take dogmatic Christianity to task.

Now, one of the things he did say, which is very interesting, was that Christianity died at its own hand.

So his notion was that because Christianity say Judaism, Christianity had elevated truth to the highest virtue, that that search for truth then ended up undermining the axioms of Christianity itself. So it developed a tool, unbelievably powerful analytic tool, and then used it to well, it's like we were sitting on a branch and saw it off with the saw that we had invented and then everyone fell. And Dostoevski well, Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian and and but an also an extraordinarily brilliant man.

And he was absolutely terrified at what the consequences of the dissolution of that belief system was going to mean for Russia in particular. And Dostoevsky explored nihilism, great in it to great degree in notes from underground and in crime and Punishment, because the murderer and Crime and Punishment is essentially nihilistic. He's a nihilistic narcissist, roughly speaking, and that's what compels him to commit murder. But Dostoyevsky also wrote a book called The Devils, which is an amazing book where he predicted that the death of Christ, the sudden death of Christianity in the Soviet in Russia was going to produce the catastrophic totalitarian horrors of the Soviet Union.

And he predicted that in like 1880, 1890, which was 30 years before the revolution, absolutely remarkable. Nietzsche, a genius nature, was a full professor when that was impossible, I think when he was twenty four and that just never happened. And so his, his extraordinary genius was recognized very early and but he was also extraordinarily ill, sick physically. His dad died at about 40 of something they called a softening of the brain, which was actually a fairly common diagnostic category back then.

No one really knows what it was. Some people have suggested that he had syphilis from one sexual encounter or that it was hereditary, but nobody really knows. But anyways, his father died young and Nietzsche died very young as well. He went he was very he was mentally incapacitated for the last few years of his life and and died and died after that. And so he could only serve as a professor for a while because he couldn't see very well.

And he was always sick. And he ended up living in this little village, I believe, in Switzerland, where he wrote his books and he could only write a paragraph or two at a time without before he became very ill. And so his writing is extraordinarily condensed and dense and brilliant, brilliant. And he I think he gave away, I think, Beyond Good and Evil, which is his masterpiece, although he had many think it only sold five hundred copies in his lifetime.

So he he also believed that he was only writing for himself. He didn't really know if anybody was ever going to pay any attention to what he said, but they certainly did. So I would say he was he ended up being certainly one of the ten most influential people of the late 19th and early 20th century. This is an example of his writing "of what is great, one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness, that means cynically and with innocence, what I relate is the history of the next two centuries.

I describe what is coming. What can no longer come differently? The advent of nihilism, our whole European culture. Is moving from some time now, moving for some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that's afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct who has found his advantage in standing aside outside.

Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Sorry about that, because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence. Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals. Because we must experience nihilism before. We can find out what value those values really had. We require at some time new values. Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanny, first of all, guest? Point of departure. " This is a good example of how nature nature said he philosophized with a hammer and and it's it's it means that he spent.

Hours, days, weeks, months, concentrating on how to make a single sentence as packed with significance as he could possibly manage, and so Nietzsche said, it's the best arrogant statement I've ever read, he said. I can say in a sentence. What it takes other people a whole book to say, and then he said what they can't say in a whole book, that's pretty good. It's like the first one's a real, like, blow to the solar plexus.

And the second one is like, I can top that with no problem point of departure. It is an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration or the corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism. That's a critique of the later Freudian ideas right there and then because what Nietzsche says would look, if things are going wrong for you or if they're going wrong in general, it's really straightforward to say that, well, there's something wrong with society that would be social distress or there's some physiological degeneration.

There's something wrong with you physically or everything is just corrupted. Being itself is corrupt, which is a classic explanation. Right. You hear that all the time. You think, well, people are suffering for one reason or another. Well, why? Well, there's something wrong biologically or society is corrupted and everything is unfair. Nietzsche says, no, no, you're not going to get away with that. First, he says ours is the most honest and compassionate age, comparing modern civilization, let's say to everything that that has come before it.

So speaking of corruption is not something you can do lightly. And then he says, and this is remarkable distress, whether psychic, physical or intellectual need not at all produce nihilism. That is the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability. Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Well, that's a rough one. It's like, well, you had a rough childhood. Well, someone else who had your childhood might not have drawn those conclusions.

So here's an example. You know that most people who abused children were abused (by children) as children. Right. But most people who are abused as children do not grow up to abuse children. And you can figure that out arithmetically, because if it was if it was the case that everyone abused grew up to abuse in about four generations, everyone would be being beat to death in childhood as a matter of course, because it would spread exponentially. That isn't what happens.

It dampens. And why is that? Well, if you're being bullied as a child, we could say, well, you could draw two conclusions, causal conclusions. Being bullied caused me to be a bully. Fair enough. Man, that's an understandable story. How about being bullied caused me not ever to be a bully. Well, why is that any less reasonable a conclusion, it's frequently one that people draw, and since the two opposite conclusions can be drawn from the same set of experiences, you cannot say that the experiences caused the conclusions.

And that's Nietzsche's critique of, say, sociological or psychological determinism. With regards to the optimism or pessimism, pessimism of your world view, such distress always permits a variety of interpretations, right? Rather, it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted the end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality. That was the development of the sense of truth which cannot be replaced, which turns against the Christian God. The sense of truthfulness, highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendacious ness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history.

A remarkable claim. And then this one's even worse. It's absolutely brilliant. I think rebound from God is truth to the fanatical faith. All is false. That's nihilism. An act of Buddhism and Nietzsche.

Nietzsche explains that. And this is, you know, our talk. Talk to you guys a little bit about the idea of the game in the meta game. You know, the meta game being the set of all games. Nature draws on a conception like that for this criticism because he says when you lose faith in something and that happens to people very frequently, when you lose faith in something because you're human and because you can abstract, it's not only that you lose faith in that thing, that person, that system, the fact that you've lost faith in that indicates to you that it's possible to lose faith in anything in every system and every person once burned forever shy.

And that's nihilism. The fact that one thing can collapse on you can make you completely unwilling to manifest any faith in anything whatsoever. And that's the emergence of nihilism. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into beyond light, leads to nihilism, another critique of Christianity embedded in that sentence. He said, well, Christianity needed to be destroyed even by itself, because it put so much emphasis on the afterworld on heaven that it forgot completely about life now and here.

And because of that needed to be destroyed because life here is sufficiently rife with suffering. So it needs to be addressed. And people if it's wrong, it's incorrect to inform people that they should wait for some hereafter and justify their suffering in that manner. And so he would say in some sense that even the idea of compassion, which is central to Christianity, is also one of the reasons why Christianity collapsed under its own weight. The untenability of one interpretation of the world upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false.

Also, what you might say, well, so what if you don't believe in anything? Well, I would take a neural psychological approach to that. Most of the positive emotion, positive emotions, dopaminergic. It's a consequence of the manifestation of the exploratory system that has its roots in the hypothalamus, a very ancient part of the brain. It's the same part of the brain that cocaine and heroin, all the drugs that people like to abuse, the drugs that are exciting, not the drugs that are calming it activates that system.

It's the system that's activated when something exciting happens to you or when something novel happens to you. But more importantly, it's the system that's activated when you're pursuing a goal and you see that you're moving towards the goal. So what does that mean?

No goal. No positive emotion, so you say, well, if you have nothing to believe in, if you have no value structure left, because the value structure says this is better than this, no value structure, no positive emotion. Well, and so what's the problem with that? It's easy to get rid of your positive emotion, that's not a problem because it's rather fragile and tenuous. Try getting rid of your negative emotion. Good luck. That is not going to happen.

So what happens is that if your value system collapses, then all you're left with is negative emotion. And that is not a good thing. Well, so Nietzsche would say, well, why do people flee into the arms of totalitarians from the specter of nihilism? It's because totalitarian certainty, even though it involves slavery and the sacrifice of the reason and intellect, totalitarian certainty might be preferable to nihilistic chaos. Well, it's a big problem, it's a it's a and he said, well, I'm telling the story of the next two hundred years.

It's like, well ever since then, for the entire 20th century, we bounced between nihilism and totalitarianism with deaths on both sides constant. And we're still doing exactly the same thing. Dostoyevsky, Dostoevsky was a big influence on Nietzsche, and it's very interesting to read them in parallel because Nietzsche, Dostoevsky is, of course, a dramatist and Nietzsche is a philosopher. And it's almost as if Dostoevsky wrote the drama and Nietzsche provided the philosophical commentary, are 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 now did nothing but abuse his bureaucratic position and used his trivial bit of power to lorded 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 100 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 afoul of economic necessity. And he basically, in a fit of false messianism, 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 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 it weak and 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 water where they drowned. 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 being. History is a is a slaughterhouse. It's a catastrophe. And how would you ever consider that something rational?

Dostoevsky's point is 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 almost unseemly one. And 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 80s, 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.

Well, Dostoyevsky was no fool. He knew perfectly well 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 that would make them any more sane than than they already are. Now and he takes that further because he says, well, you can give people cake and material goods until they're 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 cake 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 case and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive, good sense his fatal, 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 men are still men and not the keys of a piano which the laws of nature threaten 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 men 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 is, as man is, the only animal that can curse, it's his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals, maybe by his 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, too, can be calculated and 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 that 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 of itself, of its own free will coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentleman, 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 so it's so intelligence 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 you're going to be like a lion after it's eaten a zebra and do nothing but sleep that 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, 40 years before the damn Soviet revolution when that sort of utopianism was put into practice without absolutely catastrophic consequences.

Kierkegaard. It is now about four years ago that I got the notion. Of wanting to try my luck as an author, I remember it quite clearly. It was on a Sunday. Yeah, that's in a Sunday afternoon, I was seated at usual out of doors at the cafe in the Fredericksburg Garden. I had been a student for half a score of years. Although never lazy, all my activity, nevertheless, was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality and for which perhaps I even have a little genius.

I read much spending the remainder of the day idling and thinking. Or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to, so I sat there and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought, among other thoughts, I remember these you are going on, I said to myself, to become an old man without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about you in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railway's, some by omnibuses, steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recital of everything worth knowing.

And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant.

And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted because my cigarette was smoked out and the new one had to be lit. So I smoked again. And then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind. You must do something about it. As much as with your limited capacities, it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has already become. You must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely and at the same time, it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community for when all combined in every way to make everything easier.

There remains only one possible danger, namely. That these become so great that it becomes altogether too great, then there's only one want left, though it is not yet felt want when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.

Kierkegaard again. There's a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there's also the truth. And that in truth itself, there is need of having the crowd on its side. There's another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd, there is immediately untruth, so that to consider for a moment the extreme example, even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in the case, they were all to get together in a crowd, a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed to voting, noisy, audible crowd untruth would at once be in evidence.

For a crowd is the untruth in a godly sense, it is true eternally Christian, as Saint Paul says, that only one attains the goal, which is not meant in a comparative sense because a comparison takes others into account. It means that every man can be that one God helping him there in, but only one attains the goal. And again, this means that every man should be careful about having to do with the others and essentially should talk only with God and with himself for only one, attains the goal.

And again, this means that man or to be a man is akin to deity. In a world in a worldly and temporal sense, it will be said by the man of Bussel sociability and amicableness how unreasonable that only one attains the goal for it is far more likely that many by the strength of united effort should attain the goal. And when we are many, success is more certain and it is easy and it is easier for each man severally.

True enough. It is far more likely. And it is true also with respect to all earthly and material goods, if it is allowed to have its way, this becomes the only true point of view, and it does away with God and eternity and with man's kinship with deity. It does away with it. All right, transforms it into a fable and puts in its place the modern or we might rather say the old pagan notion that to be a man is to belong to a race endowed with reason, to belong to it as a specimen, so that the race or species is higher than the individual, which is to say that there are no individuals, but only specimen's.

But eternity, which arches over and high above the temporal tranquil as the starry vault at night, and God in heaven who in the bliss of that sublime tranquility holds in survey without the least sense of dizziness at such a height, those countless multitudes of men and knows each single individual by name. He, the great examiner, says that only one attains the goal. Nietzsche, a similar comment, The Traveler. A traveler who had seen many countries and peoples in several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere, and he answered, men are inclined to laziness.

Some will feel he might have said with greater justice. They're all timid. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once as something unique. And that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity, such a curious and diffuse plurality.

He knows that. But he hides it like a bad conscience. Why? From fear of his neighbor who insists on convention and veils himself with it, but what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbor, to think and act heard fashion and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps in a few rare cases. In the vast majority, it is the desire for comfort, inertia. In short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveler spoke, he is right.

Men are even lazier than they are timid. And what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity with burden.

Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret everyone's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder. They dare to show us the human being as he is down to the last muscle himself and himself alone, even more that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth contemplating as novel and incredible as every work of nature and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it's their laziness that he despises, for it is on account of this, that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction.

The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself. Let him follow his conscience, which shouts at him, Be yourself. What you are at present doing or pining and desiring. That's not really you. Why are you so firmly and triumphantly convinced that only the normal in the positive, in other words, only what is conducive to welfare is for the advantage of man is not reason in error as regards advantage, does not man perhaps love something besides well being?

Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering, perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being, a man is sometimes extraordinarily passionately in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There's no need to appeal to universal history to prove that. Ask yourself if you're a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill bred. Whether it's good or bad.

It's sometimes very pleasant to to smash things. I hold no Brooke brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I'm standing for my Caprice and for it's being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place at amusement parks, for instance. I know that. In the Palace of Crystal, it is unthinkable now in the late eighteen hundreds, there was a world exhibition in London and they erected a Palace of Cristal at the World Exhibition, and it was the first building made out of glass and steel.

And so it was a representation of the dawning materialist utopia. And that's the palace of Crystal the Dostoevski is referring to in the Palace of Crystal. Suffering is unthinkable. Suffering means doubt, negation and what would be the good of a palace of crystal if there could be any doubt about it. And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering. That is destruction and chaos. Why suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning, that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man yet I know man prises it and would not give it up for any satisfaction.

We're now in a position to see the crucial significance of the existential psychotherapy movement. It is precisely the movement that protests against the tendency to identify psychotherapy with technical reason. We have seen that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, as well as the representatives of the existential cultural movement following them. We have seen that, yes, not only contributed far reaching and penetrating psychological insights, which in themselves form a significant contribution to anyone seeking scientifically to understand modern psychological problems, but also did something else.

They placed these insights on an ontological basis, namely the study of the individual has the being who has these particular problems. They believe that it was absolutely necessary that this be done and that they feared that the subordination of reason to technical problems would ultimately mean the making of man over in the image of the machine. We'll see you on Thursday. You're going to have to stop doing that, someone accused me of YouTube on YouTube of of dubbing in applause at the end of my lectures.