Читать книгу Dr. Jordan Peterson - Man of Meaning. Complete Edition (Volumes 1-5) - Hermos Avaca - Страница 4

So, as you can plainly see, the title of this talk is "Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes and Adversaries: A complete cosmology of being". Sounds dreadfully New-Age to me - but it's not! New-Age people are very creative, but they can't think critically - but I can think critically. so, this is a creative, theoretical enterprise - conjoined with the capacity to tell the difference between bad ideas and good ideas.

What I'm going to talk to you about, hopefully, are the greatest ideas that humanity has ever produced. they are also ideas, that we don't understand well, and we risk forgetting the highest level of formal development of those ideas - we are criticizing things that we have invented as a species, but that that we cannot understand rationally.

We are predisposed to believe that ideas that we can't understand rationally have to be wrong. sometimes that's true, but sometimes we're just not smart enough to understand them. I can give you an example of something that we are not really smart enough to understand:

We are not really smart enough to understand, why people would line up for 4 nights for 10 blocks to watch Star Wars! I mean, they won't do that for a lecture - and they wouldn't pay money for it! It seems, that Star Wars is naturally interesting, and people just take that for granted. but the fact, that people will line up and engage voluntarily in a ritual activity of that sort, is a manifestation of something that is very deep in the human psyche that we do not comprehend Well.

So, I'm going to talk to you about what I like to think of as the grammar of belief. I got interested in this back in the mid-80s. I was mostly driven by the interest in global warfare that was ideologically motivated - and also atrocity. Warfare was not so difficult to understand, in some sense, because you can map it on to animal territoriality. but atrocity in the service of ideology is a whole different thing!

For example, it is now certainly clear, that in World War II, when the Nazis had to make a choice perhaps between winning the war and accelerating the rate in which they were killing Jews - they chose the latter! It's very difficult to understand that using a model based on animal territoriality.

I started reading about belief systems widely: in political writings, economic writings, religious writings and psychological writings - anywhere I could find a thread that I thought was promising. I read a lot of Jung, I read a lot of Freud... almost all the great clinical psychologists. A lot of Solzhenitsyn, a lot of George Orwell and a lot of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.

They're all people who, as far as I can tell, have something very original to say. Out of that, I learned to understand why people need belief and why it is actually inevitable - why faith is inevitable! Faith is inevitable, because your knowledge is finite and therefore you have to take some things for granted - or you fall into an infinite regress.

I also learned what constituted the difference between pathological belief and non-pathological belief - by the way, I think that those terms can be defined technically, which is a statement that runs contrary to the pre-supposition, of moral relativism. I'm definitely not a moral relativist! I think that the motivation for moral relativism fundamentally is the desire to abdicate responsibility. Even though you can make a strong intellectual case for the claim, that moral relativism is correct... the intellectual case for it and the actual motivation have nothing to do with one another, however.

I've also found out something else, which is quite interesting, and I don't know how much I can touch on it tonight, but I don't think that Newton and Darwin are commensurate. I think that most modern peoples are Newtonians, not Darwinians. I think that you can understand the grammar of belief, which is religious in nature, using Darwinian principles, but that means that you have to give up your Newtonian presuppositions. so, I think I can make that argument implicitly with what I'm doing as I progress.

The first thing I'm going to tell you, is that it's necessary for you to look at the world through a limited frame of reference. the reason for that is - you're not very smart. your consciousness can only handle about 4 bits of information per second, that is not very much, given that the number of bits of information coming at you from the external world are - for all practical purposes - infinite!

Like Aldous Huxley suggested: "your brain seems to be primarily a reducing agent!" your body is a reducing agent as Well, because there are a lot of things that you just can't detect. then, the room that you are sitting in is a reducing agent, because it is keeping all sort of things out that you would otherwise have to deal with. the stability of this city is a reducing agent, because we're not going to be stampeded by barbarians at any moment with any luck.

We deal with the complexity of the world, in part, by inhabiting a sequence of reducing structures - until the world is reduced enough, so that we can actually deal with the minute elements of it, that we can comprehend at one moment. Those are elements that we comprehend are not the familiar objects of objective reality! in fact animals, and people included, are not much interested in objective reality. We are interested in pragmatic reality!

Pragmatic reality is the reality you act on, not that you perceive! and because we're embedded in bodies and because we are biological organisms and because we are concerned with survival and reproduction - among other things - "How to act?" is a much more important question for us than "what is the the world constituted of?"

How to act is also the prime Darwinian question, in some sense - because if you act wrongly, from a Darwinian perspective, you end up dead before you can reproduce! so Darwinism is a pragmatic theory. in fact, the American pragmatists - on the North American East Coast - recognized that in very short period of time after Darwin's studies were published. they recognized the connection between pragmatism as a theory and the Darwinian theory instantaneously!

So, the world that we inhabit - given that we're alive and given that what selected us, selected us to act - is actually a pragmatic world! and the objects of a pragmatic world aren't objects: they are "tools" and "obstacles" - and they have valiance, a priori! they have value a priori!!

From a Newtonian perspective it's like this: you look at the world, then you think about the world that you see - the objects of the world that you see - and then you evaluate them and then you act. that is not how the brain works, that's just wrong!

You might see the value of things before you see the object itself. there are people, for example, who are blind, they have "blindsight". these people can recognize emotions on faces, without knowing they can see. that's because their retina is attached to their amygdala.

Your retina is attached to lot of your body, not just your visual cortex: It's attached to your spinal cord, it's attached to your nervous system at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. so, you can use your eyes to detect things that you don't know you're seeing. what you often detect, in some sense, under those circumstances is valiance - value! you're very good, for example, at detecting teeth and predatory eyes - the reasons for that are self-evident, fundamentally.

This is the smallest unit of meaning that makes up a referential frame, I think... It has three elements, one of which links the mind to the body. the mind-body problem is actually not that difficult to solve, once you take a pragmatic approach, once you look at how the brain works from a pragmatic perspective - because then, you're your consciousness is fundamentally something that is grounded in action. On this basis, you can understand the transition between consciousness and action as a sequence of analysis that are increasingly action-oriented.

The basic framework is something like this and you're always looking at the world through this framework:

The framework has as one pole, where you are and what you're doing - where you are now! So that's point A. you are always trying to get from point A to point B, because you are a linear creature and you' re embodied, so you have to be moving. Fundamentally when you are looking at the world you look through a sequence of maps and maps tell you how to get to where you want to go.

The maps specify where you are, because, obviously, you can't get anywhere if you don't know where you are - and many people, of course, are confused about where they are so, they don't get anywhere... you also have to know where you are going!

Okay, that's point A and point B and every time you look at the world, you're looking through a framework that has those two valued points implicit in your cognitive structure. and What you think is, generally, that where you are going is better than where you are - because, otherwise, why would you go there?

Now, some people do choose to go to the places that are worse than where they are, but they are a "special case - you probably live with some of them!

When you're going from point A to point B you have to move, and movement is not abstract, movement is what you do with your body! that means, once your abstract representation transforms itself into action you are no longer in the realm of abstraction. So, in order to get from one place to another, you have to know where you are and you have to know where you're going - and then you have to walk, fly, run, roll... you have to perform some sort of embodied action, to get there.

Of course, you have conscious control over your voluntary muscular system, but underneath that, you don't really have anything at all. You can move your arm, but you have no idea what muscles you're moving. So basically, your conscious representation of your body grounds out in involuntary movement of the larger muscles systems.

Now you might ask: "Well, what does specify 'where you're going'?" and the answer to that, in large part is: Biology - but biology in a complex manner! This is where a higher order Morality starts to become a concern.

You share with other animals, all the way down the phylogenetic chain, various forms of of implicit motivations. You can lump those, but it's kind of arbitrary: I lump them into "self-maintenance" motivations and "self-propagation" motivations - you can pack it different ways, like I said: it's more conceptual than based on anatomy, but it'll do.

Self-maintenance: Well, you don't want to get too hot and you don't want to get too cold, your hypothalamus deals with that - that is a very old part of the brain which is way more important than your cortex.

You can take out the whole cortex of a female cat and as long as you keep it in the cage, and has its hypothalamus, it can pretty much behave like a cat! Except that it is hyper-exploratory, which is the last thing that you would expect from an animal with no brain!

Okay, you can't be too hot, you can't be too cold. You got to regulate your water intake, you have to eat, you have to deal with the consequences of eating. then, you have to be with other people: there is a specialized place circuit, there is a specialized erotic circuit. Furthermore, there is a specialized circuit for exploration - which is, by the way, about half of what the hypothalamus does.

Those systems have often been conceptualized as "drives", but they not really that - they are more like isolated one-eyed personalities: they're like Cyclops, they want one thing! now, they're not stupid, but they not very amenable to argument. So, when you're hungry you're hungry and maybe another motivational system might object to that, but... and that's happens frequently, which is why people are often confused, and also why you need a cortex!

You need a cortex in order to allow the competing motivational systems to array themselves properly and harmoniously across time, so they all get their due - instead of fighting like 2-year olds in a room, because 2-year olds are basically hypothalamic. You know, they are lots of fun, but they are not organized, and they are not social at all.

So, what happens with those motivational systems, very deep in your brain? What happens is, that they specify the value of where you are: one of the values might be "I'm thirsty" - and then they tune your perceptions, so that things that are associated with the quenching of thirst are much more likely to be picked up by your perceptual system.

They also bias your perceptual processing and your evaluation towards improvement of that motivational lack. Therefore, you can't really think of them as drives, because they are way more complicated than that! They specify where you are, so there is an element of self-consciousness that is associated with that: "I'm thirsty!"... and they also specify your target!

For this, they usually use fantasy - you know, when you get thirsty, you think: "Well, what would I like to drink?", and you have little fantasy about a glass of juice or maybe about a bit of water, something like that. Then your nervous system is tuned, and you walk into the kitchen and you ignore everything that's irrelevant to the search for liquid and you focus in on everything that's relevant to the search for liquid - that means that you are so blind, you cannot believe it!

There have been many experiments that have shown, that... you can do things like...

I'm sure that some of you have seen this: You can introduce a gorilla into a basketball game and 60% or 70% of the people watching - as long as they are paying attention to the ball - won't see the gorilla! And this is no little, tiny gorilla, that is somewhere off in the corner: The gorilla is standing in the main center, 6 feet high, beating his chest!

Even when you know that, if something else changes in the background, you won't see that either. So as far as you guys... that carpet could be changing colors 15, 20 times a minute - you wouldn't even notice it! Unless you had some weird obsession with carpets...

Ok, so that's the beginning, in some sense, of a universal system of values, right? And I can tell you how universal this is, I always have to tell the story, because it's so damn funny, I just can't believe it:

One of the things that your brain is very concerned with is relative status. That's wired in, by the way, which is why relative poverty is often such a social problem. People hate being low in status, especially man. Male status hierarchy is a bit different than womens', women are pretty sensitive to status, too, but they use different markers. Anyways...

Par t of what happens when your status goes up, is that your brain serotonin levels go up - and when your brain serotonin levels go up, you're less irritable and you experience less negative emotion per unit of uncertainty or threat. So, when you demean someone and you lower their presumed status, as far as the very primordial circuit is concerned, you alter the system that regulates their emotions - and they hate that! People hate that more than anything, it's an unbelievable archaic circuit.

You can tell this, because: Depressed people basically act like they are low status, and depressed people are depressed about everything! Now, it is not easy to be depressed about everything, so the fact that that's the case, means that whatever has gone astray has to be very primordial, because it effects everything.

People often use anti-depressants to cure depression - hence their name - and anti-depressants decrease the rate in which serotonin is taken back up by the neurons that produce it.

300 million years ago crustaceans emerged and crustaceans live in dominance hierarchies, even if they're not particularly social. If one lobster fights with another and gets defeated, then he won't fight with another lobster, even if the fight has already been over for 20 minutes - unless you give him anti-depressants, in which case he will fight again right away!

The reason I'm telling you this, is because the status structure that underlies your being - not just your brain, but your being - is so old that you share it with crustaceans! So, you mess with that at your peril! It's not learned, by no means.

Anyways, you wonder around inside one of these little frames, going from point A to point B all the time. One annoying thing about life - and this is one of the Sisyphus's story - is that: as soon as you climb from point A to point B and you get there, then there is another point A and another point B!

That's kind of interesting, because that suggests that getting somewhere isn't really what people want, because as soon as you get somewhere, then you're done going there - and then you have to go somewhere else! So, getting somewhere seems in one sense to be an accomplishment and in another sense it is just the next rock up on the mountain.

You all know this, because you all graduated from the university and that was a good day... but the next day, you weren't a university student anymore, you were just some unemployed loser! That sets up a whole new set of problems, that's how the whole frame shifts, right? When your frame shifts like that, then the value of everything shifts around it as well.

So, it turns out that people are actually more interested in getting from point A to point A than they are in actually being at point B. And almost all the positive emotion that you feel - which is related to the dopaminergic circuitry - you experience those emotions in relationship to the pursuit of the valued goal, rather than in relationship to attainment of the goal.

The attainment of the goal actually satisfies you or, more specifically, it satisfies that motivational circuit - but then the damn thing just shuts off and another one starts yelling at you! So, this is more like a perverse form of victory.

One answer to that, that's universal, is that you should establish a relationship with a transcended value - because it never runs out of motivational power! You can see an example of that in popular culture in the "Pinocchio-" movie.

In the Pinocchio movie, one of the things that happen is: When Geppetto wishes that his son becomes a fully developed individual, instead of a puppet - which is a good thing for parent to wish - he wishes upon a star, and a star signifies something of transcendent value. The meaning of that is, fundamentally, that if you want to raise your child to be an independent being, then you better set your sight on something transcendent or it won't happen - and believe me, there are lots of times that it doesn't happen.

Par t of the utility of a transcendent value is, that it never loses its motivational effectiveness. Now, you might say "Well, that's no proof that there are transcendent values!" Yes, that's true, but.. you know, there is more to the story.

Okay, so... when you are in one of this little stories - which is basically what they are - the simplest story is: "I was in one place. I went by this means to another place." That's the simplest story, it's not that exciting.

A much more exciting story is: "I was going from point A to B and something weird happened and then I didn't know where I was. Then I was in chaos for two years and then I figured out, how to climb out of there!" Everybody likes that story, right? That's a "Death and rebirth-" story, by the way, or a "Fall from paradise-" story, with the regaining of the paradise at the end. This is an archetypal story, because everyone lives it!

Anyways, when you are in one of this little stories, frames of reference, what you see in front of you are really things that... One of the best scientists who ever studied visual perception wrote a book, the book's called: "An ecological approach to visual perception".

He called those things "affordances", and an affordance is something that affords you something. Affordances can be both positive and negative - I like to think about them as "tools" or "obstacles":

So, or example: If I need to make a bee-line for that door, you guys are all instantly obstacles and the way I would respond to that, implicitly, is that you would all be negative!

Imagine, that we just set fire: Well, you were people the minute before that, but, the second after that, you're obstacles! And your emotional reaction to the people that are in front of you are going to reflect that.

You all know that, because you drive: Once you are encapsulated in your little insectoid-shell and don't have to deal with the immediate responses of other people, you're going to treat them like obstacles, like demonic obstacles - at the drop of a hat! That's pretty much automatic behavior.

So, tools are things that get you to where you want to go, and you might remember that human beings are tool-using animals par excellence, right? We are so tool-using, that that is what we see - it's build right into us, we are always scanning the world for tools.

When you look at gravel, for example, what you actually see are throwing sized rocks.That's why they manifest themselves as that kind of object in the environment. You're built at a certain level of resolution and the way your nervous system parses up the world is: things that are useful for you and things that aren't - and those are not objects!

The whole idea of object is a very modern derivative of that much more primordial system, and it's, by no means clear at all, that our notion of object is more real than the notion of affordances. In fact, as far as your brain is concerned... "Objects? No one cares about objects!"

What your brain cares about are affordances and what your brain is adapted to, is the world as a set of affordances and obstacles. Furthermore, if you are a Darwinian, it's very difficult to escape the conclusion, that what selected you is reality - and if the reality that selected you, shaped you in a way, so that what you see are affordances and obstacles - or you die - then it's a perfectly reasonable proposition to state, that what reality is, is in fact a set of affordances, tools and obstacles! And that is how your brain works, by the way!

Let's say that I look at the projector, maybe I'm thinking about picking it up. What then happens is, that my eyes activate a part of my motorcortex, that would adjust my hand to grip it like that. So, part what I understand as the projector is grip-able object.

And that's not secondary derivation, I don't see the object and then think "This is how I would grip it!" That would take forever, you'd never catch a baseball if that's what you're were doing!

It's like: "Oh, a round object is..." *Clunk*. That's just not going to work! Really, your nervous system is nowhere fast enough to do that consciously. You're using reptile circuitry to catch baseballs - the mammalian stuff is too damn slow. Therefore, you catch the ball - especially if someone pitches it fast - often before you can even see it! You just think you saw it... after you caught it!

This is the case with tenni players, too. What they seem to do is: They judge where the ball is going to go by the angle of the racket, because if they wait untill the ball is off the racket, they can't move fast enough to hit it back - they don't have the reflexes for it, they can't move the neuromessages fast enough to do it!

So, basically, the world lays itself out as tools and obstacles. When you encounter obstacless, they make you feel bad but...

Let's say that I'm looking at this room and I'm thinking about you guys as obstacles. Now you might say "How bad does that make me feel?" - and the answer to that is "Well, not very bad, because all I have to do is to make a circuitous route and I can get to the door!" So, then the fact that you're obstacles is a very minor impediment to the execution of my plan - and as a consequence, it will produce a correspondingly low level of negative emotion.

You can think of those as known unknowns: Known unknowns aren't that big of a problem, because you can plan for them and you might have a an alternative plan, that you could put in place in case they show up. What people really don't like are unknown unknowns - and unknown unknowns... you don't walk around those, man! They blow your whole map!

Your map is quite complicated, as it is hierarchically structured. More specifically, you go from point A to point B, so that you can go to a bigger point A to point B and so forth:

 You cross the road

 to get to the library

 to study for the exam

 to pass the exam

 to get your degree

 to get a job

 to be a person

 to be a citizen

 to be a, you know... to have a good life!

So, then, if someone gets in your way while you crossing the road, then, to some degree, they're interfering with you getting a good life! Now, not very much - but sometimes you react like that.

That can certainly happen when you are dealing with an intimate partner. Maybe your partner makes some little mistake and you'll say "You always do that, you've always done that and you're always going to do it!!"... which is really not a good way to conduct an argument!

So, Unknown unknowns: Well, unknown unknowns leap at you from places that you wouldn't expect - because otherwise you would have planned for the damn thing! These are the things that always poke their beak up at you when you least expect it! They are just like, say, serpents in the garden of Eden - that might be one way of thinking about it: You can't keep the damn snakes out of the garden. That's, because you can't make a bounded area and keep the complexity out of it, the complexity always sneaks back in.

Try protecting your children from the internet, for example. You can't make a bounded circumstance and get rid of the complexity, it always comes sneaking back in.

So, what would be an unknown unknown? This one here is a good example: You have an intimate relationship, you've had it for ten years and you trust your partner. So, what does that mean? It means, that you know where you are, you know who you are and you have pretty good idea of where you're going! And then, one day, you find out that your partner has been cheating on you - not with one person, but with three people! And for the whole ten years!

Well, hypothetically that comes as a shock! Although you may have ignored many intimations that such might be the case. Let's say that it comes as a shock! Well, what happens to you?

You don't know where you are and you don't know where you've been - that's interesting, isn't it? Because, you'd think that you know where you've been, because you've already been there! But all of s sudden, something can happen that you are so flipped over that you don't even know where you were!

That means, in some sense, that the past is dependent on the present... a very peculiar thing. You also have no idea where you are going!

In terms of not knowing where you are: That's really deep! Because, you might think "Well,

 I thought, I was in a marriage - that turned out to be wrong-

 I thought, I knew who my wife (or husband) was - that turned out to be wrong

 I concluded, on the bases that I knew my wife, that I knew something about woman - that turned out to be wrong

 I thought, I was in a relationship with someone I can trust - that was wrong

 I don't know enough about trust, I'm obviously to gullible!"

And so, what all of this does, is that it throws virtually everything that has ever happened to that person in severe doubt, right?

That the emergence of chaos!

Sometimes, you are going from point A to point B and something you don't expect manifests itself in the middle of your plan, but it's not such a catastrophe, because you can just work around it. But then sometimes, something pops up and you just do not have a plan anymore! So, then you might ask yourself: "Just exactly where you are, when you don't know where you are?" and I would say: "That's a place!" - and it's actually a place that's well documented in classic-religious and -mythological stories: That's chaos:

The Daoists believe, for example, that the world is made out of chaos and order.-

 Order: that's where you are, when what you do gets you what you want.

 Chaos: that's where you are, when you have no idea what's going on.

Now you might ask: "Well, is there a way that I should act when I'm in chaos?" and the answer to that is: "There'd better be, because it's a place you are going to visit several times during your life... and everyone's going to that!"

That's why it's an archetypal story, that is the descent to the underground. The underground is that horrible place that lurks underneath all of our presuppositions. It's the frigid lake underneath the thin ice that everybody is skating on, and it's something that can manifest itself at any moment!

That's why in the Daoist symbol - the black paisley is chaos, by the way, and the white paisley is order - in the order paisley, there's a little black dot. That's, because order can, and does, turn into chaos at any moment and the reverse is also true: chaos can turn into order at any moment.

An insight will do that for you! For example, alcoholics report that when they hit rock-bottom, its like *click* - there is a catalyses and all of a sudden they look at the world in a different way! Now they are a new person, they are back from the underground - they've risen from the dead, so to speak!

The reason for this is, party, because it looks like your right hemisphere is pretty good at inferring patterns in novel and chaotic places. It is keeping track of things that happened to you, that are anomalous, and it makes alternative maps of the world that are there for you to rely on if that ever becomes necessary.

Now you might ask yourself, how upset should you be when something that you don't expect happens? It turns out that that's is really a difficult question to answer. What the problem is, when something you don't expect happens, you don't know what it is! So, then you might say, "Well, how upset should I get?" and the answer to that is "You don't know!"

What happens then? Well, you 've got some built-in approximatorsn for this situatioen. One would be your genetically determined level of neuroticism, which is basically sensitivity to negative emotion. If you are more sensitive to negative emotion, you're going to manifest more psycho-physiological preparation per unit of threat or uncertainty - which is to say that some people get more upset about the same thing than other people do! Now, who is right? Who knows?

You wake up in the morning and there is a little ache in your side... Hm, well, what is that? Is it a sore muscle or is it cancer? You don't know! And if you're hipochondrical, it is going to be cancer - and sometimes the hypochondriac is right and he is the one that survives, when he goes to the emergency room and finds out exactly what's going on. So, it's an unanswerable question.

The other way that your brain determines how upset you should be, is by calculating your position in the dominance hierarchy, because the higher you are in the dominance hierarchy, the more resources you have at your disposal - and so, the less upset you have to get when anything horrible happens.

That means, if you are barely clinging to the bottom of the social structure, you can be sure that your brain is going to estimate any anomalous occurrence as a catastrophe! That is the reason, why people don't like being at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and it is also why people who are there die a lot sooner! They die a lot sooner, regardless of their absolute level of wealth: It's relative deprivation that counts!

Okay, so here is a bit of a clue about how else your brain might calculate how upset you should be. Here is a little map of me, when I'm doing something that I frequently do, which is to write a manuscript:

So, you might say: "What are you doing, when you're writing a manuscript?" That turns out to be a very complicated question, comparable to "What are you doing, when you read a book?

Well, you're writing, or typing, letters, you're typing words, you typing phrases, you're typing sentences, you're typing paragraphs, you're typing the structure, that the paragraphs fit in to - that will be the essay.

Then, in regards to myself: I'm practicing science, because I usually write some scientific manuscripts, and that's part of embodying my professorial role and that's part of, hypothetically, being a productive citizen - although some of you might differ with that, given that I'm a professor.

And then on outside of that... well, this is what I think is on the outside of that, is : I'm confronting the unknown. Now you might say, "Well, what are you really doing, when you're writing a sentence?" and the answer to that is: "You're doing all of these things better or worse - and if you're doing a really good job of writing your sentence, you're doing all of them at once!" and that would be one of the things that would make the sentence particularly meaningful!

If something anomalous occurs, let's say, the letter T on my typewriter gets stuck - well, that's going to irritate me because then I can't type a sentence. But it's not going to irritate me too much, because that doesn't really interfere with my ability to be a productive citizen. So, I'm going to estimate the magnitude of how upset I should be - when something unknown occurs - by estimating where in the hierarchy of action that anomaly is disruptive.

Okay, let me run you through this again:

Let's ask: "What is a good person?", you might think of that from an objective perspective, but that would be a mistake, because a quality, like good, is a pragmatic quality and it's based on action, not on an object. Here is how you decompose being a good person:

A good person is a good parent - more than that, that is a subcomponent.

A good parent is a good parent, someone who has a job and takes care of the family. Then, the person, who takes care of the family is... they can play with the baby or they can complete a meal. These are abstract concepts, you can't tell a four year old: "Make a meal!", and the reason you can't is that they don't know the subordinate components of making a meal.

You can say: "Do you see that fork?" Hopefully, they know what a fork is. "See that fork?" "Yes!" "Pick that fork up, bring that fork to the table and put it there!" They can do that, because their nervous system is organized enough to operate at that level of abstraction - but they can't do something like make a meal, which is, as if you would tell a three year old in their room to "Clean up your room!"

They will just look at you - and then, when you come back in half an hour, they will just look at you again! You can say: "'Hey kid ! Do you see that teddy bear?" "Yes!" "Pick up the teddy bear and put it on that space in the wall!" And then, once you teach the three year old how to do a hundred of those things, and they got it and have some little motor routines, you can say "Clean the room!" - you can encapsulate that entire set of motor routines within the higher order concept!

So, a part of being a good person is... well, maybe you're making a meal and part of that would be that you're cutting up the vegetables. But then things get interesting, because when you are cutting up the vegetables, what you'are actually doing is that you are gripping and moving something - and that's no longer abstract, right? That's where your conceptual philosophical presuppositions, like being a good person, hit the road, they hit the level of embodied material reality: That's the dissolution of the mind into the body!

Now, if someone says to you "Cut those vegetables more thinly!", that might irritate you - but if they say "You are a bad parent!", observing the same phenomena, then you're going to get into a fight with them! The reason is, obviously, that if it were just a matter of cutting the vegetables thinner, all you have to do is to make a minor modification in the hierarchy that constitutes your self- representation - or, really, your self: it's not just a representation!

But if you are "not a good parent", it's like... if that's true, you've got a lot of repair work to do! A lot of your world has fallen apart and as soon as things fall apart - which they always do - you're in chaos and as soon as you are in chaos, then your body defaults to emergency preparation and you're stressed - and if you're stressed long enough, then you die! So, you don't like that!

When your body gets stressed, what happens is: becaue it doesn't really know what's going on, it prepares for everything! That's the generalized stress response, cortisol production does that. Cortisol production is good, it wakes you up in the morning - but if it's chronic, you get old! It's so general in its negative actions, that the best way to conceptualize its detrimental long-term effects is that it's accelerating ageing.

So, it makes you more likely to have heart disease, cancer, depression, Alzheimer's, diabetes and obesity... that will do. It's enough! Any of those are enough to kill you!

All right, so there is a hierarchy, that's a hierarchy of values: the higher the value - the less you want to have it disrupted!

There is psychologist named Piaget, some of you might know about him. Piaget was very interested in what happens to value structures and their hierarchical organization once they have to apply outside of the confounds of a body. Here's a way of thinking about it:

Two years olds are basically hypothalamic, that's why they are so much fun! First they're happy, then they're sad, then they're hungry, then they're tired, you know - they just zip from one pretty straight forward, and rather awe inspiring, motivational state to another.

But at two, they can't play. They can play by themselves, but they can't play with other children, they can't get that until they're three and they need to get it by the time they're three, because if they don't get it by the time they're four - they will never get it! And then you have an antisocial kid, who is going to be outsider for his entire life and there isn't anything you can do about it! So, that has to happen between two and four.

What happens about age three is, that the kid learns how to play a game with another person. What playing a game is, fundamentally, is the development of the ability to share a frame of reference - which is what you're doing when you play monopoly!

It's stupid to play monopoly, obviously... who cares, if you have a whole pile of counterfeit paper? But that doesn't matter, because the way you're constituted is that your brain will treat anything that you act upon - as if it constitutes a valuable goal in a valid framework of reference!

If your mind couldn't do that

1 you couldn't abstract, and

2 you could not get along with another people!

So, you can sit around the table and you can say "Let's pretend, that monopoly is a reasonable facsimile of reality!" - which you wouldn't say, but it's what you mean - and everybody says "Yes, that would be amusing!" And then you set your goal, which is to get all the little hotels and all the money and *puf!* your emotions go along for the ride! What's so interesting about that is that you can get everybody into the game!

So, one of the things that's really interesting about people is that we can establish a shared fictional frame of reference and it organizes all our emotions, so they are predictable. That's also why we can watch movies! You go to the movie, you identify the hero, you figure out what the hero wants *puf!* you are the hero!

But the way that works is not the way we think of it typically: You don't look at the hero, you think about what is he doing, and evaluate it emotionally, and then feel it.

What you really do is: You specify the hero's goal - and then you map him on to your body and you read off the emotional responses of your own body and that's how you understand the hero! So, it's embodied! You're using your embodiment as a computational device, that can run simulations of other consciousnesses - and it does that with the body! And we like doing that, you can go to a movie and be Brad Pitt for an hour and a half, you're brad pitt doing remarkable things. That's also how we understand other people, we're very good at that.

Anyways, we have this shared frames of reference, for example when we' re playing monopoly. Okay, so children at three learn how to play games and that means, they learn how to organize their own internal motivational states into a hierarchy that includes the motivational states of other people - and that is what it means when we say "they can play" - and that's what you guys do when you're out in the world!

We're also playing a game right now and we all know the rules, that's why we can all sit in this room and play the game without fighting with each other. You know what I'm talking about: the room is set up like a theatre and we all know the theatre game: The chairs are all facing this way at the moment, that's a hint that you should look forward and the podium is raised so... the room is basically telling you what to do, because it's a stage - like all rooms - and because you're smart and socially conscious, you can walk into the stage room and your body knows what to do!

Furthermore, if you civilized and social and you just do that, then all the other primates can predict what you're up to - and they won't kill you! Yes, well, that's what it means to be part of the same tribe, you know. People are very peculiar creatures and god only knows what're they up to - but as long as they're playing the same game, you are you don't have to know what they're up to, because you can predict what are they going to do and you understand they motivational states.

So, part of the building and constructing of higher order of higher order moral goals, is the establishment of joint frames of reference, that allow multiple people to pursue the goals that they're interested in simultaneously!

What you have to think about with regards to that, is: not all shared frames of reference can manage that! There is a small subset of them that are optimized - so that not only can multiple people play them, but multiple people can play them and enjoy them and do it repeatedly across a long period of time.

So, it's iterabability that defines the utility of a higher order moral structure - and that structure is not that arbitrary! It's an emerging property of biological interactions and you might say "Well, it's kind of arbitrary, because people can do what they want!" But it's not arbitrary at all, because a lot of what is constraining your games is your motivational substructure and those ancient circuits that are status oriented, and they operate within...

Virtually every animal has a status counter. Creatures organize themselves into dominance hierarchies the reason they do that is: Because that works! It's a solution, it's a solution to the Darwinian problem of existence. That is not just a epiphenomenon, it's the real thing!

So, a huge chunk of your environment is:

 dominance hierarchy plus

 "god only knows where you are"... and that's order and chaos!

Par t of the reason that people fight to preserve the dominance hierarchy is, that it's better to be a slave, who knows what the hell is going on - than someone, who is thrown screaming and naked into the jungle at night! That is the difference between order and chaos, we like order better then chaos and it's no wonder. Now, we'll invite a little chaos in for entertainment, now and then, but that has to be done voluntarily - and generally, you don't want the kind of chaos that upsets your entire conceptual structure! You know, you're willing to fool around a little bit on the fringes, but when the going gets serious, you're pretty much likely to bailout - and no wonder!

Now, I want to tell you a little bit about this chaotic domain, I can tell you a couple of things about it: It's the underworld of mythology. One of the things that's interesting about the underworld is, that it has suburbs - and one of the suburbs of the underworld is hell! Hell is the place where you end up when everything that you know falls apart and you get resentful and bitter about it.

One of the things that I have noticed in my work as a clinical psychologists is, that there's two things that really do people in... three:

 lying, that's not good, and apart from that

 resentment and

 arrogance!

If you get resentful enough, you might end up like Elliot rogers and all those other people who go on random shootings sprees, because they have a disagreement about the structure of existence - and the fact that they ended up, hypothetically, at the bottom of the heap.

So, those are real places and people get stuck in them and these are no places that you would voluntarily choose to go to, if you had any sense at all. I have to tell you: if you read the accounts of the people, who do random mass-murder, they will tell you exactly where they are - and they will tell you exactly what they are motivated to do!

What they are motivated to do is to take as much revenge on existence as they possibly can imagine, in the most unfair possible way and as fast as they can possibly manage it! That is their conscious aim and this is not a form of insanity - they know exactly what they're doing and they have precise idea what are they aiming at. This is a deep archetypal possession, for lack of a better word.

Now, I want to show you how some of this things are mapped, symbolically. They're not really symbols, in my estimation, because a symbol implies that there is something behind... there is a reality behind the representation, that's broader then the representation and the symbol is just a shadow of it. These are no symbols, they're representations that are as accurate as they can possibly be. I'll start with something that is rather easy to understand... let's try this one:

What happens, when you look at the medusa? You turn to stone! What happens, when a rabbit sees a wolf? Right, it turns to stone as well! The medusa is a symbol, a representation, of all those things that make you turn to stone, when you look at them!

Animals can deal with threat, they have instincts to deal with threat. But... let's take zebras as an example: maybe there is a bunch of zebras, they are out there in a herd and there is also a bunch of lions - and they are right there, next zo the tebras! And the zebras, what are they doing? They're grazing!

And we think: "Well, those zebras aren't very bright, because there is a bunch of lions, like, why aren't the zebras, you know, in the forest, building a fort to keep the lions out!?"

The reason they're not doing that is, because: although they can react to threat, they cannot conceive of the class of threatening objects! Now, human beings can conceive of the class of threatening objects... so, what civilization is, in large part, is an attempt to find a remedy for the class of threatening objects!

There are representations of those sorts of things, the medusa is one of them. The reason is feminine is very difficult to explain... you see the little cartoon of Robert Crumb?

He's got a big oedipal problem, old Rob Crumb, and the problem with him is, fundamentally, that his mother was something like a giant spider and did everything she could to crush the life out of him - hence his remaining relationship with women.

That's partly the reason, why femininity can be something that's turns you to stone: It's an experience that many man are familiar with, by the way, because the average man is rejected far more often then he is accepted. And since women are the gateway to reproduction, they constitute nature itself - and nature itself tells most man "You should go home and stay under your bed!"

There have been done lots of experiments about this, so, for example: Psychologists have an undergraduate woman go out into the concourse and see how long it takes her to find someone, who agrees to sleep with her, and that takes like... two seconds after she asks the first man!

Then they flip it and they get your random undergraduate guy to do the same things and you can imagine the consequences of that, since many of you man have lived through it...!

Mother nature... the woman wears the face of mother nature and the face is generally rejecting - especially towards man, who are low on the dominance hierarchy, which is one of the things that irritates guys like Elliot Rogers and one of the things that motivates their desire to take revenge. That is an universal phenomenon

So, that's part of the reason that the feminine is nature and why nature, by the way, is mother nature: Its diagnosis of your status is not good enough - and no wonder.

What seems to have happened is, that these domains that I talked about, which can be represented as chaos and order, can also be represented as masculine and feminine. I think the reason for that is that... human beings are fundamentally social primates, right? We're very very social and we know that one of the correlates of brain size in primates is the social group size!

We also know that most primates, say chimps - who we are quite closely related to - they don't like to go out and investigate leaves or pear at things through microscopes: they spend all their time interacting with other chimpanzees! Although they're chewing all the time, they have to do that, because they have a ridiculously ineffective digestive and eating system.

Their brain is adapted to the social circumstances as the primary reality, so, you could say that the tribe is the primary reality - and then, there is the secondary reality, which is all that which is outside of the tribe. And that corresponds to chaos and order!

Order, in contradiction to chaos, is symbolized by masculine symbols and that's why ideologies like radical feminism presume the existence of a patriarchy: It fits into the symbolic structure of our minds, that idea. It is true in some sense, because, just like a chimpanzee troops, the primary-, or meta- hierarchy that makes up human civilization is fundamentally masculine in its origin and structure!

So, masculine is fundamentally the dominance hierarchy - and feminine is fundamentally all the things that are outside or that challenge the dominance hierarchy. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable... it's weird, because our brain is organized to apprehend the world in terms of personalities, fundamentally.

That is, because, as we emerged over the course of evolution, it's been relatively constant that there ware males around and that there were females around - and the males were fathers and the females were mothers - and they were both mates as well. That was a constant of the evolutionary landscape and that's what our brain evolved to process.

Then, what happened when we developed the capacity to abstract was, that we used this underlying social cognitive abstraction structure to start to represent the structure of being itself! So we can say: Well, there is a dominance hierarchy, that's society and that's masculine - and there is all the things that challenge the dominance hierarchy, they're outside and they are feminine.

The weirdest thing about that, however, is that it actually works! We've got away with that for some reason, it seems to be practically reasonable to map the world in that manner - it keeps us going!

Allright, I'm going to try to explain this, this is an alchemical symbol:

At the bottom of this symbol, there is this round thing with wings. Did you ever see Harry Potter ? Do you know the game "Quidditch"? Do you remember what they chase? They chase a golden one of those, they call that the snitch, I believe, and there is a little fragment of soul in it.

That is very interesting idea, because for the alchemists the primary element of reality - whatever that was - could be conceptualized as this thing, this round chaos! What is was conceptualized of, was that reality was a container from which matter and spirit could emerge - and you might ask "Well, what does that mean?" This is what it means:

When a child experiences something it can't predict, it does the thing that led to that uncertain outcome over and over and over - until it can map it! And then you might think "What did the child do?" What the child did was, to take the domain of that which it did not understand... and transformed it into matter - which is the predictable world of entities - and spirit - which is the internal psychological structure, that is adapted to that.

So, what the alchemists basically conceptualized was, that what exists outside of your conceptual framework is something like unrealized potential and when you interact with that unrealized potential, you actualize it!

You actualize it into two component elements:

 one being: the material world and

 the other being: your own psychological structure!

That's why they conceptualized matter and spirit - the container of matter and spirit - as the ultimate reality... and out of that emerges something that's quite primordial: the dragon!

One of the things we know... do you remember the genesis story? It's the snake that gives people vision, remember that? It gives them wisdom and also produces self-consciousness.

There is a women named Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist in Los Angeles, and she was very interested in the sight of human beings, because we can really see! We can see better then any other creature, except predatory birds. We can see way better then most primates.

Isbell knew that our tree dwelling ancestors, some 60 million years ago, emerged at about the same time as snakes - they're younger than lizards, by the way - and that we were preyed on quite intensely by snakes for tens of millions of years. She also knew that we were good at detecting snakes at the bottom of our visual field and that we were particularly good at detecting their camouflage patterns.

So she did a series of field experiments, showing that primate visual acuity was strongly correlated with the presence of predatory snakes in their immediate environment - the idea that snakes gave us vision is right! Now, why is that relevant in regards to this image?

We were preyed upon for a very long period of time and we developed a neural circuit to deal with predators - and that's the neural circuit that is activated in children, when they are terrified about monsters at night! The predator-entity, the dragon in this picture, is like a like an amalgam, a manifestation of all the predatory forces and the things in general, that exist outside of the dominance hierarchy. So, it's a form of primordial reality.

It's not abstract any more, like the matter and spirit container: It's the first practical manifestation of what's terrifying and threatening outside that, concretely.

Remember: animals can respond to threat but they can't conceptualize treat as a category... this is the conceptualization of threat as a category: It emerges from the absolute unknown and then it manifests itself as threat.

For example, if you hear a loud noise or a growl behind you when you're in the forest, the first thing that happens is that you don't know what's going on - and that is the initial state of contact with potential. And then, when you turn around and you look, that potential manifests itself into something that is predatory - and you have a circuit for that!

That's the same circuit that we now use to assess anything unexpected that occurs to us... that circuit had to come from somewhere.

Therefore, our capacity to respond to surprising entities is an elaboration, an elaboration up into abstraction, of our capacity to identify predators - so that's the next level of reality. Out of that chaotic circumstance comes something that's more human, that is the emergence of masculinity and femininity, out of that more primordial element.

Let me show you two things... This is a map of our pragmatic territory, as far as I can tell. The territory that people actually inhabit:

At the first level - that's the square - I call that level "the dragon of chaos": That is the unknown as such and it's the thing that you fall into, when your conceptual schemes fall apart.

What manifests itself out of that is femininity, and femininity comes in two forms: one is benevolent femininity, an example would be this:

You see Mary on the left there, she's in a structure called a Mandorla, which has, from a Freudian perspective, obvious sexual connotations. She's standing on a reptile and she's holding her child away from it. This is a common medieval christian image and you can think of it as divine, because woman spent an awful lot of time doing that with their children over the course of millions of years of our evolution - and it's something that's sacred, because our species depended on that...for its survival!

This one is even better, this is also a medieval image, I love this image:

So, there is Mary with the christchild and she is standing, again, on a predatory reptile - but in the background... can you see all those weird little shapes? Those are musical instruments and they fill the space. The medieval artist had this intimation that behind the manifestation, as primary as the protective maternality of Mary... was something like music of the spheres, or a collection of harmonious patterns - and that this figure was constantly emerging out of that background of harmonious patterns across the infinite stretches of time itself!

It's a sacred image, because it represents something that human society cannot live without! Any society that doesn't regard the virgin and the child - the mother who protects the child from the predatory serpent - as prime element of sacred reality is going to make itself extinct!

I could say, for example, that that's what is happening to the endogenous population of eastern Europe at the moment, where the birth rate is far below replacement.

I'm going to show you another image, this is called "Vierge Ouvrante" or "open virgin", and this was a common representation in medieval Europe. It's a weird representation from a Christian perspective, because it, kind of, reverses the normal hierarchy of power.

What you have here is Mary and she's holding the christchild, when the statue is closed. Then, when you open her up, what you see inside Mary is: God the father - and God the father is holding Christ in his hands.

Now, Mary constitutes the superordinate benevolent feminine. Inside her is the structure of culture, so you can think: Inside nature is the structure of culture - and that's represented in this image by God, because in Christian thinking he is the ultimate father, obviously. And then, the God figure is holding what? The crucified individual! What does that mean?

Now, all the people around there: kings, queens, commoners... they are all gazing at that central figure, which of course is, fundamentally, what everyone in western civilization has been doing for two thousand years - not knowing why!

Nature gives rise to culture, culture gives rise to the suffering individual! Oh, that's true enough, it's true for everyone! It's also true for life at every point in time! But there is more to the image of the crucifixion, because the crucifixion also represents the voluntarily acceptance of suffering and the voluntarily acceptance of death.

It also points to something else that is of paramount importance: there is an element of the human psyche that can die and come back, and die and come back! And that's what happens to you, when you encounter a catastrophe, but then you make order of it and you climb back out of the underworld! As we all know, your voyage through life is punctuated by trips to the underworld.

You are somewhere , at some place. and then you go outside of that and then you go somewhere else and you go outside that as well and so forth. So, what happens to people is that they generally identify with where they are - order. But order dissolves and collapses and then reconstitutes itself.

So then you might say: if you are trying to adapt to the structure of reality itself, instead of identifying with order, you should identify with the process that allows you to transform yourself across repeated bouts of order and chaos. That is, what this sort of images are trying to represent!

I will show you one final idea, there is this daoist idea, that's like this... the symbol of the Dao:

I already talked to you about it: Chaos and order, masculine and feminine, constantly in interplay - that's Dao, from the Daoist perspective. Dao is the source of meaning, so the idea is, that it's the constant interplay between chaos and order that produces a sense of meaning in human beings - and that idea is true! That is what produces the sense of meaning!

You know that, because when you're engaged in a compelling operation, you're partly ordered and secured - and you have one foot out in the unknown. If the balance is proper in this operation, you are engaged in what you're doing as a consequence of that balance - and as consequence of that, you lose your self-consciousness. And if you stay engaged in that sort of situation on a continual basis, then you find that your life is meaningful and rich - and that is the best antidote to the fact that life is bounded and full of suffering!

Now, "Dao" means meaning and also means journey, and the center of the Dao is the place that you're supposed to be in, one foot in chaos and one foot in order. That's the best place to be in the actual environment itself, because the actual environment is better construed as the constant interplay between chaos and order, than it is construed as a collection of material objects.

And if you adopt the pragmatic view that points out, that there are meta-realities above the mere objects that we perceive, you can also apprehend that our brains are actually adapted to the meta-realities and not the realities! Our brains are about 300 hundred million years old and what we've done is, to abstract out those things that are constant across spans of time that are hundreds of millions of years in length - and those things aren't chairs, tables or automobiles!

They are meta-structures that are much more sophisticated than that and we ignore that at our peril, because modern people don't believe that meaning exists - they think it's epiphenomenal! But there is nothing subjective about our world view, when, in fact, our nervous systems are tuned, so that life is manifesting itself in the most meaningful possible way - when you happen to be occupying the precise position between chaos and order that maximizes your security and the development of that security across time. That is the most real thing there is!

To stay in that position is also to accept voluntarily the necessity for a certain degree of suffering, because as you extend your capacities by exposing yourself to the optimal level of the unknown, you're constantly taking yourself apart and rebuilding yourself. That's what allows you to thrive, not only in the presence of stability, but also in a state that consists of the transformation of that stability.

Here are some representations from ancient Egypt, these are representations of Horus:

There's a lot of evidence that many of the ideas we have about Christ are derivatives of Egyptian ideas. Most people who point that out, point it out in a manner that's saying "It's devaluing the ideas that we're derive from Egypt, because they have an a-priori motive - a distractive motive!"

As mythology progresses across the centuries, it transforms itself and it tends to continually encapsulate and re-encapsulate the primary ideas that the human race has managed to produce, about the structure of reality itself. There are constancies across these cultural manifestations, because the reality to which they refer, is actual reality!

Horus is the eye - the eye is not the intellect! The intellect is the thing that forces everything into a pre-existing structure and it crunches reality to do that, it warps it, it twists it and the intellect makes people ideological and rigid.

The eye is something completely different: The eye is the thing that pays attention! And your attention is automatically directed to those elements of your experiential field, where the most information is manifesting itself.

That's why, for example, if you're talking to someone in a bar and there's a Tv flickering, you can't help but look at the TV: It's the change, the transformation, what your nervous system is attuned to.

The theory is that if you are a follower of Horus - who is the eye and the falcon, because falcons can see and they fly above everything else - if you are a follower of Horus, you pay attention! When you pay attention, you absorb information and when you absorb information, you continually transform yourself and that keeps you on top of that ever shifting reality. Doing that is meaningful and that is what stops you from becoming bitter and cruel.

You know, life is suffering and if you don't have an antidote to that suffering, that is real... then you become resentful about the structure of experience and then you'll do everything you can to take revenge on it! We saw what happened when people did that in the 20th century and it would be a good thing, if people woke up and stopped doing it!

As far as I can tell, after trying to figure this out for 30 years, is: The way that you do that is by paying attention and transforming yourself when it's necessary - and stopping the process of identifying with what you already believe. Who the hell cares what you believe? You should be attending to the things you don't know, which is a much larger space than the things you do know!

And then you should be construing yourself not as the inhabitant of a sterile, static and already completed structure, but as the thing that lives on the edge of that - the thing, that is constantly building and re-building it. Then, if something happens to your structure, it's not so relevant - because that's not what you are! You are the thing that can engage in transformations of structure by paying attention... and that's what these representations mean.

These are renaissance pictures:

They elevated the entity that voluntarily accepted the necessity of suffering and death - so that's represented by Christ - to the highest position in the heavenly hierarchy. What that idea means is: What should constitute the transcended value, that sits above all other values, is your capacity to voluntarily accept the restricted and painful conditions of your life, to face them and, as a consequence of facing them, immediately transcend them!

One of the things we know from clinical psychology is that if you have someone, who is afraid, which means, that they avoid... So what do you do about that? You break down the thing they are afraid of, untill you find a small unit that they can approach.

When they approach it, they learn that they can approach it and that they're more then they thought they were! So then they can approach the next thing and then the next thing.

For example, you take a women who's got agoraphobia, who can't get into an elevator - and one week later, she can! Then she goes home and has the fight with her husband that she should have had 20 years ago. The reason for that is: When she is exposed to the things that she's afraid of - instead of running from them - she learns, that she is the thing that can be exposed to things she's afraid of. She does not learn that things aren't frightening!

And learning that she's is the thing that can be exposed to things that are frightening makes her more then the frightening things! And it's certainly possible that we 're more than the things that frighten us - if we weren't, we wouldn't be here!

We shouldn't throw these things away before we understand them - and we're in danger of doing that now! So, part what of I'm trying to do in my lectures and my work is to point out what our forefathers knew, to try to help modern people understand it - and to make he case that these things, that we think of as non-real representations, are more real then anything that we currently comprehend as a real!

The consequences of not comprehending and not living by them, as far as I can tell, is that things deteriorate - and they can deteriorate to a point, where everything is intolerable for everyone!

That seems to be a suboptimal destination.

Thank's for the invitation.