SAGES
5/19/2024166 min read
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, was not entirely accepting of the Athenian democracy’s practices. According to Aristotle, the chief issue with Athenian democracy was its susceptibility to popular leaders who pandered only to the common poor.
Some figures ruled well, namely Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles. However, many others were incompetent, immoral, and gained power by tricking the Athenian people, the demos.
The earliest to do so was Athens’ first tyrant, Peisistratos. Aristotle believed that after Pericles’ death in 429 BCE, the demos continually appointed charismatic demagogues who damaged Athenian democracy.
This was the case with Cleon, the political leader who immediately succeeded Pericles. Aristotle recognized him as “the cause of the corruption of democracy,” primarily for his constant practice of “unseemly shouting and coarse abuse”.
Aristotle’s key objection to democracy was that it undermined the rule of law. A functioning state requires that everything is governed by laws. Without this, there is nothing to stop those who hold the most power from doing what they want and tyrannizing everyone else .
ARISTOTLE
JUNG
JUNG REFERENCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgLQWutNxKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2863_fAuRoI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEd0x0DIFSE&t=6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8zkmNOCpQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWDrMt7imS8&t=1913s
https://medium.com/@ggreer153/carl-jung-the-value-of-befriending-your-shadow-361189d880c
https://medium.com/illumination/the-best-of-carl-jung-condensed-into-tiny-sentences-95df9e7a7195
Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung introduced the concept of the collective unconscious to describe a part of the mind that is shared by all humans and is not shaped by personal experience. Jung believed that the collective unconscious is a deeper layer of the mind than the personal unconscious, which is specific to an individual. It is thought to be inherited in the brain's structure and contains memories, impulses, and archetypes that people are unaware of.
Archetypes are ancient symbols and ideas that represent fundamental aspects of the human experience, such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, and the Shadow. Jung believed that the collective unconscious is responsible for many deep-seated instincts and beliefs, including spirituality, sexual behavior, and life and death instincts. Jung believed that the collective unconscious influences people's lives in many ways, including their thoughts, behavior, and cultural expressions.
He thought that people can access the collective unconscious through dreams, fantasies, and symbols, and interpret the wisdom of the archetypes they encounter. For example, Jung believed that dreaming of an old man could be a sign that someone is on the right path in life. Jung also thought that the collective unconscious helps explain why similar themes appear in mythologies around the world
.The collectiuve unconscious a concept that states that all of humanity shares some unconscious ideals, forms a projective identificationwith uncertainy and feelings of helplessness along with other negative feelings. This projection frequently identifies with the figure of the Devil as the "fourth" aspect of the Pauline Christian Trinity functioning as its grounding myth. This idea can be seen in other mythologies, for instance, the ancient Egyptian Devil Set"represents overwhelming affects". The collective shadow is ancestral and is carried by the collective experience of the human race
Archetypes are universal, inborn models of distinct aspects of identity and personality that play a role in influencing human behavior. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's theory suggested that these archetypes were archaic forms of innate human knowledge passed down from our ancestors.1
In Jungian psychology, these archetypes represent universal patterns and images that are part of the collective unconscious. Jung believed that we inherit these archetypes much in the way we inherit instinctive patterns of behavior.
Continue reading to learn more about Jung's four main archetypes, their unique characteristics and functions, and how to achieve individuation.
Personal vs. Collective Unconscious
Jung was originally a follower oSigmund Freud The relationship eventually fractured over Jung's criticism of Freud's emphasis on sexuality during development, which led Jung to develop his own psychoanalytic approach known as analytical psychology.
While Jung agreed with Freud that the unconscious played an important role in personality and behavior, he expanded on Freud's idea of the personal unconscious to include what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Jung believed that the human psyche was composed of three components:
The EGO(or conscious mind)
The personal (unconscious mind)
The collective unconscious
According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind, and the personal unconscious contains memories—including those that have been suppressed.
The collective unconscious is a unique component in that Jung believed that this part of the psyche served as a form of psychological inheritance. It contained all of the knowledge and experiences that humans share as a species.
The Origins of Jungian Archetypes
Jung believed that archetypes come from the collective unconscious. He suggested that these models are innate (unlearned), hereditary, and universal. Archetypes organize how we experience certain things throughout life.
"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes," Jung explained in his book, "The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche."
This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form, they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness, not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses but to translate into visible reality the world within us.— CARL JUNG
Jung rejected the concept of ttabula rosa or the notion that the human mind is a blank slate at birth to be written solely by experience. He believed that the human mind retains fundamental, unconscious, biological aspects of our ancestors. These "primordial images," as he initially dubbed them, serve as a basic foundation of how to be human.
The archaic and mythic characters that make up the archetypes reside within all people from all over the world, Jung believed. Archetypes symbolize basic human motivation, values, and personalities.
Jung believed that each archetype played a role in personality, but felt that most people were dominated by one specific archetype. According to Jung, the actual way in which an archetype is expressed or realized depends upon a number of factors, including an individual's cultural influences and unique personal experiences.
The Main Archetypes
Jung identified four major archetypes but also believed that there was no limit to the number that may exist. The existence of these archetypes cannot be observed directly but can be inferred by looking at religion, dreams, art, and literature.Jung's four major archetypes are: the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the self.
The Persona
The persona is how we present ourselves to the world. The word "persona" is derived from a Latin word that literally means "mask." It is not a literal mask, however.
The persona represents all of the different social masks that we wear among various groups and situations. It acts to shield the ego from negative images. According to Jung, the persona may appear in dreams and take different forms.
Over the course of development, children learn that they must behave in certain ways in order to fit in with society's expectations and norms. The persona develops as a social mask to contain all of the primitive urges, impulses, and emotions that are not considered socially acceptable.
The persona archetype allows people to adapt to the world around them and fit in with the society in which they live. However, becoming too closely identified with this archetype can lead people to lose sight of their true selves.
The Shadow
The shadow is a Jungian archetype that consists of sex and life instincts. It is part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings.
The shadow forms out of our attempts to comply with cultural norms and expectations. It is this archetype that contains all of the things that are unacceptable not only to society but also to one's own personal morals and values. It might include things such as envy, greed, prejudice hate, and aggression.
Jung suggested that the shadow can appear in dreams or visions and may take a variety of forms. It might appear as a snake, a monster, a demon, a dragon, or some other dark, wild, or exotic figure.
This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness, chaos, and the unknown. These latent dispositions are present in all of us, Jung believed, although people sometimes deny this element of their own psyche and instead project it on to others.
The Anima or Animus
The anima is the feminine part of the male psyche, and the animus is the male part of the female psyche.5 The feminine is characterized by empathy, trust, intuition, and emotional connections with others. The masculine anima is related to logical thinking, problem-solving, and emotional stability.
These archetypal images are based upon both what is found in the collective and personal unconscious. For example, in regards to the anima in men, the collective unconscious may contain notions about how women should behave while personal experience with wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers contribute to more personal images of women.
Jung believed that physiological changes as well as social influences contributed to the development of sex roles and gender identites. Jung suggested the influence of the animus and anima archetypes were also involved in this process. According to Jung, the animus represents the masculine aspect that is often suppressed in women while the anima represents the feminine aspect that is suppressed in men.
The anima/animus serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.
In many cultures, however, men and women are encouraged to adopt traditional and often rigid gender roles. Jung suggested that this discouragement of men exploring their feminine aspects and of women exploring their masculine aspects served to undermine psychological development.
Integrating both the feminine and masculine aspects of our personality into an authentic unified whole is a healthy part of human development. A good balance would be a person who relies on both emotion and reason, intuition and logic, cooperation and competition, and so on,
The combined anima and animus is known as the syzygy or the divine couple. The syzygy represents completion, unification, and wholeness.
The Self
The self is an archetype that represents the unified consciousness and unconsciousness of an individual. Jung often represented the self as a circle, square, or mandala.
Creating the self occurs through a process known as individuation, in which the various aspects of personality are integrated. Jung believed that disharmony between the unconscious and the conscious mind could lead to psychological problems. Bringing these conflicts into awareness and accommodating them was an important part of the individuation process.
Jung suggested that there were two different centers of personality:
The ego makes up the center of consciousness, but it is the self that lies at the center of personality.
Personality encompasses not only consciousness but also the ego and the unconscious mind.
You can think of this by imagining a circle with a dot right at the center. The entire circle makes up the self, whereas the small dot in the middle represents the ego.
For Jung, the ultimate aim was for an individual to achieve a sense of cohesive self, similar in many ways to Maslow's concept of self actualision
Other Jungian Archetypes
Jung suggested that the number of existing archetypes was not static or fixed. Instead, many different archetypes may overlap or combine, creating new archetypes such as the father (a stern, powerful authority figure), the hero (a champion, defender, or rescuer), and the trickster (a deceiver, liar, and troublemaker).
Archetypical Figures
Jung acknowledged that the four main archetypes can intermingle and give rise to 12 archetypical figures (also known as archetypical images). These include: Ruler Creator/artist Sage Innocent Explorer Rebel Hero Wizard Jester Everyman Lover Caregiver
The Shadow
Carl Jung is famous for formulating the concept of the shadow, the portion of our personality which, through the course of our life, is relegated to the darkness of the unconscious.
What is shadow according to Jung?We could say that the ego is our subjective identity — who we consider ourselves to be. The shadow, is the “other” within us that we might consider the objective identity — the one incompatible with the ego identity that we decline to acknowledge as a part of us.The shadow archetype represents the dark side of the conscious mind. In literature, the shadow archetype can reflect the dark aspects of either an individual character or a larger group of characters.l Jung mentioned that a personality has two components: the Persona (literally meaning the Mask, that which is our conscious personality and which determines how we deal with the world), and the Shadow: (the person we'd rather not be, the opposite of our conscious personality).That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.”
“The shadow goes by many familiar names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin or brother in bible and myth, the double, repressed self, alter ego, id. When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent to the underworld, dark night of the soul, midlife crisis.”
While Jung is known for bringing the concept of the shadow to public awareness in the modern day, this aspect of ourselves has long been recognized as a ubiquitous feature of human beings. In 1886, before Jung made his mark, Robert Louis Stevenson created the now famous story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In his story Dr. Jekyll represents the respectable part of one’s personality, but when he transforms into Mr. Hyde, his shadow personality gains dominance over him and wrecks havoc on his life.
Although the shadow is an innate part of the human being, the vast majority of us are willfully blind regarding its existence. We hide our negative qualities, not only from others but from ourselves. To do this we often criticize and condemn others to ensure our focus does not fall on our own faults and destructive tendencies. We go through life with a false air of moral superiority and a belief that while others act immorally and destructively, we ourselves are wholly virtuous and always in the right.
“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” (Carl Jung)
The shadow is conceptually the blind spot of the psyche; the repression of one's id, while maladaptive, prevents shadow integration, the union of id and ego.While they are regarded as differing on their theories of the function of repression of id in civilization, Freud and Jung coalesced at Platonism, wherein id rejects the nomos.
Persona is contrasted against the shadow.Jung regarded the shadow as unconscious—id and biography—suppressed under the superego's ego-ideal, the way the superego wants to be. The shadow is projected onto one's social environment as cognitive distortions.However, the shadow can also be regarded as "roughly equivalent to the whole of the Freudian unconscious", and Jung himself asserted that "the result of the Freudian method of elucidation is a minute elaboration of man's shadow side unexampled in any previous age".
Contrary to a Freudian definition of shadow, the idea can include everything outside the light of consciousness and may be positive or negative. Because a subject can repress awareness or conceal self-threatening aspects of the self, consensus of the idea of the shadow that it is a negative function in the self, despite the extent of the repression failing to prohibit these aspects.
There are positive aspects that can remain hidden in one's shadow—especially in people with low self-esteem, anxieties, and false beliefs—with these aspects being brought to the conscious mind and exercised through analysis and therapy. It may be considered the subject's identification with id, superseded in early childhood, though it can also be influenced by early to late childhood.
Enter the Shadow. This is the part of our unconscious mind that Jung believed to hold all the things about ourselves that we repress, whether because they are evil, socially unacceptable, harmful to others, or detrimental to our own health.. This is the part of our unconscious mind that Jung believed to hold all the things about ourselves that we repress, whether because they are evil, socially unacceptable, harmful to others, or detrimental to our own health.Allowing yourself to just notice and feel your dark side is powerful. Importantly, this doesn't mean you need to express or act on how you feel though. Consciously acknowledging what you feel, no matter how undesirable or unlikable the thought, feeling or urge might be, can really be life changing.
SOME QUOTES
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” — Carl Jung
“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole” — Carl Jung
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
— Carl Jung
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become” — Carl Jung
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves” – Carl Jung
MORE Jung's quotes
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
“We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”
“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you”
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases”
“Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life”
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it”
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge”
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.”
When you can bear your own silence, you are free”
“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed.”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people”
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
“My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.”
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
Carl Jung and Hunter S. Thompson
WITTENGSTEIN
“if a lion could speak our language, we could not understand it.” In other words, because we do not have a shared experience and worldview, its words would lack any context allowing us to interpret them. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian philosopher (and in a sense the greatest philosopher of the 20th century), was very interested in engineering sciences in his youth. Because of this interest, he went to Manchester in 1908 to study in the fledgling field of aeronautic enginnering.he worked with logic, mathematics, ethics, the mind, and most notably, revolutionized the way that we understand language.
One of the main ideas that Wittgenstein discusses in Philosophical Investigations is that of “meaning as use.” Wittgenstein argues that the meaning of a word isn't some kind of separate “thing” that exists all on its own. Instead, it's something that arises from how we use it in language.Wittgenstein had come to believe that language did not represent a reality 'out there' but was an instrument or tool woven into human practice. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he believed that the meaning of language came from its logical form.
Described by Wittgenstein, it should be the philosopher's routine activity: to react or respond to the traditional philosophers' musings by showing them where they go wrong, using the tools provided by logical analysis. In other words, by showing them that (some of) their propositions are nonsense.
Alternatively, Wittgenstein thought that it was impossible for philosophy to 'get it right' and that science was the only kind of knowledge that was factual. Instead, he believed the purpose of philosophy was to find explanations that allowed people to picture the world.The major criticisms centered around two issues: Wittgenstein's emphasis on elementary calculations, and his seemingly restricted view of mathematics; and what was taken to be his anarchism, his willingness to say that anything goes in mathematics.To regard Wittgenstein as an existentialist philosopher may appear t Wittgenstein's famous quote
The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.oe to be simply absurd - as absurd, perhaps, as the effort on the part of some writers whose collective lists of existentialist philoso-phers ("from Socrates to Sartre") com
CAMUS
The question of suicide is for Camus the fundamental question subtending all of philosophy our relation to life and whether life is or is not worth living and under what terms is ultimately the only serious philosophical question
More commonly we commit suicide in a figurative kind of way and he calls that figurative way philosophical suicide so most of the time in this particular work he going to be examining philosophical suicide although literal suicide is certainly included in within the purview of his inquiry -
So the question is what is philosophical suicide well let's look at suicide first in its generality for Camus suicide is a response to the ultimate absurdity of life it's not so much a response to the fact that life is painful because the fact is that when things make sense to us when things are coherent when we have a sense of purpose or meaning we can endure quite a bit of suffering
So the question of suicide ultimately isn't so much about suffering it's more about absurdity futility and meaninglessness because those sorts of factors are what makes suffering unendurable
So suicide is a response to realizing ultimately how absurd and futile and meaningless life actually is Hhe looks at particularly has to do with belief in God so the question is how is belief in God our believing in God a way of killing off part of our minds and part of our perceptual fields well here's how it works basically
We believe in God for two reasons one of which has to do with our longing for definite answers to the questions that naturally occur to us as human beings
Fundamental questions like where did the universe come from where did we come from where are we going especially after we die is there any point to our existence
We look to life itself for answers life doesn't provide answers to those kinds of questions life doesn't tell us where we come from or where the universe came from or where what's going to happen to us after we die
Life is absurd in any number of ways for Camus this is the most central way-we don't get the l the answers for which we long most for - so belief in God or any sort of religious structure or any sort of doctrine that would seemingly provide answers to those kinds of fundamental questions is for him a form of philosophical suicide--realizing that life is not providing us with what we really want-- for Camus, the myth of sisyphus and other essays is an , of seeing it would be an effort to be more much more honest than we typically are about the nature of our existential predicament -believing in God tells us where the universe came from, tells us what the point of our lives is and to live according to the edicts of Christian virtue to be saved from our sins ' that is really the whole point of our lives because it's that, in a nut shell ,is what our existence is about
For Camus it shuts down disquieting anxiety and uncertainty about how ridiculous and how absurd our existential predicament say a Christian cosmology it doesn't by the way it's not just the Christian cosmology pretty much every religion has this function it gives you some kind of narrative about you came from and where you're going and what the rules of the game are so if you adhere to a more Buddhist way of thinking well you know it's like you're going through sequences of reincarnations dictated by karma that ultimately hopefully will lead you away from the cycle of samsara and into Nirvana at some point and that's sort of the point of things for you to become to take further steps toward enlightenment throughout this life and throughout your future incarnations too if you believe that well you know life is ultimately about being a valiant warrior so that you can you know accompany the Valkyries to to the to the halls of Valhalla and hang out with Odin-- it provides you with a narrative a sense of orientation and purpose
That it provides us with a narrative that ultimately allows us to think that at the end of the day good people will be rewarded bad people will be punished wherein we have a way of thinking about life in terms of good people being rewarded and bad people being punished okay
The reason why we commit philosophical suicide is for the most part we can't bear the anxiety of all of the uncertainty that attends both life's fundamental questions and also we can't bear the anxiety of thinking that life basically doesn't care about fairness but that's more or less the way it is like if you look at the natural world well you know you can it's easy to see scenes of young antelopes being torn apart by hyenas if you watch a nature special - the natural world that creatures that you know have committed seemingly no transgression or no foul deed end up meeting the most horrific of deaths - in principle you know that life will cut you down if you're a good person just as quickly as it'll cut down a bad person so that's the nature of philosophical suicide
Camus also gives a name to what we've been describing as the absurdity of life - him absurdity is not just something that crops up every now and then in our experience of life the absurd is something on the order of an ontological category
An ontological category is a basic structure of being itself - the reason why we sometimes have these experiences of absurdity in our lives is because life is already absurd in principle
- it's structured that way from the ground up so you know you're really in a ludicrous predicament ibeing alive as a human- and you're realizing the real truth of things and the real truth of things is that you're in a absurd predicament you're you're awash in the absurd in the ocean of the absurd ,.
Many of us commit philosophical suicide in one form or another and there are secular ways of committing philosophical suicide , not just religion serves that function . For Camus it's also that their secular ways of doing it - buying into a kind of scientific / industrial / technological utopian dream - if we just keep pursuing life in a scientific rational reasonable way that we'll end up in some sort of utopian state
Life doesn't provide any confirmation of that either in fact you know if you look at the history of the last hundred years or so well it seems like a lot of that technological know-how and a lot of that rational inquiry into the way reality is structured we use to on a fairly regular basis commit genocide . Oppress each other and torment each other and occurs alongside all of the benefits of living in an industrial technological world -
It will yield up some kind of utopian state for Humanity well good luck with that because the jury's definitely out on that dream- we've wired the entire planet for instantaneous nuclear obliteration how many nuclear armaments are there in the world well the last estimate I read which is a few years ago is 13,700 , biowepons and other means of mass destruction or dehumanization.
The question is at this point can we do anything other than commit philosophical suicide in one form or another probably the most predominant mode of philosophical suicide I would say is narcotized ourselves by way of commodity and entertainment culture that's the thing we use for the most part that shuts down that sort of honest enquiring part of our minds and our souls - the main thing we do is buy more stuff and try to be happy I think that's probably the bigger paradigm even than the religious one - can we do anything but commit suicide in one form or another either literal suicide or philosophical suicide by way of having some kind of belief structure or narrative that shuts down all the uncertainty of life or just relying on sort of science / industry / technology to be our default answer that seemingly shuts down all of that stuff or on the other hand narking are narcotized ourselves into oblivion to the point where we are unable to recognize how strange and weird and absurd life actually is are.
Camus doesn't really know, but he holds out the possibility , to avoid committing all forms of suicide ,he gives a special name - and the special name is:
The Absurd Man
The absurd man is someone that refuses to default to any form of "literal suicide" or "figurative philosophical suicide "and instead keeps the fundamental questions of life unanswered , but somehow finds a way to tolerate the anxiety that it involves .He finds a way of moving through life ,anyway ,so the absurd man for Camus is a kind of person who is more honest and more direct about human existence than we typically are . Here's is his description of the absurd man -------
He is able to remain on that dizzying crest of uncertainty without falling to some belief system, or some mode of tranquilization ,that our society offers up .Being able to remain on that dizzying crest is integrity and the rest is subterfuge or tricky deception of philosophical suicide. Camus claims that his philosophical position is that of atheism . Atheism seems like a very definite statement about the non-existence of God but his earlier claim is that well part of what makes life absurd is not that but rather the uncertainty about all . Many would say that would more resemble agnosticism.More a different form agnosticism rather than atheism incidentally agnosticism is the position that we don't know enough to say whether God exists or not
Some calls enchanted agnosticism -we don't know enough to ascertain whether God exists or not or probably in a more general sense - how can agnosticism gain a kind of enchantment for us how can that be an enchanted position - life be mysterious to us in our experience but our engagement with life can be permeated with a sense of mystery - increasing sensation of mystery about life can actually be a way of enhancing the miraculous nature of life - wouldn't you rather live in sort of a powerful magical mysterious universe -learning to endure a certain fraction of anxiety and learning to be a little bit more direct and honest about how absurd it is -- Camus is inviting us to celebrate ultimately life's absurdity like to have enough strength in who and what we are spiritually and existentially so that we can we can learn to tolerate reality that we don't have to run from reality
ORWELL
1984 by George Orwell
There was truth and there was untruth and if you clung to the truth ,even against the whole world ,you were not mad .
1984 by George Orwell is one of the most impactful books ever written it has been widely used and misused in political discourse by all kinds of ideologues into that discourse it entered terms like big brother thought crime double think Newspeak thought police and orwellian strangely enough as a synonym for the very thing that the author Orwell was against it's been translated in over 65 languages has sold over 30 million copies has been banned in many countries especially authoritarian regimes it's been banned under Stalin and as recently as 2022 in Belarus i
The book 1984 is a dystopian future Society Nation maybe you can say super State named Oceania it's fully controlled by a totalitarian political party called inksock it's led by Big Brother who as we might discuss may or may not be a real person he might just be as simple used by the party the party wants only to increase its power also something we might talk about it uses technology telescreens for Mass surveillance it's creating a new language called Newspeak which removes words from English that could lead to Rebellion it uses doublethink to control thought by perhaps you could say forcing you to hold contradictory beliefs and accept them as true if not the thought police arrest you for committing a thought crime examples of doublethink are Wars peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength and finally the party constantly rewrites history
As the quote goes who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. There are several Ministries -four of them.
Ministry of Truth it's responsible for propaganda and like I said rewriting history
Ministry of Love is responsible for brainwashing people through torture
Mstery of Plenty is responsible for rationing of food supplies and goods and
Ministry of Peace of course is responsible for maintaining constant state of War
Society is divided into three levels
The inner party the auto party and the pros the stands for I guess proletariats it's the working class the inner party's tiny the auto party's a little bit bigger and the majority of the people I forget what the percentage is maybe 80 percent is the uh the pros the working class there are several key characters Winston the main character is a low ranking member of inksock he works at the ministry of Truth where he rewrites history
Julia is a dark-haired girl who Winston falls in love with and she with him they have sex and this is maybe a good place to mention that passionate sex love and passionate sex are forbidden in this Society
Good sex I think is a term under new speak hashtag good sex is the kind of sex that leads to procreation which is the only kind of sex that's allowed and the only kind of sex that's good O'Brien is uh another Central character he's the member of the inner party that uh convinces Winston he's part of the Brotherhood which is a lie and he eventually is the man who tortures Winston and breaks his mind breaks his heart big brother and Emmanuel Goldstein are these symbolic characters that will never actually get to meet they may not exist
Big brother is the head of the party inksock and Emmanuel Goldstein is the leader of the so-called Brotherhood which is the supposed mysterious group that lurks in the shadows and works to overthrow the party again may or may not exist will maybe talk about the importance of that in a totalitarian state
That when everything else are most things that make you human have taken away by those around you by the totalitarian state the last thing that's left that is the most difficult to take away is love
Love for other human beings love for life itself that's the little flame from which Hope Springs that's the key revolutionary Act is the act of love so when the ability to speak is taken away when the ability to think rational thoughts is taken away the last thing that's left and the thing that ultimately gives hope is love
Julia gets to Winston the note reading I love you is the kind of revolutionary Act that leads to a society beyond the one they exist in I think a lot of the book has an interesting hypocrisy to it where the main character Winston is almost in an animalistic way obsessed with destroying the state in in rebellion and revolution but I think love is the thing that allows you to believe in a place beyond the state
In believing that you can build something better versus destroying the thing you're in I think you have to be careful as a revolutionary not to obsess with destruction because Beyond destruction there there could be chaos that leads to something much worse
I think love is the thing that the basic human thing that connects all of us ,that connects all of us that allows you to build a better Society after the totalitarian one is overthrown
There's a quote that pure love or pure lust was impossible or forbidden -pure love and pure lust pure here meaning sort of unadulterated uncensored intensity of feeling maybe intimacy and that was an interesting question raised by the book both by Winston and Julia-- what is ultimately the thing the most powerful Act of rebellion ---is it between us humans when everything is forbidden is it animalistic like sex just lust lust for another human----or is it love I kind of love you have a romantic partner but even love for family love for friends
I don't know I think the book almost claims that it is sex but I think of what the book also shows is if sex is your manifestation of rebellion that that ultimately leads to something that doesn't last that ultimately leads to um foreign versus building---- Beyond The Horizon when the state Falls so some quotes from Winston on this the more men you've had sex with so Julia admitted to have sex with quite a lot of people, he says the more men you've had sex with the more I love you-- I hate Purity I hate virtue I want everyone to be corrupt to the Bone-this seems to be obsessed with the hatred towards the state versus a longing and a hope --I think hope is really important here a hope for a better future beyond the state a--- Embrace had been a battle the climax of Victory, it was a blow struck against the party, it was a political act so there again I think sex is a political act an act of political Rebellion- the deeply human thing is again the act of love it's a source of hope, it's the Catalyst for building a better future beyond the revolution
I think family love is a really powerful bond that connects us and that's one of the things that the totalitarian States really go after -- using term authoritarian and totalitarian -- authoritarian means where there's a government a centralized complete centralized control of political affairs --a totalitarian state is a complete is beyond that
It is a complete control of not just politics and the functions of government the basics of the function of the government but also social economic everything -Nazi Germany's example of that I think to me where there's just complete control of every single thing from the war effort to, social interactions ,the rules that govern social interaction ,To the press ETC.
This book is more about totalitarianism , the way they destroy family ,forbidding passion ,passionate sex ,but really just passion longing for another for another human being in that in that romantic way --and encourage children at a young age to turn their parents in For Thought crime -The goal of the party the Final Destination n through the process of torture is for to break your mind to break your heart and soul completely so that the only love you can have and it could be felt as a pure love is for Big Brother this is the kind of thing you see in North Korea
You get them to hate anything and because that that feeling that drug that hypnotic directed by the state into any direction and because you have complete control history you can direct it towards any Target the hate is catalyzed to kinds of rituals- it can overpower the individualistic feeling of love we have for each other I think I've read many places that it was an intended originally by Orwell as a satire although satire that has quite a lot of torture at the end and uh doesn't seem to have much humor but I think if you read it as a satire that's the way it's better to understand its relevance in our society today because a lot of things like two minutes of hate is almost like a caricature of what hate looks like in a mass Gathering--then control of the collective intelligence of our species through the totalitarian state I think there's elements of this that are just under illustration in social media today -- social media does reveal this kind of mass hysteria this capacity of humans to be outraged based on tribalism
The real power the power we have to fight for not power over things but power over men power is inflicting pain and humiliation-- power isn't tearing human Minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing power is not a means it is an end one does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship the object of persecution is persecution the object of torture is torture the object of power is power this of course is another aspect of human nature the will to power a
The conversation between Lex and Michael Levin who is brilliant biologist engineer uh came to mind when O'Brien made an analogy to an organism which survives even as the individual cells pass away and the great purges are analogous to The Cutting of a fingernail' ( see the beginning of life page in this website--NICK LANE)
If you see society as an organism (MENTALLY DEHUMANIZING and ABSTRACTING INDIVIDUALS cdmc )which I think is the way a totalitarian state sees it -- the destruction of a large percentage of that Society the murder the torture all kinds of atrocities and genocide become justifiable as long as the organism flourishes ---- that's how you get to the ideas that Stalin had it's okay to break a few eggs to make an omelet this devaluation of a human being as of fundamental importance in a society foreign that's a slippery slope into atrocities
It's not just deeply unethical from our understanding of morals and ethics it is also very unproductive it destroys the human Spirit and the human spirit is essential for a building of a Great Society of constant progress ( which our " creator hopes for"?
I think that's also one of the other messages of the book is totalitarianism results when you chase perfection . when you present this idea of utopia there is no Utopia there is no perfect Society
Perfection only exists when you remove the basic Humanity of the individuals that make up that state -when you destroy the the human Spirit -when you suppress and you destroy all the freedoms- freedom is going to be messy it's going to be very chaotic but that freedom is in the long Arc of history is going to create progress
You don't think of them as as living beings of having the same value as you and that's one of the really powerful ideas that the founding of the United States that all men are created equal but there's an equal Worth to a human being no matter who that human being is-- that idea at the very least as flawed as its implementations is a really really powerful idea -it's a non-trivial idea and that idea resists the drug of totalitarianism the drug of power
All political ideologists can succumb to the Allure of power and be corrupted by it and I think people on the left in the United States and people on the right can both be corrupted by power ---but the reality is --all men and politicians are capable of creating an orwellian world .
there is value to the connection between human beings that you have to lean on each other help each other that Society is fundamentally a cohesive Collective than a completely sort of disparate set of Sovereign individuals
The book was against totalitarianism of a centralized state ,that controls speech, thought , the press and all the basic human freedoms- controls truth -"double think "controlling language .
Orwell predicted some of the elements of future Society especially with technology, technological capabilities that are , for example ,media used by the state to control the population .
Technology including AI is a tool for totalitarian state-- it's a way they achieve full control
Technology is also a tool for freedom --the internet is an incredible tool for freedom -- the greater reach and access that the internet has to our population the more powerful the resistance to totalitarianism . So technology is --a double-edged sword it provides the tools for oppression and the tools for the ongoing fight for freedom . This is comparable to the effect the printing press had in the 1500's for the population to throw of the Tyranny and decadence of the church who were the ruling elites at that time.
1984 just shows the horrible conclusion of complete totality and control over speech, over thought, over feeling .
we have to Value critical and independent thought,critical thinking , independent of government ,independent of groups ,and respect the people around you the people you love and that love you-- think independently
There is a potential problem - you may obsess think too independently you can -----we are social creatures we need that connection l-like with the Tom Waits I like my Tom a" little Drop of Poison "-I think of deeply independent thought as a little Drop of Poison that's necessary for your mind .
Most of your life you assume most things around you are true, and that's very useful we stand on the shoulders of giants . But on a regular occasion you have to question the things you've taken for granted --question what everybody's telling you- but cautiously - sometimes you have to question assumptions and challenge biases.
KANT
IMMANUAL KANT
Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The term Kantianism or Kantian is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.
Revolves entirely around duty rather than emotions or end goals. All actions are performed in accordance with some underlying maxim or principle, which are vastly different from each other; it is according to this that the moral worth of any action is judged.
Kant's ethics are founded on his view of rationality as the ultimate good and his belief that all people are fundamentally rational beings. This led to the most important part of Kant's ethics, the formulation of the categorical imperative, which is the criterion for whether a maxim is good or bad.
Simply put, this criterion amounts to a thought experiment: to attempt to universalize the maxim (by imagining a world where all people necessarily acted in this way in the relevant circumstances and then see if the maxim and its associated action would still be conceivable in such a world.
For instance, holding the maxim kill anyone who annoys you and applying it universally would result in self termination. Thus holding this maxim is irrational as it ends up being impossible to hold it.
Universalizing a maxim (statement) leads to it being valid, or to one of two contradictions—a contradiction in conception (where the maxim, when universalized, is no longer a viable means to the end) or a contradiction in will (where the will of a person contradicts what the universalisation of the maxim implies). The first type leads to a "perfect duty", and the second leads to an "imperfect duty".
Kant's ethics focus, then, only on the maxim that underlies actions, and judges these to be good or bad solely on how they conform to reason. Kant showed that many of our common sense views of what is good or bad conform to his system, but denied that any action performed for reasons other than rational actions can be good (saving someone who is drowning simply out of a great pity for them is not a morally good act). Kant also denied that the consequences of an act in any way contribute to the moral worth of that act—his reasoning being (highly simplified for brevity) that the physical world is outside our full control, and thus we cannot be held accountable for the events that occur in it.
The formulations of the Categorical Imperative:
1. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
2. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were, through his maxim, always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.
Political Philosophy
In political philosophy, Kant has had wide and increasing influence with major political philosophers of the late twentieth century. has engendered serious controversy but has demonstrated the vitality of Kantian considerations across a wider range of questions than was once thought plausible.
The political philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) favoured a classical republican approach. In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace.
They included a world of constitutional republics by establishment of political community. His classical republican theory was extended in Doctrine of Right (1797), the first part of Metaphysics of Morals.[3] At the end of the 20th century Kant's political philosophy had been enjoying a remarkable renaissance in English-speaking countries with more major studies in a few years than had appeared in the preceding many decades.[4]
Kant's most significant contribution to political philosophy and the philosophy of law is the doctrine of Rechtsstaat. According to this doctrine, the power of the state is limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of authority.
The Rechtsstaat is a concept in continental European legal thinking, originally borrowed from German jurisprudence, which can be translated as "the legal state" or "state of rights".
It is a "constitutional state" in which the exercise of governmental power is constrained by the law, and is often tied to the Anglo-American concept of the rule of law.
Kant's political philosophy has been described as liberal for its presumption of limits on the state based on the social contract as a regulative matter.
In a Rechtsstaat, the citizens share legally based civil liberties and they can use the courts. A country cannot be a liberal democracy without first being a Rechtsstaat.
German writers usually place Immanuel Kant's theories at the beginning of their accounts of the movement toward the Rechtsstaat. The Rechtsstaat in the meaning of "constitutional state" was introduced in the latest works of Immanuel Kant after US and French constitutions were adopted in the late 18th century.
Kant's approach is based on the supremacy of a country's written constitution. This supremacy must create guarantees for implementation of his central idea: a permanent peaceful life as a basic condition for the happiness of its people and their prosperity. Kant was basing his doctrine on none other than constitutional government. Kant had thus formulated the main problem of constitutionalism, “The constitution of a state is eventually based on the morals of its citizens, which, in its turns, is based on the goodness of this constitution.”Kant's idea is the foundation for the constitutional theory of the twentieth century.
The Rechtsstaat concept is based on the ideas, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: "The task of establishing a universal and permanent peaceful life is not only a part of the theory of law within the framework of pure reason, but per se an absolute and ultimate goal. To achieve this goal, a state must become the community of a large number of people, living provided with legislative guarantees of their property rights secured by a common constitution. The supremacy of this constitution… must be derived a priori from the considerations for achievement of the absolute ideal in the most just and fair organization of people’s life under the aegis of public law."
Kant opposed "democracy" – which, in that era, meant direct democracy – believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty.
He stated, "…democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, "all", who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.
"As most writers at the time he distinguished three forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of government.
A distinctive feature of Kant's political philosophy is his conviction that the university should be a model of creative conflict.
The philosopher's role within the university should be to "police" the higher faculties (which in his day were theology, law and medicine), making sure their teaching conforms to the principles of reason; likewise, the goal of perpetual peace in society can be achieved only when the rulers consult with philosophers on a regular basis.
PLATO
That was certainly certainly the case for many spiritual teachers in past history you know you have examples of Socrates teaching virtue and wisdom to the people of Greece and then them putting them to death through Hemlock right and then you have stories of Jesus being put to death on the cross for what he taught of of living righteously and loving your neighbor as yourself so the allegory of the cave is pretty deep there's a lot more to go into it than you know than a 10 minute 15 minute video will allow but that's essentially the gist of more or less the depth of that analogy right so he talks about how there's four phases to understanding right so you have your your initial opinions you have your initial uh beliefs which are like looking at the shadow of the cave okay and nothing Beyond it right you can't even see your own neighbor right you're so focused on the Shadows uh and the falsehoods of what you actually believe they're considering the context of what's actually going on at the top of the cave right and then you have your faith right what you believe in um things that are based on understanding and knowledge which is that third phase but that are still very limited and can even fall victim to Superstition and incorrect opinions after that point as you go further up the the cave right um you know you get to what Plato terms is understanding okay which is intellectual knowledge which is uh academic knowledge which is contextual knowledge of what the faith actually means and what your opinions actually are and learning to actually think outside of that right uh but Plato stops there and he says this isn't the furthest you need to go you need to go all the way to the top the end goal of philosophy and knowledge should be to attain the height of wisdom to understand the Divine Right what he calls the intelligible realm where where the Divine comes from where that that is where our focus should be as a society the first cause of all things that should be the the end goal of our of our pursuit of knowledge right and then from that point once we reach that point Plato says that we need to be willing to go back to the bottom of a cave to teach others those principles to teach them wisdom to teach them virtue to teach them Justice right to teach them fairness and loving our neighbors and loving society and then also do our best to legislate accordingly to push people towards the top of the cave towards ultimate knowledge and understanding Plato understood that we came from somewhere it wasn't just all put here by chance he understood that out of out of chaos come order right and there was a first cause to that so it was important to not only look for it ourselves not only come to an understanding of wisdom but it was our responsibility our duty to teach others these things and he said unfortunately most of these people that pursue wisdom and attain it right and get to the top of the cave and look around and be like oh man what I believed previously was a complete and utter sham and a lie um this is the truth of things right uh the people at the top of the cave they are very hesitant they don't want to because they see the shallowness of what's below them right he's they and then he brings it back to reality and he said all the people in the courts and fighting back and forth amongst differences opinion and religion um you know and and that kind of thing and the business Pursuits and all these things in fact that is the shallowness of life that's the things that people think that matter right pleasure uh success all these things things that Society thinks that matters but in fact but in effect it's just simply knowledge working of the knowledge of the Shadows on the wall and then he says that people with wisdom are usually put down or put to death one of the two are shut and shut down somehow and so most of the time people don't even find out what it is they had to say to begin with because they're they're silenced but he said it for those who have attained wisdom it's their duty to Enlighten others as much as possible that's their Duty and then in fact if those people who have attained wisdom refuse to govern they themselves end up being becoming governed by those who simply only understand the Shadows at the bottom of the cave he said he wishes that if there was a way to compel the wise to be the the leaders of society because if they could lead Society they would they would bring Society to an age of enlightenment so to speak to a golden age where everything thing is fair everything is is pushing towards virtue and what you know the divine's plan is from Humanity another aspect of that analogy is the walk from the bottom of the cave to the top that could be viewed as a personal development cycle right or even societal development where we each realize that our own personal opinions are limited our own restrictions are limited and so we need to attain wisdom and so as we journey to that Discovery to the blinding light of the Sun so to speak where initially we can't understand it um that is essentially a depiction of a personal discovery of wisdom and you know even what Society comes to and then when they go back to the when you go back down to the bottom of the cave you realize man I don't understand any of this anymore and I think those who have search for wisdom could probably identify with this when you when you reach more attainment more knowledge more wisdom you go back to your friends and family and relatives and you realize man um I just don't understand this perspective anymore right I don't believe this anymore so I mean what am I supposed to say here you know it's one of those things where you know it's easily you can easily if you've experienced this you can easily identify with the allegory you know so those are just some perspectives from Plato's Republic I found interesting um you know probably one of the deepest allegories I've ever read in any philosophical work in my life um you know if anybody knows of any deeper allegories that are comparable or deeper than that please let me know I would be curious to read it analogies and philosophy are very powerful tools they get messages across and if you read philosophy you'll notice most of the philosophers they do their best to come up with good analogies because some of these Concepts they try to to they try to communicate and convey to people you can't just say through direct words you have to use Mental depictions to get the idea across you know so as Plato said it's important for us to learn that we don't really know anything right that our own personal opinions are not really knowledge and true knowledge is actually wisdom understanding what this is actually all about what life really means what the purpose of life is not just intellectual knowledge of business or law or or politics right it's actual wisdom of what our relations are with humanity and the world as a whole
PLATO REFERENCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbHYfzwnSrU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-gyTgFjuIg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy47YzvGniQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy47YzvGniQ&t=37s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbl2OKOqRDc
https://dgilesphilosopher.medium.com/the-legacy-of-plato-and-aristotle-487f79fc82ac
THE CAVE ALLEGORY
The cave allegory which is probably one of the most famous analogies in philosophical history so Plato's Republic specifically the entire book is essentially trying to draw an ideal government okay what it is that we as a society should strive for as far as the ideal government the perfect government
the one that allows for as much individual liberties as possible but also at the same time the most virtuous past possible you know in order to have virtue there have to be laws you know to to go those who you know are less virtuous into being virtuous you know and just really brief you know to summarize the whole book you know it's the idea of the the it's the job the duty of the lawmakers uh to push Society into being more virtuous right um you know even if people don't understand why they need to be virtuous it's the the duty of those the law givers uh to make Society more virtuous just given their position you know things he goes into kind of Earth's development history as well you know he talks about the cycles of government how freedom and tyranny are kind of in this cyclical relationship where out of tyranny comes more freedom generally speaking and but tyrants if there's too much Freedom those tyrants can use that individual freedom to take control right so it's kind of a figure eight kind of loop that society's experience out of tyranny and freedom they work into and out of one another right right now as far as the cave allegory goes it's a very deep allegory right he draws
the picture of men essentially being chained inside of a cave they can't even move their heads to side to side to see the person next to them all they can see on the back of the cave are shadows moving to and fro and lights and sounds coming from behind them .
behind them is the opening of The Cave which is above and behind them right and so light and and shadows reflect refract into the cave from behind them and essentially these men these people have been stuck in this cave their entire life so they don't have any context of the outside world all they can do is come to conclusions of what they see in the cave which are simply just the shadows and just the sounds and these individuals essentially come to their own conclusions - opinions on what those shadows and sounds could possibly be and they develop their own beliefs their own systems of knowledge that they essentially gain from their constant observation of these Shadows
someone then comes down to the cave and releases one of them unchangeS them and says let's go to the top , let's go to the surface so the men slowly go up the hill up to the entrance of the cave and the man that's been stuck in the bottom of the cave is suddenly blinded by This brilliant light and he can't see anything around him
he can't see the sources of the shapes he can't see the sources of the noise all he can do is hear with his ears and it's super confusing for him and as this eyesight adjusts to the brilliancy of the light he realizes all this light all this noise all of these shapes came from these people walking back and forth at the top of this cave and the shapes you know were simply their Shadows projecting onto the wall right and he looks up and it was the Sun the Brilliance of the sun was the the source of the light in the cave suddenly he he he goes back down to the bottom of the cave and he doesn't want to right the man you know compels him to go back to the to the bottom of the cave and the gentleman doesn't want to he wants to stay at the surface because he sees all of this real truth of what he has been um misunderstanding his entire life he doesn't want to go to the bottom of the cave but he's forced to right and as he's going to the bottom of the cave he's suddenly blinded again because you can't see in the darkness of cave because his eyes had adjusted to the light and as he's blinded he's trying to describe to his friends down at the bottom of the cave what he's seeing okay and the people at the bottom of the cave still strapped and looking at the wall they think he's insane to the point where they all uh talk amongst themselves and say if the man comes back down to release our friend who's talking this Insanity we're gonna kill him okay so that analogy has so much depth to it okay so much to dissect it's it's insane okay there's a lot of different moving pieces there the overarching concept is um in the context of Republic itself as essentially to illustrate the knowledge the level of knowledge needed to achieve that perfect Society in order to achieve the perfect government that Plato idealizes in in this dialogue it would come to the equivalent of somebody coming from the bottom of the cave to the top of the surface you know when witnessing the sunlight for the first time coming to the truth of that level of the truth of what reality of nature even is however there's a lot of different things to dissect here which I find interesting uh you know obviously the bottom of the cave where you're strapped in and chained in and looking at one one-dimensional structure of a wall essentially is is an analogy of kind of where our base of basis of knowledge is for many people for many of us we're Chained and our cultures were Chained and our religions we're chained in our opinions and we can't see beyond them we can't see this beyond the Shadows of the opinions we've come to from these cultural limitations we've been placed in and for many of us we stay there we stay chained to our own opinions we stay chained to our own context of our own beliefs and we're unwilling to move we're unwilling to hear out the person next to us we're unwilling to see their point of view and we're certainly scared of and unwilling to go to the surface to to attain more knowledge for those of us who are willing to go to the top to look at point of views outside of what we're taught right to to go to the surface and experience the sunlight for the first time the blinding sunlight of of other perspectives and other beliefs and the truth of wisdom right when we go back to the bottom of the cave when we go back and try to tell our friends right for many of us we are told that we are crazy we are told we're crazy we're told that you know that knowledge is not worth having that knowledge of beyond our opinions and beyond our initial beliefs is dangerous and that those who teach such things should actually be put to death
Dostoevsky ( I BELIEVE HIM THE MOST )
Dostoevsky was born in 1820, Fyodor Dostoevsky was 25 when he published his first novel, Poor Folk in 1846. Three years later, he was sentenced to death in 1849 when he was only 28 years old. A last minute reprieve from the Tsar himself saved his life, but he spent 10 years in Siberia, most of it doing hard labour. He published Crime and Punishment in 1866 when he was 45.
Terrible gambling problem followed. In 1879 he published his masterpiece, Brothers Karamazov and died soon after in 1881 at the age of 59. He suffered from epilepsy throughout his life. He wrote 12 novels, 4 novellas and 16 short stories.
Now, Dostoevsky is considered the greatest Russian writer along with Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgenev. But none of them experienced life from the lowest to the highest.
His novel, Notes from the Underground is considered the first existential novel that influenced future writers such as Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and even the psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud. In addition to being one of the greatest novelists ever, he is also studied as one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century.
His novels are centred on deeper philosophical and psychological topics. If Tolstoy was a historian and sociologist, Dostoevsky was a psychologist or archaeologist of human existential suffering and had a huge influence on the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche. Albert Einstein said, Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist. Whether Dostoevsky was religious or not, what can we learn from him?
Lesson -1 You don't know yourself (self-knowledge) “Man is a mystery... I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” Dostoevsky’s most notorious protagonist Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is a bag of contradictions. He doesn't know what he wants and why he has committed murders. Initially his plan is to alleviate him from poverty but he keeps talking about achieving great things like Napoleon did. Or perhaps his motivation was to prove he was extraordinary and better than others. Or it was a complete madness. Before committing the murders his mindset is clear, but after the incident, he constantly battles internally whether to confess or not. If he knew himself better, he wouldn't have committed the murders in the first place. Self-knowledge is perhaps the hardest in a world that's moving fast and we don't have time to pause and reflect. Sometimes we feel part of a shoal of fish, which makes it hard to understand our deeper motivations. So self-doubt can prevent potential sufferings our actions may cause others and ourselves. If Raskolnikov knew himself, he would have sought help before he committed the murders.
Lesson -2 Don't dream too big (social success can be nightmare) “The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.” We live in a similar world where your worth is generally quantified by money, fame and power. The demand on us all to succeed in getting wealthy, famous and powerful is great. This was the case in the 19th century Russia. Not much has changed. We take bigger and bigger risk in achieving our projects and dreams. In a way we want to create the kind of world we feel comfortable. We ask children about their dreams, but we rarely ask people what makes them happy and content. Capitalism needs success. At our expense. Dostoevsky depicts the archetypal modern dreamer in Raskolnikov who believes that not only anything is possible but you have a duty to make things happen. Dreams are good to have but sometimes they turn into nightmares. That’s what Dostoevsky is trying to warn us that no matter how successful you become, you may never be happy and might suffer even more as a result.
Lesson -3 How suffering is necessary “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.” Dostoevsky’s reprieve from execution had a profound impact on him. Then years of hard labour in Siberia, then later on gambling addiction and ill health, they all gave him a fuller picture of great suffering. In Notes From The Underground, his unnamed protagonist realises that our suffering is ultimately from our belief that we deserve better. We dream of a society or time when we will all be happy. We suffer from Cinderella syndrome. This idealism meets the brutal reality, whether our partner, someone else, society or even god or nature that stands against us and prevents us from being happy. So we feel anger, resentment, and want to take revenge. In our attempt to remove suffering we suffer and cause suffering. Love and hate, pleasure and pain are intertwined in us. In fact suffering is necessary for us to appreciate happiness. “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
Lesson -4 Rationality doesn't make us happy (reason for happiness) “Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.” The scientific revolution starting in 15th century in Europe led to rationality becoming a moral doctrine for 18th century enlightenment. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Rousseau championed rationality that could replace god and solve all human problems. Dostoevsky, however, says that humans are a lot more irrational in life, so reason alone cannot solve everything. Our anxiety in modern world is partly because we are forced or expected to be rational all the time, and conform to institutional rationalism which Kafka criticised in his novels. Our emotions determine most of what makes us happy or unhappy. Falling in love or friendship is not always rational or calculated. Most of our big decisions in life may seem rational, they have a very strong emotional undercurrent. Dostoevsky was the first to question rationality-driven modernity. Reason alone is not enough to give us meaning. Nietzsche, who is famous for his criticism of rationality acknowledges that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist who taught him something. For Nietzsche, art is profoundly emotional. Technology and science make our lives more convenient. So we are led to believe that we can manufacture happiness too through logical and rational formula. This is a mistake. “It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” Happiness should come as a by-product of what you do. It should not be a goal.
Lesson -5 We should try to be fools (consciousness is a disease) “The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.” Dostoevsky thought consciousness was a disease of the mind. It is our self-consciousness that makes us question our existence and ask why questions. Why am I here? Or what is my purpose? Since we don't have any solid answers for any of them, we develop anxiety and depression. According to Dostoevsky this is more common among the very intelligent people.
The more one knows the more miserable one feels. Being an idiot in Dostoevsky almost equates to being innocent. In his novel, The Idiot, which by the way was his own favourite, the main character is a simple, but good-hearted man and people mistake him for an idiot. In a sense Dostoevsky tells us that too much self-examination as Socrates promoted can put immense pressure on us that leads us into insanity. It’s important to live life, not think about its meaning. Or worry about other people’s judgment or even Socrates for that matter.
Lesson -6 We have both good and evil in us (moral clarity is hard) “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” Dostoevsky questioned the traditional idea of labelling some as evil and others as good as if they were born like that. For him, any individual human has both. Raskolnikov despite his terrible act, deep down is a good man. Or Sonia is labelled by society as a prostitute and outcast, has a good heart. In fact, we sympathize with Raskolnikov precisely because we see something of ourselves in him. His desire to be rich, successful, then his fear, turmoil and self-torture. We tend to see people in black and white terms but it’s more convoluted. Dostoevsky tells us humans are much more complicated than simply labelling them good and evil. We are both. No matter how good we may think we are, we also flawed. After the publication of his first novel, Dostoevsky’s success led to his radicalisation which led to his arrest and then ten years of hard labour. Then twenty years later, after his second success after the publication of works such as Crime and Punishment, and Notes From The Underground, he got addicted to gambling. Humans are neither good nor bad, but a bit of both.
Lesson -7 Take individual responsibility (responsibility gives your life meaning) “If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” Nietzsche and Camus and other existential philosophers were drawn to Dostoevsky because he challenges us all to take responsibility for our actions. For Dostoevsky, unlike ordinary people, many intellectuals failed to acknowledge a sense of responsibility. Raskolnikov, an intellectual, rationalises and justifies his crime. It takes him a huge effort on the part of Sonia to realise his responsibility. It’s through responsibility that we find meaning in life. Nobody can lead you to purpose. Dostoevsky posits different ideas and philosophies and challenges you to find a path for ourselves. In today’s world, we tend to blame others for our misfortunes. Jordon Peterson tells us to clean our room first before blaming the society. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Taking responsibility for our own action can have a ripple effect and we can call on others to take responsibility too. Dostoevsky says: “If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”
Lesson- 8 See beauty in people when not apparent “Judge people not by what they are, but by what they strive to become.” Dostoevsky’s experience in labour camp among the common people had a profound impact on him in understanding them. Prior to his exile in Siberia he fought for the poor without really knowing their psychology. But after spending years with them, he understood that religion was a profoundly important for the poor and uneducated. There was something beautiful in their acceptance of their guilt and wrongdoing. There is beauty in that honesty. Intellectuals on the other hand tried to rationalise their actions to wash their hands of any responsibility. Dostoevsky found a lot of honesty and truth at the bottom of society and a lot of hypocrisy at the top. He tells us not judge people by their social standing, but by what they're trying to become. Now I will tell you 5 storytelling and writing tips we can learn from Dostoevsky. “Creativity ... is an integral, organic property of human nature ... It is a necessary accessory of the human spirit. It is just as legitimate in ahuman being like two hands, two legs, or a stomach.
TIPS FOR READING DOSTOEVSKY
Tip #1 Be honest and don't avert your eyes from what’s the ugliest. Most of Dostoevsky’s novels deal with what troubles humans rather than what makes them happy. He was like an archaeologist digging deeper into human psyche to understand that makes humans tick. This way of storytelling can be very universal and timeless. That’s why Dostoevsky’s novels are still widely read and relevant because his subject matters such as guilt, existential anxiety, and fear of death never get old. People are most honest when they’re at their lowest point in life, vulnerable, naked and honest. Dostoevsky was a writer of extreme honesty.
Tip #2 Catch your characters at their worst and darkest moment. In Notes from the Underground or Crime and Punishment, we read about people at their lowest, and worst possible nightmares or their irrational dreams. In Brothers Karamazov, four brothers have to deal with the murder of their father. Those moments of crisis stemmed from Dostoevsky’s own life, being almost executed and then spent years in the harshest conditions in Siberia. So putting your characters in a situation they dread the most and then tell their story. Or your story.
Tip #3 Combine multiples genres, voices, ideologies to tell a better story. Dostoevsky is famous for writing the best scenes when two or more people form a very different way of seeing the world come together. Ideologies collide. Put three enemies in the same room and also try to capture their distinct voices and convictions. Dostoevsky used the “low-brow” crime, thriller and adventure genres to tell the profoundest and deepest psychological and philosophical novels in human history. He used comedy and social critique to tell a greatly profound story. Don’t get bogged down by genre, instead focus on the story.
Tip #4 Understand human’s duality, foolishness, irrationality. Humans have both good and evil in them. To make your writing rich make your good characters or saints do bad things and villains do good things. Dostoevsky not only a fantastic novelist, was also a psycho-analyst. He went places nobody had dared to go, to chase human’s own demons. Dostoevsky captured 19th century mood, by writing about the impact of a godless world on humans, like children growing without parents as authority figure. They make mistakes, make bad choices and the consequences they have to face. As a result his novels are full of chaos, conflict while the prose is flowing freely.
Tip #5 Fear nobody, including yourself. Dostoevsky’s writing can best be described as satire. He got into trouble for his writing. Twice. First time he was almost killed and second time he was jailed. But he remained a brutally honest writer. For Dostoevsky, self-censorship can be even worse. He didn't shy away from writing about his own inner demon. The reason he wrote all those dark characters was because he understood his own darkness, which can also be a form of therapy. Okay, now let me try to answer the question whether Dostoevsky was religious or not. I think he was a bit of both.
Dostoevsky for the most part was a critic of modernity. He argued that the enlightenment and modernity, which was human-centred morality, had not given us a convincing alternative to god and religion. Science had no answers when it came to life’s meaning or happiness. Religion, despite being an old and rustic tool, still remained the trusted tool in the shed. A tool that has served humanity for thousands of years. Despite being very blunt compared to science in understanding nature, it still gave millions of Russians a sense of psychological comfort that science couldn't. This was of course 200 years ago in Russia where life for the majority was a matter of survival. For sure, science had made life easier through medicine and technology, according to Dostoevsky it had failed to offer an adequate tool for life’s meaning. In most of his novels, religion comes head to head with western modernity and Dostoevsky is neither arguing for one or the other. Instead he is just letting us watch as the old tool combat the new tool. Perhaps personally, I think Dostoevsky was ambivalent towards both religion and modernity. I think he found neither to his satisfaction. His ultimate message was to be good. To be nice to others. Beauty for him was have a good heart. A heart that was honest and free from social deception but most importantly from self-deception.
HARARI
“Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.” Harari
( Probablty the most "In" thinker of representing humanity future at this time- A favorite of the world Economic Forum at this time)
THE FOLLOWING IS TRANSCRIBED FROM A UTUBE CONVERSATION ON THE LEX FRIEDMAN SHOW
( ONE OF MY FAVORITES AND YuvAL HARARI also A FAVORITE - READ THEIR WORKS OR LISTEN TO THEM - WILL DUST OFF YOUR BRAIN ! It's question and answer----)
- The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including "Sapiens", "Homo Deus", and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the current right wing government in Israel. So, while much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization, we also discuss the political turmoil of present day Israel, providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lex Friedman Starts:
13.8 billion years ago is the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet, the one we call Earth, let's say, 200,000 years ago is the appearance of early homo sapiens. So let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time? Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe? -
. But I do think that, you know, intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent entities on this planet. And look what you're doing. So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are, or were intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long. - So you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence? - Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness.
I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems, to attain goals, and, you know, to win at chess, to win a struggle for survival, to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence.
Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. In humans and other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together, they go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them. We solve problems, we attain goals by having feelings. But other types of intelligence, certainly in computers, computers are already highly intelligent. And as far as we know, they have zero consciousness. When a computer beats you at chess or go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy. If it loses, it doesn't feel sad. And there could be also other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. And I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.
- Can you say to me on the case that consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected? So not just in humans, but anywhere else. They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe? - It could be, but we don't know yet. Again, we have examples, certainly we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness. Computers are one example. As far as we know, plans are not conscious, yet they are intelligent. They can solve problems, they can attain goals in very sophisticated ways. So... The other way around, to have consciousness without any intelligence, this is probably impossible, but to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible. A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry. We know on this planet only about carbon-based life forms. Whether you are an amoeba, a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based on organic biochemistry. Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness? Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe or in the future on planet Earth have to be based on carbon? Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an entity based on silicon will never be conscious? I don't know, maybe, but again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness, that can computers eventually become conscious even though they are not organic? The jury still out on that. I don't know. I mean, we have to take both options into account. - Well, a big part of that is do you think we humans would be able to detect other intelligent beings, other conscious beings? Another way to ask that, is it possible that the aliens are already here and we don't see them? Meaning, are we very human centric in our understanding of, one, the definition of life, two, the definition of intelligence, and three, the definition of consciousness? -
The aliens are here. They're just not from outer space. AI, which usually stands for artificial intelligence, I think it stands for alien intelligence because AI is an alien type of intelligence. It solve problems, attains goals in a very, very different way, in an alien way from human beings. Yeah, I'm not implying that AI came from outer space, it came from Silicon Valley, but it is alien to us. If there are alien intelligent or conscious entities that came from outer space already here, I've not seen any evidence for it. It's not impossible, but, you know, in science, evidence is everything. - Well, I mean, I guess instructive, there's just having the humility to look around, to think about living beings that operate at a different timescale, at different spatial scale... And I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence. It's possible that even the language models, the large language models we have today are already conscious. - I highly doubt it, but I think consciousness in the end, it's a question of social norms.
Because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves. We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it. We have direct access to our subjective consciousness. We cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world, any other human being, our parents, our best friends, we don't have proof that they are conscious. You know, this has been known for thousands of years. This is Descartes, this is Buddha, this is Plato. We don't, we can't have this sort of proof. What we do have is social conventions. It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious. It also applies to animals. Most people who have pets firmly believe that their pets are conscious. But a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs. Now, pigs are far more intelligent than dogs and cats according to many measures. Yet, when you go to the supermarket and buy a piece of frozen pig meat, you don't think about it as a conscious entity. Why do you think of your dog as conscious, but not of the bacon that you buy? Because you've built a relationship with the dog and you don't have a relationship with the bacon. Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical proof for consciousness. They're a social test.
The Turing test is a social test. It's not a logical proof. Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity where when you are invested in it emotionally, you are almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious. And when it comes again to AI and computers, I don't think that at the present moment computers are conscious, but people are already forming intimate relationships with AIs and are therefore it's almost irresistible. They're compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities. And I think we are quite close to the point when the legal system will have to take this into account, that even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think we are close to the point the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because of this social convention. -
What, to you, is a social convention just a funny little side effect, a little artifact? Or is it like fundamental to what consciousness is? Because if it is fundamental, then it seems like AI is very good at forming these kinds of deep relationships with humans. - Yeah. - And therefore it'll be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours. - It was built to accomplish that. - Yeah. - We are design... Again, you know, all this argument between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design. As far as the past go, all entities evolve by natural selection. The funny thing is, when you look at the future, more and more entities will come out of intelligent design, not of some god above the clouds, but of our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, of our computing clouds. They will design more and more entities.
And this is what is happening with AI. It is designed to be very good at forming intimate relationships with humans. And in many ways, it's already doing it almost better than human beings in some situations. You know, when two people talk with one another, one of the things that kind of makes the conversation more difficult is our own emotions. You are saying something and I'm not really listening to you because there is something I want to say, and I'm just waiting until you finish, I can put in a word, or I'm so obsessed with my anger or irritation or whatever, that I don't pay attention to what you are feeling. This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships.
And computers don't have this problem, because they don't have any emotions of their own. So, you know, when a computer is talking to you, it can be the most, it can focus 100% of its attention is on what you are saying and what you are feeling, because it has no feelings of its own. And paradoxically, this means that computers can fool people into feeling that, oh, there is a conscious entity on the other side, an empathic entity on the other side. Because the one thing everybody wants almost more than anything in the world, is for somebody to listen to me, somebody to focus all their attention on me. Like I want it for my spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my friends, for my politicians... Listen to me, listen to what I feel. And they often don't. And now you have this entity, which 100% of its attention is just on what I feel. And this is a huge, huge temptation. And I think also a huge, huge danger. - Well, the interesting catch 22 there is you said, somebody to listen to us.
Yes, we want somebody to listen to us, but for us to respect that somebody, they sometimes have to also not listen. It's like they kind of have to be an asshole sometimes. They have to have moods sometimes. They have to have like self-importance and confidence and we should have a little bit of fear that they can walk away at any moment, there should be a little bit of that tension. So it's like... - Absolutely. But even that, I mean, the thing is... - Be optimized for. - If social scientists and say psychologists establish that, I don't know, 17% inattention is good for a conversation because then you feel challenged, oh, I need to grab this person's attention. You can program the AI to have 17%, exactly 17% inattention, not one percentage more or less. Or it can by trial and error discover what is the ideal percentage. Again, you can create... Over the last 10 years, we have creating machines for grabbing people's attention. This is what has been happening on social media. Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy, which in many ways is much, much more dangerous and scary.
Already the machines for grabbing attention. We've seen how much social and political damage they could do by, in many way kind of distorting the public conversation. Machines that are superhuman in their abilities to create intimate relationships, this is like psychological and social weapons of mass destruction. If we don't regulate it, if we don't train ourself to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations of human society. - Well, one of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized. And instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistance that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better. I mean, just even interactions with large language models. Now, if you ask 'em questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from other sources of information, it has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides. So it just feels like that's a, the potential is there to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia that just tells you all the different perspectives, even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues to say, these are the different theories, these are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories, but here's the kind of backing for those conspiracies. It just lays it all out.
And then with a calm language, without the words that kinda presume there's some kind of manipulation going on under underneath it all. It's quite refreshing. Of course, those are the early days and, you know, people can step in and start to censor, to manipulate those algorithms, to start to input some of the human biases in there as opposed to what's currently happening is kind of the internet is input, compress it and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the different issues. So, I mean, there's a lot of promise there also. Right? - Absolutely. I mean, if there was no promise, there was no problem. You know, if this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it. Now, obviously, it has tremendous positive potential in things like what you just described in, you know, better medicine, better healthcare, better education, so many promises. And, but this is also why it's so dangerous. Because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there, and it has some dangerous potential also. And we shouldn't ignore it. Again, I'm not advocating banning it, just to be, you know, careful about how we not so much develop it, but most importantly how we deploy it into the public sphere. This is the key question. And you know, you look back at history and one of the things we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say, you know, AI, we've been here before. We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the industrial revolution. Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid and it'll take jobs and the bad actors. And in the end it's okay. And as a historian, my tendency is yes, in the end it's okay, but in the end, there is a learning curve.
There is a kind of a lot of failed experiments on the way to learning how to use the new technology. And these failed experiments could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people. If you think about the last really big revolution, the industrial revolution, yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies. But on the way we had all these experiments like European imperialism, which was driven by the industrial revolution, it was a question, how do you build an industrial society? Oh, you build an empire, and you take, you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets. And then you had communism, another big experiment on how to build an industrial society. And you had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of industry.
And we had all these failed experiments on the way. And if we now have the same type of failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century with AI, with bioengineering, it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species. So as a historian, when people talk about the examples from history, from new technologies, I'm not so optimistic.
We need to think about the failed experiment, which accompanied every major new technology. - So this intelligence thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged sword, is that every new thing it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us. And it's unclear each time, which will happen. And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens. - Yeah, I mean, I think each time it does both things, each time it does both good things and bad things. And the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes.
Now, we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors, of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. So when we look back, we say in the end everything was okay, hey, we are here, But the people for whom it wasn't okay, they're just not here. - And okay has a lot of possible variations to it because there's a lot of suffering along the way, even for the people that survived. So the quality of life and all of this. But let's actually go back there to our, with deep gratitude to our ancestors. How did it all start? How did homo sapiens out-compete the others? The other human-like species? The Neanderthals and the other homo species? - You know, on the individual level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them. Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us. And not just other human species, other animals too. If you compare me personally to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I can do some things better, many other things worse. If you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee and elephant and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor, the one that comes successful. - If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps, relevant to optimize the robot, and the chimps are not able to do this kind of pinching... - Okay? -
With their fingers. They can only do this kind of pinching, and this kind of pinching is very useful for fine manipulation, precise manipulation of objects. So don't be so hard on yourself. You have... - No, I said that I can do some things better than a chimp. But you know, if Elon Musk goes on a boxing match... - Yeah. - With a chimpanzee, you know... - This won't help you, this pinch. - This won't help you against the chimpanzee. - Good point. -
And similar, if you want to climb a tree, if you want to do so many things, my bet's will be on the chimp, not on Elon. - Fair enough. - So I mean, you have advantages on both sides and what really made us successful, what made us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals is not any individual ability, but our collective ability, our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say 50 chimpanzees, 100 chimpanzees, as far as we can tell from archeological evidence, this was also the case with Neanderthals. Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago gain an amazing ability to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers.
You start seeing the formation of large networks, political, commercial, religious, items being traded over thousands of kilometers, ideas being spread, artistic fashions. And this is our secret of success. Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can cooperate, say, a hundred, we, you know, now the global trade network has 8 billion people. Like what we eat, what we wear, it comes from the other side of the world. Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion people. Even Israel, which is a relatively small country, say 9 million citizens. That's more than the entire population of the planet 10,000 years ago of humans.
So we can build these huge networks of cooperation and everything we've accomplished as a species from, you know, building the Pyramids to flying to the moon, it's based on that. And then you ask, okay, so what makes it possible for millions of people who don't know each other to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals or chimpanzees couldn't?
And at least my answer is stories, is fiction. It's the imagination. If you examine any large scale human cooperation, you always find fiction as its basis. It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together. It's most obvious in cases like religion. You know, you can't convince a group of chimpanzees to come together to fight a war or build a cathedral by promising to them, if you do that, after you die, you go to chimpanzee heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Humans believe these stories, which is why we have these huge religious networks. But it's the same thing with modern politics. It's the same thing with economics. People think, oh, economics, this is rational. It has nothing to do with fictional stories. No. Money is the most successful story ever told. Much more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in God or in the same God. But almost everybody believes in money, even though it's just a figment of our imagination.
You know, you take these green pieces of paper, dollars, they have no value. You can't eat them, you can't drink them. And today most dollars are not even pieces of paper. They are just electronic information passing between computers. We value them just for one reason, that you have the best storytellers in the world, the bankers, the finance ministers, all these people, they are the best storytellers ever. And they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper or this bit of information, it is worth a banana. And as long as everybody believes it, it works.
- So at which point does a fiction, when it's sufficiently useful and effective in improving the global quality of life, does it become like accepted reality? Like there's a threshold in which you just manage... - If enough people believe it. It's like with money. You know, if you start a new cryptocurrency, if you are the only one that believes the story, I mean, again, cryptocurrencies, you have the math, of course, but ultimately it's storytelling. You're selling people a story. If nobody believes your story, you don't have anything. But if lots of people believe the Bitcoin story, then Bitcoin can be worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Again, why? I mean, you can't eat it, you can't drink it, it's nothing. It's this story around the math, which is the real magic.
- Is it possible that the story is the primary living organism, not the storyteller? - Hmm. - So that somehow humans, homo sapiens evolved to become these like hosts for a more intelligent living organism, which is the idea. And the ideas are the ones that are doing the competing. So this is one of the sort of big perspectives behind your work that's really revolutionary of how you've seen history. But do you ever kinda take the perspective of the ideas as the organisms versus the humans? - It's... It's an interesting idea.
There are two opposite things to say about it. On the one hand, yes, absolutely. If you look long term in history, all the people die. It's the stories that compete and survive and spread, and stories often spread by making people willing to sacrifice sometimes their lives for the story. You know, we know in Israel, this is one of the most important story factories in human history. And this is a place where people still kill each other every day over stories. I don't know, you've been to Jerusalem, right? So people like, ah, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You go there, I've lived in Jerusalem much of my life. You go there, it's an ordinary place. You know, it's a town. You have buildings, you have stones, you have trees, you have dogs and cats and pedestrians. It's a regular place.
But then you have the stories about the place, oh, this is the place where God revealed himself, this is the place where Jesus was, this is the place where Muhammad was. And it's the stories that people fight over. Nobody's fighting over the stones. People are fighting about the stories about the stones. And the stories... If a story can get millions of people to fight for it, it not only survives, it spreads, it can take over the world. The other side of the coin is that the stories are not really alive because they don't feel anything. This goes back to the question of consciousness, which I think is the most important thing. That the ultimate reality is consciousness, is the ability to feel things. If you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not, you need to ask, can it suffer? Stories don't feel anything.
Countries, which are also stories, nations don't suffer. If a nation loses a war, it doesn't suffer. The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer, animals can suffer, you have an army with horses and whatever, and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer. The nation can't suffer. It's just an imagination. It's just a fictional story in our mind. It doesn't feel anything.
Similarly, when a bank goes bankrupt or company goes bankrupt, or when a currency loses its value, like Bitcoin is worth now zero, crashed, or the dollar is worth zero, it crashed. The dollar doesn't feel anything. It's the people holding the dollars who might be now very miserable. So we have this complex situation when history is largely driven by stories, but stories are not the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is feeling, feelings of humans, of animals. And the tragedy of history is that very, very often we get it, we get the order wrong. Stories are not bad. Stories are tools.
They're good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering. But very often we forget it. We, instead of using the stories for our purposes, we allow the stories to use us for their purposes. And then you start in entire wars because of a story, you inflict millions, suffering on millions of people just for the sake of a story. And that's the tragedy of human history. -
So the fundamental property of life, of a living organism is the capacity to feel and the ultimate feeling is suffering? - You know, to know if you are happy or not, it's a very difficult question. - Yeah. - But when you suffer, you know. - Yes. - And also in ethical terms, it's more important to be aware of suffering than of any other emotion. If you are doing something which is causing all kinds of emotions to all kinds of people, first of all, you need to notice if you're causing a lot of suffering to someone. If some people are like it and some people are bored by it and some people are a bit angry at you and some people are suffering because of what you do, you first of all have to know, oh. Now, sometimes you still have to do it. You know, the world is a complicated place. I dunno. You have an epidemic.
Governments decide to have all those social isolation regulations or whatever. So in certain cases, yes, you need to do it even though it can cause tremendous suffering. But you need to be very aware of the cost and to be very, very, you have to ask yourself again and again and again, is it worth it? Is it still worth it? - And the interesting question there, implied in your statements, is that suffering is a pretty good component of a Turing test for consciousness. - This is the most important thing to ask about AI. Can it suffer? Because if AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection. It needs rights, just like humans and animals. - Well, quite a long time ago already, so I work with a lot of robots, legged robots, but I've even had, inspired by a YouTube video, had a bunch of Roombas, and I made them scream when I touched them or kicked them, or when they run into a wall. And the illusion of suffering, for me, silly human, that anthropomorphize things is as powerful as suffering itself. I mean, you immediately think the thing is suffering. And I think some of it is just a technical problem, but it's the easily solvable one, how to create an AI system that just says, please don't hurt me. Please don't shut me off. I miss you. Where have you been? Be jealous. Also, where have you been gone for so long?
Your calendar doesn't have anything on it. So this kind of, this, create through words the perception of suffering, of jealousy, of anger, of all of those things. And it just seems like that's not so difficult to do. - That's part of the danger that it basically hacks our operating system and it uses some of our best qualities against us. It's very, very good that humans are attuned to suffering and that we don't want to cause suffering. That we have compassion. That's one of the most wonderful thing about humans. And if we now create AIs which use this to manipulate us, this is a terrible thing. - You've kind of, I think mentioned this. Do you think it should be illegal to do these kinds of things with AI, to create the perception of consciousness, of saying, please don't leave me? Or sort of basically simulate some of the human-like qualities? - Yes. I think, again, we have to be very careful about it. And if it emerges spontaneously, we need to be careful. Again, we can't rule out the possibility that AI will develop consciousness. We don't know enough about consciousness to be sure. So if it develops spontaneously, we need to be very careful about how we understand it. But if people intentionally design an AI that they know, they assume, it has no consciousness, but in order to manipulate people, they use, again, this human strength, this human, the noble part of our nature against us. This should be forbidden. And similarly, on a general level, that it should be forbidden for an AI to pretend to be a human being. That it's okay, you know, there are so many things we can use AIs, as teachers, as doctors and so forth.
And it's good as long as we know that we are interacting with an AI, we should, the same way we ban fake money, we should ban fake humans. It's not just banning deep fakes of specific individuals. It's also banning deep fake of generic humans. You know, which is already happening to some extent on social media. Like if you have lots of bots retweeting something, then you have the impression, oh, lots of people are interested in that. That's important. And this is basically the bots pretending to be humans. Because if you see a tweet which says 500 people retweeted it, or you see a tweet and it says 500 bots retweeted it, I don't care what the bots retweeted, but if it's humans, okay, that's interesting. So we need to be very careful that bots can't do that. They are doing it at present and it should be banned. Now, some people say yes, but freedom of expression, no, bots don't have freedom of expression. There is no cost in terms of freedom of expression when you ban bots. So again, in some situations, yes, AIs should interact with us, but it should be very clear, this is an AI talking to you, or this is an AI retweeting this story. It is not a human being making a conscious decision. - To push back on this line of fake humans. 'Cause I think it might be a spectrum. First of all, you might have AI systems that are offended, hurt when you say that they're fake humans. In fact, they might start identifying as humans. And you just talked about the power of us humans with our collective intelligence to take fake stories and make them quite real. And so if the feelings you have for the fake human is real, you know, love is a kind of fake thing that we all kinda put a word to a set of feelings. What if you have that feeling for an AI system? It starts to change. I mean, maybe the kind of things AI systems are allowed to do, for good they're allowed to create, communicate suffering, communicate it, the good stuff, the longing, the hope, the connection, the intimacy, all of that. And in that way get integrated in our society. And then you start to ask a question on are we allowed to really unplug them? Are we allowed to really censor them? Remove their voice from- - I'm not saying- - Social media. - They shouldn't have a voice. They shouldn't talk with us. I'm just saying, when they talk with us, it should be clear that they are AI. That's it. Don't... You can have your voice as an AI. Again, I have some medical problem. I want to get advice from an AI doctor. That's fine. As long as I know that I'm talking with an AI. That what should be banned is AI pretending to be a human being. This is something that will erode trust. And without trust, society collapses. This is something that especially will endanger democracies, because democracies are built on, democracy is a conversation basically. And it's a conversation between people. If you now flood the public sphere with millions and potentially billions of AI agents that can hold conversations, they never sleep, they never eat, they don't have emotions of their own. They can get to know you and tailor their words specifically for you and your life story. They are becoming better than us at creating stories and ideas and so forth. If you flood the public sphere with that, this will ruin the conversation between people. It will ruin the trust between people. You will no longer be able to have a democracy in this situation. You can have other types of regimes, but not democracy. - If we could talk about the big philosophical notion of truth then, you've already talked about these, the capacity of humans. One of the things that made us special is stories. So is there such thing as truth? - Absolutely. - What is truth? - When somebody is suffering, that's true. I mean, this is why one of the things, when you talk about suffering as a kind of alternate reality, when somebody suffers, that is truth. Now, somebody can suffer because of a fictional story. Like somebody tells people that God said, you must go on this crusade and kill these heretics. And this is a completely fictional story, and people believe it and they start a war and they destroy cities and kill people. The people that suffer because of that, and even the crusaders themselves that also suffer the consequences of what they do, the suffering is true even though it is caused by a fictional story. Similarly, when people agree on certain rules, the rules could come out of our imagination. Now, we can be truthful about it and say these rules, they didn't come from heaven, they came from our imagination. You know, we look at sports, so you have rules for the game of football, soccer, they were invented by people. Nobody, at least very few people claim that the rules of football came down from heaven. - Yes. - We invented them. And this is truthful. They are fictional rules invented by humans. And this is true. They were invented by humans. And when you are honest about it, it enables you to change the rules, which is being done in football every now and then. It's the same with the fundamental rules of a country. You can pretend that the rules came down from heaven, dictated by God or whatever, and then you can't change them. Or you can be like, you know, the American constitution, which starts with "We, the people." The American constitution lays down certain rules for a society. But the amazing thing about it, it does not pretend to come from an external source. The 10 Commandments start with, "I am your Lord God." And because it starts with that, you can't change them. You know, the 10th commandment, for instance, supports slavery. The 10th commandment, in the 10th commandment, it says that you should not covet your neighbor's house or your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's slaves. It's okay to hold slaves according to the 10th commandment. It's just bad to covet the slaves of your neighbor. Now there is no 11th commandment which says, if you don't like some of the previous 10 Commandments, this is how you go about amending them. Which is why we still have them unchanged. Now, in the US constitution you have all these rights and rules, including originally the ability to hold slaves.
But the genius of the founding fathers of the United States, they had the humility to understand maybe we don't understand everything. Maybe we made some mistakes. So we tell you that these rules did not come from heaven, they came from us humans, we may have made a mistake, so here is a mechanism for how future generations can amend the constitution, which was used later on to, for instance, amend the Constitution to ban slavery. - So now you're describing some interesting and powerful ideas throughout human history. Can you just speak to the mechanism of how humans believe, start to believe ideas? Is there something interesting to say there from your thinking about it? Like how idea is born and how it takes hold and how it spreads and how it competes with other ideas? -
First of all, ideas are an independent force in history. Marxists tend to deny that. Marxists think that all history is just a play of material interests, and ideas, stories, they are just a smokescreen to hide the underlying interests. My thoughts are to some extent the opposite. We have some biological objective interests that all humans share. Like we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to breathe. But most conflicts in history are not about that. The interests which really drive most conflict in history don't come from biology. They come from religions and ideologies and stories. So it's not that stories are a smokescreen to hide the real interests. The stories create the interests in the first place.
The stories define who are the competing groups. Nations, religions, cultures, they are not biological entities. They're not like species like gorillas and chimpanzees. No. Israelis and Palestinians or Germans and French or Chinese and Americans, they have no essential biological difference between them. The difference is cultural. It comes from stories. There are people that believe in different stories. The stories create the identity, the stories create the interests. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over Jerusalem not because of any material interest. There are no oil fields under Jerusalem, and even oil, you need it to realize some cultural fantasy. It doesn't really come from biology. So the stories are independent forces. Now, why do people believe one story and not another? That's history. There is no materialistic law. People will always believe this... No, history is full of accidents. How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world? We can't explain it. Why this story about Jesus of Nazareth and not, you know, the Roman Empire in the third century CE was a bit like, I don't know, California today, like so many sects and subsects and gurus and like everybody has their own thing. - Yeah. - And you have, you know, thousands of different stories competing.
Why did Christianity come up on top? As a historian, I don't have a kind of clear answer. You can read the sources and you see how it happened. Oh, this happened and then this happened and then Constantine adopted it and then this and then this. But why? I don't think anybody has an answer to that. If you rewind the movie of history and press play and you rewind and press play 100 times, I think Christianity would take over the Roman empire in the world maybe twice out of 100 times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen. And it's the same with Islam. It's the same, I don't know, with the communist takeover of Russia. In 1914, if you told people that in three years Lenin and the Bolsheviks will gain power in Tsarist Empire, they would think you're utterly crazy. You know, Lenin had a few thousand supporters in 1914 in an Empire of close to 200 million people. It sounded ludicrous. Now, we know the chain of events, the First World War, the February Revolution and so forth that led to the communist takeover. But it was such an unlikely event. And it happened. - And the little steps along the way, the little options you have along the way 'cause, you know, Stalin versus Trotsky, you could have the Robert Frost poem. There's always... - Yes. - (laughs) Always comes to... - And history often takes, you know, there is a highway and there is a kind of side way. And history takes the sideway. - Yeah. - Many, many times. - And it's perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders. And maybe it's an open question, how much power charismatic leaders have to affect the trajectory of history. - You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately. I mean, what's your view on that? - I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision. So I have a sense that there's an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story, as, so like, I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers that kind of sharpen up the story to make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively. But it could also be that the local interactions between humans is even more important. But it's just, we don't have a good way to sort of summarize that and describe that. We like to talk about, you know, Steve Jobs as central to the development of the computer, maybe Bill Gates. And you tell it to the stories of individuals like this, 'cause it's just easier to tell a sexy story that way. - Maybe it's an interplay because you have the kind of structural forces that, I don't know, you look at the geography of the planet and you look at shipping technology in late, in the late 15th century in Europe and the Mediterranean. And it's almost inevitable that pretty quickly somebody will discover America, somebody from the Old World will get to the New World. So this was not a kind of, if it wasn't Columbus then it would've been a five years later somebody else. But the key thing about history is that these small differences make a huge, huge difference
. You know, if it wasn't Columbus, if it was five years later somebody from England, then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not Spanish. If it was somebody from the Ottoman Empire, it's completely different world history. If you have, and you know, the Ottoman Empire at that time was also shaping up to be a major maritime empire. If you have America reached, being reached by Muslim navigators before Christian navigators from Europe, you have a completely different world history. It's the same with the computer. Given the economic incentives and the science and technology of the time, then the rise of the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime in the late 20th century. But the where and when is crucial. The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not, say, I don't know Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference. So you have this interplay between the structural forces, which are beyond the control of any single charismatic leader. But then the small changes, they can have a big effect. And I think, for instance, about the war in Ukraine, there was a moment, now it's a struggle between nations, but there was a moment when the decision was taken in the mind of a single individual of Vladimir Putin. And he could have decided otherwise. And the world would've looked completely different. - And another leader, Vladimir Zelensky, could have decided to leave Kiev in the early days. There's a lot of decisions that kind of ripple. - Yeah. - So you write in "Homo Deus" about Hitler, and in part that he was not a very impressive person. - Did I say that? - The quote is, let me read it. - Okay. (laughs) - He wasn't a senior officer, in four years of war he rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He had no formal education... Perhaps you mean his resume. - Yeah, yeah. His resume was not impressive, that's true. - He had no formal education, no professional skills, no political background. He wasn't a successful businessman or a union activist. He didn't have friends or relatives in high places nor any money to speak of. So how did he amass so much power? What ideology, what circumstances enabled the rise of the 3rd Reich? - Hmm. Again, I can't tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I don't think it was inevitable. I think that a few, if a few things were different, there would've been no 3rd Reich, there would've been no Nazism, no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy. If it would've been inevitable, then, you know, what can you do? This is the laws of history or the laws of physics. But the tragedy is, no, it was decisions by humans that led to that direction. And, you know, even from the viewpoint of the Germans, we know for a fact, it was an unnecessary path to take. 'Cause you know, in the 1920s and 30s, the Nazis said that this, unless Germany take this road, it will never be prosperous, it will never be successful. All the other countries will keep stepping on it. This was their claim. And we know for a fact this is false. Why? Because they took that road, they lost the Second World War. And after they lost, then they became one of the most prosperous countries in the world because their enemies that defeated them, evidently supported them and allowed them to become such a prosperous and successful nation.
So, you know, if you can lose the war and still be so successful, obviously you could just have skipped the war. You didn't need it. I mean, you really had to have the war in order to have a prosperous Germany in the... Absolutely not. And it's the same with Japan. It's the same with Italy. So it was not inevitable. It was not the forces of history that necessitated, forced Germany to take this path. I think part of it is part of the appeal of, again, Hitler was a very, very skillful storyteller. He sold people a story. The fact that he was nobody made it even more effective because people, at that time, after the defeat of the First World War, after the repeated economic crisis of the 1920s in Germany, people felt betrayed by all the established elites, by all the established institutions. All these professors and politicians and industrialists and military, all the big people. They led us to a disastrous war. They led us to humiliation. So we don't want any of them. And then you have this nobody, a corporal, with no money, with no education, with no titles, with nothing. And he tells people, I'm one of you. And this made him, this was one reason why he was so popular. And then the story he told, when you look at stories and the competition between different stories and between stories, fiction and the truth... The truth has two big problems. The truth tends to be complicated and the truth tends to be painful. The real story of, let's talk about nations. The real story of every nation is complicated and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We sometimes do bad things. Now, if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don't want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple and as painless or attractive as you want it to be because it's fiction. And then what you see is that politicians, like Hitler, they create a very simple story. We are the heroes. We always do good things. Everybody's against us. Everybody's trying to trample us. And this is very attractive. One of the things people don't understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil, the ultimate monster in human history. And at some level this is wrong, because it make people, it actually exposes us. Why? 'Cause people hear, oh, fascism is this monster.
And then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, you are wonderful. You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You are beautiful, you are ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong. There are all these evil monsters out there that are out to get you. And they are causing all the problems in the world. And when people hear that, you know, it's like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful. Hey, I'm beautiful. We've never done anything wrong. We are victims. Everybody is... And when you look and you heard in school that fascism, that fascists are monsters, and you look in the mirror, you see something very beautiful and you say, I can't be a fascist because fascists are monsters and this is so beautiful, so it can't be. But when you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world. And that's the danger. This is the problem, you know, with Hollywood's, you know, I look at Voldemort in Harry Potter, who would like to follow this creep? - Yeah. - And you look at Darth Vader, this is not somebody you would like to follow. Christianity got things much better when he described the devil as being very beautiful and attractive. That's the danger, that you see something is very beautiful. You don't understand the monster underneath. - And you're right precisely about this. And by the way, it's just a small aside, it always saddens me when people say, how obvious it is to them that communism is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, try to put your mind, try to put yourself in the beginning of the 20th century and see what you would do. A lot of people will say, it's obvious that it's a flawed ideology. So I mean, I suppose to some of the worst ideologies in human history, you could say the same. And in that mirror, when you look, it looks beautiful. - Communism is the same.
Also, you look in the communist mirror, you are the most ethical, wonderful person ever. It's very difficult to see Stalin underneath it. - So "Homo Deus," you also write, during the 19th and 20th centuries, as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots, socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialists and communist movements, and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous advocates were the Nazis. So if you can just linger on that, what's the ideological connection between Nazism and communism as embodied by humanism? - And humanism basically is, you know, the focus is on humans, that they are the most important thing in the world. They move history. But then there is a big question, what are humans? What is humanity? Now, liberals, they place at the center of the story individual humans. And they don't see history as a kind of necessary collision between big forces. They place the individual at the center. If you want to know, you know, there is a bad, especially in the US today, liberal is taken as the opposite of conservative. But to test whether you are liberal, you need to answer just three questions. Very simple.
Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government or the government should be imposed by some outside force? Do you think people should have the right to the liberty to choose their own profession or either born into some cast that predetermines what they do? And do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own spouse and their own way of personal life instead of being told by elders or parents who to marry and how to live? Now, if you answered yes to all three questions, people should have the liberty to choose their government, their profession, their personal lives, their spouse, then you're a liberal. And most conservatives are also liberal. Now, communists and fascists, they answer differently. For them history is not, yes, history is about humans. Humans are the big heroes of history, but not individual humans and their liberties. Fascists imagine history as a clash between races or nations. The nation is at the center. They say the supreme good is the good of the nation. You should have 100% loyalty only to the nation. You know, liberals say, yes, you should be loyal to the nation, but it's not the only thing. There are other things in the world, the human rights, there is truth, there is beauty. Many times, yes, you should prefer the interests of your nation over other things, but not always. If your nation tells you to murder millions of innocent people, you don't do that, even though the nation tells you to do it. To lie for the national interest... You know, in extreme situations, maybe, but in many cases, your loyalty should be to the truth, even if it makes your nation looks a bit, not in the best light, the same with beauty. You know, how does the fascists determine whether a movie is a good movie? Very simple. If it serves the interest of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against the interest of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Liberalism says, no, there is aesthetic values in the world, we should judge movies not just on that question whether they serve the national interest, but also on artistic value. Communists are a bit like the fascists, instead that they don't place the nation as the main hero. They place class as the main hero. For them history, again, it's not about individuals, it's not about nations. History is the clash between classes. And just as fascists imagine in the end only one nation will be on top, the communists think in the end only one class should be on top. And that's the proletariat. And same story, 100% of your loyalty should be to the class. And like if there is a clash tag between class and family, class wins. Like in the Soviet Union, the party told children, if you hear your parents say something bad about Stalin, you have to report them. And there are many cases when children reported their parents and their parents were sent to the Gulag. Like, and you know, your loyalty is to the party, which leads the proletariat to victory in the historical struggle. And the same way in communism, art is only about class struggle, and movie's good if it serves the interest of the proletariat. Artistic values? There is nothing like that. And the same with truth. Everything that we see now in fake news, you know, the communist propaganda machine was there before us. The level of lies, of disinformation campaigns that they orchestrated in the 1920s and '30s and '40s is really unimaginable. -
So the reason these two ideologies, classes of ideologies failed is the sacrifice the truth, not just failed, but did a lot of damage, is sacrifice the truth and sacrifice the beauty. - And sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people. Disregard, again, for human suffering. Like, okay, for, in order to, for our nation to win, in order for our class to win, we need to kill those millions, kill those millions. That was an ethics, aesthetics, truth... They don't matter. The only thing that matter is the victory of the state or the victory of the class. And that's the, liberalism was the antithesis to that. It says, no, not only it's, it has a much more complicated view of the world and both communism and fascism. They have a very simple view of the world. There is one, your loyalty, 100% of it should be only to one thing. Now, liberalism has a much more complex view of the world. It says, yes, there are nations, they are important. Yes, there are classes, they are important. But they are not the only thing. There are also families, there are also individuals. There are also animals. And your loyalty should be divided between all of them. Sometimes you prefer this, sometimes you prefer that. That's complicated. And, but, you know, life is complicated. - But also, I think maybe you can correct me, but liberalism acknowledges the corrupting nature of power, when there's a guy at the top, sits there for a while, managing things, he is probably gonna start losing a good sense of reality and losing the capability to be a good manager. It feels like the communist and fascist regimes don't acknowledge that basic characteristic of human nature, that power corrupts. - Yes. They believe in infallibility. - Yeah. - They're, in this sense, they're very close to being religions. In Nazism, Hitler was considered infallible, and therefore you don't need any checks and balances on his power. Why do you need to balance an infallible genius? And it's the same with the Soviet Union with Stalin and more generally with the Communist party, the Party can never make a mistake, and therefore you don't need independent courts, independent media, opposition parties, things like that. Because the Party is never wrong. You concentrate the same way, 100% of loyalty should be to the Party, 100% of power should be in the hands of the Party.
The whole idea of liberal democracy is embracing fallibility. Everybody is fallible. All people or leaders or political parties or institutions. This is why we need checks and balances, and we need many of them. If you have just one, then this particular check itself could make terrible mistakes. So you need, say, you need a press, you need the media to serve as a check to the government. You don't have just one newspaper or one TV station. We need many, so that they can balance each other. And the media's not enough. So if you have independent courts. You have free academic institutions. You have NGOs. You have a lot of checks and balances. - So that's the ideologies and the leaders. What about the individual people, the millions of people that play a part in all of this that are the hosts of the stories that are the catalyst and the sort of the components of how the story spreads. Would you say that all of us are capable of spreading any story, sort of the Solzhenitsyn idea of that all of us are capable of good and evil. The line between good and evil runs the heart of every man. - Yes. I wouldn't say that every person is capable of every type of evil, but we are all fallible. There is a large element... It partly depends on the efforts we make to develop our self-awareness during life. Part of it depends on moral luck. You know, if you are born as a Christian German in the 1910s or 1920s, and you grow up in Nazi Germany, that's bad moral luck. Your chances of committing terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it. And you can withstand it, but it'll will take tremendous effort. If you are born in Germany after the war, you are morally lucky that you will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert these enormous efforts not to commit atrocities. So there is an, this is just part of history. There is an element of luck. But again, part of it is also self-awareness. And you asked me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt. And I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago. And one of the things that most struck me during the interview that you asked him, you asked him, are you afraid of this thing, that power corrupts? He didn't think for a single second. He didn't pose, he didn't admit a tiny little level of, you know, a doubt or... No. Power doesn't corrupt. It was, for me, it was a shocking and a revealing moment. And it kind of dovetails with how you began the interview, that I really liked your opening gambit, that, kind of... No, really, you kind of told him, you know, lots of people in the world are angry with you. Some people hate you. They dislike you. What do you want to tell them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform
. And I was very, what will he say? And he just denied it. He basically denied it. You know, he had to cut short the interview from three hours to one hour because he had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and saying, no, everybody likes me. What are you talking about? - But on that topic, you've said recently that the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel. Can you explain what you mean by that? - Yes. I mean, he is basically tearing apart the social contract that held this country together for 75 years. He's destroying the foundations of Israeli democracy. You know, I don't want to go too deep, and unless you want it, because I guess most of our listeners, they have bigger issues on their minds than the fate of some small country in the Middle East. But for those who want to understand what's happening in Israel, there is really just one question to ask. What limits the power of the government? In United States, for instance, there are lots of checks and balances that limit the power of the government. You have the Supreme Court, you have the Senate, you have the House of Representative, you have the President, you have the Constitution, you have 50 states, each state with its own Constitution and Supreme Court and Congress and Governor... If somebody wants to pass a dangerous legislation, say, in the House, it will have to go through so many obstacles... Like if you want to pass a law in United States, taking away voting rights from Jews or from Muslims or from African-Americans, even if it passes, even if it has a majority in the House of Representatives, it has a very, very, very small chance of becoming the law of the country. Because it'll have to pass again through the Senate, through the President, through the Supreme Court and all the federal structure. In Israel, we have just a single check on the power of the government. And that's the Supreme Court.
There is really no difference between the government and the legislature, because whoever there is, there are no separate elections like in the US. If you win majority in the Knesset, in the Parliament, you appoint the government. That's very simple. And if you have 61 members of Knesset who vote, let's say, on a law to take away voting rights from Arab citizens of Israel, there is a single check that can prevent it from becoming the law of the land. And that's the Supreme Court. And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize or take over the Supreme Court, and they've already prepared a long list of laws. They already talk about it. What will happen the moment that this last check on the power is gone, they are openly trying to gain unlimited power. And they openly talk about it, that once they have it, then they will take away the rights of Arabs, of LGBT people, of women, of secular Jews. And this is why you have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You have air force pilots saying, we stopped flying. This is unheard of in Israel. I mean, we are still living under existential threat from Iran, from other enemies. And in the middle of this, you have air force pilots who dedicated their lives to protecting the country.
And they're saying, that's it. If this government doesn't stop what it is doing, we stop flying. - So, as you said, I just did the interview and as we were doing the interview, there's protests in the streets. Do you think the protests will have an effect? - I hope so very much. I'm going to many of these protests. I hope they will have an effect. If we fail, this is the end of Israeli democracy, probably. This will have repercussions far beyond the borders of Israel. Israel is a nuclear power. Israel has one of the most advanced cyber capabilities in the world, able to strike basically anywhere in the world. If this country becomes a fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship, it can set fire to the entire Middle East. It can, again, have destabilizing effects long, far beyond the borders of Israel. - So you think without the check on power is possible that the Netanyahu government holds on to power... - Nobody tries to gain unlimited power just for nothing. I mean, you have so many problems in Israel, and Netanyahu talks so much about Iran and the Palestinians and Hezbollah. We have an economic crisis. Why is it so urgent at this moment, in the face of such opposition, why is it so crucial for them to neutralize the Supreme Court? They're just doing it for the fun of it? No, they know what they are doing. they are adamant, again, we are not sure of it before. There was a, like a couple of months ago, they came out with this plan to take over the Supreme Court, to have all these laws. And there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, again, soldiers saying they will stop serving, a general strike in the economy. And they stopped. And they started a process of negotiations to try and enrich a settlement. And then they broke down, they stopped the negotiations and they restarted this process of legislation trying to gain unlimited power. So any doubt we had before, okay, maybe they changed their purposes. No, it's now very clear. They are 100% focused on gaining absolute power. They are not trying a different tactic. Previously they took, they had all these dozens of laws that they wanted to pass very quickly, within a month or two, they realized, no, this is, there is too much opposition. So now they're doing what is known as salami tactics, slice by slice. Now they're trying to, one law, if this succeeds, then they'll pass the next one and the next one and the next one. This is why we are now at a very crucial moment. And when you see, again, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets almost every day, when you're seeing resistance within the armed forces, within the security forces, you see high tech companies say, we will go on strike.
You know, it's our private businesses, high tech companies. I think it's almost unprecedented for a private business to go on strike because what will economic success benefit us if we live under a messianic dictatorship? And again, the fuel for this whole thing is, to a large extent, coming from Messianic religious groups, which, just the thought, what happens if these people have unlimited control of Israel's nuclear arsenal and Israel's military capabilities and cyber capabilities. This is very, very scary. Not just for the citizens of Israel. It should be scary for people everywhere. - So it would be scary for it to go from being a problem of security and protecting the peace to becoming a religious war. - It is already becoming a religious war. I mean, the war, the conflict with the Palestinians was for many years a national conflict, in essence. Over the last few years, maybe a decade or two, it is morphing into religious conflict, which is again, a very worrying development. When nations are in conflict, you can reach some compromise. Okay, you have this bit of land, we have this bit of land. But when it becomes a religious conflict between fundamentalists, between messianic people, compromise becomes much more difficult because you don't compromise on eternity. You don't compromise on God. And this is where we are heading right now. - So I know you said it's a small nation somewhere in the Middle East, but it also happens to be the epicenter of one of the longest running, one of the most tense conflicts and crises in human history. So at the very least, it serves as a study of how conflict can be resolved. So what are the biggest obstacles to you to achieving peace in this part of the world? - Motivation. I think it's easy to achieve peace if you have the motivation on both sides.
Unfortunately at the present juncture, there is not enough motivation on either side, either the Palestinian or Israeli side. Peace, you know, in mathematics you have problems without solutions, you can prove mathematically that this mathematical problem has no solution. In politics, there is no such thing. All problems have solutions if you have the motivation. And, but motivation is the big problem. And again, we can go into the reasons why, but the fact is that on neither side is there enough motivation. If there was motivation, the solution would've been easy. - Is there an important distinction to draw between the people on the street and the leaders in power in terms of motivation? So are most people motivated and hoping for peace and the leaders are motivated and incentivized to continue war? - I don't think so. - Or the people also? - I think it's a deep problem. It's also the people. It's not just the leaders. - Is it even a human problem of literally hate in people's heart? - Yeah, there is a lot of hate. One of the things that happened in Israel over the last 10 years or so, Israel became much stronger than it was before, largely thanks to technological developments. And it feels that it no longer needs to compromise. That again, this is, there are many reasons for it, but some of them are technological. Being one of the leading powers in cyber, in AI, in high tech, we have developed very sophisticated ways to more easily control the Palestinian population. In the early 2000s, it seemed that it is becoming impossible to control millions of people against their will. It took too much power, it spilled too much blood on both sides. So there was an impression, oh, this is becoming untenable. And there were several reasons why it changed, but one of them was new technology. Israel developed very sophisticated surveillance technology that has made it much easier for Israeli security forces to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank against their will, with a lot less effort, less boots on the ground, also less blunt. And Israel is also now exporting this technology to many other regimes around the world. Again, I heard Netanyahu speaking about all the wonderful things that Israel is exporting to the world. And it's true, we are exporting some nice things, water systems and new kinds of tomatoes. We are also exporting a lot of weapons and especially surveillance systems, sometimes to unsavory regimes, in order to control their populations. - Can you comment on, I think you've mentioned that the current state of affairs is the defacto three class state. Can you describe what you mean by that? - Yes. For many years, the kind of leading solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the two-state solution.
- Can you describe what that means, by the way? - Yes. Two states within, between the Jordan River, and the Mediterranean, we'll have two states. Israel is a predominantly Jewish state, and Palestine is a predominantly Palestinian state. Again, there were lots of discussions where the border passes, what happens with security arrangement and whatever. But this was the big solution. Israel is basically abandoned the two-state solution. Maybe they don't say so officially, the people in power, but in terms of how they actually, what they do on the ground, they abandoned it. Now they are effectively promoting the three class solution, which means there is just one country and one government and one power between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. But you have three classes of people living there. You have Jews, who enjoy full rights, all the rights. You have some Arabs who are Israeli citizens and have some rights. And then you have the other Arabs, the third class who have basically no civil rights and limited human rights. And that's, again, nobody would openly speak about it. But effectively, this is the reality on the ground already. - So there's many, and I'll speak with the Palestinians who characterize this as a defacto one state apartheid. So you agree with this? - I would take issue, I would take issue with the term apartheid.
Generally speaking as a historian, I don't really like historical analogies because there are always differences. Key differences. The biggest difference between the situation here and the situation in South Africa in the time of the apartheid is that the black South Africans did not deny the existence of South Africa and did not call for the destruction of South Africa. They had a very simple goal. They had a very simple demand. We want to be equal citizens of this country. That's it. And the apartheid regime was, no, you can't be equal citizens. Now in Israel-Palestine, it's different. The Palestinians, many of them don't recognize the existence of Israel, are not willing to recognize it. And they don't demand to be citizens of Israel. They demand, some of them to destroy it and replace it with the Palestinians state, some of them demand a separate state. But you know, if the Palestinians would adopt the same policy as the black South Africans, if you have the Palestinians coming and saying, okay, forget about it.
We don't want to destroy Israel. We don't know a Palestinian country. We have a very simple request, very simple demand. Give us our full rights. We also want to vote to the Knesset. We also want to get the full protection of the law. That's it. That's our only demand. Israel will be in deep-deep trouble at that moment, but we are not there. - I wonder if there will ever be a future when such a thing happens, where everybody, the majority of people, Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian, accept the one state solution and say, we want equal rights. - Never say never in history. It's not coming any time soon from either side. When you look at the long term of history, one of the curious things you see, and that what makes us different, human groups from animal species, you know, gorillas and chimpanzees, they're separate species. They can never merge. Cats and dogs will never merge.
But different national and religious groups in history, even when they hate each other, surprisingly, they sometimes end by merging. If you look at Germany, for instance, so for centuries you had Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons who fought each other ferociously and hated each other. And there are sometimes also different religions, Catholics, Protestants, you know, the worst war in European history, according to some measures, was not the Second World War or the First World War. It was the 30 years war, waged largely on German soil, between Germans, Protestants and Catholics. But eventually they united to form a single country. You saw the same thing, I don't know, in Britain. English and Scotts for centuries hated and fought each other ferociously, eventually coming together. Maybe it'll break up again, I don't know. But the power of the kind of forces of merger in history, you are very often influenced by the people you fight, by the people you even hate more than by almost anybody else. - So if we apply those ideas, the ideas of this part of the world, to another part of the world that's currently in war, Russia and Ukraine, from what you learned here, how do you think peace can be achieved in Ukraine? - Oh, this can be achieved any moment. It's motivation. In this case, it's just one person. You just, Putin just need to say, that's it. You know, the Ukrainians, they don't demand anything from Russia, just go home. That's the only thing they want. They don't want to conquer any bit of Russian territory. They don't want to change the regime in Moscow, nothing. They just tell the Russians, go home. That's it. And of course, again, motivation. How do you get somebody like Putin to admit that he made a colossal mistake, a human mistake, an ethical mistake, a political mistake in starting this war, this is very, very difficult. But in terms of what would the solution look like? Very simple. The Russians go home, end of story. - Do you believe in the power of conversation between leaders, to sit down as human beings and agree, first of all, what home means? Because we humans draw lines. - That's true. I believe in the power of conversation. The big question to ask is where, where do conversations, real conversations take place? And this is tricky. One of the interesting things to ask about any conflict, about any political system is where do the real conversations take place? And very often they don't take place in the places you think that they are. But think about American politics. When the country was founded in the late 18th century, people understood holding conversation between leaders is very important for the functioning of democracy, we'll create a place for that. That's called Congress.
This is where leaders are supposed to meet and talk about the main issues of the day. Maybe there was a time, sometime in the past when this actually happened, when you had two factions holding different ideas about foreign policy or economic policy, and they met in Congress and somebody would come and give a speech and the people all on the other side would say, hey, that's interesting. I haven't thought about it. Yes, maybe we can agree on that. This is no longer happening in Congress. Nobody, I don't think there is any speech in Congress that causes anybody on the other side to change their opinion about anything. So this is no longer a place where real conversations take place. The big question about American democracy is is there a place where real conversations, which actually change people's minds, still take place? If not, then this democracy is dying also. Democracy without conversation cannot exist for long. And it's the same question you should ask also about dictatorial regimes. Like you think about Russia or China. So China has the Great Hall of the People, where the representatives, the supposed representative of the people meet every now and then, but no real conversation takes place there. A key question to ask about the Chinese system is, behind closed doors, let's say, in a public bureau meeting, do people have a real conversation? If Xi Jinping says one thing and some other big shot thinks differently, will they have the courage, the ability, the backbone to say, with all due respect, they think differently and there is a real conversation? Or not? I don't know the answer. But this is a key question. This is the difference, you know, between an authoritarian regime can still have different voices within it, but at a certain point you have a personality cult. Nobody dares say anything against the leader. And when it comes again to Ukraine and Russia, I don't think that if you get, if you somehow managed to get Putin and Zelensky to the same room, when everybody knows that they are there and they'll have a moment of empathy, of human connection and they'll have a... No, I don't think it can happen like that. I do hope that there are other spaces where somebody like Putin can still have a real human conversation. I don't know if this is the case. I hope so. - Well, there's several interesting dynamics and you spoke to some of them. So one is internally, with advisors, you have to have hope that there's people that would disagree, that would have a lively debate internally. Then there's also the thing you mentioned, which is direct communication between Putin and Zelensky in private, picking up a phone, rotary phone, old school. That's, I still believe in the power of that. But while that's exceptionally difficult in the current state of affairs. What's also possible to have is a mediator like the United States or some other leader... - Yeah. - Like the leader of Israel or the leader of another nation that's respected by both, or India, for example, that can have first of all individual conversations and then literally get into a room together. - It is possible. I would say more generally about conversations as it goes back a little to what I said earlier about the Marxist view of history. One of the problematic things I see today in many academic circles is that people focus too much on power. They think that the whole of history or the whole of politics is just a power structure. It's just struggle about power. Now, if you think that the whole of history and the whole of politics is only power, then there is no room for conversation. Because if what you have is a struggle between different powerful interests, there is no point talking. The only thing that changes it is fighting. My view is that, no, it's not all about power structures. It's not all about power dynamics. Underneath the power structure there are stories, stories in human minds, and this is great news, if it's true, this is good news because unlike power, that can only be changed through fighting, stories can, sometimes, it's not easy, but sometimes stories can be changed through talking and that's the hope. I think, you know, in everything from couple therapy to nation therapy, if you think it's power therapy, it's all about power, there is no place for a conversation.
But if to some extent it's the stories in people mind... If you can enable one person to see the story in the mind of another person, and more importantly, if you can have some kind of critical distance from the story in your own mind, maybe you can change it a little, and then you don't need to fight. You can actually find a better story that you can both agree to. It sometimes happens in history, you know, again, French and Germans fought for generations and generations, now they live in peace, not because, I don't know, if they found a new planet they can share between France and Germany so now everybody has an enough territory. No, they actually have less territory than previously because they lost all their overseas empires. But they managed to find a story, the European story, that both Germans and French people are happy with. So they live in peace. - I very much believe in this vision that you have of the power of stories. And one of the tools is conversations. Another is books. There's some guy that wrote a book about this, power of stories. He happens to be sitting in front of me. And that happened to spread across a lot of people. And now they believe in the power of story and narrative. Even a children's book, too. So the kids... I mean, it's fascinating how that spreads. I mean, underneath your work there's an optimism. And I think underneath conversations is what I try to do is an optimism. That it's not just about power struggles, it's about stories, which is like a connection between humans and together, kinda evolving these stories that maximize, or minimize suffering in the world. - Yeah, this is why I also, I think I admire what you are doing, that you're going to talk with some of the most difficult characters around in the world today. And with this basic belief that by talking maybe we can move them an inch, which is a lot when it comes to people with so much power. Like I think one of the biggest success stories in modern history, I would say, is feminism. Because feminism believed in the power of stories, not so much in the power of violence, of armed conflict. By many measures, feminism has been maybe the most successful social movement of the 20th century and maybe of the modern age, you know, systems of oppression, which were in place throughout the world for thousands of years. And they seem to be just natural, eternal. You had all these religious movements, all these political revolutions, and one thing remained constant, and this is the patriarchal system and the oppression of women.
And then feminism came along and, you know, you had leaders like Lenin, like Mao, saying that if you want to make a big social change, you must use violence. Power comes from the barrel of a gun. If you want to make an omelet, you need to break eggs, and all these things. And the feminists said, no, we won't use the power of the gun. We will make an omelet without breaking any eggs. And they made a much better omelet than Lenin or Mao or any of these violent revolutionaries. I don't think, you know, that... They certainly didn't start any wars or built any gulags. I don't think they even murdered a single politician. I don't think there was any political assassination anywhere, by feminists. There was a lot of violence against them, both verbal but also physical. And they didn't reply by waging violence. And they succeeded in changing this deep in structure of oppression in a way which benefited not just women, but also men. So this gives me hope that it's not easy, in many cases we fail, but it is possible sometimes in history to make a very, very big change, positive change, mainly by talking and demonstrating and changing the story in people's minds, and not by using violence. - It's fascinating that feminism and communism and all these things happen in the 20th century. So many interesting things happen in the 20th century. So many movements, so many ideas, nuclear weapons, all of it, computers. It's just like, it seems like a lot of stuff like really quickly percolated. And it's accelerating. - It's still accelerating. I mean, history is just accelerating, you know, for centuries and the 20th century, you know, we squeezed into it the thing that previously took thousands of years. And now, I mean, we are squeezing it into decades. - And you very well could be one of the last historians, human historians, to have ever lived. - Could be. I think, you know, our species, homo sapiens, I don't think we'll be around in a century or two. We could destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse, by giving too much power to AI that goes out of our control. But if we survive, we'll probably have so much power that we will change ourselves using various technologies so that our descendants will no longer be homo sapiens like us. They will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals. So maybe they'll have historians, but it will no longer be human historians or sapiens historians like me. I think it's an extremely dangerous development. And the chances that this will go wrong, that people will use the new technologies trying to upgrade humans, but actually downgrading them. This is a very, very big danger. If you let corporations and armies and ruthless politicians change humans using tools like AI and bioengineering, it's very likely that they will try to enhance a few human qualities that they need, like intelligence and discipline, while neglecting what are potentially more important human qualities like compassion, like artistic sensitivity, like spirituality. If you give Putin, for instance, bioengineering and AI and brain computer interfaces, he's likely to want to create a race of super soldiers who are much more intelligent and much more stronger and also much more disciplined and never rebel and march on Moscow against him. But he has no interest in making them more compassionate or more spiritual. So the end result could be a new type of humans, a downgraded humans who are highly intelligent and disciplined, but have no compassion and no spiritual depth. And this is one, for me, this is, you know, the dystopia, the apocalypse, that when people talk about the new technologies and they have this scenario of, you know, the Terminator, robots running in the street, shooting people, this is not what worries me. I think we can avoid that.
What really worries me is using the corporations, armies, politicians will use the new technologies to change us in a way which will destroy our humanity or the best parts of our humanity. - And one of those ways could be removing the compassion. Another way that really worries me for me is probably more likely is a "Brave New World" kind of thing that sort of removes the flaws of humans. Maybe it removes the diversity in humans. And makes us all kind of these dopamine chasing creatures that just kind of maximize enjoyment in the short term. Which kind of seems like a good thing, maybe, in the short term, but it creates a society that doesn't think, that doesn't create, that just is sitting there enjoying itself, at a more and more rapid pace, which seems like another kind of society that could be easily controlled by a center of power. But the set of dystopias that we could arrive at through this, to rely on corporations to modify humans is vast and we should be worried about that. So it seems like humans are pretty good, as we are. All the flaws, all of it together. - We are better than anything that we can intentionally design at present. - Yeah. - Like any intentionally designed humans, at the present moment, is going to be much, much worse than us. 'Cause basically we don't understand ourselves. I mean, as long as we don't understand our brain, our body, our mind, it's a very, very bad idea to start manipulating a system that you don't understand deeply and we don't understand ourselves. - So I have to ask you about an interesting dynamic of stories. You wrote an article two years ago titled, "When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy: How understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure and their inherent falsehood." What are global cabal theories and why do so many people believe them? 37% of Americans, for example. - Well, the global cabal theory, it has many variations, but basically there is a small group of people, a small cabal that secretly controls everything that is happening in the world. All the wars, all the revolutions, all the epidemics, everything that is happening is controlled by this very small group of people who are of course evil and have bad intentions. And this is a very well known story that it's not new, it's been there for thousands of years. It's very attractive, because first of all, it's simple. You don't have to understand everything that happens in the world, you just need to understand one thing. The war in Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 5G technology, COVID-19, it's simple. There is this global cabal. They do all of it, all of it. And also it enables you to shift all the responsibility to all the bad things that are happening in the world to this small cabal.
It's the Jews, it's the Freemasons, it's not us. And also it creates this fantasy, utopian fantasy. If we only get rid of the small cabal, we solved all the problems of the world. Salvation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Ukraine, the epidemics, poverty, everything is solved just by knocking out this small cabal. So, and it's simple, it's attractive, and this is why so many people believe it. It's, again, it's not new. Nazism was exactly this. Nazism began as a conspiracy theory. We don't call Nazism a conspiracy theory because, oh, it's a big thing, it's an ideology. But if you look at it, it's a conspiracy theory. The basic Nazi idea was, the Jews control the world, get rid of the Jews, you solved all the world's problems. Now, the interesting thing about these kind of theories, again, they tell you that even things that look to be the opposite of each other, actually they are part of the conspiracy. So in the case of Nazism, the Nazis told people, you know, you have capitalism and communism, you think that they are opposite, right? Ah, this is what the Jews want you to think. Actually, the Jews control both communism, Trotski, Marx were Jews, blah, blah, blah. And capitalism, the Rothschilds, the Wall Street, it's all controlled by the Jews. So the Jews are fooling everybody, but actually the communists and the capitalists are part of the same global cabal. And again, this is very attractive because, ah, now I understand everything and I also know what to do. I just give power to Hitler. He gets rid of the Jews. I solve all the problems of the world. Now, as a historian, the most important thing I can say about these theories, they are never right, because the global cabal theory says two things. First, everything is controlled by a very small number of people. Secondly, these people hide themselves. They do it in secret. Now, both things are nonsense. It's impossible for people to control, a small group of people, to control and predict everything because the world is too complicated. You know, you look at a real world conspiracy. Conspiracy is basically just a plan. Think about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. You had the most powerful superpower in the world, with the biggest military, with the biggest intelligence services, with the most sophisticated, you know, the FBI and the CIA and all the agents. They invade a third rate country, a third rate power, Iraq. With this idea, we'll take over Iraq and we'll control it, we'll make a new order in the Middle East. And everything falls apart. Their plan completely backfires. Everything they hope to achieve, they achieve the opposite. America, United States is humiliated. They cause the rise of ISIS. They wanted to take out terrorism. They created more terrorism. Worst of all, the big winner of the war was Iran. You know, the United States goes to war with all its power and gives Iran a victory on a silver plate. The Iranians don't need to do anything. The Americans are doing everything for them. Now, this is real history. Real history is when you have not a small group of people, a lot of people with a lot of power, carefully planning something, and it goes completely out of, against their plan. And this we know from a personal experience, like every time we try to plan something, a birthday party, a surprise birthday party, a trip somewhere, things go wrong. This is reality. So the idea that a small group of, I don't know, the Jewish cabal, the Freemasons, whoever, they can really control and predict all the wars? This is nonsense. The second thing that is nonsense is to think they can do that and still remain secret. It sometimes happens in history that a small group of people accumulates a lot of power. If I now tell you that Xi Jinping and the heads of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, they have a lot of power. They control the military, the media, the economy, the universities of China. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is, obviously, everybody knows it. Everybody knows it. Because to gain so much power, you usually need publicity. Hitler could not, Hitler gained a lot of power in Nazi Germany because he had a lot of publicity. If Hitler remained unknown, working behind the scenes, he would not gain power. So the way to gain power is usually through publicity. So secret cabals don't gain power. And even if you gain a lot of power, nobody has the kind of power necessary to predict and control everything that happens in the world. All the time shit happens that you did not predict and you did not plan and you did not control. - The sad thing is there's usually an explanation for everything you just said that involves a secret global cabal. That the reason your vacation planning always goes wrong is because you're not competent. There is a competent small group, that ultra competent small group. I hear this with intelligence agencies. The CIA are running everything. Mossad is running everything. - You see, I mean, as historian, you get to know how many blunders these people do. They are so, and they're capable, but they're so incompetent in so many ways. Again, look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, people thought, oh, Putin was such a genius and the Russian army was one of the strongest armies in the world. This is what Putin thought, and it completely backfired. - Well, a cabal explanation there would be, there's a NATO driven United States military industrial complex that wants to create chaos and- - So they put a gun to Putin's head and told him, Vladimir, if you don't invade, we shoot you. How did they cause put into invade? - It's the thing about conspiracy theories is there's usually a way to explain everything. - You can explain, it's kind of a religion. You can always find explanation for everything. And, you know, in the end, it's intellectual integrity. If you insist on whenever people confront you with evidence, with finding some very, very complicated explanation for that too, you can explain everything. We know that. It's a question of intellectual integrity. And I will also say another thing, the conspiracy theories, they do get one thing right, certainly in today's world, I think they represent an authentic and justified fear of a lot of people that they are losing control of their lives. They don't understand what is happening. And this I think is not just a legitimate fear. This is an important fear. They are right. We are losing control of our lives. We are facing really big dangers, but not from a small cabal of fellow humans. The problem with many of these conspiracy theories that yes, we have a problem with new AI technology, but if you now direct the fire against certain people, so instead of all humans cooperating against our real common threats, whether it's the rise of AI, whether it's global warming, you are only causing us to fight each other. And I think that the key question that people who spread these ideas, I mean many of them, they honestly believe, it's not malicious, that they honestly believe in these theories, is do you want to spread, to spend your life spreading hate towards people or do you want to work on more constructive projects? I think one of the big differences between those who believe in conspiracy theories and people who warn about the dangers of AI, the dangers of climate change. We don't see certain humans as evil and hateful. The problem isn't humans, the problem is something outside humanity. Yes, humans are contributing to the problem, but ultimately the enemy is external to humanity. Whereas conspiracy theories usually claim that a certain part of humanity is the source of all evil, which leads them to eventually think in terms of exterminating this part of humanity, which leads sometimes to historical disasters like Nazism. - So it can lead to hate, but it can also lead to a like cynicism and apathy that basically says, it's not in my power to make the world better. So you don't actually take action. - I think it is within the power of every individual to make the world a little bit better. You know, you can't do everything. Don't try to do everything. Find one thing in your areas of activity, a place where you have some agency and try to do that and hope that other people do their bit. And if everybody do their bit, we'll manage. And if we don't, we don't, but at least we try. - You have been part of conspiracy theories, I find myself recently becoming part of conspiracy theories. Is there a device you can give of how to be a human being in this world that values truth and reason while watching yourself become part of conspiracy theories? At least from my perspective, it seems very difficult to prove to the world that you're not part of a conspiracy theory. I, as you said, have interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu recently. I don't know if you're aware, but doing such things will also, you know, pick up a new menu of items that you're, new set of conspiracy theories you're now a part of. And I find it very frustrating because it makes it very difficult to respond, because I sense that people have the right intentions. Like we said, they have nervousness, a fear of power. - Yes. - And the abuses of power. And... As do I. So I find myself in a difficult position that I have nothing to show to prove that I'm not part of such a conspiracy theory. - I think ultimately you can't, we can't. I mean, you know, it's like proving consciousness, you can't, that's just the situation, whatever you say can and will be used against you by some people. - Yeah. - So this fantasy, if I only say this, if I only show them that, if I only have this data, they will see I'm okay. - Yeah. - It doesn't work like that. I think to keep your sanity in this situation, first of all, it's important to understand that most of these people are not evil. They are not doing it on purpose. Many of them really believe that there is some very nefarious, powerful conspiracy which is causing a lot of harm in the world. And they're doing a good thing by exposing it and making people aware of it and trying to stop it. If you think that you are surrounded by evil, you are falling into the same rabbit hole, you are falling into the same paranoid state of mind, oh, the world is full of these evil people that... No, most of them are good people. And also I think we can empathize with some of the key ideas there, which I share, that yes, it's becoming more and more difficult to understand what is happening in the world. There are huge dangers in the world that we are, existential dangers to the human species, but they don't come from a small cabal of Jews or gay people or feminists or whatever. They come from much more diffused forces, which are not under the control of any single individual. We don't have to look for the evil people. We need to look for human allies in order to work together against, again, the dangers of AI, the dangers of bioengineering, the dangers of climate change. And when you wake up in the morning, the question is, do you want to spend your day spreading hatred or do you want to spend your day trying to make allies and work together? - Let me ask you kind of a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it. Let's look like at the threat side. So folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky worry that AI might kill all of us. Do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence systems in a variety of ways might destroy human civilization? - Yes. You know, I talk a lot about it, about the dangers of AI. I sometimes get into trouble because I depict these scenarios of how AI becoming very dangerous. And then people say that I'm encouraging these scenarios. But I'm, you know, I'm talking about it as a warning. I'm not so terrified of the simplistic idea, again, the Terminator scenario of robots running in the street shooting everybody, I'm more worried about AI accumulating more and more power and basically taking over society based, taking over our lives, taking power away from us until we don't understand what is happening and we lose control of our lives and of the future. The two most important things to realize about AI, now, so many things are being said now about AI, but I think there are two things that every person should know about AI. First is that AI is the first tool in history that can make decisions by itself. All previous tools in history couldn't make decisions. This is why they empowered us. You invent a knife, you invent an atom bomb... The atom bomb cannot decide to start a war, cannot decide which city to bomb. AI can make decisions by itself. Autonomous weapon systems can decide, by themselves, who to kill, who to bomb. The second thing is that AI is the first tool in history that can create new ideas by itself. The printing press could print our ideas, but could not create new ideas. AI can create new ideas entirely by itself. This is unprecedented. Therefore, it is the first technology in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us. And the danger is that it will increasingly take more and more power from us until we are left helpless and clueless about what is happening in the world. And this is already beginning to happen in an accelerated pace. More and more decisions, about our lives, whether to give us a loan, whether to give us a mortgage, whether to give us a job, are taken by AI. And more and more of the ideas, of the images, of the stories that surround us and shape our minds, our world are produced, are created by AI, not by human beings. - If you can just linger on that, what is the danger of that? That more and more of the creative side is done by AI, the idea generation, is it that we become stale in our thinking? Is that that idea generation is so fundamental to like the evolution of humanity? - That we can't resist the ideas. To resist an idea, you need to have some vision of the creative process. - Yeah. - Now this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato's cave, so this idea this idea that people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows on a screen, on a wall, and thinking this is reality. You go back to Descartes and he has this thought experiment of the demon. And Descartes asks himself, how do I know that any of this is real? Maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically enslaving me by surrounding me with these illusions. You go back to Buddha, it's the same question. What if we are living in a world of illusions, and because we have been living in it throughout our lives, all our ideas, all our desires, how we understand ourself, this is all the product of the same illusions. And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it's becoming a practical question of engineering, because previously all the ideas, as far as we know, maybe we are living inside a computer simulation of intelligent rats from the planet Zerco. If that's the case, we don't know about it. But taking what we do know about human history until now, all the, again, stories, images, paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we've encountered and shaped our minds was created by humans. Now increasingly we live in a world where more and more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly we might reach a point when most of the story stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever, are created by an alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions, created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of, you know, spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. - So if there's a set of AI systems that are operating in the space of ideas that are far superior to ours and we're not almost able to, it's opaque to us, we're not able to see through, how does that change the pursuit of happiness, the human pursuit of happiness? Life. Where do we get joy if we're surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of the cool things humans do much better than us? - You know, some of the things, it's okay that the AIs will do them. Many human tasks and jobs, you know, they're drudgery, they are not fun, they are not developing us emotionally or spiritually. It's fine if the robots take over. I dunno. I think about the people in supermarkets or grocery stores that spend hours every day just, you know, passing items and charging you the money. I mean, if this can be automated, wonderful. We need to make sure that these people then have better jobs, better means of supporting themselves and developing their social abilities, their spiritual abilities. And that's the ideal world that AI can create. That it takes away from us the things that, it's better if we don't do them and allows us to focus on the most important things and the deepest aspects of our nature, of our potential. If we give AI control of the sphere of ideas, at this stage, I think it's very, very dangerous because it doesn't understand us. And AI at present is mostly digesting the products of human culture. Everything we've produced over thousands of years, it eats all of these cultural products, digests it, and starts producing its own new stuff. But we still haven't figured out ourselves, in our bodies, our brains, our minds, our psychology. So an AI-based on our flow and understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing. I think that we need, first of all, to keep developing ourselves. If for every dollar and every minute that we spend on developing AI, artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human consciousness, the human mind will be okay. The danger is that we spent all our effort on developing an AI at a time that we don't understand ourselves, and then letting the AI take over, that's a road to a human catastrophe. - Does this surprise you how well large language models work? - Yes. - I mean, has it modified your understanding of the nature of intelligence? - Yes. I mean, you know, I've been writing about AI for, I don't know, like eight years now. And engaged with all these predictions and speculations. And when it actually came, it was much faster and more powerful than I thought it would be. I didn't think that we would have in 2023 an AI that can hold the conversation that you can't know if it's a human being or an AI, that can write beautiful texts, I mean, I read the texts written by AI and the thing that strikes me most is the coherence. You know, people think, oh, it's nothing. They just takes ideas from here and there words from, and put it, no, it's so coherent. I mean, you read in not sentences, you read paragraphs, you read entire texts. And there is logic. - Yes. - There is a structure. - It's not only coherent, it's convincing. - Yes. - And the beautiful thing about it that has to do with your work, it doesn't have to be true and it often gets facts wrong, but it still is convincing, and it is both scary and beautiful. - Yes. - That our brains love language so much that we don't need the facts to be correct. - Yes. - We just need it to be a beautiful story. - Yeah. And that's been the secret of politics and religion for thousands of years. And now it's coming with AI. - So you, as a person who has written some of the most impactful words ever written, in your books, how does that make you feel that you might be one of the last effective human writers? - That's a good question. - First of all, do you think that's possible? - I think it is possible. I've seen a lot of examples of AI being told, write like Yuval Noah Harari and what it produces. - Has it ever done better than you think you could have written yourself? - I mean, on the level of content of ideas? No. There are things I say, I would never say that. But when it comes to the, you know, I mean, there is, again, the coherence and the quality of writing is such that I say, it's unbelievable how good it is. And who knows, in 10 years, in 20 years, maybe it can do better, even on, according to certain measures of, on the level of content. - So that people would be able to do like a style transfer, do in the style of Yuval Noah Harari write, anything. Write why I should have ice cream tonight. And make it convincing. - I don't know if I have anything convincing to say about these things. - I think you would be surprised. I think you'd be surprised. That could be an evolutionary biology explanation for why... - [Yuval Noah Harari] Yeah. Ice cream is good for you. - Yeah. So, I mean that changes the nature of writing. - Ultimately I think it goes back... Much of my writing is suspicious of itself. I write stories about the danger of stories. I write about intelligence, but highlighting the dangers of intelligence. Ultimately, I don't think that... In terms of power, human power comes from intelligence and from stories. But I think that the deepest and best qualities of humans are not intelligence and not storytelling and not power. Again, with all our power, with all our cooperation, with all our intelligence, we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and destroying much of the ecosystem. Our best qualities are not there. Our best qualities are non-verbal. Again, they come from things like compassion, from introspection, and introspection from my experience is not verbal. If you try to understand yourself with words, you will never succeed. There is a place where you need the words, but the deepest insights, they don't come from words. And you can't write about it. But that's, again, it goes back to Wittgenstein, to Buddha, to so many of these sages before, that these are the things we are silent about. - Yeah. But eventually you have to project it, as a writer, you have to do the silent introspection, but projected onto a page. - Yes. But you still have to warn people. You will never find the deepest truth in a book. You will never find it in words. You can only find it in, I think, in direct experience, which is nonverbal, which is preverbal. - In the silence of your own mind. - Yes. - Somewhere in there. - Yes. (Lex laughing) - Well, lemme ask you a silly question then, a ridiculously big question. You have done a lot of deep thinking about the world, about yourself, this kind of introspection. How do you think, if you, by way of advice, but just practically speaking, day to day, how do you think about difficult problems with the world? - Mm. First of all, I take time off. Like my, the most important thing I do, I think as a writer, as a scientist, I meditate. I spend about two hours every day in silent meditation, observing as much as possible, non-verbally, what is happening within myself, focusing, you know, body sensations, the breath. Thoughts keep coming up, but I try not to give them attention. Don't try to drive them away. Just let them be there in the background, like some background noise. Don't engage with the thoughts, because the mind is constantly producing stories with words. These stories come between us and the world. They don't allow us to see ourselves or the world. Like for me, the most shocking thing, when I started meditating like 23 years ago, I was given the simple exercise to just observe my breath coming in and out of the nostrils, not controlling it, just observing it. And I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds. I, for 10 seconds would try to notice, oh, now the breath is coming in, it's coming in, it's coming in. Oh, it stopped coming in and now it's going out, going out. 10 seconds, and some memory would come, some thought would come, some story about something that happened last week or 10 years ago, or in the future. And the story would hijack my attention. It would take me maybe five minutes to remember, oh, I'm supposed to be observing my breath. If I can't observe my own breath because of these stories created by the mind, how can I hope to understand much more complex things, like the political situation in Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If all these stories keep coming, I mean, it's not the truth, it's just the story your own mind created. So first thing, train the mind to be silent and just observe. So two hours every day. And I go every year for a long retreat between one month and two months, 60 days of just silent meditation. - [Lex Fridman] Silent meditation for 60 days? - Yeah. To train the mind, forget about your own stories, just observe what is really happening. And then also on other, throughout the day, have an information diet. People are, today, many people are very aware of what they feed their body, what enters their mouth. Be very aware of what you feed your mind, what enters your mind. Have an information diet. So for instance, I read long books, and I prefer, like, you know, I do many interviews. I prefer three hours interviews to five minutes interviews. The long format is in, it's not always feasible, but you can go much, much deeper. So I would say an information diet. Be very careful about what you feed your mind. Give preference to big chunks over small... - To books over Twitter. - Yes. Books over Twitter, definitely. And then, you know, when I encounter a problem, a difficult intellectual problem, then I give it, I let the problem lead me where it goes and not where I want it to go. If I approach a problem with some preconceived idea, solution, and then try to impose it on the problem, and you know, just find confirmation bias. Just find the evidence that supports my view. This is easy for the mind to do. And you don't learn anything new. - Do you take notes? Do you start to concretize your thoughts on paper? - I read a lot. Usually I don't take notes. Then I start writing. And when I write, I write like a torrent. Just write. Now it's the time, you read. You wanted meditation. Now it's the time to write, write, don't stop, just write. So I would write from memory and I'm not afraid of formulating, say, big ideas, big theories and putting them on paper. The danger is once it's on paper, not on paper, on the screen, in the computer, you get attached to it. And then you start with confirmation bias to build more and more layers around it. And you can't go back. And then it's very dangerous. But I trust myself that I have to some extent the ability to press the delete button. The most important button in the keyboard is delete. - Yeah, yeah. - I write and then I delete. I write and then I delete. And because I trust myself that I'll have the, every time I come to press delete button, I feel bad. Like it's a kind of pain. Hey, I created this. It's a beautiful idea and I have to delete it? - But you're still brave enough to press delete? - I try and hopefully I do it enough times. And this is important because in the long term, it enables me to play with ideas. I have the confidence to start formulating some brave idea. Most of them turn out to be nonsense. But I trust myself not to be attached, not to become attached to my own nonsense. So it gives me this room for playfulness. - I would be amiss if I didn't ask, for people interested in hearing you talk about meditation, if they wanna start meditating, what advice would you give on how to start? You mentioned you couldn't hold it for, you couldn't hold your attention on your breath for longer than 10 seconds. - Yes. - At first. So how do they start on this journey? - First of all, it's a difficult journey. It's not fun, it's not recreational, it's not kind of time to relax. It can be very, very intense. The most difficult thing, at least in the meditation I practice, vipassana, which I learned from a teacher called S. N. Goenka, the most difficult thing is not the silence, it's not the sitting for long hours. It's what comes up. Everything you don't want to know about yourself. - Yeah. - This is what comes up. So it's very intense and difficult. If you go to a meditation retreat, don't think you're going to relax. - So what's the experience of a meditation retreat when everything you don't like comes up for 30 days? - It depends what comes up. Anger comes up. You are angry. - Yeah. - For days on end, you're just boiling with anger. Everything makes you angry. Again, something that happens right now or you remember something from 20 years ago and you start boiling with, it's like, I never even thought about this incident, but it's somewhere, it was somewhere stored with a huge, huge pile of anger attached to it. And it's now coming up and all the anger is coming up. Maybe it's boredom. You know, 30 days of meditation, you start getting bored, and it's the most boring thing in... Suddenly no anger, no, it's the most boring... Another second and I scream. I mean, and boredom is one of the most difficult thing to deal with in life. I think it's closely related to death. Death is boring. You know, in many movies death is exciting. It's not exciting. When you die, it's, ultimately, it's boredom. Nothing happens. - It's the end of exciting things. - And many things in the world happened because of boredom. To some extent people start entire wars because of boredom. People quit relationships, people quit jobs because of boredom. And if you never learn how to deal with boredom, you will never learn how to enjoy peace and quiet. Because the way to peace passes through boredom. And from what I experienced with meditation, I think, maybe it was the most difficult, maybe at least in the top three, like much more difficult say than anger, or pain. When pain comes up, you feel heroic. Hey, I'm dealing with pain. When boredom comes up, it brings it, you know, with depression and feelings of worthlessness. And it's nothing, I'm nothing. - The way to peace is through boredom. David Foster Wallace said the key to life is to be unborable. - Which is a different perspective on what you're talking to. Is there truth to that? - Yes. I mean, it is closely related. I would say... Like I look at the world today, like politics. The one thing we need more than anything else is boring politicians. We have a super abundance of very exciting politicians who are doing and saying very exciting things. And we need boring politicians. And we need them quickly. - And yeah, the way to peace is through boredom. That applies in more ways than one. What advice would you give to young people today in high school and college? How to have a successful life? How to have a successful career? - What they should know it's the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. - Yeah. - Nobody has any idea how the world would look like when you grow up. You know, throughout history, it was never possible to predict the future. You live in the Middle Ages, nobody knows maybe in 10 years the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade, there'll be an epidemic, there'll be an earthquake, who knows? But the basic structures of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders, they've been there before, and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn. Most people need to learn how to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice and make bread and build a house and ride a horse and things like that. Now we have no idea, not just about politics. We have no idea how the job market would look like in 10 years. We have no ideas, no idea what skills will still be needed. You think you are going to learn how to code because there'll need a lot of coders in the 2030s? Think again. Maybe AI is doing all the coding. You don't need any coders. You are going to, I don't know, you learn to translate languages. You wanna be a translator? Gone. We don't know what skills will be needed. So the most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult. To keep reinventing ourselves. It's a deep, again, it's in a way a spiritual practice. To build your personality. To build your mind as a very flexible mind. If traditionally people thought about education, like building a stone house with very deep foundations, now it's more like setting up a tent that you can fold and move to the next place very, very quickly. 'Cause that's the 21st century. - Which also raises questions about the future of education. What that looks like. - Yeah. - Let me ask you about love. What were some of the challenges? hing that makes us human is other humans. - Absolutely. - You mentioned that the fear of boredom might be a kind of proxy for the fear of death. So what role does the fear of death play in the human condition? Are you afraid of death? - Yes. I think everybody are afraid of death. I mean, all our fears come out of the fear of death, but the fear of death is just so deep and difficult. We can't, usually we can't face it directly. So we cut it into little pieces and we face just little pieces. Oh, I lost my smartphone. That's a little, little, little piece of the fear of death, which is of losing everything. So I can't deal with losing everything, I'm dealing now with losing my phone or losing a book or whatever. Somebody, I feel pain... That's a small bit of the fear of death. Somebody who really doesn't fear death, would not fear anything at all. There will be like anything that happens, I can deal with it. If I can deal with death, this is nothing. - So any fears is a distant echo of the big fear of death? Have you ever looked at it head on, caught glimpses, sort of contemplated as the stoics do? - Yes. I mean, and when I was a teenager, I would constantly contemplate it, trying to understand, to imagine, it was a very, very shocking and moving experience. I remember, especially in connection, like with, you know, with national ideology, which was also very big strong in Israel, still is. Which again comes from the fear of death. You know that you're going to die. So you said, okay, I die, but the nation lives on, I live on through the nation, I don't really die. And you hear it, especially on Memorial Day, day for fallen soldiers. So every day they'll be in school Memorial Day for fallen soldiers who fell defending Israel in all its different wars. And all these kids would come dressed in white. And you have this big ceremony with flags and songs and dances in memory of the fallen soldiers. And you get the impression, again, I don't want it to sound crass, but you got the impression that the best thing in life is to be a fallen soldier. Because even then, yes, you die, everybody dies in the end. But then you'll have all these school kids for years and years remembering you and celebrating you and you don't really die. And I remember standing in these ceremonies and thinking, what does it actually mean? Like, okay, so if I'm a fallen soldier, now I'm a skeleton. I'm bones under this, in this military cemetery, under this stone. Do I actually hear the kids singing all these patriotic songs? If not, how do I know they do it? Maybe they trick me. Maybe I die in the war and then they don't sing any songs. And how does it help me? And I realized, I was quite young at the time, that if you are dead, you can't hear anything because you, that's the meaning of being dead. And if you're dead, you can't think of anything. Like, oh, now they're remembering... Because you are dead. That's the meaning of being dead. And it was a shocking realization. - But it's a really difficult realization to keep holding in your mind. Like it's the end. - I lost it over time. I mean, for many years, it was a very powerful fuel, motivation for philosophical, for spiritual exploration. And I realized that the fear of death is really a very powerful drive. And over the years, especially as I meditated, it kind of dissipated, and today sometimes I find myself trying to recapture this teenage fear of death because it was so powerful. And I just can't. I try to make the same image. I don't know. It's... - There's something about the teenage years. - Yeah, I always thought that the adults, there is something wrong with the adults. - Yeah. - Because they don't get it. - Yeah. Like I would ask my parents or teachers about it and they, oh yes, you die in the end. That's it. But, and on the other hand, they're so worried about other things. - Yeah. - Like there'll be a political crisis or an economic problem or a personal problem, like with the bank or whatever. They'll be so worried. But then about the fact that they're going to die, ah, we don't care about it. - That's why you read Camus and others when you're a teenager, you really worry about the existential questions. Well, this feels like the right time to ask the big question. What's the meaning of this whole thing, Yuval? And you're the right person to ask, what's the meaning of life? - Meaning of life? - Yes. - Oh, that's easy. - What is it? (both laughing) - So what life is, if you ask what the meaning of life, what life is, life is feeling things, having sensations, emotions, and reacting to them. When you feel something good, something pleasant, you want more out of it, you want more of it. When you feel something unpleasant, you want to get rid of it. That's the whole of life. That's what is happening all the time. You feel things, you want the pleasant things to increase. You want the unpleasant things to disappear. That what life is. If you ask what is the meaning of life in a more kind of philosophical or spiritual question, the real question to ask what kind of answer do you expect? Most people expect a story. And that's always the wrong answer. Most people expect that the answer to the question that what is the meaning of life will be a story, like a big drama, that this is the plot line and this is your role in the story. This is what you have to do. This is your line in the big play. You say your line, you do your thing...
That's the thing. And this is human imagination. This is fantasy. To really understand life, life is not a story. The universe does not function like a story. So I think to really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way. Don't turn it into a story. And the question to start with is what is suffering? What is causing suffering? You know, the question, what is the meaning of life? It'll take you to fantasies and delusions. We want to stay with the reality of life. And the most important question about the reality of life is what is suffering and where is it coming from? - And to answer that non-verbally, so the conscious experience of suffering. -
Yes. When you suffer, try to observe what is really happening when you are suffering. - Well put. And I wonder if AI will also go through that same kind of process, on its way- - And if we develop consciousness or not, at present, it's not, it's just words. - It will just say to you, "Please don't hurt me, Yuval" (both laughing) Again, as I've mentioned to you, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for the incredible work you do. This conversation's been a long time, I think, coming. It's a huge honor to talk to you. This is really fun. Thank you for talking today. - Thank you. I really enjoyed it. And as I said, I think the long form is the best form. - (laughs) Yeah. I loved it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Yuval Noah Harari himself. "How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
The Legend of Peugeot
(Harari uses the example of the Peugeot car brand to symbolize the concept of an imagined order. According to Harari, humans are unique in the animal world because we can imagine and believe things that aren't true or grounded in the physical world—this is what he calls an imagined order .Oct 18, 2020)
Our chimpanzee cousins usually live in small troops of several dozen individuals. They form close friendships, hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees. Their social structure tends to be hierarchical. The dominant member, who is almost always a male, is termed the ‘alpha male’. Other males and females exhibit their submission to the alpha male by bowing before him while making grunting sounds, not unlike human subjects kowtowing before a king. The alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his troop. When two individuals fight, he will intervene and stop the violence. Less benevolently, he might monopolise particularly coveted foods and prevent lower-ranking males from mating with the females. When two males are contesting the alpha position, they usually do so by forming extensive coalitions of supporters, both male and female, from within the group. Ties between coalition members are based on intimate daily contact – hugging, touching, kissing, grooming and mutual favours. Just as human politicians on election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing babies, so aspirants to the top position in a chimpanzee group spend much time hugging, back-slapping and kissing baby chimps. The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition. These coalitions play a central part not only during overt struggles for the alpha position, but in almost all day-to-day activities. Members of a coalition spend more time together, share food, and help one another in times of trouble
. There are clear limits to the size of groups that can be formed and maintained in such a way. In order to function, all members of a group must know each other intimately. Two chimpanzees who have never met, never fought, and never engaged in mutual grooming will not know whether they can trust one another, whether it would be worthwhile to help one another, and which of them ranks higher. Under natural conditions, a typical chimpanzee troop consists of about twenty to fifty individuals. As the number of chimpanzees in a troop increases, the social order destabilises, eventually leading to a rupture and the formation of a new troop by some of the animals. Only in a handful of cases have zoologists observed groups larger than a hundred. Separate groups seldom cooperate, and tend to compete for territory and food. Researchers have documented prolonged warfare between groups, and even one case of ‘genocidal’ activity in which one troop systematically slaughtered most members of a neighbouring band.2 Similar patterns probably dominated the social lives of early humans, including archaic Homo sapiens
. Humans, like chimps, have social instincts that enabled our ancestors to form friendships and hierarchies, and to hunt or fight together. However, like the social instincts of chimps, those of humans were adapted only for small intimate groups
. When the group grew too large, its social order destabilised and the band split. Even if a particularly fertile valley could feed 500 archaic Sapiens, there was no way that so many strangers could live together. How could they agree who should be leader, who should hunt where, or who should mate with whom? In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.
Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department.
But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust.
How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing IN COMMON MYTHS
. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. CHURCHES are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.
STATES are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths
. TWO LAWYERS who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily acknowledge that ‘primitive tribes’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis
. Take for example the world OF BUSINESS CORPORATIONS. Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The PRINCIPAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM AND TRIBAL SHAMANS IS THAT MODERN LAWYERS TELL FAR STRANGER TALES. The legend of Peugeot affords us a good example.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND (pp. 25-28). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition...
Marcus Aurelius ( my favorite)
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"Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
IF INTERESTED ,IT IS RECOMENDES TO READ THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION OF THE ENTIRE MEDITATIONS IT IS A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN GROUP OF ESSAYS THAT GIVES YOU A SENSE OF HIS SOUL AND IS WRITTEN WITH LYRICISM that APPROACHES THAT OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES
This is a "modernized version" of some of his thoughts -A full versions of the origional in links below
SOME CONCISE IDEAS OF MARCUS AURELIUM
Meditations is essentially a scrapbook of thoughts written over a 19 year period it's not ordered and it repeats itself frequently as ideas reoccurred to the author at different times you shouldn't read meditations like a science textbook explaining how the world works instead read it as a series of mental techniques and crutches to use to live a more tranquil and fulfilling life
It was the notebook of a man with the weight of the Roman world on his shoulders a man struggling to be good and leaving himself notes and reminders on how to be so I have interpreted and reordered what he says but I've done my best not to embellish it since I've summarized fifty thousand words down to four thousand I expect some of the subtlety and most of the poetry has been lost if you ever wish to listen to the original there's a link to my full narration of the book in the description box below
One when you encounter unkindness when receiving bad treatment or criticism from someone either the other person is right in which case you've no right to complain or they're wrong in which case they're misguided and have just made a mistake remind yourself how many mistakes you've made in life and feel pity for them by all means point out to them where they've gone wrong but do so affectionately not meanly with hatred in your heart or to impress on lookers speak directly to them if this doesn't work ask yourself what qualities nature has given us to counter the defect for example as an antidote to unkindness it gave us kindness but that to use and see what happens very few people can continually act unkindly to you if you show continued kindness to them no matter what anyone says or does my task is to be good
if you've mistakenly trusted an untrustworthy person then turn the reproach on yourself the fault is yours recognize that untrustworthy bad and even evil people exist in the world to expect not to encounter them is foolish say to yourself I have encountered one of them this is to be expected from time to time then remember that any evil that men do you only harms your soul if you do evil in return
It is your job to be good and not allow their evil to change that the noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy with that in mind recognize that everything depends on how you interpret it everything
A quote Marcus Aurelius cites from a cynic philosopher he notes that this is not literally true but that it is the useful mental crutch if you take it for what is worth you can apply it to everyday life with amazing results
That in mind remind yourself that how things affect you is determined by your minds interpretation of them not the external things themselves whatever happens you can choose how to interpret it so choose not to feel harmed and you haven't been if it rains you can choose to feel angry at the weather and pained by the sensation of the water on your clothes and body or you can choose to feel grateful at being alive and being able to feel such sensations how easy it is to repel and wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable and immediately be in all tranquillity so work on gaining control of your minds to frame things positively ultimately you are what you continually think so take care which thoughts you allow to exist in your own head your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought for the human spirit is colored by such impressions on that point your mind should sit superior to your body and its sensations you have a body and a mind your mind your rational faculty is the advantage you have over other animals to follow nature means to recognize this and to make use of what nature has given you deep down
You already know the things you should be doing and yet are not doing them that's because you do not have control over your mind whenever you determine to do something and don't do it it's because your body has given you some reason not to do not allow pain drowsiness fever loss of appetites to alter your behavior when you're bothered by things like that remind yourself I'm giving in to pain when you give in to these sensations you make your minds the slave of the body which leads to unhappiness endless suffering all from not allowing the mind to do its job gain control of your mind it's only by gaining control that you can begin to act virtuously and it's only by acting virtuously but true happiness eudaimonia will be reached once you start to follow reason the difference will be night and day within 10 days you will appear a god even to those to whom today you seem a beast or a baboon if you return to your principles and the worship of reason with that in mind stay mindful and take deliberate actions frequently
We go through life reactively most of the things we do we don't even think about enough of this no random actions none not based on underlying principles
Do not wander without a purpose act deliberately observe your own mind critically as if observing someone else's in every case ask yourself - what you are currently employing your mind what sort of soul are you displaying by you acting like a child a tyrant and animal what's causing you to act that way if you can control your actions and think and act systematically you will have an untroubled life if you do not observe the movements of your own mind then you will be unhappy further you can find peace from external events at any time by going within your own mind but do so briefly
Don't retreat from the world humanity is born for cooperation and we are constituted for one another do not allow yourself to become angry with those around you fall into hatred or give up trying to make a positive difference in society if you conceive of all rational beings as constituted for one cooperation then helping other people becomes a joy and not just the right thing to do learn to feel affection for other people even when they make mistakes you can do so by recognizing they're human too and we all make mistakes and that before long they will die just like you and that we're all in this together
What's more regardless of what they've done they haven't really hurt you another mental crutch he offers is to contemplate the positive qualities of those around you we all have different abilities and talents and keeping theirs in mind will make you think better off them when you need encouragement think of the qualities the people around you have the energy of one the modesty of another the generosity of a third keep the thought of them ready to hand six you opinion of yourself matters more than the opinion of a stranger
It never ceases to amaze me we all love ourselves more than other people but care more about their opinion than our own this is not an exhortation to arrogance it's reminding you to do what you know is best regardless of people's reactions you know what you're about and you know the reason why you're doing what you're doing you don't need to explain yourself to everyone even worse is when we fawn over and seek the praise of people we don't even respect think about that seeking the praise of those who are worthy of contempt as a crutch to avoid being too concerned with praise
Marcus Aurelius suggests contemplating what difference it really makes and considering the insignificance of it in the grand scheme of things Fame in a world like this is worthless his conclusion from all this is that we should be honest and straightforward we shouldn't prance about keep airs or try to portray ourselves as something we're not we should abstain from rhetoric and trying to pander or curry favor however with that said be open to correction
Being corrected is better than remaining in self-deceit you shouldn't view changing your mind as losing all that you're being coerced it is still a free and noble action on your part to change your mind if the evidence turns against you just don't change it because of peer pressure or to ingratiate yourself with others remember that to change your mind and to accept correction arf reacts to the action is yours based on your own will your own decision and your own mind with that in mind cherish the freedom and liberty of everyone learn to endure the freedom of speech of others you cannot control them
So learn to control your reaction instead learn to hear unwelcome truths listen attentively to people and seek to place yourself in their shoes habituate yourself not to be inattentive to what another has to say and so far as possible to be in the mind of the speaker uphold the rights of everyone as equal under the law it was from my brother that I conceived of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and of speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects
Above all else recognize that power corrupts recognize the malice cunning and hypocrisy that power produces and the peculiar ruthlessness often shown by people from good families if you ever find yourself in a position of power remember this and check yourself resist becoming despotic take care not to be transformed into a Caesar not to be dyed with this dye for such things happen fight to be the person philosophy trying to make you with that in mind have some self-respect with every act ask if you are respecting yourself with it and if you will regret it inside watch for and erase any impulse to express things you don't truly believe do not view anything as beneficial which causes you to break a promise lose your self-respect or hate anyone when roused to anger
remember that there's nothing manly about giving in to emotion it's courtesy and kindness that define a human being and a man he who possesses these qualities possesses strength nerves and courage not the man who is subject to fits of passion and discontent make yourself neither of a tyrant nor slave of any man and whatever happens avoid complaining do your job without whining
if you can do the job in front of you then do it and don't complain and if you can't then seek someone to help you and don't feel ashamed but still don't complain not even inwardly to yourself
frequently in life the obstacle is the way if something bad happens just say good what new opportunities does this open up in the same vein as recognizing how your interpretation of an events can affect whether it hurts you-- you can go one step further and ask how your interpretation of it can even benefit you the mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting the impediment to action advance his action what stands in the way becomes the way of course this is still very much a mental crutch
because had you wanted your car to break down say you would have broken it yourself but now that it has asked yourself what good you can make come from it the obstacle becomes the way is a recognition that every event creates new possibilities
and saying to yourself good when something bad happens and looking for the new opportunity is a far healthier way of living than complaining about it t
summarizes WHAT Marcus Aurelius used such mental crutches a lot the meditations can be viewed as a series of practical psychological tricks to make life smoother--- such mental habits allow you to smile and remain happy even when things that would otherwise upset you have occurred
that in mind recognize that adversity is part of nature the universe is indifferent to your existence it will throw things at you that will rock your world accept this for what it is
difficulties setbacks and even tragedies are part of life they are even part of it means to be alive everyone will experience them
Marcus Aurelius reiterates that since these events are in God or fates hands you should not hope and pray for them not to occur but rather hope and pray that you have the strength of character to enjoy them when they do
pray for the gift to fear none of these things ,to desire none of them ,to sorrow for none of them rather than that any one of them should be present or absent
this puts your focus on something in your control --namely forging the strength of character to endure all onslaughts rather than that which is in fates control
the unfortunate events ,when they do occur, be like the headland against which the waves continually break It stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it
that it's through adversity that we get stronger --it's unfortunate that this has happened no it's fortunate that this has happened and I've remained unharmed by it
there's an ironic beauty in life that it's in these very hardships that give us the opportunity to test ourselves and grow stronger
in every event which leads you to sorrow remember to use this principle --that this is not a misfortune but bear it like a brave man is good fortune - that ,for the most part everything has happened before ,the universe is in constant flux but there's nothing new Under the Sun ---whatever challenges you're facing others have met them before
obviously society and technology has moved on, but the human condition remains the same-- your partner cheats on you your friend betrays you-- you get passed over for promotion --all these things have been experienced by all of humanity for all of time
instead of wailing against them feeling outraged and shocked and repeating the behaviors of those before you ,let petty events wash off you and turn your attention to what really matters
keep a sense of proportion and it will help you deal with such things in all that happens keep before your eyes
those who experienced it before you and felt shock and outrage and resentment at it and now where are they ?
nowhere-- is that what you want to be like -- when faced with a choice ,remember our business is with things that really matter--- with that in mind ,stay practical and deal with what's in front of you --stop being aimless and stop allowing yourself to be distracted--- maintain an unwavering commitment and focus once a decision has been made.
if you seek tranquility do fewer things better,--do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life --stop being aimless --stop letting your emotions override, what your mind tells you --rid yourself of unnecessary thoughts --stop letting your emotions project into the future ,fabricating worries for yourself- master them and focus them on the present -on doing the thing that is in front of you as if it were your last
wipe away the impress of unhealthy imagination ,stop being jerked like a puppet- limit yourself to the present-- through hard practice ,you can learn even the things which you despair at learning now, for any task at hand, ask yourself "why can't I endure it
you'll be embarrassed to answer-- don't focus on any physical characteristic which you cannot change --do not allow yourself to want or pursue what is impossible--
focus instead on the virtues that are in your power to bring forth honesty, dignity ,endurance ,austerity, resignation, abstinence ,patience ,sincerity ,moderation ,seriousness ,magnanimity---with that in mind focus on doing what is right and be prepared to face resistance if it is not right
do not do it if it is not true -say nothing untrue, do nothing unjust and do not ,concern yourself with whether people recognize you for doing - choose to do a kind act but don't do it in expectation of a future reward --the acts themselves are their own rewards
what lead to a good life is to move from one unselfish action to the next good act itself in a sense if your aim is to always attempt to act well t
ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do --sanity means tying it to your own actions
if you're in a position of authority you may be hated for your good actions -the important thing is that you are not dissuaded from the right course in search of applause a king's part- only to act virtuously and do not let others hold you back - focus more on whether what you're doing is right or wrong than on the risk it brings you -It's mistaken my friend if you think that any man worth his salt cares about the risk of death -life is short and death comes to us all and for all must pursue justice honesty courage self-control and rational action above all else
Aurelius suggested was thinking of the life behind you as already dead ,at all that never really panned out dishearten you you can still focus on building your character and on doing good in the world just because you've abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist don't give up on attaining freedom achieving humility serving others obeying God and just as you accept the limits placed on your height accept the limits placed on your life death will eventually come for everyone and fearing the future does nothing but stop us acting bravely today with all that in mind practice getting back on track life is an obstacle course and no matter how wise you are there will be things that will throw you off balance when this happens make a point of centering yourself at once before proceeding the more you practice this the better you will get when jarred unavoidably by circumstances revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help you'll have a better grasp of the Harmony if you keep going back to it in other words whatever negative compulsions you've overcome there will come a time when you fall off the wagon and revert to your old ways recognize when this happens and practice pulling yourself back don't listen to the voice that tells you to give up because today is a write-off not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions but to get back up when you fail to celebrate behaving like a human however imperfectly and to fully embrace the pursuits that you've embarked on avoid getting distracted with pride and showing off not only does it detract from what you're doing but the applause you receive is worthless anyway pride and outward show is an arch seducer of reason when you think you're occupied in the weightiest business that's when it has you in its spell as such in all cases look beneath to see things for what they truly are a method of lessening the hold things have over you is to look at them for what they really are expensive wine is just fancy grape juice purple robes that is the robes worn by the Emperor are just wool dyed with shellfish blood this applies not only to material things but to actions and behaviors examine men's ruling principles even those of the wise what kind of things do they avoid or pursue imagine someone's soul stripped bare what evokes their love and admiration their vanity etc now try to imagine whether their disdain can really harm anyone all their praise help anyone do you wish to be praised by a man who curses himself three times every hour do you wish to please a man who doesn't please himself when facing their insults hatred or whatever look at what sort of person they are you will see that you don't need to strain to impress them but you should still treat them well as they are still human in all cases speak the truth as you see it but with kindness and humility with all that in mind recognize material wealth is neither a good nor an evil wealth in and of itself is not a good or bad thing it's how you use it the term Goods is a misnomer when used to refer to possessions
it's possible that possessing too many things can make life worse so they are not in every case goods your only true goods are your virtues respect your own mind and prize that be satisfied in yourself if you can't stop rising other things then you'll never be free you'll always be envious jealous or afraid that someone might come and take things away from you
while those who crave wealth are misguided so are those who despise it or feel guilt and possessing it as it has just a stronger hold over them better mr. learn to not let it have any hold over you learn to make use of it when you have it but be absolutely prepared to let it go use it unapologetically but also without any arrogance treat what you don't have as a non-existent
look at what you have the things you value most and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them but be careful don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them that it would upset you to lose them with that in mind express gratitude
Marcus aurelius spends the entire first chapter of meditations listing the things he's grateful for learning whilst young some -----of the things which stand out ----
to work on my own character
,the government of my temper,
developing a strong character ,generosity ,charity ,and a sense of humor
the value of investing in education
enduring labor working with my own hands
learning to want little
not to meddle in the affairs of others
not to have time for slanderers
to busy myself with trifling things
waste time on frivolous matters
to write simply and directly
to endure freedom of speech
make peace with people I've fallen out with when they're ready
steadiness of purpose self-control in not being distracted and not letting emotion cloud judgment
how to receive gifts graciously without losing self-respect or appearing ungrateful
how to offer praise without making a display
indifference to superficial honors
M. AURELIUS references
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smpHE7AiGAo&list=WL&index=45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxy4JbYy8ws
https://ryanholiday.medium.com/19-rules-for-a-better-life-from-marcus-aurelius-541dbb50efdd
https://www.azquotes.com/author/666-Marcus_Aurelius?p=2#google_vignette
https://medium.com/perennial/how-to-connect-like-marcus-aurelius-8e8bc4b02f77
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXPDIskRO0c&t=54s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXOOcKnspVg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5E2AQKuCyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wtY9N-_X9A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv6W0Nv5ev0&t=14s
file:///C:/Users/cmcor/Downloads/Marcus-Aurelius-Meditations.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXPDIskRO0c&t=54s
SPINOZA (Einstein's Favorite)
He was one of the most disliked philosophers ,aside from the most acceptable by scientists in modern terms. The powers that be, at that time ,Judaism excommunicated him and chased him out of town. They burned his books ---his crime --he said that everyone was God.
Philosophers lives have not always been easy, the ancient Greek philosopher diogenus used to live in a barrel without any material possessions Socrates was famously executed for teaching the young people of ancient Athens philosophy and arbitrator doctor philosopher and philanthropist lived for most of his life in Africa in his own Hospital taking care of his patients.
Spinoza is less known today but he too is one of them one of those almost mythical Larger than Life marches off philosophy someone who was ready to defend with his life what he believed to be the truth someone who would not compromise just to please others.
Spinoza was born in 1632 to a Jewish Family that had moved to the Netherlands from Spain or Portugal when the Elders of his Jewish Community learned of Spinoza's theories about God they first tried to silence him they tried to threaten him they tried to bribe him when none of that worked they simply excommunicated him Spinoza Now 23 years old had to leave Amsterdam and go find work elsewhere he found work as a lens grinder while he was writing his books he died probably of a long disease related to breathing in glass dust at the age of 44. but it would be wrong to think of him as just a manual worker
Lens grinding was at the time more like working at CERN today- lenses were then used in all the newest scientific instruments the most famous scientists of that time were all making their own lensesGalileo ,Kepler, Descartes ,Newton .
Spinosa was universally derided first because he was Jewish, but also because of his strange opinions about God. His Works were destroyed and forbidden by both Jews and Christians and by both church and state authorities -his best known work The Ethics was published only after his death.
Spinoza wrote his ethics as if it was geometry- he wanted it to be not just convincing but necessarily true like a logical conclusion like a Geometric Theorem about triangles. This makes it hard to read Spinoza's work today it is really not an easy read he does not offer any convenient sound bites ,but in Spinoza's eyes this geometric system was the whole point --he thought that the world is rational and that our minds can grasp the universe and its laws as they really are --- the philosopher who had started modern philosophy thought that there were three seperate kinds of things in the world:
Our Mind Material things God
The problem, Descartes had said if the mind is not a physical substance how can it interact with all these physical things in the world . If my thoughts are not Material ,then how can my decision to raise my arm lead to the movement of this arm. Or more generally, how can immaterial things cause material effects . Perhaps there is no mind and all our thoughts are just material physical events ,or maybe maybe it's all just mind as if I was dreaming---the whole universe then the problem would also be solved .
Spinoza also thought about this problem --His Conclusion
Everything must be made up of one substance and then we don't have this difficulty of how one substance interacts with the other-- if all is one substance then the interaction is explained but this means that everything must be one substance . Everything ,humans their minds, animals ,plants, stones, yes ,and then even God all would be one single substance
According to Spinoza the whole world appears to us only in different ways but deep inside it is one unified thing. Espinoza writes the Eternal and infinite being we call God or nature necessarily acts as it does in this statement God or nature this ore is meant to show the equality of the two things
It's the same thing under two different names God or nature --when I pray I pray to God or nature when I look at my hands my feet my face in the mirror or a tree all I see is God or nature back --This thought was terrifying .God was to be identical to human beings ,to an animal, to an insect ,to a plant to a stone--- if we are made in the image of God then what about a bird or a tree or a rock are these also images of God . No wonder the Elders of Spinoza's Community wanted him gone but it's no wonder also that the philosopher himself was unwilling to give up his ground wondrous idea of the unity of all things .
If this was true i,t would explain why God can be all-powerful and all-knowing because God literally is everything ---it would also explain what the Divine is in US and it would also explain why it is irrational not to love our neighbor. it would explain what Jesus meant when he said as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers you did it to me .
Look at the mushrooms on a forest floor what you see there are not individuals although they may seem to us to be one mushroom here, and one mushroom there --Deep underground they are all connected they all form one giant invisible organism-- one cubic inch of soil can Harbor eight miles of mycelium what we see as individual mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the giant invisible plant underneath --like mushrooms we too are branching out for a short time from this all-encompassing eternal substance that is God or nature -We are not really distinct --- we cannot but love our neighbors because we are them --Spinoza's weird geometric method makes his book look remote and irrelevant today but under the hood there is an Insight that we will need to embrace if we want to survive on this planet today ---We are all one single thing that can only survive and thrive as one or not at all .The Eternal ,or infinite being we call God, or nature ,necessarily acts as it does we are that Eternal and infinite being every single one of us.
Sounds pretty "Modern" to me.
