Jordan Peterson Narrates the 5000 Year Old Story of Todays USA

but I want to tell you a story now and it has these characters in it and so this is a very important story and it's called the Enuma Elish and it's the Mesopotamian creation myth and it's important for a bunch of reasons first of all it's the oldest written story we know of but it's also a Middle Eastern story and the whole all the Abrahamic religions emerged out of the Middle East and so it's a foundational story it's a story that sits at the bottom of our culture now it has it has similarities to the creation story in Genesis whether the creation story in Genesis was derived from it or whether there was a whole variety of similar stories floating around in the Middle East and at the same time that were variants of a theme we don't really know but it doesn't read I don't think it really matters we don't know how old the story is we know how old it is in its written form it's it's it's thousands of years old in its written form maybe it's ten thousand years old it's written form but probably not it's probably more like five thousand years old but the thing is is that a 5,000 year old story is a lot that's written is way older than 5,000 years like we're used to being in an environment where there's a million stories you know because we have books and movies and all of these things but you know in its slower moving and more archaic cultures especially ones that are just just have an oral tradition it's not like there's a million stories there's like 20 canonical stories and god only knows how old they are there was evidence linguistic evidence I just saw a study on this last week someone sent it to me showing that some of the fairy tales that the Grimm brothers gathered might be 10,000 years old and that doesn't surprise me because the kind of depth that's in a good fairy tale is is so the depth is so the profundity is so deep that no way that someone could just conjured it up you know 100 years ago it's there's layers and layers and layers of meaning and they're basically archetypal and religious in significance and Hansel and Gretel story is a good example of that and Sleeping Beauty is a good example about – a lot of the canonical fairy tales are they're very very powerful they pack a lot of meaning into a very short into a very limited amount of time so so it was great that this was unearthed and it was only unearthed in the late 1800s so we haven't known about this story you know for a long long time and so it's it was a tremendously exciting discovery on the part of the people who who dug it up so I'm going to tell you the story so the primary character in this story is a like a dragon mother named time at and time at you could think about her as half the dragon of chaos and half the destructive creative feminine so she you could think about her as what's sort of on the border between what's a known known and an unknown in unknown and she's construed as the mother of all things now the mother of all things is like what was revealed when the towers came down it's this tremendously complex background multi-level system of operations that's always going on that that identifiable singular things emerge from now the Mesopotamians wouldn't have said that because what they said was this story because that's the form in which their knowledge had it had developed to the point where they could tell a story about instead of maybe acting it out or dreaming about it in some sense you know but they couldn't articulate it we can barely articulate it now so there's time out she's viewed as the mother of all things and she has a husband named AB sue who's her concert very little is said about AB sue in this particular story and I think the reason for that although I'm not sure of this is that the Mesopotamian civilization was knew enough as a technological state let's say because it made cities as a technological state that the meant that myths of humanity hadn't figure out how to encapsulate the nature of the of a technological dominance art there was a sense that it existed but there wasn't a sense of it has a care of differentiated character that was capable of doing all sorts of different things I think that didn't emerge until Egypt although I'm not certain that but that's how it looks to me so absolute is her husband now the way the Mesopotamians thought of the world and this is the same way that the people who wrote Genesis thought of the world they thought of that the world was a disc you know what what the world's like when you go outside and you stand in a field it's a flat field you look at the world it's pretty obvious what it is it's a big disc of Earth and then there's a dome on top of it and in the dome art of the Sun and the moon and the stars and then you might ask well what's underneath earth and the answer for the Mesopotamians was fresh water first and then salt water how did you know that well if you drill down then up the fresh water would come so obviously there was fresh water down there and then if you went to the edge of your territory it's like well there's the salt water so the earth was you know let the earth roughly speaking was a disk of matter resting on a disk of fresh water resting on a disk of salt water an absolute time at were the fresh and saltwater respect okay and there now the Mesopotamians thought that the way that the that absolute time that gave birth to everything was that they join together in sexual union like the yin in the egg and it's very much like that exact and that it was out of their union that the the elemental gods emerged and I think you can think of the elemental gods as their their their forces of nature and they're viewed through their not personified because to personify something means that you see it as an objective phenomena and then attribute human characteristics to it and that isn't how people work what happens is we perceive human characteristics and then only with terrible effort do we extract out the objective reality from that so we D personalize things when we become scientific but we just naturally see them as characters and you can see this when you read books to kids you know like everything's a person train is a person and a car as a person the moon is a person and the Sun is a person and you know you read stories to children that have that as a presupposition doesn't bother you at all you know you can just fall right into it with no problem you know and in the animations you see the Sun in the sky smiling and bouncing along and it doesn't bother you you know it's no problem to look at the world that way and there's some utility in looking at the world in that way as we'll discover so anyways and I think part of the reason that we view things that way oh yeah that was the other thing I wanted to tell you about our perceptual systems is that we we do have a social cognitive platform intellectual platform which means that our primary categories the primary categories of our mind do seem to be social so you could say that the reason our mind evolved or no what you could say that the fundamental selecting pressures on our on our mind ensured that the the primary substructure of our cognitive ability was modules that could understand social behavior men can understand women women could understand men men and women could understand children children men and women could understand the social world and that's and that's that's what we're specialized for and then it was only after those systems developed hyper developed probably under the under the force of sexual selection that they became able to separate themselves to some degree from that underlying social cognitive structure and start to see the world in ways that were personified so but what that means is that our natural categories are still and anthropomorphic and dramatic it actually turns out they work so absolute time now nature and culture is a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about them now they would say well it's the interplay between nature and culture that gives rise to the primordial forces of nature now those forces of nature would be to some degree external like a storm or like fire but they would be sucked to some degree internal – like like the fire of passion right and the and the storm of sorrow because those are natural forces as well and one of the things that the ancients knew was that man was created to serve the gods and of course modern people think of that as a superstition but that's because they don't really understand how archaic people thought archaic people thought like Freud thought it's like yeah yeah you have an ego fine you know as long as you're in a box within a bunch of other boxes the eagle runs things but as soon as we put you somewhere where those boxes are gone it's the underlying forces of nature that run you hunger thirst you know aggression sexuality and all those things that are impersonal because of course you have them and you have them and so does everyone else so they're impersonal and transcendent and they're also eternal and so when the archaic people said and they usually said this with sorrow that man was destined to serve the gods that's what they meant they meant that we were the playthings of these unbelievably powerful primordial forces that manifested themselves within our lives and determined our destinies and in an in fact a Mesopotamian said that specifically about the Elder Gods they said they were they were part of that which determined human destiny Marduk who we'll talk about in a while was given the tablet of destinies because when he was when he asked to become top god he said well if I'm going to be taught to determine the destinies and well we'll get to that so you kind of got to know what these what these archaic gods work and they were personalities you know when you could say well yeah yeah maybe it's a mistake to attribute the qualities of personality to a storm although it depends on what you think a storm is like a modern person would think of a storm as an objective event that you have subjective reactions – and our CAD person would more likely think of the storm as the subjective consequences of the storm plus the storm all at once they would make that separation so it's a lot easier to personify something under those conditions or to not to personify it but – but to stay within the realm of conceptualization that makes it a personified force so the storm god is something that you know that can instill terror into your heart it's like well you know yeah fair enough you know alright so anyways absolute timeout they give rise to these primordial gods and I'm going to think about them as forces of nature and I think that's a reasonable representation for a variety of reasons they're like the Titans alright so they give rise to these gods and the gods are their children and they run about making all sorts of racket they're making rocket and they're doing this and they're doing that they're building things and they're messing about with things and they're they're noisily engaged in their interactions with one another and they're having children and they're fighting about sex and they're just making racket like mad and then they do something stupid and so they're annoying time out as they make all this racket she's sort of slumbering down there in the depths leaving them be but they make all this racket and they annoy her it's like it's the environmentalist myth by the way it's exactly the same idea so you know human beings were kind of dopey we're running around gratifying our fundamental needs and making racket and destroying things and if we're not careful Mother Nature will come flooding back and like wipe us out it's like yeah that's happened in the past it could happen but it's an archetypal it's an archetypal idea it's a mythological idea so fine they're making racket and time outs leaving the bee but then they get arrogant I would say or careless and they they kill opsin and they make their dwelling place on his corpse now that's a that is a brilliant brilliant symbolic idea because what it means it means a bunch of things but one of the things it means is that insofar as the gods are because they're masculine they're part of the represent of the dominants hearty and human interactions within it that the idea that that that that's all existing on the corpse of ab su is something like the idea that all of the natural forces that are embodied within human beings and driving them are resting on a sub structure of dead culture and everyone knows that because everyone says especially modern people they look back at their culture and they think all that things dead you know and we can rest comfortably on it's dead surface well that's not right because if it's dead well if it's dead logically speaking it's not alive than if it's not alive it can't adapt if it doesn't adapt then it falls behind and gets full of errors and it gets corrupt it starts to fall apart and if it gets corrupted full of errors and falls apart enough then chaos comes back that's exactly what happens in the Mesopotamian myth so they kill apps ooh and they keep making racket and time at wakes up one day and she thinks oh they're noisy I don't like them that much and now they've gone and done in my husband which is order so I'm going to wake them out so the guards get wind of this and they're not very happy about it you know because after all they're gone but she is the God goddess / dragon that gave them all life and the probability that they'll prevail in a battle against that which gave them form is very very low so they're pretty damn terrified so meanwhile time at is generating her army and she generates quite an army and that Mesopotamians lists out what she does she she first of all picks for her concert a new character named King mu and King o is like the king of the demon monsters so her old husband was absolute maybe he was order and her new husband is like he's not someone that you want to have around at all and so he's basically put at the hand of this phalanx of terrible monsters and she generates like scorpion monsters and crocodile monsters and all sorts of things in her army so that she can go wipe out these these gods and so well this is happening the gods gathered themselves together and they decide that they'll elected champion from within their ranks to go out and fight with time app and so they do that they send one God out he comes back with his tail between his legs roughly speaking all right don't let his encounter with chaos and then they send another God out the same thing happens and they send another God out the same thing happens and it's getting pretty damn hopeless because they're sending out their best men against chaos and them and the mother of all things and they're getting scuttled all the time while this was happening they continue to produce new generations of gods and at one point this new god emerges as a young person I presume um but he's there's some things that are different than about him than any other thing that's being produced so far and one of the things that's different is he's quite tall and powerful so you know that's not necessarily so radical but he has eyes all the way around his head and when he speaks he can speak darkness into being and he can speak light into being so so things obey the commands of his words so he's a master of language he can see everywhere and he's a master of language okay and so the gods are checking him out what they think well you know he's he's quite something maybe we can get him to go after time at so they all go to him in this in this little group and they say look Marduk because that's his name um you know we've been checking you out and you're looking pretty impressive and so we've got a proposition for you how about if you go fight time out and Marduk who's not only all-seeing and and very capable with language is no fool and he says yeah yeah yeah I get what you want but here's the deal you get everybody together first and I'll go fight your monster but you're going to have a Congress and at that Congress you're going to elect me king of the gods and then I'll go fight time app and so of course the other gods aren't very happy about this but they go off and they have a Congress and they invite mark to it and they talk about it and they realize they don't really have any other choice so they decide that they're going to elect Marduk to the top of the hierarchy of gods now that's such a smart idea so if you think for example you can think of a hero and then you can think if you took ten heroes and add which them out of that you get a god right so it'd be ten heroes you get a meta here out of that and that would be a god and then maybe you do that to ten sets of ten heroes and you get ten meta heroes and then you take all those meta heroes and you figure out what's the same about them and you abstract that out and then you get the hero of Heroes of Heroes and that's the archetype that's the archetype it's a process of distillation it's like who's the most interesting possible the most interesting and capable possible person well that would be this person this is the most memorable possible person well we don't know who that is but this is how we figure it out now I could say well I admire something about you and I admire something about you I can notice that as a phenomenological fact you seem very capable in a certain way and you know you have this attribute and then I might say well if I was going to sort out an ideal for myself to follow then I take the good parts of all of you and I put that into one thing and then I would make that my ideal well that's the origin of the idea of the savior of the Messiah that's an emergent idea it emerges when people notice that the hero is that the hero is part of the force that makes order out of chaos or sometimes the reverse when when order has become too rigid it can also decompose order bring a little necessary chaos into it rejuvenate the whole structure so anyways so Marduk he gets elected King now you might think about how would this happen historically speaking well here's an interesting way of thinking about it so imagine a landscape that consists of tribes okay and then on top of them imagine a landscape of the imagination okay so each member of each tribal group lives in their imagined world and that imagined world is full of dandies and natural forces of various kinds that they're following but then you can imagine that as the tribes battle it out and organize themselves the figures of the imagination do exactly the same thing so as the people are battling the gods in heaven are battling which is also very common mythology and as the human beings I beat themselves into a functional group their world conceptions do the same thing and so over time you move from polytheism roughly speaking to monotheism as the the as all these tribes communicate with one another in language and in combat and sort out just exactly what should be sovereign what should be powerful what should be dominant right it's a major it's a major issue and it's partly practical it's partly conceptual so if this is reflected in the Mesopotamian creation myth the gods assemble themselves and they look among them and they think okay well someone here is has the characteristics that should should be the central element of the top deity which is like the ultimate value okay while the Mesopotamians chose wisely vision and language those are you most the most potent weapons you have against chaos because you if you pay attention you can see chaos when it first emerges and then if you are a master of language you can encapsulate it and articulate it very rapidly and you can communicate that to other peoples it's like now this you you just cannot overestimate how radical an idea that is it's a staggeringly radical idea that that's the set of attributes that should be at the top the Mesopotamians are trying to figure out what should be sovereign what should be above everything else well you might say a person it's like yeah yeah no the person embodies sovereignty sovereignty itself is something else so when Fran's de Waal for example he was watching chimpanzees hash it out for dominance in in in the zoo and I think it's in Holland Arnhem I think anyways it's a zoo that has a lot of chimpanzees in it he spent a lot of time watching them and you know one idea about the doorman and chimp is that he's just biggest meanest like most tyrannical chimp it's sort of the strongman theory of chimp leadership but what do all observed was that well that was sort of true in that the strongest and meanest chimpanzee could obtain dominance but the problem with him is if he was really like selfish and cruel was that he didn't have any friends now chimps have friends and they spend a lot of time with them and they groom each other and they protect each other in fights and like you can be the ugliest meanest chimp around but if there's two chimps that are three-quarters your strength coming out at you it's like you you lose now so that means two chimps that are capable of enough civilization to bind themselves in to a dyad that is that has mutual obligations across time is way stronger than one ship who doesn't and so what that means is that strength and viciousness you know there will be times when that can emerge as the dominant power but it's very very unstable and and everyone's motivated to bring it down as fast as possible and the best way to bring it down is with a coalition and so partly what that indicates is that it's actually the chimp who's the best at making coalition's that's most likely to become sovereign so that and that's actually what happens with the chimps is that the dictator chimp is very unstable in in the one story I rented of Arnhem at the armed zoo he rose to the top though you know bad bad guy that gangster guy and two chimps went after me torn to pieces they tore off his testicles yeah and you know it agitated the hell out of the rest of the troop and it was looking like a bloody revolution you know it was really really stressful for the troop but but what it indicates and it's so interesting is that the idea that in a in a dominance hierarchy what's most dominant is a power that there's no evidence whatsoever that that's true and in fact I was talking to what I have a partner in a business that I have who was a student of mine at Harvard he is a very very smart person and I was talking to him about dominance hierarchies and he said something very that I found very upsetting on a variety of levels he said it's not a dominance herky if you can't put a dog collar on the person one level below you which is pretty bloody blunt statement but when he's prone to that sort of thing but what he meant is that it's possible that the idea that the term dominance higher is not the right term to be applying to these sorts of social structures because what it implies is that what keeps the structure in place is power you know and that's the sort of claim that people like Foucault make it's all about power it's like the thing is it's not all about power it's not all about power it's not all about power among animals so with power with chimps if that's all you've got is power you're going to get wiped out you have to so what do all found was that the chimps who were able to establish stable patterns of leadership were quite congenial they had a lot of allies so they engaged in mutual grooming and a lot of social interaction and they were very positively predisposed to the females in the troop so that's pretty interesting you know because we don't know what constitutes valid sovereignty but even in animals it doesn't seem to be power so and then you know you look at wolf pack's and that sort of thing and you know if two wolves go at it for dominance one wolf for back off and roll over and show his throat and you know like Stalin wolf would just tear out his throat but you know um Churchill wolf let's say would say well yeah you're kind of useless but we might need you around later so why don't you get up and you know we'll let bygones be bygones and that's what wolves do you know and and unsurprisingly because what are you going to do kill everyone in your troop well that doesn't seem like a very effective strategy either for mating or for survival so the Mesopotamians are trying to work out practically who's going to be sovereign and at the same time conceptually what is the proper basis for sovereignty which is it's really the ultimate question in some sense so anyway so they elect marnik and the Martok's got all these eyes and he can speak and so he thinks all right it says if I win I'm going to get the tablet of destinies and then I'm talking on and they say yeah yeah whatever if you win no problem so she goes out to fight timeout and he takes a sword and he and he takes a net and they meet on the battlefield and he encapsulate stye map in which i think is a brilliant brilliant metaphor again because chaos is amorphous and unformed right and if you want to conquer it you have to encapsulate it within a net a network you have to you have to make it into something rather than something amorphous you know and so look maybe a client comes to me and they say oh I've been having these terrible symptoms on my heart races and I'm my breath I can't catch my breath and I think I'm going to die and I think maybe I'm having a heart attack and I'm always at the hospital and they tell me that there's nothing wrong with me and but I have like I'm I'm afraid all the time and I'm starting not to go out and I say oh you have a graph obeah lots of people have that you're not the only person like that in the world not only that it has a name we know what to do about it and there's a treatment course and they go and the reason for that is that the unknown unknown has just been turned into a known unknown and that's a massive improvement and so the person who conceptualizes the anomalous situation fastest is in fact the leader that's the definition of leadership it's like we don't know what's going on this is what's going on and what and when you say this is what's going on you also simultaneously say here's a million other things that could have been going on that aren't so it's a process of radical simplification and it lowers the stress levels immediately anyway so time that goes and or martica as he gets her in a net and then he splits her in half and he makes heaven out of one half and the earth other the other for the human beings and and he goes back to and he defeats Keo and all the monsters and then he goes back to tell the other gods and they're pretty happy about this and king who had the tablet of destinies but mardik took that from him and now he has it so he gets to determine destiny and he makes human beings out of Kings blood which is quite an interesting little twist to the story and he makes them to serve the gods and so so that's that soul so the idea is that the hero who can see and can communicate is also the hero who separates out the elements of existence so that it becomes a habitable place and that humans should serve that serve Marduk we have to serve something well you're going to serve a natural force of some sort in the all anger you can be all lust it can be all love or you can be all hunger or you going to represent some integrated ah some some balance that integrated emergent property of that that's also socially constructed you know so that you're a balance of natural forces and you're a civilized person and that's some sort of essence and that's what you're going to strive for well that's Martin so you're supposed to be a good Marduk now Margaret is immortal now the only person who was identified with Marduk in the Mesopotamian realm was the Emperor now they lived in a walled city and so what the Emperor the reason the Emperor was sovereign was because he was supposed to be the embodiment of mark on earth which meant that his job was to transform chaos into order whenever chaos threatened he was supposed to transform it back into order so this is what the Mesopotamians did at the New Year's celebration when the Year is rejuvenated right the old year dies of course we know that because we still do it and the new year is this new baby it's a time of new beginnings so the Mesopotamians would take the emperor out of the city and they'd strip him of all his emperor clothes and then they'd make him recite all the ways during the last year that he'd been a bad Marduk like he hadn't kept he hadn't been encountering chaos properly and hadn't been keeping order properly so he had to confess all of his inadequacies then the priest would whack him with a glove as a you know as a ritual punishment and then they take all the statues out of the old gods out of the city and then they re read the battle between Marduk and Tiamat and then the Emperor was Martic and he would win and then he would have sex with a ritual prostitute which was that this is a much tougher concept but it's it's a way of symbolizing the fact that if the creative force encounters the positive element of the feminine it's like the prince in Sleeping Beauty getting Sleeping Beauty from the grasp of the evil queen who turns into the dragon it's exact because it's weird right you've seen that and you understand it right Sleeping Beauty is all in the tower she's covered by a she's hemmed in by a huge fields of thorns the Evil Queen is trying to stop the fresh from getting to her she turns into a dragon which makes absolutely no sense but everyone follows it and then he has to fight his way through that to get to the to the main it's the same idea in a different context and then order productive order being reestablished everybody goes back into the kingdom and it's renewed for the next year and that's the idea behind Mesopotamian sovereignty and it's bloody brilliant because it's an abscess it's it's it's the beginnings of law in some sense it's it's the idea that to be to be proper even if you're a despot even if you're the king there's a sacred pattern of behavior that you must adhere to which is the consequence of a congress of the gods deciding what the most effective mode of being is it's staggeringly brilliant and and it took that story we just have no idea how long that story took to emerge I would say it's it's the consequence of the full course of human evolutionary history like there are elements in it that are as old as mammals and maybe older than that you know if you think about those patterns being embedded in behavior long before they were abstracted out into representations it's unbelievably archaic and ancient and so you have time at the Great Mother you have absolute the Great Father you have Marduk the archetypal son you have King Oh who's the negative element of Marduk right and you have the drama of all those characters interacting across time and that's that's the myth alone that's the mythological representation of reality and time at to tie it into the neural psychology that we talked about you know we talked about anomaly right and how anomaly you have a box that you're in it that is your world but that box doesn't contain everything in the world there's a lot of things that aren't in it and sometimes they poke their head in like a and then that's disruptive and what do you do well you have to you have to voluntarily encounter this name and either defeat it or make something valuable of you know you can cower and hide but all that generally means the state grows and grows until there's hardly any you in the box and there's all snakes and that's actually the best of Damien's story it's like if the Elder Gods weren't so careless and had been paying attention and hadn't killed absolute time that would have stayed asleep the whole time so mom so that's the that's the level of isomorphism so what's what's fascinating but I think inevitable is that the mythology reflects the physiology but how could it not the physiology produced the mythology like of course that's going to be the case it shouldn't be a surprise it should be it should be it should be the reverse should be a surprise it's like there's no relationship between these these old stories in the way that human beings are structured it's like well no no that's a dumb idea so well that's the mesopotamian creation myth and it's it's a killer it's it's a it's a staggering story and you know it still sits whether we know it or not it's it's at the very base of our culture it's absolute that story and if we kill it which we will or have been then then look out you know we know the story from so long ago if you let your culture die and act carelessly towards it all hell will break loose and it's no joke so so here we are trying to revivify it it's pretty weird that these things happen to be real but then if you think about it well how could it be otherwise you know I mean you think all these people who live before us for the tens of millions of years that you know we've had our FEGLI human pre pre dissenters were stupid they weren't and they weren't ignorant and they weren't superstitious or any of those things they were they were they were tough enough so that we're here