00:00So one of the things Jung did was he deeply, deeply studied the substructures of thought.
00:08So for Jung—like Jung, we talked about Piaget a bit, and we said, for Piaget you kind of
00:13built your brain from your body upward.
00:15Brilliant idea, so smart.
00:17But Jung has a lot of Piaget in him, it's more implicit, but for Jung, not only was
00:26your—the substructures of your thought biological, and so therefore based in your body.
00:31But your body was also cultural and historical, you know, so partly because you're an evolved
00:37creature, so God only knows what's in there, 3.5 billion years' worth of weirdness that
00:43you can draw on, or that can move you where it wants to move you.
00:48But also, you're being shaped by cultural dynamics all the time.
00:52And human beings in particular, like we're just watching each other like mad all the
00:56time to see what we're up to, what people think of us, how we should be behaving, are
01:01we being boring, are people attracted to us?
01:04It's like we're social right to the core, and that's another way that you can understand
01:08an archetype.
01:09It's like, part of the archetype is that we are social to the core, so we're interested
01:13in other people.
01:14More if you're extroverted, less if you're introverted, but it doesn't matter.
01:16But by the standards of, say, solitary animals, we're so social it's just unbelievable.
01:23And so that's built in.
01:25It's built in.
01:26What's built in is that you find that interesting.
01:29That's the archetype.
01:30The archetype is whatever it is that makes you find that interesting.
01:34It's beyond your control.
01:36Like, if you're extroverted, you're interested in people.
01:38You didn't decide that.
01:40It decided it for you.
01:43The question is, what is it?
01:45Well, it's your brain, your brain, your limbic system, whatever the hell that means.
01:50Like, we don't know what that means.
01:51You know?
01:52We have no idea how your brain produces consciousness.
01:55Like, I'm dead serious.
01:57We haven't got a clue.
01:58And what that indicates to me, since we've been hacking away at it for, say, 400 years,
02:03is that the way we think about consciousness is wrong, because we're not getting anywhere.
02:09Like, we go a long ways with lots of things.
02:12We're not getting anywhere with consciousness.
02:14Okay, so back to the archetype, so, because I can tell you how these things arise to some
02:18degree.
02:18So, you're interested in other people, say.
02:21And so, you're interested in them because they're unbelievably useful resources, right,
02:26because they know things, they have resources, that you want, plus you want even subtle things
02:31from them.
02:31You want their attention, you want to play with them, you know.
02:34There's all sorts of things that you need and want from other people.
02:37So, the social interactions are incredibly valuable and informative.
02:41But the information is interesting, because part of what every single person is constantly
02:46broadcasting to every other person is how to behave.
02:52So now, if you meet someone and let's say you find them interesting, well, I can tell
02:57you that the more ideal they are, assuming you're not too warped, the more ideal they
03:04are, the more you're going to be interested in them.
03:08Because that actually is what defines ideal.
03:10Like, as you become ideal, you could say that is also the same as becoming high status.
03:14As you become ideal, then you're interesting to people.
03:20So, that's interesting, because what that means is that you can read off people's interest
03:25to find out when you're deviating from the ideal.
03:27And they don't even know what the ideal is.
03:29The ideal is that to which their attention is inexorably drawn.
03:35And they're always telling you when you fall short of the ideal.
03:38Always.
03:39It's being broadcast at you all the time.
03:41And then your imagination back there is to try and figure out, just what is this ideal?
03:46You know, because your imagination is watching you in a Piagetian sense, noticing what you
03:51do, and then trying to figure out what that is.
03:53So you'll have fantasies about the ideal.
03:56That often happens in a romantic relationship, especially at the beginning of it.
04:00Because, you know, you project your idealization onto the person that you're romantically attracted
04:05to.
04:05That's the projection of an archetype.
04:07So Jung would say, the woman will project an animus onto the man.
04:11The animus is her conceptualization of what the ideal man is.
04:14Because it's unconscious, because it's rooted in fantasy.
04:17And the man will be in concordance with that projection in some areas, those are the areas
04:23where she likes him, by the way, and will be discordant in other areas.
04:27And that's the areas where she constantly disappoints him as the relationship develops.
04:32So the projection is there in part to help the person understand who it is that they're
04:38dealing with.
04:38Because when you meet someone, you have to assume something about them.
04:42It's the same as projection.
04:44You have to assume something about them.
04:45And if you find them fascinating, which is what happens if you fall in love, maybe it's
04:48because they smell good or they're symmetrical or something.
04:51You immediately assume that, well, those things really matter.
04:54You immediately assume that they embody the ideal.
04:57It's an oversimplification.
04:59But the oversimplification has a basis.
05:01And the basis is, if it's interesting to me, it must be close to the ideal.
05:06Well, yeah.
05:06Except the person that you're going out with, attracted to, is warped and bent and flawed
05:11and twisted in, you know, 300 ways.
05:14And you'll find that out soon enough, just as they will about you.
05:18And that often just blows the relationship into bits, because the person will say, well,
05:22she wasn't who I thought she was.
05:23It's like, well, who said, whoever said she was who you thought she was?
05:27It's like, where did you get the misapprehension that she was going to be who you thought she
05:31was?
05:31God, what do you know?
05:33You know?
05:34You're led, you're led around by your sense of smell and your ability to detect symmetry.
05:39It's like, that's, yeah, that's not very sophisticated.
05:43So those are, those are, so the anima and animus are two primary Jungian archetypes.
05:48And they're very complex, but that kind of gets at the surface.
05:51Um, the ideal that I was describing, so, people are broadcasting information to each other
05:58which is, be ideal, be ideal, be ideal, be, it's like, be my ideal, obviously.
06:02But let's say, let's say, if I took a thousand ideals and then averaged them, or extracted
06:09out the common ideal, the ideal that was common to all of them, that would be a savior figure.
06:15That's what a savior figure is.
06:18And then now, now and then someone comes along who acts quite a bit like that, and poof, you've
06:25got yourself a religion.
06:27So do not be thinking that these images that people fall around, like, like, you know, like,
06:32what, bloodhounds on a trail, do you not be thinking that those things are like conscious
06:37cognitive constructs, like conscious cognitive constructs, like Marxism.
06:43They last, like, fifty years, and they kill a hundred million people, and then that's
06:47the end of that.
06:50A good religious system, man, that would keep a culture going for, like, three thousand years.
06:54And even at the end of it, it doesn't disappear.
06:56We know that the story of Horus and Osiris, for example, drove Egypt, like Catholicism drove
07:02Europe, for, like, three thousand years.
07:04That's a long time.
07:05And then it turned into Christianity.
07:07So it's not like it disappeared.
07:09So it's not like it disappeared.
