Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
sheldon solomon
a social psychologist a philosopher
co-developer of terror management theory
and co-author of the warm at the core
on the role of death and life he further
carried the ideas of ernest
becker that can crudely summarize as the
idea that our fear of death
is at the core of the human condition
and
the driver of most of the creations of
human civilization
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let me say as a side note that ernest
becker's book
denial of death had a big impact on my
thinking about human cognition
consciousness and the deep ocean
currents of our mind
that are behind the surface behaviors we
observe
many people have told me that they think
about death or don't think about death
fear death or don't fear death but i
think not many people think about this
topic
deeply rigorously in the way that
nietzsche suggested
this topic like many that lead to deep
personal self-reflection frankly is
dangerous for the mind
as all first principles thinking about
the human condition is
if you gaze long into the abyss like
nietzsche said the abyss will gaze back
into you
i've been recently reading a lot about
world war ii
stalin and hitler it feels to me that
there's some fundamental truth there to
be discovered
in the moments of history that changed
everything the suffering
the triumphs if i bring up donald trump
or vladimir putin in these conversations
it is never through a political lens i'm
not left
nor right i think for myself deeply
and often question everything changing
my mind as often as is needed
i ask for your patience empathy and
rigorous thinking
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i ask that you unsubscribe and don't
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i think we can only make progress toward
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and now here's my conversation with
sheldon
solomon what is the role of death and
fear of death and life
well from our perspective the uniquely
human awareness of death and
our unwillingness to accept that fact
we would argue is the primary
motivational impetus for almost
everything that people do
whether they're aware of it or not so
that's kind of been your life work
your view of the human condition is that
death you've written the book warm with
the core that death is at the core of
our
consciousness of everything of how we
see the world of what drives us
maybe can you can you
elaborate like what how you see
death fitting in what does it mean to be
at the core
of our being so i think that's a great
question
and you know to be pedantic i usually
start you know my psychology classes
and i say to the students okay you know
let's define our terms and the ology
part
they get right away you know it's the
study of
and then we get to the psyche part
and understandably you know the students
are like oh that means mind
and i'm like well no that's a modern
interpretation but in a in ancient greek
it means soul but not in the
cartesian dualistic sense that most of
us
in the west think when that word comes
to mind and so
you hear the word soul and you're like
well all right that's the
non-physical part of me
that's potentially detachable from my
corporal container when i'm no longer
here
but aristotle's who
coined the word psyche i think um
he was uh not a dualist he was a monist
he thought that the soul
was inextricably connected to the body
and he defined soul as the essence of a
natural body
that is alive and then he goes on and he
says all right
but let me give you an example if
um if an
axe was alive the soul of an axe would
be to chop
and if you can pluck your eyeball out of
your head
and it was still functioning
then the soul of the eyeball would be to
see
you know and then he's like all right
the soul of a grasshopper
is to hop the soul of a woodpecker is to
peck
which raises the question of course what
is the essence
of what it means to be human and
here of course there is no one
universally accepted conception of the
essence of our humanity
all right aristotle uh you know gives us
the idea of humans as rational animals
you know we're
homo sapiens but
not the only game in town got joseph
hoisinger an anthropologist in the 20th
century he called us homo ludens
that were basically fundamentally
playful creatures
and i think it was hannah arendt uh homo
faber we're tool making creatures
uh another woman ellen dizzinayake wrote
a book called homo aestheticus
and following aristotle and his poetics
she's like well we're not only rational
animals we're also aesthetic creatures
that appreciate
beauty there's another take on humans i
think they call us homo naratans
we're all we're storytelling creatures
and i i think
all of those uh designations of what it
means to be human
are quite useful heuristically and
certainly worthy of our collective
cogitation
but what what garnered my attention
when i was a young punk was just a
single line
in an essay by a scottish guy it was
alexander smith
in in a book called dreamthwarp i think
it's written in the 1860s
he just says right in the middle of an
essay it is our knowledge
that we have to die that makes us human
and i remember reading that and i in my
gut i was like oh man i don't like that
but i think you're on to something and
then william james the the
great harvard philosopher and arguably
the first
academic psychologist he referred to
death as the worm at the core of the
human condition so that's where the worm
at the core idea comes in
and that's just an illusion to the story
of genesis
back in the proverbial old days in the
garden of eden uh
everything was going tremendously well
until the serpent tempts eve to
take a chop out of the apple of the tree
of knowledge and
adam partakes also and
this is according to the bible what
brings
death into the world and from our
vantage point
the story of genesis is a remarkable
allegorical
uh recount of the origin of
consciousness where we
get to the point where by virtue
of our vast intelligence we come to
realize
the inevitability of death and so
uh you know the apple is beautiful and
it's tasty
but when you get right into the middle
of it there's that ugly reality which is
our finitude and then fast forward a bit
and
uh i was a young professor at skidmore
college in 1980 um my phd is in
experimental social psychology and i i
mainly did studies
with clinical psychologists evaluating
the efficacy of non-pharmacological
interventions to reduce
stress and that was good work and i
found it interesting but
in my first week as a professor at
skidmore i i'm just walking up and down
the shelves of the library
saw some books by a guy i had never
heard of ernest becker
a cultural anthropologist recently
deceased he died in 1974
after um weeks before
actually he was posthumously uh awarded
the pulitzer prize and non-fiction for
his book the denial of death
and and that was his last book it's
actually his next to last
book i don't know how you pulled this
off but he had one more after he died
called escape from
evil and evidently it was supposed to
originally the denial of death was
supposed to be this giant
thousand page book that was both
and they split it up and the what became
escape from evil
uh his wife marie becker finished
well be that as it may in it is in the
denial of death
where becker just says it in the first
paragraph i i i believe uh that the
terror of death
and the way that human beings respond to
it or decline to respond to it is
primarily responsible for almost
everything we do whether we're
aware of it or not and mostly
we're not and so i read that first
paragraph lex and i was like wow okay
this dude you're on to something
you're on to something it's the same
thing it's the same thing
and then it reminded me i think um
not to play psychologists but you know
let's face it
i believe there's a reason why we end up
drifting
where we ultimately come to so i'm in my
mid-20s
i got ernest becker's book in my hand
and the next thing i know i'm
remembering uh when i'm eight years old
the day that my grandmother died
and you know the day before my mom
said oh say goodbye to grandma she's
not well and okay so i was like okay
grandma
and i knew she wasn't well but i didn't
really appreciate the magnitude
of her illness well she dies the next
day
and it's in the evening and i'm just
sitting there
looking at my stamp collection and i'm
like wow i'm gonna
miss my grandmother and then i'm like no
wait a minute
that means my mother's gonna die and
after she gets old
and that's even worse after all who's
gonna make me dinner
and that bothered me for a while but
then i'm looking at the stamps all the
dead american presidents
and i'm like there's george washington
he's dead there's thomas jefferson
he's dead my mom's gonna be dead
oh i'm gonna get old
and be dead someday and at eight years
old that was my
first explicit existential crisis i
remember it being
you know one of these blood curdling
realizations that i
tried my best to ignore
for the most of the time i was
subsequently growing up
but fast forward back to skidmore
college
mid-20s you know reading becker's book
in the
1980s thinking to myself
wow one of the reasons why i'm finding
this so compelling is that it squares
with my own personal experience
and then to make a short story long and
i'll i'll shut up lex but
what what grabbed me about becker and
this is in part
uh because i read a lot of his other
books um
there's another book the birth and death
of meaning uh which is
framed um in from an evolutionary
perspective
and and then the denial of death is
really more
framed from an existential psychodynamic
vantage point and as a a
young um academic uh i was
really taken by what i found to be
a very potent juxtaposition
that you really don't see that often yet
usually evolutionary types
are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic
types
and vice versa and maybe only john bolby
you know there's there's other folks but
the attachment theorist
john bolby was really one of the first
serious academics
to say these um these ways
of thinking about things are quite
compatible and can you comment on what's
what a psychodynamics view of the world
is versus an evolutionary view of the
world just in case people are not oh
yeah absolutely that's that's a fine
question
well for the evolutionary types um
in general are interested
in um how it is and
why it is that we
have adapted to our surroundings in the
service of persisting over time
and being represented in the gene pool
thereafter you used to be a fish
yes we used to be a fish and also yeah
and i ended up
uh talking on a podcast yeah how we came
to be that way how we came to be that
way
and so whereas the existential
psychodynamic types
i would say are more interested in
development across
a single lifespan and
but but the evolutionary types dismiss
the psychodynamic types as overly
speculative
and devoid of empirical support for
their views
well they um you know they'll just say
these guys are talking shit if you'll
pardon the expression
and of course uh you can turn right
around and
say the same about the evolutionary
types that they are often and rightfully
criticized evolutionary psychologists
for what are called the just so stories
where it's like oh this is probably
why fill in the blank is potentially
adaptive and my thought
again early on was i didn't see any
um intrinsic antithesis
between these viewpoints i just found
them dialectically
compatible and uh very powerful when
combined
so one question i would ask here is um
about a science being speculative you
know we understand so a little about the
human mind
you said you picked up becker's book and
you know it felt like it was onto
something that's the same thing i felt
when i picked up becker's book uh
probably also
in my early 20s uh you know i read a lot
of philosophy but it felt like
the question of the meaning of life kind
of
you know this seemed to be the most uh
the closest to the truth somehow
it was on to something so i i guess the
question that i want to ask also is like
how speculative is psychology how like
all of your lives work
um how do you feel how confident do you
feel about the whole thing
about understanding our mind i feel
confidently unconfident to have it
both ways like what do we make of
psychology you want to make starting
with freud's
you know starting um just just our
or even just philosophy uh even
uh the aspects of uh the sciences
like uh you know my field of artificial
intelligence but also physics
you know it often feels like man we
don't really understand
most of what's going on here and
certainly that's true
with uh the human mind yeah well to me
that's the proper epistemological stance
i don't know anything well uh it's the
socratic
uh i know that i don't know which is the
first step
on the path to wisdom i i would argue
forcefully that we know a lot more
than we used to i would argue
equally forcefully uh not that i have a
phd in the philosophy of science but i i
believe that the
thomas coons of the world are right
when they point out that change is not
necessarily progress and
so on the one hand i i do think we know
a lot more
than we did back in the day when if you
wanted to fly you put on some wax wings
and
jumped off a mountain yeah on the other
hand
i think it's quite arrogant when
scientists i'll just speak about
psychological scientists um when
they have the audacity to mistake
statistical precision for
knowledge and insight
and when they make the mistake in my
estimation
that einstein bemoaned and that's this
idea
that the mere accumulation of data
uh will necessarily result in
conceptual breakthroughs and so i i like
the um well we're all i hope
appreciative of the people who trained
us but i remember my first day in
graduate school at the university of
kansas
uh they brought us into a room and on
one side of the board was a quote by
kurt lewin or levine famous german
uh social psychologist and there was
nothing and the quote is there's nothing
more useful than a good theory
and then on the other side was another
quote by german physicist his name
eludes me
and it was all theories are wrong and
i'm like
uh which is it and of course the point
is that it's both our theories
are i believe powerful ways to direct
our attention
to aspects of human affairs
that might render us
better able to understand ourselves in
the world around us
now i also as
an experimental psychologist i adhere to
the view
that theories are essentially hypothesis
generating devices and that at its best
science is a dialectical interplay where
you have theoretical assertions
that yield testable hypotheses
and that either results in the
corroboration of the theory
the rejection of it or the modification
thereafter if we look at the
existentialists
or even like uh modern philosopher
psychology types like jordan peterson
i'm not sure if you're familiar with it
i know jordan pretty well
we go way back actually if he were here
with us today we would
he would be jumping in and i believe
very interesting and important ways but
yeah we go back 30 years ago
he was uh basically saying our work
is nonsense let's get into this i'm sure
i'll talk to jordan
uh eventually on this thing yeah going
through some rough times right now
oh absolutely and i and i wish him well
um
jordan was working on his maps of
meaning
and we were publishing our work
and i i think jordan at the time
um was concerned about
our vague claims to the effect that
all meaning is arbitrary
he takes a more jungian
as well as evolutionary view that i
don't think is wrong by the way
which is that um there are certain
kinds of meanings
that are more important let's say
religious types and that we didn't pay
sufficient attention to that um
in our early days so uh can you try to
uh lose a day like what his world view
is because he's also a religious man
uh so what uh what was this what was uh
some of the interesting aspects of the
disagreements
that then yeah well back in the day i
just said you know jordan was a young
punk uh we were young
punks he was just kind of flailing in an
animated way at some conferences saying
that
um we you're still both kind of punks
yeah we are
kind of punks so i saw him three or four
years ago we spoke on a
it was an awesome day we were in canada
at uh the ontario shakespeare festival
where we were asked to be on a canadian
broadcast
system program i think we were talking
about macbeth
from a psychodynamic
perspective and i hadn't seen him in a
ton of years and we spent two days
together
had a great time you know we had just
written our book
uh the worm at the core and he's like
you know you you
you're missing a big opportunity every
time you say something
you have to have your phone yeah and you
have to film yourself
and then you have to put it on youtube
yeah uh he was onto something that uh
you know that
just as a small tangent yeah uh it's
it's almost sad to look at jordan
peterson somebody like yourself
after having done this podcast i've
realized that there is
really brilliant people in this world
and oftentimes
especially like when they're um
i mean it would love are a little bit
like punks that's right
they they kind of do their own thing and
like the world doesn't
know they exist as much as they should
and it's so interesting because most
people
are kind of boring
and then the interesting ones kind of go
on their own and there's not a
smartphone
that's that's so interesting he was on
to something that um
i mean it's interesting that he i don't
think he was thinking from a money
perspective
but he was probably thinking of like
connecting with people or sharing his
knowledge
but uh people don't often think that way
that's right so
maybe we can try to get back to you're
both brilliant
people and i'd love to get some
interesting disagreements
earlier and later about in your
psychological work in your world views
well our disagreements
today would be uh
along two dimensions uh one is he is
and again i wish he was here to correct
me
yes um when i say that he is
more committed to
the virtues of the judeo-christian
tradition
particularly christianity and in a sense
is a
contemporary kierkegaard of sorts when
he's saying there's only one
way to leap into faith
and i would take ardent issue with that
claim on the grounds that that is
one but by no means not the
only way uh to
find meaning and value in life and so
and i see his what's his warm at the
core
what is like uh so we're talking about a
little bit of a higher level of
discovering meaning yeah what's his uh
what does he make of death oh i don't
know and this is
where it would be nice to uh have him
here
he has you know from a distance
criticized our work as misguided having
said that though when we were together
he said something along the lines that
there is no
theoretical body of work in academic
psychology
right now for which there is more
empirical evidence
and so i i appreciated that he's a great
uh
researcher he's a good clinician the
other thing that we will agree
to disagree about uh rather vociferously
is ultimately political
slash economic so i remember being at
dinner with him
telling him that the next book that i
wanted to write
was going to be called why left and
right or both beside the point
and my argument was going to be and it
is going to be that both liberal and
political liberal and conservative
political philosophy
are each intellectually and morally
bankrupt because they're
both framed in terms of assumptions
about human nature that are demonstrably
false
and jordan didn't mind me uh knocking
liberal political philosophy on those
grounds that would basically be like
stephen pinker's
blank slate but he took issue
when i pointed out that
actually it's conservative political
philosophy
which starts with john locke's
assumption that in a state of nature
there are no societies just
autonomous individuals who
are striving for survival
that's one of the most obviously
patently wrong assertions in the history
of intellectual thought and locke uses
that to justify
his claims about the individual right to
acquire
unlimited amounts of property which is
ultimately
uh the justification for neo-liberal
economics and can you look around a
little bit
uh what's the uh can you describe his
philosophy again
as view of the world sure and what uh
uh neoliberal economics is yeah let me
translate it in english so basically all
all these days anybody who says i'm a
i i'm a conservative free-market type
you're following john locke and adam
smith
whether you're aware of it or not so
here's john locke
who by the way all of these guys are
great so
for me to appear to criticize any of
these folks it is with the highest
regard
and also we need to understand in my
estimation
how important their ideas are lock is
working in a time
where all rule was top down by
divine right and he's trying desperately
to come up
with a philosophical justification to
shift power and autonomy
to individuals and
he starts in his second treatise on
government 1690 or so
he he just he says okay let's start with
a state of nature
and he's like in a state of nature
there's no societies
there's just individuals and
in a perfect universe there wouldn't be
any societies
there would just be individuals who by
the law of nature have a right to
survive
and uh in the service of survival
they have the right to acquire and
preserve
the fruits of their own labor uh um
but his point is and it's actually a
good one you know he's following hobbs
here
he's like well the problem with that is
that people are assholes
and um if they would let each other
alone
then we would still be living in a state
of nature everybody
just doing what they did to get by each
day
but it's a whole lot easier you know if
i see like an
apple tree a mile away well i can go
over and pick an
apple but if you're 10 meters away with
an apple in your hand it's a lot easier
if i
pick up a rock and crack your head and
take the apple
and his point was that
the problem is that people can't be
counted on to behave
they will they will take each other's
property
moreover he argued
if someone takes your property you have
the right
to you have the right to retribution
in proportion to the degree of the
magnitude of the transgression
english translation if i take your apple
you have the right to take an apple back
you don't have the right to kill my
firstborn
but people being people they're apt to
escalate retaliatory behavior thus
creating
what law called a state of war so he
said
in order to avoid a state of war people
reluctantly give up
their freedom in exchange for security
they agree to obey the law and that the
sole function of government
is to keep domestic tranquility and to
ward off foreign evasion
in order to protect our right to
property
all right so now here's the okay
property thing
all right so uh lock says
if you look in the bible and in nature
there is no
private property um
but lock says well surely
you if there's anything that you own
it's your body
and surely you have a right by nature
to stay alive and then by extension
anything that you do where you exert
effort or labor that becomes your
private property
so back to the apple tree if i walk over
to an apple tree
that's everybody's apples until i pick
one
and the minute i do that is my apple
right and then he says you can have as
many apples as you want
as long as you don't waste them and as
long as you don't
impinge on somebody else's right
to get apples right so far so good yep
and then he says
well okay
in the early days you you could only eat
so many apples and or you could only
trade so many apples with somebody else
so he was like well if you put a fence
around
a bunch of apple trees those become your
apples that's your
property if somebody else wants to put a
fence around nebraska
that's their property
and everybody can have as much property
as they want
because the world is so big
that there is no limit to what you can
have
if you pursue it by virtue of your own
effort
but then he says money came into the
picture
and this is important because it's a he
noticed
long before anybody before the freud's
of the world
that money is funky because it has no
intrinsic value
he's like ooh look at that shiny piece
of metal
that actually has if you're hungry
and you have a choice between a carrot
and a lump of gold in the desert most
people are going to go for the carrot
but his point is is that uh the allure
of money
is that it's basically a concentrated
symbol
of wealth but because it doesn't spoil
locke said you're entitled to have as
much money
as you're able to garner right
then he says well the reality is
is that some people are more the word
that he used was industrious
he said some people more industrious
than others
all right today we would say smarter
less lazy
more ambitious he just said that's
natural it's also true
therefore he argued uh over time
some people are gonna have a whole lot
of property
and other people not much at all
inequality for luck
is natural and beneficial
for everyone his argument was that you
know the rising tide lifts all boats
and that the truly creative and
innovative
are entitled to relatively unlimited
worth because we're all better off
as a result so the point very
simply is that well that's basically and
then you have adam smith the you know
in the next century with the invisible
hand where adam smith says
everyone pursuing their own selfish
that's not
necessarily pejorative if everyone
pursues their own
selfish interests we will all be better
off as a result and what do you think is
the flawed in that way
well there's two flaws one is is that um
well one flaw is
first of all that that it is based on an
erroneous assumption to begin with which
is that there never was a time in human
history when we were in a social
species in a sense you don't feel like
that where there's uh
this emphasis of uh individual autonomy
is a flawed premise like where there's a
there's something
fundamentally deeply uh interconnected
between us i do
i think that plato and socrates uh
you know in the crito were closer to the
truth
uh when they started with the assumption
that we were
interdependent and they derived
individual
autonomy as a manifestation of a
functional
social system that's fascinating so when
margaret thatcher
you're too young uh you know in the
1980s she said societies
there's no such thing as societies
there's just
individuals pursuing their self-interest
so uh so that's one point where i would
take issue respectfully with john locke
point number two
is when locke says in 1690 well
england's filled up um
so if you want some land just go to
america it's empty
or maybe there's a few savages there
just kill them
so and and melville does the same thing
in moby dick where he
he thinks about will there ever come a
time where we run out of whales
and he says no but we have run out of
whales
and so locke was right maybe
in 1690 that the world was large
and had infinite resources he's
certainly
wronged today in in my opinion
also wrong is the claim uh
that the unlimited pursuit of personal
wealth does not harm those around us
there is no doubt
uh that radical inequality is tragic
psychologically and physically it's
poverty is not that terrible it's easy
for me to say because i have a place to
stay and something to eat
but as long as you're not starving and
have a place to be poverty's not as
challenging as being having the
impoverished and close
proximity to those who are obscenely
wealthy
so it's not the any absolute measure of
your well-being it's the inequality of
that well-being
is quite frantically painful um so maybe
just to uh link on the jordan peterson
thing
in terms of your uh disagreement on his
worldview so he went
through quite a bit it you know there's
been quite a bit of fire right in
in his defense or maybe his opposition
of the idea of equality of outcomes
so looking at the inequality that's in
our world
looking at you know certain groups
measurably having an outcome that's
different than other groups
and then drawing conclusions about
fundamental
uh unfairness injustice inequality in
the system so like
systematic racism systematic sexism
systematic anything else that creates
inequality
and he's been kind of uh saying pretty
simple things
uh to say that uh you know the system
for the most part
is not broken or flawed yeah
that the inequalities part the um the
inequality of outcomes as part of our
world
what we should strive for is the uh you
know equality of opportunity yeah and i
i
do not dispute that as an abstraction
but again to back up for a second i i do
take issue with jordan's
uh fervent devotion to the free market
and his cavalier dismissal of
marxist ideas which he has uh
in my estimation uh mischaracterized
in his public depictions let's get into
it so he he just seems to
really not like um uh socialism marxism
communism
yeah uh historically speaking sort of
uh i mean how would i characterize it
i'm not exactly sure
i don't want to again he's yeah he'll
eventually be here to defend himself
john locke unfortunately not here to
defend exactly
but what's what's your sense uh about
marxism and and uh the
uh the way jordan talks about the way
you think about it
from the economics from the
philosophical perspective yeah well like
if we were all here together i'd say we
need to start
with marx's economic and philosophical
manuscripts of 1844
before marx became more of a polemicist
and i would argue that marx's
political philosophy he's a crappy
economist i don't
dispute that but his arguments about
human nature
his arguments about the inevitably
catastrophic
psychological and environmental
and economic effects of capitalism i
would argue
every one of those has proven quite
right
marx maybe did not have the answer
but he saw in the
18 whenever he was writing um
that inevitably capitalism
um would lead to massive inequity
that it was ultimately
based on uh the need to denigrate
and dehumanize labor to render them in
his language a fleshy cog
in a giant machine and that
it would create a tension and conflict
between those who own
things and those who made things
that over time would always you know the
thomas pickerty guy who writes about
capital
and just makes the point that return on
investment will always be greater
than wages that means the people with
money are going to have a lot more
that means there's going to come a point
where the economic house of cards
falls apart now the joseph shumpters of
the world they're like that's creative
destruction
bring it that's great so i think it's
niles ferguson
he was he's a historian he may be at
stanford now he was at harvard
you know he writes about the history of
money and he's like
yeah there's been 20 or whatever
depressions and big recessions
uh in the last several hundred years and
when that happens half of the population
or
whatever is catastrophically
inconvenienced
but that's the price that we pay
for progress other people would argue
and i
would agree with them
that i will happily sacrifice
the rate of progress in order to flatten
the curve
of economic destruction to put that in
plainer english um i
would um direct our attention
to the social democracies that
forgetting for the moment of whether
it's possible
to do this on a scale in a country as
big
as ours on all of the things that
really matter you know gross domestic
gdp
or whatever that's just an abstraction
but when you look at
whatever the united nations says how we
measure
quality of life uh you know life
expectancy
education you know rates of alcoholism
suicide
and so on the countries that do better
are the mixed economies they're market
economies
that have high tax rates in exchange
for the provision of services that
come as a right for citizens yeah so i
mean i guess the question is
you've kind of mentioned that uh you
know like as marx described a capitalism
with a slippery slope eventually things
go awry in some kind of way so that's
the question is when you have when you
implement a system yeah how does it go
wrong eventually
you know the you know eventually we'll
all be dead that's exactly right
no no no that's right so
and then the criticism i mean i think
these days uh unfortunately marxism as
like
is a dirty word i i say unfortunately
because even if you
disagree with the philosophy it should
you should
uh like calling somebody a marxist yeah
should not be a thing that uh shuts down
all conversation
no that's right and and the fact is i'm
sympathetic
with uh jordan's dismissal of the folks
and
popular the talking heads these days who
spew
marxist words um
to me it's like fashionable nonsense do
you know that book that the physicist
wrote
mocking uh you're too young so in the uh
20 or so years we're all pretty young
really yeah that's right but they're i
think they're with these nyu physicists
they wrote a paper just mocking the uh
kind of literary uh post-modern types
you know yes oh those kinds of yeah yeah
it was just nonsense and of course it
was made the lead article
um and and you know my poor is marx
wouldn't be a marxist
true i've read and listened to some of
the work of
uh richard wolff he speaks pretty
eloquently about marxism i like him
uh he's uh one of the only uh
you know one of the only people speaking
about a lot about marxism and the way we
are now
in in a serious way in it in a sort of
saying you know uh what are the flaws of
capitalism
not saying like yeah basically sounding
very different and people should check
out his work
no i it's all this kind of work this
kind of
outrage mob culture
of uh sort of demanding equality
equality of outcome
that's not marxism it is not marxism he
he didn't say that you know he literally
said each
what was it like each according to their
needs and each according to their
abilities or something like that
so the question is the implementation
like absolutely humans are messy so how
does it go wrong
like it just met there you go brilliant
it's
messy and this gets back to my rant
about
the book that i want to try if i don't
stroke out why left and right
are both beside the point you know the
the
people conservatives are
right when they condemn liberals
for being simple-minded by assuming that
a modification of external conditions
will yield
changes in human nature you know
you know again that's where marx and
skinner are
odd bedfellows you know here they are
just saying oh
let's change the surroundings and
things will inevitably get better on the
other hand
when um conservatives
say that people are innately
selfish and they use that as the
justification for glorifying
the unbridled pursuit of wealth well
they're only half right
because it turns out that we can be
innately selfish
but we are also innately generous
and reciprocating creatures there's
remarkable studies i think they've been
done at yale
of you know babies 14 month old babies
um if someone hands them a toy
and then wants something in return
babies before they can walk and talk
will reciprocate
all right fine if
someone if they want a toy let's say or
a bottle of water
baby wants a bottle of water and
i look like i'm trying to give it to the
baby
but i dropped the bottle so the baby
doesn't get what she or he wanted
when given a chance to reciprocate
little babies will reciprocate
because they're aware of and are
responding to intention
similarly if they see somebody
um behaving unfairly to to someone
they will not help that person in return
so so my point is is yeah we are
selfish creatures at times
but we are also simultaneously
uber social creatures who are
eager to reciprocate and in fact we're
congenitally prepared to be
reciprocators to the point where
uh we will reciprocate on the basis of
intentions
above and beyond what actually happened
how so
i mean your work is on the fundamental
role of the fear of mortality yeah
in ourselves how fundamental is this
reciprocation this human connection to
other
humans well i think it's really innate
yeah i think it's because
yeah bats reciprocate uh not by
intention but
uh you know this i'm going here from
richard dawkins
uh the selfish gene you know to
i love the early dawkins i'm less
enamored
like the early beat yeah no no again i
say this
with great respect but uh you know
dawkins
just points out that uh you know
reciprocation is
just fundamental cooperation is
fundamental you know it is the it's a
one-sided view
of evolutionary takes on thanks when we
see it solely in terms of individual
competition
it's it's almost from a game theoretic
perspective too it's just easier to see
the world that way
it's it's easier to i don't know i i
mean you see this in physics uh
there's a whole field of folks like
complexity yeah
that kind of embrace the fact that it's
all an intricately connected mess
and it's just very difficult to do
anything uh with that kind of science
but it seems to be much closer to
actually representing what the world is
like
so like you put it earlier lex it's
messy
so yeah left and right you mentioned
you're thinking of maybe actually
putting
it down on paper or something yeah i
would like to because what i would
what i would like to point out again in
admiration of all the people that i will
then
try and have the gall to criticize this
look these are all geniuses
um lock genius adam smith
genius when he uses the notion that
we're bartering
creatures so he uses that reciprocation
idea
as the basis of his way of thinking
about things but that's not at the core
the murdering is not at the core of
human nature it's not a well
he says it is he says we're
fundamentally bartering creatures
well that doesn't even make sense then
because then what how
how can we then be autonomous
individuals
well because we're going to barter with
an eye on on on for self
for ourselves self yeah but all right so
but back to adam smith for a second lex
is like adam smith here's he's got the
invisible hand
and my conservative friends i'm like you
need to read
his books because he is a big fan
of the free market and this is my other
uh gripe with folks who support
just unbridled markets adam smith
understood that there was a role for
government for two reasons
one is is that just like locke people
are not going to behave with integrity
and he understood that one role of
government
is to maintain a proverbial
you know even playing field and
then the other thing smith said was that
there's some things that can't be done
well for a profit
and i believe he talked about education
and public health
and infrastructure as things that are
best done by governments
uh because you can't you can make a
profit but that doesn't mean that the
institutions themselves will be
maximally beneficial
yeah so i i would uh i'm just eager
to engage people by saying
let's start with our most contemporary
understanding
of human nature which is
that we are both selfish and
tend to cooperate and
we also can be heroically
helpful to folks
in our own tribe and
of course how you define one's tribe
becomes critically important but what
some people say
is look we let what would then be
what kind of political institutions and
what kind of economic organization
can we think about to kind of hit that
sweet spot
and that that would be in my opinion uh
how do we maximize individual autonomy
in a way that fosters uh
creativity and innovation and the
self-regard that comes from
creative expression while
engaging our more cooperative
and reciprocal tendencies
in order to come up with a system that
is potentially stable over time because
the other thing about
all capital-based systems is the
stability
is it fundamentally and unstable yeah
because it's based on infinite growth
and you know it's a positive feedback
loop uh to be silly infinite growth is
only good for
malignant cancer cells and compound
interest
otherwise uh you know we want to seek a
steady state
and um that would be you know so when
stephen pinker writes for example again
great scholar but i'm gonna disagree
when he says the world
has never been better and all we need to
do
is keep making stuff and buying stuff
so your sense is the world
sort of in disagreement with stephen
pinker that the world is
um like facing a potential catastrophic
collapse in multiple directions
yes and the fact that there are certain
like the
the rate of violence and aggregate is
decreasing the
death you know the quality of life all
those kinds of measures that you can
plot across centuries that it's
improving that doesn't capture the fact
that our world might be this
we might destroy ourselves in very
painful ways
uh in the in the in the next century so
i'm with jared diamond
you know in the book collapse where he
points out
studying um the collapse of major
civilizations that it
often happens right after things appear
to never have been better
and in that regard i mean there are more
uh known voices that have taken issue
uh with uh dr pinker i'm thinking of
john gray who's a british philosopher
and
here in the states i don't know where he
is these days but robert j
lifton the psycho historian yeah they're
both
of my view and which i hope is
by the way wrong uh me too yeah no
but you know between um
you know ongoing ethnic tensions
environmental degradation economic
instability
and the fact that you know the world has
become a petri dish of psychopathology
like what what really worries me is the
the quiet economic pain that people are
going through the
businesses that are closed your dreams
that are broken because
you can no longer do the thing that
you've wanted to do and how
i mentioned to you off camera that i've
been reading uh
the the rise and fall of the third reich
and
i mean the amount
of anger and hatred
and on the flip side of that sort of
nationalist pride that can arise from
deep economic pain like what happens
with
economic pain is you become bitter yeah
you start to find
the other whether it's other european
nations that mistreated you
whether it's other groups that
mistreated you it always ends up being
the jews
uh somehow somehow our fault here yep
that's what worries me is where this
quiet anger and pain goes
in 2021 2022 2030.
if you look no sorry i'm sorry to see
the parallels no no no
rise and fall the third reich but you
know what happens 10
15 years from now from what's because of
the coved
pandemic yeah that's happening now and
lex you make a
i think a really profoundly important
point you know back to our work for
a bitter ernest becker rather you know
his point is
is that the way that we manage
existential terror
is to embrace culturally constructed
belief
systems that give us a sense that life
has meaning that we have value
and in the form of self-esteem which we
get from perceiving that we meet or
exceed the expectations associated with
the role that we
play in society well here we are right
now
in a world where first of all if you
have nothing you are nothing
and secondly as you were saying before
we got started today
a lot of jobs are gone and they're not
coming back
and that's the where the self-esteem
that's where the self-esteem and
identity come in
where people it's not only that you
don't have anything to eat
you don't even have a self anymore to
speak of
because the we typically define
ourselves you know as marx put it you
are what you do
and now who are you when
your way of life as well as your way of
earning a living is no longer available
yeah and it feels like that uh yearning
for self-esteem that we could talk a
little bit more because sure
you about defining self-esteem is
quite interesting the more i've read so
warm with the core and just
in general you're thinking
it made me realize i haven't thought
enough about the idea of self-esteem but
the thing i want to say is uh it feels
like when you lose your job
then it's easy to find it's
it's tempting to find that self-esteem
in a tribe
that's not somehow often positive
that's exactly it's like a tribe that
defines itself on the hatred of somebody
else so that's brilliant and
and this is what john gray the
philosopher
in the 1990s he predicted what's
happening today
he wrote a book about globalism and
actually hannah arendt
in the 1950s said the same thing in her
book about totalitarianism
when she said that you know that
economics has reached the point where
most money is made not by actually
making stuff
you know you use money to make money
and that uh therefore
what happens is money chases money
across national boundaries
ultimately governments become
subordinate
to the corporate entities whose sole
function is to generate money
and what john gray said is that that
will inevitably
produce economic upheaval in
local areas which
will not be attributed to
the economic order it will be
misattributed
to who whoever the scapegoat du jour
is and the anger what
and the distress associated with that
uncertainty uh will be picked up on
by ideological demagogues who will
transform that
into rage so both hannah aren't as well
as john gray
they they just said uh watch out
we're gonna have right-wingish populist
movements uh where demagogues
who are the alchemists of hate what
makes them brilliant
is they don't they don't the hate's
already there
but they take the fears and they
expertly redirect them to who it is that
i need to hate and kill in order to feel
good about myself so back to your point
lex that's right
so the self-regard that used to come
from having a job and doing it well
and as a result of that having adequate
resources to provide a decent life for
your family
well those opportunities are gone
and yeah what's left so max weber
german sociologist at the beginning of
the 20th century
um he said in times of historical
upheaval
um we are apt to embrace he was the one
who coined the term charismatic leader
right
seemingly larger than life individuals
who often believe or their followers
believe are divinely ordained to rid the
world of evil
yeah all right now ernest becker he used
weber's ideas in order to account
for the rise of hitler hitler was
elected
and he was elected when germans were an
extraordinary
state of existential distress
and he said i'm going to make germany
great again all right now what becker
adds
to the equation is his claim that what
underlies our affection for
charismatic populist leaders good and
bad
is death anxiety all right now here's
where we come in
where egghead experimental
researchers you know becker wrote this
book the denial of death and he couldn't
get a job
people just dismissed these ideas as
fanciful speculation
for which there's no evidence and
and you've done some good experiments
yeah and here's where
here's where i can be more cavalier and
where what i would urge
people i like what you said lex is
ignore
my histrionic and polemic language
if possible and step back
if you can myself included and let's
just consider
the the research findings because
uh in september 11 2001
people that are old enough to remember
that
horrible day two days before
um george w bush had the lowest approval
rating in the history of presidential
polling
right three weeks later after he said we
will rid the world of the evildoers
and then a week or two after that he
said in a cover story on time magazine
that he believed that god had chosen him
to lead the world during this
to lead the country rather during this
perilous time
he had the highest approval rating and
so
we're like well what happened you know
is what happened
to americans that their approval of
president bush
got so high so fast well our view
following becker is that 2001 was like a
giant death reminder yeah the people
dying
plus the symbols of american greatness
world trade center
and and the the pentagon so we did a
bunch of experiments and most of our
experiments are disarmingly simple we
have one group of people
and we just remind them that they're
going to die we say hey write
your thoughts and feelings about dying
or in other cases we stop
them outside either in front of a
funeral home
or a hundred meters to either side our
thought being that if we stop you in
front of a
funeral home then death is on your mind
even if you don't know it
and then there's other studies that are
even more subtle where we bring people
into the lab
and they read stuff on a computer
and while they're doing that we flash
the word death
for 28 milliseconds it's so fast you
don't see anything
and then we just measure people's
reactions
or behavior thereafter so what we found
in 2003
leading up to the election of 2004
was that americans did not care for
president
bush or his policies in iraq
in controlled conditions but if we
reminded them of their
mortality first they like bush a lot
more
so in every study that we did americans
like
john kerry who was running against bush
they like carrie more than bush
in a control condition yeah and but if
if they were reminded of death
first then they like bush a lot more
so by the way just a small pause you
said they're disseminally simple
experiments
i think that's um and people should read
uh
warm at the core for some other
descriptions you have a lot of
different experiences of this nature i
think it's a brilliant
experiment um connected to the stoics
perhaps
of uh how your world view on anything
and how delicious that water tastes
yes after you're reminded of your own
mortality it's such a fascinating
experiment
that you could probably keep doing like
millions of them
to uh draw insight about
the way we see the world no that's right
lex and i appreciate the
compliment not because we did anything
but because what these studies many of
which are now done
by other people around the world in labs
that we're not connected with what i'm
most proud about our work i am proud of
the
experiments that we've done but it's not
science until
somebody else can replicate your
findings and independent researchers
are interested in in pursuing them i
it's such a fascinating idea i don't
have to think about a lot about the
experiments you've done
and that you've inspired about the fact
that death changes the way you see
a bunch of different things uh the i
think the stoics
talked about the uh i mean in general
just memento mori like
just thinking about death and meditating
on death
is a really positive not a positive
it's an enlightening way
to uh live life so what do you think
about that
at the uh and the individual level like
what is the role about
being bringing that terror of death fear
of death to the surface
and being cognizant of it for us that's
the
that's the ball game um so
what we write in our book and here we're
just
um paying homage to the philosophers and
theologians that come before us is to
point out that literally
since antiquity um there
has been a consensus that
to lead a full life requires
um albert camus said come to terms with
death
thereafter anything is possible
and so you've got the the stoics and you
got the
epicureans and then you got the tibetan
book of the
dead and then you got like the medieval
monks that
you know worked with like a skull uh on
their desk
and the whole idea i should back up a
bit because and just remind folks that
our studies you know when we remind
people that they're going to die
and we find that yeah they drink more
water if a famous person
um is is you know advertising it
uh they eat more cookies they
want more fancy clothes they sit closer
to people that look like them
it changes who they vote for but all of
those things
those are very subtle death reminders
you don't even know that death is on
your mind
and so our point is is that and this is
kind of counterintuitive and that is
that
the most problematic and unsavory
human reactions to death anxiety
are malignant manifestations of
repressed
death anxiety you know we try and bury
it under the psychological bushes and
then it comes back to bear bitter fruit
but what the theologians and the
philosophers of the world
are saying is it behooves each of us
to spend considerable time you don't
have to be a goth
death rocker you know wallowing in death
imagery
to spend enough time
entertaining the reality of the human
condition which is that
you too will pass to get to the point
well where there is
to lapse into a cliche the capacity for
personal transformation
and growth let's go personal for a
second
uh are you yourself
afraid of death yeah um
i mean and how much do you meditate on
that thought like
uh maybe your own study of it
is a kind of escape from your own
mortality absolutely lex
so you got it and like if you figure out
death somehow you won't die
so no no uh so my my colleagues and
good friends jeff greenberg and tom
pozinski you know we met in graduate
school in the 1970s we've been doing
this work for
40 years and we cheerfully admit
even though it doesn't reflect well
on us as humans that i should just speak
for myself but
i i feel like there's a real sense in
which
doing these studies and writing books
and and
lecturing has been my way
of avoiding directly confronting my
anxieties by
turning it into an intellectual exercise
and um and every once in a while
therefore when i think that i'm making
some progress as a human
i have to remind myself that uh
that is probably not the case
um and that i have at times like all
humans
been more preoccupied with the
implications of these ideas for my
self-esteem
uh it's like oh we're going to write a
book and maybe
we'll get to go on tv or something
well no that's not the same as
to actually think about it
in a way that you feel it rather than
just think it yeah no you did when you
were eight
that's exactly right so when i first
read the denial of death
i i was so literally flabbergasted by it
that i took a leave of absence for a
year
and just like did what would be
considered menial jobs i i did
construction work
i worked in a restaurant and
i i was just like wait a minute
if if i if i understand what this guy is
saying
then i'm just a culturally constructed
meat
puppet doing things for reasons that i
know
not yeah in order to assuage death
anxiety
and that's like that that that's not
acceptable
maybe another interesting person to talk
about is ernest becker himself
sure so how did he
face his death is there
something interesting personal i think
so
so interesting to me
is becker also from a jewish family
claimed to be atheistic
did not identify ultimately as jewish i
believe he converted
to christianity but was himself
a religious person and he said he became
religious
when his first child was born now
religious
what does that mean does he have a faith
and well let's talk more most
importantly is the afterlife
he was his view on the afterlife he was
uh agnostic
on that but he did um now the denial of
death
is um there's a chapter
devoted to kierkegaard and
he talks about for kierkegaard
um if you want to become a mature
individual you know if you want to learn
something you go to
the university if you want to become a
more
mature individual according to
kierkegaard you got to go to the unit
you got to go to the school of anxiety
and what kierkegaard said is that we
have to let this
vague dis ease put a hyphen between dis
and ease about death kierkegaard's point
is
you have to really
think about that you have to think about
it and feel it you got to
let it seek in or seep into
your mind at which point
according to kierkegaard basically
you realize that your present
identity is fundamentally a cultural
construction
you didn't choose the time and place of
your birth you didn't choose your name
uh you know you didn't choose
necessarily
even the social role that you occupy you
might have chosen
from what's available in your culture
but not from the full palette
of human opportunities and so what
kierkegaard said is that
we need to realize that
we've been living a lie of sorts
becker calls it a necessary lie
and and we have to momentarily
dispose of that and so now kierkegaard
says well here i am
i i have shrugged off
all of the cultural accoutrements that i
have used
uh to define myself
and now what am i or who am i this is
like the ancient greek tragedy where the
worst thing was to be
no one or no thing
all right at this point kierkegaard said
you're really dangling on the precipice
of oblivion and some people tumble into
that abyss
and never come out on the other hand
kierkegaard said that what you can now
do metaphorically and literally is to
rebuild yourself from the ground up
and there's a in the new testament
there's something you have to die in
order to be reborn
and kierkegaard's view though is that
there's only one way to do that this is
his proverbial
leap into faith and in kierkegaard's
case it was faith and christianity
that you can't have unbridled faith and
cultural constructions
the only thing that you can have
unequivocal
faith in is some kind of transcendent
power all right but of course
this raises the question of well is that
just another death-denying belief system
right and at the end of the denial of
death
becker admits that there's no way to
tell
while still advocating for what is
ultimately a religious stance
now one of the things that i don't
understand and i
becker has been the the most singularly
potent influence
in my academic and personal life but a
year or two ago
i i started reading uh martin heidegger
i'm reading being in time and
what i now wonder is why
um why becker who refers to heidegger
from time to time in his work
why he didn't take heidegger more
seriously because heidegger
has this is like a secular kierkegaard
he's he has the same thing which is
death anxiety
oh and i should have pointed out that
what kierkegaard says is that
death anxiety most people don't go to
the school of anxiety
they flee from death anxiety
by embracing their cultural beliefs
kierkegaard says they then tranquilize
themselves with the trivial
and i love that phrase it's a beautiful
phrase because at the end of the denial
of death backers like look the average
american
is either drinking or shopping or
watching television and
they're all the same thing right
heidegger says the same thing
he says look and he acknowledges
kierkegaard
he says what makes us feel unsettled
and evidently that's an english
translation of angst
that that it's we don't feel at home
in the world heidegger says that's
death anxiety and one direction
is the the kierkegaard one he heidegger
calls it a flight from death
you just unself reflexively cling to
your cultural constructions
and heidegger borrows the term
tranquilized but he points out that
he doesn't care for that term because
tranquilized
sounds like you're subdued when in fact
what most
culturally constructed meat puppets do
is to be
frenetically engaged with their
surroundings to ensure that they never
sit still long enough
to actually think about anything
consequential
heidegger says there's another way
though he's like yo
what you can do is to come to terms with
that death anxiety
in the following way thing number one
is to realize that not only
are you going to die but your death can
happen
at any given moment so for heidegger if
you say i know i'm going to die in some
vaguely unspecified future moment
that's still death denial because you're
saying yeah
not me not now yeah heidegger's point is
you need to get to the point where
you need to realize that uh you know i
need to realize
that i can walk outside and
get smote by a comet or i can stop for
gas on the way home and
catch the virus and be dead in two days
there were any number
of potentially unanticipated and
uncontrollable fatal outcomes but
by the way sorry uh uh to bring into the
now
yeah it is brilliant i agree lex and
this is why i'm i'm
i'm wondering why didn't becker notice
this because that's the being
and time thing is it's got to be now
right and then he says so okay so now
i've dealt
somewhat uh with the the
death part and now he says
now you've got to deal with what he
calls existential guilt
and he says well all right what you have
to
you have to realize that
like it or not you have to make choices
you know this is jean-paul sartre we are
condemned by virtue of consciousness
to choosing but heidegger is a little
bit more precise he's like
look as i was saying earlier
you're in reality you're an
insignificant speck of respiring
carbon-based dust borne into a time and
place not of your
choosing when you're here for a
microscopic amount of time
after which you are not
and for heidegger
you have to realize that
like i said i didn't choose to be born a
male
or jewish or in america
the offspring of working class people
and heidegger what he says is yeah
but you still have to make choices and
accept
responsibility for those choices
even though you didn't choose any of the
parameters that ultimately
limit what's available to you and
moreover you're going to not always make
good choices so now you're you're guilty
for your choices and then
he uses the the poet uh rilka
he has a phrase becker uses it in the
denial of death
the guilt of unlived life i just
love that you have to accept
that you have already diminished
and in many ways amputated your own
possibilities
by virtue of choices that you've made or
just as often have declined to make
uh because you are reluctant to accept
responsibility
for uh for the opportunities that
you are now able to create by virtue
of seeing the possibilities that lay
before you
so anyway heidegger then says look okay
so uh you know i'm a professor
and i live in america in the 21st
century
well if i was in the third century
living in a year
in mongolia i'm not going to have an
opportunity
to be a professor but
what he submits is that there is some
aspects of whatever i am
that are independent of my cultural and
historical circumstances
in other words there is a me of sorts
heidegger would take vigorous issues
so would heidegger scholars because i'm
not claiming to understand him this is
my classic comic book rendering
but heidegger's point is that you get to
the point where you're able to
say okay
i am a contingent historical
and cultural artifact
but so what you know if i was
you know now if i was transported a
thousand years in the past
in asia i'd be in the same situation i
would still be conditioned
by time and place i would still have
choices that i could make
within the confines of what
opportunities
are afforded to me and then heidegger
says
if i can get that far in
this is his language he says that there
is a transformation
and he literally he calls it a turning
you're turning away from
a flight from death and you are allowed
you
therefore you see a horizon
as his word of opportunity
that makes you
in a state of anticipatory resoluteness
with solicitous regard for others
that makes your life seem like
an adventure perfused with unshakable
joy
all right let me unpack those things it
is beautiful it is i love lex that
you're resonating to the time
thing so he's like okay we already
talked about now
anticipatory is is already hopeful
because it's looking forward yeah right
to be
resolute it it means to be steadfast
and and to just have confidence in
what you're doing moving forward all
right
solicitous i had to look up all these
words by the way is
it just means that you are concerned
about your fellow human beings
and but i love the idea
uh even if it seems allegorical i don't
mind that at all
this idea you said love earlier and i
think that when
heidegger is talking about being
solicitous
that's as close as he can get uh there's
an
italian yes uh sergeant job well so what
was that line again with the solicitors
of that
okay
all the words you said are just
beautiful i love those words yeah
anticipatory resoluteness that is
accompanied with
solicitous regard to our fellow humans
which
makes life appear to us to be
an ongoing adventure that is
permeated by unshakeable joy
now again heidegger is not mary poppins
this guy's got a tattoo uh no this
is great i i just love that exact quote
no
i'm piecing together these are his exact
words
that and i spent the last two years
reading almost everything
that i can find because i want to i'm
sick of death
you said it so i want to second what you
say lex
so it's not about death it's the
sherwood
anderson guy he's a novelist that i like
about uh
he wrote a book called winesburg ohio
and uh now i'm going to forget what he
said on his tombstone
but you know it was something to the
effect oh he said
life not death is the great adventure
the the point being is that you know
to consider that we must die
and the existential implications of that
really the goal the way i see it
is getting from hate to to love
yeah and i feel like heidegger
has a way of thinking about things that
moves us more
in that direction and so that's kind of
my
current preoccupation is to take what i
just said to you and
to talk about it with my colleagues and
other academic psychologists because
the way we started with ernest becker
remember i said earlier i wasn't trained
in any of these things i'm an egghead
researcher that was doing experiments
about biofeedback
and you know then we read these becker
books and
i thought they were so interesting that
for the first few years we didn't have
any studies
i just would travel around and i'd be
like here's what this becker guy says i
think this is cool
well my my present view is i'm like
here's what this heidegger guy says
i i think these ideas
are consistent with what becker is
saying because they are anchored in
death anxiety
but i like that direction
as an alternative to
the kierkegaardian insistence that the
only psychologically tenable way
to extricate ourselves uh from
uh maladaptive reactions to death
anxiety is through
faith in the traditional sense yeah i i
always kind of uh saw kierkegaard
unfairly like you said
in a comic book sense uh of the word
faith as a non-traditional sense i kind
of like the idea of leap of faith oh i
love that idea
and so what i've been babbling about
with you know kierkegaard
or heidegger you know i'm like yeah
kierkegaard is a leap of faith
in god heidegger is a leap of faith
in life and i i just yeah i like it
i found the leap of faith really
interesting and
so in the technological space so of um
i've i've talked to on this thing with
elon musk but i think he's also just in
general for our culture a really
important figure oh absolutely that
takes uh
i mean he's sometimes a little bit
insane on on
social media and just in life
when i met him was kind of interesting
that uh of course there's a i mean he's
a legit engineer so he's fun to talk to
about the technical things yeah
but he also just just the way
the humor and the way he sees life
it just like refuses to be conventional
yeah so it's a constant uh
leap into the unknown and one of the
things
that he does and this doesn't even this
isn't even like
fake a lot of people say because he's a
ceo there's a business owner so
he's trying to make money no i think
this is this is as i
looked him in in his eyes i mean this is
real
is a lot of the things he believes that
are going to be accomplished that a lot
of others are saying
are impossible like autonomous vehicles
he truly believes it
to me that is the leap of faith of on
what was going like
we're like the the entirety of our
experience is shrouded in mystery yeah
we don't know what the hell's gonna
happen
what you don't know what we're actually
capable of as human beings and he just
takes the leap
he fully believes that we can you know
we can go to
we can colonize mars i mean how could
how crazy is it to just believe
and dream and actually be taking steps
towards it yeah um to colonizing mars
when most people are like that's the
stupidest idea ever
yeah well i'm i'm in agreement with you
on that um
you know two things you know one is it
reminds me of ben franklin
who in his autobiography you know has
a similarly childish in the best
sense of the word um unbridled
imagination
for what might become you know ben
franklin's like yeah i
i got electricity that's cool but we'll
be levitating soon
and i we can't even begin to imagine uh
what we are capable of and of course
people are like dude
that's crazy and there's a guy let's
it's
fcs schiller some humanistic guy at the
beginning of the
20th century he's like you know
um lots of things that
people think about may appear to be
absurd
to the point of obscene but the reality
is historically
every fantastic innovation has
generally been initiated by someone who
was condemned
for being a lunatic and
it's not that anything is possible but
surely
things that we don't try will never
manifest as
possibilities yeah and that's that's uh
that there's something beautiful to that
that's the
uh embracing the abyss and again it's
like the
uh it's the uh embracing the fear of
death the
the the reality of death and then
turning
and to look at all the opportunities
that's right let me ask you
whenever i bring up ernest becker's work
which i do and yours
quite a bit i find it surprising
how that it's not a lot more popular
in the sense that uh no not
i don't mean just your book yeah uh
that's well written people should read
it should buy it whatever
uh i think it has the same kind of
qualities
that are useful to think about as like
jordan peterson's work and
stuff like that but i i just mean like
why people uh
are not don't think of that as a
compelling
description of uh the core
of the human condition like i think what
you mentioned about heidegger is
quite connects with me quite well so i
ask
on this podcast i often ask people if
they're afraid of death
that's like almost every single part i
almost always get criticized for asking
world-class people scientists and
technologists and about fear of death
and the meaning of life
and on the fear of death they often
like don't say anything interesting what
i mean by that
is they haven't thought deeply about it
like what yeah
you kind of brought this up a few times
of really letting it sink in
yeah they kind of say this thing about
what exactly you said which is like
uh it's something that happens not today
like i'm aware that it's something that
happens yeah and i'm not
the the thing they usually say is i'm
not afraid of death
i just want to live a good life kind of
thing
yeah and what i'm trying to express is
like when i
look in their eyes and the kind of the
the core of the conversation
it looks like they haven't really become
like they haven't really meditated on
death i guess the question is um
what do i say to people that
there's something to really think about
here like
there's some demons some realities that
need to be faced yeah by
more people well that's a tough one you
know i could tell you what not to do
you know so when we are young and
annoying yeah
um a lot of famous people mostly
psychologists because that's
who we intersected with that
you know we would lay out these ideas
and they would be well i don't think
about death like that
so these ideas must be wrong and we
would say
well you don't think about death because
you're lucky
enough to be comfortably ensconced in a
cultural world view from which you
derive self-esteem
and that has it's spared you the
existential excruciations that would
otherwise arise
but that's like freud you know you're
repressing so you either agree with me
in which case i'm right
or you disagree with me in which case
you're repressing
and i'm right well so that that's the
the the nietzsche thing
i what i felt when i've there'd been a
moment in my life
moments in my life when i really thought
about death i mean there's not
too many like really really thought
about it
and feel the thing when you felt that
eight maybe i'm
traumatizing or romanticizing it but uh
i feel like it's uh uh the conservatives
call it
popular like or the movie matrix call it
the
red pill yeah moment uh i feel like it's
a dangerous thought
because um i feel like i'm taking a step
out of a society like
there's a nice narrative that we've all
constructed you are and i'm
taking a step out and uh
it feels there's this feeling like
you're basically
droughting i mean it's not a good
feeling
it is not but this gets back to the
heidegger kierkegaard school of anxiety
you are
stepping out yeah and you are
momentarily
shrugging off the the again the
culturally constructed psychological
accoutrements that allow you
to stand up in the morning and
so i mean if that in that sense it
feels like
i mean uh what do you uh how do you have
that conversation because i guess
i i i'm dancing around a set of
questions which is like
i guess i'm disappointed that people
don't
are not uh as willing to step outside
like uh even just uh even any kind of
thought experiment
yeah let's just forget uh denial death
like um
there's there's not a community of
people let's to take an easy one that i
think is scientifically ridiculous
which is there's a community people that
believe that
uh the earth is flat yeah or actually
even even better
the space is fake yeah uh like what i
find
surprising is that a lot of people i
talk to
are not willing to uh be
like imagine if it is like imagine the
earth is flat like think about it
right a lot of people just like no the
earth is round
they they're like uh like scientists
yeah too they're like
yes well actually wait have you actually
like thought about it like imagine like
a thought experiment
that like basically step outside the
little narrative that we
are comfortable with now that one in
particular
is has a really strong
uh evidence uh and scientific validation
so on it's pretty simple thing to show
that it at least is not flat uh but
just the willingness to take a step
outside of the stories that bring us
comfort
it's uh been disappointing that people
are not willing to do that
yeah and i think uh the philosophy that
you've constructed
and that ernest beck is constructed and
you've tested i think it's really
compelling and the fact that people
aren't
often willing to take that step yeah
disappointing
well yes but perhaps understandable i
mean one of
this is an anecdote of course but when
we were trying
to get a publisher for our book
um i had him we had a meeting with um
a publisher who
published some malcolm gladwell books
yeah
and she said i'm very interested in your
book
but can you write it without mentioning
death
because people don't like death and
we're like now it's really
kind of central um
and i think that's part of it i think
again if these
ideas have merit
and i actually like the way that you put
it lex it's that
to step away is to momentarily
expose yourself to all of
the anxiety yeah
that our identity and our beliefs
typically enable us to manage i think
it's as simple as that
yeah i i had this experience um
in college with my best friend uh
who got really high uh
and he forgot it was uh in the winter it
was really freezing
it was memorable to me i think it's an
analogy very useful
uh so he went to get some pizza
and of course and
uh he so i and he left me outside and
said i'll be back in five
minutes and he forgot that he left me
outside and i remember it was
i was in like shorts yeah it was
freezing winter
wow and i remember standing outside it's
a dorm
and i'm looking from the outside in it's
a light and it's warm
and i'm just standing there frozen i
think for an hour or more
and i that's how i think about it like i
just i don't give a damn about the
stupid
winter or any i just want to i'd like
it's like a i'm drawn to be back to the
warm
yeah and that's how i feel about
thinking about like death it's like
yeah at a certain point it's like
it's too much it's like that cold i like
i want to be back into the warmth back
you know
getting back to heidegger for a moment i
i like
the yeah he uses a lot
the idea of feeling at home
uh not as like in your house but just
feeling like you're comfortably situated
maybe you could talk about like i had a
conversation about this with my dad a
little bit
um how does uh religion
relate to this i see it as
the the disease and the cure
um in in a sense um
a few things um
one is that
i think a case could be made that humans
are
innately religious uh
so now we're going to get into territory
where there's going to be
a lot of disputes um and
by what do you mean by religious the
religion is an evolutionary
adaptation and religion is like a belief
in something outside of yourself kind of
thing
not necessarily so here we got to be a
little bit more
careful um and
again i'm not a scholar how about i'm a
well-intentioned dilettante in this in
this regard
yeah because what what i have read
is that religion um
evolved very early on
long before our ancestors were conscious
and the issue of death arose um
and that um the word religion
evidently is from a latin word regatta
we can look it up but and it means to
bind
and emil durkheim the dead french
sociologist he said
you know originally religion is
a darce lassen who's a dead novelist
she calls it the substance of we feeling
that it's literally that it arose
because we're
uber social creatures
who from time to time took comfort
in just being in physical proximity with
our fellow humans and that
there is this kind of sense
of transcendent exuberance
just back to the unshakable joy that
heidegger alludes to
and that the original
function of religion was to foster
social cohesion
and coordination and that it was only
subsequently some claim
that a burgeoning level of consciousness
made it such
that religious belief systems
that included the hope of some kind of
immortality
were just naturally selected thereafter
so there are some people so
it's david sloane wilson
wrote a book called darwin's cathedral
and he said religion has nothing to do
with death it's a it evolved
to make groups viable he's actually a
group
selection guy what's group selection um
the idea that um it's the group that is
selected for
rather than individual yeah so people
have vigorous disagreements about that
but i guess our point would be we see
religion
as being inextricable inextricably
connected
ultimately to assuaging concerns
about death well i guess another
question to ask around this uh like what
what does the world look like without
religion
will we if it's uh an extrapolate
inextricably connected uh to our fears
of death
do you think it always returns in some
kind of shape
maybe it's not called religion but
whatever it just keeps returning yeah
who knows so that's
a that's a great question alex so this
woman named karen armstrong
she was a non-turned historian
and she's i can't remember the name of
the book
but no matter she we could look that up
but
if you want i can look it up but i can
also i'll just yeah add it to me okay
yeah her point it has god in the title
of course but
you know she's like look all religions
are generally fairly right-minded
in that they advocate the golden rule
and all religions at their best
do seem to foster pro-social behavior
towards the in-group and that confers
both psychological as well as physical
benefits
that's the good news and the bad news is
historically all religions are
subject to being hijacked by a lunatic
french who declares
that you know they're the ones in sole
possession
of the liturgical practices or whatever
they call them
and they're the ones that turn
you know religion at its best into your
crusades and holocausts
my view not that it should matter for
much
but i i'm
i grew up just skeptical of religion
because i'm like as a kid
i'm like well if we didn't have these
beliefs we wouldn't be killing each
other
right because of them and i'd be like to
my parents well you're telling me that
all
people should be judged on the merits of
their character
but don't come home if you don't marry a
jewish woman
right which is implying that if you're
not jewish you're an inferior form of
life
yeah that's what tribes always do yeah
and there's the tribal thing
and so there's a guy named amin malouf a
lebanese
guy who writes in french who in the
1990s i think
wrote a book called in the name of
identity
violence and the need to belong and
that was his point is
unless we can overcome this tribal
mentality this will not end well
but but you said earlier something lex
that i think is profound and profoundly
important
and that is you did not recoil in horror
when i mentioned kierkegaard's use of
the term
faith and so i'm a big fan of faith
and i'm not sure what that implies
i i have and by the way this is just a
peripheral comment but i find less
resistance to becker's ideas and our
work
when i'm in like jesuit schools
you know it's the americans that you
know the secular humanists
who are most disinclined
to accept these ideas it's an important
side comment because
uh i think it's mostly because they
don't think philosophically that's
i mean i speak with a lot of scientists
and um i think that's my main
uh criticism is is you don't
i mean that's the problem with science
exactly is it's so
comforting to focus in on the details
that you can escape
thinking about the mystery of it all the
big picture things the philosophical
like
the fact that you don't actually know
shit at all like that
that uh that that yeah so
that in terms of jesuit like that's yeah
that's the beauty of
uh the experience of faith and so on is
like
uh how wherever that journey takes you
is you you actually explore the biggest
questions of our world
yeah yeah so i don't see religion going
away because
i don't see humans
as capable of surviving without faith
and hope and
everyone from the pope to elon musk
will acknowledge that it is a world that
is unfathomably mysterious
and like it or not in the absence of
beliefs here i'm
charles purse the pragmatic philosopher
he just said beliefs are the basis of
action if you don't have any beliefs
you're paralyzed with indecision
whether we're aware of it or not whether
we like it or not
in order to stand up in the morning you
have to subscribe to beliefs
that can never be unequivocally
proven right or wrong well then why do
you
maintain them well ultimately it's
because of some form of faith
but also also faith shouldn't be a
dogmatic thing that uh
you should always be leaping yeah i
guess uh
the problem with science or with
religion is uh
you could sort of uh all of a sudden
take a step into a place where you're
super confident
that you know the absolute truth of
things there you go and again back to
socrates plato back in the cave
uh you know at skidmore where i work
that's what i have the students read in
their first week
you know and plato's like oh look at all
those poor bastards you know they're in
the cave but they don't know
it you know and then they are
freed from their chains and they have to
be dragged out of the cave by the way
which is another interesting point they
don't run out
uh but that gets back to why people
don't like to be divested of their
comfortable illusions but anyway they
get dragged out of the cave into the
sunlight which he claims
is a representation of truth and beauty
and i say to the students well what's
wrong with
that and they're like nothing
that's like awesome and then i'm like yo
dudes
you out of the cave but how do you know
that you're not in
another cave the illumination may be
better
right but the minute you think
you're at the end of the proverbial
intellectual slash epistemological trail
then you have already succumbed
to either laziness or dogmatism or both
that's really well put
that's both terrifying and exciting that
we're always it's
uh there's always a bigger cave
a little bit of an outdoor question but
i think some of the
interesting qualities of the human mind
is the ideas of intelligence and
consciousness
so what do you make of consciousness so
do you think
death creates
consciousness like the fear of death the
terror of death creates consciousness
and um consciousness
in turn magnifies
the terror of death i do um i i think
what is consciousness
to you oh don't ask me that so now
if i could answer that you know i'd be
chugging rum out of a coconut with my
nobel prize that
um you know it's literally
you know stephen pinker i do agree with
his claim
and i think how the mind works that it
is the
key question for
the psychological sciences broadly
defined in the
21st century what is conscious yeah what
is consciousness
and i don't think it's an
epi phenomenological afterthought so a
lot of people
i think dan wagner at harvard uh a lot
of folks
consider it just the ass end of a
process
that by the time we are
aware of what it is it's just basically
an integrated rendering of something
that's already
happened you know evidently the there's
a half-second delay between when
something happens you know those studies
and
our awareness of it um um yeah and
that's where like ideas of free will
will step in yeah you can explain away a
lot of stuff
and i think those are all important and
interesting
questions uh i'm of the persuasion
i mean even not even but the
dawkins in the selfish gene um
is very thoughtful actually in a lot of
it's actually more in
notes than in the text of the book but
he's just like
it's hard for me to imagine that
consciousness
doesn't have some sort of
important and highly adaptive function
and what dawkins says is he thought
about it in terms of
just the that we can do mental
simulations
that uh one possibly
extraordinary product of consciousness
is
to rather than find out
often um by adverse consequences through
trying something
would be to run mental simulations and
so one possibility
is that consciousness is highly adaptive
another possibility is uh nicholas
humphrey a
british dude who wrote a book about i
think it's called regaining
consciousness
and he hypothesized i think this 1980s
maybe even earlier
the consciousness arose
as a way to better predict the behavior
of
others in social settings that by
knowing
how i feel makes me better able
to know how you may be feeling this like
the rudiments of a theory of mind
and that it really may not have had
anything to do with
intelligence so much as social
intelligence
right so so in that sense consciousness
is a
social construct like yes it's just a
useful thing for us
interacting with other humans yeah i
don't know so but
there seems to be something um
about realizing your own mortality
that's somehow intricately connected to
the idea of consciousness
well i think so also so this is where um
and and nietzsche
um he said a solitary creature
would not need consciousness
oh what do you think well i don't know
what i think about that
but what i do and then he goes on to say
that consciousness is the most
calamitous stupidity by which we shall
someday perish
and wow i was like dude
relax
[Laughter]
but so what if you say you were on an
island alone
and you saw a reflection of yourself in
in the water uh like if you were alone
your whole life
yeah great question his view
nietzsche's view would be that your
thoughts of yourself would never come to
mind
i don't know how i feel about that
though in a sense
this sounds weird but in a sense
i feel like my mental conversation has
always been with
death it's almost like another you know
um
another notion like um
you know there's these visualizations of
yeah of a death in the cloak
like i always felt like i am a living
thing
and then there's an other thing that is
the end of me
and i'm having like a conversation with
that so in the sense that's
uh that's the way i construct my
the fact that i am a thing is because
there's
somebody else that tells me well you
won't be a thing
uh eventually wow so it feels like a
conversation
uh perhaps but that's uh that might be
kind of this
mental stimulation kind of idea that
you're you're kind of
it's not really it's a conversation with
yourself essentially sure
yeah but yeah i don't know how i feel
about
that but i i tend to be in agreement
with you when we're talking about
economics
more so that uh
that we're deeply social beings like
everything
the way it just feels like we're humans
i'm i'm with uh
a harare with the sapiens
that we're kind of we seem to construct
ideas on top of each other and that's a
fundamentally a social
process absolutely i think that's a fine
book
it overlaps considerably
with our take on these matters and the
fact that
we get to these points drawing on
different sources i think makes me more
confident that
it's so it's so fascinating just like
reading your book i'm sorry
on a small tangent uh that sapiens
is like one of the most popular books in
the world
like yeah and it's reading your book
it's like
well this sounds yeah
i mean like i don't know i don't know
what makes a popular book yeah
well if you want me to be petty and
stupid i will tell you that from time to
time
um we also wonder um
why our book you know like all books
people
um can take issue with it
but we thought it would be a bigger hit
that would be
more widely read it's funny because i
i've um i don't know if i have good
examples because i forgot already but
i'm
often saddened by like franz kafka i
think he wasn't known in his life
yeah but i always wonder like these
great
yep like some of the greatest books ever
written
are completely unknown during the other
lifetime and it's like
man for some reason that it's again this
that identity thing
i think oh man that sucks well i'm
comforted by that so van gogh sold
one painting in his life and
evidently uh thoreau sold like
75 copies of walden
uh nietzsche's books did not
sell well and how did ernest beck
herself
he he is the uh his books are published
by the free press
and have sold more than any other books
um that they have published so
so what does that mean it's a lot i i
don't know if it's like jordan peterson
millions but
it's hundreds of thousands was he
respected
i just don't see him i okay yeah uh
i don't see him brought up as a like
in the top 10 philosophers of no not at
all
so how far away is he is he in the top
for people i don't think so like he
doesn't he's not brought up that often
because again
like your work is brought up more often
yeah like
term like because i think it gotten yeah
yeah i mean i think he's one of the
great philosophers of the 20th century
so
what what we say lex is that
our goal certainly when we first started
and now
just as much actually but what i say at
all my talks is
look if these ideas have interest you
enough
to go read ernest becker then this has
been good i consider him
to be one of the most important voices
of the 20th century
who does not get the attention
that he deserves all right similarly
our work i believe to be important
because point by point
we provide empirical corroboration
for all of the claims if
you know when um that so that's
literally the students that
read the denial of death and then escape
from evil they're like yeah
wow every chapter of the book you have
studies
and i'm like yeah because for 40 years
if a skimmer student said oh that's got
to be bullshit
i'm like well let's do a study let's do
a study
and my own dreams are in creating
uh robots and artificial intelligence
systems that a human can love
and i think there's something
about uh mortality and fear mortality
that is essential
for implementing in our ai systems
yeah and so maybe can you comment on
that like well
uh on uh
so this is this is a different
perspective on on your work sure which
is like
how do we engineer a human yeah so no
this is awesome lex i'm delighted that
you said that first of all
and i may mention this to you and i
don't i can't remember because i'm seen
out
when you first contacted me yeah
i had just been told i have to learn
more about your work
because i'm working with some very
talented people in new york
and they're they're writing a screenplay
uh for a movie about
an artificial intelligence it's a female
a.i set in like 30 years in the future
and basically the little twist this is
how i
had to read heidegger so these people
call me
and they're like we're making a movie
it's based on
becker and your work and heidegger
and this other philosopher levinos
and then another philosopher sylvia
benso who's an italian philosopher
and the long short story is the movie is
about
supposedly the most advanced artificial
intelligence entity
an embodied one and
who human form human form
who finds out who is having
uh having essentially existential
anxieties
and the i think the project is called a
dinner with her or something and it
doesn't really matter but the punch line
is that
she finds out that her creator
has made her
mortal and so the question
is what happens phenomenologically
and behaviorally to
an artificial intelligence
who now knows that it's
mortal and it's actually the same
question
that you're posing yeah and that is is
that
necessary in order
for an ai to approximate humanity
yeah i think yeah so the intuition again
it's uh it's unknown but
i think it's absolutely i think it's
absolutely necessary
um a lot of people
this the same kind of shallow thinking
that people have about our own
end of life our own death is the same
way people think of
i think about artificial intelligence
it's like well okay so yeah
so within the system there's a there's a
terminal position where like
there's there's a there's a point which
it ends
you just the program ends uh there's a
goal state there's a you reach the end
point
but the thing is uh
making that end a thing that's
also within the program like like the
making the thing like and then it's also
the mystery of it
so the thing is we don't know what the
hell this death thing is
i mean it's not like um it's not like we
i mean the program doesn't give us
information about the meaning of it all
exactly and the that's where the terror
is i
and and i it feels like i mean uh
in the language that you you would think
about is
um is the terror of this death or like
anticipation of it or thinking about it
is the creative force that builds
everything
right and that feels like uh
you know that feels really important to
implement
again very difficult to know how to do
technically
currently but it's important to think
about what i find is
you mentioned like screenplays and so on
is sci-fi folks and
uh philosophers are the the only ones
thinking about it currently
and that's what these folks have
convinced me yeah
and engineers aren't which is uh
i get yeah most of the most most of the
things i talk about i get kind of
um people roll their eyes from the
engineering person not these folks
that they're like because like again i
saw your name and they're like wait a
minute i've just seen that
they're like here's someone you should
check out
yeah so this was a delightful confluence
yeah i was a huge fan of um
your work and ernest becker and um
it's funny that not enough people are uh
talking about it yeah i don't know what
to do with that i think
that there's a possibility to create
real deep meaningful connections between
ai systems and humans absolutely and um
i think some of these things the fear
mortality are essential
that are essential for the element of
human experience i don't
i don't think it might be essential to
create general intelligence like
very intelligent machines but to create
a machine that connects to a human in
some
deep way what's your view
not to make me the interviewer but
what's your view about
um machine ethics
can you imagine an ethical ai
without some semblance of
yeah that's a finitude let's say well i
i think ethics
uh it's a
you know there's a there's a trolley
problem that's often used
in the work that i've done my team yeah
with uh with autonomous vehicles in
particular
oh yeah yeah uh that people
i think they offload they ask like how
would a machine deal with an ethical
situation
that they themselves humans don't know
how to deal exactly
and so i don't know
if a machine is able to uh do a better
job on
difficult ethical questions but i
certainly think to behave
properly and effectively in this world
it needs to be
uh have a fear of mortality and like
be able to even dance because i don't
think you can solve ethical problems but
you have to uh
i think like ethics is like a dance
floor you have to just
you have to uh dance properly with the
rest of the humans like if people are
dancing tango you have to dance in the
same kind of way
and for that you have to have a fear of
mortality like i think
of uh more practically speaking like i
said autonomous vehicles
like the way you interact with
pedestrians
fundamentally has to have a sense of
mortality
so uh when pedestrians crossed the road
and now i've watched
well certainly 100 plus hours of
pedestrian videos
there's a kind of social uh contract
where
you walk in front of a car and
you're putting your life in the hands of
another human being that's right
and like death is is uh is in the car
in the game that's being played death is
right there
uh it's part of the calculus it's not
but it's not
like a simple calculator it's not a
simple equation it's uh
it's an s it's a i mean i don't know
what it is but it's it's in the it's in
there
and uh it has to be part of the
optimization problem
like it's not as simple as so from the
computer vision from the
artificial intelligence perspective it's
detecting there's a human
estimating right estimating the
trajectory
like treating everything like it's a
billiard balls
as opposed to like being able to
construct an effective
model the world model of the what the
person's thinking what they're
going to do what are the different
possibilities of how the scene might
evolve
i think requires having some sense
of yeah fear of fear of mortality of
mortality i don't see the thing is i
think it's really important to think
about
i i can be honest enough to say that
it's
i haven't been able to figure out
how to engineer any of these things
right uh but i do think it's really
really important like i have uh so i
have a bunch of roombas here
i can show it to you after uh that i
have
roombas as a robot that has um
vacuums the floor and i've had them um
make different sounds like i had them
scream in pain
and it it
it you immediately anthropomorphized
absolutely and it creates uh
i don't know knowing that they can feel
pain but
see i'm i'm speaking like knowing uh
that i immediately imagine that they can
feel pain and it means
it immediately draws me closer to them
yes at the human experience and
that there's there's something in that
that should be engineered in our
in our systems it feels like i
i believe personally i don't know what
you think but uh
i believe it's possible for a robot and
a human to fall in love for example in
the in the future
oh i think it's yeah it's already there
no there's a certain kind of deep
connection with technology yeah
in a real like you would choose to marry
um
i mean again it sounds uh
i'll find a book title and i'll send it
to you and it's a serious
consideration of people
who started out with these sex dolls
but it turned into a relationship of
enduring
significance that the woman who wrote
the book is not
willing to dismiss as a perversion yeah
that's what uh
you know people kind of joke about sex
robots which is funny
uh like it's a it's a funny i mean
there's a lot of stuff about robots it's
just kind of fun to talk about that
is it's not necessarily connected to
reality
uh people joke about sex robots but if
you actually look how sex robots which
are pretty rare
these days are used they're not
used by people who want sex
especially they're actually uh they're
companions they're compared they become
companions yeah baby
it's uh yeah it's fascinating and
they're just
we're not even talking about any kind of
intelligence we're talking about just
i mean human beings see companionships
we're deeply lonely
i mean that's the other sense i have
that i don't know if i can
articulate clearly you can probably do a
better job but
i have a sense that there's a deep
loneliness within all of us
absolutely in the face of death it feels
like we're
alone so you know the what drew me
to the existential take on things
lex was the uh
who is it rallo may and irwin
yalum right about existentialism and
they're like look
it what there's different flavors of
existentialism
but they all have in common what is it
four
universal concerns the overriding one is
about death
and that next
is choice and responsibility
the next one is existential isolation
and they're like that's one of the
things about consciousness that and the
last one is meaninglessness but the
existential isolation point is
you know we
are by virtue of consciousness
able to apprehend that
unless you're a siamese twin you are
fundamentally alone
and because it is claimed it's eric
fromm
uh in a book called escape from freedom
he's like look you you're smart enough
to know that
the most direct way that we typically
communicate with our fellow human beings
is through language but you also know
that
language is a pale shadow of
the totality of our interior
phenomenological existence therefore
there's always going to be times in our
lives where even under the best of
circumstances
you could be trying desperately to
convey
your thoughts and feelings and somebody
listening could be like yeah i get it i
get it i get it
and you're like you have no fucking idea
what i'm talking about
yeah so you can be desperately lonely
in a house where you live with 10 people
in the middle of tokyo where there's
millions
yeah yeah it's the great gatsby yeah you
could be alone precisely
exactly maybe this is a small tangent
but let me ask you
on the topic of academia you're kind of
uh
we talked about jordan peterson there's
a lot of sort of
renegade type of thinkers uh certainly
in psychology but it applies in
all disciplines of
what are your thoughts about academia
being
a place to uh
harbor people like yourself that you
know
people who think deeply about things
who are not constrained by sort of the
who i don't think you're quite
controversial
no not really but you are
a person who thinks deeply about things
and it feels like
academia can sometimes stifle that i
think so
so my concern right now lex for young
scholars
is that um
the restrictions and
expectations are such that it's highly
unlikely that anybody will do anything
of great value or innovation
except for and this is not a bad thing
but stepwise improvement
of existing paradigms so
the you know in simple english you know
i went to princeton for a job interview
40 years ago
and they're like what are you gonna do
if we give you a job and i'm like i
don't know i want to
think about it and read and um
and i i saw that that interview was over
the window of opportunity shut
in my face and they actually called my
mentors
and they're like what are you doing tell
this guy to buy some pants
i had hair down to my waist also it's
like this guy looks like charles manson
of jesus but
the expectation is that you come to a
post
you know you start publishing so that
you can get grants that's certainly true
but there's also kind of a behavioral
thing you said like long hair
there's uh there's a certain style of
the way you're supposed to behave for
example
like i'm wearing a suit it sounds con
it sounds weird but i feel comfortable
in this you know i wore it like when i
was teaching at mit
i wore it sure uh warranty meetings and
so on the different
uh sometimes a blue and red tie but
like that was an outsider thing to do at
mit
so like there was a strong pressure to
not wear a suit
no that's right it's and there's a
pressure to behave to have a hair thing
no that's right the way you wear your
hair the way you uh
this isn't like a liberal or a level
anything he's just the pr
in tribes that's right and academia to
me or a place
any place that dreams of
having like renegade free thinkers like
really deep thinkers
should in fact like glorify
the outsider right yeah should welcome
just
should welcome uh you know uh people
that don't fit in
yeah no that sounds weird but i don't
know i could just imagine an interview
with at princeton you know like i
imagine why aren't people why aren't you
at
uh harvard for example or mit
um yeah well so that look i would love
to
uh you know i
i haven't lectured at mit but i've
lectured at harvard i i
i've gotten to lecture at almost every
place that wouldn't consider me
for a job yeah and
i um
well a few things i'm lucky because i
you know i go to princeton and i'm like
i don't know what i want to do
and then two days later i go to skidmore
and i'm like i don't know what i want to
do
and they offered me a job later that day
which i declined for months
because of the extraordinary pressure of
my mentors who right-mindedly
felt that i wouldn't get much done there
and but what they told me at skidmore
was
take your time you know show up for your
classes and don't molest barnyard
animals
and you'll probably get tenure and i'm
like i'll show up for my classes we'll
talk
it was that was the negotiation yeah i
negotiated i drove a hard bargain
but but honestly lex that's
i feel i'm very committed to skidmore
because
i i was given tenure when our first
terror management paper wasn't published
it took eight years to publish it was
rejected at every journal
and i submitted it as like a purple
ditto sheet
thing i'm like here's what i've been
doing here's the reviews
here's why i think this is still a
pretty good idea
and i don't know that this would happen
even at skidmore anymore
but i i was very lucky to be given the
latitude and to be
encouraged i i took classes at skidmore
that's how i learned all this stuff i
i graduated i got a phd unscathed by
knowledge
we were great statisticians and
methodologists
but we didn't have any substance
you know i and i don't mean this
cynically but we were trained in a
method in search of a question
so i appreciate having five years at
skidmore basically
to read books and i also appreciate that
i look like this 40 years ago
and my view
is that
this is how i comported myself
other people might the guy i learned the
most from
at skidmore is now dead a history
professor ted kuroda he wore a bow tie
and there's another guy darnell rucker
who taught me about philosophy
and he was very proper and he had like
his
jacket with like the leather patches
but these guys weren't pompous at all
they were this is the way
i am and i always felt that that's
important
that somebody who looks at you
and says oh what a stiff he's probably
an mba
yeah well they're wrong yeah and someone
who looks at me
when i first got to skidmore other
professors would ask
when i'd be coming to their office to
empty the garbage they just assumed you
know i was in my 20s they assumed
i was housekeeping i always felt that
was important that the students learned
not to judge an idea
by the appearance of the person who
pervades it
and yeah i mean that's uh i i guess this
is
such a high concern now because
i personally still have faith that
academia is where the great geniuses
will come from i do too
and great ideas i love hearing you say
that i i still
and it's one of the reasons why um
really apprehensive about the future of
education right now
in the context of the pandemic i um
oh yeah is that a lot of folks
i need a lot of these are google type
people who i don't you know they're
geniuses also
but i don't like this idea that all
learning
can be virtual and that much could
happen
i'm big on embodied environments with
actual humans
yeah they're interacting i mean there's
there's so much
to the university education but i think
the key part
that i is the the mentorship that occurs
somehow and at the human level like i've
gotten a lot of flack like this
conversation we're
in in person now and
i've uh even with edward snow snowden
who done all interviews remote i'm a
stickler
to in person it has to be in person like
and a lot of people just don't get it
they're like well why can't this is so
much easier
like why go through the pain like i've
traveled
i'm traveling in the next month to paris
for a single stupid conversation nobody
cares about
just to be in person well it's important
to me i
i honestly i was like
this and thank you for coming down today
well it's my pleasure but
again very self-serving i've enjoyed
this i knew i was going to
but it's not about our enjoyment
per se again at the risk of sounding
cavalier there are a host
of factors beyond verbal
yeah that i don't believe
can be adequately captured i don't care
how much the acuity is decent on a zoom
conversation i i feel
again i i felt
within five minutes that this was gonna
be
for me easy in the sense that i could
speak freely i
just don't see that happening so easily
from a distance
yeah i i tend to well i'm hopeful uh
i agree with you on the current
technology but i am hopeful unlike
some others on the technology eventually
being able to create that kind of
experience oh i think
we're quite far away from that but yeah
it might be able my hope is
i'm you know i'm i'm hopeful i was at
microsoft
in seattle and i can't remember why
and no i i can't i i
that's how i'm in my early mr magoo
phase and and somebody there was showing
us
like a virtual wall where the entire
wall
you know when you're talking to somebody
so it's life-size
and they were beginning the
get the appearance of motion and stuff
it looked pretty
yeah with virtual reality too i don't
know if you've ever been inside a
virtual world
yeah it's to me it's uh i can just
i can see the future it's uh it's it's
quite real yeah in terms of like a
terror of death
uh i'm afraid of heights me too
and there's i don't know if you've ever
tried uh you should
if you haven't there's a virtual reality
experience where you can walk a plank
yeah
you can look down and oh man i was on
the ground
like i was like i was afraid i was
deeply afraid i was
is it was it was as real as
uh yep as anything else could be in i
mean these are very early days of that
technology
relatively speaking so um
yeah i mean i don't know what to do with
that same with like crossing the street
we did these experiments
across the street in front of a car and
uh you know it's being run over
by a car uh it's terrifying
yeah it's just that uh yeah so
there is a rich experience to be created
there we're not there yet
but uh uh i yeah and i've seen a lot of
people try like you said the google
folks
uh uh silicon valley folks try to create
a virtual
online education i don't know i think
they've raised
really important questions absolutely
what makes
uh the education experience
fulfilling what makes it effective yeah
these are important questions and i
think what they highlight is we have no
clue
like uh there's a
thomas soul uh wrote a book about
uh recent book on um
charter schools yeah i would like to
talk to him yeah he's an interesting guy
we will disagree about a lot but
respectfully yeah
such a powerful mind yeah uh but he i i
need to
read i've only heard him talk about the
book
uh but he argues quite seemingly
effectively that
that um that the public education system
is broken
that we blame he basically says that we
kind of blame
uh like the conditions or the
the environment but uh the
upbringing of people like parenting blah
blah blah like the
uh the set of opportunities but okay
putting that aside
it seems like charter schools no matter
who
it is that attends them does much better
than
in in public schools and he puts a bunch
of data behind it
and in his usual way as you know
just is very eloquent in arguing his
points yep
so that to me just highlights man we
don't
education is like one of the most
important the it's probably the most
important thing
in our civilization and we're doing a
shitty job of it yeah
in academia in uh uh in university
education and
you know younger education the whole
thing
the whole thing and yet we value
um
just about anyone or anything more than
educators you know part of it is just
the
relatively low regard that americans
have
for teachers for teachers so also
similarly
like um just people
people of service i think great teachers
uh
are the greatest thing in our society
and i would say now on a controversial
note like black lives matter uh
you know great police officers is the
greatest
thing in our society also like all
people that do service
we undervalue cops severe like this
whole defund
the police is missing the point and it's
a stupid word
uh i'm i'm with you on that one our um
neighbors to one side of our house or
three generations of police
our neighbors across the street our
police
they know my
uh you know political predilections
and we've gotten along fine for 30 years
and i go out
and tell them every day you know when
you go in today
you tell the people on the force
that i appreciate
what they're doing i i think it's
really important to not tribalize
those concerns i mean we mentioned
so many brilliant books
and philosophers but it'd be nice
sort of in a focused way try to see
if we can get some recommendations from
you so what three books
technical or fiction or philosophical
had a
oh man that's the worst question
what had a big impact in your life and
you were recommending i spent four hours
driving here
perseverating about that i didn't i
everything else you sent me
that's fine and i actually i skimmed it
and i'm like i don't want to look at it
because
i want i want us to talk yeah the ones
in blue i'm like all right
and you know i've already said that i've
found
becker's work and i've put the denial of
death out there
um is that his best sorry i don't have a
small tangent
is there other books of his yeah see if
i could have this count as one
that the the birth and death of meaning
the denial of death
and escape from evil are three books of
ernest becker's that i believe to all
the
profound in a in a little sort of
brief dance around topics uh
i've only read denial death like how do
those books connect in your
yeah nice so the the birth and death of
meaning
is where becker situates his
thinking in more of an evolutionary
foundation so i like that for that
reason
escape from evil is
where he applies the ideas in the denial
of death
more directly to economic matters
and to inequality and also
to our inability to peacefully co-exist
with other folks who don't share our
beliefs
so i would put ernest becker out there
as
one um i also like
novels a lot and here i was like god
damn it no matter what
i say i'm gonna be like yes
but but the existentialist do you like
all those folks camus
you like that literary existence i i i
do
but i i mean you know i i've read
all those books i i will tell you the
last line of the plague we learn in
times of pestilence that there's more to
admire
in men than to despise and i love that
yeah um plagues such a i don't know i i
find the plague is a
brilliant me too before before uh the
plague
has come to us in 2020 it was just yeah
yeah
so a book about love about but i'll toss
a
one that may be less known to folks i
i'm enamored with a novel by a woman
named carson mccullers
written in 1953 called clock without
hands
and i find it a brilliant literary
depiction
of many of the ideas that we have spoken
about
fiction fiction yeah what's uh what kind
of ideas are we talking about
all of the existential ideas that we
have encountered today
but in the context of a story
of someone who finds out that he is
terminally ill
it's set in the south in the um
heyday of like segregation so there's a
lot of social issues a lot of
existential issues
but it's basically a nov a fictional
account
of someone who finds out that they're
terminally ill
and who reacts originally as
um you might expect anyone
uh becomes more um
hostile to people who are different like
petty and stupid
denies that anything's happening but
as the book goes on and he comes
more to terms um with his own mortality
um it ends lovingly and
back to your idea about
you know love being incredibly potent
that's the the nice thing as you
mentioned uh before with
with heidegger i really like that idea
and i've seen that in people who are
terminally ill
is they bring you know
the idea of death becomes uh current
yes it becomes like a thing you know i
could die
i really like that idea i i can die not
just tomorrow but like
now now now yeah
that's a really useful i don't even know
i think i've been too afraid to even
think about that like i have like
like sit here and think like
in five minutes it's over
yeah this is it it's five minutes it's
over
yeah so that would be my most
recent addition as i i really am struck
by
heidegger or would you recommend
that well okay well if you have a few
years i remember i tuned out being in
time i was like i tried to read it i was
like that's it look it took me
40 years to read ulysses i could not get
past
the first five pages and it took me 40
years to read being in time
it's a slog yeah and i took a james
joyce course in college so i've uh
i i i even uh i i guess
read parts of finnegan's wake no way but
like
re there's a difference between reading
and like
[Laughter]
i don't think i understood anything i i
like his uh short stories
the dead yeah yeah and um i like
faulkner
absalom absalom is is a fine book
but would you uh is there something
heidegger
connected in a book you would recommend
or no no so maybe i got to abandon him
i mean i mean being in time is
awesome um but here's an interesting
thing and not to get all academic-y but
you know it's there's two parts to it
and
most of the most philosophers are
preoccupied with the first part
it's in the second part where he gets
into all the
flight from death stuff and this idea of
uh you know a turning
and philosophers don't like that and i'm
like this is where he's
starting to really shine to really shine
before me
so yeah yeah all right that's a
beautiful set of books so
what um advice
would you give to a young person today
about their career
about life about uh
how to survive in this world full of
suffering
yeah great um yeah
my advice is to get confident advice
when i tell my students it's like don't
listen to me don't listen to me
well you know i think um
my my big piece of advice these days
is you know again it's that the risk is
sounding
like a simpleton but it's to
emphasize a few things one is
um you know so
one of your questions i think was you
know what's the meaning of life and of
course the existentialists say
life has no meaning but it doesn't
follow from that that it's intrinsic
that it's meaningless you know what the
existential point
is not that life is meaningless
so much as it doesn't have one
inevitable and intrinsic meaning you
know which then
it opens up you know i think it was
kierkegaard who said consciousness gives
us the possibility of possibilities
and but there's another lunatic oswald
spangler who wrote a book called
decline of the west and he says that the
philosopher the german philosopher
guerta he says the purpose of
life is to live and i let that's
so that's one of my pieces of advice so
the
the possibility of possibilities it's
interesting so what do you do with this
kind of sea of possibilities
like well this is one of the one when
young folks talk to me especially these
days
uh is there swimming in a sea of
possibilities yeah
well so this is it's great and so that's
another existential point which is that
we yearn for freedom we
react vigorously when we perceive that
our choices have been curtailed and then
we're paralyzed by indecision
in the wake of seemingly unlimited
possibilities because we're not choking
on choice
and and i'm not sure if this is helpful
advice or not but what i say to folks is
that the fact of the matter is
is that you know for most people
choice is a first world problem and
sometimes the best
option is to do something
as silly as it sounds and then if that
doesn't work do something else
which just sounds like my mom torturing
me
when i was young but you know part of
the thing that
i i find myself singularly ill-equipped
is that we're at the i may be at the
tail end
of the last generation of americans
where you like picked something and
that's what you did
like i've been at a job for 40 years
where you can expect to do better than
your parents because those days are gone
and where you can
make a comfortable inference that the
world in a decade or two
will have any remote similarity to the
one
that we now inhabit and so but still
you recommend just do yeah
and to do so i'm again i'm this is i'm
so
back to the heidegger guy because
all right i mean you know i consider
myself a professor but what
happens if most of the schools go out of
business
somebody else may consider themselves a
restaurant tour
but what happens if there's no more
restaurants
so what i this is negative advice but i
tell folks don't define yourself
as a social caricature yeah
don't don't limit
how you feel about yourself
by through identification
with a host of variables
that may be uncertain maybe temporary
and temporary what uh let's say
no but of course that gets back to your
point earlier lex where you're like yeah
but when you step
out of that it's extraordinarily
discombobulating so what uh
i think you talked about an axe of
chopping wood yeah uh
and seoul uh from socrates yeah
what is your soul what is the
uh the essence of sheldon
wow that was like awesome
like when god uh when you show up at the
end of this thing
he kind of looks at you he's like oh
yeah yeah
i remember you yeah well you know i
to be honest what i muse about
is to me the when
when people are i told you i have to we
have two kids
uh late 20s early 30s
and over the years
when people when we meet people that
know our kids and they're like oh
your kids are kind and decent
and i'd be like that's what i would like
to be because i think intelligence is
vastly overrated
you know the unabomber was the smart guy
yeah and i do admire intelligence and i
do venerate
education and i i find that to be
tremendously important but if i had to
pay the ultimate homage to myself
it would be to be known as somebody who
takes himself too seriously
to take myself too seriously
again as corny as it sounds i'd
like to leave the world a tad better
than i found it
or at least do no harm
and um i think you i think you did all
right and that
uh yeah in that regard i love that
question alex that's a good one
i think everyone should be asked that
what is your soul
do you have um maybe just a few
lingering questions uh
around it
so you i mean on the on the point of the
soul
you've talked about the the meaning of
life do you have um
on a personal level do you have uh
an answer to the meaning of your life of
something that brought you
meaning uh happiness
some some sense of uh
sense yeah
no i i mean yes yes and no i mean i
uh a bit you know i'm 66 so i'm in the
kind of
not ready to wrap it up literally or
metaphorically but
you look i look back and
just really with a
sense of uh awe and wonder gratitude
and is there memories that stand out to
you from childhood from earlier that
like
it's like you know stand out as
something you're really proud of
or um just
happy to have been on this earth mainly
that stuff happened yeah that
i mean you know my family um
also a chunk uh we're my folks so my
grandparents are from
eastern europe you know russia austria
um as far as we know some of them never
made it out
uh i consider um
myself um very fortunate
to have been a so-called product
of the american dream you know my
grandparents
are were basically peasants my
parents my dad worked two full-time jobs
um when i was growing up and i would see
him on the weekends i'd be like why are
you working all the time
he'd be like so you won't have to and
he said look the world does not owe you
a living
and so your first responsibility is to
take care of yourself
and then your next responsibility is
to take care of other people and um
i think you did a pretty good job of
that well i don't know but i
i i so those are the things that
i'm proud of
was it's funny you've been if you've
talked about
just yourself as a human being but
uh you've also contributed some really
important ideas
for your ideas and also
kind of integrating and maybe even
popularizing the work of
ernest becker of connecting it uh of
making it legitimate scientifically i
mean
you know as a human of course you want
to be uh
you you want your ripple to be one that
makes the world a better place but also
i think
in the span of time
i think it's of great value you've
contributed in terms of
how we think about the human condition
how we think about
ourselves assuming as finite beings in
this world
and i hope also in our technology of
engineering intelligence
i think at least at least for me and i'm
sure there's
a lot of other people uh like me that
your work has been a gift
for so oh well thank you oh no i like
that and
we have described ourselves as giant
interneurons
unlike we have had no original ideas and
and maybe that's the only thing that's
original about our work is we don't
claim to be original
what we claim to have done
is to integrate to connect
these disparate and superficially
unconnected discourses
you know so existentialists they'd be
like evidence what's that
and yeah there's now a branches
psychology experimental existential
psychology that i think we could
take credit for having encouraged
the formation of and
that in turn has gotten these ideas
in circulation and academic communities
where they may not
have otherwise gotten so i think that's
good
well sheldon is a huge honor i can't
believe
you came down here i've been a fan of
your work
uh i hope we get to talk again huge
honor to talk to you thank you so much
for talking today thanks lex we'll do it
again soon i hope
thanks for listening to this
conversation with sheldon solomon and
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connect with me on twitter at lex
friedman
and now let me leave you with some words
from vladimir nabokov
that sheldon uses in his book warm at
the core
the cradle rocks above and abyss and
common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness
thanks for listening and hope to see you
next time