and then I am going to walk through as I mentioned, I am going to walk through

the Disney movie film Pinnochio and which I presume most of you have seen

How many of you have seen it?

Yeah, OK, that's, that's...so as I think I mentioned that is something in of itself right?

I mean the fact that you have all seen it means that it's an

production of cultural significance, and because it's such a strange artifact

That's one way of looking at it, it might be worth

trying to take it apart to understand why it is, for example, that you even understand it.

and so,

I offered you the proposition last week that we

view the world as essentially through a narrative lens

and I believe that we view the world through a narrative lens

because the fundamental problem that we have to solve

as living creatures is how we should act in the world.

and,

that means,

how we should act to maintain ourselves

but also how we need to act in relationship to other people

and in relationship to the broader world in order to maintain our self across time.

so that's a complicated problem, right, it's not just how you survive

it's how you survive now and next week, and next month, and next year

and 50 years from now and maybe your, your descendants as well

if the culture is going to stabilize

and then not only you across all those time frames but you and everyone else across all those time frames

It's a viciously difficult problem

and so, I would say that we have evolved mechanisms to solve that

I think that is self-evident in some sense because for example one of the mechanisms that

animals have evolved to deal with the problem of social being

even if they are not particularly social animals

is the dominance hierarchy, right, or you could call it hierarchy of authority or power, because

I think that considering human

structures, social structures as mere power

structures is a terrible mistake, it's a terrible oversimplification

because power is no means the only, like force is what I mean

force is not a stable way of solving the problem of how to live together across time

the question is what is the stable way of solving how to live together

across time, and the really is the question and it's part of the question that

I am trying to answer

partly because it's a perennial problem, right, we face the problem of

how to organize ourselves in small social units

without undue conflict and then we face the larger problem

of how to organize ourselves into large social units without undue conflict and that conflict can be

absolutely devastating, and, and frequently is

so,

so then I would also say that the first way of solving this problem isn't conscious

you see, not at all

and, you know

you may know, and you may not know that there are

there are different forms of memory

right

really technically different forms of memory, so for example

there is short term working memory

which is the memory that you use to hold things like telephone numbers in your active imagination

it decays very rapidly, it's only 4 to 7 bits

which is why

well it's why phone numbers are, were at least

7 digits long, you know, you can kind of

manage that as a loop that, and then there is

episodic memory, and that has two elements one is semantic and the other is episodic

it's, what's the name of that

mmm, someone said something...

[Student] Procedural?

Yes well there is procedural memory and then there is another

the kind of memory that you use to represent your

experiences to yourself, so let's say it is image laden and the other one is semantic

and semantic is your memory for facts and those are quite different, so for example

procedural memory

that is how you ride a bike, that is how you play the piano

that's how you play jazz music if you are in a combo

it's, it's the memory, it's a funny kind of memory because it is built right into you, you know, I mean

so is, so is, the kind of memory that you use to represent your own life, but it is much more malleable is some sense

so, what that means is that in your procedures

there is information that you don't know about, it's patterned information that you don't know about

part of that is how to act

you know, like, when you walk into a social gathering

you don't really think through how you are going to act

you know how to act, and if someone asks you

exactly what it is that you are doing and why, you could formulate a story about it

but the probability that, that it's the existence of that story that enabled you to act that way is zero, because

you have to react way faster than that, and so, you know have social knowledge

built into your nervous system because you have practiced being a social being for a very long period of time

and of course, then that social being has been shaped forever really, it's the right way of thinking about it

Now, we know that animals organized themselves into hierarchies

and we will say of dominance, because it is more true the farther back you go in time

at least since the time of the crustaceans, you know , when we split from out common ancestor 300 million years ago, and so

and it's true for social animals and non-social animals so

even animals that don't live together in groups

have to organize themselves into a hierarchy

in the space they inhabit, songbirds are a good example and they have dominance disputes all the time

partly that's, you can hear them having their little dominance disputes in the spring when they are singing because basically what they are singing is

I am pretty damn healthy and I am ready to go and if you are another bird like me you had better steer clear of this tree!

and, the dominance songbirds

you know, they don't live together, crows are social but don't most songbirds aren't

the dominance songbirds get the best nest

and the best nest is the one that doesn't get rained on

it's not to windy and it is close to food sources, and

you know, so they have the healthiest chicks and they attract the best mates, and

like it is really important where you are positioned in the hierarchy even if you are not

like a flock or a herd creature, now, we are more like herd creatures so it's even more

it's even more relevant to us , but there is just no escaping

a hierarchical arrangement in social being

that is social being

and, and, and it is evolutionary ancient beyond conception so

300 million years ago there weren't trees, you know I mean, so the dominance hierarchy is older than trees

so that is really something to think about and then, you know, when you are thinking about the reality that shaped us

say, from an evolutionary perspective but also from a cultural perspective

what you have to understand is that that the things that have shaped us most are the things that have been around the longest, and so you could say

those are the most real things

and you can't even see some of them, it's not like you can come in here and, well it's not exactly true

you can't come in here and see the multiple dominance hierarchies that are at work

You can in a way, because,

the chairs are set up to face this way and I am facing that way and

that gives you some clues about the social order here and you take the cues instantly, right

you come down, you sit in the chairs, you organize yourselves according to mutual expectation and that's part of your procedural knowledge

about how to behave as a social creature

now,

that knowledge is really really deep and a lot of it is coded in your behaviour

now, and in other peoples behaviour as well

and that's, you know. that's the expectations you have of other people and of yourself, and a lot of those are implicit right,

so,

when we are interacting there's, there is a very large number of things that you just don't get to do

and you know that too, and you won't do them, and that way we can act as if we understand each other

even though we don't, because you are really complicated

and I am really complicated and there is lots of situations where we might really be in conflict

but because we share a map of the culture, the cultural expectations

it makes part of our, it's built right into our perception

you will act out that set of expectations and so will I

and if neither of us can do that, even if one of us can't we are going to stay, we are either going immediately

devolve into conflict or we are going to avoid each other like the plague

and that's exactly the right thing to do,

and so, one of the really useful things to understand , and this took me a long time to formulate properly, you know,

you hear the terror management theorists for example and they have this idea that

your, your meaning representation, the story you tell about the world

regulates your death anxiety, it's something like that

but that is not right, I mean it is close to right and it is a smart idea

it came from Ernest Becker by the way who wrote a book called "The Denial of Death", which is actually quite a good book even though it is wrong

you know, sometimes a book can be very useful

it can be usefully wrong, and Becker's book is usefully wrong

because he thought that

it's the internal representation of your belief system

that regulates your anxiety and that anxiety is fundamentally

in the final analysis anxiety about death, it's like well, OK, fine, it is a reasonable

proposition, but that isn't how it works, you see,

it isn't my beliefs that right now that are regulating my emotion

It is the fact that I'm acting out those beliefs, which include implicit perceptions, I'm acting them out

and so are you

and so, what you're doing and what I expect, more accurately, what you're doing and what I want you to do

and the way I want you to react to me, that's working!

so it's the match between my belief system and the way that everyone else is acting that is regulating my emotions

it's not the belief system

it's mediated by the social culture and you see if you understand this then

you understand more particularly why people

are willing to fight to the bitter end to protect their culture

it's not a psychological structure that they are protecting

it's a psychological structure and sociological structure, simultaneously

so the social contract is

you have a set of expectations and I have a set of expectations

they are actually desires, they are not merely expectations because as

living creatures we are desirous, we don't just expect

and so you desire an outcome and I desire an outcome

and we agree to act in accordance with that

that's the social contract

and so people don't like having that disrupted

well it isn't because it psychologically destabilizes them, although it does

it's because it actually destabilizes them

right, if all of a sudden we can't occupy the same

specified domain of territory it isn't only that we are thrown into psychological disarray, although we will be

it's that we will start fighting with each other, like, and that can kill you

it's no joke, it kills people a lot, like it happens

it can happen very easily that a cohesive social group can fragment along some fracture line

of identity let's say, and all hell breaks loose

and you know, that's what the Tutsi's and the Hutu in the, in the, in Rwanda

and those things can get out of control just so fast it's just unbelievable and so

and that wasn't, death anxiety, that was death, that's a whole different thing

and that's the other thing that terror management people don't exactly get, it's like

it isn't just that your culture and cultural beliefs protect you from anxiety

and say anxiety about death even, it's that they actually protect you from death!

as well as protecting you from death anxiety, I mean look

It's warm in here

it's cold outside

the fact that the culture is intact means that you are not outside freezing

that's a hell of a lot more fundamental in some sense than mere anxiety, although

I am not trying to underplay the role of anxiety that's a major issue, but

there is something that is a lot more fundamental at stake that mere psychology

so it's the match between your map of the world and other peoples actions that regulates your emotions

and, and it regulates it completely, because

you know if someone in here starting acting seriously deranged

like brandished a pistol, let's say

all of a sudden you would not be in the same place

at all

not a bit

and so what would happen, well

chaos would happen

and chaos isn't just that you would get anxious, that's not a good enough explanation

what would happen is a lot more complex than that, what happens in some sense is that your body

and it does this, it does this, what would happen is that you would react the same way that a rat reacts to a cat

it's exactly that, it's exactly that, you would respond as if

a terrible predator had emerged in your midst