Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • It's not all that

  • happens though when they eat the fruit of the tree of

  • The knowledge of good and evil because it's not called the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of nakedness

  • It's called the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

  • And I thought about that for a tremendous amount of time

  • It's like what in the world because I assumed these old stories make sense. You know, it's a game

  • I play it's like they're old. They've been around a long time. I'm not sure why they're there, but there they are

  • they're at the basis of our culture like

  • many many of the stories that we depend on depend on them our whole culture grew out of their

  • Roots, let's say and so I assume that our ancestors who managed to survive conditions

  • That would have done a lot of us in very rapidly

  • I can tell you we're a lot smarter than we think and that the mysterious

  • Processes that that produce these stories and compelled us to remember them are a lot more

  • Psychologically significant than we generally tend to presume

  • So I give them the benefit of the doubt and try to understand why it is that they might make sense

  • Instead of assuming that they don't and that that's not easy

  • As their complicated stories and so I thought about this nakedness

  • Knowledge of good and evil idea for a very very long time like about 20 years

  • Puzzling it out. What the hell is the relationship between discovering that you're naked and

  • discovering good and evil and then one day

  • mostly because of studying totalitarianism

  • Totalitarianism and the atrocity that proclivity for people to commit atrocity in the service of their group belief

  • Or maybe just because that's what they were like

  • Clued me in and I thought I see this is one of the things that really makes people different than animals

  • It's like, you know

  • It's one thing to realize that you're naked to realize that you're naked means that you know that you're limited in time and space

  • That you're mortal and that you're subject to degeneration and to social

  • Humiliation and to your own harsh judgement all of that nakedness to know that you're vulnerable

  • Against the world and definitely a source of shame because of that

  • and

  • and a felt lack of self-sufficiency and then no wonder and no wonder

  • it's understandable, but the other thing is is that

  • This is and this is the rub

  • it's like if you're out in the veldt and you're not being very careful and a hungry lion jumps on you and

  • Eats you you don't really think of the lion as evil. I mean you might right at that moment, but you know

  • Philosophically, it's not evil. It's just hungry and as soon as it's not hungry then

  • It goes and has asleep and it's not up to some malevolent trick. It's it's done for the day but

  • Human being that's a whole different sort of creature. And because human being is capable of doing terrible things to someone else and

  • Consciously, so you think well, what's the connection between that and nakedness itself? And it seems to be this is like

  • Here's the thing is that once I realize that I can be hurt, you know, I have a self conscious model of my own

  • vulnerability

  • Then I can generalize that to other people I can think. Oh, this is interesting

  • Here's how I can be heard by myself. Here's how I can be heard by society

  • Here's how I can be hurt by nature and by the unknown and what that implies is that well you can be hurt

  • with exactly the same mechanisms and

  • that in need immediately becomes part of my

  • what would you say my repertoire of ability and then all of a sudden the world is no longer a walled a

  • Walled garden and a well watered place, but it's a moral story because with that ability to inflict

  • suffering

  • Comes the knowledge of good and evil as far as I'm concerned those are identical

  • Propositions because now we have the choice a deep choice about how we're going to treat ourselves and each other we can inflict

  • tremendous pain and suffering on each other in a very

  • voluntary and and

  • conscious manner in

  • a way that no other animal can manage and that's the dawning of the moral sense that

  • capacity we now have to choose to

  • Mitigate or exaggerate suffering and and that's not all but it's a huge part of it

It's not all that

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it