you know I was uh asked on a show about a year ago of all of the human phenomena that I've studied in my life or I'm aware of which is the one that has surprised me the most about human nature and I I paused for a second and I answered the inability of people to change their minds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary justin Trudeau comes in he does a disastrous job what do Canadians do reelect him that's not enough let's do it a third time then he steps down maybe this it's time now to do some autocorrection what do Canadians do they reelect the party that put them in the position that we're in right now so I think that that answer that I gave it was a British psychiatrist who was hosting me i think it's that much more appropo today it is almost impossible to get someone to change their opinions once it is anchored solidly into their personhood so there you Hey I've got a biblical reference that will clear that up for you okay shoot so one of the mysteries in the story of Exodus is why it takes the Israelites three generations to cross a relatively trivial stretch of desert so what's the narrative explanation so it's twofold remember in the account when Moses after Moses encounters the burning bush and gets to the bottom of something and learns which is what that story means he goes back to get the Pharaoh to change his mind but he doubles down the pharaoh and that's the consequence of the ever accelerating sequence of plagues and the first eight plagues destroy the present and the last plague which is the death of the firstborn destroys the future and it isn't until the present and the future are destroyed heaven and earth both plus the future that the pharaoh relents and even then he doesn't right because he sends his army after the Israelites once they do depart right now the question is why do people double down instead of changing even in the face of accelerating evidence of error okay so the Israelites leave right so now they are escaping their tyranny and their slavedom and that's a dynamic right because there's no tyrants without willing slaves and vice versa and so the Israelites have plenty to learn too and so the first thing that happens to them is the chaos of the Red Sea and that's chaos and blood why because when you change your mind the first thing that happens is things fall apart and so right and then they cross the Red Sea and they managed that successfully so that's that chaotic threshold and then they wander in the goddamn desert for three generations right why because at least under the tyranny they knew what to do and in the wilderness they are fractious resentful immature and unable to govern themselves and it takes three generations before they recover so and you know I talked to Carl Fristen about this and Carl's a neuroscientist of some repute and he has an entropy theory of anxiety which is a ve and I had worked on a parallel theory in my lab in Montreal we published a paper on it uh not too long before I departed for parts unknown your beliefs are game principles like game rules that bring order to complexity and if you're wrong you have to modify and the consequence of modification first is an encounter with unstructured entropy in chaos and that the apprehension of that locks people into their tyranny self-imposed familial cultural whatever so it's always it's never from where you are to the promised land it's always from where you are through the threshold of chaos into the goddamn desert and then maybe forward so in in chapter seven of the parasitic mind where I talk about how to seek truth I open up the chapter with a long quote by Leon Festinger the pioneer of theory of cognitive dissonance and it exactly speaks to your point so the chaos that you're talking about with the Red Sea and so on in the biblical story is the chaos that you experience internally when you are faced with a dissonant amount of evidence that is contrary to the one that you hold so dear to you and so it is no accident that this incredible quote by uh Leon Festinger I I obviously don't have it memorized here but basically he's saying that there is no ends to which people will go to in order to maintain the coherence of their current belief system irrespective of the amount of contrary evidence that they are exposed to because then that triggers cognitive dissonance and as a matter of fact paradoxically what often happens as I'm sure you know Jordan when I uh expose you to contrary information it only solidifies your position so you could imagine how disheartening it is right i'm coming at you with a mind vaccine that hopefully gets you to perhaps revisit some of your you know cherished beliefs you mean like a university professor should like a university professor should and what it ends up happening is exactly opposite to that it only emboldens you in your position it only solidifies that you were right despite the fact that I've shown you that you were perfectly wrong and so at times it it can seem like an insurmountable struggle because I'm in the business of you know defending truth and persuading people of opposing ideas but in most of the cases it's la I don't want to hear it and that's why I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome in in the previous book because while the ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand the metaphor is very apt which is I don't want to face reality it's willful blindness it's willful blindness and so it's a very in the Egyptian mythology the god of the state they had a god of the state Osiris and Osiris was a great exploratory and nation founding hero in his youth awake and alert and curious able to transform and to bring order but as he ages he becomes oified and that's sped along by the fact that he's willfully blind that that's in the Egyptian theology now he has a brother an evil brother Seth and Seth is the origin of the word Satan by the way through the Coptic Christians and Seth is the eternal evil brother of the willfully blind king and when Osiris is sufficiently old and sufficiently willfully blind which means unwilling to understand the usurping motivations of his evil brother Osiris chops him up into pieces and spreads his parts around Egypt in fact the Egyptians regarded each Egyptian pro province as a piece of Osiris right so that body would come together as an integrated state when you he can't kill Osiris because Osiris is a deity so there's no killing him but you can make sure everything falls to pieces so that's the blindness of institutions once established they oify and then they turn a blind eye to the machinations of the usurper right okay so Osiris is now scattered all across the landscape and so things have fallen apart right people say that about their own life everything fell apart his wife is queen of the underworld Isis and she rules the domain of the underworld and chaos which is where you go when things fall apart and she makes her appearance right so that's the renewal of the social order by what the planitude and terror of nature and she finds Osiris's fallus so the vessel of the seinal idea and she makes herself pregnant and has a son the son is Horus horus is the Egyptian god with of the eye the famous Egyptian eye with the fully open pupil and he's also a falcon because birds of prey have the most acute vision and Horus is willing to see and he can see evil and so he goes back to Egypt when he grows up like King Arthur he grows up alienated from his evil community and he goes back to fight Seth and they have a terrible battle and Seth tears out one of his eyes and they continue to fight and Horus gets the eye back and he banishes Seth to the to the nether regions of the cosmos no killing him cuz the force that usurps and parasitizes never dies okay now he's got his eye back now you think he could just slap it in his head and then he could rule that's not what happens he goes to the land of the dead back to the underworld voluntarily and he finds Osiris his father languishing in the underworld you know in a ghostly and and desecated state and he gives him his eye so he provides corrupt tradition with the capacity to see and then Osiris awakens and they unite and it's the union of Osiris and Horus that is the proper sovereign of the state and the soul of the pharaoh nice isn't that something that's nice i guess that's why you love you love to study ancient themes to link them to current realities right well it's it's so brilliant the Mesopotamians too worshiped vision attention for exactly the same reason it's exactly what we're talking about you know you talk about people turning a blind eye there are none so blind as those who will not see the deity of the revivocation of the corrupt state for the Egyptians was literally the open eye pay attention right and for the Mesopotamians it was twofold pay attention and speak the proper words [Music]