Transcript for:
Understanding Social Interaction and Values

You are a social creature, right to the core, and most of your environment is other people, and those other people want something from you, you want something from them, but you're going to play games with them. You're going to be good at it, you're going to be bad at it, but you're going to play games with them. The game might have rules, sophisticated rules in fact, because as your behavior more and more approximates an ideal, you're more and more sophisticated, and the nature of the ideal is perhaps more and more complex, and difficult to understand. You get a hint of this though, if you pay attention to your own soul, your psyche, your unconscious. You'll see that there are people that you admire, there are people that you have contempt for. And it isn't necessarily that you're 100% accurate in your judgment. It's not such a bad idea to criticize your first impressions. There's a reason you admire someone. There's a reason you have contempt for someone. There may be multiple reasons. And that's a hint to your intrinsic value structure. It's a hint about your intrinsic value structure, right? You wouldn't admire someone unless there was something about them that you valued and perhaps that you would also like to be able to do. And you wouldn't despise someone or have contempt for them if you didn't feel that something they were doing was wrong. and that it would be wrong if you did it too. You're bringing to bear on the situation an implicit morality. And you have to do that because, as I said, you can't act without a morality, because if you're going to act, you're going to try to make things better. Otherwise, why bother? And if you're acting to make things better, then some things have to be better and some things have to be worse, and that's a value structure. So, you have one.