Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality
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Two latest books that we're going to talk about today. Here's the first one, Inventing God, Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality. Boy, I'm having a hard time reading my own writing here today. You can see why I had him on for that. But his other new book that just came out is called End of the World.

Civilization and its Fate. It seems like if you just watch the news, that's a rather ominous title because it often feels like it's the end of the world. John, how you doing? Nice to see you. Oh, it's nice to see you. And thanks so much for having me on your show. I've been a big fan of you for many years. Oh, you're the one. Thank you. Where are you? You're in Ontario, Canada?

Yes. Yeah. Okay. South Central Ontario. Yeah. You know, I don't think I've ever had, in fact, I know I've never had a psychoanalyst on the show. I've had a lot of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists and sociologists

social psychologists and so on. Maybe you could get in the last time I really thought about psychoanalysis, I think was in my history of psychology undergraduate course in the 70s. So just give us a kind of a background of yourself, how you got into that particular branch of psychology and what it is exactly a psychoanalyst does. Well, that's a big question. So I'll try to be brief. Yeah.

Well, I became very much interested in Freud in my undergraduate years. And when I got into grad school in clinical psychology, I naturally wanted to study more in that field. And then that led to getting professional training.

as a psychoanalyst, which entails a great deal of years of postgraduate training and supervision.

And, um, uh, you know, psychoanalysis is different, uh, for many different schools. So depending upon what you're talking about, uh, but contemporary, uh, you know, contemporary theory and practice is radically different than the classical, uh, analytic type of stereotype of being on a couch and five days a week, uh, seeing, seeing, uh,

a bearded old man that says very lentil during a 50-minute session. So it's more of a sensibility or a clinical attitude that we bring to our work.

Yeah, interesting. So if somebody, and did you have, not patients, I guess clients would be the right word, professionally as a therapist? And do you still? Yes. Oh, gosh, yeah. For many, I practiced for 30 years. So I was in full-time private practice for the last 20. And I ended up retiring during the pandemic. But I still teach and supervise. Yeah.

Right. Just give us an idea of what are some of the issues that people come to you for? I mean, like anxiety or depression or sadness or I don't know what, marital problems or work problems? Yeah, you name it. It's just all over the map. People tend to tend to come to stay for long term analytic work are usually those who have been dealing with

all kinds of conflicts for most of their life. And it's usually based in childhood or childhood traumas of some type, but it could be a variety of things. I mean,

You know, most people go through, you know, through depressions in their life. I mean, it's quite common and normative. And so that would bring in a lot of people, folks that just can't cope or are struggling in relationships, work, or just dealing with common anxieties.

And I saw adolescents and adults. So, I mean, it's very different populations have different presenting issues. And are there cases where, you know, for sure it's a long term issue dating back to their childhood and therefore conflict with parents or whatever, versus just a more short term, immediate issue?

You know, it's just a proximate problem at work with the boss, or I'm having this current problem with my spouse and my marriage. It has nothing to do with my childhood.

My problem is not my mother. My problem is my wife. Problem's not my father. The problem is my husband. Something like that. I mean, how could you make a distinction there? How would you know? Well, usually you take the patient's lead or the client's lead about what they're there for. And if they're not there to...

you know, to delve in their past and they're wanting to deal with immediate concerns and issues, it naturally would be a short-term treatment. But often the case is

is that patterns will emerge in a person's life, and the pattern can be a repetition of earlier unresolved conflicts or complexes that keep playing out over and over again in a variety of different ways. And that leads naturally to doing more long-term exploratory work,

It also leads to people feeling like they just want to have a place to a confidant to talk about anything without feeling judged or without judgment.

any kind of recourse to if they were to be completely honest in their life with other people. Yeah, I know one of the problems with testing the efficacy of psychoanalytic or just any kind of psychotherapeutic treatments is you don't have a control group, right? Because you just have this one person and each person is different. So it's hard to know if it really works. So I guess it depends on what you mean by work.

I mean, if you're sitting there one-on-one with somebody for weeks or months or however long, and they get better, they feel better, they say, hey, thanks, my life is going much better. Well, then it worked.

In that sense versus, you know, do you know for sure that that particular technique works if you had a thousand people and you ran them through the same number of sessions and so on, you'd say, you know, 650 would get better and, you know, 50 would get worse and the rest would, you know, not change or whatever it would be. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're right that everything is about a subjective experience. So everyone's their own, you know, control group.

as well. So, you know, we really just try to tailor our approach to the patient's needs and their unique subjectivities and lived experiences. But I would say that, you know, having a general approach to therapy or talk therapy or analysis, whatever you want to call it,

is based on certain clinical sensibilities, being present for a person. It's not like I'm a mechanic. It's not like I'm following a technique even. It's just a way of being. So I come to form a relationship that's unique with each person. And sometimes it really does not work out.

And other times it is a process and it develops into an emotional connection or attachment and patients feel close in that way. Interesting. Yeah, I do sometimes also wonder if a lot of people just need somebody to talk to, somebody that knows how to talk to somebody non-judgmentally and that

Some of us have, most of us have friends, not that many though.

I mean, the study of a number of friendships, oh, I have dozens of friends, but how many people do you talk to every week or a couple times a week? Really, you could count them on one hand for most people. I mean, my spouse, a couple of my cycling buddies maybe, a couple of my science friends, and pretty much that's it. Maybe five, right? That somebody that really knows me, that I would pick up a phone and just pick up the conversation where we left off last week about this particular issue.

And maybe some people, you know, you're one of those people for them. I would very much agree with that. And I also agree with what you're saying about friendship. It's very selective. And, you know, I'm like yourself. I can count my friends on one hand. And it's a special relationship.

And you just can't be friends with anyone. I mean, uh, and, but there's degrees of friendships. Uh, there's, you know, collegial friends versus really close friends that you talk to frequently or visit. And, and, um, most people I would say, uh, lack it. They don't really have the genuine deep friendships, uh, that they, that they crave. And, uh,

However, with me, I would say it's more of a professional friendship, if we're going to use this language, not a personal one. But it's unlike any other because who can you talk to where you can really say whatever you want to say?

Without without having to censor your thoughts and be accepted. Not many. In fact, I think that's probably not even true for my close friends. There's some things I probably would not disclose. And maybe just to go one step further about self-deception.

Maybe there's things I don't even want to talk to myself about. Yeah, very much so. I don't want to think of myself as that kind of person. Yet I sort of on one level know, well, maybe I would do that. Whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting problem. There was a great quote, I think it was from Nietzsche about that. You know, there's certain things that we don't want to tell most people. There's some things we wouldn't tell even our close friends. And there's some things we don't even want ourselves to know.

There you go. That's the self-deception part. Yeah, that's Bob Trivers' theory about deception and self-deception.

you're less likely to give off cues that you're lying or deceiving if you yourself believe what it is you're saying. And so we come to believe what it is we believe for whatever reason, and we sell it better if we actually believe it ourselves. So much of life in autobiography is kind of a deception. It's a story we tell about ourselves. Yes, and that's why it probably comes across as so authentic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I read two biographies of Freud, Frank Salloway's book, Freud, The Biologist of the Mind, and then Fred Cruz's biography of Freud, which was really more of a critique of Freud. Does anybody place much emphasis, given on what we know about Freud now and his methods, on what he originally said? Or psychoanalysis evolved so much Freud wouldn't really recognize it? Well, I mean, psychoanalysis is merely a footnote to Freud, right?

So, I mean, some of the key, uh, the key, um, theses of how we understand the mind and culture is based in, uh, you know, the, the primacy of unconscious processes. And, um, so, uh, this is, um, the case throughout all, all psychoanalytic schools where we predicate, um,

Understanding someone based upon how unconscious thought and conflicts and defenses and transferences are all played out in conscious life.

And so that's why people are very complex. Just like you were mentioning, most people aren't aware of their defenses. They're not aware of their self-deceptions. And because it would be having to face a very uncomfortable truth about themselves and contradict how they view themselves consciously.

So Freud is very much alive in that sense, but the field has evolved over 100 years and has come to put different emphases on relationality or the intersubjective or interpersonal relationship.

But it doesn't mean that basic things like unconscious defenses and desire and conflicts play out. Yeah. Well, I mean, that gets me to your End of the World book, in which you talk about the many threats to human civilization, violence being one of them, conflict, war, and so on. You have a subsection called The Need to Kill.

Freud tells us of two competing forces in human nature, the will toward life and the will toward death manifested as eros, or libido, lust, the sexual force responsible for erotic life and its antithetical companion conceived under the drive toward destruction. This dual class of innate psychic energies comprise those that seek to preserve and unite and those that seek to kill and destroy, both giving rise to what may be

What is this? Equipremordial, sorry, characterized as our caring and aggressive propensities. Can you unpack that for us? Because I'm not sure I really understand that. Are you saying that there's like, I don't know, is it almost like a hydraulic theory of violence and aggression that builds up and then...

is in conflict with this other drive for love and compassion? I would tend to put it more as that these are dialectical forces in the psyche and in society that are in relationship with one another. So that means that there's a constant interplay of oppositional forces.

or desires or urges, whatever the language you care to use. And so because there's loving,

you know, caring feelings that we have for people. We want emotional attachments to others. We value our relationships. But there's also other elements of us that are quite primal, and they have to be channeled. So, you know, innate human aggression.

The destructive qualities, you know, these are things that exist and they are often transformed in various ways, even creative ways, such as, you know, intellectual competition with other people is a sublimation of aggression in Freud's model.

But it would be also hard to deny the fact that there's unbridled aggression everywhere. Like you said at the very beginning, just look at the news or the TV every day and you cannot be in denial of how destructive, aggressive, and hateful, if not evil, much of pockets of society are. Yeah, I guess on that, I would say we should be cautious about the availability heuristic and

of what's available online to see or on the nightly news because that's literally their job is just to cover the bad things that happen you know the school shooting you know well there's you know tens of thousands of schools you know 99.999% of them don't get shot up but no one covers that right

And I've noticed Twitter has really gone to the dark side. There's the two parts of Twitter now, or X, sorry. There's the people I follow, and then there's for you, which I never even chose any of that. It's just part of my feed. And maybe a third of it is people fighting.

It's just like CCT video footage, usually no sound. And there's now this guy, Steve Inman, who narrates the fights because he's an MMA fight commentator. It's actually pretty hilarious to watch these things. But if that's all you watched, you know, I'd be afraid to even leave my office and walk across the street to the McDonald's or Starbucks that there might be a fight. But in fact, I never see any of this ever, ever in my goings about.

And, you know, so I think, you know, there's a selection bias there. And it's not like there's, again, this like hydraulic model, like this aggression is building up and it has to be released. You know, people fight for a reason, you know, and there's been a lot of studies on this. You know, like 90 percent of homicides are moralistic in nature.

The person deserved to die because and then, you know, the people in prison that have given these interviews will tell the interviewer, you know, this is why I killed my wife because she cheated on me or I killed my buddy because he was embezzling or he cheated in pool or he took my parking spot.

You know, it's almost always it's almost never instrumental like I wanted his Rolex. So I killed him. You know, it's always this other thing. It's moralistic in nature. So the problem is that not that we're not moral enough, that we're overly moral. We moralize everything and then want to implement it. Or you see the people that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. You know, they really believe that they believe the boss. They believe the election was stolen and our country is being taken away. And I'm going to go do something about it.

Uh, not all of them. I mean, some of them are just there to raise hell or whatever, but you know, a lot of them were in cause they've been interviewed. Uh, Nancy Pelosi's daughter, Alexandra did that film where she went to them. They're now out of prison. Some of these guys serve a couple of years in prison and they still think the election was, I did the right thing. I know, I know I broke the law. I shouldn't have done that, but darn it. I was so angry. Right.

So what is that aggression that bubbles up? Like, you know, somebody is stealing my country or they stole my, they cheated on my, she cheated on me or whatever it is. Well, to tie this into the moralization of aggression, going back to Freud's model that, you know, an overly harsh or judgmental superego, the moral equivalence of what we call conscience,

often needs to harness the aggressive energies of our psyche to justify acting in heinous ways. It doesn't make them any more moral than it would be just someone subjectively says they have a caprice that they want to satisfy because of their own desires.

you know, subjective way of thinking and feeling. It doesn't make it right, though. But, yeah, people act out like that all the time on a principle, on an ideal, and to the degree that they'll justify murder in the name of God or for country, as you put it. But the way you said it there, John, it suggests that there's this energy bubbling up for aggression.

And I got to release it. So I release it. And then I rationalize why I released it with these arguments, which are bogus. But I'm saying something different, that there really are reasons why people aggress. Revenge. They don't want to be bullied. They want to develop a reputation of not being bullied or whatever it is. There's kind of a rationality behind it. It's not an energy. See, I'm always uncomfortable with a lot of these terms. They're kind of...

constructs we, and not just Freudian, but a lot of cognitive psychology is like this. It implies that there's these modules in the brain that do something. Well, it's not clear that that's actually the case. I mean, where is this psychic energy? Can we measure it? You know, or consciousness, where is it? Well, it's everywhere, it's nowhere, it's, you know, it's, these are, get to be a little fuzzy. Yes, well, I agree with you there. Um,

You know, what is the language that we use to try to represent or depict inner processes that we are experiencing? Some of which are not even mediated through consciousness. So it's a big topic. And you're right to point out that consciousness studies, they can't even agree upon what consciousness is.

And neuroscience tends to reduce everything down to some kind of physical ontology or brain state, which of course collapses all the nuances of what's happening in terms of our inner experience.

So, yeah, I appreciate you pointing that out, that you're uncomfortable with the notion of energy because it implies a hydraulic model. We can call it other things. We can call it desire. We can call it affect. We can call it a yearning. There's a number of different models or languages we can use. That's why I prefer to call things psychic processes.

rather than the brain. And yet, I mean, it opens up a major space for talking about phenomenon. Yeah. Well, we have to use words to talk or else we can't communicate. So I'm always just trying to caution myself and others about how we use these terms like he figured it out or she remembered.

Well, we don't exactly know what's going on in the brain. We know it's in the brain because where else would it be? But what exactly is going on is hard to say. You know, there's a lot about memory we don't really understand exactly. I mean, we kind of identify where in the brain it is sometimes, but not always. Yeah, well, you...

When we talk about, again, the brain, I mean, we're dislocating the human being from the organism. So I sometimes have a difficulty buying into the reductive language that often boils everything down to our physical material stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. But just to take some examples off the headlines here, Putin invading Ukraine. Well, that's aggression. How would a psychoanalytic model explain Putin's motive? Or could you? Maybe that's not a good example. You know, I'm not an expert on on his biography, but he seems like he's a calculated psychopath.

And so, I mean, so it's trying to understand the, you know, the inner world of somebody who doesn't have genuine capacity to attach to other people or love people or can kill without.

you know, guilt, remorse, or empathy for others. So, I mean, it's probably very much based upon need for power and for narcissistic aggrandizement and a number of things that would fuel these extreme ways of acting and being in the world. Yeah. The thing is, everybody used to think like Putin, and now almost nobody does. In terms of world leaders, I mean, not everybody.

world leaders, national leaders, and so on. I mean, just centuries past, you know, wars were quite common. There were always wars going on, and now there's very few comparative to centuries ago. You cite Pinker in his book, Better Angels of Our Nature. He tracks all the decline of violence. It's not zero. It's never going to be zero. And there'll always be a handful of Putins and Kim Jong-uns around, but there's few of them than there used to be.

So I don't know how you think it'd be in terms of the end of the world. You know, those are threats. Yes, particularly if nuclear weapons were implemented. But there's less of it than there used to be. So I'm slightly more optimistic than you are, maybe. I don't know. You probably are. And I hope I'm wrong that these people that tend to run the world, at least these leaders, will...

over the process of civilization and time become much less nefarious. And I'm glad to hear if this is the case, statistically speaking, that there's less aggression in the world. But how about calculated existential risks that are compounded by other types of risks?

And, you know, I watched your podcast on the nuclear war and engagement, and it's a scary scenario. Totally. But also reading your article on the prisoner's dilemma, that you would think that the rational, sound mind would just do nothing.

They wouldn't initiate anything, knowing full well that we're all going to just go up and smoke. But it's hard to calculate how a psychopath's thing can work. Would they want to take down the ship with them?

But it's a very minuscule risk, as you're pointing out, in the grand scheme of things. You're worrying about a few rogue national leaders, but they could initiate a world war, like we're watching right now. It's not going to be a surprise if something happens. Yeah, I agree. Okay, so we can maybe make a cut at the 1% to 3% psychopaths, and then even fewer of those that are also...

narcissists and Machiavellian, the so-called dark triad, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. And then you can throw sadism in there, I guess, as well. That probably does explain people like Putin, I'm guessing. The terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah. This is it.

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I suspect they're not all psychopaths. There's something else going on there, ideology, religious fanaticism, and so on. How do you think about that other example from the headline? Yes, well, I would tend to agree that, you know, there's, you know, political Islam. I mean,

I mean, you've been inculcated in fundamental thinking ever since you came out of the womb in these countries, particularly if you're taught to hate Jews and you want to kill your enemy because they have a different belief system than yours.

So it wouldn't be all psychopathic that would be driving that. It would be these ideological beliefs. Yeah. But then when they're equipped with a terrorist mentality or approach to systematically murdering people,

That, to me, still fits the definition of a psychopath. I mean, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to actually kill a human being. I would think it would create all kinds of internal discord, and I would have a hard time processing it. But if I was trained to eliminate people because they aren't people, they're objects, then

You have a different mindset. And, you know, I think we we have to be mindful that we could see a new wave of terror that is happening just because of the.

Hamas's massacre and then watching the lunacy of the world wanting to favor a group of people who would like to wipe out the Jewish state. Of course, it's not that simple. There's complexities on each side. But but, you know, to say that, you

you know, a country doesn't deserve to exist. It needs to be wiped out, taken over. You would never see this with any other country. What happens if someone said, you know, Cameroon shouldn't exist? You know, it just is bizarre in this day and age that things would devolve into anti-Zionistic

hate and anti-Semitism that we see seeping out of the woodwork in all society. Yeah, this is one of the great questions I think that we face with understanding human behavior. Most people would not do any of these terrible things. Most people are good people most of the time, most of the place.

And so how do you get somebody to do that? Fly a plane into a building to put a bullet in somebody's head, shove somebody into a gas chamber. How do you get them to do that?

And, you know, it's gradual, like Milgram's shock experiments, 15 volts at a time, just one toggle switch each time. They're hoping it ends, but they want to finish the task or whatever of all these motives. But gradually, slowly, they, you know, kind of eke their way along the pathway of evil.

I don't know if you've seen that film or read the book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning's book. Now it's a Netflix documentary you can watch. Maybe it's on Amazon Prime, I forget. No, I think it's on Netflix, Ordinary Men. So they tracked this group of slightly older men who were a police battalion that then got shipped off to, I think it was Ukraine, after the German army swept through there and conquered the

the armies there. And then their job was to kill every Jew in every town. And what a difficult task this was. And a lot of guys, they didn't really want to do it, but it was their orders. And, you know, then they're given the option in front of everybody, you don't have to do this if you don't want. Go ahead and step out. Well, you know, everybody's looking at each other like, uh,

I don't want to be seen as a coward by my friends and all this kind of social pressure. And then they've inculcated all the anti-Semitism anyway. These are bad people, yeah. And if the roles were reversed, they'd be killing us. They'd be in our country killing our loved ones. So yeah, yeah, we should do this revenge. And then they got drunk every night. So that helps dull the pain of doing that.

A lot of them had a hard time shooting somebody up close, so they moved them to these pits where they're maybe 50 meters away and shoot them, so you're not quite as personal. And it's an interesting study in the dynamic of how you convert somebody to that. They didn't have to do it. We now know that, like the Nuremberg trials, I had to follow orders or else. Well, that really wasn't the case. They really went along with it, but for really odd reasons.

Like, I don't want to let down my friends. Wow. What does it take to get to that? Yeah. Well, I'm glad I don't have any friends like that. Yeah. But how would you think about that as a psychologist? It's often difficult to speculate about hypotheticals, especially I didn't see the show. But if I think your observations, you know, you have internal questions.

loyalties to country friends don't want to appear like a coward these things could make some sense even feigning not really you know shooting directly to kill but missing them on purpose and you know a way of justifying what you're doing but it also shows how people you know fail to take a stand on things

How there's a certain cowardliness about not saying, no, I don't want to do this. And yet there could be fear.

That if I don't go along with it, I'm going to get killed. They're going to shoot me or some kind of repercussion. So, you know, fears and prejudices often drive why people act. There could be some fantasy that if I don't participate, I'm going to get court-martialed or whatever. I'm going to lose my pension. Again, I'm just...

My fantasy is just speculating here, but there's so many different variables about why people would do that. But if they've also been trained to be a military soldier, I would imagine you would have to prepare yourself to kill. Yeah, and they do, of course. And that's why the instances like the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib

Prison abuses were kind of an interesting study in how we think about these issues. We've trained these guys to really be badasses and just go over there and kick some ass, destroy and do what you're told. And then when they go over the top and they do things they clearly should not have done.

And then we expect them to have these breaks to put on these governors to hold them back and know when when's the right time to do it. And most people, most soldiers don't abuse prisoners and things like that. But but some do. I don't know. To me, it's we shouldn't have been totally surprised. It could have been expected.

And how so many people struggle with, you know, post-traumatic trauma, right? From having to do these things or to be subjected to almost, you know, to death and destruction and almost being killed themselves. So, yeah, it's complex. Yeah. How would you, have you treated anybody with PTSD or how would you?

Oh, yes. I mean, there's so many traumatized people. I mean, in fact, it's the new it's really the new buzzword in the field. Everything's about traumas, you know, developmental traumas, not just some extraordinary event that happened. But, yeah.

I mean, so many people are in car accidents or workplace accidents or have survived, you know, or diasporas, migrants, escaping countries. I mean, it's everywhere. This is like.

now a transgenerational transmission of traumas in one family to the next generation. And if you start looking on a big mass scale of all the different parameters of society,

I mean, I'm in Toronto area, which is one of the largest multicultural centers in North America. And so people are here from all over the world. It's not just like, you know, a white city, so to speak. And everyone has their own stories. I mean, even when they don't come from, let's say, a refugee background,

They have their own stories about tribulations of immigrating here and why they had to come or wanted to come. And not to mention that the level of, and most people don't think about this, but the saturation of abuse.

that most of the population is experienced on some level, even if it's emotional abuse at home. But it's often physical, sexual abuse that people have been living with their whole life. And if you then are exposed to another trauma, it can reactivate all these other things.

That's why often we'll see these patterns of childhood traumas become reactivated. How would it transmit cross-generationally, the mechanism? It'd be more like attachment patterns, communication. It'd be...

The way, you know, the family relates to one another. Parents relate to their children. You know, a good example is after the Holocaust and many, you know, many of the the Jewry that came immigrated Europe would not want to talk about what happened to them.

in Auschwitz, let's say, because they wanted to start fresh. And there is always, I mean, of course, this doesn't happen in every family, but it's quite common with people I know and experienced relationships with. And there's, nobody wants to talk about these horrible things. And so this affects people.

Their capacity to be present for their children and relate to them in loving and available ways. And or it could be that the trauma is what gets in the way of being a good parent because they're suffering and they can't and they don't talk about it or talk through or work through it.

Um, and so, um, I, I think this happens a lot with, um, um, you know, soldiers that return from their, their tours of duty where they don't talk about these things. Um, that's why, I mean, that's why I see this stuff because, you know, keep in mind, um, you know, I see, I've seen a clinical population. I'm not seeing just the average Joe out there, even though the average Joe will come in, um,

Yeah. Yeah, I don't doubt that you have seen that, and examples abound of PTSD in lots of different examples like that. But the counterfactual question is, well, what about all the soldiers that experienced violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on? And they came back, and they're perfectly happy, fine parents, fathers. They don't have any problems with their wives. They have no PTSD whatsoever.

i guess the question is why why is that do we know why some people are more effective than others yeah yeah once again it's it's hard to ask um well i mean like because we're all unique i mean it just can't you can't be just thrown into a uh a database that's where everything's been stripped uh of your personality

um so if we go on the assumption that everyone is not the same but there might be certain commonalities or universalities that can apply but yet you're still your own unique subject with your own unique agency and your own unique history of growing up and and what you've experienced in life so that's

what I would say is often defines people differently. Some are able to cope and lead a fully functional, adjusted and happy life, and others are scarred. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about the example of the theory for a while that people held that parents who were abused as children are themselves abusive parents. And there were examples of this.

But in fact, this is leaving out the counterfactuals. Well, what about all the kids who were abused as children and they grew up to be loving parents? They wouldn't dream of hurting their children because they know how bad that feels. And of course, then there's the other two cells of the opposite conditions. And so, you know, from a social scientist perspective, you have to, you know, look at all four of the cells, all the different conditions in the counterfactuals that try to determine causality. But I suspect you're right that one of the limitations to the predictive analysis

validity of any of the social sciences is that every single person is unique with a unique historical pathway in their own life that no social science model could ever accommodate. You just can't. It's not predictable. So the example I use is this fragile family study where there was, I don't know, there was like thousands and thousands of

of these fragile families. These are families, broken homes, divorces, they're impoverished and living in horrible neighborhoods and so on. This was, I think, in the Chicago area. And so these, you know, I don't know, dozens of social scientists were tasked with

go ahead and predict who's going to succeed, who's going to fail, and so on. They could say with a certain probability that this cohort of fragile family children are going to do worse than the ones that are from this affluent neighborhood.

For sure. On average, there'll be these differences in their GPAs and their life incomes and their marriages and their health and their height and so on. But can you ever point to one kid and go, tell me what's going to happen to him? And the answer is no, they can't.

And my favorite example of this is this other book I read at the podcast guest on class, Brian class. Yeah. He's talking about this poor black kid that grew up. It's just the horrible, horrible, everything I just described. And it turns out it's LeBron James, right? He's the greatest NBA player of all time, right? So why is it that that kid became the greatest NBA player of all time? And some other kid ends up with a horrible life. And the answer is,

We can't. We don't know. Well, I would say that we cannot underestimate the power of individual freedom and agency and choice.

and existential desires that people have. They can overcome a lot. And then there's others that don't feel that they have that kind of internal power. I guess what we want to know then is, well, what can we do about it? I mean, you can do something about it as a

As a psychotherapist, one-on-one, but I guess as a society, you know, if you're the mayor, governor, president, or you're a policymaker, or you run a think tank or whatever, and you want to offer recommendations, that's a little harder. Yes, it is. How do we solve the world's problems here? But...

I think identifying them would be the first step and being honest about them, because if we don't, then we can't intervene. So I would definitely think whatever communities are in need of help would suggest that we need to give more resources to them at the very least.

And have different policies and, you know, economics that that conform to, you know, more of a socialized way of helping people. Yeah. I use examples like things the government can do is like give tax breaks.

or certain things like donating to the skeptic society. We're a 501 C three. So you can write off your donation, right? You know, in other words, it's good to give to charity. We want people to do that. We want to help motivate them so you can deduct that off your income tax. That's it. That's a nice thing. I get a break for being married. I get another tax break for having a kid. I get a, I did get a tax break for having an electric car. That's going away now because everybody's got them. But the government does do these sorts of things already. Uh,

So nudging people, it's good to be married. We want you to be married. We want you to own a home. We want you to have kids. This is what we want as a society. And so we're going to, you know, this is choice architecture, right? The libertarian paternalism, I think it's called, yes. You know, where you kind of structure the choice architecture in a way that nudges people to do what we think is a good thing to do.

Well, maybe things are a bit different up here. Oh, in Canada? In terms of taxes and economic advantages and such. But yes, they just did introduce a new subsidized daycare policy for all Canadians. So, you know, the Liberals government did that. And of course, my oldest daughter,

is very pleased to have some help with my, my grandson's daycare expenses. Oh, interesting. Okay. All right. Another topic we've covered on the show a lot is the, you know, kind of crisis amongst teenagers, particularly young or young adults and,

You know, there's this spike that's now well documented in anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, cutting, more so in girls than boys, one and a half times for boys compared to previous generations, three times for girls compared to previous generations.

You know Jonathan Haidt's book about this, The Anxious Generation. They were coddled. They didn't get outside and play. Too much time on the screen. Too much FaceTime. Or sorry, Facebook. No, that's out now. TikTok or whatever the latest thing is. In other words, society has changed in a way that's not good. And so I don't know how closely you followed this, but have you seen some of this in your practice? More teens coming in.

And if you've observed this, you know, societally wise, what do you think is the cause? Is it too much social media, not enough in-person interactions, more outdoor play is good? Or is it something else we're not thinking about at the moment? I don't know. I don't think the debate's been resolved yet. No, I don't think it will be because, you know, everything's overdetermined.

in my in my world view there isn't a single cause um and people tend to talk that way as if we'll locate that and we'll fix it but there's so many over determined forces that that shape people but i've witnessed this myself with my own children that um you know especially during the pandemic and my my youngest is now in university but

She had to go through being cooped up for a couple of years, not having in-person experiences with her cohort in school. And you're right, everyone is glued to their devices.

And, I mean, I just started using a cell phone when I retired because my wife made me. Really? Yeah. You didn't have a smartphone? You didn't have a cell phone? I don't even have a smartphone now. You are old school. Well, I have to say you're not missing much. Yeah. Except for the convenience of making phone calls when you're out and about. But, okay. Yeah.

Well, that's why it's there when I need it, but I certainly don't walk around with it in my pocket.

But, you know, you're right. The youth have gone through a lot of things, you know, with the pandemic, with the cognitive decline, with the educational deprivations. And, you know, I don't know if we can just say it's one thing. If Hyatt's thesis is that everyone is

You know, more or less addicted to this technology they carry around and you have mindless, mindless entertainment and things that people are invested in, but they're not reading.

Um, they're not being prepared for going to university. People can't even write. They're going to now use the, uh, generative AI, you know, uh, so they don't have to know how to communicate. I mean, uh, it, it's tough. Uh, I know that a lot of my professor colleagues tell me the same thing that their students are so ill prepared for university that they don't want to even read a book. Uh, and, um, uh,

And they they lack almost like lack basic cognitive development skills to be in university as a freshman, let's say, right out of school, out of high school.

So I think society, you know, with technology has changed. I mean, like, gosh, you know, we grew up with no internet, you know, we know what it's like to, to go to the library, to do research, physically take out books, you know, write on a typewriter. I mean, this is, um, entirely different generation. Um,

And the other observation is that people often don't know how to socialize with their group. I mean, young people, that they would even prefer to text one another when they're sitting right next to each other. It's bizarre. And if you ever just look at, just randomly observe people when you're out in the mall or out shopping,

and they're walking around with their device, you know, this is why people are getting hit by cars. So I do agree that there's a lot of challenges that the new technologies have created. And whether or not, you know, people aren't encouraged to, you know,

socialize or to do sports or particularly group athletics or other activities I think that's based upon for household to household often if that's encouraged in the house then kids are going to be more inclined to engage in those activities okay last question on your end of the world book here

Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Your chapter eight is titled Living in the End Times. Are we really living in the end times? Haven't people always said that? Short of nuclear weapons, I'll give you that one. I agree. That could exterminate the species even. But I'm not sure about the others. Yeah. Well, you know, we've got to use a little provocative title and things like this. I agree.

I think if we don't get our environmental crisis under control, that's probably the next catalyst for, you know, more of a societal decay or collapse scenario. This is it.

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The other thing that worries me is the overpopulation prediction, because we were talking about human aggression. I mean, the more people there are here, the more it's going to amplify tensions and intergroup conflicts and standard of living and wealth disparities.

And those things are multipliers for problems. If, I mean, if we do have biodiversity loss or ecosystems that collapse, it will likely set into effect a chain reaction of other things. So,

Do I do I think we're all going to, you know, blow up or die anytime soon? Probably not. But I'm yes, I'm much more pessimistic about about things. And it sounds like you are. Yeah, I used to worry about the overpopulation thing when I was in college and then graduate school. So I'm maybe into the 80s.

But now it looks like, I don't know, there's several dozen countries that are well below replacement level, like South Korea, Japan. The States is probably going to get there. A number of northern European countries in which the replacement level is 2.1 babies per woman. And now, like South Korea was just there, it was 0.7.

I mean, they're not even remotely closed. Their population is going to collapse, and now they're worried about economic future, the future of the economy, because a lot of the baby boomers are retiring now, and the upcoming generation that's supposed to support them through something of a pyramid-like scheme of Social Security, there are not going to be enough workers generating income to support these older generations and so on. And you need a robust population to sustain an economy.

And so there may be a birth dearth. Now, why is that happening? Well, education, economic prosperity. Women just have fewer babies when they are empowered economically, when they have rights, when they have reproductive freedom and choice. They just have fewer babies. They don't need to have as many.

And life is slowed down because we live longer. So you don't have to zip through your life quite as fast. This is Jean Twenge's theory in her book, Generation, that vaccines, public health and other measures that have allowed us to live longer mean you don't have to have babies at 18, 19, 20 years old. You can have them at 29, 30 years.

years old, which is what's happened, 10 years. The Gen Z women are having babies 10 years later than baby boomer women.

And instead of having three or four or five, or if you want to go back to the 19th century, seven or eight or nine and three or four of them die, now they pretty much all live because modern medicine. And so you really only need one, maybe two, right? So, you know, to me, if we carried on those conditions and applied them to, say, African countries as they become democratized,

and become viable market economies, they are going to have fewer babies. It may take another century for the whole thing. I think you pointed out it's going to peak in 2050, 2060 or so at about $10 billion and then go back down. We'll be back to where we are now maybe by 2100.

And then and then continue down. I don't know. That's how I think about it. Well, you're right. I mean, certainly things would be entirely different if people came from, you know, more democratic countries that value education.

value, standard of living, and they have the means to do it. But you also pointed out Africa. We also have the Arab world and we have India. I mean, so where the most people are in developing countries, they're the ones who's having tons and tons of children. Yes.

Yeah, that's true. Religion there, right? Fecundity is the other way to grow a religion. You can only grow a religion two ways, making more babies, fecundity, or conversion. And most religions are not good at conversion. Right.

The Mormons try, but I think they're sending the missionary boys out in their white-pressed shirts on their bicycles, which I always enjoy seeing here in Southern California. But they're not very successful at converting people, right? It's more of a discipline thing for young men to do. But that gets me to your other book. I want to, before our time runs out, Inventing God. I want to get your thoughts as a psychoanalyst or psychologist on this.

Why it is people believe in God, both personally, people you know or clients you've had or whatever, but more generally, how did the concept of a deity evolve in human society in the first place? Go ahead and give us your thoughts on that. Well— Big question, I know. Yeah, yeah. Well, there'd be many, of course, many motivations and factors involved in why people have a need to invent God.

So it could be as simple as conditioning. That's how we were raised. And I want to differentiate between the God posit or hypothesis or the existence of God versus religion, because I think the two are fundamentally different, even though they might be interrelated.

So, I think most of us who are aware of our early life are aware that we are introduced to some concept or notion of God as a Supreme Being. It would be just unfathomable, I think, in today's society not to have been exposed to the concept or the idea.

But the need for God, the desire for a supreme being is a very powerful comfort for most people who believe. And it's not something that I can say I was raised with. I was raised as a Christian and over time.

my life, I always questioned how could this happen? How does this exist? And so of course, it led me into philosophy eventually to get my PhD in philosophy as well. And that's where I really started to tackle the question through my readings and developing my ability to think more critically.

which culminated years later in that book. But it could, you know, like the need for a, you know, whether it be, you know, Freud's, you know, supreme father in the sky to a need to have an attachment figure that's going to take care of us and a need for our own capacity for self-regulation.

And so it's, again, an overdetermined reason or motivation why people would believe. Yeah. So Elon's going to send a bunch of people to Mars and start a new colony. Let's say, hypothetically, it was all atheists. They never mentioned God once.

to their kids and, you know, generational later, maybe 500 years later, would we still have, you think there'd be religions that evolved on Mars and there'd be people who believe in God and so on? In other words, is it in our nature, uh, to believe in a, a higher power? Um,

You know, again, it's, you know, one could use an evolutionary argument, right? And say it is. One could, or social, or whatever you call it, cultural evolutionary argument. But if we look at like Buddhism, I mean, they don't actually, most of them don't believe in a supreme entity. So, but they do have rituals and they do have practices and they have a philosophy of living.

And I think for communal reasons, people are more attracted to organized religion, but also for the aesthetic and spiritual components that come with it.

It's going to be a tough thing to eradicate, let alone if we're advocating for a secular humanism that you and I believe in, and that spiritus is not connected at all to the belief in a supreme entity, but really is about

you know, making meaning and living in the fullest presence that we can with others and authentically and with ourself. There's so many different, you know, beautiful aspects of life that one can say is numinous.

So why do we need to have, you know, the deity that somehow connects it all and brings it all together? That's where I just can't buy. Yeah, certainly you and I agree there. I try to understand the psychology of belief from the perspective of it's not possible to imagine not existing.

You know, if I asked you, picture yourself dead, you can't because if you're picturing yourself, you're, you're alive. Yeah. You know, or just, you know, picture nothing, you know, like why is there something rather than nothing picture, nothing, you can't do it. You know, at some point there's somebody doing the picturing, you know, this is Descartes. I think therefore I am. It's not possible to take that last final step or you don't even exist. So from there, I think it's kind of a natural cognitive move to think, well,

you know, I must continue somewhere else, and therefore there must be somewhere else. And then the God concept gets woven into that. Intellectually, you can make the arguments, well, the design argument, the fine-tuning, and where the stuff come from in the first place, that banged in the Big Bang, the universe exists, it had to have a beginning, there must be somebody that started it all, and so on. Those are all kind of natural phenomenon, I think,

that if we restarted the whole thing, we'd end up with something like a belief in some kind of creator, even if it's a Spinozan-type laws of nature designed us or something like that. It doesn't have to be a personal God, as you point out. Buddhists don't believe that. But something like that, I think, is probably built into our psyche, such that I want to cut people slack that say, well, I believe, especially if they're not trying to convert me. They're just saying, hey, look, this is just what I believe.

And it's, you know, I'm not trying to change your mind. It's just, you know, it works for me. Okay. But what do you say to people that say, I don't, you know, I don't really believe, but I do want, I am, well, what they say in the dating sites, I'm spiritual, but not religious. Right. What do you say to people, maybe your own clients or,

um or just anybody like where do i get my spirituality if if i don't believe in god this is a personal uh endeavor i mean maybe it's something that each person has to struggle with and it's not something that is that's ready made or it can be you know given as a recipe to follow um it really is something that um i believe is radically personal and uh however uh

There are many things that people find, whatever we want to call what spirituality means to people.

which is of course debatable but i think when people are using those terms they're thinking in terms of something either a higher meaning or purpose or a feeling of unity with cosmos or or you know some kind of you know incredible emotional experience that overcomes them that gives life a

luster and meaning, and this is what we're seeking deep down, whatever that is. It could be completely ineffable. But I'd say there's so many different elements. I mean, you know, being, you know, the love of nature.

You know, aesthetic and creative pursuits, friendship, falling in love, you know, things that we call the sublime. And usually that means some type of genuine, authentic relationship with someone. Someone who doesn't have a relationship in a deep, deep way, I think is truly missing out on, you know, on spirituality.

So that's why some people take that comfort in an idealized divine object that's invisible yet present in their psyche. And it alleviates them from everything from the anxieties of everyday life and death.

you know, to feelings of helplessness and loneliness in the universe. Yeah, Tanya Lerman on the show talking to, was it her book, Talking to God or Listening to God or something like that? Sorry. Great book, though. I mean, because a lot of Christians will say, well, I spoke to God or, you know, I heard the voice of God. Now, are we to take that literally? I mean, they're like schizophrenics hearing voices. Well, no, no.

It's just something like that still small voice within. I mean, we all have that. I can hear myself thinking when I'm just sitting by myself. I can hear it whirring away up there, something like that. And everybody has that. And so I guess it's something along those lines that you're saying, even if you're an atheist or there is no God, you have this kind of communication in your head of you and then the world around you.

I'll just read this from your book here. You're quoting Freud. He uses this term, oceanic. The oceanic feeling is the subtitle of that section. Here is Freud. It is a feeling that he would like to call a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, as it were, oceanic. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact and not an article of faith.

It brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various churches and religious systems. One may, he thinks rightly, call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion."

That's from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, one of the classics in the history of religion. Yeah, that must touch on something why it feels so good to sit at the beach.

Particularly like on a bluff looking down on like crashing waves. There's that great scene from the opening episode of Cosmos with Carl Sagan standing on one of these bluffs. He's in Big Sur just up the coast here in California.

where they have a couple hundred meters up from the ocean and the waves are crashing and you have this clear vista up and down the coast. And it is something else. He's talking about the cosmos as everything that ever was, ever will be, you know, timeless, eternal, you know, all the, you know, catching the voice, tingling the spine, like we've touched on something eternal here. And, of course, he's pitching science as, you know, the best tool to understand that.

That cosmos. But yeah, I think Freud's right about that. Well, there's also a very mysterious element to our inner experiences at times where we can't pinpoint a cause or a reason or an explanation.

And I can say I've only had a few of these moments in my life, but I would like to have more. I have many, many friends who, collegial friends in particular, who

and talk about these experiences. And I'm just curious, I'm interested in hearing what they go through. And there does seem to be something special, but I can't buy into all the theological baggage that comes

uh, with religious experience, um, but certainly don't see why we can't, uh, have it or pursue it or seek it out, uh, you know, in terms of, uh, secular humanism. Mm-hmm. Yes. Well, there are people that study this very subject from a psychological perspective. I had Dr. Keltner, Dr. Keltner on the show. His book is called, uh,

And he actually makes recommendations, you know, go outside once a day, even if it's just 20 minutes. You know, just the local park, you know, take your shoes off and walk in the dirt or on the beach or something like that. You know, just kind of, it doesn't have to be a big thing, just a little thing. Even other examples like going into cathedrals. You know, I'm an atheist, but I love European cathedrals. My wife is from Cologne, Germany. We go to the Dome every time we go to visit.

her friends and family there and it's it's very moving i mean the dome is i mean it's massive it's i think the second largest in europe and uh but i've been to all the other great ones in and so forth and um yeah the the stained glass windows the way the light comes in the the air is cooler and you know the sound the organ sounds and the way they're designed to kind of

generate those kinds of vibrations i forget ultra ultrasound no it's um i forget what the term is but it's super super low vibrate you can't hear it but it changes your body the sensations all that stuff um yeah yeah i mean uh i agree that this is uh

These are the things that are, whether it be aesthetic, whether it be, you know, emotional, whether it's spiritual, whatever we want to call it. There's a feeling of transcendence in these moments, even if it's an illusion. But.

There's a sense of psychic space, right? A place of divinity, of exaltation. I mean, these are beautiful places to visit, and I'm in agreement with you. I would think that you also would get a feeling of spiritual enhancement with your cycling. Oh, I do, yes.

Because it's outdoors. To me, it's just the scenery going by faster than I can walk. I can't really run much anymore because I had two hip replacements, but I can still cycle pretty fast. But just having the scenery go by, the wind, the sun, the air, it's damp, it's hot, it's dry, it's cold, and so on. Yeah, there's just something about that. Also going into astronomical domes, the old ones.

A lot of them are closed now or they're open for the public, but they're not used for research. Mount Wilson here in Los Angeles. There's one, Kitt Peak Observatory. I think they may still use that in Arizona. There's one in San Jose, the Mount Lick Observatory. And Palomar, you can go down by San Diego. Anyway, there's around the country and the world. And you go in there and there's the dome.

Right. With the huge telescope. And it's very much like a cathedral. You know, it's like they open that thing up and there's the stars at night. You can rent these telescopes. Now, a lot of them make money by allowing you to have star parties. If it's a big telescope, they'll actually you have to hire the operator to run it because it's a fairly big piece of machinery and they program in. The thing goes to what you want to look at. Oh, there's Andromeda Galaxy. And yeah, it's a pretty cool experience. Yeah.

I have not had the privilege, but it does sound like something. I should do another one of these. We should host one at Mal Wilson or some other observatory and do a skeptics. We've done that, skeptics trips to the observatory. It's really fun.

I also have a telescope at my home now. I have a 12-inch Meade telescope. The thing is massive. It's hundreds of pounds. I had to buy a whole wheel set for the thing so I could roll it around. I had telescopes when I was younger, but they were small enough I could hoist them around, just muscle them around. But now it's too big. But it is something else. And most people have never looked through a telescope like that. And if I show them Saturn...

I mean, the feeling is that there must be like a slide inside the telescope of the picture of Saturn. It's like, no, the photons are actually coming from Saturn right into your eyeball. And also Andromeda, Andromeda doesn't look nearly as cool as it does in photographs because you have to allow the light to pile up for minutes or hours. But it's a little fuzzy patch. But the cool thing is that

the photons of light that are coming through the telescope, they bounce off the mirror, primary mirror, they bounce off the secondary mirror, they go through the eyepiece into your retina. Those photons left two and a half million years ago. They just got here tonight, right? I mean, it's just that concept alone, deep time, deep space, eternity, you know, eternity.

Infinity, you know, it just kind of triggers. Is that what is meant by existential psychoanalysis is kind of dealing with those sorts of big issues? Or is that something different? It could. Certainly could be dealing with the meaning of your existence to the anxiety that you feel or alienation you feel about personal choice and freedom and agency that you struggle with.

And the bigger questions of the universe, your purpose and spirituality just depends who you're talking to. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, so in addition to the specific problems that people have,

with their childhood or PTSD or whatever. Maybe we all need to deal with these larger existential questions. Well, that's why I think I was drawn to philosophy. Hoping to find some answers just opens more questions. And also as a substitute for religion. So, I mean, we're all fumbling through, you know, ecstasy here. So, we have...

Whatever person can do to engage in enriching their life and the quality of their existence is worth, at least pragmatically, worth a try. Yeah, it could be there are no ultimate answers. The journey is the point, right? I'm thinking about this. I'm going to study this. I'm going to read these books. I'm going to contemplate these.

ideas and that itself is enough because there is no there there at the end it's just the journey well that's uh yeah that's what uh unions would call uh the process of individuation and um we're we're on the journey and that's what counts rather than the whatever you discover or or create

or reach the end, which I hope to postpone for as long as possible. Yeah, me too. That's why I keep working out every day. Stay healthy, keep moving. All right, John, that's a great place to end. Talking about the biggest subjects of all. Really appreciate your work. What are you working on next? What's next in your writing agenda or research? Oh, I've got a few books planned, but I'm actually writing on...

On wokeness. Oh, my God. Really? I've got a couple projects that I'm planning out, particularly on a critique of critical social justice in my field of psychoanalysis. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

Is that going to get you in trouble? That's a hot-button topic. Well, I already am in trouble. Oh, okay. You are? I have been, put it that way. And I was hoping you were going to contribute to that edited book. Oh, okay. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. I totally forgot about that. I have that on my desktop. You need me to write? That's right. I forgot about that. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. So you're, well, there's that other Canadian psychologist, I forget his name, that's always in trouble about going after woke stuff. Who could that be? Do you know Jordan?

No, I don't know him. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I mean, I think one of the explanations for his phenomenal popularity, I think, is he does deal with these existential issues that people care about. From his particular perspective, his Jungian archetype type perspective. Yeah. You know, I know he's a popularizer and popular. Yeah. But also controversial. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, all right. All right, John. Appreciate it.