So a few years ago, I found myself in Heidelberg Germany. And the City of Heidelberg and the City of Mannheim, they are adjoining cities, asked me to speak to them about purpose in life. So of course, I'm in my typical purpose in life talk, purpose is good for you blah blah blah, and it affects this part of the brain blah blah blah. And then someone raised their hand after a few minutes and said, by the way, Dr Strecher, this guy, Adolf Hitler, had a purpose, didn't he? In fact, he had a transcending purpose. He's probably willing to die for his purpose. So what's with that? And I had to stop and think about that for a second. I wanted to say no, he didn't have a purpose, but he certainly did have a purpose. So, I want to talk about that because you might have purposes that divulge from being useful for mankind, for person kind. So I really want to get into that a little bit and talk about it, especially when we're talking about what causes we care about. So, this is Soren Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard along with Friedrich Nietzsche are considered the forefathers of existentialist philosophy. And as I had said in the last session, a lot of existentialists were atheists. They didn't believe in God, they thought we're just one tiny speck in the universe or one brief millisecond of time. We don't really matter and we have to find our own purpose in life. Soren Kierkegaard is very different. Growing up in Denmark, he said, I am a very strong Christian. In fact, I am such a strong Christian, I really am amazed at people like Abraham who were told by God at this biblical story, and he takes his only son Isaac up to a mountaintop. And God says, I want you to slay, to kill your son. And Abraham is actually going to do this and has a knife out and is willing to slay his son and then God says, well, nevermind essentially. And that's a long story, but Soren was saying these people were knights of faith. They were willing to do anything for their faith. The people around here in Denmark, they're not really faithful. They're not anything like Abraham. That's real faith. That's what I believe in. And, in fact, Soren Kierkegaard said, the thing is to find a truth which is true for me to find the idea for which I can live and die. That's very powerful stuff. In other words, he wants to find a purpose in life that is so strong he is willing to live or die for it. There is actually a wonderful study that just came out very recently. Ventromedial, remember, our Ventromedial prefrontal cortex that very special part? There's also another part of the brain called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that relates more to material exchanges. Like what is the cost of doing this? What are the things I'm going to get from it, and what are the things I'm going to have to pay for it? And what are the interactions between this part of the brain that really relates to purposeful thinking, this ventromedial prefrontal cortex and this material part of the brain? And what's really interesting about this study, they took a group of Pakistani Islamic jihadists. And in fact in order to get into this study, they were asked this question, armed jihad should be waged against the enemies of Muslims. And these people on a scale of one to seven basically said I am all in, I am willing to fight and die for this. Just think about Soren Kierkegaard. We need to find a cause for which we're willing to live and die. These people were willing to live and die for their cause, this jihadist cause. Then they put them into MRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. So literally, they clapped their heads down, they put them into MRI and they asked them to rate just how strong do you feel about this statement, armed jihad should be waged against the enemies of Muslims. And as they were saying, I am willing to fight and die for this, more blood flow went to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, this part of the brain right up here and less blood flow went into the material costs. So now what we're finding is something that Soren Kierkegaard talked about in the 1800s, and now the most modern of sciences understanding that there's something going on in the brain here where our purpose is outweighing the material costs of the purpose. And that has to happen if we become completely involved in our purpose. I liken this to a person who goes into the kitchen and says, you know what, I'm going to cook something up. But they've never learned to cook, they have never figured out how to cook and they don't care. I don't need to learn how to cook, this person says, you know what happens then not good things. So if you don't know how to cook, you should stay out of the kitchen basically, is what I'm trying to say. Then there are other people who do know how to cook but they're not like expert at cooking, they're kind of like me and maybe a lot of you, you know what, I need a recipe. I need a cookbook, and that cookbook actually could be in the form, metaphorically, of a religious text. So a cookbook here in this case might be the Bible. It might be the Quran. It might be the Torah. It might be many other books of wisdom from the Buddha or other people where we're learning from other people, we're learning from experts. And then there's the person who is a chef, a person who's trained and studied and learned how to become a cook. They don't need cookbooks anymore. They go ahead and make up their own dishes. I've taken a lot of time to learn how the real world lives and now I can be a chef. In other words, now I can create my own purpose. Now if you decide I don't really have enough time to be that lion, I don't really have enough time to be this person who creates all of my own values. In fact, one might argue, nobody really can. This ideal of being this Uber man, this Superman where you are this childlike innocent person fresh of any other values, is probably pretty unrealistic. I think it is a bit unrealistic, frankly. In fact, that's one criticism of existential philosophers. That kind of saying, well, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus. You're either this new, enlightened Superman who rejects all of society's current values, or you're kind of this drone that's just basically following what society tells you what to do. I think there's something in between, and the something in between is really learning how to use this cookbook really well. And one of this central tenets of all of the cookbooks, in other words, all the experts, all the philosophers from different religions is probably something called the Golden Rule. So if we open this cookbook and look at the Golden Rule, it's simple, it's do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's pretty profound actually. It seems so simple, you probably learned it in grade school, but do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is really fundamental to just about every major religious text that we could follow. And if we follow that, as we were starting to think about our own purpose, it would probably guide us well. There's another part though that I really like a lot and it's called the Reversed Golden Rule, do not do to yourself what you would not do to others. In other words, be kind to yourself too, be kind to other people. But at the same time, be kind to yourself, don't be so hard on yourself.
