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Gil: As it turns out, it wasn't. When you look at trust, you've got to look at it in terms of the community where the trust is coming from. The community you're talking about was an isolated community.
Kevin: Well, there's a lot of communities which are very similar!
Gil: I agree with that, but that's the nature of our society. But we've got to look at our society differently in terms of how society is set up.
Kevin: Okay, so we've got to change society so that it's trustworthy, and once we've created a trustworthy society and we know that it's trustworthy--
Gil: Yes, change the structure of society so that it allows more trust.
Kevin: So, we only trust things which we know to be trustworthy?
Gil: Yes, I guess we do.
Kevin: So it doesn't take an awful lot of trust there, does it? . . . because here we're totally confident that we're doing the right thing.
Gil: That was just one value I was talking about. The other one is that we should be seeking solutions in terms of cooperation rather than in terms of competitiveness.
Kevin: Okay, but surely all these solutions involve some kind of knowledge, a knowledge of truth, some sort of escape from ignorance. Now this is what, I think, involves aggression. That is, the desire to be free from ignorance, the desire to be free from complete unconsciousness. I argue that most people alive today are really unconscious, even though we speak of people as being conscious, because they're just drifting along, victims of the forces operating on them. They don't take any conscious control of their lives as individuals. And this desire to consciously take control as an individual is a masculine thing. And generally speaking, the more testosterone a person has, probably, the more they have this desire to individually conquer and individually control. A lot of this controlling takes very bad forms, I admit. But if a man wants to conquer everything, then one of the things he wants to conquer is his own ignorance, because he feels like a darned fool if he's wrong. Consistency is very important to men. And the only way you can be truly consistent is if you have a complete knowledge of Truth. So if a person has this aggressive urge, then there's a chance that he will become a truly great philosopher - a Socrates, a Weininger, a Nietzsche, a Buddha. Whereas if you don't have this desire to achieve and to conquer - and I'm thinking of women and womanish men - there'll be no knowledge and no wisdom. So I'm saying that wisdom is the thing we should value, and only when we have a wise society can we have things like trust - because I wouldn't trust anybody who wasn't wise.
Gil: But I guess there your definition of "truth" and "wisdom" is very much from a masculine paradigm. I'm sure Pat will have a lot to say about that.
Kevin: What do you think, Patricia? Do you think there's a difference between truth for men and truth for women?
Patricia: Well, perhaps. Because, as Gil pointed out earlier, we have different bodies, and because we speak through our bodies I think the sort of information we have access to may be in a certain sense a bit different - but I don't want to make too much of that. But there was one thing which you said - a very solid point you made, I feel, though I disagree with it, but it was a very strong point - you were saying something like: because of this testosterone running around in men's bodies, they have this aggressive urge or desire to seek the truth or to seek knowledge. I mean, to me, a lot of testosterone running about in men's bodies leads to a lot of car smashes; it leads to a lot of loss of control; it leads to fighting in nightclubs. I mean, it leads to destruction. It doesn't lead to control; it leads to the lack of it.
Kevin: Well, there's certainly a price to pay isn't there.
Patricia: A big price to pay, I feel. I think we should control the aggression itself. I don't think that it's just men who are aggressive, of course. It's women as well. So in that sense if you want to say it's a desire to control which somehow acts as a catalyst for a person pursuing truth, knowledge, beauty, or whatever it is, fine, but I don't think it's testosterone.
Kevin: Well, testosterone makes a person dissatisfied. For example, research has shown that once a man reaches the age of about fifty or sixty his testosterone falls off and he becomes physically more feminine - more feminine in his mind and more feminine in his thoughts - because he simply doesn't have that testosterone coursing through his veins. Men at that age report that they become a lot happier and a lot more satisfied with life--
Sue: Contented.
Kevin: More contented. Whereas throughout their earlier life they always felt as though they we're lacking something - they didn't know who they were. I mean, if you ask a girl of the age of eighteen how they feel about themselves, they know who they are. They're fully developed and complete in themselves. A man of twenty-nine has no idea who he is or where he's going; and it's testosterone which does it. And because a man is not content, probably because of his hormones . . . I'm not saying that he's always going to search for Truth - it happens very, very rarely - but there's always a small chance that he might fluke upon getting pleasure from Truth, and then we have the first step towards our great philosophers and our great wise men - which, surely, are the most valuable things in the Universe.
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