The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.420 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 17 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:02.560 I'm Westwood One Podcast Network's Joey Salvia, and I help produce this series.

00:01:07.880 We're honored that you've subscribed and downloaded the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast,

00:01:12.160 and we thank you for joining us for Part 2 of these 2017 lectures based on the doctor's book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

00:01:21.260 This week, we present Part 1 of a three-part lecture called Marionettes and Individuals,

00:01:27.660 a personal favorite Dr. Peterson theme of mine based on one of the all-time classic Disney films, Pinocchio.

00:01:34.880 And so, without further ado, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

00:01:38.960 So, I'm going to briefly review some of what I told you last time, and then I'm going to walk through, as I mentioned,

00:01:49.180 I'm going to walk through the Disney film, Pinocchio, and which I presume most of you have seen.

00:01:55.660 How many of you have seen it?

00:01:58.180 Yeah, okay.

00:01:58.960 Well, that's, that's, so, as I think I mentioned, that's something in and of itself, right?

00:02:03.340 I mean, the fact that you've all seen it means that it's a production of cultural significance,

00:02:08.400 and because it's such a strange artifact, that's one way of looking at it,

00:02:12.140 it might be worth trying to take it apart to understand why it is, for example, that you even understand it.

00:02:19.460 And so, I offered you the proposition last week that we view the world essentially through a narrative lens,

00:02:27.080 and I believe that we view the world through a narrative lens because of the fundamental problem that we have to solve,

00:02:33.340 as living creatures, is how we should act in the world, and that means how we should act to maintain ourselves,

00:02:42.460 but also how we need to act in relationship to other people, and in relationship to the broader world,

00:02:48.700 in order to maintain ourselves across time.

00:02:52.080 So, that's a complicated problem, right?

00:02:54.160 It's not just how you survive, it's how you survive now, and next week, and next month, and next year,

00:03:00.480 and 50 years from now, and maybe your descendants as well, if the culture is going to stabilize,

00:03:07.600 and then not only you across all those time frames, but you and everyone else across all those time frames.

00:03:13.140 It's a viciously difficult problem.

00:03:15.880 And so, I would say that we have evolved mechanisms to solve that.

00:03:20.820 I think that's self-evident in some sense, because, for example, one of the mechanisms that animals have evolved

00:03:27.940 to deal with the problem of social being, even if they're not particularly social animals,

00:03:33.480 is the dominance hierarchy, right?

00:03:35.700 Or you could call it a hierarchy of authority or power, because, I think, considering human structures,

00:03:42.360 social structures as mere power structures, is a terrible mistake, it's a terrible oversimplification.

00:03:51.880 Because, power is by no means the only, like, force, is what I mean.

00:03:56.600 Force is not a stable way of solving the problem of how to live together across time.

00:04:02.360 The question is, what is the stable way of solving how to live together across time?

00:04:08.040 And that really is the question, and it's part of the question that I'm trying to answer,

00:04:13.720 partly because it's a perennial problem, right?

00:04:16.840 We face the problem of how to organize ourselves in small social units without undue conflict,

00:04:23.440 and then we face the larger problem of how to organize ourselves into large social units without undue conflict.

00:04:29.840 And that conflict can be absolutely devastating, and frequently is.

00:04:35.520 So, so then I would also say that the first way of solving this problem isn't conscious, you see, not at all.

00:04:44.240 And, you know, you may know, and you may not know that there are, there are different forms of memory, right?

00:04:52.400 Really, technically different forms of memory.

00:04:54.720 So, for example, there's short-term working memory, which is the memory that you use to hold things like telephone numbers in your active imagination.

00:05:04.160 It decays very rapidly.

00:05:05.760 It's only about four to seven bits, which is why, well, it's why phone numbers are, were at least seven digits long.

00:05:14.400 So, you know, you can kind of manage that as a loop, and then there's episodic memory, and that has two elements.

00:05:25.840 One is semantic, and the other is episodic.

00:05:30.080 It's a, what's the name of that?

00:05:32.960 Hmm?

00:05:34.080 Someone, someone said something?

00:05:36.960 Yes, well, there's procedural memory, and then there's, there's another,

00:05:42.160 the kind of memory that you use to represent your experiences to yourself.

00:05:47.200 So, let's say it's image-laden, and the other one is semantic, and semantic is your memory for facts,

00:05:53.280 and those are quite different.

00:05:54.720 So, for example, procedural memory, that's how you ride a bike.

00:05:59.680 That's how you play the piano.

00:06:01.040 That's how you play jazz music if you're in a combo.

00:06:03.920 It's, it's the memory, it's, in fact, it's a funny kind of memory, because it's actually built right into you.

00:06:09.840 You know, I mean, so is, so is the kind of memory that you use to represent your own life,

00:06:14.880 but it's much more malleable in some sense.

00:06:16.880 So, what that means is that in your procedures, there is information that you don't know about.

00:06:25.520 It's patterned information that you don't know about.

00:06:27.920 Part of that is how to act.

00:06:29.360 You know, like when you walk into a social gathering, you don't really think through how you're going to act.

00:06:34.960 You know how to act, and if someone asked you exactly what it is that you're doing and why,

00:06:41.280 you could formulate a story about it, but the probability that it's the existence of that story

00:06:47.520 that enabled you to act that way is zero, because you have to react way faster than that.

00:06:52.640 And so, you know, you have social knowledge built into your nervous system,

00:06:57.200 because you've practiced being a social being for a very long period of time.

00:07:01.440 And, of course, then that social being has been shaped for forever, really.

00:07:06.800 And it's the right way of thinking about it.

00:07:08.720 You know, we know that animals organize themselves into hierarchies,

00:07:13.360 and we'll say of dominance, because it's more true the farther back you go in time,

00:07:17.680 at least since the time of the crustaceans, you know, when we split from our common ancestor

00:07:23.200 300 million years ago.

00:07:24.640 And so, and it's true for social animals and non-social animals.

00:07:27.920 So, even animals that don't live together in groups have to organize themselves into a hierarchy

00:07:34.400 in the space they inhabit.

00:07:35.920 Songbirds are a good example, and they have dominance disputes all the time.

00:07:39.760 Partly that's, you can hear them having their little dominance disputes in the spring when they're singing,

00:07:44.640 because basically what they're singing is, I'm pretty damn healthy, and I'm ready to go,

00:07:49.040 and if you're another bird like me, you better steer clear of this tree.

00:07:52.800 And the dominant songbirds, you know, they don't live together.

00:07:58.160 Crows are social, but most songbirds aren't.

00:08:00.720 The dominant songbirds get the best nest, and the best nest is the one that doesn't get rained on,

00:08:08.320 it's not too windy, and it's close to food sources, and, you know,

00:08:12.000 and so then they have the healthiest chicks, and they attract the best mates,

00:08:15.680 and, like, it's really important where you're positioned in the hierarchy,

00:08:18.880 even if you're not like a flock or herd creature.

00:08:22.240 Now, we're more like herd creatures, so it's even more,

00:08:25.920 it's even more relevant to us, but there's just no escaping

00:08:29.280 a hierarchical arrangement in social being.

00:08:32.880 That is social being, and it's evolutionarily ancient beyond conception, so 300 million years ago,

00:08:42.240 there weren't trees, you know, I mean, so the dominance hierarchy is older than trees,

00:08:47.760 so that's really something to think about, and then, you know, when you're thinking about the

00:08:51.120 reality that shaped us, say, from an evolutionary perspective, but also from a cultural perspective,

00:08:57.200 what you have to understand is that the things that have shaped us most are the things that have

00:09:03.200 been around the longest, and so you could say, those are the most real things, and you can't even

00:09:08.880 see some of them, like, it's not like you can come in here, well, it's not exactly true,

00:09:13.120 you can't come in here and see the multiple dominance hierarchies that are at work,

00:09:17.040 you can in a way, because the chairs are set up to face this way, and I'm facing that way,

00:09:22.800 and that gives you some clues about the social order here, and you take the cues instantly, right?

00:09:28.080 You come down, you sit in the chairs, you organize yourselves according to mutual expectation,

00:09:33.600 and that's part of your procedural knowledge about how to behave as a social creature.

00:09:38.880 Now, that knowledge is really, really deep, and a lot of it's coded in your behavior.

00:09:44.640 Now, and in other people's behavior as well, and that's, you know, that's the expectations you

00:09:49.760 have of other people, and of yourself, and a lot of those are implicit, right? So, when we're

00:09:54.720 interacting, there's a very large number of things that you just don't get to do, and you know that

00:10:01.120 too, and you won't do them, and that way we can act as if we understand each other, even though we

00:10:07.200 don't, because you're really complicated, and I'm really complicated, and there's lots of situations

00:10:12.400 where we might really be in conflict, but because we share a map of the culture, the cultural expectations,

00:10:19.520 it makes part of our, it's built right into our perception, you will act out that set of

00:10:25.040 expectations, and so will I, and if neither of us can do that, even if one of us can't, we're going to

00:10:31.440 stay, we're either going to immediately devolve into conflict, or we're going to avoid each other

00:10:36.160 like the plague, and that's exactly the right thing to do, and so one of the really useful things

00:10:42.080 to understand, and this took me a long time to formulate properly, you know, you hear the

00:10:46.240 terror management theorists, for example, and they have this idea that your, your meaning

00:10:51.760 representation, the story you tell about the world, regulates your, your death anxiety, it's something

00:10:57.440 like that, but that's not right, I mean it's close to right, and it's a smart idea, it came from

00:11:02.160 Ernest Becker, by the way, who wrote a book called The Denial of Death, which is actually quite a

00:11:05.760 good book, even though it's wrong, you know, sometimes a book can be very useful,

00:11:09.760 it, it can be usefully wrong, and that, and Becker's book is usefully wrong, because he thought that

00:11:17.280 it's the internal representation of your belief system that regulates your anxiety, and that anxiety

00:11:24.560 is fundamentally, in the final analysis, anxiety about death, it's like, well, okay, fine, it's a

00:11:30.960 reasonable proposition, but that isn't how it works, you see, it isn't my beliefs right now that are

00:11:37.040 regulating my emotion, it's the fact that I'm acting out those beliefs, which include implicit

00:11:43.840 perceptions, I'm acting them out, and so are you, and so what you're doing, and what I expect, more

00:11:51.600 accurately, what you're doing, and what I want you to do, and the way I want you to react to me, that's

00:11:57.360 working, so it's the match between my belief system and the way everyone else is acting that's

00:12:03.760 regulating my emotions, it's not the belief system, it's mediated by the social culture, and you see,

00:12:09.920 if you understand this, then you understand more particularly why people are willing to fight to

00:12:15.520 the bitter end to protect their culture, it's not a psychological structure that they're protecting,

00:12:21.040 it's a psychological structure and a sociological structure simultaneously, so the social contract is,

00:12:28.000 you have a set of expectations, and I have a set of expectations, they're actually desires,

00:12:33.520 they're not merely expectations, because as living creatures, we're desirous, we don't just expect,

00:12:39.680 and so you desire an outcome, and I desire an outcome, and we agree to act in accordance with that,

00:12:46.080 that's the social contract, and so people don't like having that disrupted, well, it isn't because it

00:12:51.520 psychologically destabilizes them, although it does, it's because it actually destabilizes them,

00:12:58.640 right, if all of a sudden, we can't occupy the same specified domain of territory, it isn't only that

00:13:05.920 we're thrown into psychological disarray, although we will be, it's that we'll start fighting with each

00:13:11.840 other, like, and that can kill you, it's no joke, it kills people a lot, like, it happens, it can happen

00:13:18.880 very easily that a cohesive social group can fragment along some fracture line of identity, let's say,

00:13:25.360 and all hell breaks loose, you know, that's what happened with the Tutsis and the Hutu in Rwanda, you know,

00:13:34.160 and those things can get out of control just so fast, it's just unbelievable, and so, and that wasn't

00:13:40.880 death anxiety, that was death, that's a whole different thing, and that's the other thing that

00:13:45.120 terror management people don't exactly get, it's like, it isn't just that your culture and your

00:13:50.080 cultural beliefs protect you from anxiety, and say anxiety about death even, it's that they actually

00:13:55.840 protect you from death, as well as protecting you from death anxiety, I mean, look, it's warm in here,

00:14:03.680 it's cold outside, the fact that the culture is intact means that you're not outside freezing,

00:14:10.320 that's a hell of a lot more fundamental in some sense than mere anxiety, although

00:14:15.520 I'm not trying to underplay the role of anxiety, that's a major issue, but there's something that's a

00:14:20.480 lot more fundamental at stake than mere psychology, so it's the match between your map of the world and

00:14:27.520 other people's actions that regulates your emotion, and it regulates it completely, because,

00:14:34.400 you know, if someone in here started acting seriously deranged, like brandished a pistol,

00:14:41.200 let's say, all of a sudden you would not be in the same place at all, not a bit, and so what would

00:14:48.960 happen? Well, chaos would happen, and chaos isn't just that you would get anxious, that's not a good

00:14:56.080 enough explanation, what would happen is more complex than that, what happens in some sense is that your

00:15:01.520 body, and it does this, it does this, what would happen is that you would react the same way that a rat

00:15:08.000 reacts to a cat, it's exactly that, it's exactly that, you would respond as if a terrible predator had

00:15:14.960 emerged in your midst, and so what is that reaction? Well, it's not just anxiety, because when you encounter

00:15:22.320 a predator, anxiety isn't the only thing that's useful, that just makes you freeze, it's like that could be

00:15:27.120 the worst thing you could do, you freeze, and, well, you're a pretty easy target, so you have to be

00:15:32.320 prepared for a lot broader range of responses than mere, mere, mere petrification, like, how about a

00:15:41.440 little aggression, that might be helpful, you don't know, it also might get you killed, but, you know,

00:15:46.320 maybe you can take the guy down, and maybe that's a good idea, you know, and, and maybe you have to run,

00:15:52.240 so that's disinhibited as well, and maybe you have to think really quickly, and reflexively, so that

00:15:58.400 happens, that's activated, disinhibited, I would say as well, it's like your whole being is thrown into

00:16:03.920 intense concentration on the moment, and you're burning up physiological resources like mad, and so

00:16:09.920 what will happen after something like that, if you don't develop outright post-traumatic stress disorder,

00:16:15.280 which some of you would, is that you, assuming that the situation was brought under control,

00:16:20.960 you'd walk out of here shaking, with your heart rate at like 170, and it would take you like,

00:16:26.800 well, it might take you the rest of your life, and maybe you would never recover, but you could

00:16:30.720 bloody well be sure that it would take you the rest of the day, that's for sure, and so, it's no joke

00:16:37.680 when someone steps outside the confines of the social contract, right, and that's kind of,

00:16:43.360 there's a philosopher named Hobbes, who I suppose in some sense was a centrally conservative

00:16:48.720 philosopher, as opposed to Rousseau, who's kind of his exact opposite, Rousseau believed that people

00:16:53.920 were basically good, in their natural state, so he believed nature was basically good, and he

00:16:59.120 believed that culture was what corrupted people, and so, and Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, believed exactly

00:17:06.320 the opposite, he believed that in the state of nature, let's say, every person was at every other

00:17:12.000 person's throat, and the only thing that prevented continual chaos was the imposition of a

00:17:19.440 of a collective agreement, that would be the social contract, that essentially governed how

00:17:24.320 people would interact, and that would keep that underlying chaos at bay, and you know,

00:17:29.840 my contention is, is that Hobbes was correct, and Rousseau was correct, and, and, and I think that

00:17:36.160 if you add Rousseau and Hobbes together, you get a total picture of the world, and that's really,

00:17:41.360 I think, the picture of the world that I'm trying to relate to you, it's both at once, it's like,

00:17:46.480 well, you can't just attribute human malevolence and unpredictability to society, it's, it's a non-starter,

00:17:55.920 it's like, people built society, so all you're doing is pushing the problem back, it's like, where did it come from?

00:18:01.360 well, society, the society before, well then, the one before that, it's like, well, you've got to tangle

00:18:07.840 up the individual in there at some point, because people created society, and so, you can't just blame

00:18:14.480 human irrationality and malevolence on society, well, and also, it's, it's ungrateful for God's sake, it's like,

00:18:22.240 society obviously also makes you peaceful, part of the reason you're peaceful right now, all of you,

00:18:26.960 is because, well, you're not that hungry, you're certainly not starving to death, you would be a

00:18:31.600 very, very different person if you were starving right now, you know, or if you were enraged, or if

00:18:37.040 you were panicking, or if you were terrified, because your, your future was radically uncertain, I mean,

00:18:43.360 you're just not any of those people right now, you're satiated, and I mean that technically,

00:18:49.440 you're satisfied, none of your biological systems, except perhaps curiosity, which is a rather pleasant

00:18:55.840 emotion, are activated in the least, and you know, because of that, you all think, well, you're in

00:19:01.920 control of yourself, but don't be thinking that, that's just not right, I mean, if you look at how

00:19:07.600 the brain is structured, for example, the hypothalamus, which is a really important part of the brain,

00:19:12.400 it basically, it basically establishes the framework of reference, and the actions, the framework of

00:19:19.680 reference within which, and the actions you take, in order to fulfill basic biological needs, so the

00:19:25.600 hypothalamus makes you thirsty, and the hypothalamus makes you hungry, and it makes you sexually aroused,

00:19:30.080 and it puts you into a state of defensive aggression, and it, it actually also makes you explore, and be

00:19:37.360 curious, all of that's hypothalamic, it's an amazing structure, and then, and it's really small,

00:19:43.120 and it's right at the base of the brain, and you can imagine it as something that has tremendously

00:19:49.040 powerful projections upward throughout the rest of the brain, into the emotional systems, and the

00:19:53.520 cortical systems, and all of that, like, tree trunk-sized connections, you know, metaphorically

00:19:59.200 speaking, and then the cortex has these little, like, vine-like tendrils going down to regulate the

00:20:04.800 hypothalamus, you know, and if it's, when push comes to shove, man, the hypothalamus, that thing

00:20:11.360 wins, and so, you know, you get people now and then, who have a hypothalamic dysfunction, and one of them

00:20:17.440 produces a condition called, I can't remember it, it's not dipsomania, although it's, it's like that,

00:20:24.240 it doesn't matter, it produces uncontrollable thirst, and so what will happen is that people who have

00:20:30.080 this hypothalamic problem will drown themselves by drinking water, which, which you can do, by the

00:20:35.440 way, and so they just cannot get enough water, and there's no stopping them, right, no more than

00:20:43.520 there would be stopping you if you were suffering from raging thirst, it's like, it's a happy day when

00:20:48.560 the hypothalamus is not telling you what to do, and you know, you live in such a civilized state,

00:20:54.480 that most of the time, roughly speaking, you're tranquil and satisfied, and more or less, you can

00:21:02.160 imagine yourself as a peaceful, you know, productive, well-meaning entity, but don't be thinking that

00:21:11.760 that's what you'd be if you were put in the right situation, because that's just not right at all,

00:21:16.720 so, you know, lots of times soldiers develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they go out

00:21:21.680 on the battlefield, they're kind of naive, they're young guys, you know, and, and, and, it actually

00:21:27.600 is worse if they're not that bright, it turns out, because having a lower IQ is one of the things

00:21:31.840 that predisposes you to post-traumatic stress disorder, but anyways, they go out on the battlefield

00:21:36.000 and they see what they're capable of under battlefield conditions, and like, you know, we've been

00:21:41.280 fighting wars for a very long time, millions of years, you know, chimps basically have wars with

00:21:47.440 other chimps, the troops, right, because the juveniles will patrol the perimeter of their

00:21:53.680 territory, and if they find other chimps from other troops that they outnumber, they will tear

00:21:58.400 them to pieces, like, and chimps are really, really strong, and so, when I say they'll tear them to

00:22:03.760 pieces, I mean that literally, you know, they, they tear them to pieces, and Jane Goodall discovered

00:22:09.440 that originally in the 1970s, and she didn't even report it for a while, because she was so shocked,

00:22:15.040 you know, she kind of assumed, like most followers of Rousseau, that the human proclivity for warfare

00:22:21.440 was part, that part, that was something that was uniquely human, you know, it had something to do

00:22:26.160 with our, our unique self-consciousness, or our intelligence, or something like that, she had no idea

00:22:31.840 that it was rooted that deeply, you know, we, we split from chimps about six, seven million years ago,

00:22:38.320 something like that, and so, we were patrolling territory, we were gang members, seven million years ago,

00:22:46.080 and, you know, that, that's, that's minimum estimation, because of course, that ancestor, shaded back,

00:22:54.800 maybe, 20 million years into entities that were roughly primate-like, and so, territoriality, and the,

00:23:04.000 proclivity to defend territory is so deeply embedded in us, it's, it's, it's like, it's, it's like, it's the,

00:23:11.760 the control center for our whole brain, and so, there isn't anything more important to us, I would say, than

00:23:18.000 maintaining the match between what we want to have happen, and what other people are doing, in response to our actions, like, that's that, that's what we want,

00:23:30.000 and, as long as that match is maintained, then, our emotional systems, and I would say anxiety is probably primary in that regard,

00:23:39.120 our emotional systems remain inhibited, they're on, they're ready, like, like a nuclear reactor rods are on,

00:23:49.760 and the rest of the brain dampens them down, but, it's like, you don't want them to take time to start up, man,

00:23:55.760 you want them to be on, at a, at a tenth of a second's notice, when it's necessary, and so, you know, that's kind of why,

00:24:02.320 well, if you look like, look at a wild animal, it's like, it's alert, you know, it's ready to dart this way or that way,

00:24:08.080 especially a prey animal, instantaneously, and it has reflexes built into it, as you do, that will respond way before you're conscious,

00:24:17.440 so, for example, if you happen to be walking down a trail, and you detect something snake-like in the periphery,

00:24:24.000 you'll leap away before you even know that you leapt, and that's because it takes a fair bit of time

00:24:30.960 to actually see a snake, by which I mean, form a conscious representation of the snake, you know,

00:24:37.280 maybe it takes a quarter of a second, or something like that, or even longer, but it doesn't matter,

00:24:42.640 maybe it takes, you know, a twentieth of a second, a tenth of a second, but the thing about the damn snake

00:24:48.640 is it's way faster than that, it's really fast, that thing, and it co-evolved with primates, by the way,

00:24:54.560 and so it can nail you, like, way faster than you can look at it, so you have your eyes map snake-like

00:25:02.000 objects right onto your reflexes, so that the eyes go, the eyes make you jump, and then they see after that,

00:25:09.840 that's like, yeah, well, now you can see, that's no problem, you know, so, all right, all right,

00:25:18.400 now, what I would say that what we do is we live in a shared story, and the story is a way of looking

00:25:24.640 at the world, and it's a way of acting in the world at the same time, and that story has to operate

00:25:29.040 within narrow parameters, and this is something that's extraordinarily important to understand,

00:25:34.320 because, and this is something I think that Piaget figured out, Jean Piaget figured out better than

00:25:39.040 anyone else, I think he really got this right, and by the way, one of the things that Piaget was

00:25:43.120 trying to do, you never hear about how strange these great thinkers are, but Piaget was a very

00:25:48.720 strange guy, and he was a, he was a hyper genius, he was offered the curatorship of a bloody museum

00:25:54.320 when he was ten years old, you know, because he wrote this little paper on mollusks, which apparently

00:25:58.800 was very good, and so they offered him the curatorship of a museum, and his parents wrote back and said,

00:26:03.920 well, you know, no, probably not, because he's actually ten, and so that was Piaget, man, the guy

00:26:10.400 was a genius, and you know, he, he was actually motivated by the desire to reconcile science and religion,

00:26:17.040 that was, that was actually his entire motivation for what he did, you never hear that, but that's,

00:26:22.640 that's the case, and so Piaget was very interested in how you produce structures that enable you to

00:26:30.400 regulate yourself, because you're like a kind of a, a colony of strange sub-animals that have

00:26:35.680 to figure out how to get along, so that you can sort of be one thing, you kind of learn that,

00:26:40.080 I would say, between the ages of two and four, as you're being socialized, you know how erratic

00:26:45.200 two-year-olds are, I mean, they're a blast, and it's partly because they're erratic, it's like,

00:26:49.040 they're unbelievably happy, and then they're unbelievably hungry, and then they're really hot,

00:26:53.600 and then they're really upset and crying, you know, and then they're really scared, it's like,

00:26:57.840 and all of that's just untrammeled, and so it's really fun to be around them, especially when

00:27:02.320 they're happy, because they're so happy that it's just, you know, you don't ever get to be that happy,

00:27:07.680 and so it's nice to be around a two-year-old, because you can kind of feel that again, you know,

00:27:13.600 and a lot of, one of the horrible things about being a parent is that you spend a tremendous

00:27:18.240 amount of your time making your child less happy, and the reason for that is that positive emotion

00:27:25.040 is very impulsive, you know, and, you know, because everybody says, well, you should be happy,

00:27:29.200 it's like, well, no, when you're happy, you're actually quite stupid, and so, because happiness

00:27:34.960 makes you impulsive, happiness makes, happiness says, hey, things are really good right now,

00:27:39.440 get what you can, well, the getting's good, and so, as a, like, if you're hyper-optimistic,

00:27:46.000 manic, we'll say, it's like, every stock investment looks like a really good stock investment,

00:27:50.720 it's like, you won't spend all your money, because look, there's those wonderful things everywhere,

00:27:55.040 and you could do such great things with them, and then, you know, you spend all your money,

00:27:59.840 and then you crash, and you think, oh god, my life's over, you know, because I just,

00:28:04.880 I just spent all my money on all this useless stuff, and it's all under the grip of impulsive positive

00:28:10.800 emotion, you know, and so, when, when you're telling your kids to be quiet and settle down,

00:28:16.640 it isn't because they're making a lot of noise, being in pain, it's because they're running around

00:28:22.240 like wild baboons, having a blast, and disrupting things like mad, you know, and so, you got kids,

00:28:28.400 you got to settle down, you know, like, quit having so much fun, and it's, it's kind of awful that you do that,

00:28:35.280 but, but you do, and that's because the emotions and the motivations have to be brought into,

00:28:42.240 like a relationship with one another, within the person, so that, you know, one thing I remember

00:28:48.800 with my son, who is quite, he's quite disagreeable by temperament, which is actually a good thing,

00:28:53.600 as far as I'm concerned, although it brings its own challenges, and so, with my daughter,

00:28:58.400 when she was misbehaving, she was pretty agreeable, and, you know, if she was misbehaving,

00:29:06.640 I could basically just look at her, and then she'd quit, you know, but my son, it was like,

00:29:11.600 that was just nothing, you're looking at me, it's like, no, that's just not going to go anywhere,

00:29:15.440 man, and so then I'd like tell him to stop, and that really wasn't having much of an effect either,

00:29:20.720 he'd just sort of maybe laugh, or run away, or whatever, I mean, he was a tough little rat,

00:29:25.520 and, you know, what I would do with him is, he would be doing something, and I'd interfere,

00:29:30.800 and he'd get upset, and, you know, angry, and so then I'd get him to sit on the steps,

00:29:35.760 and I told him, and this is when he was about two, I said, look, you're going to sit on the steps,

00:29:40.080 that's time out, you're going to sit on the steps, until you've got control of yourself,

00:29:45.200 and you can come back and be, and play the family game again, I basically said,

00:29:50.560 be a civilized human being, and then you're welcome again, and so he'd sit on the steps,

00:29:54.480 it was so interesting to watch, because he was just enraged, he'd sit there,

00:29:59.120 like, have you ever seen a two-year-old have a temper tantrum? It's really quite the bloody phenomena,

00:30:03.600 if you ever saw an adult do that, you'd like, you'd call 911, right away, it's like, oh my god,

00:30:08.720 and I've seen adults do that, you know, because people say with borderline personality disorder,

00:30:13.440 we'll have temper tantrums, and it's like, man, you want to be about 30 feet away from that person,

00:30:18.480 that's for sure, it's really, but, in kids, it's like, well, first of all, they're only this long,

00:30:23.920 so how much trouble can they really cause, but it's like, you know, they're just completely gone,

00:30:28.400 they're like, on the floor, their face is red, they're just furious, like, way more furious than

00:30:34.480 you ever get, if you're even vaguely socialized, they're just outraged, and they're kicking,

00:30:39.680 and hitting the ground, and like, it's like a little epileptic fit of anger, you know,

00:30:44.320 they're completely controlled by their rage, and we took care of one kid for a while who,

00:30:49.760 he was actually a pushover, that kid, you could get him to behave by, you know, kind of shaking your

00:30:54.480 finger at him, but his mother thought he was really tough, because he had her figured out,

00:30:59.440 and one of the things he would do is have a temper tantrum, and during the temper tantrum,

00:31:03.360 he would hold his bloody breath until he turned blue, it's like, try that, like, you know,

00:31:09.200 that's your homework, go home and have a temper tantrum, and while you're doing it,

00:31:13.440 hold your breath until you actually turn blue, it's like, you won't be able to do it,

00:31:17.920 you don't have the willpower of a two-year-old, that's for sure, that little varmint man,

00:31:22.080 he'd just have a fit, then he'd hold his breath, and then he'd turn blue, it was like, wow, that's,

00:31:26.720 that's amazing, and we would just, like, let him do it, and, you know, he'd turn blue, and everybody

00:31:32.480 would be gone, and he'd come out of it, you know, and it didn't work, so he just quit doing it,

00:31:37.920 I think he did it, like, twice, and he figured out, oh, well, that's a lot of work for very little

00:31:42.800 outcome, and, you know, it's not like two-year-olds are stupid, they're, they're not stupid,

00:31:47.280 they're probably smarter than you, but they're not civilized by any stretch of the imagination,

00:31:52.080 and so anyways, back to my son, I'd put him on the steps, and he'd be like, just, like, enraged,

00:31:58.880 and, and trying to get himself together, you know, and I'd wait a few, I got a strict rule,

00:32:04.240 which was, as soon as you're done, you're welcome again, so it's completely under your control,

00:32:11.440 you, you get yourself calmed down, you come and talk to me again, if you're calm enough,

00:32:15.680 so I like you, then you're welcome back in the family, no grudge, nothing, and so it's harder

00:32:21.200 than you think, like, people think they like their kids, it's like, don't be thinking that,

00:32:25.280 they're hard to like, they're little monsters, and they're very, very pushy and provocative,

00:32:29.600 and so lots of parents do not like their children, and they do terrible things to them their whole life,

00:32:35.520 so it's no joke, and it's very common, and you know, that was Freud's observation, fundamental observation,

00:32:41.760 that a lot of psychopathology is rooted in the family, and you can be sure of that,

00:32:46.560 you know, and when you hear about some mother who's done something terrible to her child,

00:32:50.880 which happens reasonably frequently, you know perfectly well that she has a very terrible

00:32:56.000 capacity to discipline, the child's just provoked her, and provoked her, and provoked her, and provoked her,

00:33:00.480 and provoked her, and it just happens to be a day where her new boyfriend left, and she's quite

00:33:05.200 hungover, and she got fired, and it's like, that's the wrong day to provoke her, and then she does

00:33:10.800 something that is not good, and you read about it, and you think, well how could that happen,

00:33:15.200 how could anyone do that, well, that's how they do it, and so, and kids are very provocative,

00:33:20.960 just like little chimps, chimps will, the adolescents will like, throw little pebbles and sticks at the

00:33:27.760 sleeping larger males, and bung them, and that teasing, which it is, that teasing turns into full-fledged

00:33:35.120 dominance challenge behavior, once the adolescent males get big enough to do it, and so when you're

00:33:39.920 being provoked by a child, which they provoke you all the time, you're trying to figure out, well just

00:33:46.640 where are you exactly, what happens if I do this, what happens if I do this, you know, and how else

00:33:51.440 are they going to figure it out? Anyways, he'd sit on the steps, and just, he's just enraged, and trying to

00:33:57.840 control himself, and I'd watch that, and then, you know, I'd come back after about two minutes,

00:34:02.480 or whatever, and he'd still be, argh, I'd say, well, you know, have you got yourself under control,

00:34:08.320 are you ready to get off the steps, and he'd go, no, not yet, and then, you know, he'd get himself

00:34:14.560 under control, and then he'd come back, and you know, he'd be contrite, and then I would like him

00:34:19.520 right away, you know, you've got to watch that, you know, because you don't like being dominated

00:34:23.840 by a two-year-old, no one does, and so, if the child hasn't mastered himself, and started to act

00:34:31.520 in accordance with the prevailing social norms, you won't like them, well, you think, oh yeah,

00:34:36.480 I will, because you know, I'm a good person, it's like, no you won't, and no, you're not a good person,

00:34:40.480 so don't be thinking about that at all, it's just not true, so, when he was contrite, then he'd come,

00:34:47.040 and then, you know, we'd just go on like nothing had happened, because that's what you want to do,

00:34:50.960 right, as soon as you get compliance, especially if the compliance is in the best interest of the

00:34:55.920 child, you want to reward it instantly, right, that's the right thing to do, because so then,

00:35:01.680 and, and you could just see him gaining control over himself, and so really what was happening is,

00:35:08.800 his, in his mind, in his brain, we'll say there was a war between the, the psyche, the ego,

00:35:14.880 that was starting to become integrated, you know, and starting to become a continuous person,

00:35:19.920 an identity, and it's fragile in two year olds, and it can be disrupted all the time,

00:35:24.320 and it is, that's why they're so hyper emotional, it's fragile, that little ego,

00:35:28.880 and it doesn't have a lot of power, and so what you want to do is reward it when it wins,

00:35:34.160 you know, it's when it, when he gets control over the underlying motivations, you want to say,

00:35:38.080 hey, good work man, good work kid, you did it, you know, you got yourself under control, way to be,

00:35:44.000 and the kid's really happy about that, because it's actually not that much fun to have a temper tantrum,

00:35:48.400 it's exhausting, you know, it takes you over, question?

00:35:52.560 Yeah, can you give an example of what you would reward him with?

00:35:56.960 Oh, just a pat on the head, or, you know, that's good, or a kind word, you know, or, or whatever,

00:36:02.240 or, yeah, notice it, pay attention, that's it, that's it, pay attention, and that's a great,

00:36:07.520 it's a great thing to know with people, like in your relationships, here, here's the key to a good

00:36:12.320 relationship, it's not the only one, but watch your person carefully, carefully, carefully,

00:36:19.360 and whenever they do something that you would like them to do more of, tell them that that was

00:36:24.320 really good, and mean it, and it's not manipulative, because if it's manipulative, it won't work,

00:36:28.640 it's like you have to say, wow, I'm so glad you did that, and you have to be precise,

00:36:33.120 here's what you just did that I thought was great, and oh boy, that's so nice that you noticed,

00:36:37.920 I can't believe that you noticed, it's like, you know, you do that 20 times, and the person will be

00:36:42.800 like the rat that's just pushing the lever for cocaine, you know, so, but no, I'm serious,

00:36:47.440 Skinner established this, B.F. Skinner noticed this a long time ago, reward is intensely useful

00:36:54.240 in terms of modifying behavior, but the problem is, is that it's really hard to notice when things

00:36:59.600 are going right, right, because you're kind of primed to notice when things are going wrong,

00:37:04.400 and so you use threat and punishment more often as agents of shaping the people that you're around,

00:37:12.320 because, you know, when everything is going right, it's like, what are you going to say,

00:37:17.840 everything is going right, it turns to zero, you just assume it, and that's, that's not good,

00:37:23.200 that's not good, you want to pay attention, and if the, if your person, your children, your wife,

00:37:27.840 your, whoever, your mother, your sister, if you want them to, if you want to rectify your relationships

00:37:37.120 with them, and I'm not saying to do this in a manipulative way, it won't work, but if they do

00:37:41.600 something that's promoting harmony and peace and goodwill, it's like, attend to it, tell them that

00:37:46.720 you noticed, it's like, it's so useful, and you have to get rid of your grudges and your resentment

00:37:51.600 to do that, right, because you don't, you're kind of mad at your sister, and then you notice she does

00:37:56.400 something good, you think, there's no goddamn way I'm going to reward her for that, so you ignore her

00:38:00.640 when she does something good, it's like, that's brilliant, that is, because then you've just punished

00:38:05.360 her for doing what you want, and people do that with their kids all the time, you know,

00:38:10.240 because they let the kids dominate them, then they get resentful, then the kid will run up to them

00:38:15.200 to show them something that's kind of spectacular, and they'll, they're not happy, they're like, oh yeah,

00:38:20.000 that's, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm working, you know, little kid, all sad about that, and he's just learned

00:38:26.720 something, so, and it's not perhaps what you want him to learn, and so you have to keep your, your

00:38:33.280 relationship with your children pristine, and that means that you can't hold a grudge or resent

00:38:39.360 them, and that means that you have to help them learn how to behave so that you like them, and that

00:38:44.960 way, if they, if you like them, and you're kind of sensible, and maybe your partner also likes them,

00:38:50.400 so, you know, you got a consensus going there, there's a reasonable possibility that other people

00:38:55.200 will actually like them too, including other children, and then the world will open up to them,

00:39:00.160 you know, then you'll bring them to people's houses, and the people will actually smile at them,

00:39:06.240 and give them a pat on the head, instead of thinking, oh my god, that brat's coming to visit

00:39:10.160 again, I wonder what he'll break this time, you know, and that's just a horrible thing for your

00:39:15.280 child to experience repetitively, in situation after situation, all they learn is that adults

00:39:22.000 have a false smile, but they're really lying all the time, god, it's like a bit of hell, and there's a

00:39:28.480 lot of children who are trapped in that, it's really awful to see, I can see kids like that when

00:39:33.280 I walk down the street, you know, it's like, they're little doomed things, and there they are, and

00:39:38.320 you know, they're screwed in 15 different ways, and there's no way out of it, it's really awful,

00:39:43.920 so, I would not recommend that you do that, it's better to notice that you're a bit of a monster,

00:39:49.760 or a lot of a monster, and notice that you are much happier with the people around you when they

00:39:56.000 behave in accordance with reasonable social norms, and then you actually feel genuinely connected to

00:40:02.320 them, and you want to work on their behalf, so that everything works out, but if you think you're

00:40:07.120 a good person, and that you'd never do anything that was harmful to your children, then you can

00:40:11.520 just forget about that, because you'll never take it seriously enough to actually learn,

00:40:16.160 so, alright, so anyways, we live inside this story, as far as I can tell, and, you know,

00:40:22.720 we kind of put the story together inside us to begin with, and that happens between two and four,

00:40:27.200 when you're integrating those motivations and emotions into a relatively functional unity,

00:40:34.080 right, and that does happen between two and four, if you don't have your kids socialized by the time

00:40:39.600 they're four, you might as well just forget it, and I know that sounds terribly pessimistic and all

00:40:44.560 of that, but I know the literature on trying to rectify anti-social behavior in children, and

00:40:50.320 after the age of four, it's virtually impossible, no matter what you do, and the reason for that is

00:40:54.720 that kids who are still acting like two-year-olds when they're four, that, you know, they're twice as

00:41:00.560 old, eh, as a two-year-old, that's a lot of difference, like, a four-year-old's an adult, as far as a

00:41:06.320 two-year-old is concerned, and so if the four-year-old is still acting like a two-year-old, that's really

00:41:10.800 not good, and other four-year-olds will come up and, you know, do a little play invitation,

00:41:16.320 like a dog, and, you know, the kid, the two-year-old, four-year-old has no idea how to react to that,

00:41:21.680 and so the more mature kid thinks, oh well, how about I play with you, and then that kid is isolated

00:41:29.120 from the peers, and after four, you're mostly socialized by your peers, and so you just fall

00:41:34.720 farther and farther and farther behind, you're more and more alienated, you're more bitter and

00:41:38.960 angry and no wonder, and it's just not, you can't rectify it, so, so, so that's useful to know,

00:41:47.920 it's like your job from two to four is to turn your child, help turn your child into a functional unity,

00:41:54.560 and by three they should be functional enough as a unity within themselves, so that they can concentrate

00:42:01.760 on a voluntary goal for some reasonable length of time, which is also why it's useful to let them

00:42:08.080 spend some time alone, so that they can learn to amuse themselves, because if they can't amuse

00:42:12.160 themselves, they're not going to be able to play with other kids, and then by three they're sorted

00:42:16.560 together enough, so if another three-year-old comes along, they can at least play in parallel,

00:42:21.440 and may also start, may be able to start playing a cooperative game, and so that's often a fantasy

00:42:31.280 game, you know, pretend, and so what the kids will do, sometimes they mediate it verbally, but sometimes

00:42:37.280 it's more acted out, it's a combination of the two, they'll assign each other roles, they'll do this

00:42:42.960 with you too, it's like let's have a tea party, well what does that mean? Well it means let's sit down and act

00:42:49.440 out the act of sharing food, and see if we can get that right, that's what the kid is saying, have a

00:42:55.520 little tea party, you know, it's very important, because human beings share food, like this is a

00:42:59.600 major thing to get right, man, and so the kid will say, well you be the mom, and I'll be the dad, and you

00:43:05.520 know, we'll make a little fort, and that'll be our house, and we'll go in there, and we'll run our roles,

00:43:09.440 and you know, we're acting out, we're acting out family, and if we're both reasonably civilized as

00:43:17.280 three-year-olds, we can concentrate on that goal, we can establish that little fictional world,

00:43:23.120 we can negotiate a mutual goal, and then we can run the simulation, and that's what kids are doing

00:43:29.600 when they're pretending, it's bloody brilliant, that's play man, it's like, it's brilliant, it's

00:43:35.200 absolutely unbelievable, because, you know, if you're going to play mom, let's say, it isn't like you,

00:43:41.600 you, it isn't exactly like you imitate your mom, because imitation would be, you know how annoying

00:43:48.160 it is when someone copies you, so, you know, you're sitting like that, and then I do the same thing,

00:43:53.280 it's like, that's really annoying, and that isn't what kids do, they don't act out the precise actions

00:44:01.760 that they've seen the target of their fantasy display, they're way more sophisticated than that,

00:44:07.840 they watch their mother, let's say, like hawks, and then they start to extract out regularities

00:44:13.920 in their behavior, which is mom behavior, let's say, that's what makes you mom, whatever that is,

00:44:19.360 and then, so it's like they look at you across time, and they extract out the regularity that makes

00:44:25.280 you mother, and then they try to embody that regularity in their pretend play, and then they sort of

00:44:30.560 encapsulate or incorporate the spirit of being a mother, or being a father, or whatever, or an

00:44:36.320 animal, because they'll play at that, and so that's what they're doing, they're using their body as,

00:44:41.200 and their mind as dramatic forms, it's really amazing, you know, it's so sophisticated, and no other

00:44:47.120 animal does that, as far as we know, and it's the platform on which language is based, you know,

00:44:51.760 first of all, we imitate, and language is imitation, right, because we use the same words, right,

00:44:57.520 so it's imitation, it's a big deal, so you can act out someone else, and then you can conceptualize

00:45:03.280 them in fantasy, and it's only way after that that you could maybe articulate it, like what does it

00:45:07.920 mean to be a mother, so I could have you write an essay about that, well, you'd have to think about

00:45:12.400 it, right, you wouldn't just automatically know, but if someone hands you a baby, and you know,

00:45:17.200 you're not completely, um, socially blind, you roughly know what to do, after you're done with your

00:45:24.320 initial nervousness, you roughly know what to do, don't drop it, that's a good rule,

00:45:29.040 you've probably figured that one out at least, you know, don't yell at it, don't startle it,

00:45:33.840 give it a little pat maybe, try hugging it, maybe you go like this, you know, you make eyes at it,

00:45:38.880 you know what to do, it's built into you, you know, it's built into you, but that doesn't mean

00:45:43.760 you could lay it out as a series of rules about how to be a mother, it's like you could write a

00:45:48.160 whole damn book about that, so, alright, so anyways, you live in this story, and first of all,

00:45:54.560 you get your own story together, and that's by integrating your motivations and emotions

00:45:59.600 together, under social influence, you know, Piaget kind of states that before the age of three,

00:46:07.040 kids can't really play, they're egocentric, it's not exactly right, because you're actually

00:46:13.360 playing with your mother from the time you're born, so even with breastfeeding, that's a social

00:46:18.400 interaction, and it's a complex cooperative endeavor, and it's often hard for mother and infant

00:46:24.400 to get that right, because it's complicated, and it requires a lot of social interaction, like,

00:46:29.440 well, the child has to learn not to bite, for example, you know, and the mother has to learn

00:46:33.440 not to be too nervous, and there's a lot of social bonding, it's really complicated social interaction,

00:46:38.640 so the child, the infant, even at the earliest stages, is already engaged in a complex social

00:46:44.720 dynamic that's essentially play-oriented, but it's, you know, it's pretty primordial,

00:46:50.560 it has to do mostly with the mouth, and child's mouth and tongue are already hardwired at birth,

00:46:57.040 so your child is most, this is a Freudian observation as well, your child is almost all mouth and tongue

00:47:03.360 when it's born, the rest of its body, well, you watch infants, like, even when they're, how old,

00:47:10.560 seven months, six months, four months, I can't even remember now, you know, they'll move their arm,

00:47:15.040 and they kind of go like this, it's like, they have got no fine control, they're, it's more like they

00:47:20.320 have, you know, clubs on the ends of sticks, it's like that, their nervous system isn't thoroughly

00:47:26.880 myelinated, they don't have control over themselves, but their mouth and tongue are already wired up,

00:47:32.320 and so otherwise they wouldn't be able to swallow or nurse, so the oral element is

00:47:37.280 extraordinarily important for a young child, that's why kids put everything in their mouth,

00:47:41.760 you know, even when they're a bit older, it's like, they see with their tongue, which of course

00:47:45.920 everyone can do, you know, if you put a block in your mouth, you can tell that it's a, like a cube,

00:47:50.960 you can tell that it's a cube without looking at it, so you can see with your tongue, you can see with

00:47:55.840 your hands, you can even see to some degree with your ears, anyways, so there's social

00:48:02.240 interaction right from the beginning, but for the point of simplification you might say, well

00:48:06.160 first the child organizes themselves into a functional unity, under the pressure of social

00:48:12.320 dynamics, and then they get unified enough so that they can attain unity with another child by

00:48:17.680 setting up a fictional world, and cooperating and competing within that, because that's quite

00:48:22.720 interesting too, because, you know, people often juxtapose cooperation and competition as if they're

00:48:28.240 opposites, but that they're not opposites at all, another Piagetian observation, so you say, well

00:48:34.160 is hockey a competitive game, and people would say, well, yeah, but then you think, well, really?

00:48:40.320 Really? No one brings a basketball, right? So we're going to play by the rules, that's cooperation,

00:48:48.000 well, are the teams competing against each other? Well, yes, but they agree to compete within a

00:48:52.880 particular landscape, and they all cooperate to maintain that landscape, and so you do the same

00:48:59.360 thing when you're playing Monopoly, it's like you're trying to win, but at the same time you're

00:49:02.800 cooperating, that's what, that's society, man, that's society right there, you're cooperating,

00:49:10.000 that's the big enclosure, and within that there are regulated competitions, but to separate those

00:49:17.200 artificially and say, well, one's competition and the other's cooperation, it's just, it's just,

00:49:24.960 it's just not very smart, it's not observant, that isn't how it works, and games are intensely

00:49:31.200 cooperative, even if they're intensely competitive. I mean, the hockey teams are playing the same game,

00:49:37.680 that's the cooperation, then each team, there's competition within the team to be the best player,

00:49:44.000 let's say, but everyone wants that, because everyone wants good players to emerge, but you

00:49:48.480 still cooperate like mad with your teammates, and if you don't pass, and, you know, play like a

00:49:53.760 reasonable person, then they're going to not be happy with you, and so even within that competition,

00:50:00.800 cooperation is regulating the interactions, and then you can think, this is a really good thing to

00:50:05.520 think too, it's like, you know, people often say to their kids, it doesn't matter whether you win or

00:50:12.400 lose, it's how you play the game, and the kid, of course, has no idea what that means, it's like,

00:50:16.800 what do you mean, ah, I'm trying to win, and the parent says, no, no, it matters how you play,

00:50:22.080 and the kid pushes them, and the parents really can't come up with a good explanation of why that's

00:50:26.240 the case, they might say, well, other kids won't play with you, if you're, oh, there you go,

00:50:31.360 because you could say, this is something to think about, so, there's a game,

00:50:37.840 and there's a victory within the game, but then there's the set of all games,

00:50:43.680 and there's victory across the set of all games, and the victory that you attain across the set of

00:50:50.320 all games isn't winning all the games, it's being invited to play all the games,

00:50:55.040 and so if you play fair, then you're playing a metagame, and the metagame is how to win across

00:51:02.240 the set of all games, and so if you teach your child how to behave properly, then they always

00:51:07.120 get invited to play, and that makes them winners, and that's that, and so, if you understand that,

00:51:14.080 you understand something phenomenally important about the emergence of morality, you know,

00:51:20.000 because people, moral relativists in particular, think that morality is relative, you know,

00:51:25.520 and of course, human beings are diverse, just like languages are diverse,

00:51:29.520 and there's more than one playable game, but there's not really more than one playable metagame,

00:51:35.600 it's like you're either the kind of person that other people want to play with, or you're not,

00:51:40.320 and if you're not the kind of person that other people want to play with, then you're a loser,

00:51:44.720 it's as simple as that, and that's true of all cultures, they might be playing different individual

00:51:50.640 games within their culture, undoubtedly they are, but the set of all games that they play is still

00:51:57.360 common across cultures, that's part of what makes us human, and then you could say as well,

00:52:02.640 we're actually evolved to detect people who are good at playing the set of all possible games,

00:52:08.800 and we actually know that, that's not theoretical, we know for example, some things are easy to

00:52:14.160 remember, and some things are hard to remember, you know, here's something that's easy to remember,

00:52:18.880 you play with someone and they cheat, man, you will remember that, that's like in your mind,

00:52:23.920 that's not going anywhere, and so you're great at detecting cheaters, and you remember,

00:52:30.160 and that's because you can't trust a cheater, and you shouldn't invite a cheater to play a game

00:52:34.240 with you because they might cheat, and so that's part of the innate morality system,

00:52:39.520 you remember cheaters because they aren't good at playing the metagame, and of course you're evolved,

00:52:45.200 of course you're adapted to the metagame because you're the product of this immense evolutionary history,

00:52:50.640 right, and whoever your ancestors were, which is an unbroken string of successful

00:52:56.000 reproducers going back three and a half billion years, you think about that, every single one of

00:53:00.880 your ancestors successfully reproduced, it's mind-boggling, the chances against that are so,

00:53:08.080 it's billions, billions to one, and here you are, the line of three and a half billion years of success,

00:53:15.040 the whole world was trying to kill you that whole time, and here you are, it's like, and but,

00:53:20.880 you know, you're still only going to last about 80 years, so, but that's, you know, still, you know,

00:53:26.160 good for you, so anyways, there were lots of games that your ancestors were playing across that immense

00:53:32.720 span of time, many, many, you know, lizard games, and tree-dweller games, and, and, and what,

00:53:40.880 and crustacean games, you know, that huge set of games, and you're adapted to win across those games,

00:53:48.960 all of them, and that's built into you, man, that's, that's your central human nature, that's what makes

00:53:53.840 you social, and it's not some mere cultural construct, quite the contrary, it's, it's so deeply embedded

00:54:02.320 in you, it's what you are, alright, so, well, this is a story, it's a game too, that's another way of thinking

00:54:10.080 about it, you know, like, that's a monopoly game, well, what's the frame, well, that's the rules

00:54:16.160 of the game, and are they, why do you accept them, well, it's kind of arbitrary, right, it's like,

00:54:21.760 that happens to be the rules, hockey has different rules, basketball has different rules, but what

00:54:26.800 they share is that they have rules, okay, so there's a frame, that's the rules, and then within the

00:54:32.320 frame, there's a goal, and the goal is whatever the rules dictate, you know, there's usually, it's usually

00:54:38.240 the construction of a hierarchy of success within a frame, and so that's what you play, and so you

00:54:45.600 play monopoly, and it's like, well, we'll accept the rules, that's the social contract, and then we'll

00:54:49.760 each try to win, and that'll be fun, we find that amusing, and if you lose, what do you say?

00:54:55.920 Well, you say, well, there's always another game, and so that's great, so, if you have that attitude,

00:55:01.280 and, and you play fair, then it doesn't matter that much that you, whether you win or lose,

00:55:05.440 although you still want to try to win, because otherwise you're not a good player, but you

00:55:09.040 accept defeat gracefully, because you can play again, and so, and you'll win some, and you'll

00:55:14.400 lose some, and so that's not so bad, you know, and even if you lose, well, maybe you learn something,

00:55:20.080 and, and you're doing a lot more than one thing while you're playing monopoly, you know,

00:55:24.000 you're having a conversation, and learning how to interact with people, and learning how to regulate

00:55:28.080 your emotions, and so, even if you lose, if you have any sense, you win, and if your kids have any sense,

00:55:33.440 they know that, and so, that way you buffer them against defeat, it's like, yeah, yeah, you know,

00:55:40.160 next time, it's like, it's okay, and you should try, but it's okay, and, and that's, that's,

00:55:48.160 that's useful information for people to know, so, all right, so you're always in one of these little

00:55:53.520 frameworks, and there's just no getting out of it, so, and that's because, you know, at any given moment,

00:55:58.640 this is like, it's like field theory, there used to be psychological theories that talked

00:56:02.720 about the field of human experience, something like that, and this is kind of what that is,

00:56:07.200 this is a field, and basically what happens is you parse out a little part of the world,

00:56:12.560 say, and so, an amount you can handle, so let's say it has some duration, you're not aiming at something

00:56:20.000 50 years in the future, it's because how the hell are you going to do that, you, there's too many variables,

00:56:24.640 you know, so you're aiming at some handleable amount of time, and you posit a goal in there,

00:56:30.960 and you plot your route, and then that tells you what's up, and tells you what's down, because up

00:56:36.400 moves you towards the goal, and down moves you away from the goal, and that sets up your motivational

00:56:40.880 framework, so that you have something worth attaining, you know, that's a really interesting

00:56:45.280 thing to know too, it's like, why have a goal? Well, it's easy, no goal, no positive emotion,

00:56:51.760 because you experience positive emotion by noticing that you're moving towards a goal,

00:56:57.680 and so if you don't have a goal, well, you can't have any positive emotion, so you better have a goal,

00:57:04.160 and so you might say, well, what should the goal be? Well, we could start by saying, well, any goal is

00:57:09.680 better than none, and then we might say, well, it should be a goal that other people will let you pursue,

00:57:15.040 because otherwise it's going to be kind of difficult, and maybe they'll be even happy to help you pursue it,

00:57:20.080 that would even be better, and maybe it's a goal that would enable you to learn how to pursue other

00:57:25.040 goals while you pursue that goal, boy, that would really be good, and so you can see that your goal

00:57:31.360 is parameterized, but that doesn't mean that any old goal works, it means there's some goals that work

00:57:37.200 nicely, and some not so nicely, there are playable games and non-playable games, that's a good way of

00:57:42.400 thinking about it, and you want to have a playable game, and there's a lot of them, lawyer, plumber,

00:57:48.240 you know, actor, whatever, they're playable games, and it's not obvious which one's better, but

00:57:56.240 it's certainly obvious which ones are sustainable and which ones are worse, so there's a set of

00:58:00.880 playable games, and you need to extract from that set of playable games a game that suits you, and that

00:58:06.880 would be partly due to your temperament, you know, because extroverted people want to play an extroverted

00:58:11.360 game, and highly neurotic people want to play a safe game, and agreeable people want to play a

00:58:16.720 generous game, and disagreeable people want to play a game that's highly competitive so they can win,

00:58:21.920 and you know, fine, but they're all within the realm of playable games, and that means they're socially

00:58:28.960 acceptable as well, and so that means it isn't just arbitrary, it isn't just relative what you decide

00:58:37.920 to do, it's heavily parameterized, there's only, there's a set of playable games, and it's large,

00:58:44.000 the set is large, but there are commonalities within it, and that's why there are commonalities,

00:58:50.720 that's why morality has a common basis, fundamentally, and so that's partly what we're trying to

00:58:55.360 investigate, it's like, what's up, what does up mean, what does it mean, is there such a thing, now,

00:59:02.640 one thing to remember is that if you don't erect a hierarchical structure with something to aim at,

00:59:09.760 you've got no positive motivation, because you experience positive motivation in relationship to

00:59:15.920 a goal, not from attaining the goal, that's satisfaction, and besides, it's fleeting, you know

00:59:21.440 perfectly well, you graduate from university, poof, next day you have a problem, which is what do you

00:59:26.640 do next, and that's a tough problem, it's not like you've solved your problems by winning that game,

00:59:33.200 you just introduced the problem of having to introduce another game, so it's unreliable as a

00:59:38.480 source of positive emotion, but what's reliable is, you set a goal, and you try to attain it, and then

00:59:44.640 that gives your life, that literally provides your life with meaning, that's what meaning is, now it's

00:59:51.840 more than that, but that's what it is, and so then you might ask yourself, well, what's a really good goal?

00:59:59.360 Well, that's what we're trying to figure out, what's a really good goal, and now, okay, so you got that,

01:00:04.480 so now I'm going to walk through, at least partly through, we'll see how far we get, I'm going to walk

01:00:09.120 through Pinocchio with you, because that's what the movie is about, and it's a, it's hard to say how

01:00:15.280 it came about, like it was written, the story, by a guy named Claudi, C-O-L-L-O-D-I, it's quite a bit different,

01:00:22.880 the story, that story, the written one from the Disney version, the Disney version was a product of the

01:00:28.400 collaboration of geniuses of animation, essentially, so they were artistic geniuses, great at capturing motion

01:00:35.680 and emotion and all of that, be stellar at that, and imaginative, tremendously imaginative, but

01:00:43.280 collectively imaginative, and so they put together a collective product, and you might say, well, how

01:00:48.800 did they do that exactly, it's like, well, they were good storytellers, and what does that mean, well,

01:00:56.400 it means you know the story that works, and the story that doesn't, and maybe partly what you do is you

01:01:01.600 kind of think out a story, and you think, well, what if this happens, and, well, maybe this should

01:01:05.680 happen, oh, that's the thing, oh, that would work, it's like the little flash of inspiration, right,

01:01:11.520 it's like, you got a piece of the puzzle that fits, you think, yeah, that would work there,

01:01:15.600 and then you talk to the other people, and you generate ideas, and someone says, well, what if,

01:01:20.480 what if they do this, and everyone goes, no, no, that's just not believable, no one's going to buy that,

01:01:25.440 and someone else has a little revelation, they say, well, you know, it makes some sense somehow,

01:01:30.400 if they do this, and everybody goes, oh yeah, that really, that really, that really works, it's like, why?

01:01:37.200 Why? Why? Well, you don't know, you don't know why it works, but it works because,

01:01:43.920 it works because it's the right story, and so what does that mean? Well, it's kind of associated with

01:01:50.720 this metagame idea, you know, it's like, there's a story that you should be acting out, that works

01:01:56.080 across games, and you have an inkling of it, you have a notion of it, you have a vague apprehension

01:02:00.880 of it, it's sort of built into you, that's archetype, that's an archetype, and so then when you read a

01:02:06.000 story that works, you're just entranced by it, and you all know that, you go to a movie, and it's a

01:02:10.800 great movie, and it's like, you're just blown away, you know, it's, a movie can pull you in, and turn you

01:02:16.720 into one of the screen characters, and I can run you through a huge set of emotions, I saw this movie

01:02:21.760 once about South America, it started with this guy running out of a subway naked, and he didn't

01:02:27.200 know where he was, and it turned out that he had been absconded by the totalitarian death squads,

01:02:33.200 and he couldn't remember anything about himself, and he went back to his village, and basically what

01:02:39.200 happened was that he ended up back in the totalitarian death grip, and it was, it showed

01:02:46.720 how the fascist state had saturated the village completely, and so it was a tragedy, and you

01:02:53.040 could see with every action that this guy, this amnestic guy, as he recreated him himself, and

01:03:00.160 remembered his identity, was going to travel down exactly the same road, because nothing had changed,

01:03:05.280 and by the time, I wish, I've looked for what that movie was for years, I've never been able to find it

01:03:10.560 again, but when the movie was over, every single person in the theater was crying, and not just a

01:03:17.120 little bit, it was like they were just out of it, it was brilliant, terrifying movie, and that meant

01:03:23.120 there was something right about it, man, and it got people, and you might say, you know, you have dim

01:03:29.760 apprehensions about the world, and some of those are instinctual, and some of those are a consequence

01:03:35.120 of your, of your experience, and it's like, the pieces are fragmented, but if you get away from

01:03:42.000 them a long ways, you could see how they fit together, but they're fragmented, and then you go see a

01:03:47.040 story, and those pieces go click, click, click, click, click, and you think, wow, that's what, that's how

01:03:51.120 that works out, that's, that's what that means, and that produces that overwhelming emotion, and, and that's

01:03:56.800 partly how you make yourself transparent to yourself, you know, you go experience a story,

01:04:04.000 you go watch a story, you tell a story, and you start to find out who you are by doing that.

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01:07:02.400 Someone made a little animated thing out of it and put it on the internet, which is quite cool.

01:07:06.480 So anyways, he was having night terrors and he ran around like a little knight, you know,

01:07:12.160 K-I, a K-N-I-G-H-T, knight. And he had a little, you know, armor and a sword, and he'd run around the

01:07:20.160 house with a little knight hat on being a knight. And he was only like four or something, and he'd

01:07:25.360 watched a lot of Disney movies and a lot of movies, so he kind of got the knight idea. It was,

01:07:30.080 it was, he was acting that out and he was having these terrors at night, right? And so he'd go to

01:07:34.320 bed with his little knight hat and his sword and he'd put him on his bed and then at night he'd wake

01:07:39.760 up screaming and that happened for a very long time. And so when I went to visit, you know, I found out

01:07:44.800 that this was happening and he had a night terror. So the kid wakes up with night terrors,

01:07:49.920 screaming, but can't remember anything, generally speaking. So, anyways, this was happening and so

01:07:56.000 it happened one day and I was sitting with him and his family at the breakfast table and I said,

01:08:02.320 did you have a dream? And he said, oh yes, I had a dream. I said, well, you know, what was your dream?

01:08:07.360 And he said, well, I was out on this field and I was surrounded by these dwarfs and they came up to

01:08:14.240 my knees and they were, they didn't have any arms, they had big feet and they were covered with hair and

01:08:20.320 there was a cross shaved at the top of their head and they were all greasy and they had huge beaks

01:08:24.320 and everywhere I went they jumped at me with their beaks and there was lots of them and everybody

01:08:29.360 was very quiet after he said this because it was like, that, oh, that's why you're screaming at night.

01:08:35.520 It's like, yeah, okay. And so, so, and then he said, but, but at the background there was a dragon

01:08:43.360 and the dragon would blow out smoke and fire and then it would turn into these dwarfs.

01:08:48.480 So it's like, man, that kid had a problem, right? It was like, well, what are you going to do?

01:08:52.000 You fight off a dwarf, who cares? It's like, puff, ten more. That's life, man. That's life.

01:08:58.880 Really. That's the hydra. You cut off one head, seven more grow. That's life. Snakes everywhere.

01:09:05.120 And you get rid of one, there'll be more. And so, he figured that out. It's a hell of an existential shock

01:09:11.440 when you're four. And so he's like, he's a knight. He's thinking, what do I do about these dwarfs?

01:09:16.400 Well, there's too many of them, but there's a dragon. Well, so I said, well, what could you do about that?

01:09:22.400 Right? Loaded question. It implies that you could do something about that. Well, he kind of knew that,

01:09:29.120 which is why he was running around like a knight. He kind of figured that out. And he said, well, I get my dad

01:09:36.000 and I jump up on the dragon and I poke out both of its eyes with my sword and then I go right down its stomach

01:09:40.960 to the place where the fire came out, the firebox, and then I'd carve a piece of the firebox out

01:09:45.920 and I'd make a shield. And that would be the end of that. And I thought, wow! Good work, kid!

01:09:52.240 Like, you really got it, right? It's the central human story. There's the terrible unknown, right?

01:09:59.760 Fire breathing, generating trouble. And what do you do? You confront that. You confront that.

01:10:04.880 And by confronting it, you get stronger. That's the shield. And that's, that's what a human being is.

01:10:10.800 And that's, that's right. It's exactly right. And that was the end of his night terrors, by the way,

01:10:16.320 which seems too good to be true. But it is actually true, because I followed up with his mother for a long

01:10:21.120 time. And that was that. He catalyzed that part of his identity. He adopted the role of the mythological hero.

01:10:27.440 And that's what he needed to do, because, like, there was lots of drag, there's a dragon and a bunch of

01:10:31.920 dwarves. Like, what the hell are you going to do about that? Run? That's not going to help.

01:10:35.520 You know, if you run in a dream like that, the dwarves multiply and they get bigger, and you get smaller

01:10:41.600 as you run. It's like, that's not a good, that is not a good solution. And people do that in their life

01:10:48.160 all the time. And so, the dwarves get bigger until they're giants, and they get smaller until

01:10:53.680 there's nothing left of them. And then, then there's no recovery. That is not good.

01:11:02.400 Now, okay, so now, I also propose to you that there, there's a symbolic structure to the world.

01:11:09.440 It's a meta structure, I would say. I think these categories are truly real, and they're, they're

01:11:15.040 basically this. There's unexplored territory, there's explored territory, and there's you.

01:11:21.760 And unexplored territory is the source of great riches, and it probably will kill you, and

01:11:27.840 explored territory is your culture, and it crunches you into submission and conformity, and turns you

01:11:34.000 into a civilized being. And you're stuck with both of those, and then there's you, and you know,

01:11:38.560 you're kind of admirable and cool, and you do a lot of decent, wonderful, amazing things, and there's

01:11:43.520 things about you that are just horrible, and you're, and you know about them, and you're stuck with them,

01:11:48.800 and that's the world. And that's the, that's the landscape of the world. And what you'll see,

01:11:55.280 if you pay attention, is that people who are ideologues, like Rousseau, or say, like Hobbes,

01:12:01.280 but it doesn't matter. Ideologues will tell you part of that story. So environmentalists,

01:12:06.160 for example, will say, nature, that's pristine beauty, natural harmony, French landscape,

01:12:16.240 it's a paradise, especially if there are no people, it's a paradise. And then culture is a rapacious

01:12:22.720 monster, and human beings driving that culture against nature are monsters of a sort, and perhaps

01:12:32.160 there should be fewer of them. It's like, yeah, yeah, that's all true, exactly, dead on, right on,

01:12:37.280 exactly right. Is that movie called Avatar? Yes, that's James Cameron's movie, right? That's that story,

01:12:46.880 yeah. And hey, it's a good story. It's even a mythological story, but it's only half the story.

01:12:54.160 The other story, you could think about it as a frontier myth, that's Star Trek,

01:12:58.320 or Star Wars for that matter, mostly Star Trek, it's like, but it's, we'll put it in context of the frontier myth,

01:13:07.680 the myth that drew settlers into America, say, it's well, there's a wild savage landscape out there,

01:13:15.440 that can be conquered by, and settled, and stabilized by civilization, and it'll be the heroic pioneer

01:13:21.920 who does it. It's exactly the opposite story of the environmental story, which is actually why

01:13:26.480 I think the environmental story eventually emerged, it was, you know, the frontier story

01:13:32.320 had a lack in it, it missed half of the world, and so the other story had to come up, and it did,

01:13:37.680 and if you take both of those stories, even though they're exactly opposite to one another,

01:13:42.560 if you know both of those stories, then you know the whole story, and it's really weird, you know,

01:13:47.520 because one of the propositions of formal logic is, it's a fundamental proposition, is that something

01:13:54.560 can't be itself, and it's opposite at the same time, it's like, that's true for some sorts of things,

01:14:01.280 it's true for logical claims, but it's completely wrong in this particular situation, because things

01:14:08.480 are what they are, and they're opposite at the same time, and that makes it very very difficult to,

01:14:14.800 that's why a dragon hoards gold, it's like, what's up with that? Well, it'll eat you,

01:14:21.040 and it will, but it has gold, well, so what do you do about that? Because it's paradoxical demands,

01:14:29.280 well, what you want to do is face the dragon and get the damn gold, that's what you want to do,

01:14:33.600 well, you have to be a paradoxical being even to do that, so, you know, in The Hobbit,

01:14:41.680 for example, when, what's his name, Frodo, right, isn't, it's not, or it's Bilbo, it's Bilbo in The Hobbit,

01:14:47.840 you know, he's kind of this little, underdeveloped, overprotected, shire dweller, and he's called on a great adventure,

01:14:58.240 to go and find the dragon, and he has to become a thief, in order to manage it, well, that's pretty weird,

01:15:06.960 you know, it's like, well, it's because, as a good citizen, he's just not enough to conquer a dragon,

01:15:13.920 he has to also become a bad citizen, in some sense, he has to incorporate the part of himself that's monstrous,

01:15:20.320 let's say, and develop that, and hone it, and that's to say that, well, if you're harmless, you're not virtuous,

01:15:28.480 you're just harmless, you're like a rabbit, a rabbit isn't virtuous, it's just, it just can't do anything except get eaten,

01:15:37.280 it's not virtuous, if you're a monster, and you don't act monstrously, then you're virtuous,

01:15:44.720 but you also have to be a monster, well, you see this all the time, Harry Potter's like that too, it's like, he's flawed,

01:15:50.640 he's hurt, he's got evil in him, he can talk to snakes, man, he breaks rules all the time, all the time,

01:15:56.880 he's not obedient at all, but, you know, he has a good reason for breaking the rules, and if he couldn't break the rules,

01:16:03.600 him and his little clique of rule-breaking, you know, troublemakers, if they didn't break the rules,

01:16:08.800 they wouldn't attain the highest goal, so it's very peculiar, but it's very, it's a very, very, very,

01:16:15.600 very common mythological notion, you know, the hero has to be, the hero has to be a monster,

01:16:23.760 but a controlled monster, Batman is like that, you know, I mean, it's everywhere, it's the story you

01:16:28.880 always hear. Is this where morals become ethics? Meaning, we have to be more precise. I feel like,

01:16:34.960 because everyone's moral, but in order to become ethics, you have to refine the morals,

01:16:39.840 and so you have to kind of go into... Well, that's a good question, you know, because

01:16:45.040 one question is, you know, you're kind of implicitly moral in so far as you're socialized,

01:16:50.480 but that's sort of procedural, it's just built into you, this is different, this is also becoming

01:16:54.800 conscious of it, and expanding out your personality into dimensions that it wouldn't normally occupy, so

01:17:00.160 this happens to people all the time, so, for example, lots of my clients, my clinical clients,

01:17:06.320 are too agreeable, and they're generally women, because women are more agreeable than men,

01:17:11.440 but not always, because I've had agreeable men as clients as well, and what happens is, they're resentful,

01:17:16.720 and they don't know how to stand up for themselves, and it's because they're very compassionate

01:17:20.960 by nature, and so, if you're entering into a negotiation with them, they'll let you win,

01:17:25.840 well, that's not so good, because, you know, you need to win too, especially if you're in an

01:17:31.040 organization of adults, where there's, there's a struggle, right, when you have kids, you can let

01:17:37.200 them win, especially infants, like, you have to let them win, and that's partly why compassion is so

01:17:43.760 necessary, but as a, as a basis for negotiation between adults, it's like, sorry, it's insufficient,

01:17:51.600 you have to, you have to be a bit of a monster, so that you can say no, and so a lot of what you

01:17:56.800 do in, in psychotherapy, is treat people's anxiety, and depression, that's a huge chunk of it,

01:18:02.000 help them straighten out the way they think, that's a huge chunk of it, but another chunk of it is,

01:18:06.880 well, let's toughen you up, you know, let's put you in a position where you can bargain,

01:18:10.480 let's teach you how to assert yourself, and stand up for yourself, and that's assertiveness training,

01:18:15.280 and it's a huge chunk of psychotherapy, and you need to, you need to learn it, it's like,

01:18:20.000 because part of how you regulate your interactions with other people is to negotiate,

01:18:27.040 and you cannot negotiate unless you can say no, you can't do it, and it causes conflict to say no,

01:18:33.520 and if you don't like conflict, which is basically the definition of being agreeable,

01:18:37.200 then you can't tolerate the conflict, and so then you can't negotiate on your own behalf,

01:18:41.280 and so then you keep losing, and you're bullied, and you know, it's not good, then you get resentful,

01:18:46.720 and it's really not good, so you have to develop your inner monster a little bit,

01:18:52.880 and, and then that makes you a better person, not a worse person, it's weird, it's weird, but,

01:19:00.960 but that's just how it is.

01:19:03.840 Outside of that diagram is chaos itself, and that's the chaos from which things emerge, now,

01:19:10.080 I can't tell you much about that yet, because it's too damn complicated, but I think the best way to

01:19:15.120 think about chaos is as potential, that's one way of thinking about it, it's also that place you end up

01:19:21.120 when you don't know what to do, it's the source of all things, but it's also the terrible predator,

01:19:28.000 the terrible eternal predator that lurks beyond the explored domain, it's a winged dragon,

01:19:34.720 and it's winged, who knows why, matter and spirit, that's partly what it is, and I'll explain that later,

01:19:40.400 it's also potentially the predatory beast that's been after us for, for forever,

01:19:46.240 and the winged predator that picked us out from the sky, so primates for example, monkeys have,

01:19:53.280 some monkeys have three specialized alarm cries, one is for snakes, and that usually means

01:19:58.960 hit the trees, and then one's for leopards, and that means hit the trees and go out on a skinny branch,

01:20:03.920 because the leopard can't get to you, and then there's one for like birds of prey,

01:20:07.840 which means hide somewhere on the ground, so that you don't get picked off, and it's like, well,

01:20:13.680 that's what that is, that's what that is, and that's chaos, and it's expanded into much more than that,

01:20:21.680 and then I showed you, I don't remember if I showed you this, but this is, this is a symbolic representation of

01:20:27.200 mother nature, father culture, and the suffering individual, but it's all, that's all positive,

01:20:34.960 there's no negative elements there, but that's okay, that's a partial representation, and those

01:20:39.920 things are sacred in some sense, because they are representative of an ultimate reality,

01:20:45.440 of an ultimate reality, the sacrificial individual here, the suffering individual,

01:20:50.320 well, that's pretty straightforward, it's like, that's what, that's life, that's suffering,

01:20:57.120 that's life, that's what happens to the individual, and so, and everyone is looking at that,

01:21:03.600 it has power, that idea, well, it's because, you know, culture supports the suffering individual,

01:21:11.120 and culture is nested inside benevolent nature, and that's part of the story of the world,

01:21:17.040 and it's part of the story we're trying to figure out and make articulate, we've been doing that for

01:21:21.440 thousands of years, trying to make this story articulate,

01:21:26.160 and it's not yet articulate, it's only, we're only getting it, we're only getting it,

01:21:30.800 and we basically do that now, mostly with movies and stories and fiction and that sort of thing,

01:21:36.000 we still don't have it articulated, I think Jung came closer than anyone else, Jung and Eric Neumann,

01:21:42.320 who was one of his students, came closer than anyone else ever has to actually articulating that,

01:21:47.200 and that's what Jung was trying to do, is to take all these images, archetypal images,

01:21:52.240 instinctual images, and say, well, what do they mean, what do they mean, what do they mean,

01:21:56.320 and he got a long ways on that, although his writing is quite obscure, and it's obscure because,

01:22:01.040 how the hell are you going to explain an image like that without being obscure, it's like,

01:22:06.480 it's insanely complicated, and it's not linear, it's not a linear thing, that's why it's in a picture,

01:22:13.120 because a picture presents everything at once, and you want to take that apart linearly, Jesus,

01:22:18.480 it's just impossible, but we've been struggling to do that, really, we've been struggling to do that,

01:22:24.720 from the time we became self-conscious, you know, what is the world about, how should we live in it,

01:22:30.480 well, that's a partial answer, and it's a culture-bound answer, obviously, but you see,

01:22:35.760 archetypal representations like this in many cultures, so for example, the image of the virgin and child,

01:22:42.480 that way predates Christianity, like the Egyptians, that was Isis and Horus, that goes back,

01:22:48.480 oh, we have no idea how far, thousands and thousands of years before the emergence of Judaism and Christianity,

01:22:55.280 way back before that, and no doubt, back into prehistory itself, because a culture that doesn't hold

01:23:04.000 the mother and child as sacred, dies, obviously, because, obviously, so it has to be held as a,

01:23:15.760 it has to be held as something that you revere, which at least means you don't kill mothers and children,

01:23:22.800 it at least means that, and that's an instinct, you know, it's an instinct, it violates you to do that,

01:23:30.080 and thank God. So, I told you about this a little bit last week, but, you know, one of the motivations

01:23:39.600 I had for thinking the things that I've thought through, the motivation I had for thinking them

01:23:45.200 through was because, well, I, I, it, it, it seemed self-evident to me, let's say,

01:23:52.960 and I think that was partly from reading Jung, but not, but it, that just helped me clarify it, was that,

01:23:59.040 you know, it was sort of Jung's contention that

01:24:03.120 we had a organic development of a metaphysical ethic

01:24:07.600 that was embedded in, in religious tradition, and that basically unfolded, let's say, in the West,

01:24:14.080 till about 1600, 1500, something like that, and then, science emerged, and we got unbelievably

01:24:21.200 technologically powerful, on, and using a certain view of the world, you know, we're so technologically

01:24:27.040 powerful, but we're still not very wise, and that just seems to me to be a bad combination,

01:24:34.240 and I thought about that a lot, it's like, okay, well, how do you handle the combination of

01:24:38.640 exceptional technological power, and, and, and an impaired ethic, let's say, something like that,

01:24:44.000 underdeveloped ethic, or one even in which you have no faith, because, you know, it seems

01:24:49.760 the foundational elements of it are irrational, they're, they're in mythology, they're in religion,

01:24:54.880 they don't fit well with the scientific world view, how do you rectify that problem, and,

01:25:00.000 well, that's a tough problem, you know, it's a crazy problem, and certainly it was the problem

01:25:05.040 that Jung was trying to address, there's no doubt about it, and along with that went an associated

01:25:10.160 problem, which, which was, you know, what happened in the 20th century, which was so awful,

01:25:15.440 and in so many places, it was just so unbelievably brutal, and terrible, and, and it was perpetrated by

01:25:22.480 millions of people, and they were individual people, and they weren't that much different from

01:25:27.120 normal people, in fact, they were normal people, and so, the other thing that struck me was that

01:25:32.320 it would be better if that sort of thing didn't happen anymore, and so I was trying to figure out

01:25:36.240 what the hell could possibly be done about that, and, you know, part of Jung's contention was,

01:25:40.720 well, you had to understand yourself as a monster, if you were ever going to maintain some control

01:25:45.840 over the fact that you are, in fact, a monster, and that that could come forth if the situation is

01:25:50.320 correct, it's like, okay, that seems reasonable, and so, well, it seemed to me that, you know, people

01:25:59.520 had to become wiser, and, of course, that's a very difficult thing to figure out, because you can

01:26:04.640 even question whether there is such a thing as wisdom, you know, and, and then I thought, well,

01:26:10.240 that's what the universities are supposed to do, especially the humanities, mostly, in particular,

01:26:14.640 it's supposed to make you wise, that's what it's for, and it's doing a terrible job of that,

01:26:19.920 in my estimation, it's more decimating people, as far as I can tell, and undermining whatever

01:26:25.520 ethic they have, rather than making people wise, and, but I think that we have to become wise,

01:26:33.840 I don't think there's a choice, I think it's a matter of survival, and it's more than that,

01:26:37.920 because if you're wise in your own life, you're going to have a way better life, like,

01:26:42.000 incomparably better, because you're, you're going to sleep soundly with a good conscience at night,

01:26:48.320 and, you know, people say that's worth more than money, and that's worth more than money,

01:26:52.480 I know lots of people who have lots of money, and let me tell you, money protects you,

01:26:57.200 you're as well protected from the world by money right now as you ever will be for the rest of your life,

01:27:02.480 because most of life's fundamental problems can't be solved with money, you know, like,

01:27:07.600 rich people get divorced, they have affairs, their children get sick,

01:27:11.360 like, they have all the problems you have, and that's partly because you're already rich,

01:27:15.760 and so, you might think that if you had a bunch more money, things would be better,

01:27:21.840 but it's just not true, in fact, in some ways, they might be worse, because money can open up,

01:27:27.680 can open up the possibility of all sorts of temptations to you that you just can't afford at the moment,

01:27:33.040 so, well, so, like economic, economics, we've already solved that problem fundamentally,

01:27:39.520 and we're rapidly solving it everywhere in the world, right, I mean, the world economy is growing so damn fast,

01:27:44.560 that you can't even imagine how you could possibly make it grow any faster, it's crazy,

01:27:49.600 we've lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 15 years, you know,

01:27:54.800 the UN set a goal by 2015, I think it was to cut poverty by half, if I remember correctly,

01:28:01.360 and they reached it two years early, you know, it's like, it's unbelievable, so,

01:28:06.400 well, so then I started to try to understand what it might be to live, and really what I was looking

01:28:17.760 for was not so much to live a life that was wise, but at least to live a life that wasn't pathologically unwise,

01:28:24.960 you know, and I thought of the sorts of things that people were doing to one another in the

01:28:30.000 Auschwitz camps, and in the Gulag Archipelago, and all of that horror that was perpetrated on

01:28:36.400 people as definitely unwise, whatever else you might say about it was unwise, and so then I

01:28:42.240 thought, well, maybe there's a way to figure out how you could not do that, and so that's,

01:28:48.640 and I think that that's my sense is that when you come to university to learn how to be a civilized

01:28:55.280 person, which is what's supposed to happen at university, otherwise it's just a trade school,

01:29:00.080 and you might as well go to trade school, as far as I'm concerned, if you want to learn something

01:29:05.120 that will get you a job, it's like it's a lot faster, and it's more certain, and it's useful,

01:29:13.040 if you're not being taught to be a citizen at university, then why bother with it, so, well,

01:29:21.280 so that's what we're trying to figure out, and that's part of that cloud of mythological fantasy

01:29:28.400 that surrounds our culture, that's, it's part of its deep history, that we're trying to, you know,

01:29:33.520 if you grapple with the humanities, and with art, and all of that, that you're trying to, you're trying

01:29:38.000 to master, and incorporate, and, and pull into you, so that you're situated properly in history, and,

01:29:45.840 and you're not just floating in the void of, of, you know, this tiny individuality that's divorced

01:29:53.600 from everything else, you're weak in that circumstance, all right, so,

01:30:04.160 that's more of an explanation of why I'm trying to puzzle through these things, and trying to puzzle

01:30:08.640 through them with you, so anyways, we, we talked about this, this, this, the song last week, and,

01:30:15.520 you know, I, I, I made a hypothesis to you, we'll, we'll go through this quickly, um,

01:30:22.080 it's doggerel, it's, it's not great poetry, but it's irrelevant, um, it was a very popular song,

01:30:27.840 it's quite beautiful, in the movie it's actually sung by, like, a heavenly choir, that's what it sounds

01:30:32.720 like, so, it's got this cathedral, you can imagine people singing it in a cathedral, essentially,

01:30:38.080 and so that's not accidental, it's purposeful, you know, it, it, it partakes of that,

01:30:44.880 what would you call it, it, it, it partakes of that aesthetic, that, that's, that's it, so, the, the filmmakers are, are

01:30:53.440 implying that what is about to be shown to you has this

01:30:59.520 divine element, essentially, and that that's signified by the choir of voices that, that sings this song

01:31:09.040 and the song says, fundamentally, something like this, is that if you lift up your eyes

01:31:14.880 above the temporal, into the transcendent, and so that's what exists in the heavenly world,

01:31:22.480 in the stars, if you pick a, an ultimate goal, if you pick the right ultimate goal,

01:31:28.560 then, anyone can do this, that's the other thing, it's democratic, it's, it's anyone can do this,

01:31:34.080 so that's, that's the second proposition, it doesn't matter who you are, you can do this,

01:31:38.800 and so, I think that's a reflection of the idea of the divinity of the individual, it's like,

01:31:43.120 there's something about each individual that's valuable, regardless of their idiosyncrasies,

01:31:47.600 and, and so they have this potential that they can manifest, and how do you manifest it? Well,

01:31:52.240 you pick the right goal, and what's the right goal? Well, it's, it's high, it's elevated,

01:31:57.200 it's above the mundane, now, what does that mean? Well, you don't really know, you don't really know,

01:32:02.320 that's why it's signified by a star, and a star is something that glimmers in the night, right?

01:32:06.880 So it's a source of light in the darkness, and so, there's a metaphor there, obviously,

01:32:11.600 there's a metaphor there, and the star is, the star that, that's the star of Hollywood, you know,

01:32:17.760 the person that you emulate, that's part of it, because an ideal is, it's going to be a human ideal

01:32:22.880 of some sort that you're aiming at, and so the ideal human being is, is the star that you're aiming at,

01:32:28.400 maybe it's something like that, if, if that's what you're aiming at, you might say, well,

01:32:32.560 what should you aim at in life? And one answer is, well, why don't you aim at being

01:32:38.800 whatever you could be that would be the best? Now, you don't know what that is, exactly,

01:32:44.560 because how do you know? You know, but you could think, well, that would be really good if I could

01:32:48.800 have it, and then you could say, well, can I think of anything better than that? And if the answer is no,

01:32:54.480 then, well, why not go for that? You know, and you might say, well, it's, it's too ambitious,

01:32:59.920 it takes too much responsibility, it's like, yeah, yeah, that, that, those are definitely problems,

01:33:04.080 and one of the things that I've figured out over the years is that if you offered the person the

01:33:08.160 opportunity, you know, because people say, well, life doesn't really have any ultimate meaning,

01:33:12.560 it's like, yeah, okay, fine, so, fine, let's say it has an ultimate meaning, but that in order to

01:33:20.720 experience that ultimate meaning, you have to take on ultimate responsibility for what you do,

01:33:26.160 well, that's a heavy price to pay to have a meaningful life, you know, and you might say,

01:33:31.200 well, there's no damn way I'm going to do that, I'll just go for the, you know, pointless,

01:33:38.560 I'll go for the trivial, pointless perspective, which, you know, is kind of hard on me existentially,

01:33:44.560 but it frees me up, I can do whatever the hell I want moment to moment, I don't have any ultimate

01:33:48.560 responsibility, and so then you think, well, that's kind of a good deal, and then, then, but that raises

01:33:54.160 this weird specter of doubt, which is, well, when you hear people talk about the ultimate futility of

01:33:59.200 life, is it because life is ultimately futile, or is it because they've decided that they would just

01:34:05.520 assume not adopt the responsibility, and they use that real decision, which is to not adopt the

01:34:11.600 responsibility, they rationalize that by proposing that life is ultimately meaningful, meaningless,

01:34:18.080 and like, you know, I kind of buy that, I really do think that's what's going on, so, but maybe not, but it could be

01:34:27.680 that if you want to have an ultimately meaningful life, that you have to adopt ultimate responsibility, makes sense,

01:34:34.720 what might that mean? Well, one thing it might mean is that, and I do think it means this, is that,

01:34:44.240 I think it was Alexander Pope, but I might be wrong about that, who said, nothing human is foreign to me,

01:34:50.320 and that's a hell of a statement, right, because if you think about all the things that human

01:34:53.920 beings are capable of, and they're capable of some, like if you really want to know what people are

01:35:00.240 capable of, you should read about, read about unit 731, but I would not recommend it, because if you

01:35:05.600 read it, you will never forget it, and you will be sorry that you read it, but you'll know, anyways,

01:35:13.680 to say that nothing human is foreign to you, that's a hell of a thing to say, because that means that

01:35:18.720 what other people have done, you could do, and that also means you need to take responsibility for that,

01:35:24.160 that's no joke, you know, it's a big deal to do that, in even a trivial manner, anyways, so,

01:35:32.560 the idea is that you can elevate, if you elevate your viewpoint to some transcendent ethic, you want

01:35:39.440 what's ultimately good, you really want that, whatever that is, you don't know, but that's what you're

01:35:45.280 aiming at, says that, well then it says this strange thing that, well what you want will all of a sudden

01:35:50.640 come to you, well that's a proposition, and it's the proposition that's basically played out in the

01:35:55.360 movie, it's a hypothesis, the hypothesis is, the best way to orient yourself in life is to orient

01:36:00.800 yourself towards the highest good that you're capable of imagining, and then aim at that, and then

01:36:05.600 things will work out the best way they can for you, and I think, I believe that's correct, my observation

01:36:12.560 of life has led me to see that that seems to be correct, so for example, you don't get something you

01:36:18.800 don't aim at, that just doesn't work out, and so lots of people aim at nothing, and that's what they

01:36:22.960 get, so if you aim at something, you have a reasonable crack at getting it, you know, you tend to change

01:36:28.560 what you're aiming at a bit along the way, because like, what do you know, you know, you aim there,

01:36:32.160 you're wrong, but you get a little closer, and then you aim there, and you're still wrong, you get

01:36:36.000 a little closer, and you aim there, and you know, as you move towards what you're aiming at, your

01:36:41.680 characterization of what to aim at becomes more and more sophisticated, and so it doesn't really

01:36:46.400 matter if you're wrong to begin with, as long as you're smart enough to learn on the way, and as

01:36:50.320 long as you specify a goal, so specify a vague one, I want things to be the best they could be,

01:36:56.400 and I'm willing to learn what best means as I go along, okay, so fine, and then you get what you

01:37:02.400 truly need, we'll say, well maybe not, no, if your heart is in your dream, what does that mean?

01:37:09.600 Well, that to me reflects this idea of a kind of integrated viewpoint, one of the things Jung proposed was

01:37:15.280 that as you, as you integrate yourself psychologically, what happens is that

01:37:21.360 your rationality integrates with your emotions, they stop being opposed forces, like the enlightenment

01:37:27.120 idea is that rationality and desire are opposites, and enemies in a sense, and the Jungian notion is,

01:37:33.280 and the psychoanalytic notion I would say in general, and the humanist notion even perhaps is that,

01:37:38.160 no, that's not right, what you want to do is you want to integrate your rationality with your

01:37:43.040 emotions and your motivations, they're not separable, even technically, they have to work together,

01:37:49.200 and that all has to be integrated with your body, not only do you have to take your heart into

01:37:56.560 account, and notice what it is that you want and don't want, but you also have to embody that,

01:38:02.160 you have to act that out in the world, so fine, so that's what that means, and if you do that, then

01:38:07.040 well then your horizons open up, and I also believe that's true, you know I have known people in my life who

01:38:13.680 are insanely successful, like insanely successful, and those people are, like they're, they're pretty damn together

01:38:23.200 man, you know, like they're tough, smart, strategic, generous, you know, they're always giving people opportunities,

01:38:31.040 honest, like they've got it all, you know, and sometimes not, now I'm not saying that everyone

01:38:36.800 who's wildly successful is wildly successful because they've got themselves together, but, you know,

01:38:42.880 because there are crooks and, you know, there are people who gain status one way or another by nefarious means,

01:38:53.600 but that's a lot more unstable than you might think, and I can't say exactly if that, if you pursue that route,

01:38:59.200 you're going to pay for it, like you'll have your money or whatever it is, but, it's not going to do much good for you, so,

01:39:08.400 and so it does seem to me to be the people that have integrated themselves, and that,

01:39:12.720 and that are pursuing a noble goal, a high goal, who, who actually are able to do remarkable things,

01:39:19.840 and remarkable things can be done at every level, you know, it isn't like you have to change the world,

01:39:24.400 as a whole, it could be that you do something remarkable within your family, you know, and that's,

01:39:29.840 that can be tremendously admirable, you know, someone's got to take care of a family member if they're sick,

01:39:34.640 you know, you know, like there's, there's heroic acts that you can undertake in the local environment,

01:39:39.360 and maybe that will go un, unheralded, let's say, but that doesn't mean that it isn't remarkable,

01:39:45.680 I mean, I've met people who are so damaged, you just can't imagine it, and, and yet,

01:39:52.640 well, one person I met when I was at, in Montreal, was this woman, and she was just ruined, man,

01:39:58.240 she, she looked like a street person, and she was so shy, she couldn't even look at you, like,

01:40:02.160 she basically looked at the ground, because it was like there was light emanating from everyone

01:40:06.080 else, and she was way too timid and humble to even bear it, you know, and partly what I was doing

01:40:11.280 was trying to get her to straighten up, and not look so street person-ish, because it wasn't going

01:40:16.720 very well for her in social interactions, you know, but it turned out that that isn't what she came to

01:40:21.600 the behavior therapy unit for, and she had her aunt, I think she lived with her aunt who was like

01:40:26.800 schizophrenic, and, and then her aunt's boyfriend was an alcoholic who, like, went on long harangues

01:40:33.840 about the devil, and it's like, really, man, and she wasn't bright, this woman, she really wasn't, and,

01:40:39.280 and, you know, she didn't really have a job, and it was just like, it was just not good in every way,

01:40:45.200 and then she also, you know, had this unbelievable humility, and, but then, you know, it turned out

01:40:51.840 what she wanted, I just couldn't bloody well believe this, that she had this dog, and she used to

01:40:56.160 walk it around, she took care of the dog, and that, you know, that was a good thing, and,

01:40:59.280 and she'd actually been an inpatient at the Douglas Hospital, which is where I was working,

01:41:03.200 and there were inpatients in the Douglas Hospital, and this was back in the 80s, and

01:41:07.040 those people were, like, she was like superwoman compared to the inpatients at the Douglas Hospital,

01:41:12.640 those people looked like they were from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, because they had

01:41:17.920 deinstitutionalized everyone that could possibly be deinstitutionalized, and so the only people that

01:41:23.280 were left were people who couldn't be deinstitutionalized, and so those would have

01:41:27.280 been people who were in the psych ward for like 30 years, and all of the hospitals were connected

01:41:31.840 by tunnels underground, and the patients used to hang out down there by the coke machine,

01:41:35.760 and so forth, and one day I took my brother down there, he was visiting, and like, it was just like,

01:41:40.080 he just turned white, you know, because it was just, really, I don't know if you know Hieronymus Bosch,

01:41:45.600 he's very interesting painter to say the least, but that's what it was like, and so,

01:41:49.600 so here was her idea, she'd come to the behavior therapy unit, because she had been,

01:41:54.480 she'd been in the inpatient ward for a while, and she met some of these, like, ruined people,

01:41:59.120 and she tried to get the hospital, she thought, well, I'm walking my dog, you know, and, well,

01:42:03.120 maybe I could take one of these patients out for a walk, you know, and she'd been talking to the

01:42:06.800 hospital administrators, trying to get her, allow her to go, you know, take out one of these patients,

01:42:11.280 and go for a walk with her dog, and basically she'd come to the behavior therapy unit,

01:42:15.280 because that's what she wanted to do, it's like, man, that person, she just blew me away,

01:42:19.760 like, it's like, I just couldn't believe it, like, she had nothing going for her, like, nothing,

01:42:26.880 and yet, she wanted to, you know, help some people that were worse off, and like,

01:42:31.600 there just weren't that many people that were worse off than her, mind-boggling, mind-boggling,

01:42:37.600 and I never forgot it, and it really, it really blew me away, so, you know, there are opportunities for,

01:42:44.960 for elevating your sights, within your realm of capability, wherever you happen to be,

01:42:51.360 and, and that's interesting, it's, it's strange that that's the case.

01:42:55.920 She brings those who love, that's what that should say, the sweet fulfillment of their secret longing,

01:43:06.320 like a bolt out of the blue, fate, characterized here as feminine, and that's what happens in the,

01:43:12.160 in the movie, the movie's got a Christian underbelly, like, it's quite pronounced,

01:43:16.240 but it's really a pagan movie in many ways, so, for example, there's no blue fairy in,

01:43:21.920 and the reason I'm speaking of Christianity, of course, is because this movie was created in a

01:43:26.480 culture where Christianity was still reasonably intact, and of course, it was fully informed by that,

01:43:32.000 but the underlying mythos is, is not precisely Christian, even though it's informed by Christian

01:43:37.680 imagery, there is this old idea, I think it's a Gnostic idea, that the wisdom of God is feminine,

01:43:43.680 something like that, and anima, which means soul, is feminine, and so there's, there's, there's an

01:43:48.480 idea like that lurking here, and anyways, that's fate, and that's the blue fairy in this particular

01:43:53.760 movie, you know, she comes down from the star, which is, kind of makes her an avatar of God,

01:43:58.480 that's, that's the idea, and she's the transformative agent, she's really mother nature, you know, in her

01:44:04.560 positive guise, and that's why she can animate, to animate something means to infuse it with soul,

01:44:10.960 that's what it means, and she animates Pinocchio, right, she's the force that frees him from his

01:44:16.240 strings, and so that's her fate, like a bolt out of a blue, the blue fate steps in and sees you through,

01:44:23.440 well, what that means, it means something like, it means something like this, is that,

01:44:28.720 you know, if you orient yourself properly in the world, and we'll say that you do that by trying

01:44:33.200 to attain the ultimate goal, whatever that happens to be, then it's as if the world is on your side,

01:44:40.720 and things go well for you, and I also believe that's true, because certainly one of the things

01:44:45.520 that's more or less self-evident, is that, generally speaking, if you tell the truth,

01:44:49.440 things go a lot better for you, and the reason for that is, well, you want to be,

01:44:53.920 you want to have reality opposed to you, or do you want to have reality backing you up,

01:44:58.480 it's like, it's a pretty straightforward question, if you're truthful to the degree that you can be

01:45:03.120 truthful, then reality is on your side, that's a good thing, because there's a lot of it,

01:45:07.600 and there isn't much of you, whereas if you take a deceitful approach to things, then,

01:45:12.240 well, then you're challenging reality, it's like, good luck with that, man, it's like,

01:45:19.520 you're holding a plastic ruler in front of your face and bending it, you know, and

01:45:24.000 at some point, you're going to let go, and it's going to, all that force that you've

01:45:28.880 stored up, and it's going to snap back and nail you, and that happens, like, I have just never seen

01:45:35.280 anyone in my clinical practice ever get away with anything, nothing, and it's not surprising,

01:45:42.320 it's like, if you're going to mess with the structure of reality, like, it's going to mess

01:45:46.720 back, and it does, and it might not happen for years, and you might not even notice the connection,

01:45:51.920 I mean, part of what you do in psychotherapy is actually make those connections, it's like,

01:45:56.800 why did this horrible thing happen to me, well, who knows, it's like, let's take it apart,

01:46:02.560 well, who knows how far back we have to go, it might even have things to do, not even with you,

01:46:07.760 it might have things to do with the errors in your parents' relationship,

01:46:11.920 like, you just can't mess with the structure of reality, it stays warped until you straighten it out,

01:46:21.200 and it's not good, so, so there's an injunction here, which is that, you know, if you follow this

01:46:28.960 path, you pick a high goal, and you put your heart in it, you know, you commit to it,

01:46:34.800 believe in it, believe means to love, believe and be love, it's the same thing, it means to act out,

01:46:42.880 and that's what the belief means, like, we think belief means to accept a set of propositions as true,

01:46:47.840 well, that is one form of belief, but that's more like factual knowledge, right, belief is more like

01:46:54.480 you decide that you're going to act something out, you make a decision, and then you act it out,

01:46:59.120 and that's a reflection of your belief, you know, it's your staking yourself on something,

01:47:04.240 do you know, well, no, because you can't, you can't know, you're, you're bounded by ignorance,

01:47:10.720 you can make your best guess and move forward, and you can do that with commitment, but you have

01:47:15.280 to believe in order to do that, I guess that's why it's a wish, okay, so fine, well, then we have Jiminy Cricket,

01:47:27.040 that's Southern U.S. slang for Jesus Christ, by the way, and the initial overlap isn't a fluke,

01:47:33.600 I mean, I'm sure the animators thought that was funny, and of course it is funny, and you know,

01:47:38.080 in The Lion King, you know that, that baboon, who's the shaman, basically, well, to begin with,

01:47:45.200 he was kind of just a comic relief character, like a fool, you know, but one of the things Jung mentioned

01:47:50.880 about the fool is that the fool tends to turn into the savior, it's an archetypal reality, Bugs Bunny is

01:47:55.920 sort of like that, you know, he's a trickster, and as the, as the movie developed, the character

01:48:01.760 of the fool baboon took on the full-fledged, you know, shaman priest element, and, and, you know,

01:48:08.480 okay, well, Jiminy Cricket, he's this little cricket, and, and he turns out to be the conscience,

01:48:12.960 which is pretty damn weird, it's like, a bug is your conscience, and a bug is JC, and it's like,

01:48:19.520 that's a very strange juxtaposition of ideas, conscience, insect, savior, it's like, what,

01:48:26.960 what's up with that, and so, well, what bugs you, that's part of it, well, your conscience certainly

01:48:34.880 bugs you, and you should pay attention to it, it's just a little niggling, annoying thing that you

01:48:39.760 can't quite, you can override it, right, obviously, but it's this, well, and he says, when he talks to

01:48:47.280 the binoculator, he says, it's that still small voice, you know, and I've asked people before,

01:48:52.240 like, in my personality class, like, because conscience is a weird thing, and, and, like,

01:48:57.600 if I said to you, if you're about to do something that you know you shouldn't do, do you have a voice

01:49:03.920 in your head that tells you that you shouldn't do it, so how many people have had that experience?

01:49:09.680 Okay, okay, good, now, so other people have a feeling instead of a voice, and so, is there anybody here

01:49:15.520 who's willing to admit it, who has neither the feeling nor the voice?

01:49:20.960 Okay, so, and you know, it's a very understudied phenomena in psychology, this conscience, I mean,

01:49:26.000 people can be conscientious, and maybe those are people who listen to their conscience more,

01:49:30.720 I don't know, but nobody's ever investigated it, and the fact that you do have this little

01:49:35.200 voice, whatever it is, inside your head, it's like, what the hell's up with that?

01:49:39.360 You know, and it doesn't tell you what you want to hear, at least as far as I can tell,

01:49:44.000 now, you could say, well, that's the internal representation of society operating within you,

01:49:48.880 that'd be a Freudian view, that's the superego, and certainly, there's something to that, but

01:49:54.880 I don't think it's necessary to presume that that's all there is to it, and even if it is,

01:49:58.960 you still wouldn't have the voice if you didn't have the biological potential

01:50:03.440 to have that voice embed itself in you, so even if it is socioculturally constructed,

01:50:09.040 which it is in part, it's like language, it's like your language is socioculturally constructed,

01:50:13.920 but the reason you can speak is because human beings can speak, and if you have a conscience,

01:50:18.400 it's because human beings have a conscience, and the contents of that conscience might differ,

01:50:23.040 but the fact that it exists, what seems to me to be the universal, okay, so well, that's the conscience,

01:50:31.360 and that's Jiminy Cricket, and then the Cricket opens this book, and then you look at the book,

01:50:37.920 and you think, well, what kind of book is that? Well, it's got a spotlight on it, so it's being

01:50:42.720 highlighted, this is an important book, and what kind of book is it? Well, it's leather-bound,

01:50:46.880 it has a lock on it, you know, it's not some cheap book, it's kind of like a, you might think about,

01:50:51.280 it looks like something from an old library, or maybe it looks biblical, whatever,

01:50:55.280 it's a major league book, and this bug is the introduction to the book, so does that mean your

01:51:00.320 conscience is the introduction to the book? Well, maybe that is what it means, it's certainly

01:51:05.120 what's being played out in the movie, well, then the Cricket opens the book, and so then what do

01:51:10.080 you see? Well, what does that look like? What does it look like? What does it remind you of?

01:51:16.560 Okay, so that's the Van Gogh painting, it's a nativity scene, it's the Christmas star, and you

01:51:28.240 know that, because what's going to happen? Well, the hero is going to be born, that's what happens,

01:51:33.200 and so a star signifies that, why does a star signify the birth of an infant, let's say? Well,

01:51:39.920 because there's something miraculous about the birth of an infant, and why would the infant be a

01:51:46.160 savior, which is the Christian notion, say? Well, because that's what the infant is, potentially,

01:51:52.480 every infant, and so that's how you should act about them, and you know, one of the things that

01:51:57.280 really is interesting about having little kids, and I loved having little kids, is that

01:52:02.720 you have this opportunity to have this pristine relationship with someone, like a relationship

01:52:07.680 you've never had with anyone, because the kid really is just there to love you, like if you don't

01:52:12.800 screw it up, you've got that, and then you can keep that going, you know, and you can try to keep

01:52:18.080 that relationship, like, pristine, and that's so fun, it's so fun to try to do that, it's really,

01:52:26.480 it's amazing, it's an amazing thing, and you know, kids get a bad rap in our society, but

01:52:32.320 it's an amazing thing to have little kids, and they are remarkable, and they give you back

01:52:38.160 far more than they require from you, and partly because they treat you like you're valuable beyond

01:52:45.920 belief, that's what the kid thinks about you, it's like, that's pretty good, so yeah, it's like

01:52:52.880 something divine is going to happen, so okay, fine, you know, fair enough, well there's the star,

01:53:00.240 you're signifying that, and that's associated in some way with this star that you're supposed to wish

01:53:05.280 upon, well that's kind of odd, like there's this relationship that's implicit, the star that

01:53:10.800 signifies the birth of the hero is the same star that you wish upon, well, perhaps the star that you're

01:53:18.480 wishing upon is the wish that the hero will be born in your soul, it's something like that, you're

01:53:23.520 aiming at an ideal, it's the ideal you, whatever that would be, well, you can certainly figure out

01:53:30.560 what it isn't, that's where you start, as far as I can tell, you know, you know what you shouldn't

01:53:35.680 be doing, and you could at least stop doing those things, and then see what happens, you know, and

01:53:40.640 if you ask yourself, it's a meditative exercise, you know, and you do this with the autobiography

01:53:45.120 to some degree, it's like, okay, sit down for ten minutes and have a little dialogue with yourself,

01:53:50.320 like you actually wanted to know the answer, you know, so you ask, well, I'm probably doing something

01:53:56.000 stupid, that if I quit doing, my life would be better, that I could quit doing, that I would

01:54:00.560 quit doing, and maybe it's not a very big thing, because you're not very disciplined, but maybe

01:54:05.040 there's something, ask yourself that question, man, you'll have an answer in no time flat, like,

01:54:10.800 well, I should stop doing this, like, yeah, I know, and I could, and, you know, I won't, but,

01:54:15.920 or maybe I would, but if I did, I know my life would be better, it's like, you can figure that out

01:54:21.840 immediately, and if you do that a hundred times, well, you'll be in way better shape,

01:54:26.960 so if you don't know what to do that's good, you could at least figure out what you shouldn't

01:54:31.040 do that's just moronically, you know, pathetic, and you can be sure you're doing like a dozen

01:54:36.000 of those things, at least, you know, procrastinating, or, you know, you know, everyone, that's what

01:54:42.800 the conscience tells you, and if you ask, it'll just tell you why you're, you know, stupid

01:54:46.560 and insufficient, and so who wants to hear that, but, but maybe you could do something about it

01:54:55.120 okay, so the cricket comes into the village there, and he sees this, this, like, little house, and

01:55:00.400 there's a little fire in it, and so it's kind of got a welcoming place, it's a light in the

01:55:04.000 darkness, this house, just like the star, and so he hops towards it, and then he ends up inside it, and

01:55:09.040 you know, there's a nice fire, and you get to see the inside, and the inside, it's cozy, you know,

01:55:14.080 it's welcoming, and then when you look around, you see that everything's kind of in its place,

01:55:18.320 it's not hyper-organized or anything like that, it's friendly and welcoming, and it's, there's a lot

01:55:23.200 of wood, and there's a nice fire, and then there's toys everywhere, and they're well constructed,

01:55:27.840 so you know that whoever lives there likes children, and so if someone likes children,

01:55:32.000 well, if someone doesn't like children, it's like you should run away from them very rapidly,

01:55:35.680 but if they like children, well, then that's a good sign that, you know, Jesus, they're at least human,

01:55:40.400 it's a start, you know, and then these things are all high quality, they're made very well,

01:55:46.960 and then there's, and he's looking around to see all of this, and there's toys, and there's clocks,

01:55:52.640 and they're all handmade, and so he sort of infers that maybe there's a woodcarver who lives there,

01:55:57.440 and a woodcarver is someone who can build things, and if you build things that work,

01:56:02.480 and that are beautiful, that's a kind of truth, right, it's like, it's built right into the object,

01:56:07.280 that's what quality is, quality is the building into an object of truth, the thing works,

01:56:13.920 it does what it's supposed to, it has integrity, and so you see that everywhere in here,

01:56:18.560 so you're getting a sense of, the filmmakers are setting the stage, and so, well, so they set the

01:56:24.880 stage by showing you the stage, and the cricket tells you what he sees, and he's pretty happy to be

01:56:29.120 there, because, and this is also someone who's concerned about time, right, because there's a lot of

01:56:34.080 clocks, there's a lot of clocks, and so time turns out to be an important sub-element of this story,

01:56:39.600 and then he sees the puppet, he's a marionette, and so what's a marionette?

01:56:44.720 Well, a marionette, and he's sitting on the shelf, a marionette is something that's quasi-animated,

01:56:50.800 because it can move, it doesn't really have a soul, but it sort of acts like it has a soul,

01:56:56.480 in the sense of anima and soul and animated, but a marionette is something that is being

01:57:01.040 manipulated by something else behind the scenes, right, it doesn't have its own volition,

01:57:06.560 it's dependent on the will of something behind the scenes, and so there's a strong implication that

01:57:13.440 whatever this thing is, is half-formed, and that it's being manipulated by unseen forces behind, unseen

01:57:23.520 forces behind the facade, well, that's a Freudian idea, that's you, that's all of you, you know, you're

01:57:30.880 pulled hither and fro by unconscious forces, and some of those are biological, and some of them

01:57:36.800 are cultural, you know, and you think about people who are swept up in great ideological movements,

01:57:42.000 like the communists or the fascists, it's like, those people are marionettes, that's exactly what

01:57:47.280 they are, they all say the same thing, they all mouth the same words, they all act the same way,

01:57:52.880 and something's behind it, and the question is what? Well, that is the question, and that's partly

01:57:57.920 what this movie tries to figure out, so you see this marionette, he's a half-formed wooden headed

01:58:04.560 puppet, and he has a little bit of potential, you know, and the cricket goes up and interacts with

01:58:09.520 him, and sees that he's made out of pretty good wood, and makes a little joke about having a wooden

01:58:14.000 head, and you know, that's kind of obvious what that means, and you notice the cricket is dressed like

01:58:18.880 a tramp, and when you first saw him, he wasn't, he was dressed like a 1920s millionaire, so, but here

01:58:26.880 he's a tramp, and this is so interesting, it's like, so this bug that's a messiah, that's the introduction

01:58:33.440 to the book, that's the conscience, is also a tramp with no home, it's like, what does that mean, and it

01:58:39.920 took me a long time to sort that out, and it's like, he's been everywhere, this tramp, he's been

01:58:46.080 everywhere, and he knows, he's traveled the world, but he doesn't have a place, he doesn't have a home,

01:58:53.760 he hasn't made a relationship with anything real yet, he's kind of a potential, and this is one of the

01:58:59.360 things that's really interesting about this movie, because if you think about the cricket as a

01:59:03.840 fragment of the, of the hero, and say, a reflection of the, of the savior, which is his relationship

01:59:10.640 with JC, of course, and the person who introduces the book, then the story gets strange, because

01:59:18.000 if it was merely a representation of the perfect person, the archetype of the hero, then the conscience

01:59:23.840 would know everything, right, and it would just tell the puppet what to do, and that would be the

01:59:28.480 end of it, but that, first of all, that's a dull story, it's like perfect conscience comes along,

01:59:32.960 puppet does everything it says, bingo, perfection, but that isn't what happens, there's this weird

01:59:39.680 idea that this thing that's got all these attributes needs a home, and has to enter into a

01:59:46.480 learning relationship with the thing that it's trying to transform, it's so sophisticated, because,

01:59:52.640 you know, I could say, you should do what your conscience tells you, it's like, well, maybe not,

01:59:58.080 maybe that's not exactly how it works, maybe your conscience isn't omniscient and omnipotent,

02:00:03.040 maybe it's not God, right, it's a guide, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's maybe smarter than you

02:00:09.040 sometimes, maybe because it's society in your head, and obviously it's smarter than you sometimes,

02:00:14.320 because it tells you not to do something, and you go do it, and then you get into trouble,

02:00:18.000 and you think, well, if I would have just listened, but you don't, and that's interesting

02:00:22.080 too, it's something that you don't have to listen to, which is, seems to be associated

02:00:27.040 with free will, it's weird, it's like if your conscience knows what to do, why aren't you

02:00:31.600 just a deterministic puppet of your conscience? Christ, that would work a lot better, you wouldn't

02:00:36.640 have to torture yourself, and you wouldn't make any mistakes, so why the separation?

02:00:41.520 Well, maybe it's because the conscience is generic,

02:00:44.000 and so it has to be taught, it has to learn too, and so what you do is you have a dialogue

02:00:50.640 with your conscience, it's something like that, and then you expose yourself to more and more of

02:00:54.960 the world, and you get wiser and your conscience gets wiser and you, you mature together, and that's

02:01:01.200 what happens in this story, because the cricket starts out as a, this tramp that, you know, is smarter

02:01:06.800 than the puppet, but not as smart as he thinks he is, that's for sure, and when he first starts

02:01:11.840 to operate as a conscience, he's completely useless at it, he babbles off a lot of cliches

02:01:16.320 about morality, and then he's late the first day for his job, and he's just not very good at it,

02:01:21.360 and so there's this weird idea that the conscience, which is part of what puts you towards redemption,

02:01:27.440 is something that you actually have to interact with over the course of your life in order for

02:01:32.000 it to develop as you develop, and so then I would also say that the cricket represents at least in

02:01:37.600 part what Jung described as the self, which is like the potential fully developed human being

02:01:43.120 that sort of exists within you as a possibility, but it has to be, it has to be manifest in the

02:01:48.720 actual conditions of your life, and so the conscience has to learn how to position itself here and now,

02:01:55.200 and it's got generic advice, and that's not good enough, and so that's why the cricket is looking

02:01:59.920 for a home, and so he needs a home, even though he's all these other things we already said he was,

02:02:05.760 he has to find a specific home before he can become who he could be

02:02:11.520 well, so then Geppetto shows up, and he's a kindly old guy, which is pretty much exactly what you'd

02:02:15.760 expect, and you know, he's a careful craftsman, and he likes kittens, and you know, that's always a good thing

02:02:23.360 and he has some fish, and you know, he's good at making things, and he's got a sense of humor,

02:02:29.600 and he's kind of playful, and so he's the good father, fundamentally, he's the wise king,

02:02:34.640 he's the positive archetype of the masculine, and that's what he is, and so he's culture in

02:02:39.440 its positive manifestation, and he gives rise to this creation, which is his puppet, which is what

02:02:45.280 culture does, because you're a puppet of your culture, you're a marionette of your culture,

02:02:49.760 and so maybe you could be more than that, and that's the other thing that's strange about this

02:02:55.520 movie, and it's strange about the mythological way of looking at the world, because scientifically,

02:03:00.560 deterministically, there's nature, and there's culture, and you are the deterministic product

02:03:07.120 of the interaction between nature and culture, there's nothing else to you than that, that's that,

02:03:12.640 but the mythological world doesn't say that, it says something different, it says that there's

02:03:17.200 nature and culture, and then there's you, and the you that's in there has choices and a destiny,

02:03:25.280 and that you actually affect the interplay of nature and culture in determining your own

02:03:29.840 character, and it insists upon that, the oldest stories we have, there's always the hero, and the

02:03:36.320 archetypal mother, and the archetypal father, there's always those three things, there's never just

02:03:40.720 two, so from the narrative perspective, there's always the implication that there's something

02:03:46.560 autonomous about the hero of the story, and you know, you can't account for that, we don't have

02:03:53.600 a good way of accounting that, for that from a scientific perspective, I was having a discussion

02:03:58.480 with Sam Harris the other day, which was very, what would you say, he said we got wrapped around an

02:04:07.280 axle, which is pretty much, Sam Harris is one of the four famous, you know, atheists, along with

02:04:13.120 Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, yeah, and so we were having a discussion,

02:04:19.600 and he's a determinist, just right down to the bottom, it's like you're determined, there's no

02:04:26.720 free will, you're a deterministic machine, and you know, if you're a coherent scientist, and you're

02:04:31.440 a Newtonian, roughly speaking, you don't really have much choice other than to think that way, but that

02:04:36.320 isn't how it seems to people, and we don't treat each other that way, and our entire legal system is

02:04:42.160 predicated on the idea that you do in fact have free will, so well, can we account for it?

02:04:48.000 Well, no, and do we have a scientific model for it? No, but then I would also say, we do not have

02:04:53.600 a scientific model for consciousness, we don't know a damn thing about consciousness, which is why

02:04:58.800 Dan Dennett's book, which was called Consciousness Explained, was referred to by its critics as

02:05:04.640 Consciousness Explained Away, which is exactly right, as far as I'm concerned, because he took a mechanistic

02:05:10.400 approach, and I just don't think you get to do that, because there's something really weird

02:05:15.040 about consciousness, I mean, the phenomenologists like Heidegger, who tried to radically transform

02:05:21.520 Western philosophy right from the bottom up, he basically said, well, you know, you can treat

02:05:27.040 the world as if consciousness is primary, and that human experience is reality, that's reality,

02:05:32.720 and that it doesn't exist independently of consciousness in any explicable way, it's like,

02:05:38.640 well, what's out there if there's nothing to experience it? Well, everything at once, it's

02:05:43.680 something like that, it's not really comprehensible, as without a subject, the subject defines it

02:05:49.540 and makes it real, now, you don't have to believe that, but at least I'm telling you that there

02:05:54.500 are thoroughly coherent philosophical positions that make that case very strongly, and that allow

02:06:02.540 consciousness to exist as a phenomena, and to take it seriously, and you certainly act like you take

02:06:08.000 it seriously, you act like there's a you, and that you make choices, and you certainly treat other people

02:06:13.480 that way, deterministic or not, you're still going to get angry when they're being, you know, rude to you,

02:06:18.300 and you're going to act as if they had some choice in the matter, now, maybe that's an illusion,

02:06:22.540 possibly, but maybe it's not, and I would say the oldest stories that we have, always include that

02:06:29.420 as not only a fundamental element, but even as the fundamental element, so, well, so you can think

02:06:37.240 about that however you want, but anyway, so Geppetto comes along, and he's going to finish off the puppet,

02:06:42.700 and so what does he do to finish off the puppet? He gives it a, he gives it a voice, he gives it a mouth,

02:06:48.700 well, that's really, really interesting, so, in Genesis, in Genesis, this is a, this is a very,

02:06:55.580 very, very complex idea, and it took people thousands of years to figure this idea out,

02:07:00.540 and it's something like this, so, at the beginning of everything, there was chaos,

02:07:06.380 and that was like potential, it was something like potential, the potential for being, and God,

02:07:12.940 who's God the Father in the Genesis account, uses a faculty that he has, which is the word, to call being from chaos,

02:07:23.260 and that's the creation of being, right, it's the, it's the manifestation of order from chaos,

02:07:29.580 and it's the word, the logos, that, it's, it's the logos, that's the tool that God uses to do that,

02:07:36.940 and that logos, in Christianity, is associated with Christ, which is a very weird thing, and,

02:07:41.820 but the reason for that is that there's an idea that the divine element of the individual

02:07:48.620 is the thing that uses language, communicative language, to call the world into being,

02:07:55.660 and that is what we do, as far as we can tell, it's like you make a decision, you think it through,

02:08:00.860 you talk it over with your friends, you plot a course, and the world manifests itself in relationship to your choice,

02:08:07.020 and it's for that reason, and it is for that reason, that in Genesis, and in many other accounts,

02:08:12.060 that, that logos capacity is identified with human beings, it's like you have a small bit of that in you,

02:08:18.300 whatever that means, and you participate in the process of continually generating order out of chaos,

02:08:25.340 and sometimes the reverse, you mediate between them, and so, and that, that in our, in Western culture,

02:08:32.060 and it's certainly the case in other cultures as well, that, that's why you have rights, fundamentally,

02:08:38.700 that's why the law has to respect you, is because you've got this spark of divinity in you,

02:08:44.140 that's transcendent, that nobody gets to transgress against, and you say, well, do you believe that,

02:08:50.060 it's like, well, you act like you believe it, you treat other people like you believe it,

02:08:56.300 or they're not very happy with you, so, it depends on what you mean by believe, you act it out, well,

02:09:02.060 do you accept it as a proposition, well, I don't care if you accept it as a proposition, frankly,

02:09:07.980 because I think the best indicator of what you believe is how you act, not what you say, because

02:09:13.020 what do you know about what you know, hardly anything, and so actions speak louder than words,

02:09:19.660 and if you want to be treated properly by someone, what that means is that you want to treat them,

02:09:24.300 you want them to treat you as a valuable autonomous entity, that's what you want,

02:09:30.060 and so, maybe you're not that, maybe you're a deterministic puppet, and what this strange movie

02:09:36.540 suggests is that you are kind of a deterministic puppet, but that you don't have to be,

02:09:41.260 alright, well, the mouth goes on, and then Geppetto is happy about that, and then they have a little

02:09:46.700 dance, you know, they turn the music on, and all these little music boxes, and they all play together,

02:09:53.020 and it's like harmony of some sort has been established, because that's what the music represents,

02:09:58.140 and there's layers of reality that are communicating with one another, because that's what the music

02:10:03.340 represents, and then they have a little dance, and the idea is that, well, it's a good thing to let

02:10:08.780 this puppet have its own voice, well, that's an interesting idea, because what the hell does it know,

02:10:14.540 it's a wooden headed marionette, why the hell would you want something like that to talk?

02:10:19.100 Well, it's the same question you have in relationship to your children,

02:10:22.540 it's like, what do they know? They're two, or three, you know, they don't know anything,

02:10:28.140 well, so should you just, like, tyrannize them, and make them do everything you want,

02:10:32.380 or are you going to let them have a bit of a voice? And the question is, it depends on whether

02:10:36.060 we want them to be a puppet, or not, and if you don't want them to be a puppet, if you want them

02:10:41.260 to grow up autonomous, then you let them have a voice, and you facilitate the development of that voice,

02:10:46.540 and so, and that's what you do if you don't want a marionette, so, and Geppetto doesn't want a marionette,

02:10:55.820 so he gives the puppet a voice, even though he knows it's just a puppet, and that it doesn't know anything,

02:11:01.820 and then, this is fantastic, so, the cricket's sitting up there watching that, he's pretty happy

02:11:06.460 with it, that's the first little scene you see there, and he's sitting by this other thing that is

02:11:10.300 just not happy at all, and that's the terrible father, and you see, it's a character that repeats

02:11:17.100 throughout the entire movie, you see manifestations of the tyrannical father continually through the

02:11:22.140 movie in different characters, like he's played out by different roles, and so, first of all, the

02:11:26.940 cricket is so thrilled about this, and then, he looks at the frowning king there, who is not happy

02:11:33.900 that the puppet has been given a voice, he's a tyrant, right, he's the representation of a tyrant,

02:11:37.980 and a tyrant does not want you to have a voice, and so the cricket looks at him and says, well,

02:11:42.780 you can't please everybody all the time, and it's just this tiny little fragment of a joke, you know,

02:11:48.060 but it's, there's this old idea, I think it comes from Chekhov, and the idea is that if you set a play up,

02:11:54.620 and there's a gun, a rifle, or a pistol on a table in the first act, it better have been used by the

02:12:00.620 third act, or it shouldn't have been there at all, and the idea is, you don't put anything in your play

02:12:06.540 that's random, you never do that, it's like, because this isn't life, this isn't life, this is a work of

02:12:15.340 art, and everything is connected, and it's, you know, it's there by intent, and so this isn't accidental,

02:12:21.260 that this little king character doesn't like what's going on, or that he shows up,

02:12:28.300 so anyways, all the clocks go off, and the music boxes go, and they have a little dance,

02:12:32.860 and everybody's happy about it, and then, Geppetto notices what time it is, and so there's a

02:12:38.380 tremendous emphasis on time in this part of the movie, because all these clocks are going off,

02:12:43.180 and they're all telling him what time it is, like 30 clocks go off, and then he takes his

02:12:47.660 watch out, and notices what time it is, it's like the idea that there's something about time

02:12:53.020 going on, is like whacked at you, you know, dozens of times, so that you get it, and it's a little

02:12:59.500 joke that he, you know, pulls out his watch, and he figures out it's time for bed

02:13:04.300 well, so now we're making a transition between the conscious world and the unconscious world

02:13:09.260 okay, so, so there's an intimation in the movie that everything that happens now

02:13:13.740 is in the unconscious world, and the way you know that is that it's strange, because the movie moves

02:13:19.740 in and out of this underworld, but at the very end, when Pinocchio is transformed into a real boy

02:13:26.220 the last thing Geppetto does is, I think it's Geppetto, is hit one of the

02:13:30.860 pendulums, and start all the clocks again, so it's as if what happens from here onwards is part

02:13:37.660 of a dream, now it's murky, because Pinocchio goes to school, and you know, there's the next day

02:13:44.460 and all of that, but, and so those are sort of realistic elements, but then there's also the whole

02:13:48.780 going down into the ocean to find the whale thing, which seems completely dreamlike, and

02:13:53.660 but there's an intimation that we're in a different kind of world, and, and so we go to

02:13:58.460 they all go to sleep, including the cricket, and so then Geppetto notices the star, and because he's

02:14:05.820 a good guy, he makes a wish on the star, we've already explained why you might wish on a star and

02:14:10.620 what that might mean, and he makes a very interesting wish, it's, it's not a self-serving wish

02:14:17.500 in fact it's quite the contrary, he doesn't wish that Pinocchio is an obedient son, he doesn't wish

02:14:23.980 that he's produced someone who will work for him, he doesn't wish any of that, he wishes what a good

02:14:28.860 father would wish, which is that the creation that he's brought forth would develop its capacity for

02:14:36.620 autonomy, he wants him to become real, he wants him to become an actual living creature, and not a wooden

02:14:43.260 headed marionette, and so you'd say, well that is what your father should wish for you, you know, and

02:14:49.260 I have clients frequently whose fathers weren't like that at all, they were tyrannical, or they were

02:14:53.740 neglectful, or, or they punished this, them, the person every time they did something good, that's a

02:14:59.740 real fun game, they competed with them and undermined them at every opportunity, they didn't want to

02:15:07.100 produce someone strong and autonomous, they wanted to give birth to a slave and then diminish it as

02:15:14.380 much as possible, and so that's bad, it's not good, and that's, so, Geppetto's not like that, so he says, well

02:15:21.420 I'm going to wish for something completely unreasonable, which is that, part of that ideal idea, right?

02:15:27.100 and the unreasonable thing is that this puppet could become real, could actually take on its autonomy

02:15:36.220 and move forward, and so that's what he wishes, and then they go to sleep, and then the cricket starts

02:15:45.820 to become driven mad by the noises of the clock, and so it's like he's going into this sort of state of

02:15:50.620 hyper alertness, and the clocks are clanging at him, and Geppetto is snoring, and, and that he can

02:15:57.420 even hear the little grains of sand falling out of the, out of the hourglass, he's becoming hyper alert,

02:16:03.580 hyper alert, and then he yells stop, and all the clocks stop, which is a pretty good trick for a cricket,

02:16:10.780 you know, it's like he's the master of time, but also we're in a place now where time has come to a stop,

02:16:15.500 we're outside of time, and one of the things that Freud pointed about dreams, is that dreams are kind of

02:16:21.420 outside of time, now here's what that means, is first of all they draw on eternal themes, that's part of it,

02:16:27.980 but you know, you must have had this experience, and Freud noted this carefully in the interpretation of dreams,

02:16:32.460 where, you know, you're sleeping, and the alarm goes off, and the alarm noise is incorporated into your

02:16:38.860 dream, and it's like the dream has been going on for an hour in subjective time, and you wake up

02:16:44.540 and you realize that it's the alarm clock, it's like, and there's no reason why your dream time

02:16:49.340 should be the same as real time, because it's all going on in your imagination, but it's amazing

02:16:54.300 in some sense how much can happen in such a short period of time in your imagination, and so

02:16:59.820 it's outside of time, the world of fantasy is in some sense outside of time, and so the cricket

02:17:06.060 tells time to stop, and it does, and then the star enlarges

02:17:15.260 and it turns into this blue fairy, who's got a celestial gown covered with stars, and who's got

02:17:23.660 wings, so she's kind of some ethereal being, and like, you don't have a problem with that

02:17:28.780 in the movie, it's like, yeah, sure, I mean, you know, it's a fairy, it came from a star,

02:17:33.260 that makes perfect sense, which of course, it makes no sense whatsoever, right, it makes no sense,

02:17:39.020 but you're willing to go along with it, because on the one hand, it makes no sense, and on the other

02:17:44.300 hand, it makes perfect sense, it's like the fairy godmother idea, it's like, yeah, yeah, fairy godmother,

02:17:48.700 no problem, we got that, and it's, and the idea there is that, well, nature comes to your aid,

02:17:54.780 it's something like that, it's the benevolent force of nature is on your side, now, not obviously

02:18:01.180 only on your side, because it opposes you as well, but, and there's your own mother as well,

02:18:07.100 who's also nature, who's on your side, and so, but there's an idea here, and the idea is that

02:18:13.260 if the father gets the wish right, the aim right for the child, then nature will cooperate, right,

02:18:21.980 and that's true, I believe that's true, is that if you set up your relationship, your cultural

02:18:26.780 relationship with your child properly, then they're far more likely to flourish, and so you get the

02:18:31.980 magic of nature on your side by establishing the proper aim, and so that's what happens,

02:18:37.660 Geppetto says, well, this is what I'm aiming at, and because he's aiming at it, and because it's

02:18:44.300 within the realm of possibility, nature comes to his service, and that is how it works, that's exactly

02:18:50.940 how it works, because when you aim at something, then you muster your biological forces towards that

02:18:58.060 goal, and if the goal is feasible and attainable, then you will cooperate with yourself, and so,

02:19:07.500 that's quite cool, Carl Rogers would call that, what's the word for that, I think he called it

02:19:14.540 genuineness, which is kind of weak, but I think that's still what he called it, he sort of meant

02:19:19.740 that, well that's sort of what happens when your goals and your physiological and your biological

02:19:25.580 being are aligned well, and you can communicate both, you're not full of internal contradictions,

02:19:31.260 and so, your conscious aims, and your biological possibilities are manifesting themselves in

02:19:37.660 the same direction, and so, well, that would be good, so anyways, the fairy shows up, and she's

02:19:42.940 quite sexually attractive, she's quite provocative, and she charms the cricket, and who gets all blushes,

02:19:50.300 and like, is all, you know, embarrassed, and overwhelmed by this, like, figure of celestial beauty,

02:19:57.740 and decides to cooperate, the conscience decides to cooperate, and gets some responsibility,

02:20:03.260 and so, the fairy allows the puppet to move without strings, so that's kind of interesting,

02:20:10.780 so it's the intervention of nature, culture focuses the aim, then it's the intervention of nature

02:20:16.700 that produces the autonomy, and that seems to be right, I mean, even though it's not that

02:20:21.100 understandable, it seems to be right, and then, so, she takes the strings off Pinocchio,

02:20:27.980 and you might say, well that's partly because your child is not, certainly, not just a creature

02:20:32.460 of culture, by no means, your child has a temperament, you'll see that right away,

02:20:36.540 and that temperament will unfold, and hopefully it will unfold in a cultural context that's amenable

02:20:41.980 to it, and that the combination of those two things will produce something new,

02:20:48.700 he can talk, he can walk, and so the good fairy basically tells him that he's got a bit of autonomy,

02:20:57.660 and now it's up to him to like clue in a bit, and act properly, and learn the difference between

02:21:03.340 good and evil, and to speak truthfully, and all that, it's a bit propagandistic, that part of the

02:21:08.060 movie I would say, but it doesn't really matter, it's kind of inculcation of conventional morality,

02:21:13.100 and there's a fair bit to it, especially that he's supposed to tell the truth,

02:21:17.260 and you know, he says he will, and the cricket's listening, and then the puppet asks, well what

02:21:23.980 does conscience mean, because the fairy says, always let your conscience be your guide, and he says,

02:21:29.980 well what does conscience mean, and then the bug, who's like all puffed up because he wants to

02:21:33.740 impress the fairy, pops down and gets on his little matchbox, and gives this like horrible little

02:21:38.540 lecture about how to behave properly, that's just like ideological chatter, you can hardly even stand

02:21:44.620 listening to it, and it's supposed to be like that, it's generic moral advice that anyone could give,

02:21:51.420 that's kind of dull, and also puffed up and grandiose, and he's just not very good at it,

02:21:57.980 so that's why he's on his little matchbox there with his chest puffed out, and so he says,

02:22:03.020 that's just the trouble with the world today, and I think that's his opening line, you know,

02:22:08.140 he's diagnosing the whole world, and you know, the fairy, she thinks he's kind of funny,

02:22:12.940 because he is, and you know, it's sort of, there's a real interesting thing here going on,

02:22:17.020 because he's male, and he's all puffed up with his knowledge which is completely shallow,

02:22:22.220 and then he's put in contact with this like celestial feminine ideal, and he just turns into

02:22:27.660 a complete moron, and that's exactly what happens to men, it happens to them all the time,

02:22:32.460 so, anyways, she decides to give him a chance, and turns him into this conscience,

02:22:37.180 and all of a sudden he's this like 1920s millionaire, so he's been, he's been ennobled,

02:22:42.220 but then she tells him that, you know, he has to journey along with Pinocchio,

02:22:47.020 in order for things to go properly, and he promises that he'll be a good conscience,

02:22:51.820 and do it, and he already thinks that he can do it, and that's why he's on the matchbox podium,

02:22:57.100 you know, espousing his morality, but the reality turns out to be much more complex.

02:23:02.460 So, the bug has a little talk with the cricket, the bug has a little talk with the puppet,

02:23:10.540 and the bug tries to tell Pinocchio explicitly what it means to be good, and he gets completely

02:23:17.900 tangled up in the explanation, because what the hell does he know, and the puppet doesn't

02:23:22.300 understand anything that he says anyways, and so there's a message there, and the message is,

02:23:26.620 the kind of knowledge that the conscience is, that the conscience and the puppet are supposed to

02:23:32.540 co-create, is not something that you can articulate easily as a table of rules, it's not like that,

02:23:38.860 because life is too complicated to just have five rules that you live by, and that will solve every problem,

02:23:45.660 partly because the rules will conflict, that's a huge part of the problem, right,

02:23:49.980 one moral guideline contradicts another in a situation, it's like you don't know what to do,

02:23:55.180 so anyways, they decide that they're, they decide that they're just going to,

02:24:00.780 he says, Pinocchio says, well, I'll be a good boy, and the cricket says, well, that's the spirit,

02:24:05.260 and then, well, then Geppetto gets wind of it, and they have a little, like, horror episode,

02:24:11.740 and then he finds out that the puppet can, is autonomous, and they have a little party,

02:24:17.020 which tells you exactly what Geppetto's up to, is the autonomy emerges, and he's happy about it,

02:24:22.540 so it's stamping home the notion that Geppetto is, in fact, a good guy, and that that is,

02:24:27.740 in fact, what he wants, so it's like, the encouragement of your father is a precondition

02:24:33.340 for the emergence of your individuality, and it also allows the feminine to play a role,

02:24:39.660 both as nature, and perhaps as mother, and so, and the combination of those two things produces

02:24:44.860 the autonomous individual, it's like, well, that seems perfectly reasonable,

02:24:48.940 so, off they go to sleep, next day they wake up, and it's a new day, and, and Pinocchio is off to

02:24:56.300 school, and that's a good thing too, because Geppetto isn't, and he's really excited about it,

02:25:01.340 and so what that means is that he's been parented properly, and, and he's going to go out into the

02:25:06.860 world of his peers, which is where he belongs, and Geppetto isn't too worried about it, in fact, he,

02:25:11.980 he's pushing him out the door, you know, it's like, go, you can do it, this is the next thing,

02:25:17.100 the kid isn't cowering in the corner, and overcome by terror, and with the parents freaking out about

02:25:21.980 all the things that are going to go wrong, it's, there's some faith in his, his ability, so,

02:25:28.300 he sees all the kids wandering by, and, and Geppetto dresses him up, and sends him off to school,

02:25:34.620 and so, and so that's good, so that's a happy family story, it's like,

02:25:39.020 mom and dad got together, they decided that their, the kid was going to, you know,

02:25:43.820 be competent, and autonomous, and ready to face the world, and so, out he goes, and so he's like

02:25:49.500 five years old at this point, or something like that, and that's where we get, that's where we're at

02:25:54.940 in the story, and I think that's a good place to stop, because the next thing that happens is

02:26:01.500 anomaly, essentially, it's like, Pinocchio goes off to be a good boy, but it turns out that's a hell of a

02:26:06.860 lot more complicated than he might think, because there are actually complications in the world,

02:26:13.100 but also malevolence, right, the desire for things not to go right, there are people who are not

02:26:19.420 oriented towards the ideal in any way at all, and Pinocchio's young and naive, and so he has no defense

02:26:28.300 whatsoever against this malevolence, and that's, you know, that's not expected, and it also turns out

02:26:38.220 that the conscience, the cricket, who is still not very clued in, oversleeps, and so he's just not

02:26:46.060 there at a critical moment, but I think we'll pick that up, we'll pick that up next week, because this

02:26:51.100 is a good point in the plot to stop, the child has entered the broader world, and has to cope with it,

02:26:58.620 and so he's prepared, because he had a wonderful father, and he had a magical mother, and so he's as

02:27:03.980 prepared as you can be, he's not even completely a marionette anymore, but now it's up to him,

02:27:10.860 that's the thing, now it's up to him, his parents have done basically what they could, and that's really

02:27:15.340 about right, you know, it's wise, I would say, psychologically, so, all right, that's that.

02:27:25.020 We hope you enjoyed this episode, we'll be back next week with part two of marionettes and individuals.

02:27:31.180 Michaela? If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up Dad's books,

02:27:35.980 Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

02:27:41.580 Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

02:27:46.300 See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite

02:27:51.340 bookseller. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.

02:27:57.100 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

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02:28:09.900 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events,

02:28:16.680 and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanbpeterson.com.

02:28:22.420 My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts,

02:28:27.360 understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future,

02:28:32.660 can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com.

02:28:37.660 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

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130. Maps of Meaning 2： Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1)

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